newyorker--2020-01-13--The Pleasure and Pain of Being Cole Porter

Back in 1976 , the incomparable drama critic Kenneth Tynan wondered in his diary when someone was “ going to take a deep breath and declare that , at some time in the thirties , the serious music tradition finally withered , curled up and died of sterility and malnutrition ; and that the greatest composers of the twentieth century are Berlin , Rodgers , Porter , Kern , Gershwin , et al.
” This view , bold enough at the time to be fit only for a diary , has by now become commonplace .
In the mid-nineteen-seventies , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to find Ella Fitzgerald ’ s Gershwin or Cole Porter albums .
Now those recordings , and the songs they illuminate , are everywhere .
Prompted , perhaps , by the publication , in the early seventies , of Alec Wilder ’ s groundbreaking study , “ American Popular Song : The Great Innovators 1900-1950 , ” the old songwriters have come to have a new presence , and their songs even a collective brand name : the American Songbook .
Their music is now taken up routinely by the same rock singers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with some ( Van Morrison singing “ A Foggy Day ” ) oddly good , some ( Rod Stewart singing “ Someone to Watch Over Me ” ) oddly bad , and some ( Bob Dylan singing “ The Night We Called It a Day ” ) just odd .
Like all victories in art , this one has a double-edged result .
On the one hand , the music is , mostly , out there .
On the other , the essential work of discrimination is lost in a blanketing cloud @ @ @ @ @ @ @ apart ; complacent nostalgia squashes them back together .
The first wave of rediscovery had ukases and prohibitions—Alec Wilder wrote off essentially all of Rodgers and Hammerstein , and almost everything self-consciously “ jazzy ” in Gershwin .
( He preferred Harold Arlen , who knew jazz inside out , to Gershwin—a shocking view then . )
These days , a smiling , everyone-together spirit inflects the appreciative albums and Lincoln Center celebrations ; Tynan ’ s “ et al.
” covers a lot of talents , big and small .
When you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as Wilder was , it is important to sort out the fighters from the freeloaders .
Once it has been won , everybody gets a medal .
So , with squads of scholars arriving on the field after the battle , to tend the wounded and bury the dead , we have a renewed chance not just to get the story right but to get the stature right , to figure out who ranks where and why .
Certainly , Porter ’ s ghost could not ask for better care than he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Cole Porter ” ( Yale ) , edited by Cliff Eisen , a professor of music history at King ’ s College London , and Dominic McHugh , a musicologist at the University of Sheffield ( and the editor of Alan Jay Lerner ’ s letters ) .
Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus , as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland , every turn in the songwriter ’ s story is deep-dived for exact chronology , and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried , explicatory @ @ @ @ @ @ @ some secondary material that is not , strictly speaking , correspondence at all , such as a hair-raising journal of the mid-thirties M-G-M movie project that became the Eleanor Powell vehicle “ Born to Dance.
” As an artist ’ s letters , they are , truth be told , disappointing .
There are few flights of fancy or spontaneous improvisations in Porter ’ s writings to friends—for such a famous wit , there is remarkably little wit .
The most arresting passages of writing and thinking arrive less often in letters-from than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ great musical “ book writer ” —what others call a libretto Broadway people call a book , and what others call a book they usually call revenge—contributes several good things .
He offers Porter definitive wisdom about making musicals : “ Doing a show is not unlike bringing up a child .
The child develops a life of its own .
The parents do their best but certain things remain immutable , and the child is what he is.
” Porter , a great appreciator , tells Burrows that he liked those words @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Yet a reader , without learning much directly about Porter ’ s art , comes away from the book with an even higher opinion of him as an artist than might have been held before .
Though he was born into genuine if provincial affluence , with second-tier European royalty filling out the family ’ s dance card on vacation , he chose to become a working stiff .
Reversing the usual American ascent from labor to leisure makes for a more strenuous , and more moving , story .
The labor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and language .
Porter ’ s personal tale was well known even when other songwriters ’ were not .
To get a bio-pic , peers among the great songwriters had to die young , like Gershwin ( who got a pretty good movie in “ Rhapsody in Blue ” ) or Lorenz Hart ( who got a terrible one in “ Words and Music ” ) .
But Porter was the subject of two movies , including one , “ Night and Day ” ( 1946 ) , made in his lifetime @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the unsayable but far from secret truth that he was gay .
In his own social world , he was about as out as a man could be in those days , with a rich repertory of lovers and assignations .
Porter ’ s story was appealing because it was seemingly so generational—so Fitzgerald-like in its ascension from Midwestern beginnings to East Coast fame .
Born in Peru , Indiana , in 1891 to the wealthiest family in town—perhaps the wealthiest in all of Indiana—he went to Yale right before the Great War @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him , at Princeton , regarded Porter ’ s commercial career a little enviously , as a path not taken . )
A precocious though largely untrained musician , Porter wrote what are still among the school ’ s fight songs .
Then came a short period of service in the war , followed by a long holiday in Europe through the early twenties , with a loving but mostly sexless marriage of convenience to Linda Lee Thomas , of the Virginia Lees .
It was a perfect Gerald Murphy-style Jazz Age life @ @ @ @ @ @ @ determination to get to New York and become a successful Broadway songwriter—a very strange , and very “ Jewish , ” ambition for a young socialite .
Beneath his smooth , genial , almost inhumanly productive and evasive surface , there were turbulent waters .
His very name , for all its air of Ivy League ease , represents a burdened legacy .
The Porters were his difficult , scapegrace father ’ s family ; the Coles were his mother ’ s rich and ambitious Indiana family .
He was a Porter by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything to do with it , would be a Cole for life .
“ I ’ m sorry , Derek , but , now that Kelsey has learned how to convert JPEGs into PDFs , we can ’ t justify keeping you on.
” Privilege has its privileges , and Porter ’ s queerness , evident in the countless letters in this volume to kindred souls , like Monty Woolley—the once famous character actor , whom he ’ d met at Yale , the original star of “ The Man Who Came to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him , as it did Hart .
Porter , by temperament and entitlement , came of age among the openly bisexual European upper crust .
Everyone knew that he was a gay man with a marriage of convenience ; everyone agreed to maintain the pretense that he wasn ’ t .
Far from a drama of either repression or subversion , the situation seems like an oddly happy social concord .
His letters to his lovers are in the same register as those of the Oscar Wilde–Robbie Ross circle in London a few @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , with a transparent language of concealment , a more or less open code of intrigue .
“ Way out here one gets that wicked city idea about New York & all those purlieus , ” he writes to the dancer Nelson Barclift , from his cottage in Williamstown .
“ Have you been in a purlieu tonight ?
Confess .
Say , ‘ Guilty.
’ But do write me soon that you have reported it all to Ben & Ollie ” —gay friends— “ for , for some intangible reason , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ touch .
And they touch plenty.
” It might be argued , and has been , most notably in William McBrien ’ s 1998 biography , that Porter ’ s sexuality shaped his sentiments , which burst out in happy one-night-stand songs like “ Just One of Those Things ” and “ I ’ ve Got You Under My Skin , ” with their note of sexual infatuation , cherished but not easily transmuted into domesticity .
“ I ’ d sacrifice anything come what might / For the sake of having you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ voice that comes in the night / And repeats , repeats in my ear ” does not lead us neatly to become the folks who live on the hill .
But Frank Sinatra had no trouble applying the songs , or their emotions , to Ava Gardner or her successors .
At a time when everyone was chafing against the constraints of bourgeois morality , a sex song like “ Let ’ s Misbehave ” spoke as clearly to straying straights as it did to cruising gays .
The sport of writing in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is not to smuggle in specifically subversive subtext when the censors aren ’ t looking but to make the subversive emotions universal enough not to need a subtext .
Porter was to straight sex in his “ affair ” songs as his best friend , Irving Berlin , was to Christianity in writing “ White Christmas ” —the outsider ’ s triumph was to own the insider ’ s material .
It may be , as some have suggested , that the climactic lines “ But if , baby , I ’ m @ @ @ @ @ @ @ top ” in Porter ’ s “ You ’ re the Top ” already meant in 1936 what they mean in erotic slang now ; the point is that , post-Porter , they no longer had to mean only that .
Porter is so famous for his gifts as a lyricist that it might seem mischievous to the point of perversity to suggest that his real greatness resides in his skills as a composer .
Yet how many other popular composers have had more hits with instrumental , unsung versions of their work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Begin the Beguine ” is the best known , but the Dave Brubeck Quartet ’ s album of Porter songs , from the mid-sixties , with Paul Desmond ’ s peerless sax , is just as good .
Though rarely overtly jazz in the Arlen-Gershwin manner , his melodies have so much mysterious inner propulsion that , asked to swing , they practically swing themselves .
For all Porter ’ s aristocratic mien , his tastes were rather plain , as those of the American upper classes usually are—high taste is typically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eaten at a Wasp club knows .
His list of requirements for a hotel room in Philadelphia during a tryout included sliced liverwurst , salami , and bologna , and twenty-four cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer .
Another small but striking social trait that runs through the letters is the preponderance of presents that were incumbent on people in show business then ; Porter gives and gets flowers , paintings , wine , books for the smallest of reasons , and then writes at length to thank the present-giver , or to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ People who came of age in Porter ’ s time took gift-giving as seriously as the Kwakiutls took their potlatches , and for the same reason : coming of age in a culture of surplus , they believed in constant exchanges of the signs of prosperity .
Porter , high-Wasp tastes and all , had to navigate a Broadway and Hollywood world that was astoundingly uniform in its Jewishness .
A famous story has Porter confiding in a friend that he was going to write “ Jewish tunes , ” meaning minor-key pentatonic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mastered in “ Blue Skies.
” In Mary Martin ’ s first showstopper song , “ My Heart Belongs to Daddy , ” the melisma in the middle section is self-consciously , even uncomfortably , Eastern European-sounding in order to indicate that “ Daddy ” is Jewish .
The degree of reverse cultural assimilation that this Gentile from the Midwest had to undertake is captured in one of the funniest letters Porter ever wrote , to his ( Jewish ) agent , Irving Lazar : Thank you for your letter of Dec. 28 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ child .
I do not call Sol “ Saul ” nor do I call Saul “ Sol.
” These are two different people .
There is a producer named Sol Siegel—and an assistant producer named Saul Chaplin .
Sol sent Saul to be with me here for ten days while I wrote new material .
.
.
.
Since Saul ( not Sol ) returned to Culver City , I have received charming telephone calls from Sol , and a most enthusiastic letter from Saul .
It ’ s a Porter lyric in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tell Me All ” ) , and shows what a forest of alien manners , or at least names , a boy from Indiana had to make his way through at a time when all the other great show-tune innovators—Kern , Gershwin , Rodgers , Arlen—were Jewish .
What other kind of tunes could you write ?
Porter ’ s story does have a dramatic climax .
In the fall of 1937 , when he was forty-six , he endured a horrific accident , in which the horse he was riding fell on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The injuries led to more than thirty operations in the course of his life , all excruciatingly painful , and a legacy of permanent suffering .
Just how agonizing his condition must have been , and what consequences it had for his work , has been a source of much speculation .
Wilder , among others , insists that there was minimal good work after the accident .
Eisen and McHugh dispute that verdict ; certainly , his most successful Broadway shows , including “ Kiss Me , Kate , ” all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the letters are heroic in their avoidance of self-pity , though they also reveal for the first time just how bad his injuries were .
“ When the cast was removed , I shall never forget the first sight of my leg , ” he wrote to Monty Woolley from his hospital bed .
“ I asked ‘ What is the jelly it ’ s covered with ?
’ And the reply was , ‘ That ’ s not jelly , that ’ s blebs ’ ” —blisters .
“ It was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ looked like a flowing mass of lava and it sorta made me sick.
” Heavily drugged , he managed to write down some of his “ craziest illusions ” : “ My right leg stretches , slanting upwards before me , like the side of the hill , the summit of which is my toes .
From the ankle down—and approaching me—any number of small , finely sharply toothed rakes are at work.
” The rakes got only more sharply toothed over time .
He managed to persevere , it seems , by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But not a day of it could have been easy for him .
There are long , relatively unrevealing diaries from later trips to the Greek islands and Naples and beyond , and the extent of his activity doesn ’ t sound at all like that of a crippled man .
On the other hand , one of his companions says that he was “ inhuman ” on these voyages , a comment that seems to refer to the prodigious gifts of concentration necessary to keep out the pain and focus on the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an artisan , about the business of putting on a show .
It is pretty clear that he measured a show ’ s success simply by the number of hit songs it produced , and he had savvy theories about how long it takes a song to become a hit once it ’ s out in the world .
He writes minimally about his own creative process for the same upper-crust reason that he writes minimally about his suffering—only second-rate people go on and on about their inner lives .
Analyzing is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the twin of self-promotion .
Clues about his creativity shine through the workmanlike surface , though .
Porter still wrote in a revue style where the characters were hardly worth dramatizing .
The producer Cy Feuer , who put on two late Porter shows , says in his memoir that Porter didn ’ t really care where the songs fit within the story ; he was blithely composing numbers for “ Can-Can ” ( 1953 ) while the book writer and the director struggled bitterly with the plotline , and though he threw @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seems to have stood mostly aside , amused and productive , as the rest of the creative team raged and yelled .
In fact , Abe Burrows wrote a couple of deft , diplomatic letters asking Porter to please wait to write the songs until they knew what the story was .
Told that the integrity of the show demanded that there must not be any ooh-la-la songs about Paris , Porter airily wrote the most obvious of all such songs , “ I Love Paris.
” It was too irresistible not to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this was immoral , but no one has called me on it in a while , so I think I ’ ll stick it out through the season.
” He didn ’ t need the shows to write drama .
The songs were the stories .
“ Brush Up Your Shakespeare ” and “ So in Love , ” though situated in the plot of “ Kiss Me , Kate , ” are hardly situational .
He constructed songs so that each one is a drama in itself , with an allusive , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ refrain .
In perhaps his greatest song , “ Just One of Those Things , ” from 1935—it ’ s a song that Holden Caulfield , who likes nothing , likes—the verse is an offhand sequence of references that were not quite commonplace then : Dorothy Parker , Heloise and Abelard .
The chorus becomes slyly dynamic ( “ Just one of those crazy flings / One of those bells that now and then rings ” ) , building from kiss-off to remembered kissing .
The movement is minimal but emotionally exact ( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hot not to cool down ” ) , and describes a journey from mere ruefulness to actual regret , a small but significant emotional arc that requires a great singer to convey .
List songs are anathema to the post-Sondheim sensibility , trained as it is on Oscar Hammerstein ’ s heightened dramatic style , but Porter ’ s lists are his poetry .
Ring Lardner , in these pages , made fun of the overwrought imagery in Porter ’ s romantic lyrics ; where Porter had “ Under the hide of me @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , such a hungry yearning / Burning inside of me , ” he offered as an alternative “ Night and day , under the rind of me / There ’ s an Oh , such a zeal for spooning , running the mind of me.
” But Porter is never the least bit off when it comes to Americana .
He takes pleasure in rhyme for rhyme ’ s sake , in the play of language , and does so in a way that is , oddly , far more in tune with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of his time than operetta style could ever be .
In “ You ’ re the Top , ” the collisions of high and low , the mixed vernacular that expects his audience to be equally comfortable at the movies and in the museums , is the purest kind of E. E. Cummings–Stuart Davis thirties pop avant-garde : “ You ’ re the top !
/ You ’ re the Colosseum .
/ You ’ re the top !
/ You ’ re the Louvre Museum .
/ You ’ re a melody @ @ @ @ @ @ @ You ’ re a Bendel bonnet , / A Shakespeare sonnet , / You ’ re Mickey Mouse.
” The beautiful chaos of similes—Cellophane !
Botticelli !
A Waldorf salad !
—captures the hyperkinetic collisions of New York experience as perfectly as Mondrian ’ s “ Broadway Boogie Woogie.
” The wit of the build , leading past Rome and Paris and culminating in high Americana , is complemented by a brilliantly quiet bit of rhyming—had “ Mickey Mouse ” and “ Strauss ” been rhymed before ?
When George and Ira Gershwin @ @ @ @ @ @ @ couple of years later , the waltz “ By Strauss , ” Ira had to cheat a little and make all the rhymes German , including rhyming “ Strauss ” with “ Fledermaus ” —the difference between “ Fledermaus ” as a rhyme and “ Mickey Mouse ” being the difference between talent and genius .
While still a very young man , Porter coined the phrase “ See America First ” ( it was the title of his début musical , a George M. Cohan spoof ) , and that gift for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the quiddity of his genius .
Porter is one of the three great lyricists of invented American speech , with only Chuck Berry in the fifties and Robert Hunter of the Grateful Dead in the seventies his equal in this respect .
Berry constructed a world of fast cars and fried chicken and teen-age back-seat fumblings , with the right jive to cover it all ; Hunter , in songs like “ Uncle John ’ s Band ” and “ Friend of the Devil , ” invented a lost nineteenth-century world of runaway @ @ @ @ @ @ @ playing by the riverside which somehow resonated as an available American reservoir of myth .
( Of course , people had written songs about cars before Chuck did , but he was the one who had the specific wit to put Maybellene ’ s Coup de Ville in a contest with his own V-8 Ford .
Just as , where the Band wrote about Dixie in the winter of ’ 65 , only Hunter made up Uncle John , who could have been equally at home playing during the Civil War or at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; Porter made one up—a New York of penthouses and night clubs and hangovers which still resonates as another kind of American myth .
Even phrases now as familiar as “ I ’ ve got you under my skin ” and “ I get a kick out of you ” are not precisely idioms taken directly from American talk , the way that Hart ’ s “ I could write a book ” and “ I ’ ve got five dollars ” are .
No doubt people had long said that a thing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ got a kick out of something else , but no one said exactly those formal sentences ; Porter ’ s special work was in elevating the smallest of small talk into comic poetry .
It gave him license to invent a vernacular .
“ Down in the depths of the ninetieth floor , ” “ But in the morning , no !
, ” “ I ’ m always true to you , darling , in my fashion , ” even “ You ’ re the top ” —none of these things were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ acorns into mighty jokes .
When , in “ Blazing Saddles , ” the villain quotes “ You Do Something to Me ” ( “ Now go do that voodoo that you do so well !
” ) , we know at once that he is quoting Cole Porter .
Porter ’ s condition worsened—in 1958 , the crushed leg would have to be amputated—and though his energy didn ’ t slacken , the quality of the work did decline .
The letters trace his work on one good movie score ( “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of so-so shows ( “ Silk Stockings ” and “ Can-Can ” ) , and a promising but too-late-in-the-day collaboration with S. J. Perelman on an Aladdin musical for television .
What ’ s odd is that Porter writes voluminously in the nineteen-fifties without ever mentioning the recordings of his work that would do more than anything to assure his immortality : the Nelson Riddle arrangements of his greatest songs , which Sinatra recorded in the decade beginning in 1953 .
“ I ’ ve Got You Under My Skin , ” “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” “ Just One of Those Things , ” “ Easy to Love , ” “ Anything Goes ” —these are the high points of Porter interpretation .
( Sinatra ’ s sadly obscure live recording of “ Night and Day , ” with the Red Norvo vibraphone trio in Australia , is perhaps the best of all . )
As Will Friedwald and James Kaplan have both pointed out , the Riddle-Sinatra “ I ’ ve Got You Under My Skin ” was as pivotal a recording in American music as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be a decade later .
Before that , Porter is Astaire and elegance ; after that , he swings and can become anything more .
Although Porter ’ s biographer Robert Kimball recently assured an audience that Porter had admired Sinatra and befriended him—his slightly dubious evidence being that Sinatra took over Porter ’ s apartment in the Waldorf after his death , in 1964—that doesn ’ t show up in the letters , and one wonders if Porter was even fully aware of the Riddle-Sinatra records , beyond the royalties he collected @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recordings of single songs more than in the spasmodic revival of shows that often need heavy rewriting to exist onstage at all .
His dramatic songs are all the dramatic revival we need .
All art aspires to the condition of music , Walter Pater wrote ; within music itself , all music dreams of becoming another kind of music .
Art songs dream of becoming pop songs and pop songs dream of becoming folk songs , too familiar to need an author .
We hear Porter now without knowing that it ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Like Stephen Foster , he sublimated his suffering into his songs , until the songs are all we have , thereby achieving every artist ’ s dream , to cease to be a suffering self and become just one of those things we share .
♦

Back in 1976, the incomparable drama critic Kenneth Tynan wondered in his diary when someone was “going to take a deep breath and declare that, at some time in the thirties, the serious music tradition finally withered, curled up and died of sterility and malnutrition; and that the greatest composers of the twentieth century are Berlin, Rodgers, Porter, Kern, Gershwin, et al.” This view, bold enough at the time to be fit only for a diary, has by now become commonplace. In the mid-nineteen-seventies, you had to haunt London record shops to find Ella Fitzgerald’s Gershwin or Cole Porter albums. Now those recordings, and the songs they illuminate, are everywhere. Prompted, perhaps, by the publication, in the early seventies, of Alec Wilder’s groundbreaking study, “American Popular Song: The Great Innovators 1900-1950,” the old songwriters have come to have a new presence, and their songs even a collective brand name: the American Songbook. Their music is now taken up routinely by the same rock singers who once seemed to have overshadowed them, with some (Van Morrison singing “A Foggy Day”) oddly good, some (Rod Stewart singing “Someone to Watch Over Me”) oddly bad, and some (Bob Dylan singing “The Night We Called It a Day”) just odd.
Like all victories in art, this one has a double-edged result. On the one hand, the music is, mostly, out there. On the other, the essential work of discrimination is lost in a blanketing cloud of nostalgia. Embattled memory takes things apart; complacent nostalgia squashes them back together. The first wave of rediscovery had ukases and prohibitions—Alec Wilder wrote off essentially all of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and almost everything self-consciously “jazzy” in Gershwin. (He preferred Harold Arlen, who knew jazz inside out, to Gershwin—a shocking view then.) These days, a smiling, everyone-together spirit inflects the appreciative albums and Lincoln Center celebrations; Tynan’s “et al.” covers a lot of talents, big and small. When you are in the middle of a battle, as Wilder was, it is important to sort out the fighters from the freeloaders. Once it has been won, everybody gets a medal.
So, with squads of scholars arriving on the field after the battle, to tend the wounded and bury the dead, we have a renewed chance not just to get the story right but to get the stature right, to figure out who ranks where and why. Certainly, Porter’s ghost could not ask for better care than he has been given in “The Letters of Cole Porter” (Yale), edited by Cliff Eisen, a professor of music history at King’s College London, and Dominic McHugh, a musicologist at the University of Sheffield (and the editor of Alan Jay Lerner’s letters). Laid out with a meticulous scholarly apparatus, as though this were the correspondence of Grover Cleveland, every turn in the songwriter’s story is deep-dived for exact chronology, and every name casually dropped by Porter gets a worried, explicatory footnote. The editors have also included some secondary material that is not, strictly speaking, correspondence at all, such as a hair-raising journal of the mid-thirties M-G-M movie project that became the Eleanor Powell vehicle “Born to Dance.”
As an artist’s letters, they are, truth be told, disappointing. There are few flights of fancy or spontaneous improvisations in Porter’s writings to friends—for such a famous wit, there is remarkably little wit. The most arresting passages of writing and thinking arrive less often in letters-from than in letters-to. Abe Burrows, the great musical “book writer”—what others call a libretto Broadway people call a book, and what others call a book they usually call revenge—contributes several good things. He offers Porter definitive wisdom about making musicals: “Doing a show is not unlike bringing up a child. The child develops a life of its own. The parents do their best but certain things remain immutable, and the child is what he is.” Porter, a great appreciator, tells Burrows that he liked those words enough to paste them in his scrapbook.
Yet a reader, without learning much directly about Porter’s art, comes away from the book with an even higher opinion of him as an artist than might have been held before. Though he was born into genuine if provincial affluence, with second-tier European royalty filling out the family’s dance card on vacation, he chose to become a working stiff. Reversing the usual American ascent from labor to leisure makes for a more strenuous, and more moving, story. The labor produced a new kind of American lyric, and language.
Porter’s personal tale was well known even when other songwriters’ were not. To get a bio-pic, peers among the great songwriters had to die young, like Gershwin (who got a pretty good movie in “Rhapsody in Blue”) or Lorenz Hart (who got a terrible one in “Words and Music”). But Porter was the subject of two movies, including one, “Night and Day” (1946), made in his lifetime and with his reluctant collaboration, despite the unsayable but far from secret truth that he was gay. In his own social world, he was about as out as a man could be in those days, with a rich repertory of lovers and assignations.
Porter’s story was appealing because it was seemingly so generational—so Fitzgerald-like in its ascension from Midwestern beginnings to East Coast fame. Born in Peru, Indiana, in 1891 to the wealthiest family in town—perhaps the wealthiest in all of Indiana—he went to Yale right before the Great War. (Fitzgerald, four years behind him, at Princeton, regarded Porter’s commercial career a little enviously, as a path not taken.) A precocious though largely untrained musician, Porter wrote what are still among the school’s fight songs. Then came a short period of service in the war, followed by a long holiday in Europe through the early twenties, with a loving but mostly sexless marriage of convenience to Linda Lee Thomas, of the Virginia Lees. It was a perfect Gerald Murphy-style Jazz Age life, disrupted only by Porter’s determination to get to New York and become a successful Broadway songwriter—a very strange, and very “Jewish,” ambition for a young socialite.
Beneath his smooth, genial, almost inhumanly productive and evasive surface, there were turbulent waters. His very name, for all its air of Ivy League ease, represents a burdened legacy. The Porters were his difficult, scapegrace father’s family; the Coles were his mother’s rich and ambitious Indiana family. He was a Porter by birth but, if his mother had anything to do with it, would be a Cole for life.
“I’m sorry, Derek, but, now that Kelsey has learned how to convert JPEGs into PDFs, we can’t justify keeping you on.” Cartoon by Maddie Dai Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Privilege has its privileges, and Porter’s queerness, evident in the countless letters in this volume to kindred souls, like Monty Woolley—the once famous character actor, whom he’d met at Yale, the original star of “The Man Who Came to Dinner”—seems never to have tormented him, as it did Hart. Porter, by temperament and entitlement, came of age among the openly bisexual European upper crust. Everyone knew that he was a gay man with a marriage of convenience; everyone agreed to maintain the pretense that he wasn’t. Far from a drama of either repression or subversion, the situation seems like an oddly happy social concord.
His letters to his lovers are in the same register as those of the Oscar Wilde–Robbie Ross circle in London a few decades earlier: chummy more than erotic, with a transparent language of concealment, a more or less open code of intrigue. “Way out here one gets that wicked city idea about New York & all those purlieus,” he writes to the dancer Nelson Barclift, from his cottage in Williamstown. “Have you been in a purlieu tonight? Confess. Say, ‘Guilty.’ But do write me soon that you have reported it all to Ben & Ollie”—gay friends—“for, for some intangible reason, they cleanse the impurity out of what they touch. And they touch plenty.”
It might be argued, and has been, most notably in William McBrien’s 1998 biography, that Porter’s sexuality shaped his sentiments, which burst out in happy one-night-stand songs like “Just One of Those Things” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” with their note of sexual infatuation, cherished but not easily transmuted into domesticity. “I’d sacrifice anything come what might / For the sake of having you near / In spite of a warning voice that comes in the night / And repeats, repeats in my ear” does not lead us neatly to become the folks who live on the hill.
But Frank Sinatra had no trouble applying the songs, or their emotions, to Ava Gardner or her successors. At a time when everyone was chafing against the constraints of bourgeois morality, a sex song like “Let’s Misbehave” spoke as clearly to straying straights as it did to cruising gays. The sport of writing in a tightly organized genre like popular song is not to smuggle in specifically subversive subtext when the censors aren’t looking but to make the subversive emotions universal enough not to need a subtext. Porter was to straight sex in his “affair” songs as his best friend, Irving Berlin, was to Christianity in writing “White Christmas”—the outsider’s triumph was to own the insider’s material. It may be, as some have suggested, that the climactic lines “But if, baby, I’m the bottom / You’re the top” in Porter’s “You’re the Top” already meant in 1936 what they mean in erotic slang now; the point is that, post-Porter, they no longer had to mean only that.
Porter is so famous for his gifts as a lyricist that it might seem mischievous to the point of perversity to suggest that his real greatness resides in his skills as a composer. Yet how many other popular composers have had more hits with instrumental, unsung versions of their work? Artie Shaw’s version of “Begin the Beguine” is the best known, but the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s album of Porter songs, from the mid-sixties, with Paul Desmond’s peerless sax, is just as good. Though rarely overtly jazz in the Arlen-Gershwin manner, his melodies have so much mysterious inner propulsion that, asked to swing, they practically swing themselves.
For all Porter’s aristocratic mien, his tastes were rather plain, as those of the American upper classes usually are—high taste is typically simple taste, as anyone who has eaten at a Wasp club knows. His list of requirements for a hotel room in Philadelphia during a tryout included sliced liverwurst, salami, and bologna, and twenty-four cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Another small but striking social trait that runs through the letters is the preponderance of presents that were incumbent on people in show business then; Porter gives and gets flowers, paintings, wine, books for the smallest of reasons, and then writes at length to thank the present-giver, or to thank the present-recipient for his thanks. People who came of age in Porter’s time took gift-giving as seriously as the Kwakiutls took their potlatches, and for the same reason: coming of age in a culture of surplus, they believed in constant exchanges of the signs of prosperity.
Porter, high-Wasp tastes and all, had to navigate a Broadway and Hollywood world that was astoundingly uniform in its Jewishness. A famous story has Porter confiding in a friend that he was going to write “Jewish tunes,” meaning minor-key pentatonic croonings of the kind that Berlin had mastered in “Blue Skies.” In Mary Martin’s first showstopper song, “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” the melisma in the middle section is self-consciously, even uncomfortably, Eastern European-sounding in order to indicate that “Daddy” is Jewish.
The degree of reverse cultural assimilation that this Gentile from the Midwest had to undertake is captured in one of the funniest letters Porter ever wrote, to his (Jewish) agent, Irving Lazar:
Thank you for your letter of Dec. 28 1955. I am not an idiot child. I do not call Sol “Saul” nor do I call Saul “Sol.” These are two different people. There is a producer named Sol Siegel—and an assistant producer named Saul Chaplin. Sol sent Saul to be with me here for ten days while I wrote new material. . . . Since Saul (not Sol) returned to Culver City, I have received charming telephone calls from Sol, and a most enthusiastic letter from Saul.
It’s a Porter lyric in miniature (“Sol Sent Saul to Tell Me All”), and shows what a forest of alien manners, or at least names, a boy from Indiana had to make his way through at a time when all the other great show-tune innovators—Kern, Gershwin, Rodgers, Arlen—were Jewish. What other kind of tunes could you write?
Porter’s story does have a dramatic climax. In the fall of 1937, when he was forty-six, he endured a horrific accident, in which the horse he was riding fell on him and crushed one of his legs. The injuries led to more than thirty operations in the course of his life, all excruciatingly painful, and a legacy of permanent suffering. Just how agonizing his condition must have been, and what consequences it had for his work, has been a source of much speculation. Wilder, among others, insists that there was minimal good work after the accident. Eisen and McHugh dispute that verdict; certainly, his most successful Broadway shows, including “Kiss Me, Kate,” all happened well afterward. Still more certainly, the letters are heroic in their avoidance of self-pity, though they also reveal for the first time just how bad his injuries were. “When the cast was removed, I shall never forget the first sight of my leg,” he wrote to Monty Woolley from his hospital bed. “I asked ‘What is the jelly it’s covered with?’ And the reply was, ‘That’s not jelly, that’s blebs’ ”—blisters. “It was hard to believe for the whole leg looked like a flowing mass of lava and it sorta made me sick.” Heavily drugged, he managed to write down some of his “craziest illusions”: “My right leg stretches, slanting upwards before me, like the side of the hill, the summit of which is my toes. From the ankle down—and approaching me—any number of small, finely sharply toothed rakes are at work.”
The rakes got only more sharply toothed over time. He managed to persevere, it seems, by a mixture of champagne and stiff-upper-lipness. But not a day of it could have been easy for him. There are long, relatively unrevealing diaries from later trips to the Greek islands and Naples and beyond, and the extent of his activity doesn’t sound at all like that of a crippled man. On the other hand, one of his companions says that he was “inhuman” on these voyages, a comment that seems to refer to the prodigious gifts of concentration necessary to keep out the pain and focus on the pleasures.
Porter writes engagingly, as an artisan, about the business of putting on a show. It is pretty clear that he measured a show’s success simply by the number of hit songs it produced, and he had savvy theories about how long it takes a song to become a hit once it’s out in the world. He writes minimally about his own creative process for the same upper-crust reason that he writes minimally about his suffering—only second-rate people go on and on about their inner lives. Analyzing is the same as complaining, and self-analysis is the twin of self-promotion.
Clues about his creativity shine through the workmanlike surface, though. Porter still wrote in a revue style where the characters were hardly worth dramatizing. The producer Cy Feuer, who put on two late Porter shows, says in his memoir that Porter didn’t really care where the songs fit within the story; he was blithely composing numbers for “Can-Can” (1953) while the book writer and the director struggled bitterly with the plotline, and though he threw in new ones as needed, he seems to have stood mostly aside, amused and productive, as the rest of the creative team raged and yelled. In fact, Abe Burrows wrote a couple of deft, diplomatic letters asking Porter to please wait to write the songs until they knew what the story was. Told that the integrity of the show demanded that there must not be any ooh-la-la songs about Paris, Porter airily wrote the most obvious of all such songs, “I Love Paris.” It was too irresistible not to include.
“I know we decided this was immoral, but no one has called me on it in a while, so I think I’ll stick it out through the season.” Cartoon by Brooke Bourgeois Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
He didn’t need the shows to write drama. The songs were the stories. “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” and “So in Love,” though situated in the plot of “Kiss Me, Kate,” are hardly situational. He constructed songs so that each one is a drama in itself, with an allusive, erudite verse leading to a simpler storytelling refrain. In perhaps his greatest song, “Just One of Those Things,” from 1935—it’s a song that Holden Caulfield, who likes nothing, likes—the verse is an offhand sequence of references that were not quite commonplace then: Dorothy Parker, Heloise and Abelard. The chorus becomes slyly dynamic (“Just one of those crazy flings / One of those bells that now and then rings”), building from kiss-off to remembered kissing. The movement is minimal but emotionally exact (“Our love affair / Was too hot not to cool down”), and describes a journey from mere ruefulness to actual regret, a small but significant emotional arc that requires a great singer to convey.


newyorker--2020-01-13--A Tale of Two Harveys

A Tale of Two Harveys

Imagine , if you will , an alternate universe in which Harvey Weinstein ’ s picture is on the front page of the Post beneath a lurid headline .
Sounds a lot like our universe .
Except : in the alternate universe , it is Weinstein who is the victim of a shocking , horrendous crime , as opposed to being the reviled figure currently on trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan , facing multiple counts of rape and sexual assault .
Bizarre , yes ?
But what if we told you that this alternate universe actually existed , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
1993 .
That was the year Harvey Weinstein was kidnapped and held for two weeks , while his captors demanded millions of dollars in ransom .
The twist : this Harvey Weinstein was an entirely different , non-disgraced Harvey Weinstein , one who never waged an Oscar campaign or allegedly masturbated into a restaurant planter .
This Harvey Weinstein was the president of Lord West Formal Wear , a Queens-based tuxedo manufacturer .
He made headlines not just for being kidnapped but for what he endured : twelve days in a dank @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into a hillside near the 158th Street off-ramp of the Henry Hudson Parkway .
A curious coincidence : more than a few Twitter users have suggested that a pit would be a fitting home for the Hollywood Harvey Weinstein , who denies all charges of criminal activity .
( Ironic historical footnote : being buried alive was a punishment traditionally handed out to unchaste women . )
“ MY DAYS IN HELL ” read the Post headline after the -wear Harvey Weinstein was freed .
A photograph showed a dashing man looking not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fact , not unlike the actor Hugh Laurie .
So , two Harvey Weinsteins , one of whom may have actually met Hugh Laurie .
But there ’ s a second twist : John Esposito , one of Hollywood Harvey Weinstein ’ s defense attorneys , represented one of the formal-wear Harvey Weinstein ’ s kidnappers .
Whoa , as they say .
The formal-wear Harvey Weinstein ’ s ordeal began on August 4 , 1993 , when the sixty-eight-year-old “ tuxedo king , ” as the tabloids dubbed him , was abducted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Heights diner .
The kidnappers dropped him in a narrow pit , shackled him into a squat , and sealed the pit with a heavy lid .
( Another coincidence : Hollywood Harvey Weinstein was shackled with an electronic ankle bracelet , which he was accused of tampering with . )
The ringleader was Fermin Rodriguez , a disloyal employee at Lord West , which used to advertise its wares with a slightly cringey slogan , “ The Look is Lord West .
.
.
and the lady approves.
” ( That line @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Harvey Weinstein , who , whatever else anyone says about him , was good at marketing . )
The kidnappers dropped fruit and water into the pit at intervals , and , over the final three days , Weinstein survived on a single apple .
He somehow wriggled free from his bonds , but then he developed festering sores on his back .
( One more coincidence : Hollywood Harvey Weinstein claims he just underwent back surgery , which has given him an excuse to enter court with a walker . )
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ later testified , was staying sane .
An experience with foxholes in Okinawa helped .
( He likely felt even more abandoned than Hollywood Harvey Weinstein , who recently complained to the Post , “ I feel like the forgotten man.
” ) Meanwhile , the kidnappers demanded three million dollars in ransom , but failed to show up for scheduled drops .
“ Kidnappings were normally four or five days in duration , ” the retired deputy inspector George Duke , who oversaw the investigation , said last week .
“ This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ got testy .
I ’ d get testy.
” The case broke when the abductors finally picked up their ransom .
The cops arrested them and got Rodriguez to divulge Weinstein ’ s whereabouts .
Detective Ruben Santiago , also on the case , was skeptical : “ I had no faith we were going to find Harvey Weinstein where the guy was saying , because he was talking about a hole in the ground .
That just made no sense to me.
” The detectives nevertheless followed Rodriguez ’ s directions to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with rocks and branches .
“ We started shouting out Harvey ’ s name—just going through the motions , really , ” Santiago said .
“ But we hear a slight murmur , a muffled voice .
Talk about an eerie feeling .
It was , like , Where is that voice coming from ?
It was coming from below the ground.
” They pushed away the debris and the lid , and there was Weinstein , weeping with relief .
“ The first question he asked was ‘ Can I have a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ He was dirty , dishevelled , but he was all there—lucid.
” Most of the kidnappers ended up taking plea deals ; one insisted on a trial and was found guilty .
Esposito ’ s client , William Rivera , accepted a deal , and got twelve and a half to thirty years .
As for Weinstein , five years later , he said that his time in the pit had led him to rethink his “ type-A executive life ” and sell his interest in Lord West .
“ I am @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said ; he added that he never ate fruit again .
He died in 2007 , at eighty-two .
The year 1993 was notable for Hollywood Harvey Weinstein as well .
Miramax , the company he and his brother , Bob , founded , had been flirting with bankruptcy , to the point that employees were reusing copy-machine toner and working from home when the electric bills went unpaid .
But the success of “ The Crying Game , ” in 1992 , spurred Miramax ’ s sale to Disney , in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ flush , although the three movies they had in theatres at the time of the kidnapping— “ Tom and Jerry : The Movie ” ; “ Benefit of the Doubt , ” a thriller starring Amy Irving as a waitress in a topless bar and Donald Sutherland as her creepy dad ; and “ Especially on Sunday , ” an Italian omnibus film—were floundering at the box office .
The company ’ s fortunes would soar the next summer , with the release of “ Pulp Fiction.
” One more thing : 1993 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sciorra , who is scheduled to testify in Hollywood Harvey Weinstein ’ s trial , says he raped her .
Hollywood Harvey Weinstein ’ s name was only dimly on law-enforcement radar at the time of the kidnapping .
“ Someone mentioned that there ’ s a set of Weinstein brothers and one of them is also Harvey , and they ’ re film producers or something , ” Detective Santiago recalled .
Deputy Inspector Duke , asked for his view of Hollywood Harvey Weinstein ’ s case , said , “ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ away with it so long.
” From that perspective , twelve days is a blip .
♦

Imagine, if you will, an alternate universe in which Harvey Weinstein’s picture is on the front page of the Post beneath a lurid headline. Sounds a lot like our universe. Except: in the alternate universe, it is Weinstein who is the victim of a shocking, horrendous crime, as opposed to being the reviled figure currently on trial in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, facing multiple counts of rape and sexual assault. Bizarre, yes? But what if we told you that this alternate universe actually existed, and that it was called . . . 1993.
That was the year Harvey Weinstein was kidnapped and held for two weeks, while his captors demanded millions of dollars in ransom. The twist: this Harvey Weinstein was an entirely different, non-disgraced Harvey Weinstein, one who never waged an Oscar campaign or allegedly masturbated into a restaurant planter. This Harvey Weinstein was the president of Lord West Formal Wear, a Queens-based tuxedo manufacturer. He made headlines not just for being kidnapped but for what he endured: twelve days in a dank, dark pit that had been dug into a hillside near the 158th Street off-ramp of the Henry Hudson Parkway. A curious coincidence: more than a few Twitter users have suggested that a pit would be a fitting home for the Hollywood Harvey Weinstein, who denies all charges of criminal activity. (Ironic historical footnote: being buried alive was a punishment traditionally handed out to unchaste women.) “MY DAYS IN HELL” read the Post headline after the formal-wear Harvey Weinstein was freed. A photograph showed a dashing man looking not much the worse for wear—looking, in fact, not unlike the actor Hugh Laurie.
Twitter content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
So, two Harvey Weinsteins, one of whom may have actually met Hugh Laurie. But there’s a second twist: John Esposito, one of Hollywood Harvey Weinstein’s defense attorneys, represented one of the formal-wear Harvey Weinstein’s kidnappers. Whoa, as they say.
The formal-wear Harvey Weinstein’s ordeal began on August 4, 1993, when the sixty-eight-year-old “tuxedo king,” as the tabloids dubbed him, was abducted from the parking lot of a Jackson Heights diner. The kidnappers dropped him in a narrow pit, shackled him into a squat, and sealed the pit with a heavy lid. (Another coincidence: Hollywood Harvey Weinstein was shackled with an electronic ankle bracelet, which he was accused of tampering with.) The ringleader was Fermin Rodriguez, a disloyal employee at Lord West, which used to advertise its wares with a slightly cringey slogan, “The Look is Lord West . . . and the lady approves.” (That line would never have passed muster with Hollywood Harvey Weinstein, who, whatever else anyone says about him, was good at marketing.)
The kidnappers dropped fruit and water into the pit at intervals, and, over the final three days, Weinstein survived on a single apple. He somehow wriggled free from his bonds, but then he developed festering sores on his back. (One more coincidence: Hollywood Harvey Weinstein claims he just underwent back surgery, which has given him an excuse to enter court with a walker.)
Twitter content This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
The greatest challenge, the formal-wear Harvey Weinstein later testified, was staying sane. An experience with foxholes in Okinawa helped. (He likely felt even more abandoned than Hollywood Harvey Weinstein, who recently complained to the Post, “I feel like the forgotten man.”) Meanwhile, the kidnappers demanded three million dollars in ransom, but failed to show up for scheduled drops. “Kidnappings were normally four or five days in duration,” the retired deputy inspector George Duke, who oversaw the investigation, said last week. “This went on and on. The family got testy. I’d get testy.”
“Of course he’d never even think about helping clean up the dead giant.” Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
The case broke when the abductors finally picked up their ransom. The cops arrested them and got Rodriguez to divulge Weinstein’s whereabouts. Detective Ruben Santiago, also on the case, was skeptical: “I had no faith we were going to find Harvey Weinstein where the guy was saying, because he was talking about a hole in the ground. That just made no sense to me.” The detectives nevertheless followed Rodriguez’s directions to the pit, which had been covered with rocks and branches. “We started shouting out Harvey’s name—just going through the motions, really,” Santiago said. “But we hear a slight murmur, a muffled voice. Talk about an eerie feeling. It was, like, Where is that voice coming from? It was coming from below the ground.”
They pushed away the debris and the lid, and there was Weinstein, weeping with relief. “The first question he asked was ‘Can I have a cigarette?’ ” Duke said. “He was dirty, dishevelled, but he was all there—lucid.”
The pit that Harvey Weinstein, the “tuxedo king,” was trapped in for twelve days. Photograph by James Hughes / NY Daily News Archive / Getty
Most of the kidnappers ended up taking plea deals; one insisted on a trial and was found guilty. Esposito’s client, William Rivera, accepted a deal, and got twelve and a half to thirty years. As for Weinstein, five years later, he said that his time in the pit had led him to rethink his “type-A executive life” and sell his interest in Lord West. “I am a far happier person,” he said; he added that he never ate fruit again. He died in 2007, at eighty-two.


newyorker--2020-01-13--Penn Badgley Gets Away with Murder

Penn Badgley Gets Away with Murder

“ I drink some hot water , and then I get very low , like this , ” the actor Penn Badgley said the other day , over breakfast downtown , dropping his voice to a homicidal basso .
“ The room is dark .
I close my eyes .
I raise my hands .
It ’ s quite spiritual , actually.
” He was describing the ritual he undergoes before recording the creepy voice-over monologues delivered by his character , a bookstore clerk named Joe , on the Netflix show “ You.
” The second season just dropped ; @ @ @ @ @ @ @ delusional “ nice guy , ” becomes the perfect boyfriend of an M.F.A .
student—until he murders her .
Joe ’ s monologues are addressed to “ you , ” the victim and the viewer , and they ’ re violently misogynistic .
But because they are spoken by someone who looks and talks like Badgley , a dark-haired heartthrob famous for playing Dan Humphrey , the bookish outsider on “ Gossip Girl , ” Joe gets away with murder .
Characters on the show find him adorable , and so , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
This prompted Badgley to tweet at fans who are infatuated with his character , “ He is a murderer.
” “ To me , Joe is privilege embodied , ” Badgley , who is thirty-three , said .
“ He ’ s the blindness that privilege entails.
” Badgley wore a black turtleneck , black pants , and beige Converse high-tops , and he spoke in Joe ’ s melodically persuasive voice : “ This is the whole strangeness of the show .
In some ways , it ’ s this bizarre @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like ‘ Gossip Girl.
’ At the same time it ’ s , like , Ugh !
It ’ s horrifying !
” Still , Joe isn ’ t a big departure from Dan Humphrey , he said .
“ It ’ s the same role .
But now he has blood dripping down his face.
” In Season 2 , Joe has unhappily relocated to Los Angeles .
He ’ s hiding from a disgruntled ex-girlfriend ( he tried to bury her alive ) , and he figures that , given his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she ’ d never look for him there .
( Badgley , who doesn ’ t smoke or drink , and prefers meditation to TV , likes L.A. , although he lives in Williamsburg . )
As Joe hides from sunshine and retribution , he pursues a new love interest .
He deploys his usual methods , which range from Facebook stalking to trapping people in Plexiglas cages .
This season , however , Joe is trying to be better ; he reflects on his misdeeds while reading “ Crime and Punishment.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s no way that I could understand what it would take for a person like Joe to be redeemed.
” While shooting Season 2 , Badgley found himself listening a lot to the rapper Saba .
“ He ’ s African-American , in Chicago , witnessing a lot of mental illness and death and murder in his life , ” Badgley said .
“ I started to trace back the reality of white privilege .
How many white men in the days of slavery were slaveowners ?
Or were adjacent to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the color of their skin ?
” Saba ’ s music , he said , helped him understand “ that the violence of Joe is not that far from the reality of not that long ago.
” He went on , “ It seems to me that Joe is an allegory for the history of our country , maybe.
” Badgley belongs to the Baha ’ i faith , which , he explained , teaches non-engagement in partisan politics , but encourages its members to be “ engaged in thinking about and attempting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you live in.
” On Twitter , he likes to alert fans to global injustice .
“ Right now , I ’ m considering how to post about my visit to a detention facility , in New Mexico , ” he said .
“ ‘ Facility.
’ It seems silly to call it that .
It ’ s operated like a prison .
And the people there are not criminals.
” After breakfast , he walked to McNally Jackson Books and browsed the shelves .
On “ You , ” Joe scorns his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ chakra guides .
Unlike Joe , Badgley hasn ’ t read Dostoyevsky .
“ The idea that philosophers in the past have actually figured anything out when we ’ ve ended up where we ’ ve ended up .
.
.
, ” he said .
“ You ’ re kind of , like , ‘ I dunno .
I ’ m not sure , old white guy !
I ’ m not sure I ’ m interested in what you have to say !
’ ” ♦

Penn Badgley Illustration by João Fazenda
“I drink some hot water, and then I get very low, like this,” the actor Penn Badgley said the other day, over breakfast downtown, dropping his voice to a homicidal basso. “The room is dark. I close my eyes. I raise my hands. It’s quite spiritual, actually.” He was describing the ritual he undergoes before recording the creepy voice-over monologues delivered by his character, a bookstore clerk named Joe, on the Netflix show “You.” The second season just dropped; in the first, Joe, a delusional “nice guy,” becomes the perfect boyfriend of an M.F.A. student—until he murders her. Joe’s monologues are addressed to “you,” the victim and the viewer, and they’re violently misogynistic. But because they are spoken by someone who looks and talks like Badgley, a dark-haired heartthrob famous for playing Dan Humphrey, the bookish outsider on “Gossip Girl,” Joe gets away with murder. Characters on the show find him adorable, and so, to Badgley’s dismay, do viewers. This prompted Badgley to tweet at fans who are infatuated with his character, “He is a murderer.”
“To me, Joe is privilege embodied,” Badgley, who is thirty-three, said. “He’s the blindness that privilege entails.” Badgley wore a black turtleneck, black pants, and beige Converse high-tops, and he spoke in Joe’s melodically persuasive voice: “This is the whole strangeness of the show. In some ways, it’s this bizarre kind of fantastical, bingeable thing, like ‘Gossip Girl.’ At the same time it’s, like, Ugh! It’s horrifying!” Still, Joe isn’t a big departure from Dan Humphrey, he said. “It’s the same role. But now he has blood dripping down his face.”
In Season 2, Joe has unhappily relocated to Los Angeles. He’s hiding from a disgruntled ex-girlfriend (he tried to bury her alive), and he figures that, given his antipathy for gluten-free muffins and jogging, she’d never look for him there. (Badgley, who doesn’t smoke or drink, and prefers meditation to TV, likes L.A., although he lives in Williamsburg.) As Joe hides from sunshine and retribution, he pursues a new love interest. He deploys his usual methods, which range from Facebook stalking to trapping people in Plexiglas cages.
This season, however, Joe is trying to be better; he reflects on his misdeeds while reading “Crime and Punishment.” But, Badgley said, “there’s no way that I could understand what it would take for a person like Joe to be redeemed.” While shooting Season 2, Badgley found himself listening a lot to the rapper Saba. “He’s African-American, in Chicago, witnessing a lot of mental illness and death and murder in his life,” Badgley said. “I started to trace back the reality of white privilege. How many white men in the days of slavery were slaveowners? Or were adjacent to the murder and torture of people because of the color of their skin?” Saba’s music, he said, helped him understand “that the violence of Joe is not that far from the reality of not that long ago.” He went on, “It seems to me that Joe is an allegory for the history of our country, maybe.”
Badgley belongs to the Baha’i faith, which, he explained, teaches non-engagement in partisan politics, but encourages its members to be “engaged in thinking about and attempting to meet the needs of the age you live in.” On Twitter, he likes to alert fans to global injustice. “Right now, I’m considering how to post about my visit to a detention facility, in New Mexico,” he said. “ ‘Facility.’ It seems silly to call it that. It’s operated like a prison. And the people there are not criminals.”
After breakfast, he walked to McNally Jackson Books and browsed the shelves. On “You,” Joe scorns his customers for buying Dan Brown novels and chakra guides. Unlike Joe, Badgley hasn’t read Dostoyevsky. “The idea that philosophers in the past have actually figured anything out when we’ve ended up where we’ve ended up . . . ,” he said. “You’re kind of, like, ‘I dunno. I’m not sure, old white guy! I’m not sure I’m interested in what you have to say!’ ” ♦


newyorker--2020-01-13--How New Jersey’s Twitter Found Its “Big State Energy”

Why does anyone have a Twitter account ?
Moreover , why does any thing—a band , a brand , a government agency—have one ?
The President might tweet us all into World War III , but at least he ’ s a person .
Less immediately menacing , but equally surreal , are the occasions when the C.I.A .
wishes the nation a “ Happy # NationalCakeDay !
, ” or Chick-fil-A picks a fight with Popeyes .
“ Social media , naturally , is gon na reach a younger audience , ” Phil Murphy , the governor of New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explaining why his state has a Twitter account .
“ And the younger people are traditionally the ones you need to work harder to win over when it comes to policy issues.
” He was in his office in Trenton , wearing gubernatorial casual : gray Allbirds , a navy suit with no tie .
His own account , @ GovMurphy , is conventional .
( “ Today , New Jersey ’ s minimum wage rises to $ 11/hour.
” ) The official state-government account , @ NJGov , is not .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of New Jersey tweeted , apropos of nothing , on December 21st .
“ u up , ” the State of New Jersey tweeted , without punctuation , at 2:45 A.M. on Christmas Eve .
“ Who let New Jersey have a Twitter , ” a guy named Gary wondered , on Twitter , not long ago .
“ your mom , ” the State of New Jersey responded .
That one got nearly half a million likes .
“ Everyone assumes it ’ s some sleazy teen-age dude writing the tweets , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s digital director , said .
They work in adjoining cubicles , riffing out loud across a gray foam-core barrier .
“ I ’ m a millennial , ” Gabel , who graduated from college in 2004 , said .
“ So what I bring to the table is more the nostalgia , that rap-battle kind of energy.
” “ I ’ m Gen Z , ” Coyne , the former president of the Rutgers Democrats , who graduated last May , said .
“ I ’ ve been on Twitter since I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sitting with Governor Murphy in his office , and were politely refraining from checking their phones .
“ I know they ’ re doing something right , ” Murphy said .
“ Because I ’ ve got four kids , sixteen to twentytwo .
One weekend , all my kids talked about was ‘ Dad , the NJGov account is killing it right now.
’ ” “ That must have been the weekend of ‘ your mom , ’ ” Gabel said .
Gabel and Coyne returned to their cubicles , in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kibbitz about the State of the State address , which the Governor would deliver in two weeks .
“ The NJGov account is , like , one per cent of what we do , ” Gabel said .
“ We write press releases , and I ’ m constantly shooting and editing videos.
” Later that day , she would drive to Lakewood to interview a nineteen-year-old mechanic ’ s assistant for a video about apprentice programs .
“ Before I leave , though , ” she said , “ let ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Coyne scrolled through Twitter , looking for material .
“ Someone ’ s tweeting about how Trenton doesn ’ t deserve to be the capital of New Jersey , ” she said .
“ We could do a response to that .
‘ How rude.
’ ” They let that idea drop .
Gabel surveyed her desk for inspiration : a cucumber water , a half-eaten muffin .
“ Maybe it could just be ‘ muffin , ’ ” she said .
“ I guess , ” Coyne said .
“ Except @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that as slang for .
.
.
” “ Oh , God , forget it , ” Gabel said .
She opened an e-mail .
“ Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Princeton , ” she said .
“ Maybe that ’ s something ?
” She opened Wikipedia and read aloud : “ 1777 .
.
.
George Washington .
.
.
victory for the Colonials.
” She looked up .
“ Yeah , I think we can do something with this.
” They called over Derek Roseman , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know about history , ” Gabel said .
“ Battle of Princeton .
Big deal , right ?
” “ Oh , definitely , ” Roseman said .
“ The culmination of what Revolutionary War buffs call the Ten Crucial Days , when— ” “ We won , right ?
” Gabel said .
She started drafting a tweet : “ In 1777 , New Jersey won the Battle of Princeton .
.
.
” “ Not all the troops would have been from New Jersey , ” Roseman said .
From Wikipedia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oil painting : George Washington on a rearing white horse .
Using Adobe Photoshop , she scrawled a graffito across the picture : “ Jersey Wuz Here.
” “ It doesn ’ t really make sense , ’ cause they ’ re in Jersey in the painting , ” she said .
Gabel opened Twitter and started typing .
“ I ’ m just free-balling here , ” she said .
“ ‘ Without N.J. there would be no U.S. , ’ ” Roseman suggested .
“ We need more of a flex @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on “ january 3 , 1777 : the battle of princeton was won in new jersey and the revolution was saved / january 3 , 2020 : new jersey remains undefeated.
” Gabel attached the defaced painting .
“ Bombs away ?
” she asked .
They sat in silence for a moment , watching the response online .
Within the first few minutes , the tweet got several hundred likes ; by the end of the weekend , it would get more than six thousand .
“ It ’ s cute , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ d say it ’ s not a banger .
It can ’ t be ‘ your mom ’ every day.
” ♦

Why does anyone have a Twitter account? Moreover, why does any thing—a band, a brand, a government agency—have one? The President might tweet us all into World War III, but at least he’s a person. Less immediately menacing, but equally surreal, are the occasions when the C.I.A. wishes the nation a “Happy #NationalCakeDay!,” or Chick-fil-A picks a fight with Popeyes.
“Social media, naturally, is gonna reach a younger audience,” Phil Murphy, the governor of New Jersey, said the other day, explaining why his state has a Twitter account. “And the younger people are traditionally the ones you need to work harder to win over when it comes to policy issues.” He was in his office in Trenton, wearing gubernatorial casual: gray Allbirds, a navy suit with no tie. His own account, @GovMurphy, is conventional. (“Today, New Jersey’s minimum wage rises to $11/hour.”) The official state-government account, @NJGov, is not. “big state energy,” the State of New Jersey tweeted, apropos of nothing, on December 21st. “u up,” the State of New Jersey tweeted, without punctuation, at 2:45 A.M. on Christmas Eve. “Who let New Jersey have a Twitter,” a guy named Gary wondered, on Twitter, not long ago. “your mom,” the State of New Jersey responded. That one got nearly half a million likes.
“Everyone assumes it’s some sleazy teen-age dude writing the tweets,” Pearl Gabel, New Jersey’s digital director, said.
“Nope!” Megan Coyne, a digital assistant, said. “Just Pearl and me.”
They work in adjoining cubicles, riffing out loud across a gray foam-core barrier. “I’m a millennial,” Gabel, who graduated from college in 2004, said. “So what I bring to the table is more the nostalgia, that rap-battle kind of energy.”
“I’m Gen Z,” Coyne, the former president of the Rutgers Democrats, who graduated last May, said. “I’ve been on Twitter since I was thirteen.”
Gabel and Coyne were sitting with Governor Murphy in his office, and were politely refraining from checking their phones. “I know they’re doing something right,” Murphy said. “Because I’ve got four kids, sixteen to twentytwo. One weekend, all my kids talked about was ‘Dad, the NJGov account is killing it right now.’ ”
“That must have been the weekend of ‘your mom,’ ” Gabel said.
Gabel and Coyne returned to their cubicles, in the communications department. Colleagues stopped by to kibbitz about the State of the State address, which the Governor would deliver in two weeks. “The NJGov account is, like, one per cent of what we do,” Gabel said. “We write press releases, and I’m constantly shooting and editing videos.” Later that day, she would drive to Lakewood to interview a nineteen-year-old mechanic’s assistant for a video about apprentice programs. “Before I leave, though,” she said, “let’s come up with one more fire tweet.”
Coyne scrolled through Twitter, looking for material. “Someone’s tweeting about how Trenton doesn’t deserve to be the capital of New Jersey,” she said. “We could do a response to that. ‘How rude.’ ” They let that idea drop. Gabel surveyed her desk for inspiration: a cucumber water, a half-eaten muffin. “Maybe it could just be ‘muffin,’ ” she said.
“I guess,” Coyne said. “Except, I mean, some people use that as slang for . . .”
“Oh, God, forget it,” Gabel said. She opened an e-mail. “Today is the anniversary of the Battle of Princeton,” she said. “Maybe that’s something?” She opened Wikipedia and read aloud: “1777 . . . George Washington . . . victory for the Colonials.” She looked up. “Yeah, I think we can do something with this.”
They called over Derek Roseman, a speechwriter for the Governor. “You know about history,” Gabel said. “Battle of Princeton. Big deal, right?”
“Oh, definitely,” Roseman said. “The culmination of what Revolutionary War buffs call the Ten Crucial Days, when—”
“We won, right?” Gabel said. She started drafting a tweet: “In 1777, New Jersey won the Battle of Princeton . . .”
“Not all the troops would have been from New Jersey,” Roseman said.
“Fine—‘the battle was won in Jersey’?”
“Fair,” Roseman said.
From Wikipedia, Gabel downloaded an image of an oil painting: George Washington on a rearing white horse. Using Adobe Photoshop, she scrawled a graffito across the picture: “Jersey Wuz Here.” “It doesn’t really make sense, ’cause they’re in Jersey in the painting,” she said.
“Whatever,” Coyne said.
Gabel opened Twitter and started typing. “I’m just free-balling here,” she said.
“ ‘Without N.J. there would be no U.S.,’ ” Roseman suggested.
“We need more of a flex,” Gabel said.
They settled on “january 3, 1777: the battle of princeton was won in new jersey and the revolution was saved / january 3, 2020: new jersey remains undefeated.” Gabel attached the defaced painting. “Bombs away?” she asked.
“Go for it,” Coyne said.
They sat in silence for a moment, watching the response online. Within the first few minutes, the tweet got several hundred likes; by the end of the weekend, it would get more than six thousand. “It’s cute,” Gabel said. “I’d say it’s not a banger. It can’t be ‘your mom’ every day.” ♦


newyorker--2020-01-13--Pinegrove Stages a Complicated Comeback

Pinegrove Stages a Complicated Comeback

On a hot Michigan afternoon in September , 2017 , Evan Stephens Hall was onstage at a music festival , tuning his guitar and thinking about his sunglasses .
“ I feel like it ’ s unfortunate that I have to wear sunglasses , ” he said , lifting them to squint at the sun and at the crowd .
“ Because the eyes are the best way to let a person know that you mean it.
” He was joking , sort of .
Hall , who is thirty , is the singer and songwriter for Pinegrove , an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ unusually zealous group of fans—Pinenuts , they sometimes called themselves , with self-deprecating sincerity .
There is something embarrassing about loving a band enough to give yourself a nickname , just as there is something embarrassing about singing earnest songs full of romantic complaints .
“ Just trust me—I mean it , ” Hall said , with a sheepish smile .
Then he led his band through “ Visiting , ” which seems to chronicle a long-distance entanglement ( “ I ’ m spectral for days on end , these days / With @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which drives toward a fervent expression of confusion : But the truth is I don ’ t know what I thought I knew it .
Pinegrove turns lyrics such as these into rousing and sometimes twangy rock songs , which fail to be cool in two different ways : they are equally as likely to elicit cringes from listeners who value emotional restraint as they are from those who demand fashionable innovation .
And yet Pinegrove harnesses , perhaps more effectively than any other band of its era , the power of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , loosely , into the category of emo , which began , in the nineteen-eighties , as a passionate offshoot of hardcore punk , and expanded to include a universe of bands that were simultaneously scrappy and sentimental .
In the two-thousands , “ emo ” often denoted angsty and theatrical hard-rock bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance , which briefly dominated MTV and the nation ’ s high schools .
But by the twenty-tens , when Pinegrove emerged , there was no sense in worrying about who would be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hip-hop ascendant and MTV essentially dead , it seemed clear that there wouldn ’ t be one .
The spirit of emo was instead nurtured online and at do-it-yourself house shows , where the financial stakes were low .
Pinegrove built a following in basements—first in Hall ’ s home town of Montclair , New Jersey , and then farther afield .
After a few years , Hall noticed that audiences were singing along .
The band graduated from basements to clubs and got a contract with an independent record label , called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ breakthrough album , “ Cardinal , ” released in 2016 , contained “ Visiting ” and seven more songs that were similarly plaintive , and similarly addictive .
By the time Hall played that festival in Michigan , the Pinegrove cult was growing both more obsessive and less exclusive .
An article in Vice hailed “ Cardinal ” as “ a perfect album.
” The band was selling out midsize clubs nationwide , playing shows that were starting to feel vaguely religious .
Fans were getting Pinegrove tattoos—often an outline of interlocking squares @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Cardinal.
” ( The actress Kristen Stewart has a Pinegrove tattoo . )
After years of living with his parents , Hall had rented a house in rural upstate New York , with a big living room , where the band recorded an elegant and folksy new album , “ Skylight.
” Pinegrove seemed poised to enlarge its audience significantly , winning over grownup listeners who were drawn in by Hall ’ s achy sincerity , even if they would never dream of attending a basement emo show .
On November 21 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Michigan concert , Hall wrote a Facebook post that changed the way people viewed him and his music .
He explained that he had been “ accused of sexual coercion , ” by a woman with whom he had had a brief relationship .
His post contained nearly eight hundred words , but few details .
The accusation itself was not made public , and neither was the identity of the accuser ; Hall said that he was withholding the full story out of respect for her privacy .
He did not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he explain what “ sexual coercion ” entailed , except in negative terms : “ i absolutely never threatened her , i never leveraged anything against her.
” Hall acknowledged his “ privilege as a man ” and as a “ recognized performer , ” and wrote , “ i am so sorry.
” But his penitence seemed mixed with confusion , and perhaps frustration : i believed all of our decisions to be based in love .
still , i am coming to terms with the fact that i monumentally misread the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ follow this line as deeply as it goes to reflect on all of the things i could have done , and can do , better .
Hall announced that he would be “ taking some time off.
” Pinegrove cancelled its upcoming tour dates and the planned release of “ Skylight , ” and Hall vanished from social media .
A different kind of band might have had partisans rushing to defend their hero , but many Pinenuts , after registering their shock and anger , took a more ambivalent position , trying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for victims of sexual abuse .
The power of Hall ’ s music derived in part from his ability to persuade listeners to trust him .
Just as hip-hop fans may expect their favorite rappers to be as tough as they say they are , many Pinenuts wanted Hall to be as thoughtful and sensitive as the narrator of the songs they loved .
A few musicians from the scene condemned Hall ’ s statement , or his character ; one compared him to the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh .
Many more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a melancholy plea on Twitter : all I want for christmas is a clear understanding of the sexual coercion accusations toward evan stephens hall with considerate representation of the victim ’ s voice and either a pinegrove reunion tour or a pinegrove tattoo removal kit dependent on aforementioned circumstances ok ?
In September , 2018 , Hall resurfaced .
He told the music site Pitchfork that , at the request of his accuser , he had gone a full year without touring .
A couple of months later , the band launched a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Montclair and another in Brooklyn , where Hall only alluded to the topic on everyone ’ s mind .
“ This has been a really challenging year , ” he said .
The band split with its label—a mutual decision , both sides maintained—and released “ Skylight ” independently .
Online , plenty of people wondered why , in a world with no shortage of earnest indie bands , it made sense to support one with a singer accused of sexual misbehavior .
But many Pinenuts returned , filling up bigger venues than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out the ethics of supporting Pinegrove didn ’ t have much to go on .
The accuser had declined to comment to Pitchfork , but she had confirmed some details through an unnamed intermediary , who explained only that Hall had applied “ verbal and contextual pressure.
” In Hall ’ s Facebook post , he had written , “ i have been flirtatious with fans and on a few occasions been intimate with people that i ’ ve met on tour , ” adding that he had “ reached the conclusion now @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Some people assumed that the accusation had come from a fan .
In fact , Hall ’ s accuser had been on tour with Pinegrove as a member of the band ’ s crew .
Although she still wishes to remain anonymous , she told The New Yorker that she was willing to disclose her professional experience , to make clearer the pressure that she felt when she and Hall began their relationship .
An indie tour can feel like a non-stop party , or like an extended road trip , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ few written rules , and no distinct boundaries between personal and professional lives .
She says that this atmosphere , combined with Hall ’ s power as the leader of the band , gave rise to a romantic relationship that she now sees as implicitly manipulative .
“ He really had no control over me , ” she says .
“ But , in the bubble of tour , I really felt like he did.
” The relationship ended soon after the tour , and she says that it took her a while @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there had been no violence in the relationship , she felt damaged by it—and that she wanted Hall to take some time to reflect on the damage he had done .
Hall , too , talks about the disorienting insularity of touring .
He says that , in those early days , he didn ’ t give much thought to the fact that the people on tour with him were in some sense his employees , not merely his friends .
“ The culture was really one of equality , ” he says @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was no power structure there.
” He still resists the idea that he was his accuser ’ s boss , since at the time the band was not in a position to offer anyone a long-term job or even a living wage .
Of course , the leader of a burgeoning band nevertheless wields plenty of influence , no matter how little money he makes .
Every rock concert involves a power dynamic : even at an egalitarian basement show , a small number of people make most of the noise , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the listening .
Hall says that , as Pinegrove has grown , the band has developed “ more self-aware professional practices , ” with “ more clearly delineated boundaries ” ; romantic relationships between band members and crew members are now “ emphatically discouraged.
” The rise of Pinegrove was a communal phenomenon , enabled by fans and fellow-musicians who became friends , all of them devoted to creating a world apart from the corporate music industry .
But Hall ’ s accuser says that , for her , this lack of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that she ’ d had access to the indie-tour equivalent of a human-resources department .
“ I think that could have helped me at the time , ” she says .
“ Just having someone that I know I could call.
” “ Skylight ” was essentially completed before the band disappeared ; when Hall published the Facebook post , the label had already distributed advance copies for review .
Now Pinegrove is releasing “ Marigold , ” the first album to reflect the band ’ s changed circumstances .
On a recent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ door wearing a royal-blue cardigan and hand-painted Vans , and he talked readily but carefully about “ Marigold , ” which , he says , is the product of “ a period of intense self-reflection.
” Pinegrove ’ s drummer , Zack Levine , was there , too .
Levine lives down the road from Hall with his wife , Nandi Rose , a former Pinegrove member , who now leads her own band , Half Waif .
Hall found emo relatively late in life .
In high school , his favorite band @ @ @ @ @ @ @ postmodern collages .
He started a grungy rock group with Levine , his childhood best friend .
( Levine ’ s father plays in a cover band with Hall ’ s father , Doug , a commercial musician whose biggest hit is better known than any Pinegrove song : he wrote the infernally catchy comic-opera jingle for the financial-services company J. G .
Wentworth . )
Hall formed Pinegrove while studying at Kenyon College , in Ohio , and found himself drawn to richer melodies , cleaner guitars , and more forthright lyrics @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and so was his sibling , Nick Levine , whose pedal steel echoes the sorrowful sound of Hall ’ s voice .
Early on , Hall described Pinegrove as “ language-arts rock , ” but some of his most memorable lyrics were so matter-of-fact that they scarcely seemed to have been written at all : “ I saw Leah on the bus a few months ago / I saw some old friends at her funeral.
” He had no evident fear of sounding solipsistic—a word that appears in the Pinegrove corpus—or of issuing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ kind of histrionic pronouncements commonly associated with teen-agers .
( From “ Aphasia , ” a crowd favorite : “ If I don ’ t have you by me / Then I ’ ll go underground !
” ) “ Marigold , ” to be released by the esteemed British label Rough Trade , is noticeably more stoic .
Hall says that he wants to avoid the perception that he is seeking sympathy or luxuriating in self-pity .
“ Yes , I ’ ve had plenty of emotions about what ’ s going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But that ’ s not really what my focus is as an artist.
” A singer known for sharing his feelings is trying to be more circumspect .
One of the most arresting songs on the album is “ Spiral , ” which consists of thirty-two amphibrachs—three-syllable lines , with the stress in the middle—building toward an affirmation : Hall is quick to remind people that his songs are not necessarily reflections of his own life .
But on “ Marigold ” there are plenty of parallels .
“ Alcove , ” which @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to see his extended family , is a message from a man heading into exile : “ I ’ ll go if you want.
” The end of the album is anticlimactic—the last song is “ Neighbor , ” an allegory about dead animals that sounds a bit like an undergraduate writing exercise , and it is followed by a meditative six-minute instrumental track , during which the band cycles slowly between chords .
But “ The Alarmist , ” a beautiful lament in 6/8 time , suggests that Hall has not , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ It would be good to talk For my sanity Now do what you feel like you got ta do But be good to me .
Hall spoke warmly of the musical community that once nurtured Pinegrove , but when asked whether he still felt like part of such a community he paused for a long while .
“ That ’ s a hell of a question , ” he finally said .
Eventually , he was saved by a scratching sound emanating from the kitchen .
“ Maybe a mouse , ” Levine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ re around , ” Hall said .
“ It ’ s cold outside .
Let ’ s let ’ em in.
” Two years ago , the survival of Pinegrove was not assured .
Many of the band ’ s fans inhabit a musical subculture where allegations of sexual misbehavior are taken seriously , or at least more seriously than they often are elsewhere .
( About a week before Hall ’ s post , Jesse Lacey , the lead singer of the beloved emo band Brand New , was accused @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fan ; within days , the band had effectively ceased to exist . )
This vigilance reflects a shift within the world of emo , long dominated by boys singing about girls , and now increasingly self-conscious about that history .
It also reflects a shift in the broader culture , in which consumers are newly aware of their power to penalize public figures who misbehave—not just criminals but everyday manipulative creeps , too .
The rise of music streaming has created an illusion of infinite choice : no matter what kind of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ endless number of “ artists , ” as Spotify calls them , eager to find a place in your playlists .
On Twitter , one music critic voiced exasperation that people were still writing about Pinegrove : “ THERE ARE SO MANY OTHER BANDS !
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
” That is true .
And it is true , too , that a singer like Hall makes it impossible to listen to his music without thinking about his life .
But , even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ songs are a rarity .
A band like Pinegrove can certainly be ignored , but , for fans , it can ’ t easily be replaced .
Although streaming services like Spotify deliver music online , they also offer refuge from the Internet : their algorithms serve up new artists automatically while providing little information beyond names and thumbnail images .
And so the release of “ Marigold ” will surely bring Pinegrove lots of new listeners , many of whom will know nothing about the band ’ s backstory .
Those who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a yearlong hiatus is satisfactory penance .
Hall ’ s accuser wants to distance herself from the band ’ s comeback .
“ At the end of the year , ” she says , “ I felt like , The year is up , do what you ’ re going to do , and I don ’ t want any part of it.
” Certainly , Hall has reacted less like someone who thinks he did an awful thing than like someone who thinks he has been thrust into an awful situation .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be in , ” he says .
“ But I ’ m trying to play the hand that ’ s been dealt.
” Hall went to therapy weekly during his year away and is trying to live in a “ more intentional ” way .
During one song from “ Marigold , ” he sings , gently , “ No drugs and alcohol tonight / I follow my shadow up and out the skylight.
” Since returning to touring , he says , he has been working toward performing all his concerts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ listeners will be moved by Hall ’ s determination to keep anger at bay , but others may be disturbed that he is singing—still !
—songs that seem to be about his private sorrows .
There is no way to judge the sufficiency of Hall ’ s atonement without deciding how much he had to atone for in the first place .
The new Pinegrove sounds darker and more subdued , and the joyful camaraderie of early Pinegrove concerts has been replaced by a warier kind of intimacy .
These days , everyone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seem to be taking pictures .
They are happy to be there , but not quite ready , perhaps , to tell the world .
♦

On a hot Michigan afternoon in September, 2017, Evan Stephens Hall was onstage at a music festival, tuning his guitar and thinking about his sunglasses. “I feel like it’s unfortunate that I have to wear sunglasses,” he said, lifting them to squint at the sun and at the crowd. “Because the eyes are the best way to let a person know that you mean it.” He was joking, sort of. Hall, who is thirty, is the singer and songwriter for Pinegrove, an indie-rock band that was then assembling an unusually zealous group of fans—Pinenuts, they sometimes called themselves, with self-deprecating sincerity. There is something embarrassing about loving a band enough to give yourself a nickname, just as there is something embarrassing about singing earnest songs full of romantic complaints. “Just trust me—I mean it,” Hall said, with a sheepish smile. Then he led his band through “Visiting,” which seems to chronicle a long-distance entanglement (“I’m spectral for days on end, these days / With thoughts about visiting”), and which drives toward a fervent expression of confusion:
But the truth is
I don’t know what
I thought I knew it.
Pinegrove turns lyrics such as these into rousing and sometimes twangy rock songs, which fail to be cool in two different ways: they are equally as likely to elicit cringes from listeners who value emotional restraint as they are from those who demand fashionable innovation. And yet Pinegrove harnesses, perhaps more effectively than any other band of its era, the power of a well-turned musical confession. This music fits, loosely, into the category of emo, which began, in the nineteen-eighties, as a passionate offshoot of hardcore punk, and expanded to include a universe of bands that were simultaneously scrappy and sentimental. In the two-thousands, “emo” often denoted angsty and theatrical hard-rock bands like Fall Out Boy and My Chemical Romance, which briefly dominated MTV and the nation’s high schools. But by the twenty-tens, when Pinegrove emerged, there was no sense in worrying about who would be the next Fall Out Boy; with hip-hop ascendant and MTV essentially dead, it seemed clear that there wouldn’t be one. The spirit of emo was instead nurtured online and at do-it-yourself house shows, where the financial stakes were low. Pinegrove built a following in basements—first in Hall’s home town of Montclair, New Jersey, and then farther afield. After a few years, Hall noticed that audiences were singing along. The band graduated from basements to clubs and got a contract with an independent record label, called Run for Cover. Pinegrove’s breakthrough album, “Cardinal,” released in 2016, contained “Visiting” and seven more songs that were similarly plaintive, and similarly addictive.
By the time Hall played that festival in Michigan, the Pinegrove cult was growing both more obsessive and less exclusive. An article in Vice hailed “Cardinal” as “a perfect album.” The band was selling out midsize clubs nationwide, playing shows that were starting to feel vaguely religious. Fans were getting Pinegrove tattoos—often an outline of interlocking squares, like those on the cover of “Cardinal.” (The actress Kristen Stewart has a Pinegrove tattoo.) After years of living with his parents, Hall had rented a house in rural upstate New York, with a big living room, where the band recorded an elegant and folksy new album, “Skylight.” Pinegrove seemed poised to enlarge its audience significantly, winning over grownup listeners who were drawn in by Hall’s achy sincerity, even if they would never dream of attending a basement emo show.
On November 21, 2017, about two months after the Michigan concert, Hall wrote a Facebook post that changed the way people viewed him and his music. He explained that he had been “accused of sexual coercion,” by a woman with whom he had had a brief relationship. His post contained nearly eight hundred words, but few details. The accusation itself was not made public, and neither was the identity of the accuser; Hall said that he was withholding the full story out of respect for her privacy. He did not admit or deny guilt, nor did he explain what “sexual coercion” entailed, except in negative terms: “i absolutely never threatened her, i never leveraged anything against her.” Hall acknowledged his “privilege as a man” and as a “recognized performer,” and wrote, “i am so sorry.” But his penitence seemed mixed with confusion, and perhaps frustration:
i believed all of our decisions to be based in love. still, i am coming to terms with the fact that i monumentally misread the situation. i am trying earnestly to follow this line as deeply as it goes to reflect on all of the things i could have done, and can do, better.
Hall announced that he would be “taking some time off.” Pinegrove cancelled its upcoming tour dates and the planned release of “Skylight,” and Hall vanished from social media.
A different kind of band might have had partisans rushing to defend their hero, but many Pinenuts, after registering their shock and anger, took a more ambivalent position, trying to balance their fandom with their concern for victims of sexual abuse. The power of Hall’s music derived in part from his ability to persuade listeners to trust him. Just as hip-hop fans may expect their favorite rappers to be as tough as they say they are, many Pinenuts wanted Hall to be as thoughtful and sensitive as the narrator of the songs they loved.
A few musicians from the scene condemned Hall’s statement, or his character; one compared him to the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Many more were conspicuously silent. A fan posted a melancholy plea on Twitter:
all I want for christmas is a clear understanding of the sexual coercion accusations toward evan stephens hall with considerate representation of the victim’s voice and either a pinegrove reunion tour or a pinegrove tattoo removal kit dependent on aforementioned circumstances ok?
In September, 2018, Hall resurfaced. He told the music site Pitchfork that, at the request of his accuser, he had gone a full year without touring. A couple of months later, the band launched a comeback tour, with a concert in Montclair and another in Brooklyn, where Hall only alluded to the topic on everyone’s mind. “This has been a really challenging year,” he said. The band split with its label—a mutual decision, both sides maintained—and released “Skylight” independently. Online, plenty of people wondered why, in a world with no shortage of earnest indie bands, it made sense to support one with a singer accused of sexual misbehavior. But many Pinenuts returned, filling up bigger venues than ever before.
Fans trying to sort out the ethics of supporting Pinegrove didn’t have much to go on. The accuser had declined to comment to Pitchfork, but she had confirmed some details through an unnamed intermediary, who explained only that Hall had applied “verbal and contextual pressure.” In Hall’s Facebook post, he had written, “i have been flirtatious with fans and on a few occasions been intimate with people that i’ve met on tour,” adding that he had “reached the conclusion now that that’s not ever appropriate.” Some people assumed that the accusation had come from a fan.
In fact, Hall’s accuser had been on tour with Pinegrove as a member of the band’s crew. Although she still wishes to remain anonymous, she told The New Yorker that she was willing to disclose her professional experience, to make clearer the pressure that she felt when she and Hall began their relationship. An indie tour can feel like a non-stop party, or like an extended road trip, but it is also a workplace—albeit one with few written rules, and no distinct boundaries between personal and professional lives. She says that this atmosphere, combined with Hall’s power as the leader of the band, gave rise to a romantic relationship that she now sees as implicitly manipulative. “He really had no control over me,” she says. “But, in the bubble of tour, I really felt like he did.” The relationship ended soon after the tour, and she says that it took her a while to figure out that, even though there had been no violence in the relationship, she felt damaged by it—and that she wanted Hall to take some time to reflect on the damage he had done.
Hall, too, talks about the disorienting insularity of touring. He says that, in those early days, he didn’t give much thought to the fact that the people on tour with him were in some sense his employees, not merely his friends. “The culture was really one of equality,” he says. “I perhaps naïvely thought there was no power structure there.” He still resists the idea that he was his accuser’s boss, since at the time the band was not in a position to offer anyone a long-term job or even a living wage. Of course, the leader of a burgeoning band nevertheless wields plenty of influence, no matter how little money he makes. Every rock concert involves a power dynamic: even at an egalitarian basement show, a small number of people make most of the noise, and a larger number of people do most of the listening. Hall says that, as Pinegrove has grown, the band has developed “more self-aware professional practices,” with “more clearly delineated boundaries”; romantic relationships between band members and crew members are now “emphatically discouraged.”
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The rise of Pinegrove was a communal phenomenon, enabled by fans and fellow-musicians who became friends, all of them devoted to creating a world apart from the corporate music industry. But Hall’s accuser says that, for her, this lack of structure posed a problem: she wishes that she’d had access to the indie-tour equivalent of a human-resources department. “I think that could have helped me at the time,” she says. “Just having someone that I know I could call.”
“Skylight” was essentially completed before the band disappeared; when Hall published the Facebook post, the label had already distributed advance copies for review. Now Pinegrove is releasing “Marigold,” the first album to reflect the band’s changed circumstances. On a recent snowy afternoon upstate, Hall answered the door wearing a royal-blue cardigan and hand-painted Vans, and he talked readily but carefully about “Marigold,” which, he says, is the product of “a period of intense self-reflection.” Pinegrove’s drummer, Zack Levine, was there, too. Levine lives down the road from Hall with his wife, Nandi Rose, a former Pinegrove member, who now leads her own band, Half Waif.
Hall found emo relatively late in life. In high school, his favorite band was Radiohead, whose lyric sheets resemble postmodern collages. He started a grungy rock group with Levine, his childhood best friend. (Levine’s father plays in a cover band with Hall’s father, Doug, a commercial musician whose biggest hit is better known than any Pinegrove song: he wrote the infernally catchy comic-opera jingle for the financial-services company J. G. Wentworth.) Hall formed Pinegrove while studying at Kenyon College, in Ohio, and found himself drawn to richer melodies, cleaner guitars, and more forthright lyrics. Levine was a founding member, and so was his sibling, Nick Levine, whose pedal steel echoes the sorrowful sound of Hall’s voice.