newyorker--2020-08-24--David Wright Faladé on Complicated Backstories

Your story “ The Sand Banks , 1861 ” is set on the Outer Banks of North Carolina , in the early months of the Civil War .
When did you first start thinking about using this time and place as the setting for a work of fiction ?
I lived abroad for much of my twenties , much of the time in Paris , and when I came back , to enroll in grad school , in Virginia , David Zoby , a fellow first-year , asked me one day if I ’ d heard of the “ Pea @ @ @ @ @ @ @ utterly befuddled , because he added , as though clarifying , “ In the Outer Banks.
” I ’ d never heard of the Outer Banks and couldn ’ t have pointed it out on a map , even though it was only a hundred and fifty miles away .
Few , it turned out , had heard of the Pea Island surfmen—the only Black lifesaving crew in the history of the U.S. Life-Saving Service , the forerunner of the Coast Guard .
Zoby himself had stumbled upon a picture of them that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and he ’ d lived in the Outer Banks .
As he and I started working toward what would eventually become “ Fire on the Beach , ” our narrative history about the crew and about the community that forged them , we spent a lot of time out there .
The landscape is stark and rugged , really beautiful in that way .
And it turned out that I knew more about the region than I recognized , pieces of Americana that had taken place in the Banks , like the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ first flight .
Buried beneath those stories was this rich and complicated history—about race and Americanness—that appealed to me from the first .
Your main character in “ The Sand Banks , 1861 , ” is based on Richard Etheridge .
Why did you want to return to Etheridge ’ s life in fiction ?
Does he feel like the same character to you ?
What kinds of decisions did you have to make when you were fictionalizing his life ?
The Outer Banks were very isolated from mainland North Carolina and from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the community , white and Black , was small , interconnected , and relatively tight-knit .
The more Zoby and I learned about Richard Etheridge , his lifesaving station , and the surrounding community , the more a nonfiction book became inevitable .
Richard ’ s crew performed heroic rescues—notably , one during a hurricane in 1896 , when the equipment was rendered useless by the storm and they still managed to save all nine sailors on board .
Yet they were never recognized for any of their work .
This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as their story had disappeared from the historical record .
But the limitations of nonfiction didn ’ t allow me to explore the inner lives of these people to the degree to which I wanted .
For all the archival records that I uncovered about the region and its inhabitants , Black lives were always on the margins of them .
In the census , for instance , slaves were listed in a separate “ Slave Schedule , ” by age and gender only .
So , how do you find Richard in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ locate him , it was generally without enough precision or detail to be able to fully pin down his story , as a historical actor .
There were so many interesting pieces , but because of the scant and poor record-keeping for Blacks , Richard Etheridge or the other Black figures ( Fields Midgett , another true-life character ; Richard ’ s eventual wife , Fanny ; so many others ) remained kind of invisible , though plainly an integral part of the larger picture .
So , I knew fiction would provide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ complicated , underexplored lives .
What is equally important is that fiction allowed me to probe an under-explored aspect of their lives—racial mixing .
So-called “ miscegenation ” has for much of our history been taboo , even as it was also very common , especially in the South .
It remains taboo in many weird ways .
Yet , from my view , it is what defines “ Americanness.
” Hybridity .
The remaking of age-old pieties .
So , I wanted to be able to explore this in a historical context @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seemed to provide a great vehicle for it .
In “ The Sand Banks , 1861 , ” Richard turns thirteen .
His mother is a slave , and his father , John B. Etheridge , is also his owner .
He ’ s nearly always called Dick in the story .
Is that a name he ’ d want ?
The story is adapted from a novel I ’ ve written , “ Nigh On a Brother , ” which will be published in January , 2022 .
It ’ s less @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the novel , but it ’ s the white characters who call Richard “ Dick.
” In the Black community , he ’ s called “ Richard.
” ( In the short story , we only see evidence of this when Fields Midgett , in defending him against Patrick , speaks his name and says “ Richard ” and not “ Dick , ” and a little later , when , in thinking about himself , Richard refers to himself as “ Richard.
” ) Slaveowners , and whites of that era generally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ biology and by right .
For them , diminutives like “ Dick ” indicated familiarity with their lessers and were regarded ( by themselves , at least ) as gestures of kindness .
But this familiarity—overfamiliarity , even—was , in fact , a way of publicly reinforcing the lower-caste status of Blacks .
It expressed itself in other ways , too , and I try to capture this .
When the white Etheridges refer to their slave cook as “ Mammy Dinah , ” they understand the gesture to be kindly , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who they condescendingly pretend to be a member of their household .
Hence the references to “ Aunt ” So-and-So or “ Uncle ” So-and-So .
But slaves heard these names differently .
In the Black community , determining what you were called , to the degree to which you could , held tremendous significance—it was a small but significant act of resistance .
So , even as his white family calls him “ Dick , ” familiarly , he is always “ Richard ” in his own mind and among his kin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the formality of “ Richard ” denotes respect , rather than the informal “ Dick.
” In this same way , Richard refers to his mother and to the Etheridge cook as “ Ma ’ am , ” not “ Mammy , ” as the white Etheridges do .
“ Mammy ” connotes something very specific in our history , tied to minstrelsy .
I wanted my Black characters to recognize this , as I ’ m sure slaves did in real life , and to demonstrate their respect for one another by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attempted to impose upon them in its every word and gesture .
In “ The Sand Banks , 1861 , ” Richard is aware of his mother ’ s contempt for his father .
Richard ’ s feelings for the Etheridge family are more complicated .
He wants to impress his father and feels , at least at the beginning of the story , accepted by his half-sister and cousin .
Is it inevitable that his feelings will change ?
Yes , for sure .
But , despite the change that he begins @ @ @ @ @ @ @ end of the story , Richard ’ s feelings about his white family , and consequently about his own identity , will remain complicated , even afterwards .
In researching “ Fire on the Beach , ” there were so many instances of unusual acts that indicated the real-life Richard ’ s ongoing , conflicted feelings about the white Etheridges .
For instance , the real Richard was a little older than how I represent him in the short story .
With the outbreak of the Civil War , he , along with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Union Army as a soldier , not as a laborer , and Richard held a leadership role and was active in a lot of the fighting .
( The novel from which the short story originates is set during his Civil War service . )
But after the war , when he and Fields returned to the Outer Banks , Richard didn ’ t move in with his mother ; he didn ’ t live with Fields , with whom he was obviously very close .
He shared a small house with his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of two people upon whom the character of “ Patrick ” is based ) .
Richard moved in with his former master !
They also started a business together .

Photograph by Jonathan Wei
Your story “The Sand Banks, 1861” is set on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, in the early months of the Civil War. When did you first start thinking about using this time and place as the setting for a work of fiction?
I lived abroad for much of my twenties, much of the time in Paris, and when I came back, to enroll in grad school, in Virginia, David Zoby, a fellow first-year, asked me one day if I’d heard of the “Pea Island surfmen.” I must have looked utterly befuddled, because he added, as though clarifying, “In the Outer Banks.”
I’d never heard of the Outer Banks and couldn’t have pointed it out on a map, even though it was only a hundred and fifty miles away.
Few, it turned out, had heard of the Pea Island surfmen—the only Black lifesaving crew in the history of the U.S. Life-Saving Service, the forerunner of the Coast Guard. Zoby himself had stumbled upon a picture of them that summer but not known of them before, and he’d lived in the Outer Banks. As he and I started working toward what would eventually become “Fire on the Beach,” our narrative history about the crew and about the community that forged them, we spent a lot of time out there.
The landscape is stark and rugged, really beautiful in that way. And it turned out that I knew more about the region than I recognized, pieces of Americana that had taken place in the Banks, like the Lost Colony and the Wright brothers’ first flight. Buried beneath those stories was this rich and complicated history—about race and Americanness—that appealed to me from the first.
Your main character in “The Sand Banks, 1861,” is based on Richard Etheridge. Why did you want to return to Etheridge’s life in fiction? Does he feel like the same character to you? What kinds of decisions did you have to make when you were fictionalizing his life?
The Outer Banks were very isolated from mainland North Carolina and from the mainland South until the twentieth century, and the community, white and Black, was small, interconnected, and relatively tight-knit. The more Zoby and I learned about Richard Etheridge, his lifesaving station, and the surrounding community, the more a nonfiction book became inevitable. Richard’s crew performed heroic rescues—notably, one during a hurricane in 1896, when the equipment was rendered useless by the storm and they still managed to save all nine sailors on board. Yet they were never recognized for any of their work. This seemed to require treatment as nonfiction, as their story had disappeared from the historical record.
But the limitations of nonfiction didn’t allow me to explore the inner lives of these people to the degree to which I wanted. For all the archival records that I uncovered about the region and its inhabitants, Black lives were always on the margins of them. In the census, for instance, slaves were listed in a separate “Slave Schedule,” by age and gender only. So, how do you find Richard in all that vagueness?
When I could locate him, it was generally without enough precision or detail to be able to fully pin down his story, as a historical actor. There were so many interesting pieces, but because of the scant and poor record-keeping for Blacks, Richard Etheridge or the other Black figures (Fields Midgett, another true-life character; Richard’s eventual wife, Fanny; so many others) remained kind of invisible, though plainly an integral part of the larger picture. So, I knew fiction would provide a way for me to represent their complicated, underexplored lives.
What is equally important is that fiction allowed me to probe an under-explored aspect of their lives—racial mixing. So-called “miscegenation” has for much of our history been taboo, even as it was also very common, especially in the South. It remains taboo in many weird ways. Yet, from my view, it is what defines “Americanness.” Hybridity. The remaking of age-old pieties. So, I wanted to be able to explore this in a historical context, and Richard Etheridge’s story seemed to provide a great vehicle for it.
In “The Sand Banks, 1861,” Richard turns thirteen. His mother is a slave, and his father, John B. Etheridge, is also his owner. He’s nearly always called Dick in the story. Is that a name he’d want?
The story is adapted from a novel I’ve written, “Nigh On a Brother,” which will be published in January, 2022. It’s less apparent in the short story than in the novel, but it’s the white characters who call Richard “Dick.” In the Black community, he’s called “Richard.” (In the short story, we only see evidence of this when Fields Midgett, in defending him against Patrick, speaks his name and says “Richard” and not “Dick,” and a little later, when, in thinking about himself, Richard refers to himself as “Richard.”)
Slaveowners, and whites of that era generally, thought themselves superior to Blacks by biology and by right. For them, diminutives like “Dick” indicated familiarity with their lessers and were regarded (by themselves, at least) as gestures of kindness. But this familiarity—overfamiliarity, even—was, in fact, a way of publicly reinforcing the lower-caste status of Blacks. It expressed itself in other ways, too, and I try to capture this. When the white Etheridges refer to their slave cook as “Mammy Dinah,” they understand the gesture to be kindly, to be a way to acknowledge the inferior who they condescendingly pretend to be a member of their household. Hence the references to “Aunt” So-and-So or “Uncle” So-and-So.
But slaves heard these names differently. In the Black community, determining what you were called, to the degree to which you could, held tremendous significance—it was a small but significant act of resistance. So, even as his white family calls him “Dick,” familiarly, he is always “Richard” in his own mind and among his kin and community. To the slaves, the formality of “Richard” denotes respect, rather than the informal “Dick.”
In this same way, Richard refers to his mother and to the Etheridge cook as “Ma’am,” not “Mammy,” as the white Etheridges do. “Mammy” connotes something very specific in our history, tied to minstrelsy. I wanted my Black characters to recognize this, as I’m sure slaves did in real life, and to demonstrate their respect for one another by resisting the belittlement that the white world attempted to impose upon them in its every word and gesture.


newyorker--2020-08-24--Jessie Buckley: From “Fargo” to the Inside of Charlie Kaufman’s Head

The Irish actress Jessie Buckley awoke before dawn recently , in a one-bedroom apartment on the forty-third floor of a Chicago high-rise .
“ I call them hamster apartments , ” she said , a few hours later , of her anodyne surroundings : gray couch , dark-wood doors , a view of glass skyscrapers .
Buckley was halfway through a two-week quarantine , before shooting the anthology series “ Fargo ” ; she plays a Minnesota nurse , whom she described as “ a nice cake with a very dark center.
” From the apartment , she ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helicopters , amid days of clashes between rioters and police .
But what had woken her up was jet lag , after flying from London days earlier .
“ By about four o ’ clock , the blue sky in Chicago turned into an apocalyptic tornado warning , and I ’ m , like , the County Kerry girl going , ‘ Feckin ’ tornado !
I ’ m on the forty-third floor !
What does that mean ?
’ And then it cleared.
” Buckley is thirty , with a wide , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she had tucked under a Rosie the Riveter-style polka-dot bandanna .
In the past two years , she has had breakout roles in the film “ Wild Rose , ” as a Glaswegian ex-con who dreams of becoming a Nashville country star , and in the HBO miniseries “ Chernobyl , ” as the wife of a firefighter .
Pre-production quarantining is a strange new feature of actors ’ lives .
“ I was freaking out at the beginning , but I ’ ve kind of slotted into a rhythm , ” Buckley @ @ @ @ @ @ @ books , including “ Romeo and Juliet ” —she was supposed to play Juliet this summer , at the National Theatre , in London—and her guitar , so she could take remote lessons .
“ And I ’ ve allowed myself to buy nice bottles of red wine , ” she said .
“ Me and a light-bodied chilled red are currently dating and in a very serious relationship.
” Before the pandemic , Buckley had spent six months working on “ Fargo ” in Chicago .
In April , production shut down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said , ‘ We ’ re sending you home tomorrow .
Pack up your life , ’ ” she recalled .
“ So then I was flying home with Ben Whishaw , and the two of us were spraying down our seats .
But the captain was saying , ‘ Oh , it ’ s fine .
I ’ m going to go on holiday next week.
’ It was quite mad.
” She has spent much of the lockdown in London with her boyfriend , but first stayed for six weeks with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Quarantine there is not much different , because we live at the foot of a mountain and don ’ t really see people , ” she said .
Buckley is the oldest of five .
Her mother is a harpist and a singer , and her father is a bar manager who writes poetry and “ is an excellent hippie.
” He had called her days earlier from Ballinskelligs , where her family has a caravan by the sea .
“ The way he described this seaweed on the rocks , his mind @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ He ’ d be , like , ‘ Look , Jessie !
It ’ s like a dead man ’ s coat !
’ ” When Buckley was seventeen , she went to London to audition for drama school but was rejected from her first choice .
Distraught , she walked into an open call for a BBC reality show called “ I ’ d Do Anything , ” a singing competition in which the winner would star as Nancy in a production of “ Oliver !
” She got on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after one of the judges , Andrew Lloyd Webber , championed her .
“ He ’ s always stayed in contact : ‘ Come and have a cup of coffee , ’ ” she said .
Years later , she auditioned for the movie version of Webber ’ s “ Cats , ” but was relieved not to be cast .
“ I don ’ t know how fluidly feline I would have been , ” she said .
“ I ’ d be a very stagnant , boxlike , kind of anxious @ @ @ @ @ @ @ film , “ I ’ m Thinking of Ending Things , ” which premières next week , on Netflix , Buckley plays a young woman who drives to the country with her boyfriend , Jake ( Jesse Plemons ) , to meet his parents .
Or she may be a figment of his imagination , or the hallucination of a high-school janitor .
The movie is , to use the year ’ s most well-worn adjective , surreal : characters suddenly age thirty years , or break into songs from “ Oklahoma !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Charlie , even in the audition , was ‘ This girl is molecular , ’ ” Buckley said .
“ I ’ m , like , What the hell does ‘ molecular ’ mean ?
” During filming , she and Kaufman would e-mail odd inspirations back and forth : Anne Sexton poems , A.S.M.R .
videos .
Did she ever figure out what “ molecular ” meant ?
“ I am a molecule of myself , ” she speculated , of her character .
“ But I ’ m made up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which then explode and disintegrate.
” Flustered , she blew a raspberry .
“ I was crap at science.
” She had a week left in solitude in her hamster apartment , then four days of shooting “ Fargo , ” opposite Jason Schwartzman .
“ We have swabs every three days , ” she explained ; the protocols would allow the actors to play their scenes without social distancing .
“ We ’ re molecules !
” she said , lighting up .
“ Finally , I get to be a molecule @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I get it !
” ♦

Jessie Buckley Illustration by João Fazenda
The Irish actress Jessie Buckley awoke before dawn recently, in a one-bedroom apartment on the forty-third floor of a Chicago high-rise. “I call them hamster apartments,” she said, a few hours later, of her anodyne surroundings: gray couch, dark-wood doors, a view of glass skyscrapers. Buckley was halfway through a two-week quarantine, before shooting the anthology series “Fargo”; she plays a Minnesota nurse, whom she described as “a nice cake with a very dark center.” From the apartment, she’d been hearing the blare of sirens and helicopters, amid days of clashes between rioters and police. But what had woken her up was jet lag, after flying from London days earlier. “By about four o’clock, the blue sky in Chicago turned into an apocalyptic tornado warning, and I’m, like, the County Kerry girl going, ‘Feckin’ tornado! I’m on the forty-third floor! What does that mean?’ And then it cleared.”
Buckley is thirty, with a wide, crooked smile and red hair, which she had tucked under a Rosie the Riveter-style polka-dot bandanna. In the past two years, she has had breakout roles in the film “Wild Rose,” as a Glaswegian ex-con who dreams of becoming a Nashville country star, and in the HBO miniseries “Chernobyl,” as the wife of a firefighter. Pre-production quarantining is a strange new feature of actors’ lives. “I was freaking out at the beginning, but I’ve kind of slotted into a rhythm,” Buckley said. She had brought lots of books, including “Romeo and Juliet”—she was supposed to play Juliet this summer, at the National Theatre, in London—and her guitar, so she could take remote lessons. “And I’ve allowed myself to buy nice bottles of red wine,” she said. “Me and a light-bodied chilled red are currently dating and in a very serious relationship.”
Before the pandemic, Buckley had spent six months working on “Fargo” in Chicago. In April, production shut down with two weeks left. “They said, ‘We’re sending you home tomorrow. Pack up your life,’ ” she recalled. “So then I was flying home with Ben Whishaw, and the two of us were spraying down our seats. But the captain was saying, ‘Oh, it’s fine. I’m going to go on holiday next week.’ It was quite mad.” She has spent much of the lockdown in London with her boyfriend, but first stayed for six weeks with her parents, in Killarney. “Quarantine there is not much different, because we live at the foot of a mountain and don’t really see people,” she said. Buckley is the oldest of five. Her mother is a harpist and a singer, and her father is a bar manager who writes poetry and “is an excellent hippie.” He had called her days earlier from Ballinskelligs, where her family has a caravan by the sea. “The way he described this seaweed on the rocks, his mind was just flitting,” she said. “He’d be, like, ‘Look, Jessie! It’s like a dead man’s coat!’ ”
When Buckley was seventeen, she went to London to audition for drama school but was rejected from her first choice. Distraught, she walked into an open call for a BBC reality show called “I’d Do Anything,” a singing competition in which the winner would star as Nancy in a production of “Oliver!” She got on the series and won second place, after one of the judges, Andrew Lloyd Webber, championed her. “He’s always stayed in contact: ‘Come and have a cup of coffee,’ ” she said. Years later, she auditioned for the movie version of Webber’s “Cats,” but was relieved not to be cast. “I don’t know how fluidly feline I would have been,” she said. “I’d be a very stagnant, boxlike, kind of anxious cat.”
In the new Charlie Kaufman film, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things,” which premières next week, on Netflix, Buckley plays a young woman who drives to the country with her boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons), to meet his parents. Or she may be a figment of his imagination, or the hallucination of a high-school janitor. The movie is, to use the year’s most well-worn adjective, surreal: characters suddenly age thirty years, or break into songs from “Oklahoma!” “The first-ever note I got from Charlie, even in the audition, was ‘This girl is molecular,’ ” Buckley said. “I’m, like, What the hell does ‘molecular’ mean?”
During filming, she and Kaufman would e-mail odd inspirations back and forth: Anne Sexton poems, A.S.M.R. videos. Did she ever figure out what “molecular” meant? “I am a molecule of myself,” she speculated, of her character. “But I’m made up of atoms that Jake has created, which then explode and disintegrate.” Flustered, she blew a raspberry. “I was crap at science.” She had a week left in solitude in her hamster apartment, then four days of shooting “Fargo,” opposite Jason Schwartzman. “We have swabs every three days,” she explained; the protocols would allow the actors to play their scenes without social distancing. “We’re molecules!” she said, lighting up. “Finally, I get to be a molecule! This is what he meant! I get it!” ♦


newyorker--2020-08-24--Did Pangolin Trafficking Cause the Coronavirus Pandemic?

The town of Yokadouma lies in remote eastern Cameroon , close to the border with the Central African Republic , at a juncture of narrow roads that—when I visited , in May , 2010 , near the end of the long dry season—were unpaved and parched , their laterite clay pounded to powder by logging trucks rumbling north from the Republic of the Congo .
The town ’ s name translates as Standing Elephant , and in the central roundabout stood an elephant statue , its tusks and part of its trunk broken off , rebar protruding .
I checked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dining room had a gorilla skull hung on one wall , a python skin stretched beside it .
I remember the place because it was here , on the following morning , that I met my first pangolin , which was also my last .
A young man from the kitchen staff had just brought this piteous creature back from the town market .
He carried it by its tail as it dangled , groggy and helpless .
It was reddish brown , like the roadside trees , and for the same reason—it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ covering its head , body , and tail looked like rusty metal feathers .
Pangolins are amazing animals , loosely known as scaly anteaters because of their armored skin and their diet , their elongated heads and their toothless mouths , though they aren ’ t closely related to true anteaters .
In fact , they constitute a group of their own , one of the oddest of mammalian orders , the Pholidota , which contains only eight living species ( the order of bats comprises fourteen hundred species ) .
They are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to armadillos by convergent evolution .
They eat termites as well as ants , but they are virtually incapable of harming any other form of living creature , except in their own defense .
The kitchen worker dipped this one into a storm sewer to revive it , then let it walk a few steps .
Its snout was pointy , essentially an aiming device for its long , noodle-like tongue .
Its eyes were dark little beads , shiny but uncomprehending .
Its belly , unprotected by scales , was a pale-cream @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , one of four African species , three of which are native to southern Cameroon .
It tried to hide , pushing its head into a small hole in the ground near the wall .
But even with its sizable front claws , and the strength and instincts of a burrower , it had no chance of digging its way to safety .
What will you do with it ?
I asked the young man .
It would be eaten , he said .
Pangolin is commonly consumed in Cameroon , as in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also in Asia , where the other four species are native .
They are elusive creatures , seldom seen even by those who spend considerable time walking in African forests .
In 1999 and 2000 , J. Michael Fay , an American ecologist and conservationist , made an epic foot journey , with the support of Congolese and Gabonese field crews : four hundred and fifty-six days through the last great intact forests of Central Africa , trekking a zigzag course from the northeast corner of the Republic of the Congo to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ across swamps , tunnelling by machete through trackless thickets , and sometimes strolling easily along elephant trails beneath closed forest canopy .
Pausing every twenty paces or so , he recorded methodical notes and calibrations in his Rite in the Rain notebooks on every manner of biological observation .
Through the length of his expedition , Fay saw one pangolin .
I happened to be with him that day , but I missed it .
Yet pangolins are disastrously susceptible to capture by humans .
When they are attacked or challenged , their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into a ball , like a pill bug , scales on the outside , tender parts within .
The name pangolin comes from peng-goling , which in Malay means “ roller ” or “ that which rolls up.
” This defense works well against such predators as lions and leopards but not against one with a brain and a pair of hands , capable of battering a pangolin open or carrying it back to a village .
Pangolins are also susceptible to coronaviruses , and that trait has given them an unexpected role @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the COVID-19 virus , found its way into people .
Sampling of tissues from dead pangolins has shown that some carry viruses very similar to SARS-CoV-2 .
Did a population of these animals serve as intermediate hosts , within which a bat virus lived briefly—or maybe for some decades , acquiring adaptations that could make it devastating to humans ?
The evidence is complicated .
And the question is only more charged given that all eight pangolin species are presently being pushed toward extinction .
Their possible involvement in the COVID-19 story gives @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( perhaps ) dangerous .
Even as so many humans suffer and die , it ’ s worth asking the pangolin question : has our hunger for these humble creatures got us into a global catastrophe ?
Pangolins are solitary animals , each one foraging on its lonesome , the adults coming together briefly to breed .
The female carries her single offspring piggyback for some months , and sleeps with it curled tenderly within her armor .
Although pangolins are hard to find , they must have once seemed endlessly abundant .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the German biologist Sarah Heinrich and her colleagues , drawing on the database of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora ( a multinational compact known as CITES ) , roughly seven hundred and seventy-six thousand pangolins became merchandise that was traded legally on the international market .
That flow of products included almost six hundred and thirteen thousand pangolin skins , exported from countries including Malaysia , Indonesia , and Thailand .
Pangolin scales are a separate commodity , highly valued in some cultures for their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 1994 and 2000 , almost nineteen tons of pangolin scales ( accounting for roughly forty-seven thousand pangolins ) were exported from Malaysia for use in traditional Chinese medicine ( T.C.M . )
in China and Hong Kong .
Chinese tradition , as inscribed in old texts , holds that pangolin scales , ground to powder or burned to ash , can be useful against ant bites , midnight hysterias , evil spirits , malaria , hemorrhoids , and pinworm , and for stimulating lactation in women .
Science doesn ’ t support these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the same material as your hair and your nails .
“ There ’ s a lot of finger-pointing at other cultures , ” Sarah Heinrich said recently from her home near Potsdam .
The finger could point in many directions .
Most of the pangolin skins exported between 1975 and 2000 went to North America , where they were turned into handbags , belts , wallets , and fancy cowboy boots .
Pangolin leather was especially prized because the animal ’ s skin bears an eye-catching , almost reptilian , diamond-grid pattern .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Lyndon Johnson , among others , produced pangolin-leather boots before 2000 , when CITES set the export quota for wild-caught Asian pangolins to zero , essentially making the international commerce illegal .
By then , the pangolin populations in China and parts of Southeast Asia had been drastically depleted , not just to make American cowboy boots but also for regional consumption .
At one point , some hundred and fifty thousand pangolins in China went to the knife monthly , their meat eaten and their scales used in T.C.M .
“ Such @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” the Oxford University-based pangolin expert Daniel Challender and three co-authors wrote , “ that it apparently led to the commercial extinction of pangolins in China by the mid-nineteen-nineties.
” Importing pangolins was more practical than hunting down the few indigenous ones that remained .
Challender did some of his doctoral field work in Vietnam , conducting market surveys , gathering price data on pangolin scales , visiting restaurants where the meat was served .
“ If you go into a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City , ” he told me , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ paying three hundred and fifty dollars a kilo for a pangolin.
” It might be grilled , or boiled in a hot pot with ginger and spring onions .
He recalled sitting in a restaurant , in 2012 , watching three diners enjoy a seven-hundred-dollar pangolin meal .
A server carried the animal , alive , into the restaurant in an old sack .
It was balled up in its defense posture , showing only scales and claws .
“ They took out a large rolling pin and clubbed it unconscious , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some scissors and used the scissor blades to cut the throat.
” The blood was drained out and mixed with alcohol for the diners , and the flesh was cooked .

The town of Yokadouma lies in remote eastern Cameroon, close to the border with the Central African Republic, at a juncture of narrow roads that—when I visited, in May, 2010, near the end of the long dry season—were unpaved and parched, their laterite clay pounded to powder by logging trucks rumbling north from the Republic of the Congo. The town’s name translates as Standing Elephant, and in the central roundabout stood an elephant statue, its tusks and part of its trunk broken off, rebar protruding. I checked in to the Hotel Elephant, whose dining room had a gorilla skull hung on one wall, a python skin stretched beside it. I remember the place because it was here, on the following morning, that I met my first pangolin, which was also my last.
A young man from the kitchen staff had just brought this piteous creature back from the town market. He carried it by its tail as it dangled, groggy and helpless. It was reddish brown, like the roadside trees, and for the same reason—it was caked with dust. The scales covering its head, body, and tail looked like rusty metal feathers. Pangolins are amazing animals, loosely known as scaly anteaters because of their armored skin and their diet, their elongated heads and their toothless mouths, though they aren’t closely related to true anteaters. In fact, they constitute a group of their own, one of the oddest of mammalian orders, the Pholidota, which contains only eight living species (the order of bats comprises fourteen hundred species). They are similar to carnivores by descent, and to armadillos by convergent evolution. They eat termites as well as ants, but they are virtually incapable of harming any other form of living creature, except in their own defense.
The kitchen worker dipped this one into a storm sewer to revive it, then let it walk a few steps. Its snout was pointy, essentially an aiming device for its long, noodle-like tongue. Its eyes were dark little beads, shiny but uncomprehending. Its belly, unprotected by scales, was a pale-cream color. This was a white-bellied pangolin, one of four African species, three of which are native to southern Cameroon. It tried to hide, pushing its head into a small hole in the ground near the wall. But even with its sizable front claws, and the strength and instincts of a burrower, it had no chance of digging its way to safety. What will you do with it? I asked the young man. It would be eaten, he said. Pangolin is commonly consumed in Cameroon, as in many different parts of Central Africa and also in Asia, where the other four species are native.
They are elusive creatures, seldom seen even by those who spend considerable time walking in African forests. In 1999 and 2000, J. Michael Fay, an American ecologist and conservationist, made an epic foot journey, with the support of Congolese and Gabonese field crews: four hundred and fifty-six days through the last great intact forests of Central Africa, trekking a zigzag course from the northeast corner of the Republic of the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, fording rivers, mucking across swamps, tunnelling by machete through trackless thickets, and sometimes strolling easily along elephant trails beneath closed forest canopy. Pausing every twenty paces or so, he recorded methodical notes and calibrations in his Rite in the Rain notebooks on every manner of biological observation. Through the length of his expedition, Fay saw one pangolin. I happened to be with him that day, but I missed it.
Yet pangolins are disastrously susceptible to capture by humans. When they are attacked or challenged, their default mode of defense is to roll into a ball, like a pill bug, scales on the outside, tender parts within. The name pangolin comes from peng-goling, which in Malay means “roller” or “that which rolls up.” This defense works well against such predators as lions and leopards but not against one with a brain and a pair of hands, capable of battering a pangolin open or carrying it back to a village.
Pangolins are also susceptible to coronaviruses, and that trait has given them an unexpected role in the mystery of how SARS-CoV-2, the COVID-19 virus, found its way into people. Sampling of tissues from dead pangolins has shown that some carry viruses very similar to SARS-CoV-2. Did a population of these animals serve as intermediate hosts, within which a bat virus lived briefly—or maybe for some decades, acquiring adaptations that could make it devastating to humans? The evidence is complicated. And the question is only more charged given that all eight pangolin species are presently being pushed toward extinction. Their possible involvement in the COVID-19 story gives them a weird ambivalence, endangered and (perhaps) dangerous. Even as so many humans suffer and die, it’s worth asking the pangolin question: has our hunger for these humble creatures got us into a global catastrophe?
Pangolins are solitary animals, each one foraging on its lonesome, the adults coming together briefly to breed. The female carries her single offspring piggyback for some months, and sleeps with it curled tenderly within her armor. Although pangolins are hard to find, they must have once seemed endlessly abundant. Between 1975 and 2000, according to the German biologist Sarah Heinrich and her colleagues, drawing on the database of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (a multinational compact known as CITES), roughly seven hundred and seventy-six thousand pangolins became merchandise that was traded legally on the international market. That flow of products included almost six hundred and thirteen thousand pangolin skins, exported from countries including Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand.
Pangolin scales are a separate commodity, highly valued in some cultures for their supposed efficacy in traditional medicines. Between 1994 and 2000, almost nineteen tons of pangolin scales (accounting for roughly forty-seven thousand pangolins) were exported from Malaysia for use in traditional Chinese medicine (T.C.M.) in China and Hong Kong. Chinese tradition, as inscribed in old texts, holds that pangolin scales, ground to powder or burned to ash, can be useful against ant bites, midnight hysterias, evil spirits, malaria, hemorrhoids, and pinworm, and for stimulating lactation in women. Science doesn’t support these claims—the scales consist merely of keratin, the same material as your hair and your nails.
“There’s a lot of finger-pointing at other cultures,” Sarah Heinrich said recently from her home near Potsdam. The finger could point in many directions. Most of the pangolin skins exported between 1975 and 2000 went to North America, where they were turned into handbags, belts, wallets, and fancy cowboy boots. Pangolin leather was especially prized because the animal’s skin bears an eye-catching, almost reptilian, diamond-grid pattern. The Lucchese boot company, bootmaker to Lyndon Johnson, among others, produced pangolin-leather boots before 2000, when CITES set the export quota for wild-caught Asian pangolins to zero, essentially making the international commerce illegal.
By then, the pangolin populations in China and parts of Southeast Asia had been drastically depleted, not just to make American cowboy boots but also for regional consumption. At one point, some hundred and fifty thousand pangolins in China went to the knife monthly, their meat eaten and their scales used in T.C.M. “Such was the magnitude of this exploitation,” the Oxford University-based pangolin expert Daniel Challender and three co-authors wrote, “that it apparently led to the commercial extinction of pangolins in China by the mid-nineteen-nineties.” Importing pangolins was more practical than hunting down the few indigenous ones that remained.
“Oh, that’s my little place in the country.” Cartoon by Julia Leigh and Phillip Day Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Challender did some of his doctoral field work in Vietnam, conducting market surveys, gathering price data on pangolin scales, visiting restaurants where the meat was served. “If you go into a restaurant in Ho Chi Minh City,” he told me, “you’re going to be paying three hundred and fifty dollars a kilo for a pangolin.” It might be grilled, or boiled in a hot pot with ginger and spring onions. He recalled sitting in a restaurant, in 2012, watching three diners enjoy a seven-hundred-dollar pangolin meal. A server carried the animal, alive, into the restaurant in an old sack. It was balled up in its defense posture, showing only scales and claws. “They took out a large rolling pin and clubbed it unconscious,” Challender said. Then “they took some scissors and used the scissor blades to cut the throat.” The blood was drained out and mixed with alcohol for the diners, and the flesh was cooked.
As the Asian populations declined, African pangolins began flowing east in large quantities. Since early times, many peoples of sub-Saharan Africa have “harvested” pangolins, trapping the animals with snares, tracking them with dogs, or coming across them in the forest. The hunters traditionally consumed their catch or sold it into local bush-meat markets. Eventually, the meat became popular in cities, too, such as Libreville, in Gabon, and Yaoundé, in Cameroon, and that led to rising prices around the start of the twenty-first century. The scales mostly moved through the ports and airports of Nigeria and Cameroon to Asia, especially China and Vietnam.
“I know we’re serving as a transit point,” Olajumoke Morenikeji told me recently. She’s a zoologist, and a founder of the Pangolin Conservation Guild Nigeria. To judge from the thousands of kilograms of scales seized, she said, “you can’t have all that just coming from Nigeria.”
Luc Evouna Embolo, an officer for TRAFFIC, an international network that monitors the wildlife trade, gave a similar account from Yaoundé. Increasingly, middlemen incite local people to collect pangolins from the field and sell to them. The middlemen sell to urban businessmen who illegally export the animals. A villager might get paid three thousand C.F.A. francs (roughly five dollars) for a pangolin that will be worth thirty dollars in Douala, Cameroon’s economic capital, and much more in China. In 2017, police made one seizure amounting to more than five tons of scales, for which two Chinese traffickers were arrested.
In late 2016, CITES had decided to make all international trade of wild-caught pangolins and their parts illegal, but the traffic continued. Its scope could now be gauged only from the fraction seized by customs officials and other national enforcement authorities or detected by non-governmental investigators. By one estimate, almost nine hundred thousand pangolins have been smuggled during the past two decades. Some were alive. Some were dead, peeled of scales and frozen gray. The scales were concealed in sacks or boxes within shipping containers, sometimes labelled as cashews, oyster shells, or scrap plastic. Those who track this commerce, such as Challender and Heinrich, say that pangolins seem to be the most heavily trafficked wild mammals in the world.


newyorker--2020-08-24--Confessions of a Trump Troll

Confessions of a Trump Troll

A middle-aged lawyer recently sat down at a poké restaurant in a North Georgia town .
He was sniffling and dabbing his eyes with a napkin .
“ Don ’ t think it ’ s corona , ” he said , pulling up a Web site on his phone with statistics on diagnoses worldwide .
Then he looked at Twitter and began talking about a different sort of virus .
“ When Donald Trump first announced his Presidential bid , I told my wife , immediately , ‘ He ’ s going to be the President , ’ ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ How to put this and not sound fifteen ?
” he said .
“ I like chaos .
I thrive in it.
” For years , the lawyer , who asked not to be identified , worked in Washington , D.C. , for the Republican Party .
He moved his family south a few years ago , having realized , he said , that “ D.C .
is just Hollywood for ugly people.
” He found that he had time on his hands .
“ I ’ d never been interested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ I can ’ t stand Facebook.
” But he became intrigued by the power of Twitter .
“ Really repulsive meme-ing , the stuff that makes you laugh , makes you remember , ” he said .
The right , he went on , “ is great at it instinctively .
Whether it ’ s a 4chan board or basement neckbeards , they nail it .
They can distill a huge talking paragraph into a cat picture.
” He considers Trump ’ s digital facility “ absolutely genius , ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Barrack Obama , ” “ covfefe ” ) are intentional .
In 2015 , while the lawyer ’ s young children napped , he began trolling .
“ I ’ d have a glass of wine , talk to my wife , watch Netflix , and see what kinds of things we could do , ” he said .
He would sometimes pass four or five hours a day this way .
The lawyer is not a mainstream Republican ; he likes Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders .
He was also unbothered @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s election meddling .
( “ If you ’ re not interfering with elections , ” he said , “ you ’ re not doing it right.
” ) Out of curiosity , he attended a far-right gathering , where he found the younger attendees to be “ maybe a little misguided , but well intended.
” He began creating fake Twitter accounts , he said , to see “ whether I could get more interactions , more retweets , by being a little more radical.
” The Confederate flag was often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a lesser-known Confederate banner .
For his handles , he made up acronyms with a nationalistic tinge , such as FFK : Faith Folk and Kin .
He fashioned the accounts ’ ersatz users as boomers or gun-rights activists .
The latter , he said , were easy : “ Just follow Dana Loesch and interact with those crazy girls who stay up all night tweeting Second Amendment stuff.
” He added , “ I ’ d get them to retweet me and then my following would blow up.
” By the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he had about twenty accounts , each with a few thousand followers .
His fake alt-right accounts amplified Trump ’ s messaging and distorted Hillary Clinton ’ s .
( “ Something about her makes me nervous , ” he said . )
His fake Antifa ones spread what he called “ disinformation and false stories ” to benefit Trump .
He pulled up an old account with the handle Ruthless Lessruth .
“ This was supposed to be a girl who was married to an alt-right guy , ” he said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ used the account to trick an Antifa group into protesting an alt-right rally that didn ’ t exist : “ I P.M. ’ d the head of the Atlanta Antifa and told him that my ‘ husband ’ was alt-right and that I was repulsed by it.
” Then , in the guise of the wife , he directed the Atlanta Antifa group to a would-be rally at a Marriott Marquis .
A bunch of people showed up .
“ That was hard to do , to pose as a girl with political @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with.
” Some of his Antifa accounts also pushed veganism .
“ You have to find some community to exploit , ” he said .
“ I ’ d find an approved vegan account with Antifa leanings and interact with them a bit .
It was really tedious .
But I ’ m a lawyer—I get into the minutiae.
” Manning accounts on both sides of the political spectrum had its risks .
“ There was always the fear of tweeting something out of the wrong account , ” he said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or something.
” The lawyer ’ s trolling dropped off in 2017 .
He ’ d become disillusioned by Trump .
“ He hasn ’ t done anything he said he was going to do , ” the lawyer said .
“ But I ’ d vote for him over Biden .
No one is excited about Biden.
” ( “ I would have pulled for Bernie , ” he said . )
He recently opened a new Twitter account .
“ I just dicked around on it , ” he said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ tags .
I ’ m not a conspiracy theorist .
There ’ s nothing I think is being hidden from us that I care a lot about.
” He sighed .
“ Maybe I ’ ve just gotten old.
” ♦

A middle-aged lawyer recently sat down at a poké restaurant in a North Georgia town. He was sniffling and dabbing his eyes with a napkin. “Don’t think it’s corona,” he said, pulling up a Web site on his phone with statistics on diagnoses worldwide. Then he looked at Twitter and began talking about a different sort of virus. “When Donald Trump first announced his Presidential bid, I told my wife, immediately, ‘He’s going to be the President,’ ” he said. The lawyer welcomed the candidacy. “How to put this and not sound fifteen?” he said. “I like chaos. I thrive in it.”
For years, the lawyer, who asked not to be identified, worked in Washington, D.C., for the Republican Party. He moved his family south a few years ago, having realized, he said, that “D.C. is just Hollywood for ugly people.” He found that he had time on his hands. “I’d never been interested in social media,” he said. “I can’t stand Facebook.” But he became intrigued by the power of Twitter. “Really repulsive meme-ing, the stuff that makes you laugh, makes you remember,” he said. The right, he went on, “is great at it instinctively. Whether it’s a 4chan board or basement neckbeards, they nail it. They can distill a huge talking paragraph into a cat picture.” He considers Trump’s digital facility “absolutely genius,” and believes that his frequent Twitter misspellings (“Barrack Obama,” “covfefe”) are intentional. In 2015, while the lawyer’s young children napped, he began trolling. “I’d have a glass of wine, talk to my wife, watch Netflix, and see what kinds of things we could do,” he said. He would sometimes pass four or five hours a day this way.
The lawyer is not a mainstream Republican; he likes Bill Clinton and Bernie Sanders. He was also unbothered by the recent Senate report on Russia’s election meddling. (“If you’re not interfering with elections,” he said, “you’re not doing it right.”) Out of curiosity, he attended a far-right gathering, where he found the younger attendees to be “maybe a little misguided, but well intended.” He began creating fake Twitter accounts, he said, to see “whether I could get more interactions, more retweets, by being a little more radical.” The Confederate flag was often his avatar, or the Bonnie Blue, a lesser-known Confederate banner. For his handles, he made up acronyms with a nationalistic tinge, such as FFK: Faith Folk and Kin. He fashioned the accounts’ ersatz users as boomers or gun-rights activists. The latter, he said, were easy: “Just follow Dana Loesch and interact with those crazy girls who stay up all night tweeting Second Amendment stuff.” He added, “I’d get them to retweet me and then my following would blow up.” By the time the 2016 race was under way, he had about twenty accounts, each with a few thousand followers. His fake alt-right accounts amplified Trump’s messaging and distorted Hillary Clinton’s. (“Something about her makes me nervous,” he said.) His fake Antifa ones spread what he called “disinformation and false stories” to benefit Trump.
“You may have invented it, but you really don’t get it.” Cartoon by Liza Donnelly Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
He pulled up an old account with the handle Ruthless Lessruth. “This was supposed to be a girl who was married to an alt-right guy,” he said. He explained how he’d used the account to trick an Antifa group into protesting an alt-right rally that didn’t exist: “I P.M.’d the head of the Atlanta Antifa and told him that my ‘husband’ was alt-right and that I was repulsed by it.” Then, in the guise of the wife, he directed the Atlanta Antifa group to a would-be rally at a Marriott Marquis. A bunch of people showed up. “That was hard to do, to pose as a girl with political views that I’m not familiar with.” Some of his Antifa accounts also pushed veganism. “You have to find some community to exploit,” he said. “I’d find an approved vegan account with Antifa leanings and interact with them a bit. It was really tedious. But I’m a lawyer—I get into the minutiae.” Manning accounts on both sides of the political spectrum had its risks. “There was always the fear of tweeting something out of the wrong account,” he said. “Like praising immigration to my alt-right followers or something.”
The lawyer’s trolling dropped off in 2017. He’d become disillusioned by Trump. “He hasn’t done anything he said he was going to do,” the lawyer said. “But I’d vote for him over Biden. No one is excited about Biden.” (“I would have pulled for Bernie,” he said.) He recently opened a new Twitter account. “I just dicked around on it,” he said. “I watched some of the trending tags. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. There’s nothing I think is being hidden from us that I care a lot about.” He sighed. “Maybe I’ve just gotten old.” ♦


newyorker--2020-08-24--Returning to Storm King

Returning to Storm King

What ’ s with the metal-band-worthy name of Storm King , the marvellous sculpture park—or , better , landscape with sculptures in it—about fifty miles north of Manhattan , in Cornwall , New York ?
I ’ ve just spent some happy hours there , sprung from months of art deprivation , on the occasion of the Storm King Art Center ’ s reopening to visitors with timed tickets .
The setting is thundery enough , under the mighty brow of one of the highest mountains of the Hudson Highlands , in a valley of variegated hills , lawns , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ along with elegant alterations that include arboreal allées and plantings with deference to native flora—some five hundred acres hosting roughly a hundred art works .
I hadn ’ t known , until I was told during my visit , that the park ’ s name owes its provenance to the Romantic exasperation of a writer who , in 1853 , pressed locals to rebrand their principal mountain Storm King from—get ready—Butter Hill .
That nineteenth-century embrace of the hyperbolic anticipated the moxie , in 1960 , of two art-loving businessmen , Ralph E. @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who gradually acquired much of the valley .
They founded the park as a nonprofit entity , made a museum of an existing château on a hilltop , and pondered the ambient possibilities of the terrain .
In 1967 , Ogden bought thirteen works from the estate of America ’ s greatest sculptor , David Smith .
Mostly made of welded steel , they deploy a repertoire of shapes , from the surreally animate to the nobly abstract , gracing dancerly postures with lyrical drawings in space .
A suite of eight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oak and black-walnut trees , is modestly scaled .
Not so the vista-dominating , gestural arrays of mostly steel elements by a favorite of the collectors since 1968 , Mark di Suvero , which at times suggest playground facilities for giants .
Nine of those were supplemented last year by a three-year loan of “ E=mc² ” ( 1996-97 ) —a tower , more than ninety-two feet high , whose converging I-beam legs are topped by flaring forms in stainless steel that grab at the sky .
Also monumental are two maximum-sized stabiles @ @ @ @ @ @ @ air , indoors or out , Alexander Calder .
There are major works , as well , by Richard Serra , Andy Goldsworthy , and , most recently , Maya Lin , whose earthwork “ Storm King Wavefield ” ( 2007-08 ) represents a vast expanse of mid-ocean waves , up to fifteen feet high , with grassy undulations .
Sculpture parks proliferated , worldwide , in the second half of the twentieth century , in the wake of an identity crisis for large three-dimensional art .
Modernist austerity had stripped sculpture of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there were no more integrated niches and pedestals , few new formal gardens , and an epochal apathy regarding statues—until lately !
( We are now practically neo-Victorian in our awakenings—rude , for the most part—to symbolism in statuary . )
Never mind the odd plaza-plunked , vaguely humanist Henry Moore .
Where could one put outsized works that were almost invariably abstract—modernism ’ s universalist ideals persisting—to give them a chance of seeming to mean something ?
In nature !
Conjoining the made with the unmade , gratifying both .
Sculpture parks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ big art .
Storm King ’ s early concentration of works by relevant artists of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies includes some formulaic banalities , tending to presume a surefire magic in embowered angular geometry , but even there you may savor the zest of a moment when sculpture jumped into nature ’ s lap .
The history is complicated and obscured , in the art world , by the contemporaneous development , in the sixties , of Minimalism , which , by engaging the physical presence of viewers , shrugs off its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chastely white modular piece by Sol LeWitt doesn ’ t mind a bucolic site one way or another . )
As a consequence , Minimalism sidelined poetic potencies that prove their lasting worth at Storm King .
Prior visitors won ’ t be kept away by learning that few installations in this pandemic summer are new .
The park ’ s changing light , breezes , and theatre of clouds will do for novelty .
The best recent addition , on view until November 9th , is “ River Light ” ( 2019 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cyan-blue silk flags that Kiki Smith derived from a sun-sparkled film she made on a walk along the East River .
Wind stirs the fabric to rippling , soft applause .
The ensemble suggests a rallying point for angels .
Also new is “ A stone that thinks of Enceladus ” ( 2020 ) , a piece by a young New York-based artist , Martha Tuttle , which consists of a mowed field studded with boulders and cairns and rather hectically festooned with carved rocks and molded glass stones .
Close by , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , is a startling curio , the hull of an America ’ s Cup-grade racing boat that , in 1994 , was prettily decorated with a mermaid motif by Roy Lichtenstein .
Its abrupt presence , which you may less look at than gawk at , invokes the metaphysical truth that everything has to be somewhere .
Storm King ’ s prevalent rectitude might serve as a foil for other sorts of interesting shocks , within appropriate limits .
I can ’ t remember why , on a visit many years ago , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Wall ” ( 1997-98 ) , by Andy Goldsworthy—perhaps residual fatigue with a fashion , in the seventies and eighties , for back-to-the-land schmaltz .
The work strikes me now as rigorously intelligent as well as ecstatic .
Made of rocks that were gathered from the surrounding region , impeccably hand-laid , the wall snakes nearly half a mile through the park ’ s roughest terrain—clinging to slopes , plunging into ravines , ostensibly even passing underwater .
The gratuitous labor-intensiveness generates a paean to the first human being who placed one stone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ since then and in time to come .
Hiking the erratic land , you chance upon discontinuous views of the wall , proceeding at the pace of a waking dream .
Similarly inexhaustible is the authority of Serra ’ s “ Schunnemunk Fork ” ( 1990-91 ) , four rectangular steel plates protruding from the sides of a gentle rise .
The work looks smaller than I remember , from a time when I wrote that it induced “ consciousness of the earth ’ s sullen , immemorially surging mass.
” It turns @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decided to forgo any mowing around the plates , which now peek out almost shyly from rustling grasses : less imposing , their aggressiveness a kept secret , and very beautiful .
The Maya Lin “ Storm King Wavefield , ” just beyond sight of the Serra , is a tour de force by the designer of , to my mind , the single most successful work of American public art in contemporary memory , the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—a cenotaph for shared mourning—in Washington , D.C. ( Still , it proved divisive enough—we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ complement of a statuary group of three heroic G.I.s . )
At Storm King , Lin extends the idea of form that exists simultaneously upon and within—and , in this case , as—the ground it occupies .
The effect that she achieves , in common with Serra ’ s “ Fork , ” is a placeness that centers the world while you are in its vicinity .
Neither work could have a home more hospitable than Storm King .
Repeatedly , there are medium-sized objects that , spotted from a distance and drawing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of yourself to the landscape at large .
It ’ s like a recurrent bonus for tiny pilgrimages .
Louise Bourgeois ’ s writhing cluster of silvered-bronze eyeball shapes that electrically light up from within now and then— “ Eyes ” ( 2001 ) —requires a bit of a climb to be viewed properly .
You may then be reluctant to move along , so engrossing is the work ’ s rambunctious grotesquerie and smack-on-the-ground adamancy at the edge of a lovely wood .
That ’ s a happenstantial quality of the finest @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , beyond looking good , feels keenly aware of where it is and what it ’ s doing there .
It ’ s a forgiving standard for lesser art , which gets by on seeming eager to please if ever you find yourself in a mood for it .
Every piece hints at a story of its curatorial nomination and election , inviting judgment on the judgments that were made—a perambulatory discourse , if you ’ re so inclined .
In lockdown times , there ’ s euphoria in going much of anywhere @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a tract of paradise .
You could say that I was primed for giddiness on this occasion .
I noticed unaccustomed intensity in my responses to the art works that I encountered , taking them in like gulps of air after escaping a miasma .
It was a gift of refreshed aesthetic innocence , which I think awaits us all when we are set free in even non-curated environs—I ’ ve been feeling apologetic to certain trees , near my home , for my past indifference to their beauty—and a lesson in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ granted .
We will have peeled eyes .
I should warn that attendance at Storm King is limited right now : visitor tickets are capped at three hundred per day , from Wednesday to Monday .
But the place , which will stay open into December this year , is very apt to exist for at least as long as you do .
And just to know and to think about it brightens a world , our present one , that is crisscrossed with shadows .
♦

What’s with the metal-band-worthy name of Storm King, the marvellous sculpture park—or, better, landscape with sculptures in it—about fifty miles north of Manhattan, in Cornwall, New York? I’ve just spent some happy hours there, sprung from months of art deprivation, on the occasion of the Storm King Art Center’s reopening to visitors with timed tickets. The setting is thundery enough, under the mighty brow of one of the highest mountains of the Hudson Highlands, in a valley of variegated hills, lawns, meadows, forest, and waters, along with elegant alterations that include arboreal allées and plantings with deference to native flora—some five hundred acres hosting roughly a hundred art works. I hadn’t known, until I was told during my visit, that the park’s name owes its provenance to the Romantic exasperation of a writer who, in 1853, pressed locals to rebrand their principal mountain Storm King from—get ready—Butter Hill. That nineteenth-century embrace of the hyperbolic anticipated the moxie, in 1960, of two art-loving businessmen, Ralph E. Ogden and his son-in-law H. Peter Stern, who gradually acquired much of the valley. They founded the park as a nonprofit entity, made a museum of an existing château on a hilltop, and pondered the ambient possibilities of the terrain.
In 1967, Ogden bought thirteen works from the estate of America’s greatest sculptor, David Smith. Mostly made of welded steel, they deploy a repertoire of shapes, from the surreally animate to the nobly abstract, gracing dancerly postures with lyrical drawings in space. A suite of eight of them, currently installed under cathedralesque oak and black-walnut trees, is modestly scaled. Not so the vista-dominating, gestural arrays of mostly steel elements by a favorite of the collectors since 1968, Mark di Suvero, which at times suggest playground facilities for giants. Nine of those were supplemented last year by a three-year loan of “E=mc²” (1996-97)—a tower, more than ninety-two feet high, whose converging I-beam legs are topped by flaring forms in stainless steel that grab at the sky. Also monumental are two maximum-sized stabiles by art’s foremost bejeweller of air, indoors or out, Alexander Calder. There are major works, as well, by Richard Serra, Andy Goldsworthy, and, most recently, Maya Lin, whose earthwork “Storm King Wavefield” (2007-08) represents a vast expanse of mid-ocean waves, up to fifteen feet high, with grassy undulations.
Sculpture parks proliferated, worldwide, in the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of an identity crisis for large three-dimensional art. Modernist austerity had stripped sculpture of its traditional architectural and civic functions: there were no more integrated niches and pedestals, few new formal gardens, and an epochal apathy regarding statues—until lately! (We are now practically neo-Victorian in our awakenings—rude, for the most part—to symbolism in statuary.) Never mind the odd plaza-plunked, vaguely humanist Henry Moore. Where could one put outsized works that were almost invariably abstract—modernism’s universalist ideals persisting—to give them a chance of seeming to mean something? In nature! Conjoining the made with the unmade, gratifying both. Sculpture parks emerged as game preserves and laboratories for big art. Storm King’s early concentration of works by relevant artists of the late nineteen-sixties and seventies includes some formulaic banalities, tending to presume a surefire magic in embowered angular geometry, but even there you may savor the zest of a moment when sculpture jumped into nature’s lap. The history is complicated and obscured, in the art world, by the contemporaneous development, in the sixties, of Minimalism, which, by engaging the physical presence of viewers, shrugs off its surroundings. (The park’s chastely white modular piece by Sol LeWitt doesn’t mind a bucolic site one way or another.) As a consequence, Minimalism sidelined poetic potencies that prove their lasting worth at Storm King.
Prior visitors won’t be kept away by learning that few installations in this pandemic summer are new. The park’s changing light, breezes, and theatre of clouds will do for novelty. The best recent addition, on view until November 9th, is “River Light” (2019), a ring of nine high-flying cyan-blue silk flags that Kiki Smith derived from a sun-sparkled film she made on a walk along the East River. Wind stirs the fabric to rippling, soft applause. The ensemble suggests a rallying point for angels. Also new is “A stone that thinks of Enceladus” (2020), a piece by a young New York-based artist, Martha Tuttle, which consists of a mowed field studded with boulders and cairns and rather hectically festooned with carved rocks and molded glass stones. Close by, propped on an island in a pond, is a startling curio, the hull of an America’s Cup-grade racing boat that, in 1994, was prettily decorated with a mermaid motif by Roy Lichtenstein. Its abrupt presence, which you may less look at than gawk at, invokes the metaphysical truth that everything has to be somewhere. Storm King’s prevalent rectitude might serve as a foil for other sorts of interesting shocks, within appropriate limits.
I can’t remember why, on a visit many years ago, I was unimpressed by “Storm King Wall” (1997-98), by Andy Goldsworthy—perhaps residual fatigue with a fashion, in the seventies and eighties, for back-to-the-land schmaltz. The work strikes me now as rigorously intelligent as well as ecstatic. Made of rocks that were gathered from the surrounding region, impeccably hand-laid, the wall snakes nearly half a mile through the park’s roughest terrain—clinging to slopes, plunging into ravines, ostensibly even passing underwater. The gratuitous labor-intensiveness generates a paean to the first human being who placed one stone atop another, and to every other since then and in time to come. Hiking the erratic land, you chance upon discontinuous views of the wall, proceeding at the pace of a waking dream. Similarly inexhaustible is the authority of Serra’s “Schunnemunk Fork” (1990-91), four rectangular steel plates protruding from the sides of a gentle rise. The work looks smaller than I remember, from a time when I wrote that it induced “consciousness of the earth’s sullen, immemorially surging mass.” It turns out that a few years ago Serra decided to forgo any mowing around the plates, which now peek out almost shyly from rustling grasses: less imposing, their aggressiveness a kept secret, and very beautiful.
The Maya Lin “Storm King Wavefield,” just beyond sight of the Serra, is a tour de force by the designer of, to my mind, the single most successful work of American public art in contemporary memory, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—a cenotaph for shared mourning—in Washington, D.C. (Still, it proved divisive enough—we are talking about America—to acquire the neighboring complement of a statuary group of three heroic G.I.s.) At Storm King, Lin extends the idea of form that exists simultaneously upon and within—and, in this case, as—the ground it occupies. The effect that she achieves, in common with Serra’s “Fork,” is a placeness that centers the world while you are in its vicinity. Neither work could have a home more hospitable than Storm King.
Repeatedly, there are medium-sized objects that, spotted from a distance and drawing you to them, precipitate new relations of yourself to the landscape at large. It’s like a recurrent bonus for tiny pilgrimages. Louise Bourgeois’s writhing cluster of silvered-bronze eyeball shapes that electrically light up from within now and then—“Eyes” (2001)—requires a bit of a climb to be viewed properly. You may then be reluctant to move along, so engrossing is the work’s rambunctious grotesquerie and smack-on-the-ground adamancy at the edge of a lovely wood. That’s a happenstantial quality of the finest things at Storm King: art that, beyond looking good, feels keenly aware of where it is and what it’s doing there. It’s a forgiving standard for lesser art, which gets by on seeming eager to please if ever you find yourself in a mood for it. Every piece hints at a story of its curatorial nomination and election, inviting judgment on the judgments that were made—a perambulatory discourse, if you’re so inclined.
In lockdown times, there’s euphoria in going much of anywhere, not to speak of a journey to a tract of paradise. You could say that I was primed for giddiness on this occasion. I noticed unaccustomed intensity in my responses to the art works that I encountered, taking them in like gulps of air after escaping a miasma. It was a gift of refreshed aesthetic innocence, which I think awaits us all when we are set free in even non-curated environs—I’ve been feeling apologetic to certain trees, near my home, for my past indifference to their beauty—and a lesson in joys that we used to take for granted. We will have peeled eyes. I should warn that attendance at Storm King is limited right now: visitor tickets are capped at three hundred per day, from Wednesday to Monday. But the place, which will stay open into December this year, is very apt to exist for at least as long as you do. And just to know and to think about it brightens a world, our present one, that is crisscrossed with shadows. ♦


newyorker--2020-08-24--How Wagner Shaped Hollywood

How Wagner Shaped Hollywood

In February , 1915 , D. W. Griffith ’ s silent film “ The Birth of a Nation ” opened at Clune ’ s Auditorium , in Los Angeles .
It was advertised as the most amazing motion picture ever made—the “ eighth wonder of the world.
” Subsequent showings featured orchestras of up to fifty musicians playing a multi-composer score assembled by the movie-music pioneer Joseph Carl Breil .
The film , set during and after the Civil War , is based on “ The Clansman : An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan , ” a baldly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In the movie ’ s climactic scene , Klan members ride forth on horses to save a Southern town from what the film characterizes as oppressive African-American rule .
The score for this sequence is dominated by Richard Wagner : a passage from his early opera “ Rienzi , ” followed by a modified version of “ The Ride of the Valkyries , ” from “ Die Walküre.
” At the moment of triumph— “ Disarming the blacks , ” the title card reads—Wagner gives way to “ Dixie , ” the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ card spells out what kind of nation Griffith wants to see born : “ The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.
” “ The Birth of a Nation ” set the pace for a century of Wagnerian aggression on film .
More than a thousand movies and TV shows feature the composer on their soundtracks , yoking him to all manner of rampaging hordes , marching armies , swashbuckling heroes , and scheming evildoers .
The “ Ride ” turns up in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ What ’ s Opera , Doc ?
, ” Elmer Fudd chants “ Kill da wabbit ” while pursuing Bugs Bunny .
In John Landis ’ s “ The Blues Brothers ” ( 1980 ) , the “ Ride ” plays while buffoonish neo-Nazis chase the heroes down a highway and fly off an overpass .
Most indelibly , Francis Ford Coppola ’ s “ Apocalypse Now ” ( 1979 ) upends Griffith ’ s racial duality , making white Americans the heralds of destruction : a helicopter squadron blares the “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Vietnamese village .
Action sequences are only one facet of Wagner ’ s celluloid presence .
A colorful—and often shady—array of Wagner enthusiasts have appeared onscreen , from the woebegone lovers of Robert Siodmak ’ s noir “ Christmas Holiday ” to the diabolical android of Ridley Scott ’ s “ Alien : Covenant.
” The composer himself is portrayed in more than a dozen movies , including Tony Palmer ’ s extravagant , eight-hour 1983 bio-pic , starring Richard Burton .
But the Wagnerization of film goes deeper than that .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ word , and music promised a fulfillment of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk , or “ total work of art , ” which Wagner propagated at one stage of his career .
His informal system of assigning leitmotifs to characters and themes became a defining trait of film scores .
And Hollywood has drawn repeatedly from Wagner ’ s gallery of mythic archetypes : his gods , heroes , sorcerers , and questers .
This contradictory swirl of associations mirrors the composer ’ s fractured legacy : on the one hand , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Shakespearean breadth and depth ; on the other , as a vicious anti-Semite who became a cultural totem for Hitler .
Like operagoers across the generations , filmmakers have had trouble deciding whether Wagner is an inexhaustible store of wonder or a bottomless well of hate .
But that uncertainty also mirrors the film industry ’ s own ambiguous role as an incubator of heroic fantasies , which can serve a wide range of political ends .
When Hollywood talks about Wagner , it is often—consciously or not—talking about itself .
When the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in 1876 , for the première of the “ Ring of the Nibelung ” cycle , a kind of cinema came into being .
The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick , no friend of Wagner ’ s , felt that he was looking at a “ bright-colored picture in a dark frame , ” as in a diorama display .
The composer had intended as much , saying that the stage picture should have the “ unapproachability of a dream vision.
” The orchestra was hidden in a sunken pit known as the “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ through the room as if it were transmitted by a speaker system .
The inaugural performances took place in a near-blackout .
From the Festspielhaus , according to the media theorist Friedrich Kittler , “ the darkness of all our cinemas derives.
” Bayreuth ’ s technical achievements predicted cinematic sleights of hand .
In the “ Ring , ” magic-lantern projections evoked the Valkyries on their flying steeds ; in “ Parsifal , ” the Grail glowed with electric light .
Clouds of steam generated by two locomotive boilers smoothed over changes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ techniques of dissolve and fade-out .
Wagner ’ s music itself provides hypnotic continuity .
When the action of “ Das Rheingold ” shifts from the Rhine to the area around Valhalla , the stage directions say , “ Gradually the waves turn into clouds , which resolve into a fine mist.
” In the score , rushing river patterns give way to shimmering tremolos and then to a more rarefied texture of flutes and violins—what the scholar Peter Franklin describes as an “ elaborate upward panning shot.
” In the descent into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the sound of hammering anvils swells in a long crescendo before fading away .
This is like a dolly shot : a camera moves in on the Nibelungs at work , then draws back .
The convocation of the nine Valkyries in Act III of “ Walküre ” is Wagner ’ s finest action sequence—a virtuoso exercise in the massing of forces and the accumulation of energy .
At the beginning , winds trill against quick upward swoops in the strings ; horns , bassoons , and cellos establish a galloping rhythm @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a trickier wind-and-string texture , with staggered entries and downward-swooping patterns ; and , finally , horns and bass trumpet lay out the main theme .
Successive iterations of the material are bolstered with trumpets , more horns , and four stentorian trombones , but the players are initially held at a dynamic marking of forte , allowing for a further crescendo to fortissimo .
When two tarrying Valkyries , Rossweisse and Grimgerde , finally join the group , the contrabass tuba enters fortissimo beneath the trombones , giving a sense of powerful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ scores from the outset .
The “ Ride ” was employed for battles and horses ; the “ Magic Fire ” music , during which the god Wotan encloses the Valkyrie Brünnhilde in a ring of fire , accompanied flickering flames .
The “ Flying Dutchman ” overture served for seas and storms , “ Tannhäuser ” and “ Parsifal ” for religious scenes , and , of course , the “ Lohengrin ” Bridal Chorus for weddings .
Given those habits , the use of the “ Ride ” in “ The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unusual , but modern viewers have to wonder about the agenda behind the selection .
When Griffith read Dixon ’ s novel , the ride of the Klan especially seized his attention : “ I could just see these Klansmen in a movie with their white robes flying.
” The idea of Wagnerian accompaniment may have occurred to him early .
According to the film ’ s star Lillian Gish , Breil and Griffith squabbled over the “ Ride ” ; Griffith wanted to make adjustments to the music , but Breil said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with Wagner !
” Griffith apparently won the argument .
As the Klan hordes assemble—a famous shot shows scores of white-clad horses and riders traversing an open field—we hear a bit of the “ Rienzi ” overture .
Then , as the riders undertake their rescue missions , the rearranged “ Ride ” pipes up .
The galvanizing effect of this sequence on audiences of the day can be gauged by a report from a screening in Atlanta : “ Your spine prickles and in the gallery the yells cut loose with every @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Nation ” is credited with bringing about a revival of the Klan , which had terrorized African-Americans after the Civil War .

In February, 1915, D. W. Griffith’s silent film “The Birth of a Nation” opened at Clune’s Auditorium, in Los Angeles. It was advertised as the most amazing motion picture ever made—the “eighth wonder of the world.” Subsequent showings featured orchestras of up to fifty musicians playing a multi-composer score assembled by the movie-music pioneer Joseph Carl Breil. The film, set during and after the Civil War, is based on “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” a baldly racist novel by Thomas Dixon, Jr. In the movie’s climactic scene, Klan members ride forth on horses to save a Southern town from what the film characterizes as oppressive African-American rule. The score for this sequence is dominated by Richard Wagner: a passage from his early opera “Rienzi,” followed by a modified version of “The Ride of the Valkyries,” from “Die Walküre.” At the moment of triumph—“Disarming the blacks,” the title card reads—Wagner gives way to “Dixie,” the unofficial anthem of the South. Another card spells out what kind of nation Griffith wants to see born: “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defence of their Aryan birthright.”
“The Birth of a Nation” set the pace for a century of Wagnerian aggression on film. More than a thousand movies and TV shows feature the composer on their soundtracks, yoking him to all manner of rampaging hordes, marching armies, swashbuckling heroes, and scheming evildoers. The “Ride” turns up in a particularly dizzying variety of scenarios. In “What’s Opera, Doc?,” Elmer Fudd chants “Kill da wabbit” while pursuing Bugs Bunny. In John Landis’s “The Blues Brothers” (1980), the “Ride” plays while buffoonish neo-Nazis chase the heroes down a highway and fly off an overpass. Most indelibly, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” (1979) upends Griffith’s racial duality, making white Americans the heralds of destruction: a helicopter squadron blares the “Ride” as it lays waste to a Vietnamese village.
Action sequences are only one facet of Wagner’s celluloid presence. A colorful—and often shady—array of Wagner enthusiasts have appeared onscreen, from the woebegone lovers of Robert Siodmak’s noir “Christmas Holiday” to the diabolical android of Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant.” The composer himself is portrayed in more than a dozen movies, including Tony Palmer’s extravagant, eight-hour 1983 bio-pic, starring Richard Burton. But the Wagnerization of film goes deeper than that. Cinema’s integration of image, word, and music promised a fulfillment of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art,” which Wagner propagated at one stage of his career. His informal system of assigning leitmotifs to characters and themes became a defining trait of film scores. And Hollywood has drawn repeatedly from Wagner’s gallery of mythic archetypes: his gods, heroes, sorcerers, and questers.
“The Ride of the Valkyries,” from the opera “Die Walküre,” has been featured in hundreds of films and television shows throughout the past century.
This contradictory swirl of associations mirrors the composer’s fractured legacy: on the one hand, as a theatrical visionary who created works of Shakespearean breadth and depth; on the other, as a vicious anti-Semite who became a cultural totem for Hitler. Like operagoers across the generations, filmmakers have had trouble deciding whether Wagner is an inexhaustible store of wonder or a bottomless well of hate. But that uncertainty also mirrors the film industry’s own ambiguous role as an incubator of heroic fantasies, which can serve a wide range of political ends. When Hollywood talks about Wagner, it is often—consciously or not—talking about itself.
When the lights went down at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1876, for the première of the “Ring of the Nibelung” cycle, a kind of cinema came into being. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, no friend of Wagner’s, felt that he was looking at a “bright-colored picture in a dark frame,” as in a diorama display. The composer had intended as much, saying that the stage picture should have the “unapproachability of a dream vision.” The orchestra was hidden in a sunken pit known as the “mystic abyss”; its sound wafted through the room as if it were transmitted by a speaker system. The inaugural performances took place in a near-blackout. From the Festspielhaus, according to the media theorist Friedrich Kittler, “the darkness of all our cinemas derives.”
Bayreuth’s technical achievements predicted cinematic sleights of hand. In the “Ring,” magic-lantern projections evoked the Valkyries on their flying steeds; in “Parsifal,” the Grail glowed with electric light. Clouds of steam generated by two locomotive boilers smoothed over changes of scene, in anticipation of the techniques of dissolve and fade-out. Wagner’s music itself provides hypnotic continuity. When the action of “Das Rheingold” shifts from the Rhine to the area around Valhalla, the stage directions say, “Gradually the waves turn into clouds, which resolve into a fine mist.” In the score, rushing river patterns give way to shimmering tremolos and then to a more rarefied texture of flutes and violins—what the scholar Peter Franklin describes as an “elaborate upward panning shot.” In the descent into Nibelheim, the realm of the dwarves, the sound of hammering anvils swells in a long crescendo before fading away. This is like a dolly shot: a camera moves in on the Nibelungs at work, then draws back.
The convocation of the nine Valkyries in Act III of “Walküre” is Wagner’s finest action sequence—a virtuoso exercise in the massing of forces and the accumulation of energy. At the beginning, winds trill against quick upward swoops in the strings; horns, bassoons, and cellos establish a galloping rhythm, at medium volume; then comes a trickier wind-and-string texture, with staggered entries and downward-swooping patterns; and, finally, horns and bass trumpet lay out the main theme. Successive iterations of the material are bolstered with trumpets, more horns, and four stentorian trombones, but the players are initially held at a dynamic marking of forte, allowing for a further crescendo to fortissimo. When two tarrying Valkyries, Rossweisse and Grimgerde, finally join the group, the contrabass tuba enters fortissimo beneath the trombones, giving a sense of powerful reinforcements arriving.
Wagner figured in silent-film scores from the outset. The “Ride” was employed for battles and horses; the “Magic Fire” music, during which the god Wotan encloses the Valkyrie Brünnhilde in a ring of fire, accompanied flickering flames. The “Flying Dutchman” overture served for seas and storms, “Tannhäuser” and “Parsifal” for religious scenes, and, of course, the “Lohengrin” Bridal Chorus for weddings.
“Honey, if the government won’t contact-trace Kimberley’s pool parties, I will simply do it myself.” Cartoon by Maddie Dai Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Given those habits, the use of the “Ride” in “The Birth of a Nation” was hardly unusual, but modern viewers have to wonder about the agenda behind the selection. When Griffith read Dixon’s novel, the ride of the Klan especially seized his attention: “I could just see these Klansmen in a movie with their white robes flying.” The idea of Wagnerian accompaniment may have occurred to him early. According to the film’s star Lillian Gish, Breil and Griffith squabbled over the “Ride”; Griffith wanted to make adjustments to the music, but Breil said, “You can’t tamper with Wagner!” Griffith apparently won the argument. As the Klan hordes assemble—a famous shot shows scores of white-clad horses and riders traversing an open field—we hear a bit of the “Rienzi” overture. Then, as the riders undertake their rescue missions, the rearranged “Ride” pipes up. The galvanizing effect of this sequence on audiences of the day can be gauged by a report from a screening in Atlanta: “Your spine prickles and in the gallery the yells cut loose with every bugle note.” “The Birth of a Nation” is credited with bringing about a revival of the Klan, which had terrorized African-Americans after the Civil War.
Matthew Wilson Smith, in a penetrating essay on the film, concludes, “Griffith’s use of Wagner married some of the most reactionary energies of Bayreuth to groundbreaking techniques of filmic integration.” This is a reasonable assessment, although it bears mentioning that W. E. B. Du Bois, in his 1903 story “Of the Coming of John,” had used Wagner in a diametrically opposed way—as an expression of the inner yearning of a Black man who will die at the hands of a horse-riding white mob: “A deep longing swelled in all his heart to rise with that clear music out of the dirt and dust of that low life that held him prisoned and befouled.” Du Bois might have pointed out that Dixon and Griffith’s racism had no need for a German antecedent. If anything, the influence moved in the opposite direction: the Nazis admired and emulated American laws that curtailed the rights of African-Americans and other minorities. The insertion of “The Ride of the Valkyries” into “The Birth of a Nation” tells us more about the cultural arrogance of American white supremacy than it does about Wagner’s nefarious impact.
In the sound era, the lush production values of golden-age Hollywood called for a sonic carpet extending from the opening titles to the final frame. Max Steiner, who scored some three hundred films between 1930 and 1965, honed the leitmotif system to a near-exact science. In “Casablanca,” “As Time Goes By” is famously sung by Dooley Wilson, but the melody also courses through Steiner’s score, undergoing expressive permutations. The composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the doyen of the swashbuckler picture, subjected leitmotifs to sophisticated development, variation, combination, and compression.
Wagner’s own music rumbled through action-adventure pictures (“The Lion Man”), historical epics (“The Viking”), romantic dramas (“The Right to Live”), gangster movies (“City Streets”), science fiction (“Flash Gordon”), Westerns (“Red River Valley”), and horror (Tod Browning’s “Dracula” and “Freaks”). Frank Borzage’s 1932 adaptation of “A Farewell to Arms” ends with Gary Cooper holding the lifeless body of Helen Hayes and exclaiming “Peace!” while “Tristan und Isolde” swells. Less sentimental is Borzage’s nightmarish montage of war scenes, scored to a mishmash of the “Ride” and other “Ring” motifs. From “The Birth of a Nation” onward, the “Ride” has almost always signified male derring-do, ignoring the femaleness of the Valkyries. One exception can be found in Josef von Sternberg’s 1934 “The Scarlet Empress,” about the rise of Catherine the Great: a Valkyrie fantasia accompanies Marlene Dietrich’s climactic horse charge into the palace of the tsar.
Comedians treated Wagner more irreverently. In the Marx Brothers’ “At the Circus” (1939), Margaret Dumont hires a snooty French conductor and his orchestra to perform at her estate, in Newport, Rhode Island. Groucho and company—circus performers who wish to eliminate this rival group so that they can collect a paycheck from Dumont—direct the Frenchmen to a barge at the water’s edge, then cut them loose. In the closing shot, the musicians play the “Lohengrin” Act III prelude while floating obliviously out to sea—a fine metaphor for the predicament of classical music in a pop-culture age.
The onset of the Second World War inevitably darkened Wagner’s Hollywood image. For most of the thirties, the studios shied away from anti-Nazi messages, unwilling to offend German sensibilities. Warner Bros.’ 1939 thriller “Confessions of a Nazi Spy,” with a score by Max Steiner, marked a turning point. When the film was rereleased, in 1940, with a documentary-like epilogue about recent German victories, the score was augmented with distorted allusions to the “Ride” and other “Ring” themes. During the same period, the cliché of the Wagner-loving Nazi took hold. In the 1940 drama “Escape,” a Nazi general (Conrad Veidt) has an affair with a widowed aristocrat (Norma Shearer) who is becoming conscious of the evil of the regime. When Veidt plays Wagner at the piano, Shearer says, “Oh, do play something else.” He says, “I thought ‘Tristan’ was our favorite opera.” She responds, “Perhaps I’ve heard it too often.”
Shortly after America entered the war, Frank Capra set to work making propaganda films that explained the country’s mission to young recruits. As part of his research, Capra watched Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” (1935), and his first reaction was to tell himself, “We can’t win this war.” In his memoir, he wrote of Riefenstahl’s film, “Though panoplied with all the pomp and mystical trappings of a Wagnerian opera, its message was as blunt and brutal as a lead pipe: We, the Herrenvolk, are the new invincible gods!” (“Triumph of the Will” contains a ninety-second excerpt from “Die Meistersinger,” in a sequence devoted to old Nuremberg.) On reflection, Capra decided that Nazi sound and fury could be turned against itself. The result was “Why We Fight,” a series of seven films that mixed sober history lessons with taunting commentaries on Fascist and Imperial Japanese poses. A team of skilled Hollywood composers, including Dimitri Tiomkin, Alfred Newman, and David Raksin, worked on the project.
“Prelude to War,” the first episode of “Why We Fight,” quickly delivers a musical answer to the series’ guiding question. As the narrator speaks of a battle between a free world and an enslaved one, the orchestra quotes Siegfried’s principal theme from the “Ring,” in muted, menacing form. The theme recurs dozens of times in the series, in dissonant variations. These creative manglings give the enemy a readily identifiable sonic tag and also supply a forward-thrusting energy. Even as Wagner is being painted black, he lends a heroic dimension to the proceedings. From time to time, we hear patriotic American tunes orchestrated in a Wagnerian mode. The U.S. side, too, had its fantasies of invincibility. “Why We Fight” opens with a statement that by war’s end the American flag should be “recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand, of overwhelming power on the other.”
Hollywood was too addicted to Wagner’s sonic zest to demonize him entirely, as the case of cartoons shows. The music historian Daniel Ira Goldmark counts more than a hundred Warner Bros. cartoons with Wagner on their soundtracks. During the war, when cartoons were deployed for propaganda purposes, some of those references took on an anti-Nazi charge. In “Herr Meets Hare,” Bugs Bunny finds himself in the Black Forest, where he confronts a Hermann Göring type. Carl Stalling’s score dresses Göring in a frantic cluster of Wagner themes. Yet citations in “Hare We Go” and “Captain Hareblower” bear no trace of Nazi evil. In one anti-Japanese cartoon—“Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips”—Wagner is actually converted to the Allied cause. Stalling’s score uses the Siegfried motif to signify the prospect of Bugs’s rescue by an American warship—a rescue that he ultimately refuses, in favor of the company of a sexy female rabbit. The film-music historian Neil Lerner has noted the uncomfortable alignment of an Americanized Wagner with a gratuitously racist depiction of Japanese people.
When Charlie Chaplin watched “Triumph of the Will,” his immediate impulse, according to Luis Buñuel, was to burst into laughter. The orator onscreen seemed to be an insane variation on Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, down to the toothbrush mustache. The experience unnerved him, though, as it did many leftist filmmakers who witnessed the technical virtuosity of German cinema being applied to sinister ends. In 1940, Chaplin released “The Great Dictator,” a lavish satire of Hitler’s histrionics. Inevitably, Wagner is on the soundtrack, yet Chaplin makes the surprising choice to detach the music from the Nazi context. The ethereal prelude to “Lohengrin,” suggesting the sacred power of the Holy Grail, is heard twice in the film, serving first to puncture Nazi iconography and then to amplify a message of peace.
Hitler is caricatured as Adenoid Hynkel, a nincompoop of a Führer who jabbers mock-German and is more than a little fey. He prances about, tinkles on a piano with candelabra all around, and, at one point, holds a flower in an Oscar Wilde-like pose. When his propaganda minister, Herr Garbitsch, raises the idea of killing all the Jews and making Hynkel “dictator of the world,” Hynkel becomes so excited that he scurries up the drapes and exclaims melodramatically, “Leave me, I want to be alone!” As the high, thin, shining music of the “Lohengrin” prelude begins, Hynkel slides down the drapes and prowls across the floor to an enormous globe. “Emperor of the world,” he murmurs. He plucks the globe from its stand and spins it on a finger, laughing hysterically. A singular ballet ensues, as Chaplin bounces the ball from hand to hand, off his head, off his foot, and, twice, off his butt.
A parallel story arc shows the travails of a Jewish barber, identical in appearance to Hynkel. The oppressor and the oppressed switch roles: Hynkel is mistaken for the barber and sent to a concentration camp; the barber finds himself addressing a Hynkel rally, his closing speech a stirring critique of capitalist ruthlessness and a plea for brotherhood. After the crowd cheers, he sends a message to his girlfriend, Hannah, who is in exile. The music of “Lohengrin” returns as the barber reaches his peroration: “We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality. Look up, Hannah!” Hannah—in a field, listening to the barber on a radio—gazes in wonder. “Listen!” she exclaims, her eyes shining. “Lohengrin” swells all around her, as if playing from on high.