Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 47

A Lawsuit Accuses Black Lives Matter of Inciting a 'War on Police'

The father of a slain Dallas police officer filed a lawsuit Monday against leaders of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement for inciting what he called a “war on police” that led to the death of his son. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of Enrique Zamarripa, the father of Patrick Zamarripa, who died when a sniper killed five police officers in July during a protest in Dallas against the victims of police shootings.

Zamarripa is being represented by Larry E. Klayman, founder of Freedom Watch, a nonprofit that has used lawsuits to further far-right causes. Klayman is perhaps best known for suing Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, for her alleged role in the Benghazi attack; for suing President Obama over, among others things, gun-control legislation, immigration, and Ebola; and BLM and the Democratic Party for a “race war against police.”  

In this lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Texas, Klaymen writes that BLM, while claiming to be a social-justice organization, is a movement committed to “further violence, severe bodily injury and death against police officers of all races and ethnicities, Jews, and Caucasians,” and that BLM is, in fact, a “violent and revolutionary criminal gang.” But BLM, which emerged following several high-profile fatal shootings of unarmed black men by police, is an organization with a loose structure, and no official registration.

The defendant’s son, Patrick Zamarripa, was working a bike patrol July 7 during a rally through downtown Dallas to protest the shootings of several black men by police. Near the march’s end, gunman Micah Johnson opened fire on police with a rifle, killing five officers, including Zamarripa. The Navy veteran died, leaving behind a girlfriend, two children, and his parents.

“I want justice for my son,” the elder Zamarripa told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram Monday. “He served three tours in Iraq, he protected his country, and he protected everybody. And he gave up his life doing that.”

The lawsuit claims BLM inspired Johnson to violence, because, it says, the group has crafted a divisive message that teaches followers they are in a “civil war between blacks and law enforcement, thereby calling for immediate violence and severe bodily injury or death” to police. The lawsuit also references a comment made by then-police Dallas Chief David Brown, who said Johnson’s goal that day was to kill white people, especially white officers. BLM has denounced Johnson’s actions.

There is no local BLM chapter in Dallas, and the group that organized the rally, the Next Generation Action Network, was not listed as a defendant in the suit; its leader has denied knowing Johnson. The suit listed 13 defendants, among them: the Nation of Islam, the Reverend Al Sharpton, the New Black Panthers Party, George Soros (who has reportedly donated money to BLM organizers), as well as several activists connected to BLM, including DeRay McKesson, who unsuccessfully ran for Baltimore mayor.  

The lawsuit seeks $550 million in damages.

Johnson, who’d served in Afghanistan but returned home after being accused of sexual harassment, had expressed support for radical black-power groups, but even groups such as the People’s New Black Panther Party disavowed him, saying that though Johnson expressed interest in joining its ranks, he was turned away and blacklisted.

Jon Stewart’s Election-Eve Cameo Was a Dud

It’s been frequently noted over the last 18 months that this grueling election has missed Jon Stewart, the former Daily Show host who functioned both as America’s comedic conscience and one of its fiercest media watchdogs. In a cycle defined by the cable-news circus, Donald Trump’s willful subversion of political norms, and Stewart’s former roommate Anthony Weiner, Stewart’s absence has been palpable. While many of his successors are doing deft, interesting work, the mere prospect of Stewart returning to live TV on election eve was enough to get many to tune in to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Unfortunately, it turned out his trademark excoriating commentary was in short supply. Together, Stewart and Colbert used to be late night’s heftiest one-two punch. But since the latter transitioned to CBS’s Late Show, he’s left behind his more caustic humor in an attempt to appeal to a broader audience. A brief reunion with Stewart last July was more successful, promising the occasional return of Colbert’s dark, pugnacious super-pundit character from The Colbert Report, one perfectly suited to the celebrity-obsessed, cable news-driven Trump moment in politics. But on the eve of Election Day, Colbert broadcasted live on CBS with Stewart by his side, and the pair used that moment to perform ... a parody Broadway song about the importance of voting.

To be sure, Colbert’s whole approach to The Late Show hasn’t been particularly groundbreaking. He’s projected a gentle, empathetic persona, and has attempted to conduct meaningful, compassionate political interviews even when his subjects aren’t interested in meeting him in the middle. But even by that yardstick, a musical number complete with a soot-faced “orphan girl” in period dress was bland. His bandleader, Jean Baptiste, got in a funny dig about voter suppression efforts in black districts around the country, but largely, the bit was just Colbert doing high-kicks while singing about civic duty.

Then Stewart showed up in a red top hat, joking that voting isn’t that important. Reminded that Trump was the Republican nominee, he joined Colbert in urging people to the polls. The two repeated the “spit take” joke they did in Stewart’s July Late Show appearance, with Stewart feigning surprise at Trump’s success. After that, Javier Muñoz, the Broadway actor who recently replaced Lin-Manuel Miranda in Hamilton, stopped by for a brief performance that echoed Saturday Night Live’s clunky, serious cold open last weekend, where Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon dropped character to encouraged people to vote. There’s nothing wrong with tributes to democracy itself, but the bit made for an unsatisfying watch on the eve of such a critical election: It was just a vague, catch-all piece of comedy that lacked its stars’ most powerful weapon—their point of view.

Stewart almost had his own platform this year: After retiring from The Daily Show, he signed a deal with HBO to produce an “animated parody of cable news” that would have been geared more toward an online audience and premiere sometime in September or October. That show hasn’t materialized—a shame, since HBO could have guaranteed Stewart a little more freedom in airing his opinions on the election season. That’s likely the thinking behind giving Colbert a live Showtime special Tuesday at 11 p.m. to cover the election without the content strictures of network TV.

Of course, Colbert was moved over to Showtime (also owned by the CBS Corporation) Tuesday, because CBS will be covering the election. But the special could prove an interesting testing ground for the theory that the problem with The Late Show has been its time slot, and the burden on Colbert to keep to the center of the road and downplay the weirder humor. Rather than an 11-minute song-and-dance about the electoral process, Colbert and his guests will have free rein to make whatever jokes they like without cutting to commercial. In these polarized times, playing to the middle has often meant playing to no particular audience at all. But in comedy, specificity is key—and, at least Monday night, Colbert and Stewart seemed to have lost hold of that truth.

Hillary Clinton's Final Rock-Star Blitz

Popular music has been on Hillary Clinton’s side throughout this election, but it turns out most of the campaign has just been been an opening act for the grand show that the last few days have offered. Friday brought a rally headlined by Jay Z with a surprise appearance by Beyoncé. Monday, election eve, saw performances from Bruce Springsteen, Lady Gaga, Bon Jovi, and others. Chance the Rapper led a “parade to the polls” after a free show in Chicago. Madonna appeared in New York City’s Washington Square and started singing on Clinton’s behalf. The rapper YG announced he’d be distributing “Fuck Donald Trump” bagels in Compton today. The “30 Days, 30 Songs” anti-Trump protest project is nearly complete. And social media is ringing with election-day enthusiasm from across the celebrity spectrum.

But when celebrities align with a candidate, what are they actually offering? The answer involves reach, resources, and clout. Yet these past few days have mostly highlighted the political potential of an artist’s actual artistry—the most memorable celebrity moments have been in the employment of the X factor that made the celebrity famous in the first place.

Jay Z and Springsteen are particularly interesting examples of the dynamics of celebrity activism this time around. Both have been staples of Democratic presidential campaigns for years, headlining multiple rallies throughout the Octobers of Barack Obama’s previous election year (and Springsteen pitching in for John Kerry’s 2004 bid too). Jay Z’s affiliation with Obama even gave the president one of his most iconic campaigning moments: the “Dirt Off Your Shoulders” gesture. But compared to their previous political work, Jay Z and Springsteen have been subdued for 2016, only performing in the campaign’s 11th hour.

That doesn’t mean they’ve been silent, though, and their efforts highlight how “rich person,” “celebrity,” and “entertainer” are all different roles that famous surrogates can play. Hollywood’s place in Democratic politics is often as a source of cash, and Jay Z and Beyoncé have indeed been a source of it for Clinton, attending and holding lavish fundraisers—including at Jay Z’s 40/40 Club—dating back to 2015.

Another way of thinking about celebrity endorsements is as a commodity in themselves: Even if he never picked up his guitar on Clinton’s behalf, there’s value in Springsteen having told Rolling Stone that he thinks Donald Trump is “a moron.” (Then again research has shown that any given celebrity political statements often may be likely to hurt a candidate’s popularity with the general electorate as help it—no entertainer is as universally beloved as they might like.)

Yet the tail end of this campaign has offered a reminder of the singular power that entertainers have when they actually entertain for a cause. Jay Z’s concert in Cleveland commanded headlines over the final election weekend, largely thanks to Beyoncé’s surprise appearance. She made for a viral image shimmying with dancers in pantsuits to the black-and-female-pride anthem “Formation,” and her feminist-minded speech on Hillary’s behalf underlined the connection between her music’s message and her candidate’s. The entire show, including sets from Big Sean and Chance the Rapper, was edited into a compelling black-and-white video on Jay Z’s streaming service Tidal—political advertising of a hipness not otherwise seen during this election.

Similarly, there was a unique gravitas to Springsteen’s set outside of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, where he performed acoustic versions of “Thunder Road,” “Long Walk Home,” and “Dancing In the Dark.” As a storytelling songwriter long concerned parts of Rust Belt America that Trump has effectively courted this election, Springsteen’s absence on the campaign trail has previously been noted, and his special appeal was apparent last night. His remarks on Clinton’s behalf drew subtle distinctions that hit harder than some of the more platitudinal statements made by others: “She sees an America where the issue of immigration reform is dealt with realistically and compassionately,” he said while listing the concrete policy areas he supports her in.

The other remarkable pop-politics moments of the campaign’s final days have also resulted from artists making the most of their particular brands as entertainers, whether it was Chance the Rapper playing man of the people by leading a march through the streets of Chicago or Madonna allowing a rare moment of intimacy using a guitar amid a crowd. And Lady Gaga in Raleigh, North Carolina, was, well, peak Lady Gaga: Looking strikingly odd in Michael Jackson outfit, she gave a speech balanced on the edge between irony and earnestness. “Hillary Clinton is made of steel!” she shouted. “Hillary Clinton is unstoppable!” Then she put on sunglasses and performed some songs.

There are, of course, vulnerabilities to be exploited anytime a popular artist allies with a politician—artists, after all, don’t live their lives with quite the same preference for avoiding controversy and misunderstanding as politicians do. Donald Trump has, for example, spent the last few days nonsensically railing against Jay Z and Beyoncé’s language as if they were running for president or had said anything as creepy as “grab her by the pussy” (he also further riled up millennial voters by ). Some on social media are saying Gaga was dressed like a Nazi, though the real source for her outfit was not hard to determine.

This sort of attention means that artists themselves obviously have to calculate whether involving themselves in the election is in their interests, too. Taylor Swift, for example, has remained conspicuously silent this campaign—although whether out of genuine disinterest or the desire not to ruffle portions of her fan base or simply out of antipathy for the Clinton ally Katy Perry is unclear. And in 2012, Springsteen explained to The New Yorker’s David Remnick why he didn’t plan on campaigning for Obama’s re-election as vigorously as he had his 2008 election: “It seemed like if I was ever going to spend whatever small political capital I had, that was the moment to do so. But that capital diminishes the more often you do it. While I’m not saying never ... it’s something I didn’t do for a long time, and I don’t have plans to be out there every time.”

That quote was published in July of 2012; by October, Obama’s lead against Romney had diminished and Springsteen was back in the fray, playing multiple swing-state shows for the president. If he considered his political capital overdrawn then, it’s easy to imagine why he’d be yet-more-reluctant four years later, which perhaps explains why he played one sole show for Clinton. In any case, though, he’s deployed his star power perhaps when it counts most. Celebrities may rarely change someone’s mind about who to support, but it’s not hard to imagine that crowd jolted by the energy of a great concert would be more likely to go out and do what a politician, in the end, needs them to do: vote. The time for them to do so has finally arrived.

Samantha Bee Makes the Case for Clinton

In late May of this year, the journalist Rebecca Traister published a long profile of Hillary Clinton in New York magazine. The piece, “Hillary Clinton vs. Herself,” was premised on one of the key paradoxes that has defined Clinton as a politician, as a persona, and as a person: Among the people who have known her in private, she is often regarded as genuine and caring and warm and wonderful. Among the American public, though, she is often regarded as the opposite, in almost every way. Traister concluded the profile with this observation:

It’s worth asking to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait. Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men doing it? Though those on both the right and the left moan about “woman cards,” it would be impossible, and dishonest, to not recognize gender as a central, defining, complicated, and often invisible force in this election. It is one of the factors that shaped Hillary Clinton, and it is one of the factors that shapes how we respond to her. Whatever your feelings about Clinton herself, this election raises important questions about how we define leadership in this country, how we feel about women who try to claim it, flawed though they may be.

It was an argument that reached a kind of pop-cultural fruition on Monday night, on the eve of the election that will result either in the first woman president-elect of the United States, or in a situation that will be ... the opposite, in almost every way. Samantha Bee, the comedian who has herself been the subject of a Traister profile, made the case for Clinton. And with it, she argued that the politician who may shatter the highest and strongest glass ceiling in the land may also demand a widespread reckoning with what it means to be both a woman and a leader in the United States of 2016.

It was the show that Full Frontal had been building toward, in some sense, during the long course of its highly influential inaugural season. It took all the things that have made Bee’s show remarkable—her feminism, her political savvy, her righteous anger, her status as, with little exception, the only female voice in late-night comedy—and distilled it all down to one historic event. Bee’s “Let Hillary Be Hillary”—the segment’s title is borrowed from the West Wing episode premised on the idea that politics works best when politicians are allowed to be true to their own strengths and weaknesses—argued on the one hand for Clinton qua Clinton: that she is not, in fact, the lesser of two evils, or the Democratic answer to #NeverTrump, but instead an exceptional candidate who is qualified for the presidency, via her dedicated and indeed her nerdy wonkery, in her own right.

Bee presented a woman who was vilified for being simultaneously a woman and not woman enough.

The segment also took on Traister’s argument through a high-speed documentary version of Clinton’s life story—her early political awakening under the influence of Martin Luther King, Jr., her commencement address at Wellesley that had commenters of the time calling her “a voice of her generation,” her graduation from Yale Law School as one of 27 women in a class of 235. Bee presented an image of a woman who has long been exceptional, and who has dedicated her life to public service. She also presented a woman who has been unfairly served by the media—vilified for not changing her name to match her husband’s, for not caring enough about her looks, for being, in essence, simultaneously a woman and not woman enough.

As Bee put it: “Hillary Clinton has spent the past 40 years learning to mask her authenticity.”

And now, she argued, it’s time to celebrate—and elect—Hillary Clinton for what she is: not necessarily a swaggering speechmaker, or rousing rhetorician, or any of the things that Americans, after more than two centuries’ worth of male presidents, have come to expect of their leaders. Clinton may have, in the recent past, referred to herself as “not a natural politician”; what she meant was that she is not, according to the current standards, gifted with the same vaunted skills as her husband, or of the many other men who came before him. In many other ways, however—quieter ways, subtler ways, ways that are more stereotypically female—she is indeed a natural. According to the standards she has set for herself. “I’m not voting for Hillary Clinton, either,” Bee announced, the night before the presidential election, to those who will be directing their votes elsewhere. “I’m voting for Hillary Goddamn Brilliant Badass Queen Beyoncé Rodham.”

Trump's Last Stand

RALEIGH, N.C.—Most presidential candidates like to end their campaigns on a positive note, thanking their supporters, delivering inspirational rhetoric, and encouraging voters to think that whatever the result, they’ve made a difference.

Then again, most presidential candidates are not Donald J. Trump.

“If we don’t win, I will consider the single greatest waste of time, energy—wow, you need energy for this—the single greatest waste of time, energy, and money,” he said at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds on Monday, the day before Election Day. “If we don’t win, all of us—honestly? We’ve all wasted our time.”

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The Republican nominee has been using variations on this line for some time now, but it hasn’t gotten any less strange. While it is intended as motivation to vote, it can also seem like he is passive-aggressively sniping at his fans, a petulant child fuming in the face of a possible loss. Yet his crowds seem to love it. Career politicians like Mitt Romney or John McCain may be willing to see defeat as just part of the game—win some, lose some—but to Trump’s supporters his all-or-nothing attitude just shows that Trump is not a politician, and he’s playing because he thinks it matters to the fate of the nation.

Trump is facing down the possibility that he may have wasted all that time, energy, and money, even though he retains a very real chance of being president-elect by the end of Tuesday. His stop in Raleigh was his last visit to North Carolina, a state he must win, and the second of five campaign stops—one each in Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Michigan to round out the swing. Most forecasters are predicting a Hillary Clinton win, but with a few small shifts in enough states, the race could be Trump’s. A victory in the Old North State is likely necessary but insufficient for him to win.

The tight race has partisans on both sides trying to tamp down anxiety. The common thread is a belief—willed into existence, if necessary—that a person’s chosen candidate will triumph. At a Democratic rally elsewhere in the state capital last week, Clinton’s supporters were terrified by the polls, their mood fluctuating with each adjustment of the FiveThirtyEight forecast. The Trump supporters, by contrast, simply reject the polls, believing that they’re either rigged or don’t capture the true shape of his support.

“He’s gotta,” Carol Mazurick said, when asked whether she thought Trump would in. “I’m so excited. I could cry so easily,” she said. She’d been watching his rallies on the internet throughout the campaign season, and now she finally had her chance to see the man in person, just a few minutes from her home.

Melissa Whetzel, of Mebane, was feeling optimistic. “People are going to see that the things that Clinton has done—they’re just the same as things that other people have gone to jail for.” Sitting next to her, Roger James rejected FBI Director James Comey’s announcement on Sunday that his agents had reviewed a new tranche of thousands of emails in just eight days. The math didn’t make add up: “If you’re going to blow smoke up my ass, build a damn fire,” he chuckled.

Even with these rosy predictions, there was a necessarily valedictory atmosphere. N.C. State frat boys, suburban moms, and graying men in “Vietnam Veteran” hats picked over merchandise tables, taking their last chance to take home some swag: from the classic (“Make America Great Again,” “Trump That Bitch”) to the unusual (“Pumped for Trump” over a pink shoe) to the newer and novel (“Adorable Deplorable,” or “Crooked Together,” playing off the Clinton logo). A flag vendor seemed unable to convince buyers that they could take a large flag into the venue or on a plane. “You don’t have to take the pole,” he offered. A couple vendors laughed in giddy disbelief that a lucrative but punishing stretch of travel was about to be over. “Hours. Hours!”

“We’re winning plenty of other places. You know we’re in a rigged system. You gotta go, you gotta vote, you gotta make sure your vote gets registered.”

Inside, a string of speakers worked up to Trump’s appearance. There was David Clarke, the Milwaukee County sheriff, in his trademark cowboy hat. Mike Huckabee, one of Trump’s vanquished rivals, brought his dad jokes to the dais, noting that as an Arkansan, he’d known the Clintons for a long time. “The big difference between the Clintons and the Sopranos is the Sopranos never kept emails,” he said. Lara Trump, wife of Donald’s son Eric and an N.C. State grad, spoke, and so did Diamond and Silk, a rambunctious pair of African American women who often open Trump rallies.

Governor Pat McCrory, himself in a very tight race, spoke briefly, and said supporters had been approaching him on the street to whisper that they were voting for him. McCrory has endorsed Trump, but he hasn’t appeared many times with him on the stump, for reasons that became clear Monday. McCrory has argued that the state is going through a “Carolina Comeback,” an economic boom instigated by his policies, which sits uneasily with Trump’s doomsaying about the state of manufacturing here and in other states.

By 3 p.m., the Dorton Arena hadn’t filled up to its 7,000-person capacity. The floor had plenty of space, and chunks of the grandstands remained open. But Trump had a lot of travel to get in, so he came on up and said he’d better get started, even though thousands were waiting outside. (They weren’t.)

Trump was perhaps slightly lower energy than normal, though given his grueling schedule over the final few days, who could begrudge him that? (OK, maybe Jeb Bush.) He kicked off with confidence.

“I hear we’re winning North Carolina big,” he said. “We’re winning Florida, doing really big. I think we’re going to win the great state of Pennsylvania. We’re winning plenty of other places. You know we’re in a rigged system. You gotta go, you gotta vote, you gotta make sure your vote gets registered.”

The speech was, as usual, a little bit of everything. He is funny; he is blustery; he is defensive; he is puzzling. There were a few largely unnecessary lies, in addition to the thousands waiting outside. He said that murder rate was the highest it had been in 45 years, and that the dishonest media wouldn’t tell you. (While the percentage increase in the murder rate last year was one of the largest in recent memory, the rate remains well below where it was four decades ago.) He also said, confusingly, that “Hillary is going to cut your Social Security and really injure Medicare.”

He reminisced about the Republican primary, and how he’d cut through a crop of supposedly formidable, seasoned candidates like a fresh scythe. He’s often returned to that triumph at moments when the outlook for his campaign seemed bleak, though there were few other visible signs of pessimism. Just as he was back then, Trump remains obsessed with ratings. “You know the NFL ratings are way down,” he noted. “You know why? Everyone’s watching this. It’s actually tougher.”

“You know the NFL ratings are way down. You know why? Everyone’s watching this. It’s actually tougher.”

Not coincidentally, the group of celebrities campaigning for Hillary Clinton seems to have gotten under Trump’s skin. At two separate points during his remarks, he grumbled about the power couple who performed on Clinton’s behalf in Cleveland on Friday. “If I ever said the words that Jay Z said or that Beyonce said the other night? You know what would happen to me? The reinstitution of the electric chair,” he said.

Trump led the requisite boos of the media, but it seemed like, he, and the crowd, were going through the motions. He dismissed Comey’s announcement, saying,  “The FBI, the director, was obviously under tremendous pressure. They went through 650,000 emails in eight days. Yeah right. So sad what’s going on.” But when the familiar “lock her up” chants started up, Trump turned almost statesmanlike, offering an alternative to incarceration. “Now it’s up to the American people to deliver the justice that we deserve at the ballot box tomorrow,” he said, stopping to repeat: “At the ballot box.”

Trump has a label for this: “Drain the swamp.” It’s a slogan that was foisted upon him by aides, as he mentioned. “I told this story, I hated that expression,” he said. “I said, ‘No way I’m going to say that. That’s so hokey.’ I said it and the place went crazy. I said it to another place and it went crazy. Then I said it with more confidence and the place went wild. Now I love the expression, I think it’s genius.”

Much like his waste-of-time riff, it’s an odd thing to say. Trump has positioned himself as a non-politician, a candidate who works by intuition alone, but the anecdote shows him as something different: a politician whose coterie of aides is workshopping lines for him, and whose instincts were wrong. At one point in his speech, Trump even tried on the mantle of unifier.

“We are an unbelievably divided country,” said the man who has run arguably the most divisive campaign since George Wallace. “We’re going to come together. Just imagine what our country could accomplish if we started working as one people, under one God, saluting one American flag.”

Perhaps Trump, despite his admonitions about wasted time, is not immune to the reflective tendencies of a politician in the last hours of his race after all.

Inside D.C.’s Donald Trump-Themed Speakeasy

In the basement of Barrel, a whiskey joint just east of the Capitol in Washington, DC, there’s a speakeasy. It’s normally named the Elixir Bar; it sometimes features more explicit themes—tiki, for example—just for the fun of it. For the past couple of weeks, though, Elixir has taken on a pop-up theme that is both especially timely and especially appropriate for the bar’s Pennsylvania Avenue address: the 2016 GOP presidential nominee. Theme: Make Cocktails Great Again.

The bar is not a tribute to Donald Trump; it is instead, effectively, a live-action satire of him. The speakeasy (nom de pop-up: The Trump Elixir Bar) is aimed at clientele who do not support Trump, and who in fact do not support him so vehemently that they find pleasure in mocking him. It has, as the word about it has spread, presented itself as a kind of catharsis-via-cocktail.

But the real catharsis, a visit to the bar makes clear, comes not so much by way of booze as by way of … selfies. And grams. And snaps. The bar, as you’d expect, offers its patrons a selection of Trump-themed cocktails (including the “Part of the Beauty of Me Is That I Am Very Rich,” a $50 mint julep, and the “I Beat China All the Time. All the Time”—composed of soju, pineapple rum, pineapple, mint, lime, sugar, and Chinese five spice). The sell here, though, isn’t so much the cheekily named craft cocktails as it is the theme park-style appreciation of Donald J. Trump, the human and the meme and the brand. The Trump Elixir Bar suggests not just how deeply the 2016 campaign has permeated the culture of the city that the election’s victor will soon call home; it also suggests how deeply entrenched politics themselves have become in American culture. It’s hard to tell, in the Trump Elixir Bar, where politics ends and everything else begins—and that, indeed, is part of the point.

The speakeasy offers a live-action experience tailor-made for the age of Snapchat and Instagram.

On a recent Friday evening, if you wanted to do your part to #maga, you’d need to wait in a line that stretched along the wall of the main bar area at Barrel (bartenders softened the sting of the wait by passing out cups of punch to queued patrons—a holdover from Elixir’s tiki bar iteration). But once the punch had been poured and the time had been passed, the bar-goers—almost all of them in their 20s and 30s, almost all of them whiffing of Young Professional—were escorted down a narrow hallway that led, in turn, to a narrow staircase.

And then: A utopia, tailor-made for the age of Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat, awaited.

First came an assemblage of six pieces of paper, pasted onto the hallway’s brick wall, listing the types of people who might frequent such a Trump-mocking establishment: LOSERS IN LIFE, HYPOCRITES, DOPES, TOTAL FAILURES, FRAUD LIGHTWEIGHTS, and INCOMPETENT WEAKLINGS. A paper-printed arrow pointed the way, from there, to the bar. (The insults and the arrow were printed on simple sheets of white 8.5 x 11s; the Trump decor was a decidedly DIY effort.) People paused for selfies; “that sounds like my parents talking to me,” one guy said to another, as both took their pictures.

Then, over the staircase leading down to Barrel’s basement, another piece of paper warned that “LOCKER ROOM TALK” would abound in the room beyond. (The papers expressing this caution were simply hand-written in marker, and complemented with an arrow pointing the way down the stairs.) More selfies, here, ensued.

Then came the narrow hallway leading into the bar, which featured a collage of more paper print-outs, this time with portraits of some of the people Trump has insulted during his tenure as a presidential candidate. (Katie Couric: “THIRD RATE REPORTER.” George W. Bush: “NOT NICE!” John McCain: “GRADUATED LAST IN HIS CLASS.” Super Bowl 50: “VERY BORING.” Alec Baldwin as Trump: “PORTRAYAL STINKS.” Mexican flag: “WE GET THE KILLERS, DRUGS, AND CRIME, THEY GET THE MONEY!” Chinese flag: “TERRIBLE!” ) People again paused for photos and selfies and, in one case, a “jina” joke.

And then came the bar itself. Next to the speakeasy’s entrance stood a life-sized cutout of Donald Trump (material: cardboard; facial expression: light grimace). He was placed next to a lamp-lit blackboard with a chalked-in message: “Barrel is doing SO poorly—everybody knows it—that they had to steal my quotes for their failing bar.” People again posed next to this pulp-bound presidential candidate, slinging their arms around him, their appointed photographers struggling, in the dimly-lit bar, to get the lighting right.

The bar existed, in person, largely to serve the digital world.

The bar also featured more bits of selfie infrastructure: enormous, laminated menus—“we made the menu huge so it makes the customers feel like they have small hands,” the bar’s manager, Mike Haigis, told the Independent Journal Review; Make America Great Again caps; a Trump wig suspended, rather eerily, above the bar. There was a wall of Trump/Pence signs, for step-and-repeat purposes. There was another cardboard cutout of Trump, this one with its face removed, for those who preferred to pose as, rather than simply with, the candidate.

The speakeasy was on the one hand a typical D.C. basement bar, crowded and jovial and pumping with music from M.I.A. It was also, however, an extremely literal take on the Washington mandate to “see and be seen”: The bar existed, in person, largely to serve the digital world. On Instagram, the Barrel D.C. location is currently tagged with more than 150 Trump-themed photos, among them portraits taken with the Trump cutouts, photos of “nasty women” posing around the speakeasy’s oversized drink menus, and pictures of receipts for cocktails listed as “Beating China,” “ISIS Founder,” and “The P**sy” ($13 each).

The whole thing was at once extremely political and not political at all—a lighthearted way to simultaneously revel in the campaign and to transcend it. It’s an extension of similar efforts around Washington to integrate the election, cheekily, into the culture of Washington: the Donald and Hillary burgers at Del Frisco’s Grille, the Trump-vs-Clinton poll-via-Lite Brite board at the steakhouse Medium Rare (“who’s go the secret sauce?”); the new Trump-themed pop-up, Bar Ilegal, that has set up shop in another D.C. neighborhood. It’s an extension, too, of the late-night shows that have devoted their comedy to the campaign, and an extension of all the Trumps and Hillarys trick-or-treating this Halloween, and an extension of Beyoncé and Jay Z and many, many other celebrities hitting the campaign trail. The 2016 election—and, with it, politics as an infiltration and an institution—are both omnipresent and invisible. They are, at this point, infused into American pop culture—much like the pineapple that gives Elixir’s “Beating China” rum its fruity punch.  

The World Doesn’t Want Hollywood Comedies

Look at 2016’s biggest box-office successes and you’ll see plenty of familiar genres: superhero movies, horror hits, animated family films, big-budget action dramas. Increasingly missing from that list, and consequently from Hollywood’s release strategies? Comedies. Ten years ago, the blockbuster comedy was a key to any studio’s profit margin, given their relative cheapness to produce and propensity to linger in theaters on good word of mouth. Now, as worldwide box office becomes more crucial to the studio’s bottom line, comedies are vanishing from the schedule—because, in the words of one distributor, they don’t “travel well.”

Unfolding this week in California is the American Film Market, a crucial industry event where producers, agents, financiers, and developers meet to sell the international distribution rights to their movies. According to The Hollywood Reporter, years of poor ticket sales have soured the rest of the world on American comedies—unless they’re centered around a huge star or filled with (expensive) action sequences. Much has been made of the trend away from mid-budgeted adult dramas in Hollywood, as studios focus their money and time on franchises with broader appeal. But if international markets continue to drive decision-making, comedies may continue to disappear from cinemas, and the less-profitable genre will be left to indie filmmakers and the ever-expanding world of television.

Will Ferrell, maybe the biggest American comedy star of the last decade, is a perfect example of Hollywood’s new financial reality. Since breaking out with 2003’s Elf, he’s starred in nine comedies that made over $100 million domestically, and several more that earned healthy, if smaller, profits. His 2006 NASCAR comedy Talladega Nights was a huge surprise hit that played well to audiences in red states and blue states alike, earning $148 million as it tweaked America’s obsession with stock car drivers while lovingly depicting their world. But Talladega Nights only made $14 million overseas, or 9 percent of the film’s total gross worldwide.

That’s an extreme example, but a telling one, too. In 2016, it’s typical for a film to make more than 60 percent of its takings outside of America, as evidenced by some of this year’s biggest hits (Zootopia, Captain America: Civil War, The Jungle Book, and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice). Look at comedy’s biggest hits, and you’ll see the opposite trend. Ferrell’s last movie, Daddy’s Home, made a healthy $150 million in America, but only $90 million worldwide, or 37 percent of its total. Trainwreck, one of the breakout comedy hits of 2015, took $110 million in America and only $30 million more overseas. That means that when a comedy fails, it can’t rely on overseas dollars to clean up the mess like so many big-budget action movies do.

Warcraft, perceived as a colossal bomb, made a staggering $433 million total, only 10 percent of it in the United States. Pacific Rim, seen as a financial misfire, is getting a sequel on the back of its performance in China alone. Wonder why they’re making another Pirates of the Caribbean film when the franchise seems to have lost its luster? Because the fourth edition, On Stranger Tides, made 77 percent of its takings outside of America. The biggest comedy hit of 2016 is Central Intelligence, starring Kevin Hart and The Rock, which blended its big laughs with plenty of gun-toting violence, much like the Melissa McCarthy vehicle Spy. But even that mix of stars and action underperformed overseas.

Comedies could bounce back after the release of another surprise hit, like The Hangover.

The main reason comedies are flopping at the American Film Market is their lack of star power. Sacha Baron Cohen, who broke out as a star in Talladega Nights and had a huge hit 10 years ago with Borat, has floundered as a comedy star—his latest effort, The Brothers Grimsby, made only $25 million worldwide, and his new vehicle is being produced independently as a result. Look back at 2006’s box-office hits and you’ll see many stars who can no longer open a film on reputation alone. Adam Sandler (his 2006 hit was Click) is now making smaller-budget straight-to-streaming action comedies for Netflix, each getting worse reviews than the last. Vince Vaughn (2006’s The Break-Up) is more of a supporting player in dramas these days, his last hit being the forgotten 2009 comedy Couples Retreat. Matthew McConaughey (who had Failure to Launch that year), a rom-com star in the aughts, hasn’t returned to the genre since Ghosts of Girlfriends Past tanked in 2009.

There are still some homegrown comedy hits, but on the whole, they’re not being made by big studios. Bad Moms, one of the surprises of 2016, was produced by STX, a smaller-sized operation that is trying to fill the holes it perceives in the American market for mid-budget comedies and dramas. Tyler Perry, one of the biggest brands left in comedy, saw his Boo! A Madea Halloween do better than expected this October. Melissa McCarthy kept up her streak of hits with The Boss, which more than doubled its budget—but it still only made $63 million domestically, and a paltry $15 million overseas. Much of the industry’s strategy is cyclical, and it’s possible that comedies could bounce back after the release of a surprise hit (it just takes one, like The Hangover) that affirms the value of a word-of-mouth success. But only a true global smash can move the stock-market needle for a studio—and increasingly, that’s the only thing Hollywood cares about.

Even Comedy Is Getting Serious About the Election

Saturday Night Live’s cold open this week began in precisely the way you’d expect it to. There was Alec Baldwin, as Donald Trump. There was Kate McKinnon, as Hillary Clinton. Baldwin-Trump simpered and thumbs-upped and teeheefully noted that “they’re still buying it!”; McKinnon-Clinton animatedly pointed and waved and talked about her favorite part of the week being the loss of “that big, huge lead I had.” The two, apparently guesting together on Erin Burnett’s CNN show OutFront, talked about Twitter, and the FBI, and Vladimir Putin, and the recent endorsement Trump received from the KKK, and the rumors that there is, indeed, another hot-mic tape of Trump. Baldwin-Trump, as expected, began talking about his plan, once he is president, to jail his opponent.

But then: He changed course. He broke character.

“I’m sorry,” Alec Baldwin, the actor-comedian, said to Kate McKinnon, the actor-comedian. “I just hate yelling at you like this.”

The camera zoomed back to reveal the two, seemingly satellite-ing in from Florida and Colorado, standing next to each other, instead, on the SNL soundstage. “Yeah. I know, right?” McKinnon replied, following suit in the character-breaking. “This election has been so mean.”

“I mean, I just feel gross all the time,” Baldwin continued. “Don’t you guys feel gross all the time, about this?”

The audience erupted into applause and whistles.

And then things … took another turn. The camera cut to a pre-recorded scene featuring the pair leaving the confines of 30 Rock to gallivant around Times Square, as Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” played rousingly in the background. They held hands. They hugged the people they encountered, joyfully. (McKinnon even briefly hugged a man in a “TRUMP THAT BITCH” t-shirt.) They split a street pretzel. They danced an improvised hora. They hugged babies. Around them, American flags waved. Balloons ascended into the air. They hung out with Times Square versions of the Statue of Liberty, and of Uncle Sam, as people laughed and smiled and cheered.

It was extremely cheesy. It was not terribly funny. But, wow, it was cathartic.

Not to overanalyze an SNL cold open, but also to totally overanalyze an SNL cold open: The scene may have been shot in the final days before the election; it was also, however, future-oriented. It dispensed with traditional satire to acknowledge that, however the vote swings on Tuesday, the contest will be a close one. Neither candidate will end up with a mandate. Half the country—or at least half of the people who come out to the polls—will be disappointed; many of them will be angry. And Americans, starting on Tuesday evening, will have to find a way to be Americans together again. SNL’s skit speaks to that basic fact—and to the notion that, whomever one votes for or has already voted for, the shared fact of citizenship will have to be, after this long campaign ends, the main thing that matters.

The show decided that it was worth breaking the fourth wall to make that point. It was a rarity in the sketch-driven series, but one that puts SNL in league with what many of its fellow comedy shows have done throughout the campaign season: They’ve all been, in their idiosyncratic ways, getting serious. John Oliver, talking voter ID laws and special-purpose districts. Sam Bee, talking crisis pregnancy centers and superPACs. (And talking, too, with President Obama.) Whitney Cummings, talking sexual violence. Trevor Noah, comparing Trump to an African dictator. Amy Schumer, talking gun safety.

Some things are too important to be laughed at. Some things demand, on the contrary, calculated earnestness.

You could think of it, in a way, as the fifth wall: not just the one that divides the performance from the audience, but the one that acknowledges the wider audience that lives in the distance, beyond the screen. The one that appreciates a show not just as a thing unto itself, but as something that—via the slicing and dicing and sharing capabilities of the internet—can affect how the public, as a body, understands the world. The fifth wall is built into the comedy of The Daily Show and Full Frontal and Last Week Tonight, and even sometimes into network shows like the Late Show and the Tonight Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live: It’s a recognition of comedy’s power not just to amuse audiences, but to effect change.

Now, SNL is engaging in its own version of that wall-breaking. The show that gave us Ronald Reagan, mastermind, and Sarah Palin, seeing Russia from her house, and “Bitch is the new black” is now overtly weighing in on the election: not to endorse a candidate, but to endorse democracy. It’s reflecting the high stakes of an election that come down not just to party versus party, but to vision versus vision. Some things, the cold open suggested, are too important to be laughed at. Some things demand calculated earnestness.

So it was fitting that the cold open of SNL’s final show before Monday’s election special dispensed, in the end, with any pretense of comedy. It ended simply with Alec Baldwin and Kate McKinnon—actors, comedians, citizens—beseeching their viewers to exercise that most basic of rights and privileges: voting.

“And now it’s time to get out there and vote!” Baldwin said. He added: “None of this will have mattered if you don’t vote.”

“And we can’t tell you who to vote for,” McKinnon, echoed, her voice welling, just a bit, with emotion. “But on Tuesday, we all get a chance to choose what country we want to live in.”

And, with that, the moment of earnestness passed. The comedians—and the show that brought them together and gave them their stage—brought reality back to “reality”: “And live from New York,” they said in unison, “it’s Saturday night!”

The Original ‘Nasty Woman’

As a professor of English, I teach a humanities course on female icons in pop culture, and one of the first examples my students learn about is Medusa. A Gorgon from classical mythology, Medusa is widely known as a monstrous creature with snakes in her hair whose gaze turns men to stone. Through the lens of theology, film, art, and feminist literature, my students and I map how her meaning has shifted over time and across cultures. In so doing, we unravel a familiar narrative thread: In Western culture, strong women have historically been imagined as threats requiring male conquest and control, and Medusa herself has long been the go-to figure for those seeking to demonize female authority.

Benvenuto Cellini’s 1545 sculpture

Perseus with the Head of Medusa.

Wikimedia

It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that Medusa has cropped up repeatedly during this heated election cycle, one that may end with the United States electing its first woman president. One image in particular keeps recurring—the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as the mythological snake-haired monster. Clinton has been compared to Medusa by conservative writers like Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart News and bloggers like Ron Russell at Right Wing Humor, and in political merchandise sold online. Meanwhile, her opponent Donald Trump has been portrayed as her conqueror, the Greek demigod Perseus. On Zazzle, people can buy products emblazoned with an image of a stoic Trump raising the severed head of a bug-eyed Clinton, her mouth agape in silent protest—an allusion to a sculpture by the Italian Renaissance artist Benvenuto Cellini. Today, the political references to Medusa only underscore the pervasive misogyny that drives many attacks against Clinton and other so-called “nasty women.”

Medusa remains a potent icon at a time when women leaders continue to be viewed skeptically or, at worst, as inhuman. Indeed, almost every influential female figure has been photoshopped with snaky hair: Martha Stewart, Condoleezza Rice, Madonna, Nancy Pelosi, Oprah Winfrey, Angela Merkel. (Have a few minutes? Do a Google Image search: Type in a famous woman’s name and the word Medusa.) These businesswomen, politicians, activists, and artists made the same “mistake” that Susan B. Anthony identified when she commented on the lack of women’s voices in 19th-century newspapers: “Women … must echo the sentiment of these men. And if they do not do that, their heads are cut off.” These women infringed upon the domain of men. The only response, as suggested by their Medusa-fied images? To cut their heads off; to silence them.

The implicit violence of the Medusa comparison relates not only to beheading, but also to rape culture—another issue that has figured into the current election. Bits of Medusa’s story date back to at least Homer’s The Iliad, but it is with Ovid’s Metamorphosis that her story emerges most fully. A closer read of her tale may surprise those who only know her vaguely from popular culture. In Ovid’s story, the god Neptune sees Medusa, desires her, and decides that, because he is a god, he is entitled to her body (sound familiar?). He rapes her in Minerva’s temple, and Minerva, incensed that her temple has been defiled, punishes the victim rather than the perpetrator (again, sound familiar?). Minerva transforms Medusa into a snake-haired monster who now, instead of inspiring men’s desire, literally petrifies them. Later, Minerva gives her shield to Perseus to help him kill Medusa; he uses it as a mirror, deflecting Medusa’s curse. He beheads her while she sleeps and then carries her head in a bag, a trophy he pulls out as needed to destroy enemies.

Medusa has since haunted Western imagination, materializing whenever male authority feels threatened by female agency. As the art historian Christine Corretti has explained, Cellini believed Medusa symbolized both the threat of women’s burgeoning political power and a feminized Italy. Corretti notes that these sentiments were popularized during the Renaissance by Machiavelli who, in The Prince, alluded to the Medusa icon when he described the state as a woman “without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn,” desperate for a manly rescuer. Medusa again became a symbol of a monstrously feminized republic during the French revolution. In 1791, Marie Antoinette appeared as a beastly Medusa in the print “Les deux ne font qu’un.” A year later the English artist Thomas Rowlandson created a print depicting the vision of liberty espoused by the rebels of the French Revolution as Medusa-like.

A caricature by the English artist Thomas Rowlandson titled “The Contrast, 1792.” Wikimedia

Later, as women’s colleges began to open in the United States, the 19th-century painter Elihu Vedder imagined Medusa as a self-absorbed woman who petrifies herself by looking into a mirror. Sigmund Freud notably used the myth to explain his concept of castration anxiety. And as women rallied for the right to vote, various anti-suffrage postcards linked suffragettes to the monster. Concerns about gender and power continued into the 1940s when the writer Philip Wylie, in his invective Generation of Vipers, evoked Medusa (and her Gorgon sisters Stheno and Euryale) in order to urge readers to resist the women who had entered the work force after the first two world wars. By then, Medusa’s history as a rape victim had been erased from the cultural consciousness. She had simply become a woman with a terrifying potential power to emasculate men.

However, with second-wave feminism, many writers and artists began to re-examine traditional myth. Hélène Cixous, Sylvia Plath, Colleen McElroy, and others searched the recesses of history for their lost matriarchal heritage and chose Medusa as their muse. “How to believe the stories I am told?” the poet May Sarton asked in 1971 when she looked on the Medusa and found herself not frozen but “clothed in thought.” Later, as discussions about rape culture evolved in the 1970s and 1980s, poets like Ann Stanford and Amy Clampitt channeled Medusa to engage in conversations about the silencing of sexual-assault victims.

Similarly, feminist scholars like Marija Gimbutas re-read the myth of Medusa as a beheading of early matriarchal societies by Greco-Roman culture. According to this interpretation, Neptune’s rape of Medusa and Perseus’s subsequent beheading of her represent the same effort to legitimize male privilege by muting female authority. Indeed, ancient mythology is rife with stories of gods who violate women. This devaluing of women was reflected in the norms and laws of a culture wherein women were traded as commodities between men and rape was permissible by law.

When Medusa pops up in pop culture today, her deeper significance is largely ignored. For example, in the 2010 film adaptation of Clash of the Titans, Perseus rallies his men before confronting Medusa: “I know we’re all afraid. But my father told me: Someday, someone was gonna have take a stand. Someday, someone was gonna have to say enough! This could be that day. Trust your senses. And don't look this bitch in the eye.” In the film, Perseus knows Medusa has been raped, but she’s nonetheless treated with indifference by the plot, and with hostility by the other characters.

Those satirizing Clinton as a Medusa are likely unaware of the misogyny tied into the iconography.

With this context, my students look anew on art like Cellini’s sculpture. Now, they can see that Perseus is the aggressor, not a hero but a symbolic rapist standing astride the body of his victim, her bloodied head held high in victory. Medusa’s closed eyes and lips speak volumes about both the history of women’s oppression and the submersion of women’s histories. It’s a submersion poignantly symbolized by a story that Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney shared recently at a panel discussion in historic Seneca Falls, New York. For years Maloney tried to get a statue of the first-wave feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucretia Mott moved from the basement of the Capitol Building to center stage in the Rotunda. Colleagues, however, argued that it was “too ugly.”

Women’s physical appearances are often particularly used as a way to demean them, as the Clinton-Medusa images show, and tying women’s value to their looks has also been a feature of this election thanks to Donald Trump. The misogyny of the election comes through in much of the anti-Clinton imagery that abounds, including a t-shirt featuring a beheaded Medusa Clinton that reads, “Life’s a bitch, so don’t vote for one.” The shirt echoes the campaign’s most popular slogan, “Trump that Bitch” (and even the “bitch” quote from The Clash of the Titans.)  The fact that there’s even a market for such political paraphernalia testifies to the terror that powerful women continue to elicit even in the 21st century and to the related and troubling persistence of mythologies that endorse and perpetuate rape culture.

Unlike the eyes and mouth of the Cellini Medusa, those of the Clinton Medusa in the Triumph t-shirt are wide open, a grotesque caricature of female agency that likely gratifies her conservative foes. Those satirizing Clinton as a Medusa are likely unaware of the misogyny tied into the iconography. For them, Medusa is just a creature who castrates men and that must be defeated. In their minds, Hillary is monstrous, too, but in a slightly different way: She’s a woman who wears pantsuits, who calls attention to institutional sexism, who is ambitious, and who altogether refuses to conform to traditional gender roles. And yet, as Greco-Roman history makes clear, when the gods devalue women, the people will too. On Tuesday, voters in the United States will decide which candidate they want as figurehead, which representative they think best embodies the values of this country. The implications of that choice could not be more profound.

Dance Lessons and the Cubs: The Week in Pop-Culture Writing

Dance Lessons for Writers

Zadie Smith | The Guardian

“Every move [Michael Jackson] made was absolutely legible, public, endlessly copied and copyable, like a meme before the word existed. He thought in images, and across time. He deliberately outlined and then marked once more the edges around each move, like a cop drawing a chalk line round a body. Stuck his neck forward if he was moving backwards. Cut his trousers short so you could read his ankles. Grabbed his groin so you could better understand its gyrations. Gloved one hand so you might attend to its rhythmic genius, the way it punctuated everything, like an exclamation mark.”

Why Atlanta’s Police-Shooting Scene Was So Effective

Joshua Alston | Vulture

“Considering Atlanta’s tendency to insert deeply surreal elements—the invisible car, for instance—it says a lot about the scene that it feels so startling, realistic, and sad. Because so many of Atlanta’s story elements can’t be taken at face value, I wondered why I found it so affecting, or why I spent the moments prior fearing Alfred might end up face-down and bleeding.”

Vine Dries Up, Black Humor Loses a Home

Jazmine Hughes | The New York Times

“Vine incubated black ingenuity and creativity, allowing makers to play with structure, form, insertion, pacing and interpolation, and letting users employ the videos as punch lines, shorthand, and punctuation. The service became its own ecosystem of black culture, both by relying on familiar figures, experiences and jokes, and by creating the next batch of them.”

The Cubs Just Ended Baseball’s Analytics War

Rany Jazayerli | The Ringer

“To be perfectly clear, ‘analytics’ doesn’t mean ‘numbers.’ It means cutting through the bullshit. It means having a reason for every decision you make, and that reason being something other than ‘because that’s the way it’s always been done.’ It doesn’t mean eliminating Conventional Wisdom; it means questioning it. It means getting as much data as you can, but ‘data’ is just a fancy word for information. ”

Analyzing Zayn Malik’s Autobiography

Anna Leszkiewicz | New Statesman

“In short, the art of the celebrity memoir is to appear revelatory while revealing nothing—at least, nothing that could potentially paint the author in a bad light. That tension can make for a strange reading experience, one of sanitized intimacy. This is particularly precarious for an artist like Zayn, whose post-boy band narrative depends on his newfound ‘realness’.”

Phil Collins and the Pop Man’s Burden

Kathleen Massara | The New Republic

“Take apart any Phil Collins song and you have on your hands an unfettered mess of synthesizers and male pain. Whether he liked it or not, Collins embodied this type of ‘white man’s pop,’ even though his music wasn’t about money, or even success. Rather, it chronicled his failures in love, and the creeping feeling of not fitting in, despite the millions of records sold. It was music for a generation of men who wanted to climb the corporate ladder and not get led astray by a deceitful woman, but who also yearned to find a home in an available body.”

Art, History, and Why It’s Okay to Play With Manson Family Paper Dolls

John Reed | Guernica

“The stuff of art and intelligence is in the recognition of patterns, the simplification of the divine equation. Oversimplification, however, is banal. That’s the fine line traversed by all art: The simpler the art, the more marketable it is—simple is easy to categorize, explain to consumers, contour for hype; conversely, the more complex a work of art, the smaller its audience and the more recondite the conversation around it.”

The World’s Greatest Living Animator and the Masterpiece He Knows He May Never Finish

Brian Phillips | MTV News

“He can do things no one has thought of. One day, on a film being made with cutouts—essentially two-dimensional puppets, drawings with movable limbs—he startles his colleagues by gathering all the cutouts and tearing the hinges out of their joints. Why rely on hinges when he can make them move more naturally as loose collections of shapes? Sometimes he senses a possibility in this, a faint stirring of potential. But it remains distant.”