Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 31
December 19, 2016
Hillary Clinton's Political Afterlife (on Saturday Night Live)
During the episode of Saturday Night Live that aired just after the November presidential election, Kate McKinnon, dressed as Hillary Clinton and clad in celebratory/funereal white, sat at a grand piano and performed a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” It was a double-edged dirge: The song was on the one hand a tribute to Cohen, who had died the same week, but it was also a tribute to Clinton herself, and to her saddened supporters—many of whom counted SNL’s audience and creators among their members. The song was also, however, a requiem for someone else: the particular version of Clinton that McKinnon has been playing regularly on Saturday Night Live since 2015, the swaggering, simpering, behind-the-scenes caricature. The version that managed to cartoonify and humanize the actual Clinton, both at the same time—and the version that, now, would not go on to be president, or really, it would seem, to be much of anything worth satirizing.
That Clinton, it turns out, needn’t have said farewell so soon. Since the election, while the actual Hillary Clinton has been extremely selective about the public appearances she has made, the SNL version has been resurrected on the show, in the service of both comedy and advocacy. There Kate-Clinton was, a couple of weeks ago, framed as a kind of political Yeti, gleefully evading determined “Hil Hunters” in the woods of Chappaqua. And there she was again, during this Saturday’s SNL, showing up at the door of an elector, Love Actually-style, and begging that elector not to vote for Donald Trump.
“Hillary Actually” is one of SNL’s best sketches of the year, a clever collision of many of the things that are in the air right now: the holiday season, and with it the many, many televised re-airings of the controversial rom-com; Monday’s vote in the U.S. electoral college; the general anxiety that this particular election managed to have an outcome without also having a full resolution. The sketch was also fitting, though, because Clinton, as McKinnon plays her, is precisely the kind of person who would show up at a stranger’s door, boombox and cue cards in hand, to make a political argument. Here, the comic collisions that made McKinnon-Clinton such a compelling caricature—swagger and neediness, warmth and creepiness, cool control and inadequately contained exuberance—found a new outlet, by way of the personage who may have a name, but who is most accurately remembered as “cue card guy.”
What’s most remarkable about the sketch, though, is what it hints at the continued resurrection of McKinnon’s Clinton character, even as someone not named Clinton prepares to assume the presidency. In SNL’s boombox-stalker version, Clinton isn’t just a caricature; she is also a political advocate. She’s making an argument, and a plea. One of the cue cards Clinton reveals in the sketch offers 16 reasons why the electoral college should vote against Donald Trump. One of them: “He won’t acknowledge Aleppo but he tweets about Saturday Night Live.” Another: “He wants to leave NATO.” Another: “He doesn’t know how the government works.”
Clinton’s final argument is this: “If Donald Trump becomes president… he will kill us all.”
It’s an open question, right now, what the political future of the actual Hillary Clinton will hold. Will she, in the manner of Al Gore, devise alternate strategies for keeping the issues she most cares about in the public consciousness? Will she serve as a party elder? Will she run again? Will she give it all up for a life of Chappaqua-hiking? Whatever the fate of the real Clinton is, though, with “Hillary Actually,” Saturday Night Live might have settled on the future of its fictional version: as a voice of advocacy, and of political resistance. As a hovering specter of what might have been. As a candidate who has become, in the aftermath of her loss, a conscience—and, quite possibly, a Cassandra. In SNL’s estimation, at any rate, Hil, actually, is all around.
The End of North Carolina's HB2?
Updated on December 19 at 11:48 a.m.
DURHAM, N.C.—Leaders in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Monday voted to repeal a city nondiscrimination ordinance, the first part of a prospective deal that would end in the repeal of HB2, the Old North State’s controversial “bathroom bill.”
The details are still unclear, with a surprise meeting of Charlotte’s city council Monday morning the first public sign that something is afoot. Here’s the general outline: The Queen City has unanimously repealed an ordinance that it enacted in February which banned discrimination against LGBT people and, most controversially, required businesses to allow transgender people to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify. In turn, the North Carolina General Assembly will reportedly return to Raleigh and repeal HB2, the law it passed in March to overturn the Charlotte rule. If, however, the General Assembly failed to repeal HB2 by December 31, then Charlotte’s ordinance will go back into effect.
Related Story
North Carolina's 'Legislative Coup' Is Over, and Republicans Won
“Senator Phil Berger and House Speaker Tim Moore assured me that as a result of Monday’s vote, a special session will be called for Tuesday to repeal HB 2 in full,” Governor-elect Roy Cooper, a Democrat and the current state attorney general, said in a statement. “I hope they will keep their word to me and with the help of Democrats in the legislature, HB 2 will be repealed in full.”
Outgoing Governor Pat McCrory said he would call a special session of the legislature, but blamed Democrats for not completing a similar deal earlier.
There have been rumors of a deal along the same outlines as the one under consideration now for months, involving a mutual disarmament by Charlotte and the General Assembly, but none of them have come to fruition. Particularly staunch opposition has come from some Democrats who opposed a deal for reasons of both politics and policy.
As a matter of politics, repealing HB2 could have been a pre-election boon for Republicans, who rushed the bill into law only to encounter massive resistance, including costly national boycotts, and a negative response to the law statewide. The state law not only overturned local nondiscrimination ordinances, it also dictated that transgender people use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificates. In addition, it barred cities in North Carolina from enacting their own minimum wages.
As a matter of policy, opponents of the repeal deal argued that Charlotte would be sending the wrong message by removing its LGBT non-discrimination ordinance, since many cities around the country have similar rules. A mutual-repeal deal would apparently return the state to the status quo ante, which Charlotte’s city council had previously decided was inadequate.
But the Human Rights Campaign and Equality NC, two organizations that have been on the frontline of the HB2 battle, issued statements hailing the deal on Monday. While many North Carolina Democrats were taken by surprise by the deal, the groups had apparently been involved in discussion.
“Governor-elect Cooper has briefed us on a deal he brokered with state lawmakers to reach a complete and total repeal of HB2,” said HRC President Chad Griffin. “It's time for state lawmakers to repeal HB2 and begin repairing the harm this bill has done to people and the damage it has done to North Carolina's reputation and economy."
Chris Sgro, who is executive director of Equality NC and an openly gay state representative, said, “The Charlotte City Council and mayor did the right thing by passing their ordinance—HB2 is wrong. Since its passage, the deeply discriminatory HB2 has hurt our economy and people. Now, the General Assembly must fully repeal HB2 so that we can start the necessary talks for protecting LGBTQ people and bring back businesses across the state.”
The joint statement noted that Charlotte city council opened the door to passing a new nondiscrimination measure once HB2 is repealed. “The City of Charlotte is deeply dedicated to protecting the rights of all people from discrimination and, with House Bill 2 repealed, will be able to pursue that priority for our community,” the council said in a statement.
In November, Governor McCrory, a Republican and former mayor of Charlotte who signed the bill and then became its public face, narrowly lost reelection. Cooper is a moderate, but he was critical of HB2 and refused to defend it in court. The Department of Justice and several civil-rights groups have sued the state over the law. Many artists have boycotted the state, major employers have canceled, postponed, or curtailed employment expansions, and other organizations have withdrawn events from the state—including the 2017 NBA All-Star Game and some NCAA and ACC sports tournaments. Estimates of the cost to the state economy range in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Seeing the General Assembly return to Raleigh, just days before Christmas, is yet another stunning turn in a busy December in the state. In early December, after weeks of challenges and recount requests, McCrory conceded the governor’s race in early December. Last week, the legislature met for a special session that had been announced as necessary to pass disaster relief for victims of flooding and wildfires. But after a relief bill had been passed, the GOP leaders of both chambers quickly gaveled the session out and then reopened a new special session. The General Assembly then passed a series of measures intended to strip Cooper, the incoming governor, of a range of appointing powers; subject his cabinet appointments to confirmation; and rework state and county boards of election to limit Democrats’ power.
The moves were met with fury by Democrats in the legislature and hundreds of protestors, and brought national condemnation to the state, echoing the HB2 controversy. But with huge GOP majorities in both houses, there was little stopping the bills. McCrory has so far signed one bill, overhauling election rules, but has not yet signed the bill that would limit the governor’s appointment powers.
The new special session seems to offer several risks for the parties involved. Legislators already seemed somewhat peevish about having to be in Raleigh last week, with the holidays nearing. To repeal the law, Republican leaders in the General Assembly will likely have to depend on Democratic votes, while facing dissension from GOP lawmakers who still support the law. Democrats could split between those who think a compromise that eliminates HB2 is best for the state and those who still believe Charlotte is making a mistake by repealing its ordinance. Cooper, for his part, could emerge with a major victory even before he takes office. But he is also risking being humiliated by Republican leaders in the legislature—and by inviting them to come back to Raleigh, he’s offering them another chance to try to undercut him, too.
December 18, 2016
‘Photography Is Not a Team Sport’
The Scottish-born photographer Harry Benson found his way to the United States in 1964 when he was assigned to cover the Beatles’s invasion. He was chosen for the prime assignment because he was handsome; according to Benson, the other photographer was too ugly to pal around with Paul, John, Ringo, and George. Musings like this are revealed in Magnolia Pictures’s new film, Harry Benson: Shoot First, a documentary that explores the iconic images of Benson’s career. He remembers history as happenstance; Benson’s just as lucky as he is ferocious. “I’ve had an exciting life, every day is a new day,” the 87-year-old said. “What I’ve learned is that photography is not a team sport. Perseverance counts.” The photojournalist and celebrity portraitist has photographed every U.S. president since Eisenhower, attended Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball, marched with Martin Luther King Jr., and documented the Berlin wall go both up and down. Below, he’s shared a few of his earlier photographs with The Atlantic, as well as the stories behind the images.
December 17, 2016
Patti Smith and the Mariah Carey ‘Problem’: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing
How Does It Feel
Patti Smith | The New Yorker
“The evening’s proceedings went as planned. As I sat there, I imagined laureates of the past walking toward the King to accept their medals. Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus. Then Bob Dylan was announced as the Nobel Laureate in Literature, and I felt my heart pounding. After a moving speech dedicated to him was read, I heard my name spoken and I rose. As if in a fairy tale, I stood before the Swedish King and Queen and some of the great minds of the world, armed with a song in which every line encoded the experience and resilience of the poet who penned them.”
The Album of the Year Is the Other Frank Ocean Album
Sean Fennessey | The Ringer
“There are many reasons to love Endless, especially as a musical statement — it’s the rolling tide that carries in Blonde’s crashing wave. It takes its time, it ebbs and releases — it’s inconsistent and unpredictable. It is, in many ways, music in 2016. It’s also an artistic statement that is unrivaled — a power move leveraging technology and corporate structures against one another to engender personal freedom. That may seem haughty, but it is true. Frank Ocean is free because of Endless.”
The David Foster Wallace Disease
Sasha Chapin | Hazlitt
“Wallace snares transitory, forgettable milliseconds with unforgettable prose. That’s what I envied most. If I had this particular gift, I felt I would finally break the boundary impeding my making great art—the artlessness of my own life was composed almost exclusively of the kind of bland lack that Wallace articulated so well. I was a filthy, whiny child who had become a loud, sensitive nerd … But if I had the Wallace magic, my artistic power would become boundless—compelling writing would fall out of my fingers. I could make something profound from the nothing I lived in.”
Why Do We Keep Trying to Solve a Problem Like Mariah?
Pier Dominguez | Buzzfeed
“It is often said, intended as criticism, that Mariah Carey lives in her own time, even her own reality. But our culture is finally catching up with her. It is not an accident that Mariah’s World is full of clips of Mariah moments from the Rainbow era—including the “Heartbreaker” video—because reality television is the perfect stage for the campy contradictions that define her.”
How 2016’s Movies and TV Reflected Religion
Alissa Wilkinson | Vox
“Perhaps recognizing that a myopic view of religious people results in underwritten characters, many shows have developed the sense that, as with gender or race, a character’s religion is part of their identity, one in a series of overlapping layers.”
Rihanna, Rock Star in Repose
Doreen St. Fèlix | MTV News
“Fighters carry a serenity in the body that contradicts that of dancers, who are their parallels in terms of movement. Preparation, for the dancer, is the limit; not so for the combatant, whose stage is many things, including the square of battle, but also the opponent buzzing around them and those fights that have been internalized. They’ve got to be permeable to risk, and resigned to chance. Rihanna moves more like a fighter than a dancer.”
Obama: On the End of a Literary Presidency
Jonathan Reiber | Literary Hub
“Literature gives us something on which to fall back when the straightforward path gets lost. The legacy of the last eight years and the writings of prior eras can help us imagine our way through whatever may come. To plot a course for our politics as well as our lives.”
The Gun Industry’s Lucrative Relationship With Hollywood
Gary Baum and Scott Johnson | The Hollywood Reporter
“The [NRA’s ‘Hollywood Guns’] exhibit highlights the sometimes uneasy but fruitful partnership between the gun industry and Hollywood, where firearms are an integral part of life and storytelling. Meanwhile, gun manufacturers say that there's no better way to brand, market and sell a weapon than to get it placed in a big Hollywood production. And most of the time, it's free—product placement at its finest.”
Our Favorite 31 Songs of 2016
This isn’t a definitive list of the year’s best tracks. It’s an alphabetically ordered selection of songs our staff writers and editors found themselves putting on repeat in 2016. You can listen along with our Spotify playlist.
“Adore You,” NAO
The last half of For All We Know, in many ways, examines relationships unravelling. In the single “Girlfriend,” the British R&B singer NAO wonders if she can discard enough baggage to be a partner. In “Bad Blood,” her nostalgia is tinted with the pain of a former paramour’s obliviousness. On “In the Morning,” she’s too civil to rebuff someone who adores her. In each instance, NAO has blame to place, on a lover, a friend, or herself. But “Adore You” is the turning point that precedes all of those tracks, where love is at once suspended and terminal. The ’80s synths and soft background vocals are disarming even as NAO sings about being intoxicated, addicted, and then consumed.
“Ain’t It Funny,” Danny Brown
Though “Really Doe” and “When It Rain” have gotten the most attention of the songs on Danny Brown’s brilliant Atrocity Exhibition, “Ain’t It Funny” remains my stubborn favorite. Maybe it’s the dissonant mess of horns and alien-like synths that have no right being as catchy as they are. Maybe it’s Brown’s hectic, unhinged flow, or the way the unbearable darkness of the album seems to come to a head. Here, Brown is still his charismatic, funny, and party-loving self—but he leaves you with the demented image of him cackling in the face of Satan and ingesting far too many substances while swaying at the edge of a cliff. You get snippets of just how dire things are: “Nose bleeds red carpets / But it just blend in.” “Broke serving fiends / Got rich became a addict.” “Might need rehab / But to me that shit pussy.” As afraid as you are for him, hearing him slip further and further out of control, you can’t stop listening—but you’re not laughing, either.
“Am I Wrong (feat. Schoolboy Q),” Anderson .Paak
From its curtain-raising drum break, “Am I Wrong” puts you right on the beach in L.A., circa summertime ’75. It’s a song full of flourishes, with Anderson .Paak’s distinctive, raspy voice half-crooning, half-talking over an airtight bass groove, decorative percussion (performed by Paak himself), a billowing horn section, and a cameo by Schoolboy Q. The track feels as close to old-school disco and funk as it does to hip-hop, an amorphous, anything-but-gray area that Paak thrives in. He’s channeling Marvin Gaye and D’Angelo here but bringing all of the unique and restless energy that’s made him such a popular commodity in music these days, working with the likes of Dr. Dre and A Tribe Called Quest. “Am I Wrong” is a glowing, vibrant party-starter.
“Angel Down (Work Tape),” Lady Gaga
Try to forget the half-heartedly hammy production that made Joanne so much less fun than it could have been. Try to ignore that Gaga used the supposedly socially conscious lyrics of “Angel Down” as a cudgel against a writer who’d criticized her. Just appreciate this demo track written with RedOne, the collaborator on her best hits. Note the delicate, elliptical, and strangely memorable melody. Hear her muster all her theater-geek gusto as the ballad progresses. And be reminded that even in her least satisfying phases, Gaga remains one of the most interesting pop stars going.
“Augustine,” Blood Orange
On his latest effort as Blood Orange, Devonté Hynes looks back to his father’s native Sierra Leone while keeping a firm focus on the present reality of black bodies in the U.S. and in his native U.K. On “Augustine,” a dance-floor ballad with a romping ’80s drum-machine loop that stays constant throughout, Hynes sings about the immigrant experience, exile, and the yearning for human comfort in foreign circumstances. He repurposes Saint Augustine, whose Confessions remain a doctrine for Christian love, for our age: “Tell me, did you lose your love? / Cry and burst my deafness / While Trayvon falls asleep.” “Augustine” is a track filled with political references if you choose to find them, but in its essence, it’s a ringing and heartfelt call for compassion in a dark moment.
“Away With You,” Mary Halvorson
It doesn’t really seem fair for one musician to cover the kind of range Mary Halvorson does. In 2015, Halvorson—whom The New York Times calls “the most critically acclaimed jazz guitarist to emerge” in the last decade—released an explosive collection of covers on solo guitar. This fall, she’s produced a stunning collection of originals for octet. Members include several fellow disciples of the great avant-gardist Anthony Braxton. The album’s title track is a series of melodies that veer off in unexpected directions and toe-tapping rhythms that defy a casual listener’s abilities to easily count a time-signature. It’s an episodic collection of enticing, off-kilter grooves—a four-chord riff that teeters between soothing and queasy-making, an almost big-band horn section, a duo for Halvorson’s guitar and Susan Alcorn’s otherworldly, luminous pedal steel.
“Broccoli,” D.R.A.M.
In an interview with Billboard over the summer, D.R.A.M. noted that people tried to count him out after his first hit “Cha Cha” gave way to an even bigger hit in Drake’s “Hotline Bling” last year. But after the Virginia singer-rapper teamed up with Lil Yachty on “Broccoli” this spring, it was obvious that he hadn’t doubted himself the way others had. “I was 5 or 6 years old when I had told myself ok you're special / But I treat you like my equal never lesser / I was 26 years old when we had dropped this one amazing record / Had the world stepping / That’s what I call epic,” he raps over a sunshiny piano chord. The song’s foundation might not feel vital, but the glee in D.R.A.M.’s delivery is magnetic. It’s easy to write “Broccoli” off as a stoner anthem (“broccoli” being slang for marijuana), but it’s one that is infectiously cheerful at a time when, for many, that energy is needed the most.
“Call Yourself Renee,” Okkervil River
Will Sheff hit reset on his long-running literary rock band this year with an album that ditched scrappiness for grace in long, slow, lushly orchestral songs. The most moving of them is “Call Yourself Renee,” where Sheff describes some characters who seem to have run away from an old life only to find that spiritual emptiness ran with them: “I don't know why so-and-so’s taking much time to breathe something new into my life,” one of them wonders, devastatingly.
“Calvander,” Mount Moriah
This track takes its name from an unincorporated community near Chapel Hill, North Carolina; miss the sign Heather McEntire mentions in the first line and you’ll miss the whole thing. “Calvander” is the lead track from the country-rock band’s third album, How to Dance, whose lyrics offer a virtual atlas of cities, towns, squares, streams, and highways. The record is informed by deep depression McEntire experienced recently. When she sings, “Down on my knees by the Bogue Bank tide, prayed to something for some kind, any kind of light,” one senses she might not have received it yet, but she’s headed down the right road.
“Cranes in the Sky,” Solange
One of the best albums of 2016, Solange’s A Seat at the Table insists, from start to finish, on the beauty, anger, endurance, and sovereignty of black people in America. “Mad,” “Don’t Touch My Hair,” and “F.U.B.U.” are the kinds of songs certain listeners would consider abrasive, or even uncivil, in their simple message: Respect me; respect us. The first standout on the album, “Cranes in the Sky” isn’t as politically explicit, lyrically. But it’s written from the same place of disillusionment, one inextricable from Solange’s experience as a black woman. Over swishy percussion, cascading synths, and a burbling bass, Solange outlines her melancholy with a list of everything that failed to fix her pain. “I tried to work it away, but that just made me even sadder ... I tried to sleep it away, I sexed it away, I read it away.” I tried, I tried, she repeats. The word “away” keeps catching in her mouth—roughly 40 times—and each time it does, the fantasy of escape feels at once closer and more remote.
“Decks Dark,” Radiohead
Around 1:30 a.m. on election night, Thom Yorke tweeted out some lyrics from his band’s single “Burn the Witch,” which was neither the first nor last time that Radiohead’s vast catalogue of freak-outs about authoritarians and doomsday was invoked against Donald Trump. But if you indeed were perturbed by the election’s results, the jangly, tense “Burn the Witch” was no therapy. Better to turn to its Moon Shaped Pool companion “Decks Dark,” whose gentle sway depicts the arrival of every dreaded thing—death, depression, the apocalypse—not as a calamity but as a simple change of weather. “You've gotta be kidding me,” Yorke mutters as if to a cloudburst interrupting a picnic.
“The Great Unwind,” William Tyler
Modern Country, the guitarist William Tyler’s wryly titled 2016 release, is full of gems, and on a different day I might choose a different one for this list. A talented instrumental guitarist in the lineage of John Fahey, Tyler expands from solo performances or sparse accompaniment to a full band on this record, which is heavily informed by traveling the backroads of the American South (while listening to krautrock). “The Great Unwind” is a journey itself: A faintly Celtic riff begins over a martial beat, nearly fit for Ken Burns employment, until a delirious, fuzzed-out electric guitar sweeps over it. That in turn morphs into a collage of faraway distortion and bird song, only to restart again with glistening pedal steel and a new riff, something like Ry Cooder doing a deconstructed country cover of “Sultans of Swing.” This isn’t modern country or any other genre except its own.
“Higher,” Rihanna
In the time leading up the album’s release, many hoped that Anti would be the record that cemented Rihanna’s pop dominance. Though the album didn’t necessarily live up to the extraordinary hype, it had its hits with “Work,” “Needed Me,” and “Sex With Me.” Those popular tracks played into Rihanna’s most well-recognized persona—one of unwavering self-assurance and sexual autonomy. But to me, in the album’s most interesting track, Rihanna reveals an almost antithetical self. “Higher,” at just over two minutes long, is the equivalent of a liquor-fueled voicemail to a distant lover begging him to come over. The song is stripped down, and simply features her sharply wailing over melancholy violins. It’s nice to know that the woman with the confidence to declare that her sex is amazing, and that bitches better have her money, can also be undone. “I wanna go back to the old way / But I’m drunk instead with a full ashtray / With a little bit too much to say,” reflects a messy love fit for a really messy year.
“I Can’t Give Everything Away,” David Bowie
David Bowie’s final song on his final album suggested that for however much wonderful material the world received from his career, there was still more he could give. It was in the withholding, in the mystery-making, that much of his power lay: “Seeing more and feeling less / Saying no but meaning yes / This is all I ever meant,” he offers here what might be an epitaph. But his appeal also lay in the virtues otherwise displayed in the song: an adventuresome palette of sounds, an ear for entrancing melodies, and lyrics that hit the heart even if they’re not fully understood by the head.
“I Need a Forest Fire (feat. Bon Iver),” James Blake
James Blake made a triumphant and typically understated return with The Colour in Anything this year, his first full-length since 2013’s Overgrown. While the whole album is worth an end-to-end listen, you can hear Blake’s gorgeous voice and control at its very best as it plays off the mercurial falsetto of Justin Vernon’s cryptic refrain in “I Need a Forest Fire.” It’s a beautifully complex song that never overplays its intricacies, as Blake and Vernon’s harmonies combine over a stuttering vocal sample, whistling keys, and a dampened kick drum. The result is a hypnotic wash of building melodies. Blake has spent the years between albums producing for Beyoncé and Frank Ocean, but on “Forest Fire,” he seems thrilled to return to the meditative world of his own music.
“Jacked Up,” Weezer
On Weezer’s white album, Rivers Cuomo quit his recent habit of smug semi-ironic arena rock and got back to using his melodic gifts from a place of vulnerability. “Jacked Up” is the kind of abject airing of heartsickness that made 1996’s Pinkerton a classic, but there’s nothing dated about the dilemma he’s describing. He knows what he wants but he knows full well that taking it will have consequences—an appropriately grown-up reason to sound this emo, no?
“The Ministry of Defence,” PJ Harvey
PJ Harvey’s very good and somewhat misunderstood The Hope Six Demolition Project was inspired by the venerated rocker touring global sites of poverty, war, and genocide and making music out of her own incomprehension. Many of the tracks are dry and distant, but on the dirge-like “The Ministry of Defence” she airs full-out horror, rendering a city ruins like a Hieronymus Bosch painting. “This is how the world will end,” she cries, and perhaps “this” refers to the indifference she seeks to disrupt.
“Never Be Like You,” Flume
The standout track on the second studio album from 25-year-old Harley Edward Streten, a.k.a. Flume, starts with a celestial upswing of twinkles and bells that ushers in Kai’s angelic vocals. Then the track transforms under a thudding, sludgy beat, as Kai pleads with a lover she’s cheated on to take her back. It’s a strange mix of ethereal and grimy, ambient and aggressive, but it’s undeniably satisfying to listen to, soaring as it does from profane to sacred (“Forgive me, I’m a fucking fool ... Absolve me of my sins won’t you?”) and right back again.
“No,” Nicolas Jaar
“Ya dijimos no pero el sí está en todo,” sings Nicolas Jaar, the enigmatic Chilean American producer, over a thumping reggaeton-meets-cumbia rhythm in which low drums and deep bass coalesce. The line, translated roughly as “We already said no but the yes is in everything,” refers to the 1988 referendum where saying “no” meant saying “yes,” an affirmation of democracy that ousted the brutal Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. Jaar, who sings entirely in Spanish here, reflects these contradictions of language and meaning in a similarly playful production. Chords on up beats play off the driving bassline, with flourishes of wooden percussion thrown into the mix, building to an apparent climax that’s ultimately a scratchy sample of a harp piece by Sergio Cuevas. With mathematical precision, Jaar creates a hypnotic and spacious song that uses silence and sound to keep moving itself forward.
“Not Gonna Kill You,” Angel Olsen
Here’s a glorious song for when you need a shot of courage. Angel Olsen and her band stomp and flail on a journey that recalls Stevie Nicks, Led Zeppelin, and Jefferson Airplane while Olsen describes the terrifying rush of opening yourself up to another person. “It’s not gonna break you, it’s just gonna shake you / shake you aliiiiive,” she wails as the music evokes the zero-gravity feeling before a roller coaster takes its big plunge.
“Prima Donna (feat. A$AP Rocky),” Vince Staples
Vince Staples’s music dwells in a dark, hallucinatory world where minimal, lo-fi beats are punctuated by gunshot snare sounds and glitchy keys. On Prima Donna, the title track off his new EP, low bass notes pound ominously alongside loose hi-hats, creating a barren landscape for the precocious L.A. rapper to run riot across with his signature, breathless flow. Here, Staples comments on the fragile fantasy of fame, echoing his own rapid rise since his breakout last year with Summertime ’06. While he’s suddenly surrounded by women and money and accolades, Staples knows too well how fleeting success is: The surprisingly melodic, vocoder chorus finds Staples bleary-eyed, asking, “Is it real?” with A$AP Rocky reminding him it isn’t, “Once you get addicted to it.” The song is an enthralling flash through the mind of one of hip-hop’s most skillful wordsmiths.
“Same Drugs,” Chance the Rapper
Chance the Rapper’s 2016 album Coloring Book, as my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote earlier this year, uses millennial nostalgia as a key to draw “from the past when dealing with very real challenges of the present.” “Same Drugs,” not actually a song about drugs, alludes to Peter Pan, Wendy, growing up, and the bittersweet pain of growing apart, over exquisite layers of piano chords, strings, gospel riffs, and the vocals of Chance and Eryn Allen Kane. “Don’t forget the happy thoughts,” Chance concludes, compelling his fans to remember what it feels like to fly.
“Solo,” Frank Ocean
Few artists can spin entire universes with the detail and texture that Frank Ocean can. On “Solo,” he doesn’t waste a breath doing this, his voice tumbling through with the first warm note of an organ, filling up the space with a haze of sex and loneliness all at once. Ocean’s voice is at its intoxicating best here, shapeshifting from one melody line and to another with an ease that masks the complex chord changes going on underneath it. Absent of any percussion, the song feels self-propulsive, as Frank leaps registers between verse and chorus before a gorgeous outro in which his voice twists and turns like a trail of smoke. “Solo,” filled with transient lovers, epic imagery, and drug-induced nights in the city, lives in the achingly intimate moment after it all vanishes, when you’re left alone and feeling, well, so low.
“Sorry,” Beyoncé
Beyoncé, inarguably one of the best singers in the universe, showcases a whole new breadth of vocal power in “Sorry.” Her voice is percussive rather than melodic, layering staccato rhythms over minimal backing, all while communicating the tightly controlled drama and wretched pain of an Ibsen play. “Sorry” will always be remembered for crushing the pop-cultural cachet of Beckys everywhere, but musically it’s one of the most intriguing songs on Lemonade. Who else could make a response to feckless lovers and dreams gone sour so ballsy and so contagious?
“Take Me to the Alley," Gregory Brown
In April, when my former colleagues at NPR Music offered us a first taste of Gregory Porter’s Take Me to the Alley, the album and its title song felt like anachronisms. In the throes of an election for which the word “divisive” felt like a euphemism, in floated this soulful paean to humility and compassion, buoyed by a lilting piano line and a baritone that seemed like an embrace. Somehow, far from the gilded houses, straight on through this alley, there’s a garden and a reprieve. It may indeed be a fable or an anachronism, but every time I listen, I think of it more as a gift from out of time.
—Matt Thompson
“Tilted (Paradis Remix),” Christine and the Queens
In April, Christine and the Queens (a.k.a. Hêloïse Letissier) released an EP of remixes of “Tilted,” her ode to joyful noncomformity. The Paradis remix takes the odd beats and warbled weirdness of “Tilted” and turns it into something smoother, with more complex harmonies and blissed-out tones. It’s a little spacey, a little mellow, but with the wackiness of Christine’s most triumphant lyric: “I’m doing my face / with magic marker / I’m in my right place / Don’t be a downer.”
“Ultralight Beam,” Kanye West
Why, exactly, do Kanye’s lovingly arranged gospel choirs ask for serenity and strength at the start of The Life of Pablo? For the duration of the tentative climb to bliss that is “Ultralight Beam,” you aren’t sure what’s ailing him—Chance the Rapper and Kelly Price ably take the verses. But as the chaotic Pablo album then unfolds, you begin to understand why he began in such a calming manner. And as this chaotic year unfolded, the early plea for grace became even more poignant.
“Untitled 02 | 06.23.2014,” Kendrick Lamar
Kendrick Lamar is righteous and rich, and he knows there’s tension between those two things. So as he deftly shouts out each member of his record-label crew, mocks Drake’s performed machismo, and brags about having Barack Obama’s ear, he also mourns black poverty and death over the kind of beat you might hear in a nightmare. “Get God on the phone,” Lamar commands; presumably, he wants to deliver the Almighty both heady praise and very dark complaints.
“Welcome to Earth (Pollywog)” Sturgill Simpson
Sturgill Simpson greets his newborn son here, but really he’s introducing his own adult self to everything about human existence that he previously hadn’t known how to access. With an arrangement of Brian Wilson-like grandeur—tinkling piano, multi-tracked vocals, the Dap Kings on horns, and a sudden glorious tempo change mid-song—he marvels at grandfatherly advice and worn adages that suddenly make sense to him. The childless can’t know the feeling he describes, but with this song they at least can better anticipate it.
“Your Best American Girl,” Mitski
At once a tender ballad and a blistering anthem, “Your Best American Girl” is a track that demands to be listened to over and over again. It begins as a quiet, wistful Post-It note to an “All-American boy” blissfully unburdened by the body he lives in, unlike the narrator herself. “I’m not the moon, I’m not even a star,” Mitski sings, less sadly than matter-of-factly. But then, as the guitars build and then explode into a wall of noise, the self-deprecation morphs into a declaration of reluctant self-love. “Your mother wouldn’t approve of how my mother raised me,” Mitski sings in the first chorus. “But I do, I think I do.” (In a bit of goosebump-inducing perfection, later in the song, the “I think I do” becomes an “I finally do.”) Like all of Mitski’s best work, “Your Best American Girl” is characteristically self-aware, vulnerable, haunting, and beautiful—a song with a perspective that made me feel something music rarely does: gratitude.
“You’re Still the One,” John Scofield
Yes, this is a jazz cover of Shania Twain’s 1998 pop-country megahit; no, it’s not a joke; yes, it is very, very good. Scofield, a leading jazz guitarist who cut his teeth with Miles Davis in the 1980s, has been equally at home in the straightahead and jam-band worlds recently, but on Country for Old Men (Get it? He’ll reach senior citizenship on Boxing Day) he tries twang, and succeeds. The whole thing is a rollicking delight, with songs by the likes of Merle Haggard, George Jones, Dolly Parton, and the Carter Family rendered in his signature, almost vox humana guitar sound, but this less obvious choice is my unexpected favorite. Sco swings through the lilting melody and even drops a nonchalant, unobtrusive, and witty quote of Thelonious Monk’s “Friday the 13th” into his solo.
December 16, 2016
The OA Is a Bizarre, Totally Absorbing Puzzle
The OA, which had a Beyoncé-like surprise release on Netflix on Friday, is a puzzle to be solved: a strange mashup of genres and story threads and dimensions that unfurls slowly. In the first episode, a woman in her twenties (Brit Marling) is spotted jumping off a bridge; she survives, but footage of her makes the news, and is seen by her parents, who rush to the hospital to claim her. They identify her as Prairie, who went missing seven years ago, and who used to be blind, but can somehow now see—a miracle she can’t or won’t explain.
To say too much about the plot is to spoil the intrigue of the show, which is more complex and layered than the premise might suggest. Prairie is a strange woman, childlike in affect but often unexpectedly insightful. She begins to attract a group of misfit friends and followers, to whom she tells her history, and the circumstances in which she disappeared. Cutting between scenes of her stories and scenes showing what happened to her, The OA expands in unexpected, sometimes baffling directions, defying many of the conventions of dramatic storytelling while keeping tight control on the narrative. If some of the more outlandish twists occasionally give episodes a vertiginous feeling, the central mystery of the show is intriguing enough that it carries viewers through.
The natural comparison for The OA is Stranger Things, another Netflix mystery that appeared seemingly out of nowhere and featured a girl with mysterious powers caught up in a grand conspiracy, who attracted a group of male friends who helped her. The OA is certainly similar—Prairie, like Eleven, even gets nosebleeds that coincide with disturbing visions—but it’s a much more experimental series. Rather than hewing rigidly to the formula of a specific genre, it veers off in sometimes gratifying, sometimes messy ways. The first episode, running a lengthy 70 minutes, veers in tone between indie movie, gothic horror, children’s book, sci-fi fantasy, and high-school drama: There are moments of interdimensional travel, graphic scenes of sex and violence, and a sudden shift back 28 years in time. Forty minutes into the first episode the opening credits roll, disorienting viewers altogether by hinting that another show entirely is about to begin.
The OA was created by Marling and Zal Batmanglij, who previously worked together on the 2011 indie movie The Sound of My Voice, about a mysterious cult leader who claims to be from the future, and 2013’s The East. There are elements of both in the new series, which also seems connected to 2011’s Another Earth, which Marling co-wrote and starred in. Prairie, like The Sound of My Voice’s Maggie, has an inexplicable aura that draws people to her, and Marling is exceptional in the role, communicating the character’s confusion and vulnerability, as well as her moments of complete resolve. Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter franchise) plays a doctor with some sense of what might make Prairie special. Riz Ahmed plays a counselor, while Phyllis Smith is a dowdy math teacher who becomes enthralled by Prairie. The supporting cast is also terrific, from Alice Krige and Scott Wilson as Prairie’s parents to Patrick Gibson as an aggressive, troubled teenager with whom she strikes a bargain.
What’s most striking about The OA, though, is the richness of the story. It weaves in such a variety of textures and styles and allusions that it sometimes feels transparently absurd, but it’s hard not to be drawn in given the wealth of different objects on offer. Batmanglij, who directs, gives the scenes of Prairie’s small-town home a hazy, washed-out feel, making it seem like a naturalistic portrait of an American community. But then he offers up a dramatic, sweeping landscape of an entirely unfamiliar environment, or a surreal rendering of a bizarre, celestial event. The lone note of consistency is Prairie, who seems certain that she’s connected with the world in ways that most people are not.
As the show unspools, it challenges notions of who’s trustworthy and who isn’t, while offering its own testament to the transformational nature of imagination. Prairie, like Eleven, may have a group of male helpers surrounding her, but the show is defined by her experiences, not theirs. Anchored by a spectacular central performance and a series of increasingly wacky ideas, The OA is frequently mind-boggling, but worth the effort.
North Carolina's 'Legislative Coup' Is Over, and Republicans Won
It’s all over but the shouting, and the suing, in Raleigh—though both the shouts and the suits are likely to go on for some time.
The North Carolina General Assembly on Friday wrapped up a special session in which the Republicans who dominate both chambers mounted a brazen and successful effort to strip the incoming Democratic governor of a host of powers afforded to his Republican predecessor and many governors before. Having lost the governor’s seat in November’s election, the GOP legislature opted to simply reduce the governor’s power drastically. The two most prominent bills involve the elections system and the governor’s right to make appointments.
Pat McCrory, the outgoing GOP governor, quickly signed the electoral-reform bill into law. He has been presented with the bill reducing the governor’s appointments, but has not yet signed it. McCrory, who narrowly lost to Attorney General Roy Cooper in his quest for reelection, had not made any statement on the takeover bid, and he himself had tangled with the legislature over separation of powers, at one point successfully suing to recover appointment powers.
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On the appointments front, the legislature withdrew the governor’s ability to make appointments to the state board of education and the boards of trustees of University of North Carolina-system schools; subjected his cabinet appointees to senate approval; and reduced the number of appointments the governor can make for government jobs. That number dropped to 425, near the level it was before the General Assembly increased that to 1,500 for McCrory. It appears that many of his political appointees could now become permanent employees.
The election reform reworks the state board of elections and combines it with the state ethics commission. Previously, the state board of elections had a 3-2 majority in favor of the governor’s party, while every county board had a 2-1 advantage for the governor’s party. Under the new rules, the state board will have eight members, four of each party, appointed half by the governor and half by the legislature. County boards will have four members. The chairmanship will rotate, but appears to guarantee that Republicans will lead the board during crucial even-numbered election years for the foreseeable future. Supreme Court elections, which have been nonpartisan but handed a majority to Democrat-aligned justices this November, will now be partisan.
It is difficult and perhaps impossible to construe the changes as anything more than naked politics. Leading Republicans even admitted that they might not have pursued the changes if McCrory had won reelection. The timing of the changes was also controversial: Legislators returned to Raleigh for a special session billed as a chance to pass disaster-relief bills for victims of flooding and wildfires. Rumors flew that Republicans would attempt to pack the Supreme Court to restore a conservative majority. That didn’t happen; instead, as soon as the disaster-relief bill had been signed, Republican leaders gaveled the special session to a close, then promptly opened a new special session, with no declared agenda—surprising both the press and Democratic members. House Speaker Tim Moore said the decision to do so had only been made on Wednesday, a claim debunked when documents putting it into motion, dated Monday, were revealed.
It appeared that part of the reason for conducting the business in a special session was to avoid rallying of opposition. That was a tactic that Republicans used to pass HB2, the state’s controversial “bathroom bill,” in the spring, and it worked this week. Democrats warned that just like HB2, the new legislation might have unintended effects, and they accused Republicans of sidestepping public opinion. Certainly, it is true that the GOP will return in the new year retaining their current supermajorities, which means they likely could have forced changes through [[over]] a Cooper veto. In this case, all parties had two days to review the legislation, nearly four times as much as they did to review HB2 before it was signed into law.
“We came here to deal with a natural disaster. What we’re dealing with is a political disaster. Let’s deal with the reality: It’s a power grab,” said Dan Blue, the Democratic leader in the senate. “If McCrory had won the election, we wouldn’t be here now, reducing the number of positions he has control over.”
With Democrats so outnumbered, the result of the session was foreordained. During debate in the senate, the two sides largely talked past each other. Republicans argued, accurately, that the state constitution allowed them to make the changes they sought to make. They also pointed out past examples of Democrats attempting to consolidate power. Democrats argued, with equal validity, that the changes violated norms and could easily have been done at the start of McCrory’s term. They also noted that the GOP examples dated back decades, and were just the sort of behavior that Republicans had condemned at the time.
At one point, Senator Chad Barefoot, a Republican, insisted that the GOP had to give McCrory a chance to appoint 1,500 people because he had been trying to turn the state around. Why would anyone want to fire them? Wasn’t everyone pleased with the result, he wondered? But apparently not—after all, North Carolina voters decided not to give McCrory a second term.
“We came here to deal with a natural disaster. What we’re dealing with is a political disaster. Let’s deal with the reality: It’s a power grab.”
Cooper has threatened to sue over the changes, though it’s unclear at this point on what grounds or how successful he might be. The sudden spree of measures to undermine him has sparked outrage and bafflement not only within the state but also nationally—once again putting the Old North State in the spotlight, just a few months after HB2. Keith Ellison, the liberal U.S. representative who is running for chairman of the Democratic National Committee, on Friday said, “Republicans are attempting to do a coup right now.”
HB2 offers an interesting contrast: While the law is unpopular with voters and has cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars, and likely contributed to McCrory’s law, it remains in place. But whereas costly and public boycotts by musicians and corporations helped turn opinion against HB2, there’s no obvious similar constituency to fight the new changes.
There is an inescapable racial dimension to the new laws, and particularly to the election changes. African Americans in the state are heavily Democratic, and Republicans have worked to overhaul North Carolina’s voting system through a variety of measures that marginalize black votes. They redistricted the state in order to give themselves a large advantage, with the result that Republican majorities now seem insurmountable for the time being. Although the state is closely divided along partisan lines, with Democrats clustered in cities and Republicans elsewhere, that gives the GOP a strong edge in Raleigh. However, a federal court also ruled that some of those districts constituted unconstitutional gerrymandering, and has mandated some new elections next year. That led Democrats to decry the special session as the work of an illegitimate legislature.
Republicans also passed a massive overhaul of the state’s voting laws, including shortening early voting, ending same-day registration, and requiring a photo-ID to vote. That law was mostly struck down by a federal court this summer, with judges ruling the law had been designed to disenfranchise minorities. The executive director of the state Republican Party then called on the Republicans who controlled all 100 county boards of elections to arrange early-voting hours to benefit the GOP.
The Democratic leaders in both houses, Larry Hall and Dan Blue, are both black, and spoke with frustration about the legislation during floor debate. But given Democrats’ disadvantages, the real action came from protests, which were coordinated by the North Carolina NAACP. On Thursday and again on Friday, protestors in the gallery of the house and senate noisily protested the special session, leading the presiding officers of each chamber to have the galleries cleared. On Thursday, a journalist was arrested for resisting. Once cleared from galleries, protestors continued chanting and making noise outside, at points still disrupting the sessions inside. Multiple protestors were arrested on both Thursday and Friday.
By about 3:30 p.m., the legislature was wrapping up its business, including confirming Yolanda Stith, the wife of McCrory’s chief of staff, to the state industrial commission. Republicans complained that the protestors were disrupting a triumphal moment for a black woman. A few minutes later, the General Assembly adjourned for the year. Outside, the protestors were still at it, chanting, “Our house!” But as the special session proved, they don’t make the rules.
With Rogue One, the Star Wars Franchise Gets Even More Feminist
Mild spoilers ahead.
In May of 1977, in New York magazine, John Simon reviewed the new George Lucas film, Star Wars. Simon was not a fan. “It is all trite characters and paltry verbiage,” the critic wrote of the much-hyped film, “handled adequately by Harrison Ford as a blockade-running starship pilot, uninspiredly by Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker (Luke for George Lucas, the author-director; Skywalker for his Icarus complex), and wretchedly by Carrie Fisher, who is not even appealing as Princess Leia Organa (an organic lay).”
An organic lay. It’s a good reminder, by way of a bad joke, of how far American culture has come since 1977—and also of the time that the Star Wars saga has spanned, not just in its own (far)faraway galaxies, but also in the one its viewers share. The original Star Wars was, in its time, progressive; Leia, who was not just a princess but also a rebel and fighter and a leader, was smart and feisty and no-nonsense—a Strong Female Lede for the time before that designation would become a category and a cliché. Leia was also, though, the heroine who squirmed in that (in)famous metal bikini and desperately uttered the line, “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” Leia is a great character, undeniably, a model for Katniss and Ripley and Imperator Furiosa; as a feminist one, though, she has been decidedly fraught.
Jyn is no damsel; even when things get dire, we do not see her in distress.
Much less fraught is the heroine of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) has been forged in the comic-book mold of the heroes who have been defined by their separation from their parents, and she is a natural leader who is not at all a princess. She is a soldier, not just by training and circumstance but also by inclination. She is tough, but kind; she is hardened, but human. She is, as Leia—and as, for that matter, the Star Wars denizens Padmé and Rey—have been before her, both a product and a reflection of her times. Jyn is a feminist heroine who is uniquely at home within the feminism of 2016.
First of all, and most obviously: Jyn is the star of this Star Wars story. It is her story, fundamentally: She is the axis around which everything else spins. That’s unique because, while the Star Wars franchise has emphasized and exploited the power of the ensemble, its previous installments have all, in some way, revolved around male-and-female couples: Leia and Luke, Leia and Han, Padmé and Anakin, Rey and Finn. Rogue One has very little of that kind of elemental pairing. There are duos in it, yes—Jyn and her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen); Jyn and her one-time caretaker, Saw Gerrera (Forest Whitaker); Jyn and her fellow rebels, Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and Bodhi Rook (Riz Ahmed)—but none of them define the movie. That is because, simply but powerfully, it is Jyn who defines the movie.
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Rogue One also goes out of its way to poke fun at one of the themes that ran through the canonical Star Wars films: the notion of rescuing. “Congratulations, you are being rescued,” the droid K-2SO tells Jyn, as she is thwarted in an escape attempt after being captured early on in the film. “Please do not resist.” It’s one of the few great lines of Rogue One, and it’s great precisely because of its knowingness: Jyn, it has already become clear, is not the kind of heroine who needs rescuing. She, instead, is the kind of heroine who rescues others. She is no damsel; even when things get dire, we do not see her in distress.
We also see Jyn, repeatedly, running and climbing and blaster-shooting and basically doing what she needs to do to complete the mission she and her fellow rebels set out to get done. She does that easily, in part, because her clothes are fit to her purpose. Rogue One reads, among other things, as a rebuke to the costumes of Jyn’s fellow Star Wars women: the vaguely Grecian dresses; the skin-tight white Spandex; the convenient rip in the midriff of the skin-tight white Spandex; the layered robes; the skimpy bikini. These fanciful outfits have been replaced, in Jyn and on her, by an insistently practical uniform: pants that are neither too loose nor too tight, a jacket, clunky combat boots, and a shawl that doubles as a scarf and a head covering. All of them come in drab shades of brown and gray.
It’s a costuming choice that reflects what might be the most progressive element of Rogue One: the fact that the film features almost none of the romantic subplotting that has helped to carry, and add charm to, the canonical Star Wars films. There’s a moment, at the very end of Rogue One, that casts Jyn roughly as a romantic heroine; the brief scene comes almost as a throwaway, though, and ends up scanning more as evidence of shared moral purpose than of attraction or romantic love. Those things, the film suggests, have very little place in this particular Star Wars story. Rogue One, indeed, is an almost asexual movie—not in the oops-the-stars-had-no-chemistry manner of Padmé and Anakin in the Star Wars prequels, but rather in a there-are-more-important-things-to-deal-with-right-now manner of wartime. Rogue One forecloses the possibility of romance; this, too, is progressive. This, too, is suggestive of how far the Star Wars franchise—and how far the rest of us, along with it—have come since the heady spring of 1977.
Trump's Pick for Israel Ambassador Is No Diplomat
There was a time when Donald Trump’s statements on Israel rattled hardliners who were concerned he would be too friendly to Palestinians. In February, when Joe Scarborough asked him who was to blame for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Republican candidate replied, “I don't want to get into it for a different reason, Joe, because if I do win, there has to be a certain amount of surprise, unpredictability. Let me be sort of a neutral guy, let's see what—I'm going to give it a shot. It would be so great.”
Those days are long gone, a fact made clear by President-elect Trump’s decision to appoint David Friedman, an extreme hard-liner on the right, as his ambassador to Israel. Friedman, like many of Trump’s picks for Cabinet jobs, does not have any directly relevant experience, and the two men previously worked together when Friedman, a bankruptcy attorney, represented him in past bankruptcy proceedings.
But Friedman advised Trump on Israel policy during the campaign and has left behind a long trail of statements indicating his views, including equating liberal Americans Jews to “kapos” who assisted Nazis in ghettos; labeling President Barack Obama an anti-Semite; and suggesting Israel should annex the West Bank.
Even Friedman’s quote in the statement announcing his nomination has stirred up controversy.
“I am deeply honored and humbled by the confidence placed in me by President-elect Trump to represent the United States as its Ambassador to Israel,” he said. “I intend to work tirelessly to strengthen the unbreakable bond between our two countries and advance the cause of peace within the region, and look forward to doing this from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”
It’s that last bit that’s notable, because the U.S. embassy is currently in Tel Aviv, as it has been since it was established. The embassy has not moved because the status of Jerusalem remains a disputed element in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Trump said during the campaign that he would move the embassy to Jerusalem, but as Peter Baker of The New York Times noted last month, promising to move the embassy and then going back on that promise is a time-honored tradition for U.S. presidents: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both did so, only to change their minds later. A 1995 law even mandated it, but every president since it was passed has repeatedly waived that requirement.
Going through with such a move would likely further inflame an already touchy situation, with little prospect of serious peace negotiations, much less a resolution. Friedman’s other statements suggest little inclination to change that. Longstanding U.S. policy has been to oppose Israeli settlements in the occupied territories of the West Bank, which the international community holds to be unlawful. But Friedman has repeatedly argued that the settlements are legal. Friedman has also said that despite longstanding U.S. policy that seeks a two-state solution, with a separate nation for the Palestinians, “a Trump administration will never pressure Israel into a two-state solution or any other solution that is against the will of the Israeli people.” He says Trump would support annexation of chunks of the West Bank and thinks a single-state solution would be workable, because he believes there are fewer Palestinians than commonly estimated.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz concludes, “Based on statements he has issued and columns he has penned, Friedman is positioned on the far right of the Israeli political map—more hardline in his views than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
But Friedman has reserved some of his harshest statements for liberal American Jews. He has tangled with my colleague Peter Beinart, saying that reading his work would drive one to vote for Trump. Friedman was reacting in part to Beinart’s criticism that Friedman had compared J Street, a liberal, dovish American Jewish group, to kapos who collaborated with Nazis. That was wrong, Friedman wrote this summer:
They are far worse than kapos—Jews who turned in their fellow Jews in the Nazi death camps. The kapos faced extraordinary cruelty and who knows what any of us would have done under those circumstances to save a loved one? But J Street? They are just smug advocates of Israel’s destruction delivered from the comfort of their secure American sofas—it’s hard to imagine anyone worse.
The New York Times reports that at an off-the-record meeting earlier this month, Atlantic Editor in Chief Jeffrey Goldberg pressed Friedman on the statement, which he refused to withdraw. “They’re not Jewish, and they’re not pro-Israel,” Friedman replied, according to the Times.
Unsurprisingly, J Street reacted negatively to Friedman’s nomination, saying in a statement, “The nomination shows breathtaking disdain for the vast majority of American Jews who support the two-state solution, progress toward peace with the Palestinians and common decency in public discourse.”
Also reacting negatively was a top Palestinian official, Saeb Erekat, who said that while he doubted the U.S. would really move the embassy or allow the annexation of the West Bank, doing so would “be the destruction of the peace process.” Where Trump had once imagined that the negotiation skills he often boasts could help bridge one of the world’s deepest divides, the Friedman nomination suggests that the president-elect may have decided brokering Israeli-Palestinian peace is one deal he’s not interested in making.
Is Arrival the Best ‘First Contact’ Film Ever Made?
This conversation discusses plot points of Arrival, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact.
What if there’s more? What if, somewhere out there, there are others? What if, one day, everything—really, everything—changes?
Contact with extraterrestrial life is an ongoing theme in film, and there’s a good reason for that: As a story alone, it’s mysterious. It’s epic. It’s awe-inspiring. But it’s also, as a story, intimate and personal. Arrival, the most recent entry in the “first contact” genre, is a reminder of that. So, though, are many of its predecessors. Below, two Atlantic staffers, senior editor Ross Andersen and staff writer Megan Garber, discuss a small (and, be warned, not at all comprehensive) sampling of those movies.
Megan Garber: Hi, Ross! So let’s start with the most recent film, Arrival. (Which I loved, unreservedly, until the final, space-squid-ex-machina twist—the clunkiness of which, I have to admit, ended up making me think a little bit less of the movie overall.) One of my favorite things about Arrival, before that final chunk, was the film’s treatment of the Moment of Contact itself—that small, enormous second that changes everything. I loved that the film, via its director, Denis Villeneuve, seemed to appreciate the context that moment was operating in, cinematically and otherwise: Villeneuve is clearly familiar with Contact and Close Encounters and the others, and seemed to want to make his own telling of the most epic event imaginable particularly distinctive.
He did that, I think, by paying tribute to the moment’s counterintuitive smallness: This is the story of two species—two civilizations, and ostensibly also two planets, two galaxies, two systems—colliding, yes, but it is also the much simpler story of two creatures meeting for the first time. It’s one-to-one as much as it is all-to-all … and I loved that Arrival went out of its way to emphasize that intimacy. It was emotionally right for me, as a viewer, and it was thematically right for the movie, since Arrival is in so many ways, as David Sims pointed out, about empathy. Here that all was, laid bare in the gentle touch of a hand to a leg, and in the simple, solved mystery of how to say hello. Arrival found a way to capture all of that—the high and (sorry) the hi—in its treatment, and I really appreciated that.
One more thing along those lines: I also loved how Arrival’s contact scene managed to marshal, on the human side, the two primary emotions you’d expect someone to have upon meeting an extraterrestrial: fear and wonder. Wonder, in particular, is such a hard thing to evoke onscreen in a way that isn’t cheesy (sorry, but Contact) or vaguely pompous (sorry, but 2001: A Space Odyssey), or trite. But Arrival, for my money, nails it. And it does that, I think, by understanding that wonder, as it’s experienced by real people, will often come with a side dose of anxiety—in the same way that “awesome” suggests both amazement and terror. So many movie renderings of that first moment of interplanetary meeting scan, in some way, as glib, in large part because they don’t appreciate how tangled the wonder and the fear can be within the person who is making the meeting. Arrival, though, uses its own aesthetic minimalism—the bare geometry of its space pod, the spare chords of its score—to suggest, actually, complexity. I loved that. Its treatment of the contact moment struck me, overall, not just as sensitive, but also, in its way, as wise—fitting, I guess, since one of the movie's other themes is how closely connected compassion and wisdom can be, on Earth and beyond its limits.
Ross Andersen: You are so right about that tension between fear and wonder. More on that in a minute, but first I want to say that I’m with you on Arrival’s ending, which is too bad, because its basic premise was clever. There is always this paradox at the heart of these “first contact” stories, where the filmmakers have to imagine what an intelligence capable of traveling to Earth from a distant star might be like, from the limited perspective of a species that has barely leapt to its lunar satellite. The clumsiest way to do that is to think about the kind of technologies that humans have, and just ramp them up to some absurd degree. Like, “Oh, they’ll have super-duper warp drive!” The more interesting thing to do is to think about how an extraterrestrial intelligence might see the world differently, like a cosmic version of, “What is it like to be a bat?”
Arrival is, in many ways, a film about revelation.
It’s particularly fascinating to imagine alternative perceptions of time, because the nature of time is still an unsettled matter in the physical sciences. Which is to say: It’s entirely possible that our perception of time is limited in some profound way. And so, yeah, it was an inspired choice to have this advanced intelligence give humans the gift of omnitemporal perception, and to have it be received by a linguist. But just like Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, the filmmakers couldn’t resist making the heroine into a Pietà figure, a Mary grieving her lost child. It’s like they knew they had a cerebral story on their hands, and decided they needed to artificially graft on emotion by introducing the most tragic stakes possible. As an audience, we never really come to know Louise’s daughter. She comes across like this blurry, indistinct presence, like the faceless preppy kids in Inception. And yet, she’s supposed to be the emotional core of Louise’s story.
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But that’s probably the worst thing I can say about this film. I can’t wait to watch it again. I really loved how they used non-humanoid aliens, and that they resembled the octopus, the great shapeshifter and chameleon of the oceans. You know, an octopus can recognize individual human faces? The octopus traveled a radically different evolutionary path than human beings. Its brain is distributed all through its body. It might be Earth’s closest thing to an alien intelligence.
Arrival’s sleek spaceships were nice, too, although, for me, they fell short of Kubrick’s monoliths, which remain, in their Platonic simplicity, cinema’s most striking alien artifacts. The first entry into the spaceship was one of the most wondrous scenes in the film, especially that moment when Ian, the physicist, feels the alternate gravity kick in. Everyone else shakes it off and starts walking toward the light. For them, gravity is just another quality of personal experience. It’s a perception, mere phenomena. But for Ian, it’s a fundamental law of the universe. Arrival is, in many ways, a film about revelation, and in that moment, Ian is like Paul thrown from the horse.
I’m going on too long! I’m like the alien in Arrival who blasts hundreds of thousands of circle-y symbols onto the glowing surface between us. I should pass the conch shell back to you. But before I do, I want to ask you a question. In the past, you and I have talked about Close Encounters of the Third Kind, another plausible candidate for “best ‘first contact’ film ever,” and I know you’re not a fan. What don’t you like about it?
Megan: It’s true! I’m not a fan. And, actually, my non-love of Close Encounters has to do with what we’ve been talking about already: the wonder stuff. And also the family stuff! Close Encounters works, primarily, as an action movie, and in that respect it’s totally compelling. As a quest story, and as a yarn, it’s great. But when it comes to the meeting that makes the movie—the pathos of that moment, and, yes, the wonder of it—Close Encounters, ultimately, left me cold. In part, that was because the plot of the movie—the idea that Roy’s mind was both his own and, somehow, also the aliens’—made it hard for me to fully empathize with him. But it was also because the real emotional core of the film, Roy’s relationship with his family, got completely disregarded in the film’s self-styledly “epic” conclusion. I love Terri Garr, and I love her character in Close Encounters, and it struck me as both frustrating and supremely sad how her story, and her family’s, were essentially victims, in the end, of the movie’s almost childish enthusiasm for its alien creatures.
And then! Those creatures. My caveat here is that I only recently—like, in the past couple of years—watched Close Encounters for the first time, and it can be hard, with movies like that, to respect them as they would have been experienced in their own times. Close Encounters may well have been innovative in the ’70s, and it’s not its fault that it has been widely imitated and referenced in the years that have intervened. However: So much of Close Encounters, from its little green men to its Lite-Brite-tastic flying saucers on down, struck me as trite, on both sides: It both built on existing cliches and was itself widely replicated.
Close Encounters made, to its credit, a lot of wry little comments about the moment of contact—poking fun, for example, at the interplay between the discovery of extraterrestrial life and decidedly earthly brands (I loved the line in which Ronnie asks Roy whether the aliens he’s seen look like Sarah Lee cookies). But the aliens here, in their way, also seemed branded—Little Green Men™, etc.—and that struck me less as an ironic commentary on commercial culture than as a fairly disappointing failure of imagination. The cumulative effect of all that, for me, was to take the most wondrous event imaginable, the one Arrival portrayed so sensitively, and to reduce it down to two-dimensionality. Roy couldn’t be fearful about the moment of alien contact, on account of the extraterrestrials’ mashed potato-ed mind control; he couldn’t be fully wondrous, either. And, so, neither could his movie.
But! Speaking of that moment of contact! I’m curious to know what you think about, yep, Contact—and, in particular, the way it handled that moment. Spirituality, science, stars, heaven, a beach, The Truman Show … the moment, hooboy, had a lot going on. What did you make of it?
Ross: You know, I cannot defend the family dynamics in Close Encounters. Not at all. My memories of Close Encounters are almost all from adolescence, before I would have known to pick up on the way the film gives Roy a total pass for abandoning his wife and kids to make mashed potato sculptures. (And amazingly risky decisions.) As a kid, I was completely, unthinkingly, on Team Roy. I was like, “Lady, the man has seen aliens, this shit is world-historical, get off his back!”
Which is so typical, right? I think this is one thing we won’t miss about the auteur era: That constant trope that everything must yield to a man’s sacred ambition. One part of adulting, I’ve realized, is gaining a new perspective on movies that participate in that myth. Like when you are married, or in any serious relationship, to build a giant mud mesa in the middle of the living room? That would be, at a minimum, a massive outlay of marital capital. I was blind to that aspect of it when I was younger, in a way that embarrasses me now.
But, I will defend the wonder of Close Encounters! Its opening scenes, especially. The first signs of contact set all around the world—the pristine WWII planes, the chanting of the alien signal in India, the tension among the air-traffic controllers during the fly-by—all of that felt like Spielberg at his most limber. But I should add that I came across Close Encounters at a special time, right when I first began thinking about what it might mean to make contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence. When writers and filmmakers try to depict the wonder of first contact, they’re usually focused on the particulars of this meeting between two civilizations, but rarely do they explore what it would mean for our view of the cosmos at large.
Right now, the night sky is a cold, lifeless expanse. But if we’re lucky enough to make contact with another intelligence, that intelligence will likely be relatively local, which is to say it will be evidence that two sets of conscious beings evolved in the same general neighborhood. And if that’s true, it would almost certainly be the case that the universe is teeming with life. There are two trillion galaxies in the part of the cosmos that we can see, and each one is packed with billions of stars. If those vast reaches are brimming with life, that would say something profound about the raw creative power of nature. That’s an awesome thought to contemplate, and it was one I was starting to mull over when I first saw Close Encounters, which is probably why I remain fond of it.
“We … are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium … begins to ask where it came from.”
As it happens, I saw the film (on VHS!) shortly after reading, and becoming obsessed with, Carl Sagan’s novel Contact. When Robert Zemeckis adapted it on film, in the late nineties, I could barely stomach it. The source material was such an essential text for me that any departure from it felt like ugly compromise. Ten years later, I saw Contact again and I came around. I especially loved how the film was so comfortable leaving the viewer in an uncertain state, a state of longing to know. That’s true in the film’s conclusion, of course, but also in the earliest scenes, with McConaughey and Foster at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico. Like a lot of stuff by Sagan, Contact does an amazing job of dramatizing this scientific moment we’re in, where we’ve sketched out a decent portion of the cosmos, and figured out a lot of the big questions, except for this really big one about whether or not we’re alone. And that’s a moment we might be living in for a very long time.
Megan: I love that way of thinking about it, Ross: Contact gets at the wonder stuff by making its viewers, literally, wonder. That was one of my favorite things about Contact, too, its cheesiness notwithstanding: its ambivalence, not in a way that suggested creative cowardice or moral hedging, but rather in a way that suggested that there are some things that we simply can’t know—at least not yet. And while the contact moment in this case was animated by the tensions that had run throughout the movie—faith versus science, heaven versus something more earthbound—it refused to take sides or even, finally, to frame them as sides to begin with. All things can be true, Contact insists. It’s not faith versus science; it’s faith and science.
We tend to think of contact stories as futuristic, the stuff of spacesuits and worm holes and intergalactic travel. What I love about Contact, though—and what I love about Arrival, and what I will, under duress, mildly appreciate about Close Encounters—is that they understand the narrative intimacy of the contact moment. Whatever we find out there, whenever we find it, that will change not just humanity’s future, but also humans’ sense of our own past. There’s a reason so many of these stories deal, in some way, with notions of circular time: Contact is a matter of our history as much as it is a matter of our destiny.
It seems appropriate, in that sense, to close this out not just with Sagan’s wonderfully accommodating ambivalence about that encounter, but also with the insight of Jill Tarter, the astronomer many consider to be the inspiration for Contact’s fictional heroine, Ellie Arroway: “We, all of us,” Tarter says, “are what happens when a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from.”
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