Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 38

The Pirelli Calendar Shows Fashion Trying to Catch Up

The Pirelli Calendar was created in 1962, when an enterprising advertising executive in London, Derek Forsyth, was pondering ways to boost sales for an Italian tire company. At the time, “girlie” calendars featuring women in various states of undress were popular among mechanics and car manufacturers. Forsyth’s idea was to class the format up, bringing fashion models and respected photographers together to produce an artier advertisement for the Pirelli brand.

The Pirelli calendar became a hit, unexpectedly uniting the worlds of auto manufacturing and high fashion. But it also became a way for photographers to break new artistic ground, free of edicts from magazine editors or clothing companies. The calendar’s goal (after selling tires, naturally), was to capture shifting cultural trends. “‘The Cal,’” Pirelli explains on its site, “aspired to be a sign of changing times.”

This year’s calendar, shot by Peter Lindbergh, presents itself as a similarly aspirational and inspirational work. Lindbergh photographed 14 Hollywood actresses (and one Russian academic, presumably for diplomatic reasons), most of whom are over 40. He captured them wearing minimal hair and makeup, in an artistic decision he described as “a cry against the terror of perfection and youth.” Lindbergh’s images are striking: His unretouched models, including Helen Mirren (71) and Julianne Moore (55) radiate poise, confidence, and peace with their physical selves. But the muted fanfare they’ve received mostly signals how much fashion as an industry—from the Pirelli Calendar to Vogue—has fallen behind when it comes to breaking new ground for women. Rather than trailblazing new standards for beauty, the 2017 calendar is a sign that institutions that were once at the forefront of new trends and movements are now struggling to catch up.

Peter Lindbergh / Pirelli

One symbol of the industry’s recent conservatism is Ashley Graham. The 28-year-old plus-sized model has been in the business for more than 15 years, and has appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated and in campaigns for Nordstrom, Macy’s, Bloomingdale’s, and Liz Claiborne. She’s the official face of Lane Bryant lingerie. In November, she was honored with a Barbie doll in her image. This week she was announced as the January cover star of British Vogue.

That it’s taken this long for fashion’s most prestigious title to put a plus-sized model on its cover—for Vogue to catch up with Liz Claiborne—is a sign of how dramatically the cultural zeitgeist has changed. (American Vogue has never featured a plus-sized model on its cover, although Italian Vogue featured the models Robyn Lawley, Tara Lynn, and Candice Huffine on its cover in 2011.) It also points at how the internet is redefining standards of beauty more quickly than might ever have been imagined.

In the 1960s, it was Pirelli propagating cultural shifts that made many uncomfortable.The first calendar, shot in 1963 by Terence Donovan featuring lovely but normal-looking women posing next to Pirelli products was a flop, so much so that Pirelli opts to omit it from its official history of “The Cal.” The following year, the photographer Robert Freeman ditched the tire motif altogether and simply took pictures of models in soft focus on a beach. Amid the emerging free-love movement, the calendar signaled a new openness toward sexuality in fashion. (Around the same time, the photographer Helmut Newton was producing increasingly eroticized work for French Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.)

In 1966, an image from Pirelli’s calendar of a woman wearing underwear was deemed so racy at the time that the Vatican complained to the Italian brand. In 1971, Francis Giacobetti included topless women in the calendar for the first time. Although his images seem like dubious representations of female empowerment in retrospect, at the time they were emblematic of changing attitudes about sexuality. While in the first half of the 20th century, eroticism was rarely explicit in fashion, in the 1960s, it became “a playful way of flaunting new moral codes that mocked the hypocrisy of the Establishment,” Rebecca Arnold writes in Fashion, Desire, and Morality. In rejecting the oppression of morality, sexualized images were “a refreshing alternative to the controlled grooming of 1950s couture.”

In 1972, Sarah Moon became the first female photographer to shoot the Pirelli Calendar, and her concept was light years away from Giacobetti’s headless, hypersexualized women. Once again, the Pirelli Calendar was seeking to distinguish itself by subverting expectations about sexuality, right at the vanguard of second-wave feminism. In 1987, Terence Donovan returned to shoot his second calendar for the company, choosing to use only black models. At the time, only two black women had ever appeared on the cover of British Vogue.

Since the ’90s, though, the Pirelli Calendar has mostly reflected an industry still mired in restrictive, eurocentric ideas about what beautiful women look like, and who they should appeal to. Between 1990 and 2015, only two women were hired as photographers, Annie Leibovitz and Inez van Lamsweerde. Meanwhile, movements to broaden the fashion industry’s standards of beauty seemed to stall. In 2014, 22 percent of the models in New York Fashion Week were women of color. As body positivity movements gained traction with campaigns like #AskHerMore and #EffYourBeautyStandards, fashion magazines and houses seemed increasingly at odds with public perceptions about beauty.

But in 2016, the calendar (once again) made a dramatic shift. Shot by Annie Leibovitz, it featured women chosen for their accomplishments rather than their physical appearance. All were fully clothed with the exception of the comedian Amy Schumer, who posed in her underwear, and the tennis star Serena Williams, seen from behind in an image that expressed her physical power. Many of the other models—Agnes Gund, Fran Lebowitz, Patti Smith—were over 60. Pirelli seemed to be recognizing increasing awareness, especially among young women, that standards propagated by the industry tend to be not just unrealistic, but sluggish to respond to their readers’ changing demographics.

Annie Leibovitz / Pirelli

“The Pirelli pivot seems to give real substance to the theory that we are at a flexion point in the public objectification of female sexuality,” Vanessa Friedman wrote in The New York Times. The question, Friedman wondered, was whether Pirelli’s decision to dramatically shake up its format was “an example of calculated exploitation of a social trend, a clever attempt to profit from the spirit of the age or a more permanent commitment to change.”

Whichever it was, it was undoubtedly a savvy marketing strategy. The costs of producing each Pirelli Calendar have been estimated at around $2 million, versus the $300 to $350 million in free advertising that the calendar offers the brand. The more consequential the changes to the calendar, the more publicity for Pirelli. But the 2017 calendar, in showing beautiful women without makeup, clambers aboard a train that’s very much in motion. In early 2014, after the actress Kim Novak was criticized for her barefaced appearance at the Academy Awards, a number of social-media users began posting images of themselves without makeup in protest. This makeshift movement somehow turned into #nomakeupselfie, a hashtag encouraging women to post makeup-free pictures of themselves online while donating money to Cancer Research, a British charity. The campaign raised £8 million in six days.

Meanwhile, in a Lennyletter article earlier this year titled “Time to Uncover,” the singer Alicia Keys announced that she was eschewing makeup after becoming frustrated with “how much women are brainwashed into feeling like we have to be skinny, or sexy, or desirable, or perfect.” She concluded it by writing, “I don’t want to cover up anymore. Not my face, not my mind, not my soul, not my thoughts, not my dreams, not my struggles, not my emotional growth. Nothing.” After the essay was published, a number of public figures posted their own makeup-free photos, and when Keys appeared on The Today Show, her interviewers, Tamron Hall and Al Roker, removed their own makeup live on air.

In furthering Keys’s message—that women should be appreciated for all aspects of their selves, not merely their physical appearances—Pirelli is hoping a movement that’s long been felt on social media and among women themselves can turn into good branding, even for a company that’s historically benefitted from the promotion of impossible beauty ideals. It’s an institution acknowledging that many women reject long-held benchmarks for what they should be aspiring to. So while Lindbergh’s images of Lupita N’yongo, Charlotte Rampling, Nicole Kidman, and Zhang Ziyi capture a sea change that’s very much ongoing, they’re also a sign that in recent years, fashion as an industry has played a very small part in revolutionizing the way women see themselves.

Always Shine’s Sobering Female Rivalry

Sophia Takal’s new film Always Shine is an effective, tense psychological thriller with deceptively low stakes: the fate of a friendship between two actresses, played by Caitlin Fitzgerald and Mackenzie Davis. Beth (Fitzgerald) is more pliant and flirty, jovial at auditions, and seems to be booking many more roles than Anna (Davis), who is far blunter and more eager to call out gender discrimination in their line of work. Things between Beth and Anna begin to disintegrate as they take a weekend vacation together. Takal turns their banal-seeming conversations into a thrill ride, questioning the ways women perform for each other, and the people around them, in an oppressively sexist industry.

Always Shine, which is in limited release now and debuts on VOD Friday, is the latest project in a career year for Davis, who (unlike her character) is one of Hollywood’s most intriguing new stars. Curiously enough, her biggest roles in 2016—in Always Shine, the AMC tech drama Halt and Catch Fire, and the new season of Netflix’s Black Mirror—involve tumultuous but layered female friendships, a still-uncommon theme in mainstream pop culture. In October, Davis appeared in “San Junipero,” the most widely praised installment of the third season of Black Mirror, as the awkward, lovelorn Yorkie. The rare Black Mirror episode to present a slightly hopeful take on the future of technology, “San Junipero” saw Yorkie navigating a virtual world in search of love, then struggling to reconcile her new connection with the free-spirited Kelly (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) with her much more circumscribed lifestyle in the real world.

Also hinging on a complex relationship between two women is Halt and Catch Fire, which aired its brilliant third season this year. Davis’s first major role was playing the lovable and deeply frustrating programmer Cameron Howe, who attempts to navigate the burgeoning tech scene of the ’80s—and all of its institutional sexism—with her business partner Donna (Kerry Bishé). Their relationship has its share of conflicts, though they don’t arise over a man, or some manufactured twist in the women’s love lives. Instead, Halt and Catch Fire takes care to make their differences of opinion feel organic, rooted in their wider views of the world. “There’s nobody getting knifed,” Davis told me. “It’s people breaking your trust, small moments becoming a huge deal.”

A much more avant-garde work, Always Shine puts an edgier spin on a similar dynamic—an intense female friendship—with a script drawn from real-life experience. “[The film’s writer/director] Sophia Takal is extremely open ... about her vulnerabilities and her demons, her competitiveness, her jealousy, things she feels insecure about,” Davis said.“It felt embarrassing how much I connected to [the script]. I felt like someone was portraying me in a very honest way.” The movie has the same nightmarish feel as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, in which the identities of both female leads begin to meld as their personal rivalry grows. Takal’s script builds its psychological tension around the anxieties Beth and Anna perceive in each other; she plays with, and subverts, the appearances actresses often have to maintain as they try to break into the film industry.

In Always Shine, the effort to project the right image becomes a dark competition.

“The sort of poisonous female friendship that’s depicted in Always Shine, it’s not the cause of the movie. It’s the result of an environment that tells women that they’re supposed to be a certain way or they have failed,” Davis said. “They’re constantly trying to fit themselves into smaller, tighter, more perfect boxes. And when they see somebody doing it effortlessly, it’s this indictment against them for not doing it the right way. And I have absolutely had that experience, and I knew Sophia had.”

As with so much art of the moment, it’s hard not to draw parallels to the election. For Davis, the ideas about gender and social expectations that undergird Always Shine were magnified in media coverage of the former presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. “She’s been criticized her entire public life for being too much or not enough in any direction, and there’s no place she can land where it’s just silent,” Davis said of the critiques Clinton received for her image, including how much or how little she was smiling. “There are thousands of politicians that don’t have to receive the level of ... vitriol that she does.”

In Always Shine, the effort to project the right image becomes a dark competition. As Beth and Anna vie for attention both from Hollywood executives and from the patrons of a local bar near their weekend getaway, their interactions become malicious. “I think it’s cool to make [their dynamic] as active and dangerous as Sophia makes it, instead of this purely internal experience of trying to adjust and exercise in a different way,” Davis said. “There are so many off-limits things for women, and finding that narrow groove in which it’s okay for you to exist, is going to cause someone to explode. And this movie is about that explosion.” Throughout her burgeoning career, Davis has been unafraid to reckon with those kinds of explosion and their aftermath—and Always Shine is one of her boldest achievements yet.

François Hollande's Legacy

When President François Hollande announced Thursday that he would not be seeking reelection in next year’s presidential contest, he began first by outlining all the ways in which France has progressed since he took office in May 2012. It’s for his successes— from reducing unemployment to legalizing same-sex marriage— that the 62-year-old Socialist president would likely want to be remembered.

But such achievements won’t define his presidency, at least not alone. While he could be remembered as one of only two Socialist politicians to ever be elected to the French presidency (the other was François Mitterrand), he could also go down in history as being the least popular French president since World War II, hobbled by a 4 percent approval rating, campaign pledges that weren’t delivered, and a stream of deadly terrorist attacks that hit France seemingly at will over two years.

Dr. David Lees, a researcher on French politics at Warwick University in the U.K., told me that while it’s often expected that presidents lose popularity over the course of their term, the reason Hollande’s satisfaction rating dropped so low could be because he didn’t deliver the promises he made on the campaign trail.

“Change, or le changement, was the explicit title of his campaign,” Lees said. “He was there to be real change in the Socialist way, to introduce meaningful, left-wing reform. But he was also there to be real change from Nicolas Sarkozy and his ostentatious, extravagant lifestyle—to be more of a “Monsieur Normal.”

In many ways, Hollande did bring change. Early in his term, he introduced a 75 percent tax on companies paying salaries of more than 1 million euros. As one of Hollande’s flagship campaign promises, the passage of the “millionaire’s tax” in December 2013 was a political victory for the Socialist government. And though it led to the high-profile departure of Gérard Depardieu, the French actor who in opting to avoid being taxed bid adieu to his French citizenship and moved to Belgium (he has since become Russian), the majority of French people favored the reform.

Socially, Hollande achieved another major campaign promise when in May 2013 his government approved a law allowing same-sex couples to marry and adopt children, putting France well ahead of many other Western countries.

“It seemed as though he were trying to help ordinary people,” Lees said of Hollande’s early years.

Not all of Hollande’s reforms were received as warmly. In his effort to address the effects of the 2008 financial crisis, Hollande oversaw the passage of two highly unpopular economic reforms. The first, dubbed the “Macron Law” after its chief architect Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister and current independent presidential candidate, was passed in July 2015 in an effort to boost economic growth, and included measures permitting businesses to open some Sundays of the year, as well as allow companies and workers to negotiate more flexible pay and working hours. The second round of reforms, which were imposed by decree in July, aimed to make it easier for businesses to employ people and gave employers more leeway to negotiate hours, wages, and time off—reforms that were met with widespread protests.

“He failed to put more money in the pockets of ordinary people, and that’s really what you expect from a Socialist president,” Lees said.

But perhaps the most memorable aspects of Hollande’s presidency will be not his policy decision, but the events that were seemingly out of his control. Several high-profile terrorist attacks on French soil plunged the country into a state of emergency it has yet to emerge from. They began in January 2015 with the deadly attack on Charlie Hebdo, the French satirical magazine, and ended, most recently, with the attack on Bastille Day (July 14) in Nice. In between, there were stabbings, beheadings, and a high-profile attack in Paris in November 2015 that killed 130 people. In all, more than 200 people were killed in all the attacks.

“Every time he appeared to respond to the attacks, there was never any sense that the Socialist government really knew what he was doing,” Lees said. “There wasn’t a clear plan of action—a sense that we’re going to look at the issue of integration, the issue of how Islam is taught in French schools, or how we can try and improve things with regard to making sure that immigrants from across the world feel welcome in France. It was in many ways the opposite.”

Indeed, it was his call following the Paris attacks to strip convicted terrorists holding dual citizenship of their French nationality that Hollande identified as his “sole regret” in his public address Thursday, a move he said thought would unite the people, but instead “divided us.”

Even Hollande’s promise of appearing as being “Monsieur Normal” faded following numerous revelations into his personal life. In January 2014, the president was revealed to be having an affair with Julie Gayet, the French actress, after Closer magazine published photos of the French president waiting outside the actress’s apartment on a scooter, donning a motorcycle helmet. Though his approval rating paradoxically rose by two points after the allegations were made, only to plummet again thereafter, the tryst lumped him in with past presidents like Sarkozy and Mitterand, both of whom had well-chronicled love-lives.

Ultimately, Hollande’s decision to remove himself from contention for the Socialist nomination could help save the Socialist party, which some polls projected could come in at a disqualifying fourth place behind Macron in the first round of next year’s presidential contest. Hollande stepping down opens the door for his prime minister, Manuel Valls, to run to succeed him at the head of the Socialist ticket, but whether or not he stepped down soon enough for Valls to run in next month’s primary is unclear. Should Valls decide to run, he’ll have to declare his candidacy before December 15.

Regardless of how next year’s election plays, Lees said Hollande will likely be remembered for le changement that never came.

“He could have been brilliant,”” Lees said. “He could have been really, really good.”

How Gold Went From Godly to Gaudy

For a would-be populist hero, the optics were jarring. During his recent 60 Minutes interview, Donald Trump perched on a throne-like gilded Louis XV chair—just one of the many gold-plated objects the president-elect surrounds himself with, from his plane to his apocryphal toilet. Indeed, critics and designers alike have wondered if he will turn the White House into the Gold House—a replica of one of his defunct casinos or his Trump Tower penthouse.

Gold has always been the color of absolute power and those who aspire to it, as a sumptuous new exhibition at The Frick Collection illustrates. Pierre Gouthière: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court (on view until February 19) has been in the works for five years, though the curator Charlotte Vignon told me that, as of the November 8 election, “the timing is right” to reexamine the aesthetics and politics of gold décor. As a symbol of wealth, power, and eternity, gold inspired centuries of bloody wars and dangerous mining endeavors. But in more recent history, its meaning has become more complex: Its association with dictators, celebrities, and artists has also transformed it into a sign of excess, corruption, and cultural domination.

A detail from a marble and gilt bronze side table (Michael Bodycomb)

Because of its high cost and its unearthly beauty, gold has always had a strong association with royalty. In ancient Egypt, gold was reserved for deities and Pharaohs, who were considered to be gods among men. The biblical Book of Kings describes how “all the household articles in the palace” of King Solomon were pure gold. The “household” part is key: Any ruler can have a gold crown, but performing quotidian tasks such as eating, sleeping, sitting, and, especially, defecating on gold takes luxury to a whole new level.

The modern history of gold décor begins with King Louis XIV, who revived the ancient practice of gilding, or applying a thin gold veneer to objects. In addition to beautifying, gilding protects against corrosion, and, in some cases, has even enabled objects to pass for solid gold. But unlike pure gold or delicate gilt plaster or wood, gilt metals—particular bronzes—are durable materials, making them suitable for objects that need to function as well as shine, like clocks. Gold and gilding were crucial to enhancing Louis’s image as the self-professed Sun King—an Apollo bringing light to an unenlightened world.

Upon assuming absolute power in 1661, Louis began transforming a humble brick hunting lodge in the swamps of Versailles into the greatest palace in Europe. To fill its 700 rooms, he appointed a furniture czar, explaining that “there is nothing that indicates more clearly the magnificence of great princes than their superb palaces and their precious furniture.” Versailles became a showplace for the French furniture industry’s finest examples of gilded wood and bronze. Far from being cold and static, their gleaming surfaces danced in candlelight and firelight, maximizing available illumination with the help of with priceless mercury-backed mirrors and rock-crystal chandeliers, an effect that the art historian Mimi Hellman called “the aesthetics of the glint” in the book Paris: Life and Luxury in the 18th Century.

It was a look so unique, so self-aggrandizing, that it granted the king a kind of material immortality. “You haven’t seen anything if you haven’t seen the pomp of Versailles,” the Vicomte de Chateaubriand remarked in his memoirs after a visit to the palace in the 1780s. “Louis XIV is still there.” Commoners, too, sought to distinguish themselves in the eyes of posterity by collecting gilt bronzes, as the 18th-century journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier wryly observed in his Tableau de Paris: “Every man may tell himself, during his lifetime: These bronzes and pictures which have cost me so much, and which I hide from curious eyes, will serve as evidence, after my death, for judgment of my tastes.”

“It makes sense that people looking for absolute power would continue to associate themselves with that kind of interior.”

If Louis XIV promoted the art of gilding, Pierre Gouthière perfected it in the mid-18th century. According to legend, his gilt bronzes imitated gold so perfectly that Marie-Antoinette herself was fooled. Scholars are still debating whether these gold-plated objects were intended to deceive, or considered prestigious in their own right. Vignon argued that what gilt bronze lacked in intrinsic value it made up for in skilled and costly labor. Sculpting models, which were then cast, chased, gilded, and polished, was a time-consuming and technically challenging process. “At that time, these objects were more than just trappings of power,” Vignon told me. “They were cutting edge, they were original, they were interesting—like the latest Apple phone.”

In 1767, Gouthière was appointed gilder to King Louis XV. His work was so heavily in demand that he managed to extract commissions from both of the rival factions at court, united respectively around the king’s mistress, Madame Du Barry, and his granddaughter-in-law, Marie-Antoinette. The Frick exhibition reunites a monogrammed gilt bronze window knob that Gouthière made for the Du Barry’s Salon en Cul-de-Four at Louveciennes with Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s series The Progress of Love, painted for the same room. But, as Vignon pointed out, “when the painter Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun wrote about her visit to Louveciennes 20 years later, it wasn’t the paintings she remembered; it was the chimneypieces and the gold locks on the doors.” That is, objects crafted by Gouthière.

When did gold become gaudy? The work of Gouthière and his contemporaries was considered modern and tasteful, not garish and over-the-top. “When you read the descriptions of Gouthière’s mounts in catalogues of the time, they talked about taste and elegance,” Vignon told me, adding that these merchants were not just trying to justify Gouthière’s high prices, but also celebrating his mastery of his craft. Louis XVI acquired several examples of Gouthière’s work for the national art collection, in recognition of their lasting value. He could not have known that the rich culture of craftsmanship and patronage that produced them was about to disappear forever.

Knob for a French window (Th. Hennocque)

Rather than going out of style, the taste for all that glitters became frozen in time with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. “[Gold] became a cliché, very soon after the Revolution,” Vignon said. “These objects became symbolic of a time of absolute power and an elitist society—so much so that it ended in a bloody revolution. It makes sense that people looking for absolute power would continue to associate themselves with that kind of interior.”

Indeed, the gilded “Louis Style” became part of the decorative vocabulary of 19th-century imperialism and 20th-century despotism, as regimes of questionable legitimacy sought to bolster their cultural and political authority through elaborate visual propaganda. (In 2011, The Telegraph dubbed the look “Dictator Chic.”) Saddam Hussein built dozens of grandiose palaces of marble, crystal, and gold leaf, which Vanity Fair cheekily compared to Trump’s similarly decorated properties. People have been quick to point out that Muammar Gaddafi, too, shared Trump’s taste in gilded chairs. But it’s not just dictators and despots who adhere to the gold standard; even the Elysée Palace, the official residence of the President of the French Republic, is filled with 18th-century gilded furniture today. “It seems to be a huge paradox about the representation of power,” said Vignon, who was born in Paris. “French power is still expressed in the language of ancien régime!”

One man’s Versailles is another man’s Graceland.

In popular culture, entertainers like Elvis “The King” Presley and Liberace, the “King of Bling,” used the power of gold to project an air of royalty, untouchable and otherworldly. Elvis’s 141 gold records paled beside his 24-karat gold-plated piano, his gold-trimmed Cadillac, and his $10,000 gold lamé suit. Liberace, too, had a gold disco ball of a suit to match his glittery gold Bradley. And the artist Jeff Koons chose rococo-style gilded porcelain as the medium for his deliberately kitschy life-sized statue of Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop,” and his chimp, Bubbles. Fittingly, the piece was displayed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 2008.

The more-is-more vibe of the 1980s—when Trump Tower was built—brought a fresh revival of the ornate 18th-century style, epitomized in fashion by designers like Christian Lacroix, John Galliano, and Vivienne Westwood and in interiors by Angelo Donghia, Trump’s decorator. It’s an aesthetic Trump has clung to in his homes and hotels, even as fashion has moved on to minimalism and industrialism and beyond. “I think Trump is using objects like that to express power, but without taste and refinement,” Vignon said. In the 18th century, she added, gold furnishings “were not only luxury objects. They were also an expression of cutting-edge craftsmanship. When it is not new and it is only an expression of power, it’s not interesting.”

A vase (Joseph Godla)

Of course, tackiness is in the eye of the beholder; one man’s Versailles is another man’s Graceland. But men (and women) who would be the Sun King should remember the cautionary tale of another king, the mythical Midas who greedily wished that everything he touched would turn to gold. Trump, for his part, is aware of the story: His father once bragged about his son that “everything he touches turns to gold,” and Trump has made that boast his brand, even titling one of his books The Midas Touch.

Of course, the fictional King Midas came to realize that his golden gift was actually a curse. (Elvis came to a similar conclusion about his beloved gold Cadillac, putting it into storage because it was so impractical to drive.) In Ovid’s version of the story, Midas begs the gods to take back his power, only to get saddled with a pair of ass’s ears instead. In Aristotle’s version, Midas dies of starvation. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s telling, Midas accidentally turns his beloved daughter into a gold statue. But it was Gouthière, the man with the Midas touch, who gave the legend its most chilling twist; he once designed a vase with handles fashioned from the golden visage of Midas himself.

Will the Far-Right Triumph in Austria?

Austrians will vote Sunday in an election that could propel the far right to the country’s highest office for the first time since World War II.

The vote is a rerun of an election in May that was won by the tiniest of margins by Alexander Van der Bellen, the 72-year-old independent candidate backed by the Green Party, who defeated Norbert Hofer, the 45-year-old presidential candidate of the far-right Freedom Party. Hofer had been favored to win, but Van der Bellen triumphed by 31,026 votes, or 0.6 percentage points. His victory was attributed to the 750,000 postal votes that were cast in the election. Two weeks later, the Freedom Party, citing a “massive number of irregularities and mistakes,” said it would appeal the result. It alleged that postal ballots in 94 out of Austria’s 117 districts were opened before rules permitted their unsealing, and that they were counted by people who weren’t authorized to do so. In July, Austria’s Constitutional Court upheld that appeal and annulled the result. The court found that though rules had been broken in a way that could have influenced the results, there was no proof the vote count was manipulated. The election was rescheduled for October 2, but the vote was postponed when it was discovered in September that the glue on the postal ballots wasn’t sticking. A new date was fixed for the election: Sunday, December 4. Polls show a tight race this time around, too.

Austria hasn’t had a president since July 8, when Heinz Fischer stepped down. Although the post is largely ceremonial, it does serve some important purposes: It can influence the formation of a new government and even move to dismiss an existing government. That’s where a Hofer victory can be pivotal. The Freedom Party is ahead in most polls for the parliamentary elections, which must be held before the end of 2018. If it wins, the far-right will have a hold on Austria’s political system, upending the control that the center-right and center-left have had on the country since the end of World War II.

But the consequences could stretch beyond Austria. The old European political order, founded on the ruins of war and based on open borders and free trade, is under threat from a far-right, anti-immigrant, anti-globalization alliance stretching through the continent. Indeed, Hungary, which borders Austria, has its own far-right leader; Netherlands may get its own, as well; and there is a slim possibility next year that a far-right president emerges in France and a far slimmer one that a far-right chancellor emerges in Germany. Donald Trump’s election victory in the U.S. has also boosted the Freedom Party. Hofer told the The New York Times that Trump’s victory has “loosened” the stigma in Austria against voting for his party, which was founded in the 1950s by former Nazis. Indeed, writing in the Times this week, Robert Misik, a journalist and author, noted that the Freedom Party is “a potential role model for the new European right.”

But, as Misik and the polls point out, Van der Bellen still has a chance. Last week he posted on Facebook an appeal from an 89-year-old woman identified only as Gertrude. The woman, a resident of Vienna, said she was a Holocaust survivor, and compared the political tone in Austria to conditions faced by Jews under the Nazis.  

“The thing that bothers me the most is the denigration of others, the attempt to bring out people’s most base feelings instead of their decency,” she said. “I have seen this once before ... and it hurts and scares me.”

The video has garnered more than 3.2 million views, and has galvanized Austria’s left. Another motivating factor for the left: Trump’s victory in the U.S. Thousands of volunteers have turned out for Van der Bellen. But the retired professor of economics has his own detractors. He is seen as a divisive figure because of his views on a border-free Europe that should accommodated migrants, and because he quit the center-left Social Democrats and joined the Greens in the 1990s. Indeed, ahead of his victory in the May election, Van der Bellen, the child of a Russian father and an Estonian mother who had fled Stalin’s purges, pleaded with voters: “I ask all those who don’t like me but perhaps like Hofer even less to vote for me.”

Austrians will let the world know Sunday whom they dislike less.

Keith Ellison and the Battle for the Democratic Party

Deciding who will chair a political party probably isn’t the most effective place to fight for the soul of that party. Did Reince Priebus or any of the people who supported his run for Republican National Committee chair foresee president Trump? But DNC chair is the slot that’s open now, so that’s where Democrat are hashing out their differences.

Almost all of the pressures on and contradictions within the party can be projected onto Keith Ellison, the U.S. representative from Minnesota, who announced his bid for the spot shortly after the disastrous election for Democrats. That follows several years of disastrous cycles for the party—despite President Obama’s two terms, Democrats have been pummeled at the state and national levels—and the party stewardship of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, which is widely viewed as shiftless and failed. With the Democratic field for 2020 diffuse and enigmatic, the chairmanship is one place to fight the battle.

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The central disagreement within the Democratic Party is being described as a debate between economic populism and identity politics, which were supposedly represented by the Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton campaigns, though that gloss is so simplistic as to be misleading. And of course that’s also not really the question: It’s less about which approach to pursue, than how to reconcile those two strains. The Democratic Party can’t afford to abandon the espousal of minority rights, but as the presidential race showed, it also faces difficulties winning a presidential race without appealing to white working-class voters. There’s also a generational struggle, between the aging, typically more centrist wing of the party and a younger, more liberal wing.

Ellison, who at 53 is part of the younger guard, sits at an interesting intersection for these issues. On the one hand, as a black man and one of two Muslims in the House, he can’t really avoid identity politics. (This is also the refrain from people of color, queer people, and others during the debate: We didn’t choose identity politics; we have no choice but to live them.) But Ellison is also an economic progressive and the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and he was an early and fervent endorser of Sanders’ presidential bid, back in the days when Sanders was struggling to gain supporters of color. (In a moment that has gone viral, he also predicted that Donald Trump could win the nomination when few others believed it.)

Ellison has already collected an hefty list of endorsements, ranging from middle-of-the-road Democrats—like outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and his presumptive successor, Chuck Schumer—as well as leaders of the party’s progressive wing, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Sanders. On Thursday, he released a platform for his run for DNC chair, which emphasizes a “focus on working people,” putting “accountability and inclusion” not far behind it. But the leading bullet points are about the nuts-and-bolts work of building grassroots support and revitalizing a party whose local parties have been battered.

In a speech last week, Sanders criticized what he portrayed as a myopic focus on identity issues among Democrats. “It’s not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’” he said. “No, that’s not good enough. What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies, to the fossil fuel industry.” The Vermont senator wasn’t saying it wasn’t important to have women and people of color in leadership; he was saying it was insufficient.

Ellison has tried to reconcile these two ideas in a slightly smoother fashion. “It’s about the money. A lot has been made about the white working class. I think we’d better take a look at the working class of all colors,” he said on the Keepin’ It 1600 podcast. For many young liberals and leftists, Ellison’s attempt to fuse these ideas may look like the future of the Democratic Party, fluent in both identity issues and progressive economics.

But the biggest impediment to Ellison winning might be his past. Critics are focusing on statements he made, particularly involving Israel and Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam. Ellison has said he was never a member of the Nation, but he was involved with the group, including helping to organize a Minnesota delegation to the 1995 Million Man March. He also defended Farrakhan, an open anti-Semite. He has also been critical of Israeli policy toward Palestinians.

These statements have been known for a while, and Ellison has apologized for them in the past. He said he should have looked into Farrakhan more closely and disavowed the leader once he had, and during his run for chair he has said that he supports the Democratic Party positions in favor of Israel and its right to self-defense, for a two-state solution, and against the Boycott-Divest-Sanctions Movement. For the most part, that seemed to satisfy the Jewish left. The progressive group J Street backed Ellison, and so did Schumer, a stalwart defender of Israel. The Anti-Defamation League issued a long, carefully worded statement, basically saying that Ellison needed to be very clear about distancing himself from past comments but that they took him at his word.

On Thursday, CNN published a report detailing more of Ellison’s past statements. One episode involved a speech by Stokely Carmichael, the civil-rights leader, at the University of Minnesota. The university’s president criticized Carmichael, then going by the name Kwame Ture, for suggesting collaboration between Nazis and Zionists. Ellison, in turn, defended Carmichael and his right to speak on campus: “The University's position appears to be this: Political Zionism is off-limits no matter what dubious circumstances Israel was founded under; no matter what the Zionists do to the Palestinians; and no matter what wicked regimes Israel allies itself with—like South Africa. This position is untenable.” That comment upset conservatives, although many on the right have spent the last year warning that liberal students trying to bar controversial speakers from college campuses posed a threat to free speech.

In addition, a tape emerged that is apparently of Ellison speaking in 2010, complaining that U.S. policy in the Middle East was too focused on Israel. “The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people,” he says in the tape. “A region of 350 million all turns on a country of 7 million. Does that make sense? Is that logic?”

In response, the ADL changed its mind. “Rep. Ellison’s remarks are both deeply disturbing and disqualifying,” CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. His words imply that U.S. foreign policy is based on religiously or national origin-based special interests rather than simply on America’s best interests” and added that they “raised the specter” of myths about Jewish control of the government. Ellison responded in an open letter that the audio had been “selectively edited and taken out of context” and restated his support for Israel.

Will this be enough to derail Ellison? It’s likely that younger Democrats as a whole, which is to say the party’s base going forward, are less concerned than the ADL. They tend to be less tied to Israel and more friendly to Palestinians, while Louis Farrakhan is a dim and distant figure, assuming they have any idea who he is, or what the Nation of Islam stands for. (The very oldest Millennials were 14 at the time of the Million Man March.)

Schumer, meanwhile, has not changed his mind.

"I stand by Rep. Ellison for DNC chair,” he said in an emailed statement. “We have discussed his views on Israel at length, and while I disagree with some of his past positions, I saw him orchestrate one of the most pro-Israel platforms in decades by successfully persuading other skeptical committee members to adopt such a strong platform. As C‎hair of the DNC he has committed to continuing to uphold that platform and to convince others that they support it as well.”

Is there anything Ellison could say to redeem himself in the eyes of critics for these comments, and if so, what it would be?

Even if he can find those words, or even if the current controversy is not enough to stop him, Ellison still won’t have a totally clear path to the chairmanship. For one, there’s more than one vision for changing the party, and Ellison may still focus too much on identity issues for some Democrats’ tastes—he’s also still a long way from the lunchpail economic liberalism of Tim Ryan, the Northeast Ohio congressman who unsuccessfully challenged Nancy Pelosi for the Democratic House leadership this week. Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment still carries some punch, as demonstrated by both Clinton’s nomination and Pelosi’s reelection as leader. Obama loyalists are also said to be uneasy about Ellison and seeking alternative candidates. Ellison could represent one future for the Democratic Party, but the current leaders aren’t necessarily ready to accept relegation to the past.

The Hamilton Mixtape, a Love Letter to a Love Story

Hamilton is likely destined to carry the word “influential” around with it for a long time—after all, it’s already influencing the 45th president. The Hamilton Mixtape, an official new album largely composed of Hamilton’s showtunes reinterpreted by pop and rap stars, underscores the remarkable scope of that influence. Contemporary American idols like Kelly Clarkson, Nas, Jimmy Fallon, Usher, John Legend, and Common have each now recorded loving tributes to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s loving tribute to the original American idols.

But The Hamilton Mixtape—an exuberant, taste-scrambling medley that swings between grinworthy and cringeworthy—also underlines how much of Hamilton’s novelty came from Miranda himself being influenced by pop culture. He cribbed from the flows of Nas, Busta Rhymes, and Queen Latifah; now they show up for him like proud parents. Most fascinating is the case of the standout ballad “Helpless,” which Miranda apparently modeled after Ja Rule/Ashanti hits of the early aughts. The Mixtape sees those two delivering an irresistible, lackadaisical take on the song, an inversion that reveals Miranda’s knack for reference: All along, the number about Alexander Hamilton’s young courtship subtly reminded certain listeners of their own young courtships—or at least of MTV images of carnival flirting.

The great revelation of The Hamilton Mixtape, in fact, is in how much it makes the musical sound like a love story. It’s of course a cliché by now to say that Hamilton injected messy humanity into the Founding Fathers myth, a cliché that the rapper Black Thought reprises cleverly in the Mixtape’s intro, “No John Trumbull.” Still, a lot of the commentary about the Hamilton phenomenon has focused on historical accuracy, bootstraps narrative, diverse casting, or political resonance. Turning Hamilton into a pop album, unsurprisingly, recenters the visceral qualities that made the thing successful in the first place: the ooey-gooey melodies and the lovey-dovey relationships. Rather than serving up the play’s gloriously overstuffed exposition anthems—“Alexander Hamilton,” “Aaron Burr, Sir,” “Yorktown (The World Turned Upside Down),” “Non-Stop”—the mixtape is anchored by tunes about husbands and wives, parents and kids, and deep personal yearning for improvement.

While few tracks match the cast album in emotional impact, many do shift emphases in refreshing ways, confirming these songs’ potential to live outside of a narrative. Usher’s “Wait for It” is breathier, hammier, smoother, and more radio-ready than the original. The father/daughter address “Dear Theodosia” shows up twice, first with Regina Spektor and Ben Folds tweeing it up (meh) and later with Chance the Rapper’s cracked falsetto turning it into a wrenching lullaby (prepare yourself). The internet has already used up its crying gifs for Kelly Clarkson’s bombastic version of the mournful “It’s Quiet Uptown.” Even bigger—though worse—is “Satisfied,” which despite distinctive performances by Sia and Queen Latifah has become the lurching Frankenstein monster its deft stage version was so miraculous for never becoming.

In the cast recording, the big romance-related twist of Hamilton’s life—America’s first political sex scandal—feels a bit like an extra puzzle piece thrown into the box. Here, though, it gets deeper treatment, providing a fuller glimpse into what the episode illuminated about Hamilton’s character and times. Jill Scott turns “Say No to This” to “Say Yes to This,” purring and cooing with panache as she imagines the mistress’s perspective. The rapper Dessa delivers “Congratulations,” a blistering diss track from Hamilton’s wife that was cut in the jump from Off-Broadway to Broadway. And Andra Day inflates the betrayal ballad “Burn” with a very current kind of nu-soul angst; you can imagine it fitting in on a dystopian YA movie’s soundtrack.

The Hamilton Mixtape shows how Hamilton’s feel-good giddiness isn’t just a mood—it’s a theme.

Even the songs that seem more political come with heavy doses of the personal. “My Shot” is retrofitted into rap-rock with all-new verses from a clutch of emcees, the first of whom, Black Thought, makes explicit how Hamilton’s childhood obstacles recall the black-youth experience today. “Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)” remixes the most iconic bit of the play’s dialogue into a pan-global crew anthem that gets across how immigration isn’t an abstract concept but one involving vibrant individuals, cuisines, cultures, and talents. For “Write My Way Out,” another new track, Miranda raps a verse about how childhood misfit anxiety has motivated his entire life. All of these songs suggest that the deeper, embedded romance of Hamilton and maybe even hip-hop in general is between people and their own sense of potential.

Sprinkled throughout the album are also demos for tracks than never made it onstage. The most intriguing of these is “Cabinet Battle 3,” in which Hamilton and George Washington’s advisers tartly debate a proposal to end slavery. The fact that Miranda wrote it and has now released it helps address criticism that Hamilton doesn’t reckon with the deepest failings of the Founding Fathers (though the fact that the outcome of the battle was to simply punt emancipation to another generation probably explains why the scene didn’t make the cut). In another song sketch, Miranda describes the horrifying struggle of Valley Forge; some of the details did end up in the musical, but over a far more rambunctious arrangement than Miranda originally had planned.

The wisdom of omitting those virtuous-bummer moments can now be debated, but obviously it make sense from a show-biz perspective: uplift sells. Yet The Hamilton Mixtape also shows how Hamilton's feel-good giddiness isn’t just a mood, it’s a theme: For all of the story’s tragic dimensions, Miranda’s creation is about love connecting people, connecting cultures, and connecting eras.

Trevor Noah Finds His Late-Night Voice

Tomi Lahren, the 24-year-old host of Tomi on the conservative cable network TheBlaze, feels like a pundit created by a computer algorithm, someone who primarily exists to say something provocative enough to jump to the top of a Facebook feed. She’s called the Black Lives Matter movement “the new KKK,” partly blamed the 2015 Chattanooga shootings on President Obama’s “Muslim sensitivity,” and declared Colin Kaepernick a “whiny, indulgent, attention-seeking cry-baby.” At a time when such charged political rhetoric feels increasingly like the norm, Lahren stands at one end of a widening gulf—which made her appearance on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah Wednesday night all the more fascinating.

In his first year at The Daily Show, Noah has struggled to distinguish himself in an outrage-driven late-night universe. He has sometimes seemed too flip about the failures of the country’s news media, something his predecessor Jon Stewart made a perennial target. Noah’s 26-minute conversation with Lahren, though, posted in its entirety online, set the kind of tone that Stewart frequently called for throughout his tenure. The segment never turned into a screaming match, but it also avoided platitudes and small-talk. Lahren was unapologetic about her online bombast and leaned into arguments that drew gasps and boos from Noah’s audience, but the host remained steadfastly evenhanded throughout. If Noah was looking for a specific episode that would help him break out in his crowded field, he may have finally found it.

Lahren first made a name for herself in 2015 with her commentary on the Chattanooga shootings for the network OAN. At the age of 22, she seemed poised to become a star who could appeal to young conservatives online, the kind of firebrand who could stick out in a social-media feed. “I care that our commander-in-chief is more concerned with Muslim sensitivity than the honor and sacrifice made by these Marines,” she said. In the same segment, she also somehow implicated President Obama’s actions on issues like climate change and universal healthcare in an act committed by a man diagnosed with bipolar disorder who was seemingly radicalized by online propaganda.

“Why are you so angry?” Noah asked Lahren as she sat down, referring to the biting tone she often uses in her broadcast. He seemed to be getting at other questions, too: Does anger like Lahren’s, delivered in bite-size, shareable video clips eagerly devoured by a certain segment of the population, exist only to grab their attention? Is it a more extreme example of the “Samantha Bee problem” that Ross Douthat claimed hurt the Clinton campaign—that overt activism was getting injected into previously mainstream areas of the media like late-night comedy? Noah has largely steered clear of giving lectures straight to the camera, perhaps because hosts like Seth Meyers and John Oliver have staked out that territory so well. In talking with Lahren, he seemed interested in going a more conciliatory, diplomatic route.

Still, Noah wasn’t afraid to challenge his guest, including on her widely criticized comment that the Black Lives Matter movement was the “next KKK” because of some violent anti-police rhetoric from isolated members of the movement. “Just because you say the thing doesn’t mean that’s what it stands for,” Noah said exasperatedly. “You’ve argued on your show, just because Donald Trump has KKK supporters doesn’t mean he’s in the KKK.” Indeed, minutes later she angrily refuted the idea that she or Trump belonged to the white supremacist alt-right, just because that group supported him.

In the wake of the 2016 election, even a bare minimum of respectful discourse stands out.

“Surely you understand the incendiary feeling of your comments, surely?” Noah pleaded. “It’s controversial, but I think there are some things that need to be said,” Lahren countered. Her point, it seems, is the foundation for so much in the factionalized world of social media-driven news. If something is controversial, is it defensible simply because it “needed” to be said? Her argument is rooted in the First Amendment, which Lahren kept referencing, but Noah remarked on some inconsistencies in her views on free speech. Lahren has criticized the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick for his kneeling protest during the national anthem—but Noah noted the parallels between Lahren’s professed right to criticize Kaepernick and Kaepernick’s right to not kneel.

Toward the end, Noah crystallized his point without having to yell it at the audience like some of his late-night peers: He tried to get a genuine answer from Lahren on a much more nuanced query relating to Kaepernick’s protest. “Here’s a black man who says, ‘I don’t know how to get this message across. If I march in the streets people say I’m a thug. If I go out and protest, people say it’s a riot. If I go down on one knee, it’s wrong,’” Noah said. “What is the right way, I’ve always wanted to know, what is the right way for a black person to get attention in America?” Lahren didn’t give a full answer, but Noah kept coming around to the same idea, trying to untangle the baffling contradictions he’s noticed in the country’s political discourse.

The interview was frustrating in that it produced few answers to the questions Noah and Lahren lobbed at each other. Every topic of conversation, from Black Lives Matter to immigration reform, ended with the pair politely agreeing to disagree. But in the wake of the 2016 election, even that bare minimum of respectful discourse stands out—as Lahren later said on Twitter, neither side resorted to name-calling, but on social media afterward, the personal insults began flying between each of their supporters. Noah’s approach was memorable both for how measured it felt and for how quickly it moved to more complicated topics. Even if the interview didn’t find much common ground, it was an encouraging, intelligent step forward for Noah as he charts a course for his show in the coming year.

The Re-Flowering: Charles Lloyd's Second Golden Age

When Charles Lloyd was 22, he quit a stable job teaching school in Los Angeles, dropped out of graduate school, and came to New York to try to make it as a working musician. Lloyd sometimes went to see the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins playing at the Village Vanguard, which was then, as now, the center of the jazz world. After a set, Lloyd could make his way through the dimly lit halls of the club, past the men’s room, to the dressing room, where Hawkins would be sitting and sipping scotch. The younger musician viewed the older man as a guru, a deity.

But Hawkins was an ailing god. Though he was barely in his mid-fifties then, Hawk’s salad days—his glorious tenure with Fletcher Henderson, his epochal recording of “Body and Soul”—were past him. Within a few years, he would be dead at 64, a casualty of too many scotches. Hawkins sounded beautiful but looked rough.

“I said to myself, this is a young man’s music,” Lloyd recalled. “I said, I hope that I won't have a saxophone in my mouth when I get that age.”

When Lloyd told me this story this spring, he did so fully aware of the irony of that earlier statement. Once a young man in a hurry in the jazz world, Lloyd now finds himself an old man with a saxophone still in his mouth. At 78, he has a patience and openness and discipline rare in a human being of any age; he is also, at the moment, in the midst of a quiet late-career renaissance. Earlier this year, he released I Long to See You, a collaboration with younger musicians that is one of 2016’s best jazz releases. (Lloyd is touring in support of that record this week and in the spring.) That follows on his equally, but very differently, outstanding 2015 record Wild Man Dance. The first is a restrained, outwardly mellow collection, while the second is a searching, swinging plaintive expedition. Together, they suggest that this music—jazz, avant-garde, whatever you call it—is very much an old man’s game, too.

This is one of many incongruities in Lloyd’s life. There was a time when Lloyd was a fiery, sharply dressed young man, hobnobbing with celebrities and sharing stages with the Grateful Dead and the Byrds and indulging in some of the same drugs they did. He sold huge quantities of records but divided critics, some of whom viewed him as a bit flashy. These days, his audience is a fraction of what it was, though it is still, by jazz standards, considerable. But Lloyd has become a critical favorite in the intervening decades. He also seems to have become more content, considered, deliberate.

It wasn’t a straightforward journey. Lloyd is happy to tell it, even if his retelling can be as elusive and knotty as the story itself. Some of what he says is perfectly clear, linear storytelling of the finest type, with oft-told anecdotes burnished to a shine. But these vignettes are interspersed with sayings and parables (“truth is one, sages call it by various names,” he told me twice), their meanings sometimes obscured. The effect is both soothing and a little disorienting. This is, as it happens, not a bad description of the effect of Lloyd’s music, either. A Lloyd group can stretch into free-jazz territory, but his melodies are often as hummable as a pop song.

Lloyd was born and raised in Memphis, which imparted to him a musical omnivorousness and a sense of spirituality. As a boy, he sometimes stayed with his grandparents on a farm in Mississippi, where he heard down-home Delta Blues pickers. In Memphis, his mother owned a large house where she would put up traveling musicians who couldn’t stay in the city’s segregated hotels, giving young Charles a chance to meet musicians like Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton.

“The thing about musicians is that growing up in the South, cross-pollination was such that we didn’t feel those lines of demarcation.”

Lloyd took up the saxophone at 9, and became comfortable playing in a range of styles and genres. The great jazz trumpeter Booker Little was a close childhood friend. Around town, Lloyd backed up bluesmen like Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King. Pianist Phineas Newborn took him under his wing. Phineas’s brother Calvin, a guitarist, was giving lessons to an aspiring young singer named Elvis Presley, who would hang out at the Newborn house. Lloyd played in bands that would gig across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas. On Sundays, a country band called the Snearly Ranch Boys played a matinee before the jazz started, and Lloyd became friends with the band’s pedal-steel player, Al Vescovo, who later became an ace session man in California.

“The thing about musicians is that growing up in the South, cross-pollination was such that musicians didn’t feel those lines of demarcation,” Lloyd said. “That’s always been something for me, I’ve always heard the deep spiritual quality in the music, because I was always a spiritual seeker since I was a little kid, and so it just followed my natural course.”

That course took Lloyd west to the University of Southern California for studies, and then eventually to New York, where he reconnected with his friend Booker Little. He’d been called to New York to take a spot in drummer Chico Hamilton’s band, where he replaced the legendary Eric Dolphy. With Hamilton, he met the Hungarian guitarist Gabor Szabo, who became a close collaborator. In 1964, he jumped to the band led by alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderley. The following year, he went out on his own as a leader, and recorded his classic record Of Course, Of Course. (One of the musicians on that session was the guitarist Robbie Robertson, who at the time was also backing Bob Dylan as a member of the Hawks.)

But Lloyd hit his stride when he formed a quartet with pianist Keith Jarrett, drummer Jack DeJohnette, and bassist Cecil McBee. John Coltrane was an obvious touchstone for the group, though Lloyd’s sound was not so raw or effusive; the pairing of Jarrett and DeJohnette created one of jazz’s all-time great rhythm duos. (They would reunite first as sidemen with Miles Davis a couple years later; now, they play in a long-running trio with the bassist Gary Peacock.) In 1967, the group traveled to the Soviet Union for a rare performance. “The chances are the Russians will be a little shook up,” The New York Times reported. “The Charles Lloyd Quartet roughly qualifies as an avant-garde group. There are other groups that play wilder and more concentrated jazz … but few are as free in their associations.”

Regardless of what the Soviets thought, young American fans were delighted. Forest Flower became a best-selling record in 1967, and Lloyd started appearing at rock venues like the Fillmore West on bills with bands like Jimi Hendrix and Cream. Viewed from today, Lloyd’s popular success is a little bit puzzling, not because the quality of the music is not high, but precisely because it is so high: How did music this challenging reach such a wide audience?

“There was absolutely no compromise,” recalled guitarist Bill Frisell, who as a teenager saw Lloyd play a concert in Denver, backed by Jarrett, drummer Paul Motian, and bassist Ron McClure. “They weren’t like trying to—they were just playing music, you know. They were going full force what they believed in.”

Critical reception was more mixed. In Harper’s, Eric Larrabee praised Lloyd as belonging to the “first rank of jazz musicians now playing,” and lamented that his status was higher in Europe—likening him to Herman Melville as an American artist with more honor across the Atlantic than in his own country. But the New York Times critic Martin Williams wasn’t so complimentary. “With wildly bushy hair, military jacket, and garishly striped bell bottoms, he looks like a kind of show-biz hippie,” Williams wrote. “He usually sounds like a kind of show-biz John Coltrane.”

Just as suddenly as Lloyd had risen to the heights of stardom, he disappeared, choosing to go into the wilderness, a period he now refers to as his “exile,” though it was a decision he made for his own good. “I got off the bus in ’69,” he said. “I just realized, the so-called fame or whatever came upon me as a young man—I wasn’t prepared for it. I began to medicate myself, because too much was coming at me in my mid-twenties there.”

Leaving New York, he first he went to Malibu, where he hung out with the Beach Boys (who appear on his ill-received 1971 release Warm Waters), Bob Dylan, and Peter Fonda. He eventually decamped farther, to Big Sur, living in near-seclusion. He hung out with Cat Stevens. He practiced Bach cello suites alone on saxophone. He swam in the ocean and hiked at night. (“I learned to get my Native American night vision back,” he said.) Lloyd never stopped playing music, but he seldom played publicly.

Two things helped to bring him back. The first was the arrival in Big Sur in the early 1980s of Michel Petrucciani, a brilliant young French pianist born with a rare genetic defect that made his bones brittle and kept him very short. Lloyd, impressed, went on tour to help launch Petrucciani, but then returned to the wilderness. Then in 1986, Lloyd nearly died from an intestinal ailment and in the aftermath decided to return to music full time. He made a series of well-regarded records for ECM Records before the venerable Blue Note label signed him, leading to Wild Man Dance and now I Long to See You. His return has brought him critical acclaim and greater recognition. In 2015, Lloyd was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, a sort of Nobel Prize for jazz musicians.

The fulcrum of I Long to See You is Lloyd’s collaboration with Frisell, who was inspired by seeing Lloyd decades ago. Frisell is a particular kindred spirit; like Lloyd, he is almost jarringly sincere. Both have been drawn to recording folk songs. Both men have a penchant for making music that is so superficially beautiful that it can disguise just how complex, thorny, and challenging it is.

“The first time we played he said, ‘I’m looking forward to singing together with you.’ That’s totally what it is, what it feels like. I can’t sing, my guitar is my voice, and it really feels like you’re just, hugging each other, something, singing,” Frisell said. “He’s definitely one of the greatest singers alive today, for sure.” (Interestingly, Lloyd noted something very similar: “I wanted to be a singer when I was 3 or 4. I didn’t have the voice for it. And then when I was about my 9, my mother finally broke down and got me a saxophone and then I could sing through it.”)

Frisell pointed out that Lloyd is content to sometimes barely improvise, sticking to a song’s main motif: “He’s really playing the melodies... not just getting through it so he can get to some other stuff.” But that shouldn’t be taken as reductive or simplistic. “This record, it’s deceptive,” Lloyd said. “It sounds like we’re playing some spirituals and some little songs like ‘La Llorona.’ But what we’re really doing is using all the benefits of what has been rich in our lives and what has the been the cumulative benefits living this experience to bring something forth that takes the individuality and transposes it in universality.”

I Long to See You includes several traditional tunes and revisits a couple of classic Lloyd compositions. There’s a cover of “Masters of War,” the Dylan tune that both Frisell and Lloyd have often played over the years, and guest spots by Norah Jones and Willie Nelson—the sort of big-name cameos that might seem gimmicky if not for Lloyd’s long history of collaboration and disregard for demarcation.

The instrumentation on the album is noteworthy, too: It’s the rare jazz recording to feature pedal steel. The band, dubbed the Marvels, is a mashup of Reuben Rogers and Eric Harland, two of the three members of the rhythm section in Lloyd’s current powerhouse quartet, with Frisell and Greg Leisz, a steel guitarist who has played with Frisell for nearly two decades, but is best known as a first-call session man for artists from Beck to Joni Mitchell to Bruce Springsteen. Pedal steel is not otherwise often found in jazz settings (“We invited Greg to come over and sit in because I didn’t know what it would be like,” Lloyd said), and the sound on the record is unorthodox, hearkening back to Lloyd’s friendship with Al Vescovo in Memphis.

Denis Balibouse / Reuters

Lloyd’s late career resurgence coincides with the rise of Kamasi Washington, another highly touted young tenor saxophonist whose appeal extends beyond traditional jazz audiences. Just as Lloyd played rock venues in the 1960s, Washington appears at festivals like Coachella. Appropriately enough, Lloyd mentioned Washington unprompted when I asked him what he’s listening to today. (Other names included Lucinda Williams, the alt-country songwriter who Lloyd notes hails from the same part of the country as him, and Greek singer Maria Farantouri, with whom he has played.) Then he mentioned another, perhaps surprising choice—a musician with whom Washington sometimes appears.

“You know what really moved me? I don’t know if you saw that Grammys thing, but Kendrick Lamar—those guys are coming over into our territory! Kamasi was out there with Snoop and those people. I was out there with Dylan and Jimi Hendrix and like that. Each young man does it in his lifetime,” Lloyd said. “That blew my mind!” he went on. “He was out there with a message to wake up and to realize the oneness of all this. And yet he had a jazz context.”

This musical omnivorousness, and eagerness for new experiences, is one of the traits that has persisted throughout Lloyd’s career, from his youth in Memphis through his exile in New York, although it’s rarer in musicians his age. Lloyd remains spry and vital, but he has seen many of his close friends and colleagues pass on, and views his own advancing years with equanimity.

“A lot of us come through here, we sing our song, nobody knows us, and we’re gone. I have to be prepared for that,” he says. But that preparation hasn’t bred complacency. “It's like the creator has a carrot dance with me on a stick, and the closer I get he says, ‘Not yet, Charles.’” Apparently the creator is holding out for years of more exploration from Charles Lloyd, too.

Jackie Enters a First Lady’s Worst Nightmare

It’s not unusual for a biopic to present a manicured, zoomed-in version of a true story—compressing a life for audience satisfaction, while boiling off the messier elements. In Jackie, that meta storytelling process is woven into the film’s substance. This is a movie broadly about Jacqueline Kennedy in the wake of her husband’s assassination, but it’s also about her efforts to shape the country’s perception of the event amid her deep trauma, and to leave out the uglier parts. Pablo Larrain’s new film is a wonderful subversion of one of Hollywood’s favorite genres: an illustration of public life that understands its inherent artifice.

“People like to believe in fairytales,” Jackie (Natalie Portman), intones to the journalist Theodore H. White (Billy Crudup). The film is structured around an interview she gave to White eight days after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, in which she was careful to mention her husband’s fondness for the musical Camelot, and firmed up the mythic legacy of his presidency. Jackie is a remarkably composed, artful piece of storytelling about storytelling, as an examination of the gauzy reputation of the Kennedys and the darker myth-making involved. It attempts to reckon with the inner life of an iconic figure while acknowledging just how much she worked to obscure it.

Larrain, a Chilean director, has some experience making movies about the selling of a story. His Oscar-nominated No (2012), about the 1988 plebiscite that ended Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, was shot like a 1980s news broadcast, on grainy magnetic tape and in a square aspect ratio. It had a time-capsule feel, but it brought the viewer inside the time capsule; it was a recreation that was more than fuzzy footage of protests on a vintage TV. Jackie has its own visual archness. Here, Larrain films his subjects in extreme close-up, often having them look right at the camera lens, as if they’re speaking straight to the viewer.

There’s a voyeurism to much of the film, which follows Jackie in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s death. For much of the first act, she’s still wearing the iconic pink Chanel suit from that day, covered in his blood. The audience sees her undress, shower, talk to her children, and over the following week, try to arrange a state funeral that conveys appropriate grandeur. They see her close relationship with Robert F. Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard), which vacillates between that of bickering siblings and that of an old married couple. She talks to a priest (John Hurt) about her fury with God over what she’s lost, including the children she miscarried. Viewers watch as her pain spills out behind closed doors, while she tries to carefully manage it in front of the cameras. Portman’s performance is, unsurprisingly, perfectly controlled at all times.

Throughout, Larrain frequently cuts back to Jackie’s interview with White, in which she calmly lays out what he can and can’t include in his reporting—reminding him that she’s never smoked a cigarette, for example, as she lights one up in front of him. The gap between how she was and how she wanted the world to see her is made thuddingly obvious, but the story she was promoting was obvious, too—not just her repeated mentions of Camelot (the title song of which, along with Mica Levi’s gorgeous minor-key score, is a recurring motif in the film’s soundtrack), but also in the massive funeral she planned.

Jackie is an emotionally vivid work, bright and flamboyant at times, but always told with compassion.

Larrain (working from a script by Noah Oppenheim) also pivots back to Jackie’s famous tour of the White House, broadcast live on television in 1962, which helped sell Americans on the major renovations she’d made to the building. There, viewers see Jackie first exercising her muscles for crafting a national narrative. The ostentatiousness of the redecoration was there to lift the whole nation’s spirits, to celebrate America’s historical legacy rather than hide it behind closed doors. Larrain leans into the royal opulence of the Kennedys while poking fun at it from afar.

This is a film about the difference between public and private grief, rendered on the biggest scale possible. But it’s also about the guilt contained therein, as Jackie struggles to reconcile the story she’s built with the very flawed man that she undoubtedly loved. Jackie is an emotionally vivid work, bright and flamboyant at times, but threaded through with compassion. Larrain’s wide-screen cinematography is designed to envelop the viewer in his characters’ mindsets and the stunning environment around them, so it’s be best to see Jackie on a large screen. Above all, what Larrain understands about his subject is that she would want this movie to overwhelm the viewer; he tells her tale with a certain slyness, and with all the majesty she would demand.