newyorker--2020-12-14--When a Virus Is the Cure

When a Virus Is the Cure

Born in Hungary in 1941 , he trained as an athlete in his teens , as a way , he said , of escaping Communism .
Short and not particularly muscular , he opted for dinghy sailing , reasoning that a lack of homegrown competition ( Hungary has no coast , after all ) might enable him to qualify for the national team , compete overseas , and then defect to the West .
In 1960 , after a respectable performance at a regatta on Lake Chiemsee , in Germany , his plan succeeded .
He ended up in Munich @ @ @ @ @ @ @ selling newspapers in the evenings .
One night a year or two later , as he tells it , he heard music—catchy , melodious , altogether irresistible—drifting out of a club .
The band was performing again the following night , so he came back early and struck up a conversation with the four young Liverpudlians .
He took them to a ski resort nearby , he told me , and it quickly emerged that winter sports were not yet part of their repertoire .
“ You don ’ t believe me !
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ t wrong . )
A love of music , Bunevacz said , brought him to America before the sixties were over .
After hearing the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson perform in a Munich church , he moved to Detroit , and then travelled around the country working in hotels—in the kitchen , then behind the desk , and , eventually , as a manager at the Sheraton in Waikiki , at the time the world ’ s largest .
There , he told me , he met the crooner Al Martino and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reminisced about later travels with the Hungarian National Olympic Committee , and lectured me on the best way to make strudel , smoked Hungarian sausage , and the fruit brandy pálinka .
Whenever Bunevacz paused for breath , Filomena , a retired nurse , filled me in on the dates of his various scans , his handful of colonoscopies , his gall-bladder operation , his bile-duct stent , the surgical removal of his upper colon , and his trips to urgent care .
“ Do you know how many blood cultures they have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said .
“ When I was a nurse , the patients who were this sick—they died.
” Despite his irrepressible good humor , Bunevacz is , indeed , very unwell .
His case is also something of a medical mystery .
His symptoms—fever , nausea , abdominal pain , and diarrhea—are easily explained : he is being poisoned by E. coli bacteria in his bloodstream .
But it ’ s not clear what has been causing the infection to recur .
When I saw him , Bunevacz had been going to his local @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to receive huge doses of antibiotics , but after each treatment ended the infection would return .
For years , doctors from across the country have scanned him , probed him , and sliced him open to inspect or remove the tissue in which they suspect the E. coli may lurk .
Nothing has made the slightest difference .
“ Honestly , I would have thought he would have died from this a year ago , ” Emily Blodget , his infectious-disease consultant at the University of Southern California ’ s Keck Hospital @ @ @ @ @ @ @ optimist by nature , but the cost—financial as well as personal—of the procedures , along with the recurring fevers and pain , not to mention the side effects of the antibiotics , have begun to seem overwhelming .
“ I would try anything , ” he said , in a rare moment of seriousness .
Late last year , the Bunevaczes ’ daughter came up with a new suggestion : an emergency treatment , not yet approved by the F.D.A.
, that had saved the life of a man in San Diego .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mom , you have to get Dad to do phage therapy , ’ ” Filomena told me .
“ P-H-A-G-E , ” Bunevacz clarified , nodding .
So Filomena asked Blodget whether he might be a candidate for this mysterious new medicine .
Phages , or bacteriophages , are viruses that infect only bacteria .
Each kingdom of life—plants , animals , bacteria , and so on—has its own distinct complement of viruses .
Animal and plant viruses have always received most of our scientific attention , because they pose a direct threat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our livestock and crops .
The well-being of bacteria has , understandably , been of less concern , yet the battle between viruses and bacteria is brutal : scientists estimate that phages cause a trillion trillion infections per second , destroying half the world ’ s bacteria every forty-eight hours .
As we are now all too aware , animal-specific viruses can mutate enough to infect a different animal species .
But they will not attack bacteria , and bacteriophage viruses are similarly harmless to animals , humans included .
Phage therapy operates @ @ @ @ @ @ @ our enemy could be our friend .
If Bunevacz ’ s doctors could find a virus that infected his particular strain of E. coli , it might succeed where antibiotics had failed .
“ I ’ d heard of it , ” Blodget said , when I asked her how she ’ d responded to Filomena ’ s question about phage therapy .
“ But in the past it was thought of as kind of fringe.
” Recently , though , she ’ d seen reports describing patients whose long-standing , sometimes life-threatening @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Last year , a paper published in Nature Medicine documented the role of phages in saving the life of a teen-age cystic-fibrosis patient in the U.K. , who was stricken with a bacterial infection after a double lung transplant .
Another case study described how phages helped save a Minnesota man ’ s leg , which had become infected after knee surgery .
In the past five years , phage research has accelerated , with a proliferation of publications , conferences , and pharmaceutical-company investment .
This enthusiasm reflects the ever-growing threat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new antibiotics available to fight them .
In 2016 , the United Nations pronounced antibiotic resistance “ the greatest and most urgent global risk.
” Without reliable antibiotics , even relatively routine surgery—Cesarean sections , hernia repair , appendix or tonsil removal—could be deadly .
One analysis published in a leading British medical journal estimated that , without antibiotics , one in seven people undergoing routine hip-replacement surgery might die from a drug-resistant infection .
Already , some seven hundred thousand people die each year as a direct result of drug-resistant infections , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to ten million by 2050 .
The bacteria plaguing Bunevacz haven ’ t yet developed resistance to the full range of antibiotics , but Blodget told me that they inevitably would .
Soon after Thanksgiving last year , he was identified as a viable candidate for the therapy , and Blodget told him that she thought it was worth a try .
“ I said , I don ’ t think it ’ s going to hurt , and it can possibly help , ” she recalled .
“ I mean , at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ else to do.
” Part of the problem with phages is that they were discovered almost too early—far in advance of the technology and scientific understanding required to use them effectively .
In 1915 , a British bacteriologist named Frederick Twort reported the existence of an infectious agent capable of killing bacteria , but he didn ’ t pursue the finding .
It was left to a French-Canadian scientist , Félix d ’ Hérelle , to name and describe phages , in 1917 .
Unfortunately , d ’ Hérelle was an autodidact working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in Paris .
What ’ s more , he recklessly claimed that phages were the basis of the human immune response , in direct opposition to the Nobel Prize-winning research of the institute ’ s Brussels director , Jules Bordet , who had demonstrated that immunity was based on antibodies .
D ’ Hérelle , with a lack of restraint that was apparently characteristic , described his superior ’ s work as laden with “ monstrosities.
” Bordet responded by championing Twort ’ s prior observation of phages ; as a result @ @ @ @ @ @ @ controversial .
D ’ Hérelle realized that bacteriophages congregated wherever bacteria did , and that a particularly fruitful source was effluvia from sick humans .
He would mix fetid water with meat bouillon , wait until any bacteria had fed and multiplied , then pass the murky soup through a porcelain filter fine enough to remove the bacteria and leave the phages .
He then evaluated the filtered dregs by pouring them into a test tube filled with the target bacterium .
The results were promising .
After “ proving ” the safety @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , his young family , and some of his colleagues , d ’ Hérelle went on to inject them into the swollen lymph nodes of four people who had bubonic plague , effecting a seemingly miraculous cure .
Phages were briefly all the rage : in 1925 , Sinclair Lewis used them to tackle a fictional outbreak in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel , “ Arrowsmith .
”

Some years before Joseph Bunevacz came to America, and decades before he got sick, he taught the Beatles how to ski. Or so he told me when I visited him at his home, on the arid northeastern slopes of the mountains that separate Los Angeles from the Mojave Desert, to learn more about an experimental medical treatment that he was hoping to receive for a strange and persistent infection in his blood. His wife, Filomena, took me through his medical history, consulting a stack of yellow legal pads in which, for the past five years, she has recorded countless tests and treatments. Yet Bunevacz, a bright-eyed seventy-nine-year-old with a shock of white hair, wearing an official Hungarian Olympic tracksuit, just wanted to tell wild, improbable stories about his younger years.
Born in Hungary in 1941, he trained as an athlete in his teens, as a way, he said, of escaping Communism. Short and not particularly muscular, he opted for dinghy sailing, reasoning that a lack of homegrown competition (Hungary has no coast, after all) might enable him to qualify for the national team, compete overseas, and then defect to the West. In 1960, after a respectable performance at a regatta on Lake Chiemsee, in Germany, his plan succeeded. He ended up in Munich, working in a department store and selling newspapers in the evenings. One night a year or two later, as he tells it, he heard music—catchy, melodious, altogether irresistible—drifting out of a club. The band was performing again the following night, so he came back early and struck up a conversation with the four young Liverpudlians. He took them to a ski resort nearby, he told me, and it quickly emerged that winter sports were not yet part of their repertoire. “You don’t believe me!” he exclaimed. (He wasn’t wrong.)
A love of music, Bunevacz said, brought him to America before the sixties were over. After hearing the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson perform in a Munich church, he moved to Detroit, and then travelled around the country working in hotels—in the kitchen, then behind the desk, and, eventually, as a manager at the Sheraton in Waikiki, at the time the world’s largest. There, he told me, he met the crooner Al Martino and the jazz pianist Oscar Peterson. He reminisced about later travels with the Hungarian National Olympic Committee, and lectured me on the best way to make strudel, smoked Hungarian sausage, and the fruit brandy pálinka.
Whenever Bunevacz paused for breath, Filomena, a retired nurse, filled me in on the dates of his various scans, his handful of colonoscopies, his gall-bladder operation, his bile-duct stent, the surgical removal of his upper colon, and his trips to urgent care. “Do you know how many blood cultures they have done on this man?” she said. “When I was a nurse, the patients who were this sick—they died.”
Despite his irrepressible good humor, Bunevacz is, indeed, very unwell. His case is also something of a medical mystery. His symptoms—fever, nausea, abdominal pain, and diarrhea—are easily explained: he is being poisoned by E. coli bacteria in his bloodstream. But it’s not clear what has been causing the infection to recur. When I saw him, Bunevacz had been going to his local emergency clinic every month, in order to receive huge doses of antibiotics, but after each treatment ended the infection would return. For years, doctors from across the country have scanned him, probed him, and sliced him open to inspect or remove the tissue in which they suspect the E. coli may lurk. Nothing has made the slightest difference.
“Honestly, I would have thought he would have died from this a year ago,” Emily Blodget, his infectious-disease consultant at the University of Southern California’s Keck Hospital, told me. Bunevacz is an optimist by nature, but the cost—financial as well as personal—of the procedures, along with the recurring fevers and pain, not to mention the side effects of the antibiotics, have begun to seem overwhelming. “I would try anything,” he said, in a rare moment of seriousness.
Late last year, the Bunevaczes’ daughter came up with a new suggestion: an emergency treatment, not yet approved by the F.D.A., that had saved the life of a man in San Diego. “She called and said, ‘Mom, you have to get Dad to do phage therapy,’ ” Filomena told me. “P-H-A-G-E,” Bunevacz clarified, nodding. So Filomena asked Blodget whether he might be a candidate for this mysterious new medicine.
Phages, or bacteriophages, are viruses that infect only bacteria. Each kingdom of life—plants, animals, bacteria, and so on—has its own distinct complement of viruses. Animal and plant viruses have always received most of our scientific attention, because they pose a direct threat to our health, and that of our livestock and crops. The well-being of bacteria has, understandably, been of less concern, yet the battle between viruses and bacteria is brutal: scientists estimate that phages cause a trillion trillion infections per second, destroying half the world’s bacteria every forty-eight hours. As we are now all too aware, animal-specific viruses can mutate enough to infect a different animal species. But they will not attack bacteria, and bacteriophage viruses are similarly harmless to animals, humans included. Phage therapy operates on the principle that the enemy of our enemy could be our friend. If Bunevacz’s doctors could find a virus that infected his particular strain of E. coli, it might succeed where antibiotics had failed.
“I’d heard of it,” Blodget said, when I asked her how she’d responded to Filomena’s question about phage therapy. “But in the past it was thought of as kind of fringe.” Recently, though, she’d seen reports describing patients whose long-standing, sometimes life-threatening bacterial infections had been eradicated by phage. Last year, a paper published in Nature Medicine documented the role of phages in saving the life of a teen-age cystic-fibrosis patient in the U.K., who was stricken with a bacterial infection after a double lung transplant. Another case study described how phages helped save a Minnesota man’s leg, which had become infected after knee surgery.
In the past five years, phage research has accelerated, with a proliferation of publications, conferences, and pharmaceutical-company investment. This enthusiasm reflects the ever-growing threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and a dearth of new antibiotics available to fight them. In 2016, the United Nations pronounced antibiotic resistance “the greatest and most urgent global risk.” Without reliable antibiotics, even relatively routine surgery—Cesarean sections, hernia repair, appendix or tonsil removal—could be deadly. One analysis published in a leading British medical journal estimated that, without antibiotics, one in seven people undergoing routine hip-replacement surgery might die from a drug-resistant infection. Already, some seven hundred thousand people die each year as a direct result of drug-resistant infections, a number that is predicted to rise to ten million by 2050.
“Do you ever think about all the tabs you left open?” Cartoon by Joe Dator Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The bacteria plaguing Bunevacz haven’t yet developed resistance to the full range of antibiotics, but Blodget told me that they inevitably would. Soon after Thanksgiving last year, he was identified as a viable candidate for the therapy, and Blodget told him that she thought it was worth a try. “I said, I don’t think it’s going to hurt, and it can possibly help,” she recalled. “I mean, at this point, there’s nothing else to do.”
The explanation for Blodget’s initial hesitance can be found in phage therapy’s complicated history. Although it is still considered an experimental treatment in the U.S., phages have been used to treat and prevent bacterial infections since their discovery, more than a century ago. For many American doctors, the obvious next question is: If they actually work, wouldn’t we know by now?
Part of the problem with phages is that they were discovered almost too early—far in advance of the technology and scientific understanding required to use them effectively. In 1915, a British bacteriologist named Frederick Twort reported the existence of an infectious agent capable of killing bacteria, but he didn’t pursue the finding. It was left to a French-Canadian scientist, Félix d’Hérelle, to name and describe phages, in 1917. Unfortunately, d’Hérelle was an autodidact working as a volunteer at the Institut Pasteur, in Paris. What’s more, he recklessly claimed that phages were the basis of the human immune response, in direct opposition to the Nobel Prize-winning research of the institute’s Brussels director, Jules Bordet, who had demonstrated that immunity was based on antibodies. D’Hérelle, with a lack of restraint that was apparently characteristic, described his superior’s work as laden with “monstrosities.” Bordet responded by championing Twort’s prior observation of phages; as a result, the credit for the discovery remains controversial.


Arthur Jafa’s Radical Alienation

“ That was a weird time , ” Jafa said .
“ ‘ Daughters ’ was the toast of the New York film community , but we ’ d given away a large part of our financial interests , and knew we weren ’ t going to make any money on it .
Plus , Julie ’ s and my relationship at that point was not in the best place.
” By 1991 , they had separated .
“ I was struggling with some personal stuff , psychological stuff , and Julie , what with the child and the movie @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” he said .
“ I was just very immature.
” He also said , “ I didn ’ t want to become Mr.
Dash.
” Jafa usually sat with his back to a window , so on bright days he was in shadow , and only gradually did I become aware of his tattoos .
They were more or less everywhere : a black panther on his neck ; a drawing of an early work by Zaha Hadid , “ The Peak , ” which was never built , on his left @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ The Lord of the Rings , ” in capital letters and also on his left arm ; Krazy Kat on the back of one hand .
There were a lot more of them , he said , and a story to go with each .
So , Krazy Kat ?
“ People have pointed out to me that it ’ s ironic , because I don ’ t like cats , ” Jafa said .
“ They don ’ t respect your personal space .
But Krazy Kat at one point was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and the artist who drew him , George Herriman , is such an interesting figure to me—his own kids never knew their father was Black.
” When Jafa tells stories , the words come slowly at first , in a baritone drawl , but as he gets going the pitch rises and the tempo accelerates .
“ The cat loves the mouse , the mouse hates the cat , ” he said .
“ The dog , Officer Pupp , loves the cat , but the cat can ’ t see him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ And what makes it worse is that the mouse keeps throwing a brick at Krazy Kat ’ s head , which is an act of violence , but the cat sees the violence as an act of love , and so the circle continues .
The absurdity of it strikes me as being as good a model of Black love and hate in white society as we ’ ve ever seen , a profound and absurd meditation on the thin line between love and hate.
” Jafa ’ s school integrated the year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was one of a handful of African-Americans in his class .
Two years earlier , the family had moved to Russellville , Alabama , but Jafa was sent back to Tupelo to live with his grandparents so that he could go to school there .
When the Ku Klux Klan burned down their house in Russellville ( Arthur had been named football coach of the recently combined white and Black high schools ) , they returned to Tupelo .
The whole family moved again , less than a year later , to Clarksdale @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had been offered positions at Coahoma Junior College , an innovative school for Black students .
Arthur taught physical education and coached football and basketball ; Rowena , who taught business administration , became the school ’ s financial director .
Clarksdale is in the Mississippi Delta , which Jafa describes as a Black Jurassic Park .
“ I grew up in a region where some of the more horrific acts in the century occurred , ” Jafa said .
“ Emmett Till was killed , the three civil-rights workers were killed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was brought to trial.
” Unlike Tupelo , Clarksdale had held on to hard-core segregation long after it became illegal .
And yet , growing up in a supportive family and on a college campus , the Fielder children felt protected and encouraged .
For the first few years , the family lived on the campus in a blue-and-white trailer with three bedrooms .
“ Art and I shared a room , ” Boston recalled .
“ It was filled with Marvel and DC comic books , and boxes of the magazines that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in notebooks .
He slept in the top bunk , and I was on the bottom .
We ’ d tell each other stories and make drawings—he ’ d draw something and hand it down to me , and I ’ d hand one up to him.
” “ The move from Tupelo to Clarksdale was mainly a change in soundtrack , ” Jafa said .
“ In Tupelo , the radio was dominated by Elvis Presley .
I remember my grandmother telling stories about Elvis .
They knew him in the Black @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he was .
When Elvis was a kid , he would sit on the porch of a nearby house and play guitar.
” Jafa was never a Presley fan .
In Clarksdale , where the soundtrack was Memphis soul , all four Fielder boys went to Catholic school , because their non-Catholic parents thought they would get a better education that way .
( Their father eventually converted to Catholicism . )
Jafa was an altar boy and a straight-A student , and in high school he became a National Merit Scholar .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ that I had one student , just one , who could have gotten into M.I.T.
, ” Olenza McBride , his social-studies teacher , recalled .
Jafa read all the time—first comics , then science fiction , the World Book ( his parents bought the series , and later they added the Encyclopædia Britannica ) , history , sociology , and world literature .
“ Our neighbor was head librarian at the college , ” he said .
“ She would let me stay there after hours—I ’ d fall asleep in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to pick me up at two in the morning.
” Jafa and Boston saw every movie they could get to .
One Saturday afternoon , when Jafa was ten , their parents dropped them off at the white people ’ s theatre on the other side of town to see Stanley Kubrick ’ s “ 2001 : A Space Odyssey.
” The theatre was empty except for a few white couples , who left before the intermission .
“ The lights go down , the movie begins , and it ’ s like @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in a 2015 essay called “ My Black Death.
” “ Even now , I ’ m still searching for an art experience capable of matching the effect this film had on me.
” When it ended , he and Boston walked out in a daze to the empty lobby , where the white theatre manager sat in the ticket booth reading a newspaper .
“ At this point in my life I didn ’ t have un-chaperoned interactions with white people , young or old , ” Jafa wrote .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the door open , so I walked over to him and said , ‘ Excuse me , sir , I ’ ve just come out of the movie , could you tell me what it was about ?
’ He looked at me over his paper , paused a moment , and said , ‘ Son , I ’ ve been looking at it all week and I haven ’ t got a clue.
’ ” There was a coda to the experience .
In the mid-nineties , when Jafa was working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be a second-unit cameraman for “ Eyes Wide Shut.
” Kubrick shot most of the film in England , but it was set in New York , and Jafa spent a lot of time filming locations there .
“ We were constantly shooting things over and over , because Kubrick kept sending notes saying would we try it again three degrees to the left , or three degrees to the right , ” Jafa recalled .
“ He called many times a day , and occasionally the assistant director would say , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he wants to say hi , ’ and I would say , ‘ Not now , I ’ m shooting.
’ ” In 1999 , returning from Europe to attend the film ’ s New York première , Jafa saw a newspaper headline : “ STANLEY KUBRICK DIES AT 70.
” “ Stanley Kubrick was one of my heroes , ” he said .
“ There was so much I wanted to say to him , and I ’ d had this fantasy that when we finished shooting we ’ d be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I went to the première and got very depressed , trying to figure out why I had never spoken to him.
” I asked him to name the filmmakers he most admired .
“ I like films more than filmmakers , ” he said .
“ But , anything Andrei Tarkovsky ever did , especially ‘ The Mirror ’ and ‘ The Sacrifice , ’ his last .
Tarkovsky ’ s films are philosophical meditations on life , time , aging , things like that.
” Yasujirō Ozu , he said , was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as high as Tarkovsky .
Ozu will sit with things.
” The Italians ?
“ I love Fellini , Pasolini , Antonioni .
Antonioni is a great filmmaker , but to me that really does come down to ‘ L ’ Avventura , ’ the film where he plays with dimensions of dramatic time and space .
There ’ s a scene with Monica Vitti in a hotel corridor .
She walks into the frame , and then out of the frame , and in a Hollywood film you would cut , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , empty hallway.
” Jafa respects Ingmar Bergman , but , he said , “ I don ’ t know if his films have aged so well , even ‘ Persona , ’ which is clearly a great film.
” He likes Godard more than Truffaut , and , he said , “ Bresson is above anybody we ’ ve mentioned , except Tarkovsky—Bresson is the Beethoven and Bach of cinema.
” He also paid homage to Oscar Micheaux , whom he called “ the godfather of Black American cinema.
” I asked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and neck with Bresson , ” he said , to my surprise .
“ Every moment in a Warhol film is an extended moment .
You think of Miles Davis , the speed at which he improvises .
His notes sit in the air like they ’ re unfurling in slow motion .
They always feel introspective , considered , not in the moment.
” Jafa puts “ The Godfather : Part II ” in his top ten films , “ but Coppola is not in my top ten directors.
” Jafa also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and immersed himself in art history and theory .
His fascination with Marcel Duchamp kept surfacing in our conversations .
“ My whole understanding of Duchamp has to do with African artifacts , aesthetic artifacts , and their profound effect on Western art , ” Jafa said .
Picasso , Matisse , Derain , and other artists in Paris during the early years of the twentieth century had discovered African sculpture at the Musée d ’ Ethnographie du Trocadéro , and it had changed the way they saw the world .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ make paintings , because they had certain spatial and formal implications , and the massing of those implications produced Cubism , ” Jafa said .
“ Duchamp made paintings in that modality— ‘ Nude Descending a Staircase , ’ where you see the figure multiple times at the same moment and from different vantage points .
But Duchamp was smarter than anybody around .
I think he realized that a lot of the energy produced by African objects came not from their formal and spatial qualities but from their being what I would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
An African artifact in a white museum space , with all this baggage of ideas about painting and contemplation , was deeply alien.
” Jafa believes that Duchamp ’ s 1917 “ Fountain , ” a porcelain urinal from a plumbing-supply store , turned upside down and signed “ R .
Mutt , ” was directly influenced by African sculpture and drew its undeniable power from the same sort of radical alienation .
“ What Duchamp did better than any other artist was to take something that existed and turn it into @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ He didn ’ t make it—he turned it into something else .
It ’ s like what I say about Black people and basketball .
We didn ’ t invent basketball , but we created it .
One of the more telling things about Black people is that we do things that don ’ t make our job easier .
Why do a three-sixty before you land a basketball ?
You don ’ t get more points—it just raises your level of difficulty .
What is that about ?
” ( His @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) “ Folks argue that it ’ s entertainment , but it ’ s central to who we are .
It ’ s refusing the structures that want to turn the game into a business .
We know it ’ s a business—winning—but we refuse to acquiesce in the elimination of play .
And I don ’ t think it ’ s a big leap to say that ’ s central to Duchamp ’ s entire practice .
For all the intellectualism around Duchamp , what did he always insist on ?
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ definitely in his cheek.
” So was Jafa ’ s when he revealed his “ secret theory ” that Jeff Koons is “ a very light-skinned Black guy passing for white.
” He argued , “ Look at the works that made his reputation .
The vacuum cleaners refer to Black women , domestic workers .
The two basketballs floating in vitrines , I insist , are testicles , connoting everything from castration to Black sexual prowess .
The bunny rabbit , which most people say is his masterpiece , is clearly Brer @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vein for quite a while before returning to Duchamp .
“ He is one of the non-musicians I would put in the company of John Coltrane and Miles Davis , ” he said .
“ There were occasionally white people at our family reunions , in-laws and white friends of my parents .
Duchamp is one of the people we will always reserve a seat for.
” Twenty years later , when Jafa decided to do “ this art thing , ” success came almost immediately .
A group of his short videos @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the curators , Valerie Cassel Oliver , described them in ARTnews as “ very subtle , very poetic.
” Jafa ’ s “ Tree ” was included in the Whitney ’ s “ BitStreams ” exhibition a year later ; it ’ s an eight-minute video of a blurry , constantly moving tree that looks like it ’ s escaped from a Monet painting and gone off on its own .
Other art works by Jafa appeared in group shows in this country and abroad : a metal bench he had found on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am , resting on a frame that gave it the appearance of floating ; a video of a man in a yellow jacket lying on a sidewalk with people walking past .
By 2005 , though , the overbearing whiteness of the art world had driven him back to filmmaking .
“ I was invited to parties where I was the only Black person , ” he recalled .
“ It just didn ’ t feel right , so I walked away from the art world.
” In 2002 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Eve party in New York , he met Suné Woods , a young woman on her way to becoming an artist .
“ It was almost like a force turned me around , and I said to Greg Tate , ‘ Hey , man , who is that ?
I ’ m going to marry her.
’ ” Woods and Jafa never married , but in 2004 they had a son , Ayler .
“ Then we just fell apart , ” Jafa said .
“ Suné said she was going to graduate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with her , and that was terrifying to me , because I ’ d had the same experience when I split up with Julie.
” Jafa commuted between New York and San Francisco for two years , before moving to Los Angeles in 2010 .
He wanted to be closer to Ayler , and also to N ’ Zinga , who was living with her mother in L.A .
Dash had built an impressive reputation as a director of film biographies ( she ’ s currently doing one on Angela Davis ) , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of touch .
( “ We ’ re still best friends , ” Dash told me recently .
Their first grandchild , Adrian Julian Arana , born to N ’ Zinga in 2017 , brought them even closer . )
When Jafa moved to Los Angeles , his self-confidence was at a low ebb .
The film industry seemed less and less interested in hiring him .
He was approaching fifty , and he felt as though he hadn ’ t achieved any of his goals .
His friends were worried .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” John Akomfrah said .
“ He ’ d always been a figure of such promise .
All of us expected something great to happen , and as the years went by some people were thinking maybe it wasn ’ t going to come.
” In 2011 , he hit rock bottom .
Depressed and suicidal , he went to stay with his parents , in Atlanta .
( “ You can always come home , ” they had told their children . )
After the breakup with Dash , Jafa had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ therapy .
This time , the film world intervened .
Sitting in his parents ’ living room , wondering what to do with his broken life , he got a telephone call from Paul Garnes , a Hollywood producer who worked with the showrunner Salim Akil .
“ Paul said I was like a mythical beast , because everybody out there had heard of me but nobody knew me , ” Jafa told me .
He had called to see if Jafa was available to shoot the pilot for a new TV series @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” about Black people , that Akil was directing .
“ Available ?
I was broke and out of work .
The producers must have liked the pilot , because they asked me to shoot the series—for a shitful of money .
I thought , Well , maybe just grow the fuck up and take the money.
” Jafa used the forty-five thousand dollars he ’ d been paid for the pilot to buy a new Prius and to rent a small apartment in L.A .
The series wasn ’ t picked up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ find something to do right away—he was determined not to sink back into despair .
Kahlil Joseph , a filmmaker and a close friend , called to say that ZDF , a German public-television network , had commissioned him to make a documentary about the March on Washington , whose fiftieth anniversary was coming up in 2013 .
Joseph had scheduling conflicts .
Would Jafa be interested in directing it ?
Jafa said he would—and he had ideas about how .
“ I wasn ’ t interested in looking back , ” Jafa @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in where Black people are now .
I wrote a really insane , crazy treatment that had very little to do with the March on Washington , and they gave me the money and I went off and did it .
And that was the beginning of the work I ’ m doing now.
” Close to eight hundred separate images flash by in “ APEX ” ’ s eight minutes and twenty-two seconds , against a pounding techno beat : a man ’ s deeply scarred back , Walt Disney and Mickey @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sun , a cartoon shark , lynchings , Sojourner Truth , Aretha Franklin , a cross-legged monk on fire , movie stills of white actors in blackface , Black people being fire-hosed , a 1920 Harlem street parade beneath a sign that reads “ The New Negro Has No Fear.
” Jafa worked on “ Apex ” for four years , off and on , without knowing what it was .
“ I didn ’ t understand it as a film , or as art , ” he told me .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I showed to my friends.
” Early in 2016 , working again as a cinematographer and staying in a New York hotel room between jobs , Jafa put together the basic elements of “ Love Is the Message , the Message Is Death.
” There was no concept and no script .
“ It was a response to the influx of footage of Black people being assaulted , which I had just been throwing in a file.
” A week later , he heard Kanye West ’ s “ Ultralight Beam ” performed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ decided to use it as the soundtrack—without notifying West or getting permission .
( West ’ s reaction , when he and Jafa met , in 2020 , was to say that Jafa ’ s film had brought him “ back to life , ” and to hire him to direct a music video for the song “ Wash Us in the Blood.
” ) Jafa showed an early version of “ Love Is the Message ” to Greg Tate , Fred Moten , Saidiya Hartman , the cinematographer Bradford Young , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There ’ s something about the construction of it , the flow and the velocity , that ’ s very much the way young people experience the Internet .
It resonates with this generation ’ s hip-hop culture.
” Jafa wanted to post the film on YouTube , but Kahlil Joseph urged him not to give it away .
Joseph screened it several times on film nights at the Underground Museum , in Los Angeles , as an unannounced opener for the main feature .
Soon afterward , in June , Joseph showed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Switzerland during Art Basel , the international art fair .
Gavin Brown , a British-born artist who had become a New York art dealer , and who had a long history of finding and nurturing new talent , saw it there .
“ I remember being stuck to my chair , eyes wide , trying to keep up with it , and then as it ended I felt the air being expelled from my body , ” he said .

“Daughters of the Dust” premièred in 1991 at the Sundance Film Festival, where it was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize, and Arthur Jafa won the award for Excellence in Cinematography. But the film’s nonlinear narrative structure and the fact that some of its dialogue was in the Gullah language made distributors nervous, and none of them would go near it. Jafa eventually negotiated an agreement with Film Forum, the art-house theatre in Greenwich Village, which showed “Daughters” in 1992. Dash went on the “Today” show, and when the film started drawing sellout crowds the run was extended. “Daughters of the Dust” was the first film by an African-American woman to get a theatrical release.
“That was a weird time,” Jafa said. “ ‘Daughters’ was the toast of the New York film community, but we’d given away a large part of our financial interests, and knew we weren’t going to make any money on it. Plus, Julie’s and my relationship at that point was not in the best place.” By 1991, they had separated. “I was struggling with some personal stuff, psychological stuff, and Julie, what with the child and the movie, couldn’t help me,” he said. “I was just very immature.” He also said, “I didn’t want to become Mr. Dash.”
Talking on Skype, as Jafa and I were obliged to do because of the pandemic, has unexpected limitations. I was on the East Coast, and Jafa was in Los Angeles, and it took me three sessions to realize that Jafa’s brother Boston was sitting across the desk from him, working quietly while we talked. I finally “met” him when he got up and walked into view and waved. The brothers don’t look alike, but they sound very much like brothers, with Deep South accents. A.J., who is interested in clothes and gets invited to openings at Gucci, wears a small diamond stud on his right eyebrow, and another one just under his lower lip. “I’ve had the studs for more than twenty years,” he told me. “People used to think the one below my lip was a crumb—before Covid, they’d try to brush it off.”
Jafa usually sat with his back to a window, so on bright days he was in shadow, and only gradually did I become aware of his tattoos. They were more or less everywhere: a black panther on his neck; a drawing of an early work by Zaha Hadid, “The Peak,” which was never built, on his left arm; “FRODO,” from “The Lord of the Rings,” in capital letters and also on his left arm; Krazy Kat on the back of one hand. There were a lot more of them, he said, and a story to go with each. So, Krazy Kat? “People have pointed out to me that it’s ironic, because I don’t like cats,” Jafa said. “They don’t respect your personal space. But Krazy Kat at one point was the biggest thing in American popular culture, and the artist who drew him, George Herriman, is such an interesting figure to me—his own kids never knew their father was Black.”
When Jafa tells stories, the words come slowly at first, in a baritone drawl, but as he gets going the pitch rises and the tempo accelerates. “The cat loves the mouse, the mouse hates the cat,” he said. “The dog, Officer Pupp, loves the cat, but the cat can’t see him because the cat loves the mouse. And what makes it worse is that the mouse keeps throwing a brick at Krazy Kat’s head, which is an act of violence, but the cat sees the violence as an act of love, and so the circle continues. The absurdity of it strikes me as being as good a model of Black love and hate in white society as we’ve ever seen, a profound and absurd meditation on the thin line between love and hate.”
Jafa was born in 1960 in Tupelo, Mississippi, the birthplace of Elvis Presley. “My mom was born in Tupelo, and so were my aunt and uncle, and my grandparents grew up there,” Jafa told me. His aunt Nettie has served on the Tupelo City Council since 2001. Jafa’s full name is Arthur Jafa Fielder; he dropped Fielder (as his grandfather, another Arthur Jafa, had done) when he was in his early twenties, but his family ties have never weakened. Arthur and Rowena, his parents, were teachers, and his siblings—three younger brothers—have all found arts-related careers: Boston, the second oldest, is a musician and a filmmaker. (Named for their father’s cousin, Ralph Boston, he was called Ralph until he got to high school, where everyone started calling him Boston.) Jim teaches film production in New York City high schools, and his twin brother, Tim, writes graphic novels.
A still from Jafa’s film “Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death.” “It was a response to the influx of footage of Black people being assaulted, which I had just been throwing in a file,” Jafa says. Art work courtesy the artist and Gladstone Gallery
Jafa’s school integrated the year he entered first grade, and he was one of a handful of African-Americans in his class. Two years earlier, the family had moved to Russellville, Alabama, but Jafa was sent back to Tupelo to live with his grandparents so that he could go to school there. When the Ku Klux Klan burned down their house in Russellville (Arthur had been named football coach of the recently combined white and Black high schools), they returned to Tupelo. The whole family moved again, less than a year later, to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where Arthur and Rowena had been offered positions at Coahoma Junior College, an innovative school for Black students. Arthur taught physical education and coached football and basketball; Rowena, who taught business administration, became the school’s financial director.
Clarksdale is in the Mississippi Delta, which Jafa describes as a Black Jurassic Park. “I grew up in a region where some of the more horrific acts in the century occurred,” Jafa said. “Emmett Till was killed, the three civil-rights workers were killed, people were tortured and murdered and nobody was brought to trial.” Unlike Tupelo, Clarksdale had held on to hard-core segregation long after it became illegal. And yet, growing up in a supportive family and on a college campus, the Fielder children felt protected and encouraged. For the first few years, the family lived on the campus in a blue-and-white trailer with three bedrooms. “Art and I shared a room,” Boston recalled. “It was filled with Marvel and DC comic books, and boxes of the magazines that Art cut pictures out of and pasted in notebooks. He slept in the top bunk, and I was on the bottom. We’d tell each other stories and make drawings—he’d draw something and hand it down to me, and I’d hand one up to him.”
“The move from Tupelo to Clarksdale was mainly a change in soundtrack,” Jafa said. “In Tupelo, the radio was dominated by Elvis Presley. I remember my grandmother telling stories about Elvis. They knew him in the Black part of town—that’s how poor he was. When Elvis was a kid, he would sit on the porch of a nearby house and play guitar.” Jafa was never a Presley fan. In Clarksdale, where the soundtrack was Memphis soul, all four Fielder boys went to Catholic school, because their non-Catholic parents thought they would get a better education that way. (Their father eventually converted to Catholicism.) Jafa was an altar boy and a straight-A student, and in high school he became a National Merit Scholar. “I was just elated to know that I had one student, just one, who could have gotten into M.I.T.,” Olenza McBride, his social-studies teacher, recalled.
Jafa read all the time—first comics, then science fiction, the World Book (his parents bought the series, and later they added the Encyclopædia Britannica), history, sociology, and world literature. “Our neighbor was head librarian at the college,” he said. “She would let me stay there after hours—I’d fall asleep in the stacks, and my dad would come to pick me up at two in the morning.” Jafa and Boston saw every movie they could get to. One Saturday afternoon, when Jafa was ten, their parents dropped them off at the white people’s theatre on the other side of town to see Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The theatre was empty except for a few white couples, who left before the intermission. “The lights go down, the movie begins, and it’s like being buried alive,” Jafa wrote, in a 2015 essay called “My Black Death.” “Even now, I’m still searching for an art experience capable of matching the effect this film had on me.” When it ended, he and Boston walked out in a daze to the empty lobby, where the white theatre manager sat in the ticket booth reading a newspaper. “At this point in my life I didn’t have un-chaperoned interactions with white people, young or old,” Jafa wrote. “He was sitting in the ticket booth with the door open, so I walked over to him and said, ‘Excuse me, sir, I’ve just come out of the movie, could you tell me what it was about?’ He looked at me over his paper, paused a moment, and said, ‘Son, I’ve been looking at it all week and I haven’t got a clue.’ ”
There was a coda to the experience. In the mid-nineties, when Jafa was working as a cinematographer, Kubrick hired him to be a second-unit cameraman for “Eyes Wide Shut.” Kubrick shot most of the film in England, but it was set in New York, and Jafa spent a lot of time filming locations there. “We were constantly shooting things over and over, because Kubrick kept sending notes saying would we try it again three degrees to the left, or three degrees to the right,” Jafa recalled. “He called many times a day, and occasionally the assistant director would say, ‘Stanley’s on the phone, he wants to say hi,’ and I would say, ‘Not now, I’m shooting.’ ” In 1999, returning from Europe to attend the film’s New York première, Jafa saw a newspaper headline: “STANLEY KUBRICK DIES AT 70.” “Stanley Kubrick was one of my heroes,” he said. “There was so much I wanted to say to him, and I’d had this fantasy that when we finished shooting we’d be able to have a proper conversation. I went to the première and got very depressed, trying to figure out why I had never spoken to him.”
Shooting other people’s films was always, for Jafa, a stepping stone to shooting his own. “I love cinematography, but once I’d mastered the craft it was never fulfilling on its own,” he told me. “Daughters of the Dust” had brought no directing offers, though, and until recently neither Dash nor Jafa could get funding for a second feature. Hollywood producers had financed and profited from nineteen-seventies blaxploitation films, some of which had Black directors, but the first Black filmmaker of Jafa’s generation to break into the Hollywood system and establish a career on his own terms was Spike Lee. Lee went to a screening of “Daughters” and as he was leaving the theatre he introduced himself and asked if Jafa would like to work on a film about Malcolm X. Jafa said yes, and his skill as a cameraman on the movie led to his becoming the cinematographer for Lee’s next feature, “Crooklyn.” “Spike changed my life,” Jafa said. “He put me on the path to being a legitimate entity in the film universe.” The two of them didn’t get along, though, and they haven’t worked together since. Lee had no interest in Jafa’s urge to experiment on “Crooklyn” with lenses and film speeds, cinematic rhythms, and nonlinear storytelling. “We had a rocky collaboration, but we’ve finally reached a rapprochement, and I want to keep it that way,” Jafa told me.
I asked him to name the filmmakers he most admired. “I like films more than filmmakers,” he said. “But, anything Andrei Tarkovsky ever did, especially ‘The Mirror’ and ‘The Sacrifice,’ his last. Tarkovsky’s films are philosophical meditations on life, time, aging, things like that.” Yasujirō Ozu, he said, was “right up there, not quite as high as Tarkovsky. Ozu will sit with things.” The Italians? “I love Fellini, Pasolini, Antonioni. Antonioni is a great filmmaker, but to me that really does come down to ‘L’Avventura,’ the film where he plays with dimensions of dramatic time and space. There’s a scene with Monica Vitti in a hotel corridor. She walks into the frame, and then out of the frame, and in a Hollywood film you would cut, but the camera just stays on that long, empty hallway.”
“I’m a huge proponent of control over speed.” Cartoon by Juan Astasio Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Jafa respects Ingmar Bergman, but, he said, “I don’t know if his films have aged so well, even ‘Persona,’ which is clearly a great film.” He likes Godard more than Truffaut, and, he said, “Bresson is above anybody we’ve mentioned, except Tarkovsky—Bresson is the Beethoven and Bach of cinema.” He also paid homage to Oscar Micheaux, whom he called “the godfather of Black American cinema.” I asked him about Andy Warhol. “Neck and neck with Bresson,” he said, to my surprise. “Every moment in a Warhol film is an extended moment. You think of Miles Davis, the speed at which he improvises. His notes sit in the air like they’re unfurling in slow motion. They always feel introspective, considered, not in the moment.” Jafa puts “The Godfather: Part II” in his top ten films, “but Coppola is not in my top ten directors.”
From the early nineties to 2000, living in New York, Jafa shot documentaries (on Audre Lorde and W. E. B. Du Bois, among others), music videos, and television commercials. “The early nineties was when you started to see more Blacks in Hollywood movies,” he said. “I wanted to direct music videos, and I was very unsuccessful. I could never crack it. I guess I could have moved to Hollywood and done what everybody else does, but I didn’t see that.” Ideas for films proliferated in his head. The schoolboy notebooks in which he’d pasted images from comic books and magazines when he was ten had been succeeded by three-ring binders filled with movie stills, advertisements, news photographs, and reproductions from art books and countless other sources—images that he liked to show to people. He often had binders with him. “A.J. was always a great storyteller of his own film ideas,” the writer and critic Greg Tate recalled. “He would act out all the parts.” Tate and Jafa connected when they were both returning books to the Founders Library at Howard. They talked for six hours on the library steps, and the conversation has been going on ever since.
Jafa also spent time in art galleries and museums, and immersed himself in art history and theory. His fascination with Marcel Duchamp kept surfacing in our conversations. “My whole understanding of Duchamp has to do with African artifacts, aesthetic artifacts, and their profound effect on Western art,” Jafa said. Picasso, Matisse, Derain, and other artists in Paris during the early years of the twentieth century had discovered African sculpture at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and it had changed the way they saw the world. “All those people used African artifacts to make paintings, because they had certain spatial and formal implications, and the massing of those implications produced Cubism,” Jafa said. “Duchamp made paintings in that modality—‘Nude Descending a Staircase,’ where you see the figure multiple times at the same moment and from different vantage points. But Duchamp was smarter than anybody around. I think he realized that a lot of the energy produced by African objects came not from their formal and spatial qualities but from their being what I would call radically alienated. It was contextual. An African artifact in a white museum space, with all this baggage of ideas about painting and contemplation, was deeply alien.”
Jafa believes that Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain,” a porcelain urinal from a plumbing-supply store, turned upside down and signed “R. Mutt,” was directly influenced by African sculpture and drew its undeniable power from the same sort of radical alienation. “What Duchamp did better than any other artist was to take something that existed and turn it into another thing,” Jafa said. “He didn’t make it—he turned it into something else. It’s like what I say about Black people and basketball. We didn’t invent basketball, but we created it. One of the more telling things about Black people is that we do things that don’t make our job easier. Why do a three-sixty before you land a basketball? You don’t get more points—it just raises your level of difficulty. What is that about?” (His voice went up about an octave.) “Folks argue that it’s entertainment, but it’s central to who we are. It’s refusing the structures that want to turn the game into a business. We know it’s a business—winning—but we refuse to acquiesce in the elimination of play. And I don’t think it’s a big leap to say that’s central to Duchamp’s entire practice. For all the intellectualism around Duchamp, what did he always insist on? That it was playful. His tongue was definitely in his cheek.”
So was Jafa’s when he revealed his “secret theory” that Jeff Koons is “a very light-skinned Black guy passing for white.” He argued, “Look at the works that made his reputation. The vacuum cleaners refer to Black women, domestic workers. The two basketballs floating in vitrines, I insist, are testicles, connoting everything from castration to Black sexual prowess. The bunny rabbit, which most people say is his masterpiece, is clearly Brer Rabbit.” Jafa went on in this vein for quite a while before returning to Duchamp.
“He is one of the non-musicians I would put in the company of John Coltrane and Miles Davis,” he said. “There were occasionally white people at our family reunions, in-laws and white friends of my parents. Duchamp is one of the people we will always reserve a seat for.”
Arthur Jafa on the set of “Daughters of the Dust” in 1989. Photograph by Kerry James Marshall
In 1999, Jafa decided to quit the film world. He wasn’t getting any closer to directing his own films, and it seemed to him that the art world offered more opportunities to realize the ideas swarming in his head. He’d been interested in art since his second year at Howard, when one of his architecture teachers sent the class to see I. M. Pei’s new East Building, at the National Gallery of Art. “There was an exhibition of Mark Rothko, eight brownish paintings that all looked the same to my untrained eye, and they infuriated me,” Jafa recalled. “I told the instructor it was bullshit. I was irate. I went back to that show ten times, kept going back, couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was obsessed. He’s still my favorite painter.”
Twenty years later, when Jafa decided to do “this art thing,” success came almost immediately. A group of his short videos appeared in the 2000 Whitney Biennial—one of the curators, Valerie Cassel Oliver, described them in ARTnews as “very subtle, very poetic.” Jafa’s “Tree” was included in the Whitney’s “BitStreams” exhibition a year later; it’s an eight-minute video of a blurry, constantly moving tree that looks like it’s escaped from a Monet painting and gone off on its own. Other art works by Jafa appeared in group shows in this country and abroad: a metal bench he had found on a visit to Bamako, Mali; a Pontiac Firebird Trans Am, resting on a frame that gave it the appearance of floating; a video of a man in a yellow jacket lying on a sidewalk with people walking past. By 2005, though, the overbearing whiteness of the art world had driven him back to filmmaking. “I was invited to parties where I was the only Black person,” he recalled. “It just didn’t feel right, so I walked away from the art world.”
In 2002, at a New Year’s Eve party in New York, he met Suné Woods, a young woman on her way to becoming an artist. “It was almost like a force turned me around, and I said to Greg Tate, ‘Hey, man, who is that? I’m going to marry her.’ ” Woods and Jafa never married, but in 2004 they had a son, Ayler. “Then we just fell apart,” Jafa said. “Suné said she was going to graduate school in San Francisco and taking Ayler with her, and that was terrifying to me, because I’d had the same experience when I split up with Julie.” Jafa commuted between New York and San Francisco for two years, before moving to Los Angeles in 2010. He wanted to be closer to Ayler, and also to N’Zinga, who was living with her mother in L.A. Dash had built an impressive reputation as a director of film biographies (she’s currently doing one on Angela Davis), and she and Jafa had never been out of touch. (“We’re still best friends,” Dash told me recently. Their first grandchild, Adrian Julian Arana, born to N’Zinga in 2017, brought them even closer.) When Jafa moved to Los Angeles, his self-confidence was at a low ebb. The film industry seemed less and less interested in hiring him. He was approaching fifty, and he felt as though he hadn’t achieved any of his goals. His friends were worried. “He was like a falling star,” John Akomfrah said. “He’d always been a figure of such promise. All of us expected something great to happen, and as the years went by some people were thinking maybe it wasn’t going to come.”


newyorker--2020-12-14--The High-Wattage Holiday Lights of Dyker Heights

The tree at Rockefeller Center may have its own prime-time special , but for seasonal spectacle it ’ s hard @ @ @ @ @ of Dyker Heights ( pictured ) .
Since the mid-nineteen-eighties , the residents of this @ @ @ @ @ their homes into high-wattage displays between Thanksgiving and the New Year .
( The event @ @ @ @ @ Christmas in New York City that it ’ s the theme of a holiday window @ @ @ @ @ year . )
Optimal viewing is between dusk and 9 P.M .

The tree at Rockefeller Center may have its own prime-time special, but for seasonal spectacle it’s hard to compete with the lights of Dyker Heights (pictured). Since the mid-nineteen-eighties, the residents of this Brooklyn neighborhood have been turning their homes into high-wattage displays between Thanksgiving and the New Year. (The event has become so synonymous with Christmas in New York City that it’s the theme of a holiday window at Saks Fifth Avenue this year.) Optimal viewing is between dusk and 9 P.M.


newyorker--2020-12-14--Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Briefly Noted Book Reviews

The Nine Lives of Pakistan , by Declan Walsh ( Norton ) .
The author , a foreign correspondent who was based in Pakistan for almost a decade , here tells the story of this complicated nation through some of its most influential personalities , including Muhammad Ali Jinnah , its founder ; the human-rights activist Asma Jahangir ; and the legendary spy Sultan Amir Tarar .
Equally perceptive about the megacities of Karachi and Lahore and the remote regions of Waziristan and Balochistan , Walsh portrays a Pakistan that is “ more concept than country .
.
.
strained @ @ @ @ @ @ @ identity and faith.
” After examining the legacy of partition , the grip of the Taliban , and a web of ethnic and sectarian fault lines , Walsh concludes that “ the most pertinent question might be not whether Pakistan will fail , but how it has survived this long.
” Oak Flat , by Lauren Redniss ( Random House ) .
The value of time is at the heart of this illustrated nonfiction book , which blends reportage , oral history , and cosmology in an account of conflict over a copper @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will cause Oak Flat—an ancient burial ground and religious site of the San Carlos Apache—to collapse into a crater a thousand feet deep .
Redniss focusses on Naelyn Nosie , a self-proclaimed “ modern day Apache female warrior , ” whose family has lived on a reservation for generations , and on the Gorham family , for whom the new mine promises relief from years of hardship .
The narrative resists oversimplification and draws out points of connection among people thrown into opposition by circumstance .
Nights When Nothing Happened , by Simon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ début novel opens in a middle-class suburban neighborhood in Texas .
The members of the Cheng family , having arrived from China at different times , are wildly disconnected .
The career-oriented mother came first , followed by her aimless husband , while their son stayed behind with grandparents .
Only Annabel , the youngest , was born in the U.S. , and her empowered outlook clashes with the rest of the family ’ s determination to tread lightly and fit in .
Han switches nimbly among family members ’ perspectives , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of obligation , “ for to cancel a party was to announce to your guests that something was wrong.
” At Night All Blood Is Black , by David Diop , translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis ( Farrar , Straus & Giroux ) .
Alfa Ndiaye , the narrator of this mystical novel , is a Senegalese soldier during the First World War .
Recruited by the French Army to “ play the savage , ” he sneaks into the “ blue-eyed enemy ” encampment every night , returning with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sees the attacks , which earn him a fearsome reputation , as avenging the death of a friend , but they exact a psychological toll .
Hospitalized , he is made to draw , an activity that unleashes memories of his childhood in colonial Senegal , reveals parallels between his parents ’ suffering and his own , and brings a deepening confrontation with a heritage of brutality .

The Nine Lives of Pakistan, by Declan Walsh (Norton). The author, a foreign correspondent who was based in Pakistan for almost a decade, here tells the story of this complicated nation through some of its most influential personalities, including Muhammad Ali Jinnah, its founder; the human-rights activist Asma Jahangir; and the legendary spy Sultan Amir Tarar. Equally perceptive about the megacities of Karachi and Lahore and the remote regions of Waziristan and Balochistan, Walsh portrays a Pakistan that is “more concept than country . . . strained under the centrifugal forces of history, identity and faith.” After examining the legacy of partition, the grip of the Taliban, and a web of ethnic and sectarian fault lines, Walsh concludes that “the most pertinent question might be not whether Pakistan will fail, but how it has survived this long.”
Oak Flat, by Lauren Redniss (Random House). The value of time is at the heart of this illustrated nonfiction book, which blends reportage, oral history, and cosmology in an account of conflict over a copper mine in southeastern Arizona. The mine will cause Oak Flat—an ancient burial ground and religious site of the San Carlos Apache—to collapse into a crater a thousand feet deep. Redniss focusses on Naelyn Nosie, a self-proclaimed “modern day Apache female warrior,” whose family has lived on a reservation for generations, and on the Gorham family, for whom the new mine promises relief from years of hardship. The narrative resists oversimplification and draws out points of connection among people thrown into opposition by circumstance.
Nights When Nothing Happened, by Simon Han (Riverhead). This suspenseful début novel opens in a middle-class suburban neighborhood in Texas. The members of the Cheng family, having arrived from China at different times, are wildly disconnected. The career-oriented mother came first, followed by her aimless husband, while their son stayed behind with grandparents. Only Annabel, the youngest, was born in the U.S., and her empowered outlook clashes with the rest of the family’s determination to tread lightly and fit in. Han switches nimbly among family members’ perspectives, and tensions culminate at a potluck hosted out of obligation, “for to cancel a party was to announce to your guests that something was wrong.”
At Night All Blood Is Black, by David Diop, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Alfa Ndiaye, the narrator of this mystical novel, is a Senegalese soldier during the First World War. Recruited by the French Army to “play the savage,” he sneaks into the “blue-eyed enemy” encampment every night, returning with a severed hand from each kill. He sees the attacks, which earn him a fearsome reputation, as avenging the death of a friend, but they exact a psychological toll. Hospitalized, he is made to draw, an activity that unleashes memories of his childhood in colonial Senegal, reveals parallels between his parents’ suffering and his own, and brings a deepening confrontation with a heritage of brutality.


newyorker--2020-12-14--Asking All Georgians: Are You Seventeen and a Half?

Aly Yamamoto , a seventeen-year-old in Georgia , won ’ t turn eighteen until March , which has been bugging her lately .
“ Two months too late to vote in the runoffs ” that will determine which party has control of the Senate , she explained .
“ But at least I can still register people.
” Yamamoto , a volunteer for the New Georgia Project , a local voter-mobilization effort , was holding a clipboard and standing outside Decatur High School , east of Atlanta , where she is currently a senior .
She was joined by another @ @ @ @ @ @ @ health-care-management consultant .
In Georgia , you must be eighteen to vote , but only seventeen and a half to register .
Yamamoto and Woodcock decided to see how many seventeen-and-a-half-year-olds they could find .
They ’ d heard that there were twenty-three thousand teens in the state who hadn ’ t been old enough to vote in November but who would be in January .
“ That ’ s , like , twice as many people as Biden won by here , ” Yamamoto said .
She wore a purple sweatshirt and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a “ Count Every Vote ” mask . )
The two headed toward Decatur Square , a historic walking and shopping district , but , first , they stopped at a Chick-fil-A , where a young man was standing outside .
“ Are you seventeen and a half ?
” Woodcock asked him .
He shook his head and left to check on his order .
They continued on to the square .
A group of skateboarders were hanging out under a tree .
“ Hi , ” Woodcock said .
“ Are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” “ No , ” one said , “ we ’ re much younger .
Thank you , though.
” “ Those are my brother ’ s friends , ” Yamamoto said .
“ They ’ re fourteen.
” They kept walking .
“ Are you registered ?
” Yamamoto asked a young man in headphones .
“ You already asked , ” he replied .
Turning a corner , Yamamoto bumped into a floppy-haired guy who was wearing a puffy jacket and carrying his own clipboard .
His name was Ewan Pritchard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in an election for student-body president .
“ Very fierce competition—very emotional , ” Pritchard said .
“ I didn ’ t look at the numbers .
But I trust the system.
” He was walking around with Woodcock ’ s mother .
Pritchard , who is eighteen , said that he ’ d voted for Joe Biden in November : “ It ’ s fun to be able to finally vote.
” “ I have a lot of friends who are just behind the cutoff , ” Pritchard went on .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of their classmates might vote , out of the hundred and fifty who ’ d be old enough .
“ That ’ s why we ’ re doing this , ” Pritchard said .
“ My résumé has already gone to colleges , ” he added .
Yamamoto and Pritchard split off from Woodcock and her mom and took a roundabout path back to the school .
( “ Maybe we can register the parkour guy , ” Pritchard said . )
They waved to some underclassmen playing soccer , dodged a spewing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ elderly woman for a while about pecan trees and God .
But they did not find anyone who was seventeen and a half .
Thirty minutes later , they debriefed with the rest of the team in the school parking lot .
“ We didn ’ t get any takers , ” Yamamoto said .
Then she turned to a young man named Miles Havard , her co-student-body president , who was also volunteering : “ When ’ s your birthday ?
” “ June 3rd , ” Havard said .
“ On @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ll be seventeen and five months and twenty-nine days .
One day short.
” He shook his head .
Pritchard began texting classmates in his address book , at random .
One , Dominick Calandra , was the right age .
“ He ’ s in the apartments up there , ” Pritchard said to the volunteers , pointing a few hundred yards away .
He told Calandra to bring his I.D .
A few minutes later , Calandra , a skinny kid with sagging jeans and tousled hair , arrived @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Calandra was the only one who would be newly eligible to vote in January .
“ We ’ re all here to register , ” he mumbled , drawing applause from the small crowd of volunteers .
Calandra explained how his day had gone .
“ Worked on some world-history work , ” he said .
“ Then came here.
” A girl he ’ d brought with him added , about the decision to come register , “ It was really convenient , so we figured we might as well.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ take a picture for the yearbook ?
” a young woman asked .
They obliged .
Pens began to scratch paper : the scribble of democracy .
Pritchard offered the new registrants some candy .
“ I ’ m not super enthusiastic about politics , ” Calandra confessed afterward .
“ But , ” he added , “ this seems important.
” ♦

Aly Yamamoto, a seventeen-year-old in Georgia, won’t turn eighteen until March, which has been bugging her lately. “Two months too late to vote in the runoffs” that will determine which party has control of the Senate, she explained. “But at least I can still register people.” Yamamoto, a volunteer for the New Georgia Project, a local voter-mobilization effort, was holding a clipboard and standing outside Decatur High School, east of Atlanta, where she is currently a senior. She was joined by another volunteer, Elizabeth Woodcock, a fifty-year-old health-care-management consultant. In Georgia, you must be eighteen to vote, but only seventeen and a half to register. Yamamoto and Woodcock decided to see how many seventeen-and-a-half-year-olds they could find. They’d heard that there were twenty-three thousand teens in the state who hadn’t been old enough to vote in November but who would be in January.
“That’s, like, twice as many people as Biden won by here,” Yamamoto said. She wore a purple sweatshirt and a burgundy mask. (Woodcock wore a “Count Every Vote” mask.) The two headed toward Decatur Square, a historic walking and shopping district, but, first, they stopped at a Chick-fil-A, where a young man was standing outside. “Are you seventeen and a half?” Woodcock asked him. He shook his head and left to check on his order. They continued on to the square. A group of skateboarders were hanging out under a tree. “Hi,” Woodcock said. “Are you guys seventeen and a half?”
“No,” one said, “we’re much younger. Thank you, though.”
“Those are my brother’s friends,” Yamamoto said. “They’re fourteen.”
They kept walking. “Are you registered?” Yamamoto asked a young man in headphones. “You already asked,” he replied.
Turning a corner, Yamamoto bumped into a floppy-haired guy who was wearing a puffy jacket and carrying his own clipboard. His name was Ewan Pritchard, and Yamamoto had recently beaten him in an election for student-body president. “Very fierce competition—very emotional,” Pritchard said. “I didn’t look at the numbers. But I trust the system.” He was walking around with Woodcock’s mother.
Pritchard, who is eighteen, said that he’d voted for Joe Biden in November: “It’s fun to be able to finally vote.”
“I bet,” Yamamoto said.
“I had to eat a couple of people ahead of me in line, but, yep, I got the last chess set.” Cartoon by Kate Isenberg Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
“I have a lot of friends who are just behind the cutoff,” Pritchard went on. He and Yamamoto figured that about a hundred of their classmates might vote, out of the hundred and fifty who’d be old enough. “That’s why we’re doing this,” Pritchard said. “My résumé has already gone to colleges,” he added.
Yamamoto and Pritchard split off from Woodcock and her mom and took a roundabout path back to the school. (“Maybe we can register the parkour guy,” Pritchard said.) They waved to some underclassmen playing soccer, dodged a spewing fire hydrant, and chatted with an elderly woman for a while about pecan trees and God. But they did not find anyone who was seventeen and a half.
Thirty minutes later, they debriefed with the rest of the team in the school parking lot. “We didn’t get any takers,” Yamamoto said. Then she turned to a young man named Miles Havard, her co-student-body president, who was also volunteering: “When’s your birthday?”
“June 3rd,”Havard said. “On the day of the registration deadline, I’ll be seventeen and five months and twenty-nine days. One day short.” He shook his head.
Pritchard began texting classmates in his address book, at random. One, Dominick Calandra, was the right age. “He’s in the apartments up there,” Pritchard said to the volunteers, pointing a few hundred yards away. He told Calandra to bring his I.D.
A few minutes later, Calandra, a skinny kid with sagging jeans and tousled hair, arrived with four friends from the senior class. Calandra was the only one who would be newly eligible to vote in January. “We’re all here to register,” he mumbled, drawing applause from the small crowd of volunteers. Calandra explained how his day had gone. “Worked on some world-history work,” he said. “Then came here.” A girl he’d brought with him added, about the decision to come register, “It was really convenient, so we figured we might as well.”
“Do you guys mind if I take a picture for the yearbook?” a young woman asked. They obliged.
Pens began to scratch paper: the scribble of democracy. Pritchard offered the new registrants some candy. “I’m not super enthusiastic about politics,” Calandra confessed afterward. “But,” he added, “this seems important.” ♦


David Hockney’s “Hearth”

For the magazine ’ s latest cover—and for these short , dark days—David Hockney offers the traditional comfort of a hearth .
Hockney , one of our most renowned painters , is now eighty-three , but he continues to be his peripatetic self .
He was born in Yorkshire , England , and spent much of the nineteen-sixties and seventies in Los Angeles , producing portraits of friends , lovers , and relatives .
For the past year , he ’ s been sheltering in place in a half-timbered , seventeenth-century house in Normandy , France , with his partner @ @ @ @ @ @ @ went to visit them there in October ; we were not far from Monet ’ s house in Giverny .
Hockney has always drawn from the people and landscapes around him—he spent nine years in Bridlington , Yorkshire , and painted the seasons there—and he ’ s been doing the same in Normandy , capturing the tableau outside by using an iPad .
( “ Ma Normandie , ” an exhibition of Hockney ’ s iPad work , is showing at the Galerie Lelong , in Paris , through February . )
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and about his newest project , which is inspired by the art and nature near him .
You ’ ve been working a lot on the iPad .
Why is it so compelling ?
Well , I drew on the iPad when it first came out , in 2010 .
I thought the app Brushes was just the best .
But then they altered it : they made it a lot worse ; it took you longer to find the brushes .
And I stopped using it .
In 2018 , Jonathan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he could make a new app with a mathematician in Leeds .
It was rather good , and then I got six or seven new brushes custom made .
I did say I was drawing on the iPad , but actually I ’ m painting on it .
I ’ ve got two hundred and twelve paintings done this year , with only eight more to do .
I want those to be of black trees in rain or snow , but I ’ m still waiting on the weather .
Then I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ twenty paintings for 2020 .
What led you to resettle in Normandy ?
When I first came to Normandy with Jean-Pierre , two years ago , we stayed in Honfleur , and then we went to see the Bayeux Tapestry , which was the first time I ’ d seen it since the sixties .
Then we went to see the Apocalypse Tapestry , in Angers .
At some point , on the way to Paris , Jean-Pierre said we could see this house .
We only looked at one house , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we went to Paris ’ s Musée de Cluny and saw the “ Lady and the Unicorn ” tapestries .
So we saw three great tapestries of Europe within a week .
Why are the tapestries so interesting to you ?
They ’ re marvellous—I ’ ve always wanted to do something like this .
You move through time , and it ’ s you who moves , not the pictures .
I think that ’ s very exciting .
They think the Bayeux one was made in Canterbury and commissioned by the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ half brother of William the Conqueror .
It ’ s not actually a tapestry ; it ’ s an embroidery .
It ’ s a marvellous thing , with wonderful colors still , even though it ’ s nearly a thousand years old .
It tells the story of the conquest of England over the course of a few years , and ends with the battle of Hastings .
Well , now I ’ m going to be telling a story that ’ s one year in length , and it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just nature changing .
Is that what you ’ ll work on after you finish the 2020 drawings ?
Yes .
I ’ m going to paint the whole year in six very large panels .
Each will be one and a half metres high by ten metres long .
We ’ ll be showing it first at the Musée de l ’ Orangerie , in Paris .
It ’ ll be in a long corridor , so , as you walk down one side and up another , the seasons will change @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be sixty metres long .
The Bayeux Tapestry is sixty-eight metres long , but it ’ s going to be similar , because it ’ s you that ’ s going to move , not the pictures .
I find it fascinating that centuries-old tapestries inspired you to work more on an iPad .
And now you ’ re returning to painting on canvas .
Are you looking forward to that ?
Oh , yes , and I couldn ’ t have done this two years ago .
I ’ m making it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ ve done , all the trees I ’ ve drawn .
And this also involves new technology .
We visited this canvas shop in Paris , Marin .
The man came out here , and he was very excited with everything I ’ ve done .
They said they would stretch the canvases up in my studio first and then they ’ d roll them up and stretch them in l ’ Orangerie .
They have a new canvas made for rolling up , just like a tapestry—it ’ s got linen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ You can ’ t have thirty-foot-long pictures otherwise .
How would you move them about ?
So we ’ re working together on this .
I think it could be rolled up for about five locations .
And , right at the end , we might have snow .
You can ’ t guarantee snow in Normandy—you can in Yorkshire , but not here .
But Monet did paint snow here , so it can happen .
And , in the last little bit , I have snow coming down and landing on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , waiting for rain and snow .
See below for more covers by David Hockney :

For the magazine’s latest cover—and for these short, dark days—David Hockney offers the traditional comfort of a hearth. Hockney, one of our most renowned painters, is now eighty-three, but he continues to be his peripatetic self. He was born in Yorkshire, England, and spent much of the nineteen-sixties and seventies in Los Angeles, producing portraits of friends, lovers, and relatives. For the past year, he’s been sheltering in place in a half-timbered, seventeenth-century house in Normandy, France, with his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. I went to visit them there in October; we were not far from Monet’s house in Giverny. Hockney has always drawn from the people and landscapes around him—he spent nine years in Bridlington, Yorkshire, and painted the seasons there—and he’s been doing the same in Normandy, capturing the tableau outside by using an iPad. (“Ma Normandie,” an exhibition of Hockney’s iPad work, is showing at the Galerie Lelong, in Paris, through February.) We recently spoke about experimenting with new techniques, and about his newest project, which is inspired by the art and nature near him.
You’ve been working a lot on the iPad. Why is it so compelling?
Well, I drew on the iPad when it first came out, in 2010. I thought the app Brushes was just the best. But then they altered it: they made it a lot worse; it took you longer to find the brushes. And I stopped using it. In 2018, Jonathan Wilkinson, my technical assistant, said he could make a new app with a mathematician in Leeds. It was rather good, and then I got six or seven new brushes custom made. I did say I was drawing on the iPad, but actually I’m painting on it. I’ve got two hundred and twelve paintings done this year, with only eight more to do. I want those to be of black trees in rain or snow, but I’m still waiting on the weather. Then I’ll have done two hundred and twenty paintings for 2020.
Inside the house in Normandy that Hockney shares with his partner, Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima. Photograph by Jean Fremon
What led you to resettle in Normandy?
When I first came to Normandy with Jean-Pierre, two years ago, we stayed in Honfleur, and then we went to see the Bayeux Tapestry, which was the first time I’d seen it since the sixties. Then we went to see the Apocalypse Tapestry, in Angers. At some point, on the way to Paris, Jean-Pierre said we could see this house. We only looked at one house, and we decided to get it. Then we went to Paris’s Musée de Cluny and saw the “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries. So we saw three great tapestries of Europe within a week.
“In Front of House Looking West,” 2019.
Why are the tapestries so interesting to you?
They’re marvellous—I’ve always wanted to do something like this. You move through time, and it’s you who moves, not the pictures. I think that’s very exciting. They think the Bayeux one was made in Canterbury and commissioned by the bishop of Bayeux, who was the half brother of William the Conqueror. It’s not actually a tapestry; it’s an embroidery. It’s a marvellous thing, with wonderful colors still, even though it’s nearly a thousand years old. It tells the story of the conquest of England over the course of a few years, and ends with the battle of Hastings. Well, now I’m going to be telling a story that’s one year in length, and it’s not a battle; it’s just nature changing.
“In the Studio,” 2019.
Is that what you’ll work on after you finish the 2020 drawings?
Yes. I’m going to paint the whole year in six very large panels. Each will be one and a half metres high by ten metres long. We’ll be showing it first at the Musée de l’Orangerie, in Paris. It’ll be in a long corridor, so, as you walk down one side and up another, the seasons will change very slowly. The entire work will be sixty metres long. The Bayeux Tapestry is sixty-eight metres long, but it’s going to be similar, because it’s you that’s going to move, not the pictures.
“No Fire,” 2020.
I find it fascinating that centuries-old tapestries inspired you to work more on an iPad. And now you’re returning to painting on canvas. Are you looking forward to that?
Oh, yes, and I couldn’t have done this two years ago. I’m making it up now from all the drawings I’ve done, all the trees I’ve drawn. And this also involves new technology. We visited this canvas shop in Paris, Marin. The man came out here, and he was very excited with everything I’ve done. They said they would stretch the canvases up in my studio first and then they’d roll them up and stretch them in l’Orangerie. They have a new canvas made for rolling up, just like a tapestry—it’s got linen and a synthetic fiber in it. You can’t have thirty-foot-long pictures otherwise. How would you move them about? So we’re working together on this. I think it could be rolled up for about five locations.
And, right at the end, we might have snow. You can’t guarantee snow in Normandy—you can in Yorkshire, but not here. But Monet did paint snow here, so it can happen. And, in the last little bit, I have snow coming down and landing on the trees. So here I am, waiting for rain and snow.
See below for more covers by David Hockney: