The New Yorker - 1 June 2015

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JUNE 1, 2015
JUNE 1, 2015
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN
17
THE TALK OF THE TOWN
Adam Gopnik on art-market records;

an Uber for choppers; a school in Malibu;
Vin Scelsa signs off; bat-mitzvah games.
ed cAESAR
22
HOUSE OF SECRETS
Questions surrounding an extravagant home.

Paul Rudnick
michael sPECTEr
31
32
WHOS HAPPY NOW?

EXTREME CITY
Luanda endeavors to become the next Dubai.

BEN TAUB
38
william Finnegan
50
JOURNEY TO JIHAD
How teen-agers are lured into Syrias war.

OFF DIAMOND HEAD
Lessons learned while surng in Hawaii.

art spiegelman
59
salman rushdie
62
NARCISSYPHUS
FICTION
THE DUNIAZT
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
thomas mallon
Dan Chiasson
68
73
75
Elizabeth Kolbert
76
anthony lane
80
Monica Youn
Mary Ruee
46
64
Kevin M. Schultzs Buckley and Mailer.

John Ashberys Breezeway.
Briey Noted
A CRITIC AT LARGE
Why people want to get to Mars.

THE CURRENT CINEMA
Mark Ulriksen
Tomorrowland, Gemma Bovery.

POEMS
Goldacre
Inglenook
COVER
Suiting Up
DRAWINGS Bob Eckstein, Emily Flake, Mike Twohy, Tom Chitty, Tom Cheney, Liana Finck,
Michael Maslin, Julia Suits, Joe Dator, Jack Ziegler, Dan Roe, Benjamin Schwartz, Drew Panckeri,
Harry Bliss, Jason Adam Katzenstein SPOTS Tibor Krpti
THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015
CONTRIBUTORS
ben taub (JOURNEY TO JIHAD, P. 38), a 2015 graduate of Columbias Journalism
School, spent the past two summers in a small town on the Turkish-Syrian border.
ed caesar (HOUSE OF SECRETS, P. 22) was named Journalist of the Year for 2014
by the Foreign Press Association in London. His rst book, Two Hours: The
Quest to Run the Impossible Marathon, will be published in October.
michael specter (EXTREME CITY, P. 32) covers science and public health for
the magazine. Denialism is his most recent book.
dana goodyear (THE TALK OF THE TOWN, P. 19) won a 2015 James Beard Foundation Journalism Award for her article lite Meat, which appeared in The New
Yorker last November.
monica youn (POEM, P. 46) is the author of the poetry collections Ignatz and
the forthcoming Blackacre.
william FInnegan (OFF DIAMOND HEAD, P. 50) is a staff writer. His new book,
Barbarian Days: A Surng Life, comes out in July.
has written twelve novels, including Two Years

Eight Months and Twenty-eight Nights, which will be published in September.
salman rushdie (FICTION, P. 62)
thomas mallon (BOOKS, P. 68) is a novelist, essayist, and critic and the author of
Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years, which is due out in September.
elizabeth kolbert (A CRITIC AT LARGE, P. 76), a staff writer, won this years Pulitzer
Prize for general nonction for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.
mark ulriksen (COVER)
wrote and illustrated the childrens book Dogs Rule
Nonchalantly.
NEWYORKER.COM
Everything in the magazine, and more
than fifteen original stories a day.
ALSO:
THE SCREENING ROOM: Short films we
PODCASTS: On the Political Scene,

Dexter Filkins and Nicholas Schmidle
join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss the
U.S.s hit-or-miss strategy with regard
to ISIS. Plus, on Out Loud, Joshua
Rothman and Sarah Larson talk with
Amelia Lester and David Haglund about
David Lettermans retirement and the
future of late-night television.
love and the stories behind them.

New this month: the Oscar-nominated
short A Single Life and the BAFTA
nominee The Krmn Line.
POETRY: A reading by Monica Youn.

Plus, the monthly Poetry Podcast,
with Paul Muldoon and Ada Limn.
DAILY COMMENT / CULTURAL COMMENT:
Opinions and reflections by Jeffrey

Frank, Anwen Crawford, and others.
VIDEO: New episodes of The Cartoon
Lounge, with Bob Mankoff, and

Richard Brodys Movie of the Week.
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THE MAIL
READING MAGNA CARTA
The central tenet of Jill Lepores essay

on Magna Carta is that its importance
has been overhyped (The Rule of History, April 20th). But it is not surprising that a thirteenth-century document
from a feudal kingdom doesnt have a
literal counterpart in American law.
What is surprisingand important
is that some of the ideas in it have resounded through the English Civil
War, the English Revolution of 1688,
the formation of the United States, the
rise of modern American democracy,
the American Civil War, the ghts for
racial and gender equality, and on to
todays battles. Magna Carta continues to play a role in the demand for
meaningful rule of law as opposed to
arbitrary and capricious exercises of
power and coercion. To commemorate
Magna Cartas legal signicance is not
to deny its role in political ghts. Indeed, the document is a potent reminder
that law, history, and politics are inextricably linked in any effort to achieve
justice for all.
Heidi Li Feldman
Co-Director, Joint Degree in Law and
Philosophy, Professor of Law,
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.
Magna Carta has hallmarks of a constitution, but, as a medieval document, the charter attested to King Johns
reconciliation with the Church in
Rome. It reected an ambitious Church
bent on expanding its hegemony by
means of an astute political strategy.
The charter acknowledges the power
of Pope Innocent III, who had profound inuence over England. In 1215,
he was perhaps the only gure in Christendom capable of annulling the charter, for it had stemmed from King Johns
friction with the Church. John, from
the beginning of his reign, had scandalized the papacy by seizing Church
estates. The Pope tried to recover properties and curb the Kings excesses,
and the barons rebelled. The King, believing his monarchy was threatened,
sought the Popes favor. John surrendered the kingdom of England to the
papacy, and Pope Innocent acknowledged the restoration of the peace. Reconciling with the Pope, the King turned
the tables on the barons and persuaded
him to annul Magna Carta.
Shael Herman
Brookline, Mass.
1
MITCHELLS CHARACTERS
I read with interest Charles McGraths

review of Thomas Kunkels biography
of Joseph Mitchell (The People You
Meet, April 27th). I can attest to the
fact that at least one of Mitchells subjects was accurately portrayed. When I
was thirteen years old, I was given a
copy of McSorleys Wonderful Saloon.
I read one of the pieces, Evening with
a Gifted Child, many times. It dealt
with a nine-year-old biracial musical
prodigy whose parents kept her on a
strict dietary regimen of raw foods. I
reached out to the subject, Philippa
Duke Schuyler, and suggested that we
correspond. We became pen pals. When
I went to college, at Barnard, we continued our friendship, and I attended
her piano concerts. She was unassuming and somewhat emotionally guarded.
Eventually, we lost touch, but I later
learned that she had abandoned her musical career, suffered from racial discrimination, and become estranged from her
family. While working as a reporter in
Vietnam, in 1967, she died in a helicopter accident. She was only thirty-ve.
Miriam Nelson Brown
Sayville, N.Y.
CORRECTION: Sense of Self (May
11th) misstated where Terrance Hayes
is currently teaching. He is a professor of English at the University of
Pittsburgh.
Letters should be sent with the writers name,

address, and daytime phone number via e-mail
to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be
edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to
the volume of correspondence we cannot reply
to every letter or return letters.
GOINGS ON
ABOUT TOWN
M AY/J U N E
W E D N E S DAY
2015
27TH
T H U R S DAY
28TH
F R I DAY
29TH
S AT U R DAY
30TH
S U N DAY
31ST
The writer Dave Malloy and the director Rachel Chavkin have found a magical wormhole between
hipster Brooklyn and nineteenth-century Russia. In 2013, their immersive electro-pop musical Natasha,
Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, based on a swath of War and Peace, had an extended run in a popup supper club in the meatpacking district, complete with caviar and unsmiling Slavic waitresses. (Malloy
played Pierre.) Their latest musical fantasia, Preludes, at LCT3s Claire Tow, is set in the febrile mind of
Sergei Rachmaninoff, who visits a hypnotist after the disastrous premire of his first symphony. The cast
includes Gabriel Ebert (who won a Tony for Matilda the Musical) as Rachmaninoff, Eisa Davis (Passing
Strange) as his psychiatrist, and Nikki M. James (a Tony winner for The Book of Mormon) as his fiance.
P h oto g r a p h by P e t e r H a pa k
M O N DAY
1ST
T U E S DAY
2ND
DANCE | movies
THE THEATRE | art
classical music
NIGHT LIFE
ABOVE & BEYOND
FOOD & DRINK
DANCE
The Rose Adagio, in a new production for American Ballet Theatre, at the Metropolitan Opera House.
fty shades
Alexei Ratmansky stages The Sleeping Beauty.
even the most devoted ballet lovers, if woken up in the middle of the night,
would probably admit that theyd like a vacation from at least one of the classics.
Giselle, with its uttery-hearted heroine? Swan Lake, with its messy, over-revised
score? Actually, those two are ne by me. The ballet that occasionally gives me a little
pain is the most enthroned of the classics, The Sleeping Beauty. It is set to what most
people believe is Tchaikovskys greatest ballet score. It has a king and a queen, a castle
and a dark woods, an evil fairy, grinning nastily, and a good fairy who, though she cannot
countermand the bad fairys curses, can introduce modications, arrange for second
chances, the way God does in the New Testament. (Many early spectators would have
noticed the connection.) As for the historical importance of The Sleeping Beauty, it is
doubtful that any other art work, ever, has inuenced its own eld so heavily. Beauty, in
its original, 1890 productionchoreographed by Marius Petipa, the chief ballet master
of the Imperial Theatreswas what converted the young Serge Diaghilev to classical
dance. It was therefore the seed of the Ballets Russes, the company that revived the dying
art of ballet in Europe in the early twentieth century. In 1921, Diaghilev put on his own
6
production of Beauty, in London,

and that, in turn, was the foundation
of British ballet culture, which for
many people in the West, at least
before (also during) Balanchine, was
ballet culture itself.
So The Sleeping Beautyis a grand
thing, and modern performance
practice may have made it too grand,
blaringly grand, or such was the
opinion of Alexei Ratmansky, the
artist-in-residence at American Ballet
Theatre, when he set out to mount
a new production for A.B.T., last
year. Ratmansky felt that the original
version had more subtlety, more
nuance, than we allow it. Now, this is
the sort of thing Ratmansky might
be expected to think. In his own
choreography, he is Mr. Nuance: lots
of steps, lots of complexity. But, when
it comes to Beauty, he can point to
evidence. The ballet was notated, in
what is estimated to be 1903-1905,
and Ratmansky spent a month
studying the movement scores.
What he found was that Petipa liked
degrees of things: softer knees, and
feet that were sometimes half-pointed
rather than fully pointed. His dancers
extensions never looked anything
like todays six-oclock. At most, the
leg was lifted ninety degrees. (You
never saw under the tutu.) Even the
morals had gradations. These days,
the evil fairy is usually electrocuted,
or vaporized, or something, for her
sins; in Petipa, she was invited to the
wedding party. Ratmansky restored
all this. Wasnt he afraid of seeming
old-fashioned? I always said, anything
looks dated or boring, we wont do it.
In the end, they did itRatmanskys
production premired in California
in Marchand to judge from the
reviews nobody found it boring. It
opens in New York on May 29, with
performances through June 13.
Joan Acocella
ILLUSTRATION BY CELINE LOUP
New York City Ballet

In the first program this week, Jerome Robbinss N.Y. Export: Opus
Jazza period piece reminiscent
of West Side Story, but without
the storyis performed alongside
Peter Martinss swoony but overlong
Morgen and Balanchines lively
Raymonda Variations, set to music
by Glazunov. Another program features Justin Pecks rip-roaring take
on Aaron Coplands Rodeo, from
last season. The third is anchored by
Robbinss hour-long meditation on
Bach, The Goldberg Variations.Then
the company launches Balanchines
Midsummer Nights Dream, teeming
with forest fairies brought to life by
Mendelssohns entrancing score.May
27-28 at 7:30 and May 31 at 3:
Raymonda Variations, Morgen,
and N.Y. Export: Opus Jazz.May
29 at 8: Funrailles, Clearing
Dawn, Varied Trio (in Four), This
Bitter Earth, and The Goldberg
Variations. May 30 at 2 and 8:
Symphonic Dances, Rodeo: Four
Dance Episodes, and Mercurial
Manoeuvres. June 2 at 7:30: A
Midsummer Nights Dream. (David
H. Koch, Lincoln Center. 212-4960600. Through June 7.)
American Ballet Theatre

Its a big week at A.B.T. On May
29, the company unveils its brandnew production of The Sleeping
Beauty, staged by Alexei Ratmansky
and based on notations of the 1890
original. The detailed, rococo sets
and costumes, inspired by Lon
Baksts designs for the Ballets Russes,
are by Richard Hudson. On May
27, in back-to-back performances
of Giselle, two of the companys
longest-serving ballerinas, Paloma
Herrera and Xiomara Reyes, take
their leave. Steven McRae, of the
Royal Ballet, will partner the spectacular Natalia Osipova in the same
ballet the following evening.May
26 and May 28 at 7:30 and May 27
at 2 and 7:30: Giselle.May 29 at
7:30 and May 30 at 2 and 8: The
Sleeping Beauty.June 1-2 at 7:30:
La Bayadre. (Metropolitan Opera
House, Lincoln Center. 212-362-6000.
Through July 4.)
Wendy Whelan / Restless
Creature
A few years ago, Whelan, who retired
from City Ballet last fall, decided to
take the reins in the creation process,
hand-picking four choreographers
for an evening of new works. She

asked each for a duet, in which she
would partner the choreographer
himself. Joshua Beamishs work is
more formal, Brian Brookss more
experimental; Alejandro Cerrudos
simmers with quiet sensuality; Kyle
Abrahams toys with gender dynamics.
Along the way, we get a complex
portrait of a fascinating dancer.
(Joyce Theatre, 175 Eighth Ave., at
19th St. 212-242-0800. May 26-31.)
Graham 2
This pre-professional troupe, which
consists of top students from the
Martha Graham School, specializes
in classics by its namesake creator.
Diversion of Angels, Heretic, and
the failsafe Steps in the Street are
on the program. But, like the main
company it feeds into, this group also
seeks relevance in living choreographers. Turning Point, a premire, is
by Blanca Li, a hyper-eclectic artist
whose work can be seen in Almodvar
films and Daft Punk videos, and
who in 1981 quit Spains rhythmic
gymnastics squad to train at the
Graham School. (Martha Graham
Studio Theatre, 55 Bethune St.
212-229-9200. May 28-31.)
La Mama Moves
In the second week of its tenthanniversary season, the festival
offers the premire of Altiplano,
in which Jane Comfort turns away
from the chatty approach of recent
years, instead favoring corporal
images and interlocking clusters
meant to evoke desert weather and
animal behavior. In Hyperactive,
four men from the Irish Modern
Dance Theatre roughhouse in the
titular fashion. Jon Kinzels Provision Provision is much subtler
and pared down, a pencilled-in
duet for the choreographer and
Edisa Weeks. (La Mama, 74A
E. 4th St. 212-475-7710. May 28-31.
Through June 21.)
Niv Sheinfeld & Oren Laor
Ship of Fools, a 2011 work by this
Israeli team, is a No Exit kind of
trio. It involves two men, one woman,
an acoustic guitar, and a blindfold.
Theres everyday movement, spoken
dialogue, a sing-along, and a mock
funeral. Humorous high jinks twist
into humiliations; laughter is induced
as something to choke on. (Abrons
Arts Center, 466 Grand St. 212-3523101. May 29-30.)
MOVIES
Now Playing
Le Amiche
In his fourth feature film, from 1955,
Michelangelo Antonioni turns a glossy
romantic melodrama of modern
prosperity inside out to reveal the
essence of modernity itself. Clelia
(Eleonora Rossi Drago) moves to
Turin to open a new branch of the
high-fashion boutique that she managed in Rome. When Rosetta, the
flighty bourgeoise in the adjoining
hotel room, attempts suicide, Clelia
takes her under her wing, joins her
circle of friends, and gets caught up
in their frivolous, desperate games of
love. What makes this conventional
drama enigmatically original is the
details: the architectural contours of
the films myriad locations seem to
determine the action of the people
who traverse them, and the assortment
of portraits, reflections, sketches, and
eye-catching clothing have more reality
than the empty, miserable characters to
whom they lend identities. Antonionis
quietly audacious attempt to convey
the inner workings of modern life is
also a standard-issue romanceof
exactly the sort that fills his heroines
minds. In Italian.Richard Brody (Film
Society of Lincoln Center; May 29
and May 31.)
Good Kill
Tommy Egan (Ethan Hawke) is
a major in the U.S. Air Force,
stationed outside Las Vegas. Its an
unlikely perch for a combat pilot,
especially one with thousands of
flying hours to his credit, but then
Tommy, these days, never leaves the
ground. He sits in a metal box and
directs unmanned aerial vehicles,
or drones, toward targets on the
far side of the worldin Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Yemen, and other hot
spots. He dislikes the job, despite his
skill at it, and dislikes himself even
more for doing it; he takes to drink,
his wife (January Jones) finds him
distant, and his senior officer (Bruce
Greenwood) continues, against his
better judgment, to argue the case
for drone warfare. Andrew Niccols
movie is almost Tommy-tightincreasingly airless, boxed in by its
own anxietiesand easier to admire,
for its solid construction and its
command of tone, than to warm to.
But the scenes of destruction, calmly
wrought by remote control, grow ever
more unnerving to the eye and the
conscience alike, and Hawke does
a fine job of showing the progress
of self-contempt as it eats into the
heros habits and into his stricken
face. With Zo Kravitz.Anthony

Lane (Reviewed in our issue of
5/18/15.) (In limited release.)
Heaven Knows What
The destructive power of herointhe
effects of the drug itself and the desperate efforts to get itis in evidence
throughout this furious drama of
destitute young addicts surviving on
the streets of todays luxurious Upper
West Side. The directors Josh and
Benny Safdie add an element that
renders it all the more toxic: love.
Harley (Arielle Holmes) is devoted
to Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones) with a
nearly religious fanaticism, despite
his brutal indifference to her suicidal
threats. She makes an attempt and
recovers in a psychiatric hospital; upon
her release, she takes up with Mike
(Buddy Duress), a motormouthed lowlevel drug dealer who provokes Ilyas
violent jealousy. The script, written
by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein,
is based on Holmess memoir; its
filled with astonishing, geographically specific details of addicts daily
practical agoniesthe struggle for
shelter and a place to shoot up, the
habits of theft and begging, their
unwelcome patronage of fast-food
restaurants and public libraries, the
emotional deprivation of near-feral

subsistence. The Safdiesaided
by the raw intimacy of Sean Price
Williamss camera workcapture
Harleys panic-stricken rage and
futile tenderness, as in a harrowing
macrophotographic shot of her
inability to thread a needle due to
tremors.R.B. (In limited release.)
In the Name of My Daughter
The true story of a late-seventies
murder case, which is well-known
in France, is a ready-made classic
melodrama. Catherine Deneuve is
calmly ferocious as Rene Le Roux,
the elegant widow of a casino owner
in Nice who is struggling to keep
the business afloat in the face of
predatory competition from a mobster (Jean Corso). Her lonely and
socially awkward daughter, Agns
(Adle Haenel), returns home to
ask for her inheritance, which is
tied up in the casino. There, Agns
gets involved with Maurice Agnelet
(Guillaume Canet), an ambitious but
unappreciatedand marriedlocal
attorney who is her mothers righthand man. When Maurices drive
for power puts him at odds with
Rene, he influences Agns to help
him work some behind-the-scenes
Opening
Aloha
Cameron Crowe directed

this comic drama, about a
military contractor (Bradley
Cooper) who begins a
relationship with a pilot
(Emma Stone). Opening
May 29. (In wide release.)
Gemma Bovery
Reviewed this week in The

Current Cinema. Opening
May 29. (In limited release.)
Heaven Knows What
Reviewed in Now Playing.

Opening May 29. (In limited
release.)
Results

release.)
San Andreas
Uncertain Terms

release.)
Revivals And Festivals
Titles in bold are reviewed.

Anthology Film
Archives
This Is Celluloid: 35mm.

May 29 at 7 and June 1
at 9: M.May 31 at 9:
Moonfleet (1955, Fritz
Lang).June 2 at 7:15:
Taza, Son of Cochise
(1954, Douglas Sirk).
BAM Cinmatek
Black & White Scope.

May 29 at 2, 4:30, 7,
and 9:30: The 400
Blows (1959, Franois
Truffaut).June 1 at 7 and
9:15: The Red and the
White.
Film Forum
In revival. May 29-June 4

(call for showtimes):
Pickup on South Street.
Film Society of Lincoln
Center
Films produced by Titanus.

May 29 at 4:15 and May 31
at 9: Le Amiche.
movie OF THE WEEK
A video discussion of Peyton

Reeds The Break-Up, from
2006, in our digital edition
and online.
8
BAM Cinmateks Black & White Scope series includes The Red and the White, a drama of the Russian Revolution.
mischiefand to get hold of her

money. When Agns disappears,
Maurice is accused of murder. The
director, Andr Tchin, has a keen
eye for the Balzacian furies behind
the cold formalities of business and
the stifling mores of the provincial
bourgeoisie. The movies French title,
The Man They Loved Too Much,
suggests its true focus: Maurice, the
Machiavellian outcast who pulls the
strings. The storys tension slackens
when the action extends to later
years, but by that time a dramatic
feast has already been served. In
French.R.B. (In limited release.)
Love at First Fight
This drama, directed by Thomas
Cailley, is centered on the rough
physicality of two young adults in
a cozy lakeside town in western
France. Arnaud (Kvin Azas) is
a carpenter who, with his brother
(Antoine Laurent), is struggling
to maintain the small construction
firm that they inherited from their
father. Madeleine (Adle Haenel),
a disaffected college student from
a bourgeois family, is possessed of
apocalyptic visions and paranoid plans
for survival. Meeting cute in a wrestling match at an Army-recruitment
fair, Arnaud and Madeleine begin
a brusque flirtation that intensifies
when they take a two-week Army
commando-training course. For a
movie about bodily endurance and
rugged adventure, Cailleys direction
is oddly detachedhe lets the script
(which he co-wrote with Claude Le
Pape) suggest the tough work and
hardly bothers to film it. But near
the end the long, schematic setup
delivers a remarkable twist: the
near-couples theoretical training for
survival gets put to a severe practical
test. Here, too, Cailley leaves much
of the most interesting action to the
imagination, but the power of his idea
overrides, albeit briefly, the thinness

of its realization. In French.R.B.
(In limited release.)
M
The police investigation at the heart
of Joseph Loseys 1951 remake of Fritz
Langs 1931 German classic, about
the hunt for a serial child-killer,
reflects the McCarthyite inquisitions
that Losey was enduring at the time
(and which led to his blacklisting
and exile). Sticking closely to the
plot of the original, Losey turns
the story into pungent Americana
through his attention to alluringly
grubby Los Angeles locations. Ernest
Laszlos cinematography renders the
mottled sidewalks and grim faades
eloquent; urgent tracking and crane
shots convey the paranoid pairing
of menace and surveillance. David
Wayne brings a hectic pathos to the
role of the psychopath at war with
his urges, and such character actors
as Howard Da Silva and Raymond
Burr lend streetwise flair to the officers of the law and the underworld
posse competing to catch the killer.
The Brechtian irony of criminals
delivering punishment is a Berlin
import, the Freudian psychology is
an American touch, and the corrosive
view of the government is the kind
that couldand didget a filmmaker
in trouble.R.B. (Anthology Film
Archives; May 29 and June 1.)
Mad Max: Fury Road
The fourth chapter in the saga of
Max and the best, even if you emerge
with dented eyeballs. The loners
role that belonged to Mel Gibson
now passes to Tom Hardy, who, as
is only proper, gets little to say but
plenty to do, most of it involving fire,
dust, velocity, and blood. The time
is the looming future, the landscape
is dry and stripped of greenery, and,
to cap it all, Max is a prisoner. Once
escaped, he teams up with Furiosa

(Charlize Theron), a one-armed and
single-minded truck driver, who is
carrying a cargo of young women
stealing them, in fact, from a masked
tyrannical brute named Immortan
Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne), who uses
them as breeders. The feminist slant
of the movie comes as a welcome
surprise, while the rampant verve of
the action sequences is pretty much
what admirers of George Miller, the
director, have been praying for. Rarely
has a filmmaker seemed less in need
of a brake pedal. Luckily, his sense
of humor remains undamaged, and
his eye for extravagant design is as
keen as ever; some of the makeup
is so drastic that you can barely
distinguish between human flesh and
the bodywork of cars. The director of
photography, keeping his composure
in the melee, is John Seale.A.L.
(5/25/15) (In wide release.)
Pickup on South Street
Samuel Fullers bilious, streetwise
drama, from 1953, begins with what
looks like a molestation on a crowded
New York subway train, of a glossy
young woman, Candy (Jean Peters),
by a leering young wolf (Richard
Widmark). But something else occurs: he slips into her handbag and
gets away with her walletwhich
happens to contain microfilm of a
military formula that shes delivering
to Communist agents. The man, Skip
McCoy, is a well-known pickpocket
(or, in the trade, a cannon), who is
named to the police by Mo Williams
(Thelma Ritter), an aging stool pigeon who lives above a tattoo parlor
on the Bowery. Candy, who has a
criminal past herself, also consults
Mo and traces Skip to his waterfront
bait shack beneath the Brooklyn
Bridge, where both of them use sex
as a weapon along with fists and
beer bottles. The police are following
EVERETT (BOTH)
An action film, directed

by Brad Peyton, about
parents (Dwayne Johnson
and Carla Gugino) in
search of their daughter
(Alexandra Daddario) after
an earthquake. Opening
May 29. (In wide release.)
them, and Candys ex (Richard Kiley), himself a

Communist agent, is being threatened by Party
higher-ups. Fullers pugnacious direction and his
gutter-up view of city life romanticize both the
criminal code of honor and the jangling paranoia
of global plots; his hard-edged long takes depict
underworld cruelty with reportorial wonder as
well as moralistic dread.R.B. (Film Forum;
May 29-June 4.)
Pitch Perfect 2
Despite the ribald joke that sets the plot in motion,
this musical sequel is even more sanitized and
frictionless than the original. Because of a wardrobe
malfunction at a high-profile performance (with the
Obamas in attendance), the Barden Bellas, Americas
collegiate-champion a-cappella group, are banned
from domestic competitionand must, instead,
win a world title in order to be spared dissolution.
Meanwhile, with graduation looming, the members
of the group have life choices to make: Beca (Anna
Kendrick), the most musically talented, secretly
takes an internship at a recording studio; Chloe
(Brittany Snow), the leader of the pack, delays
facing life after college; Fat Amy (Rebel Wilson)
cant admit that shes in love. The groups chemistry
is altered by the arrival of an over-eager freshman
(Hailee Steinfeld) just as theyre preparing to face
the existential threat of a swaggering German
troupe. Meanwhile, the bickering commentators,
John (John Michael Higgins) and Gail (Elizabeth
Banks, who also directed), offer wan comic diversion. In her feature directorial dbut, Banks doesnt
reveal much personality, though her affection for
the performers is evident; theyre a joy to watch,
but they have little to do. Ethnic clichs abound,
college comes off as a free sleepaway camp, and
the simple wonders of unaccompanied singing
are inflated to Las Vegas-style bombast.R.B.
(In wide release.)
lover. Trevor is a small businessman with a big

philosophy; he sees fitness in terms of physical,
mental, emotional, and spiritual values, which appeal
to Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a new client whos out
of shape, well-to-do, and socially awkward. Kat begins to train Danny in his palatial but unfurnished
home; Dannys big check for future sessions will
help Trevor expand the gym. But Kat begins an
affair with Danny as well, and their relationship
gets in the way of business. Bujalski pays close
attention to money and its power, seeing a small
company as like a film productiona matter of
comic drama that runs on personalities. He stages
the clashes of idiosyncratic characters that give the
enterprise its life while observing the infinitesimal
details of which that life is madehow to make new
friends, how to hook up cable TVas well as the
ethereally intimate connections that result.R.B.
Slow West
Whether the dbut feature from John Maclean
was wisely titled is open to debate. The story
certainly ambles along, yet it lasts less than ninety
minutes, and there are times when it quickens into
bursts of compelling activity. Kodi Smit-McPhee
plays the youthful Jay, who travels from Scotland
(not that you would guess it from his accent) to
Americaaiming for Colorado, where his beloved,
Rose (Caren Pistorius), is said to be. Enter Silas
(Michael Fassbender), who knows the country and
offers to guide the hapless Jay to his destination,
for cash. Along the way, they are tested by various
incidents, some of which are no more than narrative
doodling, bereft of purpose; others, however, like
a gunfight in a secluded store, make more of an
impact, as does the climax, set amid fields of ripe
corn. Maclean reserves the best for last, in a quiet

reckoning of all the human damage that has been
left behind. In an uneven cast, it is Fassbender
and Pistorius who stand outthe first, as sombre
as usual; the second, steady and lethal beyond her
years.A.L. (5/18/15) (In limited release.)
Uncertain Terms
A rural group home for pregnant teen-agers is
the setting for this intimately detailed, sharply
observed modernist melodrama, directed by Nathan
Silver. The directors mother, Cindy Silver, plays
Carla Gottlieb, the residences founder and leader.
Carlaherself a onetime unwed motherhosts five
girls at a time; in quiet but intense confessional
scenes of formal sharing or offhand chat, they
discuss their difficult situations. The troubles
ramp up with the arrival of Carlas grown nephew,
Robbie (David Dahlbom), newly separated from
his wife, who volunteers for a two-week stint as
a handyman. While there, Robbie becomes a
part of the household and falls in love with Nina
(India Menuez), one of the pregnant women,
sparking conflict with her boyfriend, Chase
(Casey Drogin). Silvers incisive direction blends
patient discernment and expressive angularity; he
develops his characters in deft and rapid strokes
and builds tension with an almost imperceptible
heightening of tone and darkening of mood. The
involuted acting and the freestyle cinematography,
keenly sensitive to the flickers of the moment,
yield sensual and emotional wonders. With a
superbly poised, experienced independent-film
cast that includes Gina Piersanti (It Felt Like
Love), Hannah Gross (I Used to Be Darker),
and Tallie Medel (The Unspeakable Act).R.B.
The Red and the White

In this historical epic, from 1967, the Hungarian
director Mikls Jancs, a great screen choreographer, deploys his forces on the battlefields of
the Russian Revolution. The film opens with a
bravura three-minute crane shot as Bolsheviks
and Hungarian volunteers are fiercely pursued by
the White Army along a hilly riverbank. Some
survive through feral cunning, only to wander into
an undefined war zone of ambushes, arrests, and
summary executions, where visual points of view
shift and multiply with the bewildering suddenness of combat. Jancs organizes the swarming
and scattered fighters with a stupendous, almost
unnoticed virtuosity, delineating the chaotic action
in precise, flowing long takes. Though he filmed
in the Soviet Union with official coperation and
duly depicts the tsarists haughty contempt for the
passionate ragtag partisans of the popular cause, he
stays relentlessly outside his characters heads in
order to get past the rhetoric and bring the great
forces of history to life. As the revolutionaries
slog through the embattled countryside without
leaders and without refuge, Jancss bold, defiant
judgment emerges silently from the clamor of the
bloody pageant: Bolshevism is not the triumphal
fulfillment of history but simply suicide. In Russian
and Hungarian.R.B. (BAM Cinmatek; June 1.)
Results
One of the strangest and strongest of recent romantic triangles develops in the course of this lyrical,
fanatically realistic comedy, written and directed
by Andrew Bujalski. His subject is the overlap of
business and pleasure. Kat (Cobie Smulders) is a
trainer at a gym in Austin, Texas, which is owned
by Trevor (Guy Pearce), who is also her occasional
the
THEATRE
Openings and Previews
An Act of God
Jim Parsons (The Big Bang Theory)
stars in a play by David Javerbaum,
in which God answers some of lifes
eternal questions. Joe Mantello
directs. In previews. Opens May
28. (Studio 54, at 254 W. 54th St.
212-719-1300.)
The Tempest, directed by Michael Greif, opens the Shakespeare in the Park season.
stormy weather
Sam Waterston plays Prospero, at the Delacorte.
the late legendary columbia university professor Mark Van Dorens 1939 book,
Shakespeare, is very moving, in part because Van Doren is so alive to his subject. Dedicated to each
of Shakespeares plays and his poems, Van Doren is especially ne when he gets to the maestros
last play, The Tempest, and one of my favorite characters, Caliban. A servant once mentored
by Prospero, Caliban is forsaken by his friend, the better for the crafty older manthe man with
wordsto take over the island that Caliban called home. Caliban says, This islands mine, by
Sycorax my mother, / Which thou takst from me. When thou camst rst, / Thou strokdst me and
made much of me. Caliban, writes Van Doren, has no capacity for abstraction, and consequently
for the rational harmonies of music and love. But how you can be rational when youre bereft?
In Prosperos Books, Peter Greenaways riveting 1991 lm version of the play, the dancer and
choreographer Michael Clark played Caliban, and he did it without speaking, miming his disgust
with the rational mind: its Prosperos two-faced reasoning that got him in trouble in the rst place.
Clarks nuanced performance illustrates the amazing text, narrated in voice-over, which describes the
complicated love that can exist between the colonized and the colonizerand the betrayal that lies
at the heart of it.
This summer, the Public Theatres Shakespeare in the Park kicks off its fty-third season with
Michael Greif s rendition of The Tempest (previews begin May 27), starring Sam Waterston, as
Prospero, and Louis Cancelmi, as Caliban. Its terric casting to choose Waterston for the role of
the keeper of books, the greedy and prophetic elder whose self-creation is his greatest creation. (It is
Waterstons thirteenth production with the Public.) For years, the young Waterston was one of our
more awkward leading men, skinny and elegant and troubled, with such pronounced features and
expressive eyes that you could not look away. His Prospero will no doubt be infused with his characteristic
romanticism, enhanced by the settingfor what could be more appropriate than the Delacortes venerable
outdoor space to stage this work that feels as though it were written under the stars?
Hilton Als
10
ANT Fest 2015

The annual showcase for rising
theatrical talents includes Andrew
Bancrofts freestyle-infused evening
Orpheus and Eurydice Are Fucking in Love, Lisa Clairs Whats
YOUR Problem?: A Deep Space
Lounge Act, and a special edition
of Showgasm, John Earlys brash
variety show. Opens June 1. (Ars
Nova, 511 W. 54th St. 212-352-3101.)
Composition . . .
Master-Pieces . . . Identity
The writer-performer David Greenspan returns with this solo piece
for Target Margin Theatre, which
draws on two lectures and a play by
Gertrude Stein. In previews. Opens
June 1. (Connelly, 220 E. 4th St.
212-352-3101.)
Doctor Faustus
Chris Noth stars in Christopher
Marlowes tale of a man who sells
his soul to the Devil, directed by
Andrei Belgrader. Previews begin
June 2. (Classic Stage Company, 136
E. 13th St. 866-811-4111.)
Gloria
A new play by Branden JacobsJenkins (An Octoroon), directed
by Evan Cabnet, follows a group
of ambitious editorial assistants who
dream of getting published by the
time theyre thirty. Previews begin
May 28. (Vineyard, 108 E. 15th St.
212-353-0303.)
Guards at the Taj
Amy Morton directs a new play by
Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the
Baghdad Zoo), in which two imperial
guards in seventeenth-century India
watch the sun rise on the newly built
Taj Mahal. In previews. (Atlantic
Theatre Company, 336 W. 20th St.
866-811-4111.)
ILLUSTRATION BY SIMON PRADES
A Human Being Died That

Night
In Nicholas Wrights play, based on a
book by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela,
a South African psychologist interrogates the apartheid-era political
assassin Eugene de Kock in his prison
cell. Opens May 29. (BAM Fishman
Space, 321 Ashland Pl., Brooklyn.
718-636-4100.)
Preludes
A new musical from Dave Malloy and
Rachel Chavkin, the writer-director
team behind Natasha, Pierre &
the Great Comet of 1812, in which
the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff
sees a hypnotist after the ill-fated
premire of his first symphony. In
previews. (Claire Tow, 150 W. 65th
St. 212-239-6200.)
The Qualms
Pam MacKinnon directs a new play
by Bruce Norris (Clybourne Park),
in which a suburban couple attend a
spouse-swapping party that challenges
their notions of free love. In previews.
(Playwrights Horizons, 416 W. 42nd
St. 212-279-4200.)
Significant Other
The Roundabout stages a new play
by Joshua Harmon (Bad Jews),
directed by Trip Cullman, about a
young gay urbanite searching for love
as his female friends begin to settle
down. In previews. (Laura Pels, 111
W. 46th St. 212-719-1300.)
The Spoils
The New Group presents a play written by and starring Jesse Eisenberg,
about an angry grad-school dropout
who tries to thwart the impending
marriage of his grade-school crush.
Scott Elliott directs. In previews.
Opens June 2. (Pershing Square
Signature Center, 480 W. 42nd St.
212-279-4200.)
10 out of 12
Anne Washburns new work, directed by Les Waters, is set amid
the drudgery and high tension of
a technical rehearsal for a play. In
previews. (SoHo Rep, 46 Walker St.
212-352-3101.)
3
Now Playing
Forever
Dael Orlandersmith, the author and
the performer of this eighty-minute
monologue (directed indulgently, but
not unintelligently, by Neel Keller),
is no stranger to chaos and conflict.
When we first meet her, she is in
Paris, at Pre Lachaise Cemetery,
where she communes with the artists
who inspired her and who form, for
her, a kind of ideal family. It doesnt
take us long to realize that her will to
dramatize is, to a great extent, about
upstaging the first performer in the
family: her mother, Beula. When the
young Orlandersmith turns to Beula
for answers about herselfWhy am
I different? Why am I bigger than

everyone else?her mother beats her,
or exacerbates her self-doubt with
more criticism. Unlike her daughter,
Beula is unable to stand outside her
story long enough to tell it, but Orlandersmith is unable to stand outside
hers long enough to transform it into
mysteryinto art that will transport
an audience. (Reviewed in our issue of
5/25/15.) (New York Theatre Workshop,
79 E. 4th St. 212-279-4200. Through
May 31.)
The Other Thing
Ghost hunting is a perilous pastime,
best approached with a healthy suspicion about seemingly innocuous
details and incidental passersby. So we
learn from Emily Schwends mordant
comedy, directed by Lucie Tiberghien,
which blends psychological drama
with tales of the paranormal, conjuring
a creepy portrait of a journalist named
Kim (Samantha Soule), who has a
serious Jekyll-and-Hyde dilemma.
Kim begins reporting on ghost
huntersguys who investigate spooky
barns and haunted atticsbut soon
her own phantasms erupt, wreaking
havoc on her psychic and social life.
Ghosts serve as rich metaphors here,
representing memories, past selves,
and unknowable parts of other
people. The play would be scarier if
it explained less and ended sooner,
and its gender critique, emerging
late, feels grafted on. But Schwend
writes with adventurous intelligence,
lending the play a haunting and
wry beauty. (McGinn/Cazale, 2162
Broadway, at 76th St. 212-246-4422.)
Permission
Robert Askins, whose raunchy
comedy Hand to God is running
on Broadway, seems to have a few
recurring motifs: Texas, devout
Christianity, repressed female lust,
and what happens when a perverse
element explodes the whole wholesome picture. In Hand to God, its
a Satanic hand puppet. In this new
play, directed by Alex Timbers for
MCC Theatre, its Christian Domestic
Discipline (spanking for Jesus), in
which modern husbands submit their
wives to Bible-approved domination.
When the mild-mannered Eric (an
unfocussed Justin Bartha) and Cynthia (Elizabeth Reaser) pick up the
practice from their steamy friends
Zach and Michelle (Lucas NearVerbrugghe and Nicole Lowrance,
both excellent), their marriage picks
up, toothe running joke being that
C.D.D. is thinly veiled S. & M. The
blasphemies of Hand to God mount
in giddy accumulation; here they
swim around in circles, never quite
landing comedically. (Lucille Lortel,
121 Christopher St. 212-352-3101.)
Tuesdays at Tescos
Simon Callow gives a thrilling performance as Pauline, who used to
be called Paul, as she recounts her
weekly visits to her difficult, distant,
disdainful father, helping with chores

around the house and accompanying
him to the local supermarket in her
old neighborhood. Movingly directed
by Simon Stokes, Emmanuel Darleys
play was adapted and translated from
the French by Matthew Hurt and Sarah
Vermande. The writing is generally
narrative, but it veers off expansively
in some poetic, existentialist directions,
with notes of Beckett and Pinter. The
effect is enhanced by Robin Dons
surrealistic set and Chahine Yavroyans perception-altering lighting.
But the evening is driven by Callow,
a powerful actor giving a master class
in characterization, vocal technique,
and movement. Accompanied onstage by some spiky, atonal music by
Conor Mitchell, Pauline occasionally,
startlingly, interrupts her monologue
with an expert dance sequence. (59E59,
at 59 E. 59th St. 212-279-4200.)
Also Notable
Airline Highway
Samuel J. Friedman
An American in Paris
Palace
The Audience
Schoenfeld
The Belle of Belfast
DR2
Clinton the Musical
New World Stages

Cool Hand Luke
59E59. Through May 31.

The Curious Incident
of the Dog in the
Night-Time
Ethel Barrymore
Dinner with the Boys
Acorn
Finding Neverland
Lunt-Fontanne
The Way We Get By

In the predawn hours, Doug (Thomas
Sadoski) wakes up in a New York
apartment, hours after having insane
good sex with Beth (Amanda Seyfried, uncharacteristically abrasive).
Hes awkward and puppyish and a
bit of a man-child (Its vintage, he
says of his Star Wars T-shirt); shes
sarcastic and romantically jaded. What
seems like a one-night stand between
strangers is revealed, during Neil
LaButes eighty-five-minute play, to
be something thornier and stranger.
One of LaButes best skills is knowing
how to spoon out information at satisfying intervals. The dialogue can be
artificially gabbyyou wonder how
these two ever made it to bed, with
all their talk about whether its Sunday
or Mondaybut the play, directed by
Leigh Silverman, relaxes into a sweet,
searching little love story. Has LaBute
finally gone soft? (Second Stage, 305
W. 43rd St. 212-246-4422.)
What I Did Last Summer
A. R. Gurneys 1983 play is set in his
typical milieuamong the buzzing
Wasps of Buffalo, New York. During
the hot months of 1945, with his
father still at war, the fourteen-yearold Charlie (Noah Galvin) flees the
neatly ironed bosom of his wellto-do family to work odd jobs for
Anna, the local eccentric (Kristine
Nielsen). Will he retreat to domestic comfort or take on the tattered
mantle of an artists life? The acting
is generally fine (Galvin is gifted at
adolescent obnoxiousness; Nielsen
is daffy and melancholic), and the
dialogue practiced. The director Jim
Simpson, a longtime Gurney enthusiast, offers a few stylistic eccentricities: the stage directions appear as
typewritten letters on the backdrop
of Michael Yeargans set, and a percussionist provides sound effects in
the manner of Japanese drama. But
this revival cant elevate the play
beyond the maddeningly inconsequential. (Pershing Square Signature
Center, 480 W. 42nd St. 212-244-7529.)
Fish in the Dark
Cort
The Flick
Barrow Street Theatre

Fun Home
Circle in the Square

Gigi
Neil Simon
Hand to God
Booth
Hedwig and the Angry
Inch
Belasco
It Shoulda Been You
Brooks Atkinson
Its Only a Play
Jacobs
The King and I
Vivian Beaumont
Macbeth
Public
On the Town
Lyric
On the Twentieth
Century
American Airlines Theatre

One Hand Clapping
59E59. Through May 31.

The Painted Rocks at
Revolver Creek
Pershing Square Signature

Center
Skylight
Golden
Something Rotten!
St. James
The Sound and the Fury
Public
The Tempest
Delacorte
The 39 Steps
Union Square Theatre

The Two Gentlemen of
Verona
Polonsky Shakespeare
Center
The Visit
Lyceum
Wolf Hall: Parts One
& Two
Winter Garden
11
ART
Museums Short List
Metropolitan Museum
China Through the Looking

Glass. Through Aug. 16.
Museum of Modern Art
Yoko Ono: One Woman Show,

1960-1971. Through Sept. 7.
Guggenheim Museum
Monir Shahroudy
Farmanfarmaian: Infinite
Possibility. Through June 3.
Whitney Museum
America Is Hard to See.

Through Sept. 27.
Brooklyn Museum
Basquiat: The Unknown

Notebooks. Through Aug. 23.
American Museum of
Natural History
Life at the Limits: Stories of

Amazing Species. Through
Jan. 3.
Museums and Libraries

New York Botanical Garden
Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life
In this luxuriant installation in the
institutions grand old Conservatory,
a long walkway is flanked by jacaranda, oleander, philodendron, roses,
sunflowers, fuchsia, marigolds, palms,
ferns, fruit trees, and many varieties
of cacti and succulents associated
with the Mexican artist and La Casa
Azul, her stunning home in Mexico
City. Other plants are depicted in a
small exhibition of Kahlos paintings,
drawings, and prints, which combines
scholarly integrity, aesthetic flair, and a
calculated occasion, as if any should be
needed, for a visit to the two hundred
and fifty acres of Eden in the Bronx.
This is the first Kahlo show in New
York in more than a decadetoo
long, for an artist whose prestige and
influence, worldwide, have ballooned
in that time. Today, she inhabits international culture at variable points
on a sliding scale between sainthood
and a brand. Through Nov. 1.
SculptureCenter
Erika Verzutti: Swan with Stage
The Brazilian artists witty New
York dbut includes a room of small,
biomorphic sculptures based on pears

and breadfruit, but the main event
is a twelve-foot-tall abstracted swan
made of Styrofoam, polyurethane,
and fibreglass. In the Instagram-ready
installation, viewers can go face to beak
with the bird by climbing steps and
walking onto a platform. In a related
series of black-and-white photographs,
a performer serenades another swan
sculpture (he also gnaws it, kisses
it, and falls asleep on it). In several
shots, the performer wears a jumpsuit
embroidered with the artists name,
as if she had deputized him to fall in
love with her work: a Pygmalion by
proxy. Through Aug. 3.
3
GalleriesUptown
Robert Frank
At ninety, the great photographer
is in an introspective, reminiscent
mood. Interior views of his home
in Nova Scotia are accompanied by
pictures taken in Zurich, New York,
and Arizona (where he snapped a pair
of glazed doughnuts on a tray, then
printed the image twice) and portraits
of friends (Paolo Roversi, Eugene
Richards, Richard Serra) and of his
wife, the artist June Leaf. There are
some recurrent motifspictures of

pictures, signs, headlinesbut, over
all, the mood is desultory. Among
the brief texts on the wall, one sums
up Franks thoughts on the pictures:
They are quiet / They demand no
attention / They are not empty.
Through June 13. (Pace/MacGill, 32
E. 57th St. 212-759-7999.)
3
GalleriesChelsea
Emi Anrakuji
The Tokyo-based photographer, who
is fifty-two and has been legally blind
since her twenties, exhibits a quietly
sensational series of black-and-white
nude self-portraits taken last year.
Whether posing on her bed, in her
bathroom, or in a mirror, she remains
faceless; her head is either cropped by
the camera or obscured by a curtain
of hair, which parts only once to
reveal a wide-open mouth. The erotic
intimation of that image is explored
further in four color photographs in
which the lens skims so close to the
body that the subject becomes flesh
itself. Through May 30. (Yoshinaga,
547 W. 27th St. 212-268-7132.)
Rivane Neuenschwander
The Brazilian artists winning but
disjointed show includes pinhole
photographs, wallpaper infused with
the scent of biscuits, a hanging fern,
and a video of a parakeet eating seeds
painted with punctuation marks. In
some cases, back story helps. Youd
be unlikely to guess that six small
abstract paintings on shelves are derived from the covers of bossa-nova
records by Chico Buarque, who left
Brazil during the dictatorship. But
Neuenschwanders inscrutability is
also a virtue. Hovering beyond language or logic, her intimate works
have the lure of a forgotten secret.
Through June 20. (Bonakdar, 521
W. 21st St. 212-414-4144.)
The domestic marries the architectonic in the intimate still-lifes of the New York painter Sydney Licht. A show of her
new work (including Fat Quarters, above) opens at Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, in Chelsea, on May 28.
12
GalleriesDowntown
Pam Lins
If there is such a thing as post-Internet
art, this ambitious, rambunctious, and
beautiful show might be its opposite:
scores of glazed-ceramic tabletop sculptures about pre-digital networks. Along
a corridor, on shelves lining opposite
walls, are endearingly goofy renditions
of push-button phones, resting on U.S.
Postal Service boxes. (The boxes are
flat rate, a gag about pictorial versus
sculptural objects that runs through the
show.) On one wall, the pieces are in
gray scale, with grace notes of red; on
the other, theyre all in color. This sets
up a marvellous trick in the main room,
in which tables full of small abstract
ceramics (based on models made in
a Constructivist workshop) appear
unglazed as you approach them, but
become polychrome when seen from
behind. The conceptual overload is a
bit taxing, but, formally, Linss show is
a triumph. Through May 31. (Uffner,
170 Suffolk St. 212-274-0064.)
COURTESY THE ARTIST AND KATHRYN MARKEL FINE ARTS, NY
cLASSical MUSIC
Opera
Opera Lafayette
The Francophile company makes a point of unearthing
French operas from the B.C. (before Carmen) era.
It concludes its twentieth-anniversary season with
Lpreuve Villageoise (The VillageTrial), by Andr
Grtry, an early champion of the comic-opera form
who gets little love today compared to later masters
like Offenbach. The director, Nick Olcott, sets the
rustic comedy during a Cajun Mardi Gras in rural
Louisiana; Ryan Brown conducts. (Florence Gould
Hall, French Institute Alliance Franaise, 55 E. 59th
St. 800-982-2787. May 27 at 7:30 and May 28 at 7.)
American Opera Projects:
A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseinis follow-up to The Kite Runner
gets the musical treatment in a new opera by Sheila
Silver. A.O.P. presents scenes from the opera in
progress, which the composer colors with Hindustani ragas and traditional instruments (bansuri and
tabla) to evoke Afghanistan. The workshops cast
includes the mezzo-soprano Deanne Meek, who in
2007 created a memorable portrait of Ma Joad in
the premire of Ricky Ian Gordons The Grapes of
Wrath. (National Opera Center, 330 Seventh Ave.
operaprojects.org. June 1 at 5 and 7:30.)
3
Orchestras and Choruses
New York Philharmonic
The Austrian conductor Manfred Honeck, an authoritative presence when he made his dbut, in 2013,
returns with an all-Teutonic program. The performance
begins with a spring in its step, with Johann Strauss IIs
Overture to Die Fledermaus. Mozarts spirited
Violin Concerto No. 5 (Turkish), performed by
the celebrated virtuoso Augustin Hadelich, is the
centerpiece of the entertainment, before things close in
gloomy Romantic grandeur with Brahmss Symphony
No. 4 in E Minor. (Avery Fisher Hall. 212-875-5656.
May 28 at 7:30, May 29 at 2, and May 30 at 8.)
New Amsterdam Singers
Clara Longstreth and her excellent avocational choir,
with a long history of premires behind them, set
out for fresh territory in a program that combines
French-language classics by Poulenc, Hindemith
(the exquisite Six Chansons, to poems by Rilke),
and Bernstein (the French Choruses from The
Lark), along with new and recent pieces by Ben
Moore (Dear Theo, settings of letters by Van
Gogh), Michael Dellaria, and Eric Whitacre.
(St. Ignatius of Antioch Church, West End Ave.
at 87th St. nasingers.org. May 28 at 8.)
American Symphony Orchestra:
American Variations
The centenary of the late George Perle, a lauded
composer whose music was as much admired for its
eloquence and charm as for its impeccable intellectuality, is the theme for a concert of music by
a glorious generation of late-twentieth-century
American masters. Leon Botstein conducts the orchestra in two of Perles works (including the impressive
Transcendental Modulations) as well as signature
pieces by Copland, Lukas Foss (Baroque Variations),
and William Schuman (the fiery New England
Triptych). (Carnegie Hall. 212-247-7800. May 29 at 8.)
Recitals
Ferus Festival
The results of VisionIntoArts annual incubation
period for new projects get some exposure over
two crazy days at Pioneer Works, in Brooklyn.
On Friday night, the composer-performers Hafez
Modirzadeh (on alto sax) and Agata Zubel (a Polish
singer whose interests range from Copland to the
avant-garde) join other musicians for an evening
of improvisations and new works; two concerts
on Saturday feature, among other provocations, a
pair of works (by Cornelius Dufallo and Mikael
Karlsson, respectively) with texts by the ubiquitous Royce Vavrek, (The Many Trespasses of)
Invisible Men and The Diana Vreeland Opera.
(159 Pioneer St., Red Hook. pioneerworks.org.
May 29 at 7 and May 30 at 3 and 5.)
Met Museum Presents
The museum, nearing the end of its classical
performance season, presents two events showcasing legends of crossover creativity. May 29
at 7: The composer and Wilco drummer Glenn
Kotche joins his friends in Chicagos Third Coast
Percussion in a program that highlights one of
the oddest elements in the Mets instrument
collectiona rock harmonicon, or stone dulcimer, from 1880. The concert also features two
classic works by Steve Reich, Music for Pieces
of Wood and Nagoya Marimbas. (Fifth Ave.
at 82nd St.) May 30 at 1:30 and 3:30: The
wondrously creative John Zorn has curated a
special program of his music for the Fuentiduea
Chapel at the museums northern branch, the
Cloisters. Its headlined by the JACK Quartet,
which offers the world premire of The Remedy
of Fortune (for string quartet) and the New York
premire of Pandoras Box (with the soprano
Tony Arnold); the program begins with The
Holy Visions, a work for female voices. (Fort
Tryon Park.) (212-570-3949.)
Glass Farm Ensemble: Faint Objects
Music by Swiss composers (in this case, Luigi
Laveglia and Lars Werdenberg) is always featured
on the composer-pianist Yvonne Troxlers programs
with her long-standing ensemble. But this one,
a concert concerned with matters of time and
perspective, also includes such American works
as Cages Ryoanji (inspired by a rock garden
in Kyoto, Japan), Mary Ellen Childss Faint
Object Camera (named for a device inside the
Hubble Space Telescope), and Paula Matthusens
In Absentia (a meditation on the power of
memory). Assisting are the clarinettist Eileen
Mack and the percussionist Bill Trigg, among
others. (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th St.
212-864-5400. May 29 at 7:30.)
Sonnambula
William Lawes (1602-1645), who died in the service of his doomed king, Charles I, wrote music
for viols that combined stirring sensuality with
commanding technique. The fine young New York
viol group plays his Consort Sets in Five Parts
at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields, with the
gambist Joshua Lee and the organist Avi Stein (of
the Juilliard faculty) also on board. (487 Hudson
St. sonnambula.org. May 30 at 7.)
13
NIGHT LIFE
Rock and Pop
Musicians and night-club proprietors
lead complicated lives; its advisable
to check in advance to confirm
engagements.
Robert Cray
The B. B. King Blues Club & Grill
has been open since 2000, hosting
all manner of classic rock, funk, and
soul acts. But after the recent death
of King himself its worth thinking
about the blues acts that populate
the club. Cray is one of Kings most
interesting heirssince he first started
recording, in the early eighties, he has
combined traditional blues guitar,
Memphis soul vocals, and sophisticated songwriting that often plays
with unreliable narrators. Strong
Persuader, from 1986, remains Crays
best-known (and best) album, but hes
been consistently compelling over the
years, both as a recording artist and
as a live performer. (237 W. 42nd St.
212-997-4144. June 2.)
NYC Popfest
In the late seventies in the U.K.,
when the punk scene was dominated
by angry men who screamed, indie
pop developed as an alternative way
for mild-mannered cardigan-clad boys
and girls to be D.I.Y. Egalitarian,
amateurish, childlike, and deliberately
uncool, indie-pop devotees formed

communities around small labels with
names like Sarah Records and Bus
Stop. The bands wrote songs about
crushes and parents who fought, and
the vibe was warm and earnest. Their
detractors called the movement twee,
a word that stuck. This four-day festival, which was founded in 2007, is a
labor of love, without sponsorship or
branding, that celebrates the continued
vitality of this underground movement.
Dozens of bands are attending, and
highlights include a performance by
the eighties U.K. legends the Loft, who
have never before played the U.S., and
rare appearances by Swedens Club 8
and the Welsh band the Darling Buds,
who havent played New York since 1999
and 1993, respectively. In addition, the
documentary My Secret World: The
Story of Sarah Records is receiving its
New York premire. In true, considerate
indie-pop spirit, the festival, which takes
place in Manhattan and Brooklyn, has
scheduled the performances with no
overlap, so fans wont have to miss a
thing. (nycpopfest.org. May 28-31.)
Purity Ring
Corin Roddick and Megan James, who
make up this duo from Canada, create
electro-pop that is as warm and human
as it is cold and alien, an intoxicating
combination that feels boldly futuristic.
The pair crafted their 2012 dbut album,

Shrines, while working largely in
separate cities, with Roddick composing
dark, rickety beats in Montreal and
e-mailing them to James across the
country in Halifax, who added visceral
lyrics and her ethereal vocals to the
tracks. The acts second LP, Another
Eternity, which came out in February,
was made mostly in the same room,
and is cleaner and more poppy than its
predecessor, while staying the galactic
course. (Terminal 5, at 610 W. 56th St.
212-582-6600. June 2-3.)
3
Jazz and Standards
Terence Blanchard
E-Collective
Blanchard, a virtuosic trumpeter and
versatile composer, has never been easy
to pin down stylistically, slipping in
and out of the post-bop mainstream
for the past four decades. He recently
made yet another left turn by going
electric with this funk-fusion group.
Retaining the pianist Fabian Almazan,
who has worked with him frequently
in the past, Blanchard bulked up
his band with the guitarist Charles
Altura, the electric bassist Donald
Ramsey, and the drummer Oscar
Seaton. (Jazz Standard, 116 E. 27th
St. 212-576-2232. May 27-31.)
George Cables
A musician doesnt have to break
new ground to achieve distinction;
a case in point is the pianist Cables,
whose alert and ever-swinging playing has enhanced the bands of such
heavyweights as Dexter Gordon and
Art Pepper (who dubbed Cables
Mr. Beautiful). Fronting his own
trio, as he did on the recent album
above
World Science Festival
With the advent of the Internet,
mobile phones, apps, and robots that
can write prose and the prospect of
self-driving cars, science is taking over
our lives. This gathering, an annual
affair since 2008, is organized by
the string theorist Brian Greene and
the journalist Tracy Day. It features
fifty events in museums, parks, and
other venues across all five boroughs.
Highlights include a celebration of
the hundredth anniversary of Einsteins general theory of relativity,
a stargazing session accompanied
by live music, catch-and-release fish
counts, and a daylong science street
fair in Washington Square Park. If
those activities dont sound intellectually rigorous enough, there are
also presentations with the physicist
and string theorist Edward Witten;
14
NASAs chief scientist, Ellen Stofan;

the paleoanthropologist Lee Berger;
the Nobel-winning theoretical physicist
Steven Weinberg; and many other
leading thinkers. (worldsciencefestival.
com. May 27-31.)
Auctions and Antiques
Christies devotes two days to LatinAmerican art (May 27-28), dominated
by works by Mexican artists and
European exiles who converged on
Mexico during the Second World
War, such as Leonora Carrington
and Remedios Varo. Varos cheekily
titled Vampiros Vegetarianos (1962),
depicting three underfed ghouls sipping
fruit through long straws, is one of
the highlights, along with a folkloric
scene of washerwomen and buzzards,
Lavanderas con Zopilotes, by Diego
Rivera. This sale is followed by one
containing sumptuous articles for

the homeIsfahan carpets, gilt-wood
chairs, and Svres porcelain (June
2). (20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th
St. 212-636-2000.) Impressionist
and modern art works go under
the gavel on May 28 at Sothebys,
Icons & Influences, Cables delivers

mainstream satisfaction in an elegant
package. For this run, hes joined by
Essiet Okon Essiet, on bass, and
Victor Lewis, on drums. (Village
Vanguard, 178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th
St. 212-255-4037. May 26-May 31.)
Mark Dresser
A stalwart of the jazz avant-garde
on both coasts since the seventies,
the bassist Dresser does whatever it
takes to achieve his musical ends, at
times pummelling the strings and
body of his instrument to generate
arresting tones. Among the players
joining this audacious improviser
and composer are the trombonists
Roswell Rudd and Ray Anderson and
the saxophonist Ned Rothenberg, as
well as the lauded ensembles Trio M,
with the pianist Myra Melford, and
C/D/E, with the saxophonist Marty
Ehrlich and the drummer Andrew
Cyrille. (The Stone, Avenue C at
2nd St. thestonenyc.com. May 26-31.)
Bill Frisell: Up & Down
the Mississippi
The guitarist Frisell, an understated
visionary, concludes his Roots of
Americana explorations at Jazz at
Lincoln Center. Bringing together the
saxophonist Greg Osby, the cornettist
Ron Miles, the pianist Craig Taborn,
and the drummer Kenny Wollesen,
Frisell tackles the musical idioms of
the nations heartlandthis concert
is subtitled Traveling Highway 61.
Expect the blues, folk, jazz, and
gospelrespectfully yet radically
transformed in the inimitable Frisell
mannerto each make an appearance.
(Appel Room, Broadway at 60th St.
212-721-6500. May 29-30.)
beyond
in an auction that abounds in pretty
seascapes, pastel still-lifes, and charming domestic scenes, as well as a
stage design by Maurice Denis for
Vincent dIndys opera La Lgende
de Saint-Christophe. (York Ave. at
72nd St. 212-606-7000.)
Readings and Talks

John Waters
The director, actor, and writer is in town to discuss Carsick, his 2014
account of hitchhiking from Baltimore to San Francisco. On May 27 at
12:30, hes in Bryant Park with the journalist Matthew Love. (42nd St.
between Fifth and Sixth Aves. bryantpark.org.) Later that day, at 8:30,
he visits the Powerhouse Arena, in Brooklyn, to talk with Mike Sacks, an
editor at Vanity Fair. (37 Main St., Dumbo. powerhousearena.com.)
National Arts Club
Mary Norris, a copy editor at this magazine, talks about her new book,
Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. (15 Gramercy Park S.
212-475-3424. May 27 at 8.)
FOOD &
DRINK
BAR TAB The happiest hour
Tables for Two
rebelle
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL KRALL
218 Bowery (917-639-3880)
theres something delicious about the idea that a restaurant in Paris run
by a bunch of Americans is elevating modern French cooking. That place, Spring,
is known for its precisely composed plates, which, even as they toy with ashes and
foams, skirt fuss. Now a chef who ran its kitchen, Daniel Eddy, has come home to
his native New York. At Rebelle, on the Lower East Side, Eddy has, in a very short
time, become a ag bearer for the newly formal strain of downtown dining. Rebelle
is one of those places that regard the wine with as much seriousness as the food, with
a list that verges on a tome, and a sommelier eager to show off the funkier corners of
his cellar. The waiter, meanwhile, is more focussed, and asks that each diner pick one
dish from each of the courses. Stern, surebut also a source of relief, a welcome bit
of bossiness for diners accustomed to juggling small plates that arrive on the kitchens
idiosyncratic schedule.
So, four courses, fteen hundred wines on offer, and food that looks like it involves
tweezers but also tastes good. Much of the menu involves American tweaks to Gallic
classics: fried shallots on a lamb tartare havent been put to such good use since last
Thanksgivings green-bean casserole, and the creamy lobster sauce on sweetbreads
evokes a New England chowder. A rst course of uke and lemon sounds familiar, but
then you taste the brown butter and sherry and its new. Whats best about Rebelle
is that it is contemporary but not trendy. Theres a vegetable in quotation marks, and
its not gimmicky: a velvety, rich beet bourguignon, better suited to May in New
York than its beefy brethren. The cherry clafoutis is to share, a spontaneous act of
generosity from the kitchen, hearty and delicate at the same time. It wears a jaunty hat
of Chantilly cream. By this point, there has been a lot of wine. The experience is gouty
but elegant, and, tonight, the Bowery is our Boulevard Saint-Germain.
121 W. 10th St. (212-243-2827)

Its hard to imagine how people will
describe mid-century chic post-Mad
Men, or to guess whether New Yorks
virulent case of retro fever will clear
up now that the nal nal credits
have rolled. But at the Happiest
Hour, amid palm-tree wallpaper and a
amboyance of amingo tchotchkes,
you can still guzzle mai tais and hear
jokes about Don Draper on vacation.
The bar is a sort of baby Bungalow
8, or, as one patron described it, a
place for young people skewing
old and old people skewing young.
When someone requested a What
the Doctor Ordered (sarsaparilla,
vanilla, wintergreen, soda, booze) a
bartender with a moony surfer vibe
explained that it could be made with
rye, rum, or Scotch. (There are seven
pick-your-liquor cocktails; you can put
vodka in anything.) The rye would
make it pretty Old Westy, he said;
the Scotch, pretty cool. The rum
made it taste like a mind-bending root
beer. A waitress in a mint-green miniuniform deemed the slushy du jour,
which contained cognac, gin, rum, and
orange juice, kinda citrusy, denitely
alcoholic. As Lets Get It On played,
gorgeous cheeseburgers were ferried
to a group of lady friends. One
said, I think I R.S.V.P.d when I got
the save-the-date, but who knows?
Another added, wistfully, I thought
you were talking about bread, and
somewhere in syndication Betty
Draper rolled her eyes.
Emma Allen
Amelia Lester
Open for dinner Mondays through Saturdays. Entres $12-$24.
PHOTOGRAPH BY LANDON NORDEMAN
15
THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT
ART AND MONEY
ILLUSTRATIONS BY TOM BACHTELL
he news that, in a week of contemporary-art auctions

that saw more than a billion dollars worth of art sold,
the record for the price of a single work sold at auction had
once again been brokenthis time, with a hundred and seventy-nine million dollars spent on a so-so Picasso, from his
just-O.K. later periodcouldnt help sending some observers, with what is technically called hollow laughter, back to
1980 and the conclusion of Robert Hughess great synoptic
history of modern art, The Shock of the New. There Hughes
wondered at how a spiralling market had made for a brutalized culture of unfulllable desire, producing auction prices
that had seen a mediocre Picasso from 1923 sell for three
million dollars. Yesterdays outrage becomes yesterdays bargain, as the price spiral extends, upward and outward, with
no end in sight.
Two arguments arise from such events: one mostly moral,
the other largely legal. The moral issue is about what rising
prices can do to our feelings about pictures. For good or ill,
some idea of money has always been constitutive to our idea
of art. Whatever Phidias or Praxiteles did it for, it wasnt the
naches. The intertwining of art and money
has even been part of the positive character of the modern age, when artists fought
free of princely and church commissions,
and began to paint pictures intended for
sale in a free market of collectors. What
would a sane, well-ordered art market look
like? What is a so-so Picasso really worth?
Who knows? Markets are designed to
make their own rationality. Where people put their cash reects what they think
and desire. That is why we have auctions.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, as S. N. Behrman documented in
these pages, in his famous Prole of the
art dealer Joseph Duveen, the same kind
of inationary bubble afflicted the world
of Old Master art. The most striking thing
about the current craze is that the Old
Masters are among the least affected. The rising tide of money
has elevated the resale value of contemporary art and the
work of living artists sometimes close to the level of that of
the distinguished deadthough, like the dead, they dont
make money from the resale. And so a movement has got
under way, led by Jerrold Nadler, who represents a chunk of
this city in Congress, to give artists and their estates a royalty, capped at thirty-ve thousand dollars, when their work
is resold at a large auction house. Its a complex issue. Copyright law is called copyright law because it is meant to be
concerned with the problem of copies. Since books and records can be copied freely (as, indeed, they are, online), we
impose a royalty on the copyist in order to insure that the
originator isnt cheated for his labor. The deal that visual artists typically make with their buyers is different: the artist
sells the original and reaps the benet. The logic here is that
if the owner of a Jeff Koons sells it at auction for a prot,
that will be reected in the next Koons that Jeff Koons
makes; the royalty that he reaps is the increase in the value
of his next work of art, sold to the next individual buyer.
Yet the idea of paying royalties to artists probably still resonates emotionally
with most of us. Thats because what distinguishes a work of visual art is not merely
that it passes through many hands, increasing or losing value as it does, but that
it is made by a singular hand (or, at any
rate, comes from a singular vision), whose
claim on it lingers, even after it changes
owners. A work by Chuck Close can be
a wall decoration, an investment, a legacy, and a tax deduction, but, before it is
any of these, it is, and remains, a Chuck
Close. Thats why the French doctrine of
moral right, which holds that an artist
has the right to guarantee her works integrity even when she no longer owns it,
seems to us both moral and right: if you
possess an artists painting, you cant deface
17
it or mutilate it or alter it without the artists consent. Essentially, what artists are asking for, through Nadlers bill, is little more than the courtesy of a tip. The counter-argument is
that a good chef is rewarded not with tips but with a better
job in a richer kitchen, but our moral intuition tells us that
he deserves one, especially if his dish is still mysteriously delicious years after he rst served it.
In some ways, a mediocre Picasso that sells for three million dollars is no more or less shocking than one that sells
for nearly two hundred million, but the increase suggests
something more than the ination of time. It suggests the
intrusion of oligarchythe ever-greater gap, hard to imagine even thirty years ago, between people who have the money
to buy art, and the human values that it frames, and the rest
of us. Neil Irwin, in the Times, by factoring in ination and
a metric for how much of their worth people are willing to
spend, calculated that the number of those who could easily afford to pay $179 million for a Picasso has increased more
than fourfold since the painting was last on the marketin
1997. It seems to be not inequality alone but also that other
four-star economic force, globalization, that drives the art
UP AND AWAY
AIR BUS
s Memorial Day approached, Hamptons residents girded themselves

for seasonal headaches: traffic jams, guys
in tank tops, the Kardashians. For the
next few weeks, at least, another irritant
will remain: helicopter noise. The East
Hampton Airport, long a haven for discreet private planes, recently imposed
restrictions on noisy aircraft, which aviation interests have sued to block. Last
week, a judge delayed ruling on the matter until June. Much of the controversy
revolves around new air services such as
Blade, which allows people to crowdsource helicopter ights.
Blade works like Uber. You download an app, and when you nd yourself
needing a chopper you press a button
to launch a charter ight, splitting the
fare with other passengers. The system
has brought the cost of helicopter travel
from around thirty-ve hundred dollarsC.E.O. territoryto six hundred
dollars for a one-way forty-minute trip
to or from East Hampton. Blade has
been downloaded by twenty thousand
users, and it advertises with slogans like
Beat your boss to work! Locals hate it.
18
market now. More wealth may be in more countries, but it

remains in few hands, and there are as many shoppers abroad
as there are on Park Avenue or in Beverly Hills. Their money
is chasing the same brand-name art goods, and there are only
so many Picassos.
Pressed to an extreme, inequities, both visible and symbolic, become a source of social outrage even if they are no
worse than older inequities. Paintings matter to us as visual
symbols of order and balance, of creative energy and innovation, so can we be surprised that seeing works of art withdrawn to the top of the oligarchic tower offends our moral
sense? Even mediocre Picassos derive from a modern belief
that a liberal civilization can produce social space for originality, for self-expression and unhindered invention. There is
something admirable about a society whose highest values include such works of daring and imagination. And there is
something disturbing about one in which there seems to be
so little imagination left to nd ways in which democratic
horizons of human possibility that such art once symbolized
can still be shared. For the time being, at least lets tip the chef.
Adam Gopnik
Patricia Currie, a consultant, lives in Sag

Harbor, close to the airports ight path.
Its like the apocalypse is descending
on top of your house, she said. Its an
ill bird that fouls its nest. And thats
whats happening here. These people are
coming out to Paradise. And then theyll
foul the nest and leave.
With that in mind, the app was
downloaded, and a trip was booked to
East Hampton, departing from the heliport at Thirtieth Street and the Hudson River. It was a gray day, the Thursday before the long weekend. The
parking lot teemed with limos. Beside
it were two double-wide trailers: one
tan, with dingy blue sofasa waiting
room for the grandees who charter their
own helicoptersand the other black,
its interior as glossy as a night clubs,
with a purple-lit cocktail bar. This was
the Blade lounge. Inside, Message in a
Bottle played on a sound system, and
two customer experience specialists
blond women in tight black T-shirts
handed out free drinks.
At one-thirty, a group of men arrived.
They were taking a Bouncea Blade
helicopter to J.F.K., for seven hundred
dollarsen route to a bachelor party in
Prague. The blond women handed out
vodka-and-sodas in plastic sippy cups.
(Before ying, Blade passengers turn
their drinks over to the pilot, who then
serves the drinks back to them on board,
in deference to F.A.A. regulations.)
The party guys posed for pictures

on the tarmac. A man at the bar
watched them through the window.
Taking a picture before you get onto
a chopper or a plane is called Bon Jovi
style, he said, explaining that the band
routinely did this. He wore a cashmere
sweater and sunglasses, and was on his
way to East Hampton. This was his
rst Blade ride, he said, but not his
rst chopper. Ive got noise-cancelling headphones, he said.
Another passenger arrived, a blond
woman, also in cashmere. Hello. Im
Marcy, she said. She is a Blade junkie.
Its so convenient, she said, explaining
that she is an angel investor in tech
startups. She added, Im fortunate
enough to be in Uber, and rapped her

forehead with her knuckles. Marcy and
the man introduced themselves and ordered sippy cups of ros. They took pictures of the drinks with their phones
and posted them to an app called Wine
n Dine. Its an Instagram just for food,
the man explained. Its stupid, but
its great.
A roar of rotor blades announced that
the chopper had arrived. Two more
passengers showed up, just in time: buff
men in baseball caps, carrying a uffy
dog exactly as blond as Marcy. The
dog was named Paddington. The men
were married, and their hats advertised each others business: Jons hat read
BARRYS BOOTCAMP, where Joey is a
trainer. Joeys had the logo for Jons L.A.
restaurant. This was their rst Blade trip,
a treat for Jons birthday.
The passengers posed for pictures in
front of the helicopter, except for the
man in sunglasses, who muttered, Bon
Jovi style, and climbed in back. The
pilot redistributed the drinks. Cheers!
everyone said, and the sound of clinking plastic was drowned out by the whirr
of the blades.
The helicopter oated up the West
Side, making a right over Central Park.
Marcy took pictures and posted them
to Instagram, with hashtags like #yblade and #ygirl. She aimed her phone
at Paddington, and Joey lifted him up
for a better angle. He has his own Facebook page, Jon said.
The chopper glided along the North
Shore of Long Island, Gatsby country,
and the passengers grew quiet. Ive
seen people sleep on this thing, Marcy
said. She reected on her Blade trips:
You meet new friends. The crowd is
all different. Its aspirational. Asked
about the noise complaints, she said
that she has a house in Sag Harbor and
has never been bothered by choppers.
She said, When I see a helicopter, I
think its cool.
After thirty minutes, the chopper
sailed over Gardiners Bay and cruised
toward East Hampton. Marcy took out
her phone again. Hey, guys, I just ordered an Uber! she said, and the men
cheered. The helicopter made its shuddering descent. Legs shook; sippy cups
spilled. Marcy said, Wow! I love this
part! The pilot yelled, Touchdown!
Lizzie Widdicombe
1
MALIBU POSTCARD
D.I.Y. SCHOOL
ey, baby, come over here, a tall,

thin woman, dressed all in white,
standing at the mouth of a shipping container, called out. Come check this thing
out. This is the Wunderkammer. This
is our natural-history museum. The
woman was Suzy Amis Cameron, a former actress who is now an environmental activist married to the director James
Cameron. He was baby. It was late afternoon, and they were visiting the campus of MUSE, a school in Malibu Canyon, California, that Amis Cameron
founded with her sister, Rebecca, in 2006.
That evening was the school fund-raiser.
A rusted-metal skeleton of a triceratops sat on the roof of the museum;
out front was a submersible orange robot
that appeared in Camerons Titanic.
Inside the narrow space, Cameron inspected shelves full of artifacts the students had found and made: Da de los
Muertos skulls, fossilized trilobites. Amis
Cameron picked up a tiny mandible
with forbidding teeth. A sabre-tooth
kitten? her husband asked. Me-ow.
MUSE, which has a hundred and forty-six students from Pre-K to twelfth
grade, is a radically sustainable school
devoted to hands-on learning.The lower-
school campus has organic garden beds

and a large makers space. The middle
and upper schools occupy a building
whose previous tenant was a school
started by the actor Will Smith. They
said it wasnt a Scientology school, but
we think it was, Rebecca Amis said.
Jeff King, the head of the school
and the husband of Rebecca Amis, says
the goal is to nurture autonomous and
innovative students. All students follow
their passions: Grow eighty pounds of
lettuce! Make a scale model of a tennis
court! Build a pinball machine! If I
had a young Jim Cameron at our school,
we would be keeping up with him,
King said.
MUSE does, in fact, have three young
Camerons: Rose, Quinn, and Claire.
Quinn, who is eleven, built a motorcycle as a school project. Theres no better way to learn about a broad range of
subjects than to build a vehicle, Cameron said. At culmination, he rode the
motorcycle around here and did a couple of jumps. Several years ago, Cameron, who is also an explorer, designed
a submarine, equipped it with 3-D cameras, and, in 2012, took it to the deepest part of the Mariana Trench.
Cameron had come to MUSE to unveil his latest innovation: ve thirty-threefoot-tall sculptural sunowers, with
sun-tracking heads made from solar panels, which will supply approximately ninety
per cent of the schools energy. Everyone
trudged up a hill to a bar in the shade of
an oak tree. Below, in a clearing, a solar
19
sunower gazed toward the west. Amis

Cameron said that Jim had presented
her with the plans three years ago, as
a ftieth-birthday present. Most girls
like to get jewelry, most girls like to go
to the spa, she said. My husbandmy
incredible husbandreally, really knows
how to give a girl a bouquet of owers.
(For Christmas, he gave her a Tesla.)
Amis Cameron also said that by the
fall the schools cafeteria would be completely plant-based, thereby signicantly
reducing its water footprint. Cameron,
who gave up animal products three years
ago, said, We consider meat and dairy
to be basically toxic. He held up a glass
of wine. Alcohol is toxic, too, but I give
that an exemption!
One of Camerons agents, Adam Devejian, of C.A.A.buzz-cut and buff
came up to say hello. You look like youre
weight-training, Cameron said.
Devejian said, I go to a guy who says
I need two hundred grams of protein a
day, but I cant get that from vegetables.
Of course you can! Cameron said.
You dont eat a fuckin calf brain and
think its going straight to your brain!
When you eat muscle, it doesnt go
James Cameron
straight to your muscle. There is more
protein per calorie in broccoli than in
steak. He enumerated the lite athletes
who eat only plants.
Later, at a silent auctiona basket
full of Kardashian Kids clothes, a signed
Bret Michaels guitarDevejian said,
When I met Jim, he was on the set of
Avatar, eating meatball sandwiches and
cold cuts. He looked a little heavy. One
day, he said, Were going vegan, and
20
we went through the office fridge and

threw everything away. Then we get the
Cameron Christmas gift. Vegan delightsvegan cookbooks, hemp clothes.
I use it allits just I still eat meat.
Cameron, Devejian said, sees things in
terms of good and evil. He went on,
Im going to try vegan for a week and
see if I get small. If I get weak, then Im
going to go back.
Dana Goodyear
1
DEPT. OF FINALES
LIFE WITHOUT AUDIENCE
in Scelsa nished taping the last

episode of Idiots Delight, his
long-running free-form radio program,
at 2 P.M. on the rst day of May. He recorded it in a home studio stocked with
thousands of CDs and LPs, and then
submitted it, via Dropbox, to WFUV,
the Fordham University station that has
broadcast the show since 2001. He hadnt
done it live for yearshed come to appreciate the opportunity to correct for
mistakes and memory lapses.
One hallmark of the show had been
the occasional sound, amid his lengthy
on-air peregrinations, of his shuffling
through papers or jewel cases in search
of an elusive fact or name. In the show
hed just nished, which included a tribute to his old colleagues at WNEW-FM,
hed neglected to mention one of them.
I forgot Dave Herman, Scelsa said. It
was a little after 4 P.M., and he was still
puttering around the studio. The show
wasnt to air until the following night.
So it was that Scelsas last act as a d.j.
was to patch in Hermans name. Of
course, with Dave Herman it gets complicated, he said. Herman, who hosted
the morning show on WNEW in the
seventies, died last year, while in jail
awaiting trial on charges related to soliciting sex from a seven-year-old girl.
Maybe it was better to forget about
Dave Herman.
Scelsa, who is sixty-seven, lives in
Roseland, New Jersey, near a pair
of golf courses, in a quiet neighborhood that suggests the habitat not of a
rock-and-roll magpie but of bygone lis-
tenerssuburban longhairs in bongy

basements and Camaros, getting their
education over the airwaves from the
curates of FM. (The intro to his program used to imagine a different audience: Attention, artists, cabdrivers, and
melancholy waitresses . . .) He and his
wife, Freddie, whom he met in high
school, have owned the house since
1980. Her family had a chain of jewelry stores in New Jersey, and her work
eventually enabled Scelsa to be a stayat-home d.j. and dad. (Their daughter
is now thirty-four.) The house abuts
some woods. A pair of wild turkeys
strutted at the edge of the trees. We
dont go out there, Scelsa said. Were
scared to death of the ticks.
Hed been thinking for a while about
retiring. I worried about the inability to
keep up with new things, he explained.
I didnt want to succumb to nostalgia.
Free-form radio means the d.j. plays
whatever he likes andnotably, in Scelsas casetalks about whatever he wants
for as long as he wants. There is no official repository of Scelsas old shows. But
diehards have collections; a fan club of
sorts, called Idiots Delight Digest, has
been convening since 1995, when Scelsa
was red by K-Rock (WXRK). He said,
Its cool to think that whatever intelligent life there is out there may one day
come upon Idiots Delight and think,
This is what life is like on the blue
planet. Life is digressive here.
His resistance to automated playlists
and the edicts of program directors was
so strong that he couldnt program a
show even for himself. I cant plan it
out beforehand, he said. Still, hed
thought about his last one, and while
the farewell wouldnt be Letterman scale,
he had a few moves in mind. For an
opener, he chose Sopwith Camels Hello
Hello, the rst thing hed played on his
rst night on the air, on WFMU, at Upsala College, in 1967. Its not unthinkable that youll never hear that one on
the radio again, anywhere. He also had
a closer: hed come across his copy of
Lou Reeds collected lyrics (inscribed by
Reed: To a great man) and opened it
to Goodnight Ladies.
Its perfect, Freddie said.
After Goodnight Ladies, Scelsa
signed off: Thanks for your ears. I
love you all.
Two weeks later, Scelsa was still
trying to adjust. Hed recently had his

rst retirement dream. Scelsa said, Someone in the dream suggested a piece of
music: You can use that on Saturday.
Oh, my God, no! I realized I no longer
had a show. I woke up very upset. And
then I had the experience this week of
listening to new music and nding that
I really liked it and yet had no way of
doing anything with it. It was such an
empty feeling.
The track, by the songwriter Stella
Peach, was called Ah! So This Is How
It Feels! The title resonated with him.
I said, I gotta do something with this.
My daughter-in-lawmy daughters
wifeshe works in the avant-garde
puppet world. I wanted to make a copy
and send it to her. But he didnt. He
was afraid of becoming the aging parent who sends newspaper clippings.
Its not just about sharing, he reected.
Its more selsh than that. Its Heres
what I found. Look at how cool I am.
Its also nice to have nothing to do.
The other day, when I learned that
B. B. King had died, I felt relieved not
to have to deal with that on the air, he
said. Musicians keep dying, and it is only
going to get worse. Sometimes it felt
like the shows were becoming a deathwatch. In June, there will be a tribute
to Scelsa at City Winery, with performances by a number of his favorite artists. He gave the organizers a wish list.
Presumably, hell talk some.
Nick Paumgarten
1
UP LIFES LADDER
ITS MY PARTY
n April, Matthew Murstein got an

awesome bar-mitzvah present: his
father, Andrew, who runs a taxicabmedallion business, hired Nicki Minaj
to perform at the celebration of Matthews transition into manhood, held
at the Pierre Hotel. Not every kid can
rent a pop star, but Erick Mauro, the
founder of a Long Island-based company called Creative Games, Inc., has
made it his business to custom-design
bar- and bat-mitzvah entertainment
to clients specications.
Most I cant even talk about, for the

biggest of the big, Mauro said recently,
at a midtown office where he meets
with his preteen customers. He wore a
watch with a face the size of an Oreo
and talked fast and loud. Most of my
clients are top one-per-centers, he said.
And they offer me jobsYou could
run my company! But Im good with
what I do. Im a big kid. Im Tom Hanks
from Big.
Mauro was setting up for a powwow
with a girl named Mikayla, whose bat
mitzvah was eight months away. He sat
at a table, his laptop hooked up to a
screen on which hed show some of his
greatest hits (customized game show,
$2,000; roving iPad caricaturist, $1,500;
candy-sushi station, $1,995). He has
squeezed an elephant and the fuselage
of an airplane into hotel ballrooms. My
budgets can be three thousand to two
hundred thousand dollars, he said. The
full-party budgets, though, are sometimes in the millions.
Over the years, hes learned the nuances differentiating Manhattans private schools: When youre at Dalton,
you have to keep up with the Joneses;
when youre at Chapin you dont, necessarily. Mauro, who is Catholic, said
that he grew up extremely poor, on
Long Island, one of seven kids. After a
stint in business communications, he
moved back to Farmingdale and began
working for an inatables company. I
saw almost immediately that no one was
really customizing games for kids. The
kids were bored.
Mikayla, a seventh grader at Chapin,
arrived with her mother, Amy Shecter,
who is the C.E.O. of CorePower Yoga.
Mauro began his pitch: This is your bat
mitzvah, he said. Dont let me go down
a wrong road because you feel like youre
going to hurt my feelings.
Mikayla, who wore a plaid T-shirt
and had her hair in a ponytail, nodded.
So where is this party? he asked.
Shecter said, Its at Arenaa Times
Square night club with interiors reminiscent of the Death Star. Were having our ceremony there, too. We thought
we would put velvet curtains around
anything you have to set up early.
My stuff at a service is ugly, Mauro
said. You dont have a photo booth in
a temple.
Shecter said, I think its important
to understand that this is a family event

for us. We want it to be about the celebration of the bat mitzvah. I know
Mikayla feels very strongly about this.
She went on, Were taking a very artsy
approach to the ceremony. Im Jewish,
my husband is Greek Orthodoxso
were using poetry and music. She
added, Mikaylas at an all-girls school,
so its going to be more of a girl-power
event.
Mauro: Are you inviting boys that
youre friends with or just cousins who
are boys?
Mikayla: Um, cousins, and maybe
camp friends?
Mauro: Then we need that one item
to make them know we didnt forget
about them. He suggested an L.E.D.
air-hockey table.
Shecter: Maybe something thats
unisex?
Mauro: Im not going lipstick station here.
Shecter: We should tell you about
our ideas, because we denitely want
a makeup area. Mikaylas initials are
M.A.K., like MAC Cosmetics, so we
thought we could play on that.
Mauro pulled up a photo of an illuminated vanity table. This is our beauty
bar, he said. We could do some type
of photo station with it.
Shecter nodded. Did we talk about
anything else? she asked her daughter.
Mikayla said, Airbrushed stuff? Hats
or something?
Mauro was opposed. Dont get me
wrongI created JenJen! I love JenJen.
( JenJen is a celebrity in the world of
party-favor airbrush artists.) But what
if we played off MAK and made shirts
for everyone. We could gure out a cool
logo. So you could do MAKDonalds,
with the arches. Or MAKDaddy. Mikayla looked uncertain. Mauro backpedalled. Thats just the rst thing that
came into my head, he said.
She also wanted the T-shirts that
shoot out of guns, Shecter said. And
someone on stilts.
Mauro said hed send an itemized
proposal, and Mikayla and her mother
left. He seemed pleased. The thing thats
easier about the kids than the parents, I
call it the Veruca Salt effect, he said. If
I get a kid to really want something and
they want it now? Theyre getting it.
Emma Allen
21
ANNALS OF REAL ESTATE
HOUSE OF SECRETS
Who owns Londons most expensive mansion?
BY ED CAESAR
itanhurst, Londons largest private house, was built between

1913 and 1920 on an eleven-acre plot
in Highgate, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood north of the city center. First
owned by Arthur Croseld, an English
soap magnate, the mansion was designed
in the Queen Anne style and contained
twenty-ve bedrooms, a seventy-footlong ballroom, and a glass rotunda; the
views from its gardens, over Hampstead
Heath and across the capital, were
among the loveliest in London. For decades, parties at Witanhurst attracted
potentates and royalsincluding, in
1951, Elizabeth, the future Queen.
In May, 2008, I toured Witanhurst
with a real-estate agent. There had been

no parties there for half a century, and
the house had not been occupied regularly since the seventies. The interiors were ravaged: water had leaked
through holes in the roof, and, upstairs,
the brittle oorboards cracked under
our footsteps. The scale of the building lent it a vestigial grandeur, but it
felt desolate and Ozymandian. A few
weeks later, Witanhurst was sold for
fty million pounds, to a shell company named Safran Holdings Limited,
registered in the British Virgin Islands.
No further information about the buyers was forthcoming.
In June, 2010, the local council ap-
The houses owners have built a vast basement that amounts to an underground village.
22
proved plans to redevelop the house and

ve and a half acres of grounds, maintaining Witanhurst as a family home.
It was the culmination of a long battle
with other Highgate residents, who did
not welcome such an ambitious project. Since then, Witanhursts old service wing has been demolished and replaced with the so-called Orangerya
three-story Georgian villa designed for
everyday family accommodation. And
beneath the forecourt, in front of the
main house, the new owners have built
what amounts to an underground villagea basement of more than forty
thousand square feet. (The largest residential property in Manhattan is said
to be a fty-one-thousand-square-foot
mansion, on East Seventy-rst Street
between Madison and Fifth, owned by
Jeffrey Epstein.) This basement, which
is connected to the Orangery, includes
a seventy-foot-long swimming pool,
a cinema with a mezzanine, massage
rooms, a sauna, a gym, staff quarters,
and parking spaces for twenty-ve cars.
In late 2013, the local council approved
plans for a second basement, beneath
the gatehouse, which will connect that
building to both the main house and
the Orangery. Earlier this year, the
owners also sought planning permission to extend an underground servants passage.
When the refurbishment is complete, Witanhurst will have about ninety
thousand square feet of interior space,
making it the second-largest mansion
in the city, after Buckingham Palace. It
will likely become the most expensive
house in London. In 2006, the Qatari
royal family bought Dudley House, on
Park Lane, for about forty million
pounds; after a renovation, its estimated
resale value is two hundred and fty
million pounds. Real-estate agents expect that the completed Witanhurst
will be worth three hundred million
poundsabout four hundred and fty
million dollars.
If a vast and lavishly appointed house
in Manhattana palace nearly double
the size of the White Housewere
being redeveloped on the edge of Central Park, New Yorkers would want to
know who lived there. Londoners are
equally inquisitive, and concerted efforts
have been made to uncover the identity of Witanhursts owners. Shortly
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL KIRKHAM
after the house was sold, it became

knownfrom local gossip and publicly
accessible planning documentsthat
Witanhurst belonged to a family from
Russia. Several newspapers speculated
that the owner was Yelena Baturina,
Russias richest woman, and the wife of
Yury Luzhkov, then the mayor of Moscow. (Luzhkov and Baturina reportedly
enriched themselves while he was in
office, before Luzhkov clashed with the
Russian government; she now lives in
London.) Baturina denied owning Witanhurst, and in 2011 she sued the London Sunday Times for publishing an article titled BUNKER BILLIONAIRESS
DIGS DEEP.
The Baturina lawsuit and the continued secrecy surrounding Witanhurst
have intensied the guessing game. Generally, the names of homeowners in Britain are listed in the Land Registry, which
can be read for a small fee. But listings
for properties owned by offshore companies do not disclose individual beneciaries. In the British Virgin Islands,
records reveal merely the name of the
registered agent of Safran Holdings
Equity Trust Limited, a local agency
that holds several such positions and is
connected to the company by name
onlyand the companys post-office
box, on the island of Tortola.
A recent investigation by the Financial Times found that more than a hundred billion pounds worth of real estate in England and Wales is owned by
offshore companies. London properties
account for two-thirds of that amount.
Charles Moore, a former editor of the
Telegraph, says that Londons property
market has become a form of legalized
international money laundering. For
Highgate residents, however, worries
about the lack of transparency in the
purchase of Witanhurst have come second to a more English concern. People
irritated by the construction noise and
the traffic that have blighted their normally quiet neighborhood have no owner
to complain toonly managers.
It might have been expected that the
identity of Witanhursts owners would
slip out, given the volume and the scale
of work at the site, and the number of
contractors involved. (Last year, I met
a craftsman who said that he was on
one of six teams of carpenters working
there.) But few employees are told the
owners names. Senior contractors who

have dealings with the family or their
agents have been required to sign condentiality agreements. Guards protect the property, and cameras monitor
the grounds. A woman who knows the
owners advised me to choose another
story. Stephen Lindsay, one of the
real-estate agents who sold the house,
spoke to me only after I agreed to leave
my phone and bag in another room. He
then put the familys lawyer on speakerphone and announced that he would
take the secret of Witanhursts ownership to the grave.
itanhurst has always been an attractive place to park new money.

In 1814, Joseph Croseld, a twentyone-year-old chemist, started a soapand-candles business in Warrington, in
the industrial northwest of England.
The company was passed down to his
son, George, and then to his grandson
Arthur. By then, the companynow
named Croseld & Sonswas worth
a fortune.
Arthur was no mere businessman:
he was the 1905 amateur golf champion of France and a musician who composed many pieces for piano. In 1906,
he won the parliamentary seat of Warrington, becoming a Liberal M.P. for
four years. He eventually married Domini Elliadi, a ne tennis player who
was the daughter of a Greek merchant.
(She competed at Wimbledon and once
won the Swiss ladies title.) In 1911,
Arthur sold the family business. With
the proceeds, he bought Parkeld, an
elegant eighteenth-century house in
Highgate.
Highgate had only recently been subsumed by Londons late-Victorian
sprawl. Before then, the village of Highgate had abutted the Bishop of Londons hunting grounds to the north and
Hampstead Heath to the southwest,
and was situated on the main road from
London to the North of England. (The
notorious highwayman Dick Turpin hid
out in a pub, The Flask, which faces
Witanhurst.) Because of its elevation
and its handsome views, Highgate became a favored place for rich families
from London to build summer retreats.
The Croselds knocked down much
of Parkeld and started afresh with a
new house and a new name, Witanhurst,
23
which, in Old English, means Parliament on the Hill. Arthur commissioned

the Scottish architect George Hubbard
to design a gigantic new building, and
the landscape architect Harold Peto to
create a raked Italianate garden. Witanhursts dcor was formalwalnut wall
panels, cornices embellished with gold
leafbut it had some arriviste quirks. In
the music room, three ornate crystal chandeliers were reected in ceiling-height
mirrors, giving the effect of endless dazzling light. The house also had three
hundred and sixty-ve windows
one for each day of the year. Nearly sixty
years after the site was sold to the Croselds, Lady Phyllis Greig, who had grown
up at Parkeld, told an interviewer that
she was horried by Witanhurst. We
tried to keep things in scale, she said.
Not like the present monster.
If Witanhurst was a means of
smoothing the passage of industrial
money into English society, it worked.
The place was set up to entertain many
guests, both indoors and out. Four tennis courts were built on the grounds,
and every year the Croselds hosted a
tournament featuring famous players
who had recently competed at Wimbledon. The event became a staple of
the English season. In 1915, Arthur
was made a baronet, and Domini became Lady Croseld. Between 1918
and 1925, Arthur headed a campaign
to save the grounds of Kenwood, a beautiful house on Hampstead Heath, from
being spoiled by developers. In 1929,
he was knighted. Not long afterward,
however, Sir Arthur made a bad investment in a Greek mining venture and
lost most of his wealth. He died in 1938,
when he fell out of the speeding GenevaVentimiglia express train, near Toulon,
France.
Lady Croselds tennis parties continued after the tragedy, but near the
end of her life Witanhurst sank into
disrepair. When she died, in 1963, the
Croselds only child, Paul, inherited
the property, and he struggled to maintain the crumbling mansion. Paul considered several schemes for Witanhurst, including demolition, which
prompted a successful public campaign
to have the house protected by a government agency. In 1970, Paul sold
Witanhurst to Lionel Green, a developer, whose business soon went bust.
24
Banks repossessed Witanhurst, and

during the next two decades the property was passed among developers.
Proposals for transforming Witanhurst
into a hotel or a club or a suite of apartments were quashed by the local council. Meanwhile, parcels of the grounds
were sold off.
In 1985, Witanhurst was sold by its
latest ownersNoble Investments, a
shell company said to be connected to
the al-Hasawi family, of Kuwaitto
Mounir Developments, a company registered in Panama. The beneciary of

Mounir Developments was later revealed in court to be a branch of the
Assads, Syrias ruling family, that had
gone into exile. The Assads eventually
tired of the burdensome estate, and in
2005 they put it up for sale. In court,
Somar al-Assada cousin of Bashar
al-Assad, the President of Syriarevealed that he hadnt spent the night
there in eight years.
In 2007, a developer named Marcus
Cooper bought the house from the Assads, for thirty-two million pounds. At
the time, Witanhurst was so dilapidated
that it was the subject of several official
complaints from the local councila
signicant deterrent to an international
buyer. Cooper repaired the house sufficiently to address the complaints and put
it back on the market, for seventy-ve
million pounds. He then hired Glentree Estates and another agency, Knight
Frank, to nd a buyer for Witanhurst
who was wealthy enough to restore the
house. In London during the late aughts,
two kinds of buyers generally t that
description: billionaires from Russia or
from the Middle East. Glentree produced a hardback brochure lled with
panoramic photographs and hyperbolic
text. Its pitch began with three words:
Dacha. Chateau. Palazzo.
On June 5, 2008, Grant Alexson, an
agent at Knight Frank, made an appointment to visit Witanhurst with
Yelena Baturina. (This presumably gave
rise to the rumors naming her as the

owner.) Baturina arrived at the property with an Englishman who did not
reveal his name or occupation to Alexson. Baturina seemed to like the house,
but after the tour she communicated
through her representative that she
would not be making an offer. Four days
later, Alexson heard that the house had
been sold to Safran Holdings, for fty
million pounds. He had no idea who
the buyer was, and Glentree Estates had
not shown anyone the house. Clearly,
some private deal had been made. Alexsons agency received a commission, but
the secrecy of the deal puzzled him. It
was a very funny business, he says.
Later, Alexson discovered that his
colleague Stephen Lindsay had made
the sale without his knowledge. Lindsay now works at a rival agency. He told
me, They came to me through their
lawyer. They wanted it to be kept private and condential. We did the deal,
we kept it quietend of story.
Soon after the purchase, Safran Holdings submitted expansion plans to the
local council. The plans were initially
rejected, and Safran Holdings hired a
prominent barrister, Sir Keith Lindblom, to lead an appeal at a public hearing. Lindblom amassed expert witnesses
to make the case for a major redevelopment of Witanhurst. An architect insisted that the proposed design would
not clash with neighboring properties;
a hydrologist allayed fears that basement additions might displace the water
table. At the appeal, a planning expert,
Caroline Dawson, attempted to alleviate concerns about offshore ownership:
While the applications were made in
the name of Safran Holdings, this company represents the Russian family
which owns Witanhurst. The company
was formed to pursue the restoration of
Witanhurst and its reuse by the family. She also suggested that Witanhurst,
whilst impressive, is not suited to the
needs of current everyday living for the
only families likely to be its market.
Safran Holdings won its case, and renovations began.
n 2011, Michael Hammerson, a local

councillor, complained to the Daily
Mail about the changes at Witanhurst,
noting, We dont want limos with
smoked windows and men in dark
glasses with bulging breast pockets, and

the place surrounded by CCTV. Thats
not Highgate.
In fact, Russian plutocrats own
many homes in the area. Alisher Usmanov, Russias third-richest man, who
founded the mining company Metalloinvest, owns Beechwood, a white
stucco Regency villa. On the Bishops
Avenue, a billionaires row between
Hampstead and Highgate, several large
houses are owned by Russians. Andrey Yakunin, the son of Vladimir
Yakuninthe boss of Russian Railways, and one of Vladimir Putins oldest friendslives nearby, in a mansion
worth four and a half million pounds.
Andrey Yakunins son, Igor, attended
Highgate School, a prestigious private
school.
In recent decades, huge amounts of
foreign money have poured into Londons most expensive neighborhoods.
Henry Pryor, a British real-estate agent
who represents many foreign clients, told
me that, although Paris and New York
have experienced a similar phenomenon,
the trend was particularly pronounced
in London. Many foreign billionaires,
he said, like the fact that London is an
English-speaking capital midway between Asia and New York. In recent
years, more than seventy per cent of newly
built properties in central London have
been bought by foreign investorsoften
for cash. Billionaires, Pryor said, acquire
London property in the same way that
they acquire expensive watches or highpowered motorcars.
Many Londoners wonder whether
the inux of rich buyers has provided
any benet to less affluent residents.
Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography at Kings College London, has studied the effect of foreign money on the
citys property market, and likens it to
a three-bowl fountain of the type often
found in London parks. A jet of water
lls the topmost and smallest bowl;
overow spills into the middle bowl
and, eventually, into the bottom, largest bowl. In Hamnetts analysis, the constant pump of water is money owing
into the most expensive parts of London. Residents who might have hoped
to live in Kensington are priced out, and
thus look farther from the centersay,
in Islington. Prices then rise in Islington, and people who might have bought
property there must look yet farther out.

According to the mortgage lender Halifax, house prices in two boroughs of
London increased by more than twenty-four per cent last year. People are
being sequentially displaced, Hamnett said.
There has been some windfall from
the foreign-property boom. New laws
have increased taxes on high-value
houses: if Witanhurst is sold for three
hundred million pounds, the buyer will
owe about thirty-six million in taxes.
And owners of houses that are registered offshore and worth more than
twenty million pounds must pay an annual charge of two hundred and eighteen thousand pounds.
London also benets from the employment of carpenters, interior decorators, and landscape gardeners. The
renovation of Witanhurst alone has
provided many dozens of people with
work. At the end of 2014a particularly frenzied phase of the renovationa
builder at the site speculated to me that
the project was then costing approximately two million pounds a week.
Whatever the precise total, the refurbishment project has surely outstripped
the initial estimate of thirty-ve million pounds. It is many tens of millions, one contractor said.
The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is ambivalent about the rise in
foreign-owned property. In a recent
radio interview, he said, The success
of London is having the weird effect
of making it very hard for Londoners
to afford to live there. . . . In assets,
there is no question that there is a
steady impoverishment of the bour-
geoisie, and we need to address it.

However, he did not want to scare off
the private jets. London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are
to the orangutan, Johnson said. Were
proud of that.
ext door to Witanhurst is The

Grove, a row of gorgeous brick
houses from the late seventeenth century. The street has always attracted
famous residents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge spent his nal years in a rented
room in No. 3; Kate Moss and her
husband, Jamie Hince, now own the
entire house. Yehudi Menuhin sold
No. 2 to Sting and Trudie Styler. George
Michael owns No. 5.
For half a century, Sir Patrick Sergeant and his wife, Gillian, have lived
in No. 1, and on a warm fall day last
year I visited them. Lady Sergeant is
a small, spry woman of eighty-eight.
Sir Patrick, who is ninety-one, is a former nancial journalist and publisher.
The magazine Private Eye once described him as looking like an ageing
matine idol. When we met, he apologized that his movement was a little
stiff; he had played tennis the previous day. The Sergeants took me into
their garden, which borders Witanhurst. Lady Sergeant peered over the
fence on tiptoe. Dozens of workers in
neon jackets were ling in and out of
the mansion. Trucks lled with detritus from the renovation rattled toward
the gatehouse and onto the main road.
Pneumatic drills clattered.
In 1961, when the Sergeants moved
in, Lady Croseld was still living at
Witanhurst. Sir Patrick remembers
Its not so much a minivan as it is a hearse for our youth.
her as a delightful old girlmad about

owls and tennis. She sometimes let
the Sergeants play on her courts. After
Lady Croseld died, in 1963, Witanhurst was largely dormantuntil, as
Sir Patrick put it, these bloody Russians bought it.
Sir Patrick used to have an unblighted view across the Heathessentially, the same view that Coleridge had seen from his second-oor
window two centuries earlier. Now
the gray-green roof of Witanhursts
Orangery appears like a hillock at the
bottom of the Sergeants garden. The
new building is imposing but not garish: with double-height round arch
windows and a shallow roof, it resembles a departmental college library. Nevertheless, the Sergeants consider its location obnoxious and, in 2013, they
planted a hedge to block it out.
There was still a spot from where
you could see past the Orangery and
imagine the old panorama. The day I
visited, the leaves of the oak trees on
the Heath were turning, and the dense
canopy of treetops shone green, russet, and yellow. Sir Patrick, holding
my hand to keep his balance, said, It
used to be a beautiful view. The Sergeants believe that the proceedings
next door have knocked about a million pounds off the value of their house.
They may be right. Kate Moss and
Jamie Hinces house, which is similar
to No. 1, was bought in 2011 for more
than seven million pounds.
Sir Patrick told me that the current rumor in Highgate was that the
house belonged to Vladimir Putin, although he was skeptical. I asked Lady
Sergeant whether she had ever been
given any clues about the identity of
her neighbors. Never! she said, over
the hammering of the construction
crews. Then, in as rueful a tone as the
noise allowed, she added, Why have
we had to put up with this for ve
years? At that point, the Sergeants
decided not to ruin a ne day. They
went inside and poured three glasses
of champagne. It was 11:30 A.M.
n June, 2014, I met with Robert

Adam, an architect who has designed many large houses. He won the
commission to rebuild Witanhurst in
2008, having been interviewed by an
26
agent of the owners. He told me that

local opposition to the development
was overblown. Property owners had a
right to build whatever they pleased,
as long as it did not harm anyone else.
Houses are a major expression of peoples status and ambition and dreams,
he added.
Adam, a raffish man in his sixties, is
a classical architect who can recite the
exact proportions of a Corinthian column. I observed that there was a vogue
for digging out enormous basements
beneath London propertiescreating
so-called iceberg housesand asked
him if he approved. I dont have a problem with people digging a big hole in
the ground and living in it, he said. He
could even summon a classical rationale
for underground living spaces: The Romans did it. They had a thing called the
cryptoporticus, so you could keep cool in
the summer.
The basements at Witanhurst, Adam
conceded, were not about keeping cool.
He suggested that the trend of adding
basements was connected to a huge
amount of capital coming into London,
and not enough land. But Witanhurst
was already big enough to have twentyve bedrooms. Why the need for so
much extra space? You cant put the
word need on this, Adam said. The
word is want.
He smiled when I asked about the
owners. When he won the commission,
the agent who interviewed him said that
their identity was a matter of profound
secrecy. Adam responded, Dont tell
meIll just get drunk and tell someone. Since then, he has had meetings
with the owners son, but Adam declined to share the name, citing a nondisclosure agreement.
In October, 2008, Philip Masterman was hired as the on-site architect.
Looking around Witanhurst, he was
taken aback: It was quite daunting,
really, to think that youre going to have
to transform something like that. He
was also surprised by the proposed
schedule: the family wanted to move
in before the 2012 Summer Olympics.
In Mastermans opinion, this was impossible: the project would take a decade. The planning appeal had been
won only in June, 2010. It took a year
of excavation and construction just to
create the concrete box outlining the
main basement. Masterman had built

underground spaces for London clients, but this one was the biggest basement anyones really seen.
Still, the commission was interesting, and so Masterman worked as fast
as he could. When the Olympics came
and wentwith the house still far from
nishedMasterman and the manager of the redevelopment project were
replaced. Masterman says that the attitude of the family was They have
failed us.
According to Masterman and others, the interior decoration of the main
house is being supervised by the designer Gabhan OKeeffe, who has
worked with a number of wealthy Russians, and is known for his lavish style.
Nobody from OKeeffes agency agreed
to be interviewed for this article. However, the project manager of Witanhurst, Andrew Hall, said that in the
grand rooms of the main house he and
his team had created a continental Baroque interior, with English-eccentricity overtones. The ceiling in the ballroom is yellow, gold, and blue and took
six months to paint and gild. At the
end of the ballroom, Hall said, oorto-ceiling mirrors can fold and slide
into pockets, revealing a receiving
room decorated in aquamarine and
white gold.
The landscape architect, Michael
Balston, told me, in a telephone interview, that Witanhursts owners were
very interested in the combination of
statuary, stonework, and water at Versailles. But Balston would not divulge
the familys identity. I cant say a word,
he said, laughing. Theres a guy standing by me with a gun.
ost paths leading to the owners

of Witanhurst remain carefully
obscured, but some bread crumbs have
been scattered. Two companies are associated with the property: Witanhurst
Construction Management Limited
and Witanhurst Interiors Limited. To
comply with British law, both list their
directors at Companies House, a government registry. Almost all the named
directors are British developers or managers with unremarkable histories. But
one director of Witanhurst Interiors is
Russian: Alexei Motlokhov, a thirtythree-year-old Ph.D. in economics
whose dissertation focussed on mineral

resources.
In documents led at Companies
House, Motlokhov listed several home
addresses, including a triplex apartment
at Flagstaff House, a complex on the
Thames. Land Registry documents say
that it was bought, in 2008, for seven
million pounds, and is owned by an
offshore company named Flagstaff Investments Group Limited. Coincidentally or not, Flagstaff Investments is registered at the same address where
Witanhursts owner, Safran Holdings,
is listed: Box 438, Road Town, Tortola.
(The original name for Safran Holdings, it turns out, was Flagstaff Development Limited.)
Its not immediately obvious how
Alexei Motlokhov, who completed his
doctorate in 2006, acquired such an expensive apartmentor why, given his
expertise in mineral resources, he is a
director of Witanhurst Interiors. However, Motlokhovs father, Vladimir, works
for a giant Russian fertilizer company,
PhosAgro, and between 2000 and 2008
Vladimir Motlokhov was also the
vice-governor of the Murmansk region,
where PhosAgros mining operations
are based.
The Financial Times has called PhosAgro a powerful market player with a
lot of secrets. Most of the shares are
owned by offshore companies. PhosAgro was formed by executives who had
worked at Apatit, a Soviet mining interest; it now owns Apatit as a subsidiary. PhosAgro was rst listed on the
London Stock Exchange in 2011, and
its market capitalization is currently
more than ve billion dollars.
Neither Motlokhov appears to be a
major shareholder in PhosAgro. Where
does Alexei Motlokhovs money come
from, then? According to former PhosAgro employees, in 2012 he married a
Russian woman named Julia Gurieva.
Though Gurieva carefully guards her
public proleher Instagram account,
which is protected, has the handle
@t_o_p_s_e_c_r_e_tshe is the daughter of Andrey Guryev, one of the founders of PhosAgro. In 2011, when PhosAgro held an initial public offering, the
Guryevs were revealed to control the
majority of the companys shares.
Andrey Guryev is Russias twentyeighth-richest man. Forbes lists his per-
sonal fortune at some four billion dollars. According to a Web site about Russian real estate, Guryev and his wife,
Evgenia, have a large house in a gated
community called Forest, in a pine-clad
area on the outskirts of Moscow that is
favored by oligarchs. Putins main residence, which has become the site of
most Presidential business, is close by.
Andrey Guryev has never given an
interview to the press; though he was a
Russian senator for twelve years, he never
made a public speech in the Federal Assembly. In the few photographs that circulate, he looks pointedly unglamorous,
with an inscrutable expression, a mustache, and mediocre clothes. According
to acquaintances, he grew up in Lobnya, a town near Moscow, and became
a martial-arts champion as a teen-ager
before injuries curtailed his athletic
career. His father died when he was
young. He and Evgenia attended the
same high school.
In 1994, shares in Apatit, which in
the Soviet era controlled several enormous phosphate mines, were sold for
a bargain price to a company connected to Menatepthe bank controlled by the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Menatep grew out of Komsomol, the Communist Youth League
of the Soviet Union, of which both
Khodorkovsky and Guryev were inuential members.
Khodorkovsky instructed a management group led by Guryev to run Apatit, with the understanding that Guryev
would eventually be given the option
of acquiring half of Khodorkovskys
mining assets. Guryev was a young man
with no experience in the mining sector, but he and his managers soon realized that Apatit might not ever be
wildly protable on its own. They decided to buy fertilizer factories, with
credit from Menatep, in order to manufacture a nished product that could
be sold overseas. The resulting company was PhosAgro.
In 1995, Khodorkovsky acquired
the oil-and-gas company Yukos, and
soon became the wealthiest man in
Russia. In 2003, he and his business
partner Platon Lebedev were arrested
for fraud and tax evasion. The charges
against them were ostensibly connected
to Menateps acquisition of shares in
Apatit but were widely interpreted
27
as punishment: Khodorkovsky had

clashed with Putin, publicly accusing
one of the Prime Ministers friends of
corruption. The arrests also allowed
members of Putins clique to seize control of Yukos.
Guryev had been elected to the Russian senate in 2001; as a legislator, he
had a level of immunity from the criminal charges faced by Khodorkovsky.
At the time of his arrest, Khodorkovsky
still owned about fty per cent of PhosAgro. Guryev decided to purge his company of Khodorkovskys moneya wise
move if he wanted PhosAgro to continue to prosper in Putins Russia.
Early in 2004, Guryev sent a message to Khodorkovsky in prison, stating that Russian prosecutors would destroy PhosAgro, just as they destroyed
Yukos, unless Khodorkovsky sold his
half of the business to Guryev. Khodorkovsky was in no position to negotiate, and he instructed his partners to
reach a deal with Guryev. According
to several people with knowledge of
the transaction, Khodorkovsky sold his
shares to Guryev at an extremely low
price. A representative for Guryev said
that in 2004 the company was not a
valuable enterprise, as there were numerous complaints being made against
Apatit. (Khodorkovsky, who has since
become one of Putins most prominent critics, and now lives in exile in
Switzerland, declined to
comment for this story.)
At around the same time,
Alexander Gorbachev, Guryevs friend and a top executive at PhosAgro, was
targeted by prosecutors in
relation to the acquisition
of Apatit, and he left Russia for London. Gorbachev
was later granted political
asylum in the U.K.; after
going into exile, he relinquished his post
at PhosAgro.
Guryev had acquired control of the
company at a bargain price while two
other large stakeholders were sidelined. Since then, he has sought to protect his assets, as all Russian billionaires must, by cultivating the favor of
Putin and his circle. In 2011, PhosAgro completed the construction of a
shing lodge in Murmansk, which has
since been used by senior government
28
gures, including Dmitri Medvedev.

Several years ago, Guryev named Vladimir Litvinenko the chairman of PhosAgrorewarding him with about ten
per cent of the company. Litvinenko is
the rector of St. Petersburg Mining Institute, the small university where Putin
acquired his Ph.D.with a thesis later
found to have been heavily plagiarized.
Both Andrey Guryev and his son, Andrey Guryev, Jr., who is now the C.E.O.
of PhosAgro, also received degrees
there. Litvinenko was a campaign manager for Putin during the 2000, 2004,
and 2012 elections, and remains a close
ally. Litvinenkos stake in PhosAgro
has recently risen to nearly fteen per
cent, and has a value of around threequarters of a billion dollars. A former
PhosAgro employee joked to me that
Litvinenko was the richest-in-theworld professor.
n December, I met a man in central

London who knew Andrey Guryev
and had witnessed the expansion of his
real-estate portfolio. On the condition
of anonymity, the man told me that
one day in the spring of 2008 Andrey
Guryev came to London to view two
properties: the triplex apartment on
the Thames, a recent purchase, and
Witanhurst, a prospective one.
Guryev, accompanied by his wife
and his son, rst inspected the triplex.
They were joined by Alexander Gorbachev and Nikolay Bychkov, who is involved with the Guryevs in
freight shipping. Two Mercedeses then drove the party
to Witanhurst, where they
were met by agents from
Knight Frank and the Guryevs lawyer, Neil Micklethwaite, who represents
many rich Russians.
According to the source I met in
central London, when the group entered Witanhurst Andrey Guryev spoke
as if the house already belonged to him.
It appeared that a verbal deal had been
made, and that once the paperwork was
complete he would be handed the keys.
During the tour, the source said, Andrey Guryev spoke of possibly ipping
Witanhurst for prot after a renovation, but he also expressed interest in
using it as a private home. Soon after-
ward, it was decided that at least two

generations of the Guryev family would
live at Witanhurst. Each would need
its own space. This was the genesis of
the Orangery. Either Guryevs son or
his daughter could live there with their
families.
Four other people independently
told me that the Guryev family owns
Witanhurst. (On May 21st, Guryevs
spokesman said that Guryev is not the
legal owner of Witanhurst but a beneciary of the company that owns the
house. However, the spokesman acknowledged, it was always intended
that the mansion would be used for
the benet of the family.) Why would
Andrey Guryev not want the public to
know this? In 2008, Guryev was still a
Russian legislator, and it appears that
by law he should have listed his foreign
properties in an official registry. According to records led with the Russian
government, Guryev has never registered a foreign property. (The spokesman says that because his ownership of
Witanhurst is indirect he had no obligation to register the property.) Guryev also sails on a super-yacht, named
the Alfa Nero, whose retail price is more
than a hundred million dollars; the yacht
is not declared, either. (The spokesman
said that Guryev did not own the yacht
but charters the Alfa Nero on a regular basis.) In 2013, Russia passed a law
making it illegal for politicians to own
foreign assets. That year, Guryev left
the Russian senate, along with a number of other wealthy men. Putin has
been intensifying his de-offshorization
campaign, and Russia now levies substantial tax penalties on rich citizens
who do not repatriate their assets.
If Guryev sidestepped transparency
rules, his secrecy may have been prudent. The prosecution of Khodorkovsky haunts other wealthy Russians, and
Putins government is growing more
aggressive toward billionaires who are
seen as even slightly disloyal. Last September, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, a Moscow billionaire who had a large stake
in the Bashneft oil company, was arrested on charges of money laundering, and his shares were conscated
by the court. (He was released in December, and charges were dropped.) Sergei Pugachev, who was once known as
the Kremlins bankerand who now
lives in London, having suffered a similar raid on his assetshas said, Today
in Russia, there is no private property.
There are only serfs who belong to
Putin. With the recent collapse of the
ruble, PhosAgro is one of the few large
companies in Russia to have thrived
lately. A large part of its business is exports, so its costs are in rubles and its
payments in dollars. Such success might
make Guryevs company a fresh target.
On a recent trip to Moscow, I met
Guryevs former business associate
Sergey Fedorov. A talkative, ursine man
of sixty-one, Fedorov told me that he
began working at Apatits mines in
1976. Guryev, lacking mining experience, made him part of Apatits management team after buying the company, and kept promoting him. In 2001,
Fedorov was named the director-general of PhosAgro.
Fedorov became so close to Guryev
that they used to go on vacation together. He described his old friend as
a complicated, intense man who found
public situations stressful, and who
had few interests outside business. Although Guryev worked for a long time
with speechwriters, Fedorov claimed,
he could never break free of his shyness. Guryev liked to ski in the Khibiny Mountains, on the Kola Peninsula,
at a ski lodge built by PhosAgro, and
when he and Fedorov were drinking
they occasionally sang Cossack songs.
Guryev is a member of the Orthodox
Church, and recently his religious practice has taken on an added fervor. Fedorov said that Guryev wears a large
gold cross around his neck and has led
several trips to Greece, a center of the
Orthodox faith.
In 2004, after Khodorkovskys arrest
and Guryevs consolidation of his control over PhosAgro, Fedorov was forced
out. He was red without compensationand without the many shares in
PhosAgro he says he had been promised. (Guryevs spokesman says that Fedorov left of his own volition.) Fedorov told me that whenever he asked
for a contract to formalize his compensation Guryev deected the request by
saying, You dont trust me or something? (Two other employees told me
that PhosAgro, in its early days, established compensation almost entirely by
verbal contracts.)
30
Igor Sychev, the former head of PhosAgros tax department, has a similar
grievance with Guryev: he also says that
he was promised shares in the company.
PhosAgro has denied his complaints,
arguing that he signed a release of all
claims when he left the company, in
2013. Sychev has known Guryev for
two decades, and says that when they
rst met, in Moscow, Guryev was not
given to ostentatious displays of wealth,
and lived on Khoroshevskoye Highway,
in the same modest building as his driver.
One evening when Sychev was staying
at the drivers apartment, Guryev unexpectedly arrived with a bunch of owers: he had remembered that it was the
drivers wedding anniversary.
Since then, Guryev has become a
more remote gure. The other members of his family also guard their privacy. One of the few things known about
Evgenia is that she owns a stable of classic and luxury cars. According to a family friend, she drives two Rolls-Royces
that used to belong to Elton John. Last
summer, she broke several bones when
the Mercedes she was driving collided
head on with another car, in Rublyovka,
an exclusive neighborhood on the western edge of Moscow. This news was
hardly reported in Russia.
The only member of the family who
has seemed eager to share the details of
her life publicly is Valeria, the wife of
Andrey Guryev, Jr. Valeria, who studied at the London College of Fashion,
is on Facebook, and her banner image
shows her posing on a motorcycle in a
black miniskirt. In another photograph,
she is on a yacht, drinking champagne
from the bottle. On Instagram, her avatar bears the slogan Im too pretty to
work. On that account, which was
recently turned private, she frequently
posts professionally shot portraits of
herself and her children; in a different
set, she poses with a pistol strapped to
her bare leg. She has also documented
evenings at the Bolshoi; parties at Twiga,
a night club in Monte Carlo; and dinners at Per Se, Thomas Kellers restaurant in New York. Despite this gilded
life, very few people in Moscow high
society appear to have heard of Valeria
Gurieva or her family. Ksenia Solovieva,
the editor of Russian Tatler, which assiduously documents the lives of the
oligarchs, looked blank when I men-
tioned Gurievas name. I will put her

on my radar, she said.
Its hard to square the competing impulses of the Guryevs. They seem to
need other people to know they are rich,
but only the right people. If the family
really wanted to live undetected in London, they could have bought a ve-bedroom terrace house in Richmond. Instead, Guryev bought a palace. But,
unlike the Croselds, who built Witanhurst to show off their wealth, the Guryevs are not going to be hosting tennis
tournaments. Any social activity is likely
to move indoors. The Guryevs seem to
want the property to play three roles:
refuge, showroom, deposit box. Witanhurst may still look like a grand English estate, but, with so many of its
riches buried below the surface, its design is distinctly modernthe architectural embodiment of an offshore account. When the restoration is nished,
the Guryevs will be able to arrive in a
car with blackened windows, drive into
a car elevator, and descend to the parking garage. Their neighbors may never
know they are home.
One sunny afternoon this month, I
returned to No. 1, The Grove. In the
seven years since the purchase of Witanhurst, the Sergeants said, they had
never heard anyone mention the Guryev name. Lady Sergeant took me into
the garden, where the bluebells were in
bloom. At the back of the garden, the
hedge that had been planted to block
out the Orangery had matured enough
to fulll its purpose. Lady Sergeant
squeezed through a slim hole in the
hedge, and encouraged me to follow
her. We suddenly had an unimpeded
view of Witanhurst. The northwestern
end of the main house, where a renovated portico could be seen, was almost
entirely covered in tarpaulin and
scaffolding. To the right of the Orangery, where Lady Croselds gardens
and tennis courts had once been, was
a regal sequence of stone terraces and
balustrades, and hardly any greenery.
Down the hill, toward the Heath, a mature oak had been circled in red-andwhite tape. It wasnt clear if the tree was
being preserved or had been marked
for death. A blue crane steepled over
the property. It is extraordinary, Lady
Sergeant remarked. Its like Versailles.
Who would want to live at Versailles?
SHOUTS & MURMURS
WHOS HAPPY NOW?

BY PAUL RUDNICK
-A T-shirt with a silk-screened

Warhol-style picture of Edward Snowden, worn on the elliptical machine.
Things that cause conservatives to
laugh uproariously :
-Any comic who talks about the
differences between men and women,
because its all just so damn true.
-When an evangelical pastor makes
a pun.
-When a conservative candidate
deliberately mispronounces Hillary,
calling her Shillary or Pillary.
Things that cause liberals to weep
bitter tears :
-Any photograph of Sarah Palin
without a sarcastic caption.
-Any sitcom that features only a
single minority character and a thin,
blond female lead. In 2015? Really,
people?
-The use of gender-specic pronouns, and the failure to acknowledge that a newborn baby might be
transgender.
Conservatives are happier than liberals,

or so decades of surveys that ask about life
satisfaction would suggest. . . . But a new series of studies questions the gap itself, raising
the possibility that although conservatives
may report greater happiness than liberals,
they are no more likely to act in ways that
indicate that they really are happier.
The Times.
JEAN JULLIEN
urther research has been done in

this intriguing area, and the results
are in.
Ways in which conservatives express
extreme happiness :
-They waggle their jowls.
-They kiss their spouses passionately on the forehead or the cheek.
-A male conservative will snap his
suspenders and shout Yowza! A female conservative will offer a tight,
chilly smile and almost touch her
hair.
Ways in which liberals express extreme
happiness :
-They make independent lms about
how happiness is expressed through
batik fabrics in Third World countries,
despite fracking.
-They dance wildly in public, which
causes their children to use heroin.
-The men bake something, and then

the women write a personal essay about
how a man baking isnt enough, and
how, in fact, its condescending and
offensive.
Causes of clinical depression in conservatives :
-The thought of two people of the
same gender getting married and wearingwhat the hell do those people
wear, anyway? Matching scarves and
rainbow jumpsuits?
-The thought of an illegal immigrant receiving a free measles vaccine
and then taking Sunday off.
-The thought of a teen-age girl
aborting a child who might have grown
up to buff a conservatives Mercedes
with a chamois.
Items of clothing that make liberals
burst with pleasure :
-A Portuguese hemp poncho bought
at a street fair and worn to a wedding.
-A rawhide bracelet knotted with
an amber bead bought at Burning Man,
where fty per cent of the purchase
price goes to ght the use of drones
and preservatives.
Young conservatives are made especially happy by :

-Just knowing that, on a conservative scale, forty-six is still considered
young.
-Turning down offers of marijuana,
a free weekend of Showtime, and a trip
to New York City, because a young
conservative would rather play golf with
his dad and maybe learn something.
-Rocking out to Katy Perry while
studying for the L.S.A.T., watching
Fox News on an iPad, and trying to
decide which of these activities is the
most fun.
Young liberals are made especially
happy by :
-All liberals are young. Just ask one.
Things that would make a conservative and a liberal equally happy :
-If all of their children got into their
rst-choice school but didnt have to
room together.
-If no one ever challenged them to
nd Syria on a map.
-The trailer for the new Star Wars
movie.
31
LETTER FROM LUANDA
EXTREME CITY
The severe inequality of the Angolan oil boom.
BY MICHAEL SPECTER
arlier this year, I was invited to a

barbecue at the home of a Texas
oilman, Steve Espinosa, and his wife,
Norma. Their two-story house sat on
an unnamed road, nestled in a community called the Condominio Riviera
Atlantico, about ten miles from Luanda, the rapidly expanding capital of
Angola. There were no sidewalks or
footpaths in the area, and there wasnt
much movement on the street. But
there were plenty of cars: Porsche Cayennes, Audis, and BMWs, all tucked
neatly into identical carports adjacent
to identical houses. Espinosa, a burly
man in cargo shorts and a Brooklyn
Industries T-shirt, answered the door
and held out a beer. He steered me

through a sparsely furnished living
room, past a humidor lled with Cuban
cigars, and onto the patio, where several of his friends and colleagues were
snacking amiably on ostrich meat.
There was a second kitchen beside the
pool in the back yard, with a sink, a
large refrigerator, and a Weber grill.
For the past two years, Luanda
not Tokyo, Moscow, or Hong Kong
has been named, by the global consulting rm Mercer, as the worlds most
expensive city for expatriates. Luandas
lure, and its treasure, is oil. Jos Eduardo dos Santos, who has presided over
Angola for more than thirty-ve years,
A melon can cost a hundred dollars; most Angolans make less than two dollars a day.
32
long ago realized that foreign oil companies were the key to power, and he
has worked diligently to accommodate
them. In the past decade, tens of thousands of American and European employees of international oil conglomerates, fortied by generous cost-ofliving allowances, have descended on
Luanda. (Multinational companies base
their overseas salaries on the comparative costs of housing, clothes, food,
and other commodities.)
The country now produces 1.8 million barrels of oil a day; in Africa, only
Nigeria produces and exports more.
The boom has transformed a failed
state into one of the worlds fastestgrowing economies. Exxon-Mobil,
Chevron, the French company Total,
and BP all have signicant operations
in Angola, along with rmsSchlumberger and Halliburton among them
that provide the complicated logistical
support required to drill and maintain
deep offshore wells. Most of the foreign workers live with their families in
well-guarded suburban communities
with names such as Bella Vista and
Paraso Riviera.
At the height of the British Empire, colonial rulers lived by a credo:
Make the world England. The oil expatriates of Luanda have taken that
message to heart. Few would work there
if they couldnt live as they do at home,
but their comforts have been hard to
come by. Almost nothing is made in
Angola, so nearly every car, computer,
crate of oranges, tin of caviar, jar of
peanut butter, pair of bluejeans, and
bottle of wine arrives by boat. Every
day, a trail of container ships backs up
from the port through the Bay of Luanda and out into the sea.
Grotesque inequality long ago became a principal characteristic of the
worlds biggest and most crowded
cities. But there is no place quite like
Luanda, where the Espinosas rent is
sixteen thousand dollars a month, a
bottle of Coke can sell for ten dollars,
and Range Rovers cost twice their
sticker price. Per-capita income in Angola has nearly tripled in the past dozen
years, and the countrys assets grew
from three billion dollars to sixty-two
billion dollars. Nonetheless, by nearly
every accepted measure, Angola remains one of the worlds least-developed
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIANO PONZI
nations. Half of Angolans live on less

than two dollars a day, infant mortality rates are among the highest in the
world, and the average life expectancy
fty-twois among the lowest. Obtaining water is a burden even for the
rich, and only forty per cent of the population has regular access to electricity. (For those who do, a generator is
essential, as power fails constantly.)
Nearly half the population is undernourished, rural sanitation facilities are
rare, malaria accounts for more than a
quarter of all childhood deaths, and
easily preventable diarrheal diseases
such as rotavirus are common.
Because the oil companies routinely
pay most large expenses for their foreign workers in Angola, a dollar bill
can quickly begin to feel like Monopoly money. Before I visited the Espinosas, I asked at my hotel if it could
provide a car and driver for the tenmile journey from the center of the city
to the suburb of Talatona. The clerk at
the front desk told me it would cost a
hundred and fty dollars. There werent
many alternatives, so I agreed. Later, I
saw him waving frantically at me in
the lobby. He explained that he had
been wrong about the taxi: it would
actually cost four hundred and fty
dollars, each way. I found another ride.
The trip took two hours. It was a
Friday afternoon, and the single rutted
road that runs south toward Luanda
Sul was jammed with commuters,
trucks, tractors, and a stream of the unregulated Toyota minivanscandongueirosthat pass for public transportation. Children worked the roadway,
selling soccer balls, popcorn, phone
cards, toilet seats, and multicolored polyester brooms. I stopped at the Casa dos
Frescos, a grocery store favored by expatriates, to buy some Scotch for my
hosts, but a fth of the Balvenie cost
three hundred dollars, so I settled for
a mediocre bottle of wine, for sixty-ve.
The woman in front of me, juggling an
infant and a cell phone, unloaded her
groceries on the checkout counter. She
had a couple of steaks, a few pantry
items, and two seventeen-dollar pints
of Hagen-Dazs ice cream, along with
juice and vegetables. The bill was eleven
hundred and fty dollars. She didnt
seem fazed, and I later learned that the
store was famous for its prices. A few
years ago, the Casa dos Frescos had

been the site of what locals refer to as
the incident of the golden melon. An
enraged French customer, having paid
a hundred and ve dollars for a single
melon, sued the store for proteering.
The case was thrown out of court, in
part because the man not only bought
the melon but also ate the evidence.
For dinner, Espinosa grilled steak
and part of a thirty-ve-pound tuna
that hed caught the previous week on
the Kwanza River. When oil people
leave Angola, he told me, they often
sell their freezers, packed with American beef, to their successors. People
can charge ten thousand dollars for a
well-stocked freezer, he said. He mentioned that a friend once tried to sell
him a roll of aluminum foil for a hundred and forty dollars. Espinosa grinned
and rolled his eyes. That crazy Randy,
he said. In the end, I think I paid thirty
dollars.
T.I.A., man, he said, shrugging his
shoulders and using a favorite acronym: This is Angola.
ngola endured four centuries of servitude and slavery before gaining

independence, in 1975, and Luanda
was once the worlds busiest slave port.
The National Museum of Slavery, about
an hour from the city, is housed in a
spare colonial structure that sits on a
promontory overlooking the Kwanza
River. There isnt much to seedrawings of slaves crammed into steerage
for the trip across the Atlantic, a display of shackles, and some brief historical notesbut the simplicity is
powerful and disturbing. The building is the last place that slaves came
before they were blessed by a priest,
put on a boat, and shipped to the markets of Rio de Janeiro, New Orleans,
and the Dominican Republic. Millions
passed through the region, many of
whom died before they reached their
destination.
The Portuguese arrived in 1575,
took control soon afterward, and remained in power until 1974, when a
military coup nally toppled the government in Lisbon. Nationalists had
been ghting in Angola for more than
a decade, and when the colonists pulled
out of the country the eeing citizens
took everything that could be moved.
Ryszard Kapuscinski, in Another Day

of Life, his memoir of that time, described the efforts to cram the entire
city into a series of wooden crates and
ship most of it to Lisbon. I dont know
if there had ever been an instance of a
whole city sailing across the ocean, but
that is exactly what happened, he
wrote. On the streets now there were
only thousands of cars, rusting and covered with dust. The walls also remained,
the roofs, the asphalt on the roads, and
the iron benches along the boulevards.
Angola has millions of acres of rich,
arable land and an unusual abundance
of mineral wealth, particularly diamonds. One Brazilian businessman
told me that turning Angola into a
farming nation and lowering its dependence on oil revenues should not
be that difficult. My country sells many
thousands of tons of crops to China
each year, he said. Angola is closer to
China, and the countries have a strong
relationship. The land is tremendously
fertile. Why not grow those crops here
and steal the Brazilian market? With
spectacular waterfalls, some of the
worlds most elusive bird species, miles
of untouched beaches, and what surfers regard as nearly perfect conditions,
there are also promising opportunities
for tourism.
But Angola lacks the infrastructure
for any of those industries; the roads
are so poor that the biggest farms often
burn crops, because they cannot get
them to market before they rot. Chevron began drilling during the nineteen-fties; before independence, and
even after oil became the nations most
valuable commodity, exports of sisal,
maize, coffee, and cotton as well as
diamonds and iron ore contributed
signicantly to the countrys economy.
That ended with the exodus of the Portuguese; few Angolans had been trained
to manage factories or farms. Trade
vanished, the communications systems
fell apart, and the economy collapsed.
For the next twenty-ve years, Angola fell into one of the most destructive civil wars in modern history. At
least a million people died. By most
estimates, roughly ten million land
mines were buriedmany of them
remain activescarring a territory
twice the size of Texas and making
large-scale agricultural planning nearly
33
impossible. The war was fought as

much for oil and diamonds as for ideological reasons, but it also served as the
last major proxy battle of the Cold War.
The United States, still struggling to
accept the loss in Vietnam, refused to
cede the territory to the Russians, who
were equally committed to retaining a
foothold in southern Africa. The UNITA
rebels, backed by the C.I.A. and South
African mercenaries, were led by Jonas
Savimbi, a murderous despot who embraced Maoist principles. The Marxiststhe Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola (M.P.L.A.)
with support from the Russians and
led by Agostinho Neto, who later became the countrys rst President, relied on an unusual mixture of Eastern
European economic advisers and Cuban
soldiers. Both sides often condemned
the inuence and the power of Western oil companies, but Neto understood that his regime and the country probably wouldnt survive without
them. He made sure that American oil
companies were protected and, in turn,
won nancial backing from companies
such as Chevron.
It was a true witches cauldron,
one foreign official who spent years
in Angola told me. The hostilities
ended only in 2002, when assassins
shot Savimbi in the head. (The best
use of bullets in the history of munitions, another longtime resident of
Luanda said.) President dos Santos,
who is seventy-two, became the head
of the M.P.L.A. in 1979, after Neto
died. The Party still uses that acronym, although it officially abandoned
Marxism more than twenty years ago.
fter hundreds of years of strife, Angola has been a peaceful country

for little more than a decade. No society forged in that kind of conict can
quickly nd its footing. I spent my
rst two years here hunting for water,
Nicholas Staines, who until recently
served as local director of the International Monetary Fund, told me one afternoon, as we sat in the garden outside the I.M.F. office. And I mean
hunting. I would walk out of my house
with a stful of cash, and my wife would
say, Dont come back till you nd some
water. So I would hunt for the nearest water truck and say, Where are you
34
going? How much is that person paying you? I will double it. That is how
you got water in Angola just a few
years ago.
Then, suddenly, there were hundreds
of people with unimaginable wealth
and few restraints. Tales of excess became commonplace, and often they are
told with pride. One businessman famously distributed Rolexes to guests
as party favors at a wedding. Each member of parliament recently received a
new hundred-thousand-dollar Lexus.
Isabel dos Santos, the Presidents forty-two-year-old daughter, is typically
described as the richest woman in Africa; Forbes puts her net worth at more
than three billion dollars. She was educated in London, at Kings College,
and owns the biggest building, with
the most expensive apartments, in Luanda. In 2011, as president of the Red
Cross, dos Santos paid Mariah Carey
a million dollars to perform for two
hours at the organizations annual gala.
The show was sponsored by Unitel,
Angolas principal mobile-phone company, which she also owns.
Dos Santos is one of the citys most
ambitious restaurateurs. One day, I had
lunch at Oon.dah, on the rst oor of
the Escom Center, another of her properties; the house specialty, the Wagyu
Beef Hamburger, sells for about sixty
dollars, and a half pound of tenderloin
goes for twice that. A bottle of Cristal
champagne costs twelve hundred dollars. Displaying such wealth in a country as impoverished as Angola can be
a challenge. One member of the Presidents inner circle owns a Rolls-Royce,
but there are few good roads in Luanda. So every Sunday he loads the car
into a trailer, takes it to the Marginala
recently renovated two-mile-long promenade along the South Atlanticdrives
it for a while on the capitals only
smooth road, loads it back into its trailer,
and has it hauled away.
Angola is widely regarded as one of
the worlds most egregious kleptocracies. The bulk of the countrys wealth
is controlled by a few hundred oligarchsPresidential cronies, generals,
and their families. The default position of Angolan businessmen is above
the law, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira,
an associate professor of politics at Oxford University, writes in Magnicent
and Beggar Land, his comprehensive

new account of Angolas recent history.
Whether it is a matter of capital ight,
money laundering, the unilateral abandonment of partnerships with foreigners, the non-payment of loans and import duties, conict of interest between
public and private roles . . . These are
not occasional whims, but the very stuff
of Angolan private sector life.
Last year, the nation ranked a hundred and sixty-rst out of a hundred
and seventy-ve countries on Transparency Internationals corruption scale
and a hundred and eighty-rst on the
World Banks most recent Ease of
Doing Business index. In one category,
resolving bankruptcies, Angola came
in last. Twice in a week, my driver was
hustled for money by traffic cops. The
officers were patient and polite, but
they lingered in a way that made it
clear that it would be wise to hand over
a hundred kwanzas, the equivalent of
about a dollar. One night, as I pulled
into the parking lot of a popular restaurant, a man suddenly appeared at the
door. We pay him, my companion
said. This way, we will probably get
the car back when we leave. We then
paid another man to seat us in a nearly
empty restaurant, and another to bring
us a fteen-dollar bottle of Evian. That
was before we ever saw our waiter.
The next afternoon, I needed batteries for my tape recorder. The only
store I could nd that carried them
charged sixteen dollars (and gave me
a handwritten receipt). Then the salesman punched the official gure, six
dollars, into the cash register; the extra
ten dollars was for him. Angola has
several dozen universities, more even
than South Africa. But few have functioning libraries, and degrees are bought
as often as they are earned. More than
one person told me that in order to
graduate from Agostinho Neto University, the largest academic institution
in Angola, even some of the most talented students are forced to pay bribes.
Antonio, an official of a major oil company who was educated at several of
Luandas best international schools,
said that he had entered the university but quickly dropped out. It was
a giant step backward, he said. A
complete waste of my time. (Few Angolans were willing to be identied
by more than a rst or middle name.

The constitution protects freedom of
speech and assembly, but the government has grown increasingly intolerant of criticism.)
Antonio is a thin, contemplative
man with an oval face and a head of
loose, springy curls. He and two of his
friends, Pedro and Marisa, joined me
one night for dinner at La Vigia, a popular restaurant where diners can select
sh from a tank near the cash register.
It is really hard to nd honest people
here, Pedro said. Everywhere you go,
even every small business, somebody
is trying to cheat you. Like Antonio,
Pedro had graduated from premier
schools, and, despite his comments, he
expressed optimism about the countrys long-term future. Marisa, who attended college and business school in
Europe, said that when she is stopped
by the traffic police she simply refuses
to payand eventually they go away.
The three, all in their thirties, agreed
that although they might prefer to live
abroad, there has never been a better
time to be a well-educated Angolan.
The government requires foreign oil
companies to hire local residents, and,
for those who are qualied, the prospects for lucrative jobs are excellent.
We can function effectively in a
foreign environment, Pedro said. That
makes us unusual. His English, which
he said he learned from watching
American police shows on TV, was letter-perfect. He told me that he and his
colleagues often see job applicants who,
despite having graduated from the
countrys best tech programs, barely
know how to turn on a computer. The
three friends stressed more than once
that, owing to their education and relative prosperity, they were far from typical. Yet they represent the vibrant and
promising new Angola that is struggling to emerge. None of them have
known any leader other than dos Santos. International human-rights groups
regularly denounce him, but his power
remains absolute. A lot of people see
him as the King of Angola, Pedro said.
He kind of owns the country. People
almost cant look him in the eyeshes
that powerful.
Marisa added, Its like your father
who is very mean to you. You go to
dinner every day, and he shows up, and
you smile and say, Hi, Daddy. You say

nothing instead of saying, What have
you done to me, you are horrible.
Marisa, who is single, runs the procurement operation at an oil-services
rm. Just that day, she had interviewed
a twenty-ve-year-old prospective employee who was the father of seven
children. Thats pretty normal, she
said. Not necessarily seven kids, but
having children by the time youre in
your early twenties. Marisa lives in the
center of town and commutes through

heavy traffic to an office on the outskirts of the city. She rises at ve, a
driver arrives by six, and she is at the
office shortly after seven. There is tremendous pressure to have at least one
child before you hit thirty, she said.
But things are changing. She said
that she recently heard a woman explain on a radio show why lesbians
exist: they werent loved by men, and
therefore looked to their mothersor
perhaps a sister or a cousinfor a model
of what love should look like.
The same principle applied to homosexuals or violent people, Marisa
said. You become violent because your
parents are violentthat is the view.
You become a lesbian because you didnt
have a father gure. This is ridiculous
and offensive. But its also a great step
forward, because we are speaking in
broad daylight, on the radio, about lesbians and homosexuals. They are not
accepted, but they are not going to be
killed. This is an advance.
uanda aspires to become the Dubai

of Africa, but it has a long way to
go. In 1975, the city had half a million
residents; today there are almost six million. Hotels, luxury apartment buildings, shopping arcades, and modern
office complexes compete for space in
the city center with shantytowns made
from corrugated tin and heavy cardboard and with tens of thousands of
people who live on mounds of dirt, in
the scrapped remains of rusted and abandoned vehicles, or out in the open, next
to fetid, unused water tanks. To make

room for development, President dos
Santos has cleared many slums in the
past decade, usually without warning or
compensation. He has promised to provide displaced occupants with housing
farther away from the city center, but
the government has struggled with the
furious pace of population growth.
Construction cranes are visible everywhere. (It pays to look up as you
walk the streets: there are no scaffoldings to protect pedestrians from falling debris, and workmen occasionally
toss empty water bottles from the skyscrapers.) The city often smells of sewage and stagnant water, but it has grand
ambitions. After almost a decade of
delays, the nearly completed Intercontinental Hotel and Casino, a ziggurat
of glass, steel, and reinforced concrete,
hovers over the harbor. An eight-lane
highwayLuandas rst genuinely
modern roadruns along the citys
horseshoe-shaped port. Between the
highway and the water, pedestrians
amble along the Marginal, enjoying
spectacular sunset views. Across the
bay, connected to the city by a causeway, ostentatious night clubs with
names like Chill Out and Miami Beach
line the shores of the neighborhood
known as the Ilha, which for many
years was an abandoned strip of sand
used mainly by local shermen.
Most expatriates leave Luanda after
a few years, but some choose to stay.
One afternoon, I visited Tako Koning,
a Canadian petroleum geologist, who
lives on the seventh oor of an older
building in the center of Luanda with
his wife, Henriette, an energetic and
engaging English teacher. Ko ning
is sixty-ve, with a thick mustache,
heavy-lidded blue eyes, and slightly
shaggy hair. He worked for Texaco
for thirty years, rst in Canada and then
in Indonesia and Nigeria; in 1995, he
and Henriette moved to Luanda. Koning retired from Texaco when it merged
with Chevron, in 2001, and now works
as a consultant. The couples apartment
is comfortable but not luxurious. (Because power failures are so common,
Henriette refuses to enter the elevator,
preferring to climb the seven ights.
I dont do African elevators, she told
me.) The rentsix thousand dollars a
monthis reasonable for a place in the
35
center of the city with excellent views.

From their terrace, the city looks
like an archeological cutaway. Henriette pointed to a building across the
street. You can see they are not well
off, because during power outages the
building is dark, she saidmeaning
that they lacked a backup generator. In
another nearby building, occupied by
diplomats and oil executives, a threebedroom apartment rents for as much
as twenty thousand dollars a month. I
could see the new BP headquarters, a
twenty-ve-story building called Torres do Carmo, and the massive glass
headquarters of Sonangol, the state oil
company. Thats the French Embassy,
Henriette said, pointing to a stolid town
house. And now look straight down.
Below us, rows of tin roofs were wedged
tightly between apartment buildings.
They were displaced during the civil
war, she said. Now they live on the
street right next to the diplomats and
millionaires.
The Konings often entertain young
Angolans, including the three I had
recently met. The couple has supported
students, and Tako, who was born in
the Netherlands but lived mostly in
Canada, contributes his time to a variety of schools and engineering societies. You quickly realize that you can
make a bigger difference here than in
a place like Toronto, he said. It can
be very satisfying. I asked what he
thought of expatriates who seemed to

avoid interacting with Angolans. He
shrugged. The thing about Americans
that I always loved is that you jumped
in and got things done, he said. You
rolled into Europe after World War II
with the Marshall Plan. The countries
were destroyed, but you put them back
together. I understand that the U.S.
wanted to hold off the Russiansthere
are always geopolitical reasons. But
what matters is what you did.
In Angola, he added, you cant simply hit a switch and say everything is
normal just because the war has ended
and the country has oil. China essentially provided its own Marshall Plan:
as the worlds biggest oil consumer, it
buys nearly two million barrels a day
from Angola, more than from any other
country, and Chinese rms are building schools, roads, bridges, ports, and
one of the largest housing developments in Africa, in nearby Kilamba.
The buildings, designed for middleincome residents, are still mostly unoccupied, but they take up thousands
of acrespastel high-rises, just a few
miles beyond the city limits, that look
like a sub-Saharan Co-op City.
We never planned to stay here forever, Koning said. We have two children and a grandchild in Toronto. But
the longer you stay the deeper your roots
go down. And we know people. I went
to a local place for a beer with him one
night. Many of the street people waved,

and several approached, eagerly but
pleasantly. Koning says he doesnt think
it makes sense to hand out money, but
he pays a man to watch his car, more
as charity than for security. When people need medicine and clothing, he and
Henriette often chip in.
The political landscape is troubling,
though. In Luanda, security forces regularly stop protests and arrest those
who try to attend them. In 2012, two
activists disappeared after an anti-government protest. For more than a year,
Angolan officials denied any knowledge of their fate. Late in 2013, after
sustained protests by human-rights
workers, the attorney general admitted that the two men had been kidnapped and probably murdered. Residents of Luanda are understandably
afraid to test their freedom. When Koning and I got to the bar, we were joined
at a table in the garden by a Russian
diamond dealer. We produce more diamonds than anyone else on earth, my
dear, he said in a very slight Russian
accent. But keep it to yourself. There
was also a dance teacher, a couple of
other journalists, and an American
woman who did not give her name or
discuss her profession. The weather
was dry and clear, and at night the air
became softer, more fragrant and inviting. The others were relaxed, but the
woman, who I later learned worked for
an international N.G.O., looked anxious. You cant write about me, she
said, when I told her that I was a journalist. Its not safe. I will get death
threats. After a few moments of awkward silence, she stood up, said she
couldnt trust me, and walked out.
Im weighing the risk of brain damage against a life of celibacy.
oreign embassies routinely warn

their citizens about crime in the
capital. Avoid walking around Luanda,
especially after dark, the British Foreign Office advises. One should also
avoid wearing jewelry or watches in
public places and walking between
bars and restaurants on the Ilha do
Cabo, as well as crowded places like
markets. The U.S. State Department
is even more blunt: The capital city,
Luanda, continues to maintain a well
deserved reputation as a haven for
armed robberies, assaults, carjackings, and overall crimes of opportunity.
However, reliable statistical crime data

is unavailable in Angola. Many foreign workers are forbidden by their
employers to drive cars there; those
who want to spend a weekend in the
countryside need to get permission well
in advance. One afternoon, about an
hour before I planned to meet some
people near my hotel, one of them
called. What time should we pick you
up? she asked. I told her that I would
walk the ve hundred yards to our
meeting spot. She tried to dissuade me,
but when I insisted she urged me to
lock my bag, passport, and wallet in
the safe in my hotel room. Bring a
Xerox of the passport page and some
money, she said. And do not show
your phone on the street. I made it to
the meeting and back without incident.
Most expatriates said that their concern about crime was the main reason
they avoided the city. At times, though,
the fears seemed exaggerated. Not long
after I arrived, I had dinner in the suburbs with a French journalist and some
Americans. My colleague told one of
the guests that she lived in the center
of Luanda, a block or so from the Skyna
Hotel, which is on the Avenue de Portugal, the citys version of Fifth Avenue. The Skyna is enormous, extremely
well known, and readily picked out of
the skyline. Where is that? the guest,
who had lived in Angola for more than
a year, asked. Ive never heard of it.
Americans can earn twice their usual
salary in Angola, but there are few easily accessible cultural institutions or
opportunities for entertainment. Theres
the Slavery Museum and the Portuguese
fortress of So Miguel, which overlooks
the port, but in Luanda theres not a single commercial movie theatre. Its all
Netix here, Steve Espinosa told me.
If your Internet connection is good
enoughotherwise you are out of luck.
There are more signicant challenges.
Exxon-Mobil, among other companies,
carries out random urine tests on its
workers, and those who fail are sent
home. The company isnt really looking
for drugs such as cocaine, heroin, or marijuana; rather, it wants to make sure that
employees are taking their malaria medicine. (The concern is understandable,
but long-term use of malaria preventives can cause serious liver damage.)
Foreigners typically stay for two or
three years; the Espinosas have been

there for six. Two of their children
attended the Luanda International
School, which is only a couple of miles
from where they live. The campus is
beautiful and modern, with computer
systems and well-kept playing elds.
The staff is made up largely of foreign
teachers, who tend to move every few
years among the worlds lite international schools. Fees, which are almost
always paid by oil companies, come to
about fty thousand dollars a year. Some
companies even pay when they dont
have a student who needs the seat. If
Chevron or BP wants to transfer somebody in the middle of a year, one
teacher said, these companies have to
be certain that children can attend a
good school.
Students are typically driven to
school, waved through a security gate,
collected after class, and then driven
back to the safety of their housing cluster. Nobody takes a bus, rides a bike,
or walks. There are also many local
students at the international school
mostly children of Angolas lite, which
can be a problem in civics classes, given
the governments deplorable humanrights record. A few weeks earlier, the
mother of an important minister spoke
at the school. Its hard for people like
that to admit the truth about issues
like free speech and hard for us to
ignore it, one teacher told me. So
we try to walk a line. (One report, released in March by the International
Federation for Human Rights, which
represents more than a hundred and
seventy human-rights groups throughout the world, found that journalists
and human-rights workers in Angola
are subject to judicial and administrative harassment, acts of intimidation, threats and other forms of restrictions to their freedom of association
and expression.)
For those who prefer the protected
life, the cocoon can extend all the way
to Houston. The Houston Express, operated by Atlas Air, ies three times a
week between George Bush International Airport and Luandas Quatro de
Fevereiro Airport. Tickets are usually
available only through the oil companies. Most seats, which sell for about
ten thousand dollars, are in business
class. People who y on a commercial
airliner from the U.S. typically change

planes in Paris or London. On my ight,
there were about two hundred and
seventy-ve passengers, all but a few
of them men. It felt like a military
transport.
obody is sure how long Angolas

expat exceptionalism can last.
The plummeting price of oil has
already forced Halliburton, Baker
Hughes, and Schlumberger to cut thousands of jobs throughout the world. So
far, Angola has mostly been spared.
(No official from any oil company would
agree to talk to me about its presence
in Angola.) But if the United States
stops buying Angolas oil, and if Chinas rate of economic growth continues to slow, major foreign companies
would be unable to sustain their current staffing levels and expenditures.
Oil revenue accounts for more than
ninety per cent of Angolas foreignexchange earnings, and there are many
risks for a country that relies too heavily on one commodity. Economists call
it the resource curse. For years, oil experts predicted that by 2020 Nigeria
and Angola would account for twentyve per cent of Americas crude imports; the shale revolution in Texas and
North Dakota put an end to such speculation. Within a few years, the United
States might not need any Angolan
oil. The current price of a barrel of oil
is about fty dollars, but just a few
months ago the Angolan government,
for the purposes of its 2015 budget,
assumed that the average price would
be eighty-one dollars. That gap will
prove hard to close. The dos Santos government announced earlier this year
that it would cut the budget by a quarter, and it has said that it will work
harder to diversify the economy. Few
economists who study Africa believe
that it will be easy.
They say that they will diversify
the economy all the time, Gustavo
Costa, the Luanda correspondent for
the Portuguese newspaper Expresso,
told me. There has always been that
opportunity. And in theory, at least, its
still there. But the government has built
a certain kind of societyfor themselves. You can call it prosperity if you
want, but it is incredibly fragile. It all
could end tomorrow.
37
Jejoen Bontinck at his home in Antwerp, in December, 2014. The Belgian authorities who interrogated him emerged with a portrait of the
38
A REPORTER AT LARGE
JOURNEY TO JIHAD
Why are teen-agers joining ISIS?
BY BEN TAUB
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BEN TAUB
radical Islamist recruitment process.
n 2009, a fourteen-year-old Belgian

named Jejoen Bontinck slipped a
sparkly white glove onto his left hand,
squeezed into a sequinned black cardigan, and appeared on the reality-television contest Move Like Michael Jackson. He had travelled to Ghent from
his home, in Antwerp, with his father,
Dimitri, who wore a pin-striped suit
jacket and oversized sunglasses, and who
told the audience that he was Jejoens
manager, mental coach, and personal assistant. Standing before the judges, Jejoen (pronounced yeh-yoon) professed
his faith in the American Dream. Dance
yourself dizzy, a judge said, and Jejoen
moonwalked through the preliminary
round. That is performance! Dimitri
told the shows host, a former Miss Belgium named Vronique de Kock. Youre
gonna hear from him, sweetie.
Jejoen was soon eliminated, but four
years later, when he least wanted the attention, he became the focus of hundreds of articles in the Belgian press.
He had participated in a jihadi radicalization program, operated out of a rented
room in Antwerp, that inspired dozens
of Belgian youths to migrate to Syria
and take up arms against the government of Bashar al-Assad. Most of the
groups members ultimately became part
of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham,
joining more than twenty thousand foreign ghters engaged in the conict in
Syria and Iraq. Today, ISIS controls large
parts of both countries. With revenue
of more than a million dollars a day,
mostly from extortion and taxation, the
group continues to expand its reach; in
mid-May, its forces captured the Iraqi
city of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar
province, and, last week, they took control of Palmyra, in Syria.
About four thousand European jihadis have gone to Syria since the outbreak of war, in 2011, more than four
hundred from Belgium. (It is estimated
that at least a hundred Americans have
joined the ght.) The migration of youths

from seemingly stable and prosperous
communities to ght with radical Islamists has bewildered not only their families but governments and security forces
throughout Europe.
Tens of thousands of Muslim civilians and moderate rebels, mostly Sunnis,
died in the early stages of the war in Syria,
and many people have argued that the
European jihadis were motivated by humanitarian concerns. But thousands of
pages of Belgian federal-police documentsincluding wiretaps and interrogations of jihadis who fought abroad and
later returnedshow that, even before
ISIS announced its presence in Syria, the
primary objective for many Europeans,
including those in Jejoens group, was to
establish an Islamic caliphate through violence. We were already talking about
terrorism in 2012, a Belgian security
official told me. But, at that time, no one
wanted to talk about terrorism, because
Assad insisted that the opposition was
composed of extremists. The Belgian security official said, It was very difficult
to say, Well, yes, he is right, because our
Belgians are terrorists.
After eight months in Syria, Jejoen
returned to Belgium, where he was
promptly arrested. Jejoens lawyer says
that the authorities interrogated him for
more than two hundred hours. They
emerged with a portrait of the radical Islamist recruitment process, as well as an
account of the workings of ISIS. We are
sure that he probably didnt tell us everything, the Belgian security official said.
But he added, of what Jejoen did divulge,
We havent found one element that is
not correct.
I met Jejoen several times last winter, usually at his mothers home, in
Antwerp, where he was awaiting sentencing in Belgiums largest terrorism
trial. He mostly avoided discussing
his experience in Syria, preferring
to play Counter-Strike on a laptop. But
39
transcripts of the police interrogations

show that he was, as his father calls
him, the golden witness.
n 1994, Dimitri Bontinck, then a

twenty-year-old night-club bouncer,
travelled to West Africa on holiday,
where he met and married Rose, a Nigerian woman with strict Catholic beliefs. Their son, Jejoen, was born in
southern Nigeria the following year; the
family moved to Belgium shortly afterward. Dimitri told me that he served in
the military, and then in a U.N. peacekeeping mission to Bosnia, before taking an administrative position in the
Antwerp court system. When Jejoen
was eight, the Bontincks had a daughter, Iris. Family life was always in harmony, Dimitri said this winter, in his
one-room apartment in Antwerp. Now
forty-one, Dimitri has a buzz cut and
an athletic build that belies his reliance
on whiskey and Marlboros.
Jejoen was brought up Catholic, and
enrolled in a prestigious Jesuit academy
called Our Lady College. I think that
was the best period of his life, Dimitri
said, praising the schools structure. But
when Jejoen was fteen he started doing
poorly in math, and had to transfer to a
remedial high school. Then his girlfriend
dumped him. At that point, Dimitri told
me, Jejoen fell down in a black hole.
Jejoen described this period to the
police as one of searching and looking for an alternative to the pain.
When he was sixteen, he
started dating a Moroccan
girl at his new school, who
introduced him to Islam,
and told him that if he
wanted to keep seeing her
he had to learn about the
religion. Jejoen searched
What is Islam? online, and,
on August 1, 2011, the rst
day of Ramadan, he converted at De Koepel Mosque.
De Koepel, which means The Dome,
was founded in Antwerp, in 2005, by
Belgian converts. At the time, no mosque
in Belgium conducted Friday prayers in
Dutch, so Muslims who didnt speak Arabic or Turkish had difficulty following
sermons. De Koepel became a home not
only for converts but for hundreds of
second- and third-generation Moroccans and Turks.
40
On Fridays, the ground oor of the

mosque is lined with four rows of men
and boys at prayer. Women pray upstairs,
and watch the imam deliver his sermon
by live video. At De Koepel, Jejoen prayed
ve times a day and closely followed the
sermons of Sulayman Van Ael, the imam
at the time, who took a relatively moderate tone, emphasizing charity work and
the ve pillars of Islam.
Dimitri found the conversion frustrating. A family is supposed to eat together at the table, he told me, but, when
Jejoen adopted halal dietary restrictions,
family dinners grew less frequent. Still,
Dimitri saw Jejoens new habits as a kind
of teen-age rebellion. What can you
do? he said.
n November, 2011, three months after

Jejoens conversion, a neighbor named
Azeddine invited him to visit the headquarters of Sharia4Belgium, at 117 Dambruggestraat. The mission of Sharia4Belgium, established the previous year, was
to transform Belgium into a state governed as the cities of Raqqa, in Syria, and
Mosul, in Iraq, are today: replace the
parliament with a shura council and the
Prime Minister with a caliph; stone adulterers and execute homosexuals; and convert or banish all non-Muslims, or force
them to pay jizya, a tax levied on those
who dont adhere to the faith.
The leader of Sharia4Belgium was
Fouad Belkacem, a thirty-three-yearold militant preacher. A slight, bespectacled, balding man with a
full dark beard, who usually
wears a long djellabah, Belkacem was born in Belgium
to Moroccan parents. In his
twenties, he wore jeans and
was clean-shaven. He was
arrested for burglary and
forgery, for which he spent
time in jail. After he got out,
he worked as a used-car
salesman and volunteered at
a youth center, where, according to a
social worker named Peter Calluy, he
propagated homophobia and antidemocratic ideas.
Anjem Choudary, a British radical Islamist, told me that in March, 2010, Belkacem visited him in London to ask his
advice about how to start something in
Belgium. Choudary, who is forty-eight,
and has a long, graying beard, has acted
as a spokesman for various radical groups,

such as al-Muhajiroun and Islam4UK,
that have since been banned under U.K.
terrorism laws. He has been arrested on
several occasions for organizing illegal
protests, and several of his associates have
committed acts of terrorism, including,
in 2013, the killing of Lee Rigby, a British soldier, on the streets of London. But
Choudary, who is closely monitored by
security services, has never been convicted
of any terrorism-related charges.
I went through the history of alMuhajiroun, how we set it up, Choudary
told me one afternoon last winter, in a
London caf. You cant do what the
prophets of old did, which was to stand
on the hills and the mountains and address people, he said. The hills and
mountains today are Sky News, CNN,
Fox News, the BBC. We were meeting
just a few hours after the murders of
twelve people at the office of Charlie
Hebdo, and Choudary proudly showed
me his statement on Twitter: Freedom
of expression does not extend to insulting the Prophets of Allah, whatever
your views on the events in Paris today!
#ParisShooting. He was delighted by
the reaction. Thats not bad, actually
two hundred and eighty-six retweets?
he said. A few minutes later, Choudarys
phone rang. Fox News, tonight, he said,
smiling. Sean Hannity wanted Choudary
to represent the Muslim view.
Choudary described Belkacem as an
incredibly receptive younger brother.
Belkacem returned to Belgium and started
Sharia4Belgium that March. By the time
Jejoen arrived, in November, 2011, the
group had publicly burned an American
ag to commemorate the attacks on the
World Trade Center and, in a Facebook
post, applauded the news that a young
politician, who belonged to an extremeright political party that denounced Muslims and immigrants, was dying of cancer. Later, on YouTube, Belkacem declared
Sharia4Belgiums intention to destroy city
monuments, and members travelled to
the Netherlands to disrupt a lecture delivered by two openly gay Muslims. Every
weekend, the group held demonstrations
in public squares in Antwerp and Brussels, as well as in the small towns along
the train line between them. Sharia4Belgium enjoyed the protection of the same
free-expression laws that the group
sought to dismantle. It was a little bit
irritating, the Belgian security official

told me, but its very clear that youre not
going to demolish democracy in Belgium
by giving yers to people.
Belkacem also established contact
with jihadis in other countries. He had
connections with people in Denmark
and other parts of Europe, Choudary
told me. One prominent jihadi ideologue
in the Middle East, Abu Muhammad
al-Maqdisi, advised Belkacem to focus
on recruitment. The goal was to establish Sharia law not just in Belgium but
everywhere.
hen Jejoen rst visited the headquarters of Sharia4Belgium, Belkacem asked him if he was prepared to
learn the Koran without any distortion
or editing or interpretation. He then
sent Jejoen back to De Koepel with a set
of questions for Van Ael, the imam, including one about the validity of hatred
in the name of Allah. Van Ael literally
told me that this was the ideology of
Sharia4Belgium, Jejoen said, and that
I should turn away from it. But Belkacem had quoted verses from the Koran
and the hadith to convince Jejoen of his
interpretation of Islam. Van Aels response only affirmed Jejoens belief in
Belkacems message.
Typical recruitment patterns in Europe and the West tell us that it helps if
that person doesnt have a religious background, Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist recruiter who now runs a counterextremism think tank in London called
Quilliam, told me. Converts and the
newly devout, dislocated from the traditional hierarchies of Islam, are less
likely to challenge a purported authority on religious matters.
Jejoen adopted a Muslim name, Sayfullah Ahlu Sunna. He also took a kunya,
a kind of nickname that in the Arab
world reects familial relations and endearment but in jihadi circles is also used
to obscure identity. Jejoens kunya was
Abu Assya; Belkacems was Abu Imran.
In Sharia4Belgium, most members, who
were known as brothers, addressed one
another by their kunyas.
Belkacem ran an intensive twentyfour-week program of ideological training. He began by declaring that the world
was divided into two groups: Muslims
and non-Muslims. In mainstream mosques,
nuance and interpretive religious schol-
Do you have a moment to talk about toxic waste?
arship are encouraged. Notes collected

in police raids show that Belkacems lessons reduced the world to owcharts and
categories: Muslims versus indels; Sharia versus democracy. Belkacem taught
the brothers that most imams ignore discussions of jihad and martyrdom because
they want to keep state funding. Bart
Buytaert, the chairman of De Koepel,
told me, Belkacem and Sharia4Belgium
accused us of being non-Muslims.
Jejoen began spending most of his
free time at the headquarters of Sharia4Belgium. One of the brothers regularly
led martial-arts classes there, which some
members supplemented with kickboxing training at a nearby gym. Choudary,
who is identied in police les as a nancial supporter of Sharia4Belgium, lectured remotely, through a video-chat
Web site called Paltalk. Choudarys mentor, Omar Bakri Muhammad, a radical
preacher who became known in London as the Tottenham Ayatollah, did the
same from Lebanon, where he lived after
being exiled from the U.K. Choudary
also fostered an exchange program,
through which Belkacems followers came
to England to study with him, and some
of his followers visited the Sharia4Belgium headquarters. On one occasion,
Choudary and a group of his followers
travelled to the Netherlands, to deliver
a lecture for the brothers of Sharia4Belgium and its partner organization Sharia4Holland about the methodology to
overthrow the regimes. The visit was
captured by a documentary crew from
the Belgian channel RTBF. I come from
England in order to radicalize the youth
in this country, Choudary said. One
Sharia4Belgium member remarked to a
British counterpart, Sometimes you need
laptop, sometimes you need Kalashnikov.
Members were discouraged from sharing information about the group with
their parents. Choudary told me, Theres
no need for them to be informed. When
Jejoens parents asked where he was spending so much time, he said that he was
playing video games with friends. Jejoen
routinely came home late and struggled
to get up in the mornings. Step by step,
he started to neglect his responsibilities, Dimitri said. Some of the brothers
dropped out of school. Many lost interest in friends who werent affiliated with
Sharia4Belgium. Choudary said that it
was natural that members would distance ourselves from our previous life,
and our previous friends and behavior.
Dimitri found out about his sons
membership in Sharia4Belgium in
late 2011, shortly after Jejoen joined
the group. Then a brother named Michael Delefortriewho had named his
41
Ass kickers Ass kickers
two sons for founding members of Al

Qaedawas arrested for trying to sell a
Kalashnikov online. Belkacem held a
press conference that was covered by an
evening-news show. Dimitri was watching television at home that evening when
he spotted Jejoen next to Belkacem on
the screen. Dimitri told the police that
Jejoen was a minor, and asked them to
extract him from the group, but he says
that a judge told him that there was nothing they could do.
Then, one evening in February, 2012,
the principal of Jejoens high school
warned the police that Jejoen had threatened to purge the school. A juvenile
court ordered Jejoen to see a counsellor,
but, according to Dimitri, she didnt know
anything about Islam. How you can solve
a problem if the other parts dont even
know where is Mecca? he said. Dimitri
42
started visiting the Sharia4Belgium headquarters, hoping to nd evidence of illegal activity. I always had a feeling that
something is going wrong inside that
clubhouse, he told me. Dimitri and Rose
invited Belkacem to their house, but he
was adept at deecting their inquiries,
and Dimitri never saw any extremist materials inside the headquarters. Though
police raids later discovered fundamentalist literatureincluding a pamphlet
with instructions on how to beat women
with a corrective and educational intentit was kept in members homes,
not at the Sharia4Belgium headquarters.
As part of the indoctrination program, the brothers often watched archived lectures by Anwar al-Awlaki, the
American-born imam who was killed in
a U.S. drone strike in Yemen a little more
than a month before Jejoens rst visit to
Sharia4Belgium.They also watched footage of battles in Afghanistan, Chechnya,

and other jihadi conict zones, and came
to think of the mujahideen in the videos as seless heroes defending Islam
against corrupt crusaders. One day, they
watched a video of a beheading. Members discussed where theyd like to ght
in the future, from Libya to Somalia to
the Seychelles. You sit for months in a
group in which jihad is considered quite
normal, Jejoen said.
Jejoen continued to text girls, which
was forbidden by Belkacem; one day, he
ordered a brother to destroy Jejoens SIM
card. Months later, Jejoen got in worse
trouble for proselytizing on his own.
Other Sharia4Belgium members said
that Jejoen was using the activity as an
excuse to meet girls. Belkacem accused
him of practicing exorcism. He was
temporarily suspended from the group.
Belkacem dedicated the last four weeks
of the course to teaching the importance
of loyalty toward Muslims, and disavowal
of non-Muslims. The prospect of excommunication kept most members obedient; one brother, who was in his late teens,
was required to undergo circumcision.
The programs nal task was a written
exam. The questions were rudimentary,
including What does Islam mean? and
Should I vote? (Members were discouraged from voting, on the ground that it
acknowledged the legitimacy of the democratic process.) One student, whose exam
was found in the police raid, scored eightyfour per cent. Today, he is believed to be
a member of the religious police in Raqqa.
y February, 2012, Belgian police were

wiretapping phone calls within the
group. But many of the trainees were
petty criminals familiar with police tactics, and a former Belgian counterterrorism investigator told me, They know
the way. They buy a cheap cell phone,
and they throw it away.
Belkacem never explicitly instructed
his followers to ght in Syria. But he
taught them that martyrdom on the battleeld, which he called pure Islam,
yielded the greatest reward in paradise.
The battle is not only an invitation, but
an individual obligation, Walid Lakdim, a Sharia4Belgium member, said in
a police interrogation after returning
from Syria.
At the time, the Syrian revolution was
not known for its foreign jihadi element.

The face of the rebel side was the Free
Syrian Army, a loose affiliation of groups,
some of which were led by officers who
had defected from Assads government
forces after refusing to shoot unarmed
protesters. The rebels spoke of the eventual triumph of democracy over Assads
brutal regime.
In 2011, a Sharia4Belgium member
named Nabil Kasmi travelled to Lebanon, where he visited Choudarys mentor, Omar Bakri Muhammad, who was
living under house arrest in Tripoli, a
coastal city in the north. Kasmi returned
to Belgium a few months later, but, in
March, 2012, he came back to Lebanon.
At the same time, other Sharia4Belgium
members travelled to Yemen, where they
were detained and subsequently deported,
under suspicion of trying to join Al
Qaeda. Then, in May, Kasmi crossed into
Syria. Jejoen told police that Kasmi called
Sharia4Belgium headquarters, declaring
that he was in Syria to ght. According to a Lebanese military court, Bakri
Muhammad and Kasmi helped a few
European jihadis establish themselves in
Al Qaeda-affiliated groups across the
Syrian border. Once they were ready to
go to Syria, the Belgian security official
said, they had a whole operational network, owing to Sharia4Belgiums ties
to Bakri Muhammad and Choudary.
(Choudary denied sending people to
Syria, and said, If I were to send someone somewhere, I would go there rst.)
The following month, Belkacem was
arrested and imprisoned for instigating
hate. One of his wives, Stephanie Djato,
had refused to comply with a Belgian
law that bans full-face coverings in public. (Though polygamy is illegal in Belgium, Belkacem has married at least two
women in religious ceremonies.) When
a female police officer tried to remove
her niqab, Djato head-butted her, breaking the officers nose. Belkacem and
Choudary both posted statements online, threatening retribution against the
police for removing Djatos niqab. Riots
ensued in Brussels, and two police officers
were stabbed by a man carrying Sharia4Belgium literature.
With Belkacem in jail, Sharia4Belgium was rudderless. The members continued their video sessions with Choudary,
who invited them to protest the Olympics, which were held in London that
July. Kasmi returned to Belgium for a

short period. Then, on August 20, 2012,
he left for Syria again; the next day, ve
other members followed. In September,
Jejoen and several other Sharia4Belgium
members participated in demonstrations
against Innocence of Muslims, a lm
that depicted the prophet Muhammad
as a homosexual and a child-molester
and which sparked deadly protests across
the Middle East and North Africa. By
October, the group had dissolved, and in
the next eighteen months about fty Belgians directly affiliated with Sharia4Belgium made their way to Syria. Those who
arrived rst joined groups that were later
absorbed into Al Qaeda and ISIS; the others mostly joined ISIS directly. Only Belkacem stayed behind. In a long open letter, written from jail, Belkacem insisted
that he was only a provocateur, comparing himself to Pussy Riot and Femen.
n February, 2013, shortly after Jejoens

eighteenth birthday, he woke up from
a dream in which Azeddine, the friend
who had introduced him to Sharia4Belgium, was praying for help. They hadnt
seen each other in ve months. A few

days later, Jejoens phone rang, and a number appeared beginning with 963, the
Syrian country code. It was Azeddine.
Jejoen asked him who else was in Syria.
Everyone, he replied.
On the pretext of going to Amsterdam with friends, Jejoen borrowed his
fathers suitcase and packed it with a
sleeping bag, warm clothes, a ashlight, andon Azeddines request
night-vision goggles. Another Sharia4Belgium member, already in Syria,
told Jejoen how to get to the border
between Turkey and Syria. Jejoen left
home on February 21, 2013, without
knowing the name of the group that
he would join. He expected that he
would fall martyr within a short time
and would go to paradise, he said. He
believed, as he had been told, that good
deeds erase bad deeds, and jihad is the
best deed of all.
At Schiphol Airport, in Amsterdam, Jejoen dawdled so long at a Burger King that he missed his ight to
Istanbul. He had forgotten his passport, too, but his Belgian identity card
sufficed. He had been instructed to

meet two other aspiring jihadis in Istanbul, but he ended up at the wrong
airport. So he continued alone, ying
to Adana, in southern Turkey, where
they all nally met in a caf. Together,
they took a bus to Antakya, a city near
the Syrian border.
A smuggler met them there and
drove them to a village in the mountains,
where they waited with other jihadis
for the signal to cross. Once in Syria,
Jejoen and his companions texted other
Sharia4Belgium members and asked
to be picked up. By nightfall on February 22nd, Jejoen was in a car, reunited
with his friends from Belgium. I found
it strange to see them with weapons,
he told police. I hesitated and then
asked if this was what I had come for.
Soon, the car pulled up to a walled villa
in Kafr Hamra, a small town on the
outskirts of Aleppo. Around seventy
pairs of shoes, belonging to Belgian,
Dutch, and French jihadis, were arrayed on racks outside the front door.
Inside, Jejoen met Amr al-Absi, the
Syrian emir in charge of the Mujahideen Shura Council, a group of international jihadis whose goal was to transform the northern part of the country
into an Islamic state. Absi had been severely injured in battle, and had several
broken ribs and a large open wound on
his left leg.
bsis family is from Aleppo, but he

was born in Saudi Arabia, probably in 1979. His older brother, a dentist named Firas, trained with Al Qaeda
in Afghanistan. Amr and Firas are
thought to have joined Al Qaeda in
Iraq, which became the Islamic State
of Iraq; the groups aim was to establish an Islamic caliphate that would
spread throughout the Middle East
and beyond. In 2007, Amr al-Absi was
arrested in Syria, and held in the Al
Qaeda wing of Sednaya prison, with
hundreds of other extremists. Four
years later, in June, 2011, Assad released them. It was a turning point in
the Syrian war. Assad had stated that
the opposition was full of terrorists, a
claim that the mysterious amnesty
then fullled. It seemed like a calculated move to poison the nascent Syrian revolution.
Absi took up the leadership of a ji-
44
hadi brigade near the Syrian city of

Homs. His brother Firas had recently
founded a group called the Shura Council of the Islamic State, which gained
notoriety after raising the Al Qaeda
ag at the border gates near Bab alHawa, a major crossing point between
Turkey and Syria, in July, 2012. It was
the rst mention of an Islamic state in
the Syrian civil war. The following week,
the group kidnapped two European
journalists, Jeroen Oerlemans and John
Cantlie. Moderate Syrian rebels rescued and released the journalists a week
later. Firass extremism was a liability
to the revolution, and in September,
2012, he was kidnapped and murdered
by moderate rebels. Amr al-Absi inherited his brothers role as emir, and
the group changed its name to the Mujahideen Shura Council.
In Kafr Hamra, Absi divided his
ghters according to origin. Most of the
Europeans, including the Sharia4Belgium members, lived in a walled villa,
with an indoor swimming pool and a
fountain. The Arabs, and some luckier
Europeans, lived in a nearby complex,
known as the palace, which was said
to have been captured from an official
in the Assad regime. It had a fuelling
station, an orchard the size of a football
eld, and a rooftop pool.
Absi designated Houssien Elouassaki, a twenty-one-year-old Sharia4Belgium member, as the leader of the
European group. When Absi wasnt
present, Elouassaki decided matters
ranging from who washed the dishes
to which Europeans would be allowed
to join them in Syria. It is something
incredible, his brother Abdel, who remained in Belgium, told a friend over
the phone. He is the youngest emir in
the world.
Absis ghters didnt know his real
name. They called him Sheikh, or Emir,
or by his kunya, Abu Asir. Jejoen told police that the Belgians mostly knew him
as the big nancier of everything. Absi
bought the weapons, the fuel, and the
food, and when ghters were injured in
battle he covered their medical expenses.
In early December, 2012, the Mujahideen Shura Council assisted Jabhat
al-Nusra, the jihadi group that ve
months later became Al Qaedas official Syrian affiliate, in an attack on an
Army outpost called Base 111, near the
village of Sheikh Suleiman. It was Assads last major base west of Aleppo,
and soon the Al Qaeda ag ew overhead. Absis group took prisoners, and
initially, a jihadi said in a wiretapped
call, they planned to use them for ransom or prisoner exchanges. Instead,
Everyone cut someones throat, Houssien Elouassaki told his brother Abdel
over the phone. Afterward, the Army
base, which stretched over ve hundred
acres, became a jihadi training camp.
Jabhat al-Nusra controlled the checkpoint to the camp, but Absis group
trained on its own.
Training lasted twenty days. Each
morning began with a ninety-minute
run led by a former Egyptian special-forces officer, followed by two
hours of tactical lessons with unloaded
weapons and simulated attacks, a short
break for lunch and prayers, and lectures by Islamist scholars. Lessons were
given in Arabic and translated by bilingual jihadis into Dutch. In the evenings, the Europeans took turns on
sentry duty.
By late December, the Europeans of
the Mujahideen Shura Council were
setting up roadblocks on the main road
through Kafr Hamra and stopping buses.
They ried through passengers belongings, hoping to identify Shia, Christian,
Alawite, and Kurdish civilians by small
signs: a necklace with a cross, a garment
that signied a particular tradition, a
picture of Irans ayatollah stored on a
mobile phone.
Hakim Elouassaki, one of Houssiens older brothers, joined him in
Syria. He explained the routine in
phone calls to his girlfriend in Belgium, captured by a wiretap. We take
every unbeliever . . . and we take his
money and everything from him, he
said. I can take money, as much as I
want . . . but it must be in the path of
Allah. Only the Sunnis were spared.
Hakim stole a gold ring from a Kurd
and a laptop from a Christian. His girlfriend later recounted to a friend that,
when she offered to send Hakim an
iPhone from Belgium, he told her not
to bother, because he was waiting to
steal it from an indel.
At the roadblocks, the Belgians held
Syrian civilians for ransom. Normally
it is seventy thousand euros, Hakim
told his girlfriend. If they do not pay,
then we kill them. But prices varied

according to the victims sect. Hakim
released an Armenian Christian after
his family paid thirty thousand euros,
but, when the brother of a captured
Shiite civilian delivered the same amount
of money, Hakim killed him. That evening, Hakim called his girlfriend. As
I shot him, he put up his hand, he said,
One day, he went to a hospital for

a sinus infection, and asked the doctor to write an extra prescription for
antidepressants.
On his third day at the training
camp, Jejoen received a black headband with Mujahideen Shura Council printed in white Arabic letters. It
was the rst time he learned the name
him, bound his hands, and marched

him up a steep trail to a bunker, which
had been converted into a prison. Jejoen was chained in the cell without
being told what he had done. About
two weeks later, Elouassaki came in
and interrogated him. He referred to
a text message on Jejoens phone, but
wouldnt explain what it said. After an-
Dimitri Bontinck found a YouTube video showing several Belgian jihadis in a eld with yellow owers. One of them looked like Jejoen.
so the bullet went through his hand
and his head. Yet Hakim felt unfullled.
I wish the lming worked when I killed
him, he said. I placed the camera badly,
and it lmed nothing. (Hakim has
since denied killing anyone in Syria.)
The Europeans lmed other murders,
though, including the beheading of
an old man. In the video, one jihadi
saws at his neck with a knife, while
another hacks at the same wound with
a rusty machete, to the excitement of
the others.
ejoen told Belgian police that as soon

as he arrived in Syria he wished he
could leave. He said that he was sickened by the violence, and that he tried
to get out of the mandatory training.
of his affiliation. Beyond these headbands, the group had no uniform.

Shortly after dawn prayers one day, Jejoen asked one of the camp leaders if
he could return to Belgium. He cited
a medical issue. The jihadi expressed
surprise, but said that he would not
stand in the way. Houssien Elouassaki,
the Belgian emir and Absis deputy,
was less sympathetic. He demanded
Jejoens mobile phone and identity
card. Jejoen handed over his card, but
claimed that he didnt have his phone
on him.
After dawn prayers on Tuesday,
March 5th, Jejoens eleventh day in
Syria, he ate breakfast with his friend
Azeddine and Houssien Elouassaki.
When the meal was over, they seized
other couple of weeks, more members

of Sharia4Belgium came into the bunker and told Jejoen that Dimitri had
shown up at their villa. They asked
how he knew of the location.
fter Jejoen left for Syria, Dimitri

began trawling the Internet for
clues to his whereabouts. He had learned
that other Sharia4Belgium members
were in Syria, and thought that Jejoen
must be among them. I was sending
more than a thousand messages, Dimitri told me. Never reply on his
phone. One day, Dimitri found a YouTube video showing several Belgian jihadis in a eld with yellow owers. One
of them looked like Jejoen. When I
saw that, I couldnt continue my life
45
here, Dimitri told me. He decided to

go to Syria to nd his son.
Dimitri announced his intention in
the Belgian press, and two journalists,
Joanie de Rijke and Narciso Contreras,
offered to help him, in exchange for
the story. Both had covered the region,
and had connections in rebel-held parts
of Syria. Dimitri met them in Turkey,
and they crossed into Syria in early
April, staying with pro-revolution activists in Aleppo.
On a moonless night a week later,
they drove to Absis villa. Dimitri was
exhausted and sunburned, and his clothes
reeked of sweat. Armed jihadis told the
journalists to stay in the car but allowed
Dimitri to come inside, along with two
Syrian activists. Dimitri removed his
shoes by the entrance to the villa. Inside,
dozens of Jejoens comrades and captors,
most of them wearing balaclavas and
scarves, sat on couches and on the oor
of the living room. Some were holding
AK-47s, though the room was supposed
to be reserved for surng the Internet or
playing video games on a at-screen television that was mounted on the wall.
Absi, a skeletal man in his early thirties, was not wearing a balaclava, and
he had long, thick black hair and an
even thicker beard. Sitting on a couch,
his wounded leg propped up, he beckoned Dimitri over and said, in English,
that there were no Belgians in his ranks.
But, when Dimitri stood to leave, Absi
snapped his ngers and several jihadis
yanked a black hood over his head, cuffed
his hands, stripped him naked, beat him,
and stuck the barrel of a Kalashnikov
in his mouth. Who gave Dimitri the location? they asked. Did Jejoen leak secrets about the training camp to his father? The jihadis interrogated Dimitri
in English, and took his passport and
his phone, saying that they would kill
him if they found any mention of the
police. Then they forced him to mimic
the sounds and movements of chickens,
horses, and goats. A bright light shone
through the black hood, and Dimitri
assumed that the militants were lming the interrogation. He had seen hostage videos before, and feared that hed
be blackmailed or killed.
Finally, the militants removed the
hood, gave him some tea, and, after
further questioning, returned his passport and told him to leave. Dimitri
46
GOLDACRE
digitize
from the Latin to nger
or handle as if
to sink your ngers
deeply
into this
ood of light
*
hard not to grip
hard not to shape handfuls
loaves
for the hooded basket
something to store away for later
something to place upon the slab
*
the light
a richer color now
wrong to regret
the reddish undertones of day
climbed into the car. In his absence,
the Syrian driver and one of the journalists had been beaten and threatened
with execution. Shaken, after a few
days they returned to Kilis, a Turkish
town on the Syrian border. Weeks later,
Dimitri went back to Aleppo, but again
failed to nd Jejoen.
Dimitri soon left for Belgium, where
he began a campaign to bring attention to his sons case in the media. Eventually, he released a video in which he
red guns and exchanged calls of Allahu akbar with Syrian rebels. He told
me that his outlandish behavior was
designed to court publicity for Jejoen,
in the hope of bringing him home, but
his antics suggested someone out of
his depth. With a ghostwriter, he produced a book called Jihadi Against
His Will, which featured a photograph of a shirtless Jejoen on the cover.
Dimitri acquired a reputation for eccentricity and lurid exaggeration; later,
he fabricated a story that Jejoens girl-
friend had given birth to triplets, in

Belgium, and even invented names for
the imaginary children.
imitris visit convinced the Belgian

jihadis that Jejoen was a spy. A
week later, Amr al-Absi, still on crutches,
hobbled up the rocky hill to Jejoens cell
to ask if he had sought help from Israel.
I told him that this was one big mistake, Jejoen said. His father had sent a
text message mentioning Israeli contacts,
and Elouassaki had found it while looking through Jejoens phone.
A few days later, Jejoen was released,
on the condition that he complete his
training and fully commit to the group.
When another Belgian jihadi told Jejoen that he was homesick, and asked
for his help in escaping, Jejoen agreed,
and said that hed go with him. But it
was a setup. As they were sneaking out
of the camp, a BMW with Belgian plates
pulled up. Jejoen was taken at gunpoint
and driven to another building on the
wrong to regard them

as a kind of ripening
*
the young morning
grommeted
with minutes
threaded
with wisps of wool
*
no signs of resentment
furrow
the innite
amenability of dawn
no sounds
suggesting discord
from the songbirds
tethered
to their wheels
Monica Youn
compound, where Absi stood, loading a
pistol. Jejoen was forced to kneel at his
feet. Then Absi aimed at his head and
pulled the trigger. I closed my eyes and
heard a bang, Jejoen told police.
Absi had loaded the gun with blanks.
He laughed, and asked Jejoen if he had
died. I said nothing, Jejoen told police. He felt my neck and told me that
I had soft skin. Then someone reached
for a machete on the wall. I thought
I was going to be beheaded, because
that is the judgment of the spies, Jejoen said. Instead, the jihadis tortured
him for four days, gagging him and
then whipping him with electrical cables until he could no longer walk.
n 2010, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a militant jihadist from Samarra and a

former prisoner of the U.S., was named
the leader of the Islamic State of Iraq.
In the next few years, the I.S.I. captured
large portions of northern and western
Iraq, near the Syrian border. According
to the journalist Rania Abouzeid, writing in Politico, Baghdadi sent emissaries to Syria in 2011 to capitalize on the
chaos of the revolution and prepare to
establish an Islamic state there.
Baghdadi was supposed to take orders from Al Qaedas leadership. But, on
April 8, 2013, he announced that the
I.S.I. had added Syria to its mandate, creating ISIS, and that Syrias jihadis were
obliged to consolidate under his leadership. This set up a power struggle. Jabhat
al-Nusra insisted on remaining loyal to
Al Qaeda. Absi, whose membership in
the I.S.I. had caused his imprisonment
in Sednaya, guided the Mujahideen Shura
Council directly into Baghdadis control.
(Only a few defectors joined al-Nusra.
One was the Belgian emir, Houssien
Elouassaki. Within weeks, he was murdered by his former allies.)
An anonymous Twitter account called
Wikibaghdady, with apparent inside
knowledge of ISISs leadership, has asserted that Absis group was the rst
branch for Baghdadi in Syria. Absi and

Baghdadi discussed ways to depict other
rebel groups as puppets of intelligence
agencies, Wikibaghdady wrote. Soon,
ghters in other jihadi brigades began
to defect to ISIS in large numbers. Richard Barrett, a former director of Global
Counter Terrorism Operations for the
British Secret Intelligence Service and
a senior vice-president of the Soufan
Group, a security company that tracks
Islamic extremism, told me, My impression is that, were it not for the Absis, you
wouldnt have got that sudden ow of
foreigners away from al-Nusra into the
Islamic State. Absis loyalty proved to
many that it wasnt Al Qaedas show; it
was Baghdadis show. In return, Baghdadi made Absi the Wali of Aleppo, overseeing all Islamic State operations within
the province. From then on, abduction
on the road to Aleppo became a greater
risk for Western journalists and aid workers than living under bombardment in
the embattled city.
Isolated in his cell, Jejoen didnt know
that ISIS existed until at least seven weeks
after the rest of the world did, even
though he was now its prisoner. In August, he was transported to an ISIS prison
in the basement of Aleppos childrens
hospital, where some captives were
chained to radiators. Many were tortured, and sometimes Jejoen heard gunshots. He told police that the Mujahideen Shura Council usually beheaded
prisoners, but the Islamic State used
bullets. After a few days, Jejoens captors moved him to a cell with three emaciated Western prisoners. Two of them,
the journalists James Foley and John
Cantlie, had been captured nearly a
year before. (Cantlie was reportedly
abducted while working on a lm about
his rst kidnapping.) The third was a
German hostage named Toni Neukirch.
Foley and Cantlie had been kidnapped
together, in November, 2012, after leaving an Internet caf near Aleppo to drive
back to Turkey. They told Jejoen that
their captors belonged to Jabhat al-Nusra,
but they were moved to different locations, and eventually fell into Absis hands.
For three weeks, Jejoen, Foley, and
Cantlie played word-association games
like Animal, Vegetable, Mineral to pass
the time. Foley and Cantlie had undergone torture, including waterboarding,
and Cantlies ankles were scarred from the
47
chains. Foley and Cantlie had converted

to Islam while in captivity, so the group
prayed together, and discussed their faith.
One day in mid-September, the emir
of the prison, a Dutch jihadi, said that
Jejoen could leave if he returned to a
training camp or performed lookout
duty near the Sheikh Najjar industrial
complex, in Aleppo, a site of intense
ghting. He chose the latter. The jihadi
told Jejoen that Foley and Cantlie would
soon be sent to a training camp.
Jejoen had been in prison more than
six months. The captors who had tortured him over the Israel text message
had moved on to other locations, and
nobody seemed to care how he passed
his time. He spent the next several days
testing the limits of his freedom, leaving
his post for hours at a time. Sometimes,
he said, he went to Internet cafs to see
how long it would take for anyone to
notice. He also briey fought in a battle
north of Aleppo; the European ghters
called the front line there the gates of
heaven. Jejoens lawyer admitted that he
red a grenade, but said that he did it
out of boredom.
On October 7th, Jejoen sent a message to his father: Maybe I will leave
now.
To where? Dimitri wrote back.
Turkey.
Having been a captive for most of his
time in Syria, Jejoen knew nothing of
the countrys geography, so Dimitri
helped plan his route. I have studied all
topographic maps, Dimitri wrote Jejoen. I know it by heart! Because of
ghting between moderate rebels and
ISIS forces near the closest border crossing into Turkey, Jejoens best way out was
a longer route, through ISIS territory west
of Aleppo. They decided that Jejoen
should take a bus to a Syrian hospital
near the Bab al-Hawa border crossing,
where his father had established contacts. Dimitri travelled to Reyhanli, a
dusty town on the Turkish side of the
crossing, and gave his contacts three hundred dollars and Jejoens passport. The
next day, they smuggled Jejoen across the
border, dropping him at Dimitris hotel.
Dimitri and Jejoen took a bus to Antakya, where Dimitri bought his son a
silver ring with an onyx stone, which he
wears every day. They ew to Amsterdam, and Dimitri rented a bungalow at
a Dutch campsite, where they enjoyed a
brief vacation. Jejoen told his father that
he had hoped to ride horses in Syria, so
Dimitri arranged for them to ride together in the countryside. After a few
days, they returned to Antwerp.
In early 2014, ISIS transported Foley,
Cantlie, and its other Western hostages
to Raqqa, abandoning prisons that were
lled with Syrian captives. When another faction of rebels opened the prisons, they encountered only corpses.
Wikibaghdady wrote that Amr al-Absi
had issued an order to leave no one
alive in the prisons.
Last fall, Absi was inducted into the
Islamic State Shura Council, a group of
advisers who answer directly to Baghdadi.
Richard Barrett, the former spy chief, told
me that Absis role on the council was to
oversee ISISs media strategy. In August,
Foley was executed by ISIS. The video
Nice guy, but I wish hed lose the muttonchops.
showing his beheading was broadcast

throughout the world. Cantlie is now the
only publicly acknowledged Western hostage still held by the Islamic State. Since
the fall, he has appeared in Islamic State
propaganda, recently serving as a narrator of videos from cities under Islamic
State control. While lming an episode
in Mosul, Cantlie spotted a drone overhead. Trying to rescue me again? he
shouted at the sky. Do something! (Absi,
according to a U.S. official, was killed in
an air strike last November.)
esperate to bring Jejoen back to

Belgium, Dimitri had assured him
that he wouldnt go to prison, but on October 18, 2013, hours after they arrived
in Antwerp, Belgian police arrested Jejoen at his mothers apartment. (While
he was in Syria, Dimitri and Rose had
divorced.) The forensic medical examiner at Antwerp University Hospital noted
dozens of scars on his back, abdomen,
wrists, and the tops of his feet. After initial questioning, Jejoen was interrogated
by officials from the security forces of
several countries, including the U.S. and
the U.K. His descriptions of Foleys tattoos and Cantlies family history were
the rst indications since the hostages
had disappeared that they were still alive.
Jejoens testimony to the police contributed to the prosecutors case against
forty-six members of Sharia4Belgium,
including himself. The group was collectively prosecuted as a terrorist organization; members were individually
charged with numerous other crimes,
ranging from threatening to kill Belgian
politicians to abducting and torturing
Jejoen. Jejoen was charged with being a
member of ISIS for the number of days
that he had not spent as its prisoner, and
for being a member of Sharia4Belgium
before that. Only eight of the forty-six
Sharia4Belgium members appeared in
court. The rest are in Syriamost still
ghting, and some already dead.
The trial began last September, almost a year after Jejoens return, in Antwerps Palace of Justice, a glass-and-steel
complex. Armed security forces lined the
perimeter of the courtroom, monitoring
the visitors gallery. On December 10th,
the last day of hearings, two police officers
brought Belkacemdressed in an olive
jumpsuit, handcuffed, and restrained with
a thick beltinto the courtroom.
Twenty minutes into the proceedings,

the magistrate invited Belkacem to
make his plea. He spoke so quietly that
people in the courtroom stood up and
leaned toward him, straining to hear. I
am a Muslim, not a terrorist, he said.
Liar! Ozana Rodrigues, the mother
of Brian De Mulder, who is now ghting in Raqqa, shouted. Belkacem calmly
asked whether it was a crime to promote your faith.
he verdict and the sentencing for

Belkacem, Jejoen, and the others
were set for January 14, 2015. I visited
Antwerp for six weeks this winter, while
the judges were deliberating. My life is
totally destroyed, Dimitri told me. He
hasnt held a job in two years. When we
arranged our rst meeting, he asked me
to bring either red wine or whiskey. As
his ex-wife remarked, He doesnt drink
water anymore.
In 2014, against the advice of his
lawyers and the Belgian government,
Dimitri started taking other parents of
jihadis to Syria, for a small fee, to search
for their children. Last summer, when I
met him in Kilis, he was guiding two
Belgian fathers into Islamic State territory. One of them, Pol Van Hessche, later
told me that he had taken a car into
northern Syria and stopped at the front
gate of a jihadi villa near Manbij. It was
a holding place for young ghters waiting to go to an Islamic State training
camp. His son, Lucas, came out of the
building, and Pol pleaded with him to
come home. Lucas refused.
Other parents of jihadis told me that
Dimitri offered the only hope that one
day they might reunite with their children. One evening, in Antwerp, Dimitri
assured Ozana Rodrigues that he could
guide her into Raqqa to nd her son, who
had recently fathered a child with a Dutch
jihadi bride. But later, drinking whiskey
in his apartment, he insisted that he was
nished with Syria. I cannot continue
my life like this, he said. Then the phone
rang, and after he hung up he announced
that he had a new mission: You think
Im going to say no when a mother is crying in my face? He continued, I wake
up with Syria, and I go to sleep with Syria.
Dimitris efforts to gain publicity for
his son, and for parents facing a similar
situation to his own, have been perhaps
too successful. He has taken to speaking
in sound bites, calling himself Mother

Teresa, for his attempts to help parents
of other jihadis, and describing Jejoen as
being just like Edward Snowden, for
leaking jihadi secrets. Outside the courtroom, Dimitri shouted at TV cameras, in
English, Bin Laden is laughing from
hell, Belkacem is laughing from the cell.
This month, Dimitri received an eightmonth prison sentence for a 2013 incident in which he hit a former girlfriend,
the daughter of a judge, and held her hostage in a hotel room. (He has since appealed.) After the judgment, he compared
his plight to that of Nelson Mandela.
n New Years Eve, two weeks before the sentencing, Jejoen and I
ate at his favorite Chinese restaurant in
Antwerp. He had grown out his hair and
his beard since returning to Belgium. As
we shared a large bony sh, Jejoen told
me that he still believes in the caliphate,
and sees it as something which you cant
stop or hold back. It irks him that his
father believes he is no longer radical,
though he attributes this, in part, to his
own minor deceptions. When Dimitri
is around, Jejoen wears trousers, but
when he doesnt see it he wears a qamis,
a traditional Muslim garment.
I asked Jejoen about the execution of
James Foley, and he said that it was a
question for scholars of Islam, adding,
I cant say anything about it, because
Im not at that level. He told me that
there is no difference between his views
and those of his spiritual leader, Belkacem. With the prospect of prison looming, Jejoen seemed to have recast in his
mind his experience in Syria. He declared that his only regret about his time
there was that he returned to Belgium.
Living in Raqqa, he said, might be cool.
He had been home for more than a year,
and was frequently recognized and harassed on the streets of Antwerp. In recent months, Jejoen had sat in court next
to other Sharia4Belgium defendants,
some of whom had repeatedly lied to the
authorities; his coperation seemed to
have carried no benet. He hadnt been
offered a plea deal or witness protection,
because, the Belgian security official said,
thats just the system in Belgium.
Although he had divulged jihadi secrets in his police interrogations, Jejoen
believed that he could return to Syria
unscathed. People think I cant go there,
because Ill get killed, he told me. But

he compared his coperation with the
authoritieswhich other Sharia4Belgium members liken to treasonto committing a minor sin, such as drinking alcohol while in Belgium. You cannot be
punished for that in the caliphate, he
said, because it didnt take place there.
We left the restaurant, and Jejoen
headed back to his mothers apartment.
A few nights later, he called me from an
unfamiliar phone number and asked for
urgent help. I would like to go to Turkey, he said. He told me that it would
be just for a holiday in a seaside resort in
Antalyawhere the temperature was
barely above freezing. He faced no restrictions on his travel, and said he would
return to Antwerp for the sentencing. He
planned to travel with his girlfriend, a
Belgian of Algerian descent, whom his
father described as extremist. He asked
to use my credit card, and promised to
give me eight hundred euros immediately.
The ight left in nine hours. I said no.
Later that night, Dimitri stood in the
freezing alley outside his front door,
smoking a cigarette. One of my Syrian
connections said that my son called to
them, three weeks ago, he told me. Jejoen later denied it, telling his father, If
I want to go back in, I know how to go.
Dimitri believed that if Jejoen went to
Syria the Islamic State would kill him.
You will see him in a video, he said.
Nonetheless, Dimitri gave his son the
money for the trip to Antalya.
Before sunrise the next day, Jejoen was
arrested at Brussels Airport. His journey
violated a restraining order led by his
girlfriend, after a ght nearly two months
before. (They had since resolved their issues and she had asked for the order to
be cancelled.) He remained in prison
until the sentencing, which was delayed
a month, after the Charlie Hebdo murders.
On February 11th, the court concluded that Sharia4Belgium was a terrorist organization. Jejoen was given a
forty-month suspended sentence.
Belkacem received twelve years in
prison. (He has since appealed his sentence.) Do you know how much potential there is in prison? Belkacem once
joked with his followers at the Sharia4Belgium headquarters. Everyone in
prison is against the system, he said.
Indels and Muslims alike. There is
work to be done. It will be awesome.
49
PERSONAL HISTORY
OFF DIAMOND HEAD

To be thirteen, with a surfboard, in Hawaii.
BY WILLIAM FINNEGAN
he budget for moving our family

to Honolulu was tight, judging
from the tiny cottage we rented and the
rusted-out Ford Fairlane we bought to
get around. My brother Kevin and I
took turns sleeping on the couch. I was
thirteen; he was nine. But the cottage
was near the beachjust up a driveway
lined with other cottages, on a street
called Kulamanuand the weather,
which was warm even in January, when
we arrived, felt like wanton luxury.
I ran to the beach for a rst, frantic survey of the local waters. The setup
was confusing. Waves broke here and
there along the outer edge of a mossy,
exposed reef. All that coral worried me.
It was infamously sharp. Then I spotted, well off to the west, and rather far
out at sea, a familiar minuet of stick
gures, rising and falling, backlit by the
afternoon sun. Surfers! I ran back up
the lane. Everyone at the house was
busy unpacking and ghting over beds.
I threw on a pair of trunks, grabbed
my surfboard, and left without a word.
I had been surng for nearly three
years when my father got the job that
took us to Hawaii. He had been working, mostly as an assistant director, in
series televisionDr. Kildare, The
Man from U.N.C.L.E. Now he was
the production manager on a new series, a half-hour musical variety show
based on a local radio program, Hawaii Calls. The idea was to shoot Don
Ho singing in a glass-bottomed boat
or a calypso band by a waterfall or hula
girls dancing while a volcano spewed
and call it a show. It wont be the Hawaiian Amateur Hour, my father said.
But close.
If its really bad, well pretend we
dont know you, my mother said.
I was beside myself with excitement just to be in Hawaii. All surfers,
all readers of surf magazinesand I
had memorized nearly every line, every
photo caption, in every surf magazine
50
I ownedspent the bulk of their

fantasy lives, like it or not, in Hawaii.
Now I was there, walking on actual
Hawaiian sand (coarse, strange-smelling), tasting Hawaiian seawater (warm,
strange-smelling), and paddling toward
Hawaiian waves (small, dark-faced,
windblown).
Nothing was what Id expected. In
the mags, Hawaiian waves were always
big and, in the color shots, ranged from
a deep, mid-ocean blue to a pale, impossible turquoise. The wind was always offshore (blowing from land to
sea, ideal for surng), and the breaks
themselves were the Olympian playgrounds of the gods: Sunset Beach, the
Banzai Pipeline, Makaha, Ala Moana,
Waimea Bay.
All that seemed worlds away from
the sea in front of our new house. Even
Waikiki, known for its beginner breaks
and tourist crowds, was over on the far
side of Diamond Headthe glamorous western sidealong with every
other part of Honolulu anybody had
heard of. We were on the mountains
southeast side, down in a little saddle
of sloping, shady beachfront west of
Black Point. The beach was just a patch
of damp sand, narrow and empty.
I paddled west along a shallow lagoon, staying close to the shore, for
half a mile. The beach houses ended,
and the steep, brushy base of Diamond
Head itself took their place across the
sand. Then the reef on my left fell away,
revealing a wide channeldeeper water,
where no waves brokeand, beyond
the channel, ten or twelve surfers riding a scatter of dark, chest-high peaks
in a moderate onshore wind. I paddled
slowly toward the lineupthe wavecatching zonetaking a roundabout
route, studying every ride.
The surfers were good. They had
smooth, ungimmicky styles. Nobody
fell off. And nobody, blessedly, seemed
to notice me. I circled around, then
edged into an unpopulated stretch of

the lineup. There were plenty of waves.
The takeoffs were crumbling but easy.
Letting muscle memory take over, I
caught and rode a couple of small, mushy
rights. The waves were differentbut
not too differentfrom the ones Id
known in California. They were shifty
but not intimidating. I could see coral
on the bottom but nothing too shallow.
There was a lot of talk and laughter among the other surfers. Eavesdropping, I couldnt understand a word.
They were probably speaking pidgin.
I had read about pidgin in James Micheners Hawaii, but I hadnt actually
heard any yet. Or maybe it was some
foreign language. I was the only haole
(white personanother word from
Michener) in the water. At one point,
an older guy paddling past me gestured
seaward and said, Outside. It was the
only word spoken to me that day. And
he was right: an outside set was approaching, the biggest of the afternoon,
and I was grateful to have been warned.
As the sun dropped, the crowd thinned.
I tried to see where people went. Most
seemed to take a steep path up the
mountainside to Diamond Head Road,
their pale boards, carried on their heads,
moving steadily, skeg rst, through the
switchbacks. I caught a nal wave, rode
it into the shallows, and began the long
paddle home through the lagoon. Lights
were on in the houses now. The air was
cooler, the shadows blue-black under
the coconut palms. I was aglow with
my good fortune. I just wished I had
someone to tell: Im in Hawaii! Surng
in Hawaii! Then it occurred to me
that I didnt even know the name of the
place Id surfed.
t was called Cliffs. It was a patchwork arc of reefs that ran south and
west for half a mile from the channel
where I rst paddled out. To learn any
new spot in surng, you rst bring to
PHOTOGRAPHS BY WILLIAM R. FINNEGAN/COURTESY THE AUTHOR
The surfers were good. They had smooth, ungimmicky styles. Nobody fell off. And nobody, blessedly, seemed to notice me.
51
bear your knowledge of other breaks

all the other waves youve learned to
read closely. But at that stage my archives consisted of ten or fteen California spots, and only one that I really knew well: a cobblestone point in
Ventura. And none of this experience
especially prepared me for Cliffs, which,
after that initial session, I tried to surf
twice a day.
It was an unusually consistent spot,
in the sense that there were nearly always waves to ride, even in what I came
to understand was the off season for
Oahus South Shore. The reefs off Diamond Head are at the southern extremity of the island, and thus pick up
every scrap of passing swell. But they
also catch a lot of wind, including local
williwaws off the slopes of the crater,
and the wind, along with the vast jigsaw expanse of the reef and the swells
arriving from many different points of
the compass, combined to produce constantly changing conditions that, in a
paradox I didnt appreciate at the time,
amounted to a rowdy, hourly refutation of the notion of consistency. Cliffs
possessed a moody complexity beyond
anything I had known.
Mornings were especially confounding. To squeeze in a surf before school,
I had to be out there by daybreak. In
my narrow experience, the sea was supposed to be glassy at dawn. In coastal
California, early mornings are usually
windless. Not so, apparently, in the
tropics. Certainly not at Cliffs. At sunrise, the trade winds often blew hard.
Palm fronds thrashed overhead as I
tripped down the lane, board on my
head, and from the seafront I could see
whitecaps outside, beyond the reef, spilling east to west on a royal-blue ocean.
The trades were said to be northeasterlies, which in theory was not a bad
direction, for a south-facing coast, but
somehow they were always sideshore
at Cliffs, and strong enough to ruin
most spots from that angle.
And yet the place had a growling
durability that left it ridable even in
those battered conditions. Almost no
one else surfed it in the early morning, which made it a good time to explore the main takeoff area. I began to
learn the tricky, fast, shallow sections,
and the soft spots where a quick cutback was needed to keep a ride going.
52
Even on a waist-high, blown-out day,

it was possible to milk certain waves
for long, improvised, thoroughly satisfying rides. The reef had a thousand
quirks, which changed quickly with the
tide. And when the inshore channel
began to turn a milky turquoisea
color not unlike some of the Hawaiian fantasy waves in the magsit
meant, I came to know, that the sun
had risen to the point where I should

head in for breakfast. If the tide was
extra low, leaving the lagoon too shallow to paddle, I learned to allow more
time for trudging home on the soft,
coarse sand, struggling to keep my
boards nose pointed into the wind.
Afternoons were a different story.
The wind was lighter, the sea less
seasick, and there were other people
surng. Cliffs had a crew of regulars.
After a few sessions, I could recognize
some of them. At the mainland spots
I knew, there was usually a limited supply of waves, a lot of jockeying for position, and a strictly observed pecking
order. A youngster, certainly one lacking allies, such as an older brother,
needed to be careful not to cross, even
inadvertently, any local big dogs. But
at Cliffs there was so much room to
spread out, so many empty peaks breaking off to the west of the main takeoff
or, if you kept an eye out, perhaps on
an inside shelf that had quietly started
to workthat I felt free to pursue my
explorations of the margins. Nobody
bothered me. Nobody vibed me. It was
the opposite of my life at school.
had never thought of myself as a

sheltered child. Still, Kaimuki Intermediate School was a shock. I was
in the eighth grade, and most of my
new schoolmates were drug addicts,
glue sniffers, and hoodsor so I wrote
to a friend back in Los Angeles. That
wasnt true. What was true was that
haoles were a tiny and unpopular mi-
nority at Kaimuki. The natives, as I

called them, seemed to dislike us particularly. This was unnerving, because
many of the Hawaiians were, for junior-high kids, quite large, and the
word was that they liked to ght. Asians
were the schools most sizable ethnic
group, though in those rst weeks I
didnt know enough to distinguish
among Japanese and Chinese and Korean kids, let alone the stereotypes
through which each group viewed the
others. Nor did I note the existence of
other important tribes, such as the Filipinos, the Samoans, or the Portuguese
(not considered haole), nor all the kids
of mixed ethnic background. I probably even thought the big guy in wood
shop who immediately took a sadistic
interest in me was Hawaiian.
He wore shiny black shoes with long,
sharp toes, tight pants, and bright owered shirts. His kinky hair was cut in
a pompadour, and he looked as if he
had been shaving since birth. He rarely
spoke, and then only in a pidgin that
was unintelligible to me. He was some
kind of junior mobster, clearly years
behind his original class, just biding
his time until he could drop out. His
name was FreitasI never heard a rst
namebut he didnt seem to be related to the Freitas clan, a vast family
with several rambunctious boys at
Kaimuki Intermediate. The stilettotoed Freitas studied me frankly for a
few days, making me increasingly nervous, and then began to conduct little
assaults on my self-possession, softly
bumping my elbow, for example, while
I concentrated over a saw cut on my
half-built shoeshine box.
I was too scared to say anything, and
he never said a word to me. That seemed
to be part of the fun. Then he settled
on a crude but ingenious amusement
for passing those periods when we had
to sit in chairs in the classroom section of the shop. He would sit behind
me and, whenever the teacher had his
back turned, hit me on the head with
a two-by-four. Bonk . . . bonk . . . bonk, a
nice steady rhythm, always with enough
of a pause between blows to allow me
brief hope that there might not be another. I couldnt understand why the
teacher didnt hear all these unauthorized, resonating clonks. They were
loud enough to attract the attention of
our classmates, who seemed to nd

Freitass little ritual fascinating. Inside
my head the blows were, of course,
bone-rattling explosions. Freitas used
a fairly long boardve or six feet
and he never hit too hard, which permitted him to pound away without
leaving marks, and to do it from a certain rareed, even meditative distance,
which added, I imagine, to the fascination of the performance.
I wonder if, had some other kid been
targeted, I would have been as passive
as my classmates were. Probably. The
teacher was off in his own world, worried only about his table saws. I did
nothing in my own defense. While I
eventually understood that Freitas
wasnt Hawaiian, I must have gured
that I just had to take the abuse. I was,
after all, skinny and haole and had
no friends.
seemed as embarrassed as I was. He

paddled furiously past me, looking
affronted. I tried to stay out of his way
after that. But the next day he cocked
his chin in greeting. I hoped my happiness didnt show. Then, a few days
later, he spoke.
Mo bettah that side, he said,
throwing his eyes to the west as we
pushed through a small set. It was an
invitation to join him at one of his obscure, uncrowded peaks. I didnt need
to be asked twice. His name was Roddy
Kaulukukui. He was thirteen, same
as me. Roddy and I traded waves warily,
and then less warily. I could catch waves
as well as he could, which was important, and I was learning the spot, which
became something of a shared enterprise. As the two youngest guys at Cliffs,
we were both, at least half-consciously,
in the market for an age mate. But
Roddy didnt come out there alone. He

had two brothers and a sort of honorary third brothera Japanese guy
named Ford Takara. Roddys older
brother, Glenn, was a lineup mainstay.
Glenn and Ford were out every day.
They were only a year older than we
were, but both of them could compete
with anybody in the main peak. Glenn,
in particular, was a superb surfer, with
a style that was already owing and
beautiful. Their father, Glenn, Sr., also
surfed, as did their little brother, John,
though he was too young for Cliffs.
Roddy began to ll me in on some
of the other guys. The fat one who appeared on bigger days, taking off far
outside and ripping so hard that the
rest of us stopped surng to watch, was
Ben Aipa. (Years later, Aipa photos and
stories began to ll the mags.) The
Chinese guy who showed up on the
iscreetly, I studied the surng of

some of the regulars at Cliffs
the ones who seemed to read the wave
best, who found the speed pockets
and wheeled their boards so neatly
through their turns. My rst impression was conrmed: I had never seen
such smoothness. Hand movements
were strikingly in synch with feet.
Knees were more deeply bent than in
the surng I was used to, hips looser.
There wasnt much nose-riding, which
was the subspecialty rage at the time
on the mainland and required scurrying, when the opportunity arose, to the
front of ones boardhanging ve,
hanging ten, defying the obvious physics of otation and glide. I didnt know
it then, but what I was looking at was
classic Island style. I just took my mental notes from the channel, and began,
without thinking about it, to walk the
nose less.
There were a few young guys, including one wiry, straight-backed kid
who looked to be about my age. He
stayed away from the main peak, riding peripheral waves. But I craned to
see what he did. Even on the funky little waves he chose, I could see that he
was uncommonly quick and poised. In
fact, he was the best surfer my age I
had ever seen. He rode an unusually
short, light, sharp-nosed boarda
bone-white clear-nish Wardy. He
caught me watching him, and he
Youre overthinking this.
biggest day I had seen yet at Cliffsa

solid, out-of-season south swell on a
windless, overcast afternoonwas Leslie Wong. He had a silky style, and
deigned to surf Cliffs only when conditions were exceptionally good. Leslie Wong caught and pulled into the
wave of the day, his back slightly arched,
his arms relaxed, making the extremely
difficultno, come on, the ecstatic
look easy. If I ever grew up, I wanted
to be Leslie Wong. Among the Cliffs
regulars, I got to know who was likely
to waste a wavefail to catch it, or fall
offand then how to snag the wave
myself without showing disrespect.
Even in a mild-mannered crowd, it was
important not to show anyone up. Male
egos (I never saw a girl out at Cliffs)
were always, subtly or otherwise, on
the line in the water.
eres how ridable waves form. A

storm out at sea churns the surface, creating chopsmaller and then
larger wavelets, which amalgamate,
with enough wind, into heavy seas.
What we are waiting for on distant
coasts is the energy that escapes from the
storm, radiating outward into calmer
waters in the form of wave trains
groups of waves, increasingly organized,
that travel together. Each wave sets off
a column of orbiting water, most of it
below the surface. The wave trains produced by a storm constitute what surfers call a swell. A swell can travel thousands of miles. The more powerful the
storm, the farther the swell may travel.
As it travels, the swell becomes more
organizedthe distance between each
wave in a train, known as the interval,
becomes uniform. In a long-interval
train, the orbiting water may extend
more than a thousand feet beneath the
ocean surface. Such a train can pass
easily through surface resistance like
chop or other smaller, shallower swells
that it crosses or overtakes.
As waves from a swell approach the
shoreline, they begin to feel the sea
bottom. Wave trains become sets
groups of waves that are larger and
longer-interval than their locally generated cousins. The approaching waves
refract (bend) in response to the shape
of the sea bottom. The visible part of
the wave grows. The resistance offered
by the sea bottom increases as the water
54
gets shallower, slowing the progress

of the wave. Finally, it becomes unstable and prepares to topple forward
to break. The rule of thumb is that it
will break when its height reaches
eighty per cent of the waters depth
an eight-foot wave will break in ten
feet of water. But many factors, some
of them endlessly subtlewind, bottom contour, swell angle, currents
determine exactly where and how each
wave breaks. As surfers, were just hoping that it has a catchable moment (a
takeoff point), and a ridable face, and
that it doesnt break all at once (close
out) but, instead, breaks gradually,
successively (peels), in one direction
or the other (left or right), allowing
us to travel roughly parallel to the
shore, riding the face, for a while, in
that spot, in that moment, just before
it breaks.
y parents had sent me to Kaimuki

Intermediate, I later decided,
under a misconception. This was 1966,
before the Proposition 13 tax revolt,
and the California public-school system, particularly in the middle-class
suburbs where we had lived, was among
the nations best. The families we knew
never considered private schools for
their kids. Hawaiis public schools were
another matterimpoverished, mired
in colonial, plantation, and mission traditions, miles below the American average academically.
Ignorant of all this, my parents sent
two of my younger siblings (I have
three) to the nearest elementary school,
which happened to be in a middle-class
area, and me to the nearest junior high,
up in working-class Kaimuki, on the
inland side of Diamond Head crater,
where they assumed I was getting on
with the business of the eighth grade
but where I was occupied almost entirely by the rigors of bullies, loneliness, ghts, and nding my way, after
a lifetime of unconscious privileged
whiteness in the segregated suburbs of
California, in a racialized world. Even
my classes felt racially constructed. For
academic subjects, at least, students
were assigned, on the basis of test scores,
to a group that moved together from
teacher to teacher. I was put in a highend group, where nearly all my classmates were Japanese girls. The classes,
which were prim and undemanding,

bored me in a way that school never
had before. To my classmates, I seemed
not to exist socially. And so I passed
the class hours slouched in back rows,
keeping an eye on the trees outside for
signs of wind direction and strength,
drawing page after page of surfboards
and waves.
My orientation program at school
included a series of stghts, some of
them formally scheduled. There was a
cemetery next to the school grounds,
with a well-hidden patch of grass down
in one corner where kids went to settle their differences. I found myself facing off there with a number of boys
named Freitasnone of them, again,
apparently related to my hairy tormentor from wood shop. My rst opponent was so small and young that I
doubted that he even attended our
school. The Freitas clans method for
training its members in battle, it seemed,
was to nd some fool without allies or
the brains to avoid a challenge, then
send their youngest ghter with any
chance at all into the ring. If he lost,
the next biggest Freitas would be sent
in. This went on until the non-kinsman was defeated. It was all quite dispassionate, the bouts arranged and refereed by older Freitases, and more or
less fairly conducted.
My rst match was sparsely attendedreally of no interest to anyonebut I was still scared sick, having no seconds in my corner and no
idea what the rules were. My opponent
turned out to be shockingly strong for
his size, and ferocious, but his arms
were too short to land punches, and I
eventually subdued him without much
damage to either of us. His cousin, who
stepped up immediately, was more my
size, and our sparring was more consequential. I held my own, but we both
had shiners before a senior Freitas
stepped in, declaring a draw. There
would be a rematch, he said, and, if I
won that, somebody named Tino would
come and kick my ass, no questions
asked. Team Freitas departed. I remember watching them jog, laughing and
loose, a happy family militia, up the
long slope of the graveyard. They were
evidently late for another appointment.
My face hurt, my knuckles hurt, but I
was giddy with relief. Then I noticed
a couple of haole guys my age standing in the bushes at the edge of the
clearing, looking squirrelly. I half recognized them from school, but they
left without saying a word.
I won the rematch, I think. Then
Tino kicked my ass, no questions asked.
There were more ghts, including
a multiday brawl with a Chinese kid
gang name notwithstanding, they were

impressively bad. Their leader was a
jolly, dissolute, hoarse-voiced, brokentoothed kid named Mike. He was not
physically imposing, but he shambled
around school with a rowdy fearlessness that seemed to give everyone but
the largest Samoans pause. Mikes true
home, one came to understand, was a
Our main enemies were the mokes

which seemed to mean anyone dark
and tough. You been been with mokes
already, Mike said to me.
That was true, I realized.
But my ghting career soon tailed
off. People seemed to know that I was
now part of the haole gang, and elected
to pick on other kids. Even Freitas in
At Waikiki, 1967: Waves were the playing eld. They were the goal. They were the object of your deepest desire and adoration.
in my agriculture class who refused to
give up even when I had his face shoved
deep in the red mud of a lettuce patch.
This bitter tussle went on for a week.
It resumed each afternoon, and never
produced a winner. The other boys in
the class, enjoying the show, made sure
that the teacher, if he ever came round,
didnt catch us at it.
I dont know what my parents
thought. Cuts and bruises, even a black
eye, could be explained. Football,
surng, something. My hunch, which
seems right in retrospect, was that they
couldnt help, so I told them nothing.
A racist gang came to my rescue.
They called themselves the In Crowd.
They were haoles and, their laughable
juvenile detention center somewhere

this school-going was just a furlough,
which he intended to make the most
of. He had a younger sister, Edie, who
was blond and skinny and wild, and
their house in Kaimuki was the In
Crowds clubhouse. At school, they
gathered under a tall monkeypod tree
on a red-dirt hill behind the unpainted
bungalow where I took typing. My induction was informal. Mike and his
buddies simply let me know that I was
welcome to join them under the monkeypod. And it was from the In Crowd
kids, who actually seemed to include
more girls than boys, that I began to
learn rst the broad outlines and then
the minutiae of the local racial setup.
wood shop started easing up on me.

But had he really put away his two-byfour? It was hard to imagine that he
would be worried by the In Crowd.
ay in, day out, Glenn Kaulukukui,

Roddys brother, was my favorite surfer. From the moment he caught
a wave, gliding catlike to his feet, I
couldnt take my eyes off the lines he
drew, the speed he somehow found,
the improvisations he came up with.
He had a huge head, which appeared
always to be slightly thrown back, and
long hair, sun-bleached red, also thrown
lushly back. He had thick lips, and black
shoulders, and he moved with unusual
elegance. But there was something
55
elsecall it wit, or ironythat accompanied his physical condence and

beauty, something bittersweet that allowed him, in all but the most demanding situations, to seem as if he were
both performing intently and, at the
same time, laughing quietly at himself.
He also laughed at me, though not
unkindly. When I overpowered a kickout, trying to put a ourish on the end
of a ride, slicing awkwardly over the
shoulder and into parallel with his board
in the channel, Glenn said, Geev um,
Bill. Geev um da lights. Even I knew
that this was a pidgin clichan overused exhortation. It was also a dense
little piece of satire. He was mocking
me and encouraging me both. We paddled out together. When we were nearly
outside, we watched Ford catch a set
wave from a deep position and pick a
clever line to thread through a pair of
difficult sections. Yeah, Fawd, Glenn
murmured appreciatively. Spahk dat.
(Look at that.) Then he began to
outsprint me toward the lineup.
One afternoon, Roddy asked where
I lived. I pointed east, toward the shady
cove inside Black Point. He told Glenn
and Ford, then came back, looking
abashed, with a request. Could they
leave their boards at my house? I was

happy for the company on the long
paddle home. Our cottage had a tiny
yard, with a stand of bamboo, thick
and tall, hiding it from the street. We
stashed our boards in the bamboo and
washed off in the dark with a garden
hose. Then the three of them left, wearing nothing but trunks, dripping wet,
but clearly stoked to be unburdened of
their boards, for distant Kaimuki.
he In Crowds racism was situationist, not doctrinaire. It had no

historical pretensionsunlike, say, the
skinheads who came along later, claiming descent from Nazism and the Klan.
Hawaii had seen plenty of white supremacism, particularly among its lites,
but the In Crowd knew nothing of
lites. Most of the kids were hardscrabble, living in straitened circumstances,
though some had been kicked out of
private schools and were simply in disgrace. Among Kaimuki Intermediates
smattering of haole students, most were
actually shunned by the In Crowd as
insufficiently cool. These unaffiliated
haoles seemed to be mainly military
kids. They all looked disoriented, scared.
The structural privilege that came with
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can be taken out
of context and put on Twitter and then itll be a whole thing.
being white was all but invisible to me

at school.
I thought the In Crowds main activity would be gang ghting, and there
was certainly continual talk of impending warfare with various rival moke
groups. But then Mike always seemed
to be leading a peace delegation to some
powwow, and bloodshed would be
avoided through painstaking, face-saving diplomacy. Truces would be formalized by solemn underage drinking.
Most of the groups energy actually
went into gossip, parties, petty theft
and vandalism, and being obnoxious
on the city bus after school. There were
a number of pretty girls in the In Crowd,
and I was serially smitten with each of
them. Nobody in the gang surfed.
Roddy and Glenn Kaulukukui and
Ford Takara all went to Kaimuki Intermediate, it turned out. But I didnt
hang with them there. That was a feat,
since the four of us spent nearly every
afternoon and weekend together in the
water, and Roddy was soon established
as my new best friend. The Kaulukukuis lived at Fort Ruger, on the north
slope of Diamond Head crater, near
the cemetery that abutted our school.
Glenn, Sr., was in the Army, and their
apartment was in an old military barracks tucked into a kiawe grove below
Diamond Head Road. Roddy and
Glenn had lived on the island of Hawaii, which everybody called the Big
Island. They had family there. Now
they had a very young stepmother, and
she and Roddy didnt get along.
Conned to quarters after a ght
with his stepmother, he poured out his
misery in bitter whispers in the stiing
room he shared with Glenn and John.
I thought I knew something about
misery: I was missing waves that afternoon in a show of solidarity. There
wasnt even a surf mag to leaf through
while grimacing sympathetically. Why
he have to marry her? Roddy keened.
Glenn, Sr., occasionally came surng
with us. He was a formidable character, heavily muscled, severe. He ordered
his sons around, not bothering with
niceties. He seemed to loosen up in
the water, though. Sometimes he even
laughed. He rode a huge board in a
simple, old-fashioned style, drawing
long lines, perfectly balanced, across
the long walls at Cliffs. In his day, his
sons told me proudly, he had surfed

Waimea Bay.
Waimea was on the North Shore of
Oahu. It was considered the heaviest
big-wave spot in the world. I knew it
only as a mythical placea stage set,
really, for the heroics of a few surf
celebrities, hyped endlessly in the mags.
Roddy and Glenn didnt talk much
about it, but to them Waimea was
obviously a real place, and extremely
serious business. You surfed it when
you were ready. Most surfers, of course,
would never be ready. But, for Hawaiian kids like them, Waimea, and the
other great North Shore breaks, lay
ahead, each a question, a type of nal
exam.
I had assumed that only famous surfers rode Waimea. Now I saw that local
fathers rode it, too, and in time, perhaps, their sons would as well. These
people never appeared in mainland
magazines. And there were many families like the Kaulukukuis in Hawaii
multigenerational surng families,
ohanas rich in talent and tradition,
known only to one another.
Glenn, Sr., reminded me, from the
rst time I saw him, of Liloa, the old
monarch in a book I loved, Umi: The
Hawaiian Boy Who Became a King.
It was a childrens book, rst given to
my father, according to a faded yleaf inscription, by two aunts who had
bought it in Honolulu in 1939. The author, Robert Lee Eskridge, had also
done the illustrations, which I thought
magnicent. They were simple but
erce, like lushly colored woodcuts.
They showed Umi and his younger
brothers and their adventures in old
Hawaii: sailing down mountainsides
on morning-glory vines (From vine to
vine the boys slid with lightning speed),
diving into pools formed by lava tubes,
crossing the sea in war canoes (Slaves
shall accompany Umi to his fathers
palace in Waipio). Some of the illustrations showed grown men, guards and
warriors and courtiers, whose faces
scared metheir stylized cruelty, in a
pitiless world of all-powerful chiefs and
quaking commoners. At least the features of Liloa, the king (and Umis secret father), were softened at times by
wisdom and paternal pride.
Roddy believed in Pele. She was the
Hawaiian goddess of re. She lived,
You just missed her.
people said, on the Big Island, where

she caused the volcanoes to erupt when
she was displeased. She was famously
jealous and violent, and Hawaiians tried
to propitiate her with offerings of pork,
sh, liquor. She was so famous that
even tourists knew about her, but Roddy
made it clear, when he professed his
belief to me, that he wasnt talking about
the kitsch character. He meant a whole
religious world, something from the
time before the haoles camea Hawaiian world with elaborate rules and
taboos and secret, hard-won understandings about the land, the ocean,
birds, sh, animals, and the gods. I took
him seriously. I already knew, in rough
outline, what had happened to the Hawaiianshow American missionaries
and other haoles had subjugated them,
stolen their lands, killed them en masse
with diseases, and converted the survivors to Christianity. At the time, I
felt no responsibility for this cruel dispossession, no liberal guilt, but I knew
enough to keep my junior atheists
mouth shut.
We started surng new spots together. Roddy wasnt afraid of coral the
way I was, and he showed me spots
that broke among the reefs between
my house and Cliffs. Most were ridable
only at high tide, but some were little
keyholes, slots between dry reefsweet
waves hiding in plain sight, essentially windproof. These breaks, Roddy

said, were customarily named after the
families who lived, or had once lived,
in front of themPattersons, Mahoneys.
There was also a big-wave spot, known
as the Bomb, that broke outside Pattersons. Glenn and Ford had ridden
it once or twice. Roddy had not. I
had seen waves feathering (their crests
throwing spray as the swells steepened)
out there on big days at low tide, but
had never seen it big enough to break.
Roddy talked about the Bomb in a
hushed, strained voice. He was obviously working up to it.
This summer, he said. First big day.
In the meantime, we had Kaikoos. It
was a deepwater break off Black Point,
visible from the bottom of our lane. It
was hard to line up, and always bigger
than it looked, and I found it frightening. Roddy led me out there the rst
time, paddling through a deep, crosschopped channel that had originally
been cut, he told me, by Doris Duke,
the tobacco heiress, to serve a private
yacht harbor that was still tucked into
the cliff under her mansion. He pointed
toward the shore, but I was too worried about the waves ahead to check
out Doris Dukes place.
Thick, dark-blue peaks seemed to
jump up out of deep ocean, some of
57
them unnervingly big. The lefts were

short and easy, really just big drops, but
Roddy said the rights were better, and
he paddled farther east, deeper into the
break. His temerity seemed to me insane. The rights looked closed-out (unmakable), and terribly powerful, and,
even if you made one, the ride would
carry you straight into the big, hungrylooking rocks of outer Black Point. If
you lost your board in there, you would
never see it again. And where could
you even swim in to shore? I darted
around, dodging peaks, way out at sea,
half-hysterical, trying to keep an eye
on Roddy. He seemed to be catching
waves, though it was hard to tell. Finally, he paddled back to me, looking exhilarated, smirking at my agitation. He took pity on me, though, and
said nothing.
oddy was transferred, for some reason, to my typing class. Listening to him report to the teacher, I was
stunned. He abandoned, briey, his
normal pidgin and spoke standard English. Glenn, I learned later, could do
the same thing. The Kaulukukui boys
were bilingual; they could code switch,
as we would say now. There just werent
many occasions in our daily rounds
indeed, almost nonewhen they had
to drop their rst language.
But keeping my two worlds separate got suddenly trickier. Roddy and
I started hanging out at school, far from
the In Crowds monkeypod. In the cafeteria, we ate our saimin and chow fun
together in a dim corner. But the school
was a small pond. There was nowhere
to hide. So there should have been a
scene, a confrontation, perhaps with
Mike himselfHey, whos this moke?
There wasnt, though. Glenn and
Ford were around then, too. Maybe
Glenn and Mike hit it off over some
shared laugh, nothing to do with me.
All I knew was that, seemingly overnight, Glenn and Roddy and Ford were
showing up not only at the In Crowds
schoolyard spot under the monkeypod
but also at Mike and Edies house in
Kaimuki on Friday nightswhen
Mikes uncle supplied the Primo (local
beer) and mod Steve, one of the gangs
cooler kids, supplied the Kinks. The In
Crowd had been integrated, with no
visible fuss.
58
This was at a time when the Pacic

Club, the leading local private club, where
much of Hawaiis big business was conducted over cocktails and paddle tennis,
was whites-only. The Pacic Club,
apparently unmoved by the fact that
Hawaiis rst U.S. representative and
one of its rst two senators were AsianAmerican (both were also distinguished
veterans of the Second World War;
one of them, Daniel Inouye, had lost
an arm),still formally excluded AsianAmericans from membership.This sort
of bald discrimination wasnt exactly unAmericanlegal segregation was still
in force in much of the countrybut it
was badly out of date in Hawaii. Even
the low-rent haole kids in the In Crowd
were more enlightened. They saw that
my friends were cool guysparticularly,
I think, Glennand, at least for gang
purposes, just let the race thing go. It
wasnt worth the trouble. It was radioactive crap. Lets party.
Not that kicking it with the In
Crowd was the fondest ambition of
Glenn, Ford, or Roddy. From what I
knew, which was a lot, it was no big
deal to them. It was only a big deal to
me. In fact, after Roddy got to know
a couple of the girls I had been telling
him aboutIn Crowd girls I had agonized overI could see that he was
unimpressed. Roddy had been suffering his own romantic torments, which
I had also heard much about, but the
object of his affections was a modest,
notably old-fashioned, quietly beautiful girl whom I would never have noticed if he hadnt pointed her out. She
was too young to go steady, she told
him. He would wait years, if necessary,
he said wretchedly. Looking at my erstwhile girlfriends through his eyes, I
didnt like them any less, but I began
to see how lost they were, in their delinquent, neglected-child glamour, their
sexual precocity. In truth, they were
more sexually advanced than I was,
which made me timid.
And so I developed a disastrous crush
on Glenns girlfriend, Lisa. She was
an older womanfourteen, in ninth
gradepoised, amused, kind, Chinese.
Lisa was at Kaimuki Intermediate but
not of it. That was how I saw her. She
and Glenn made sense as a couple only
because he was a natural-born hero and
she was a natural-born heroine. But he
was a wild man, an outlaw, a laughing

truant, and she was a good girl, a good
student. What could they possibly talk
about? I would just wait, impatiently,
for her to come to her senses and turn
to the haole boy who struggled to amuse
her, and worshipped her. I couldnt tell
if Glenn noticed my hapless condition.
He had the good grace, anyway, to say
nothing off-color about Lisa within my
hearing. (No Spahk datwhich boys
were always saying to one another,
popping their eyes at girlish rumps and
breasts.)
Lisa helped me understand Ford. She
knew his family, including his hardworking parents, who owned a gas station. I knew that Ford was considered
unusual for a Japanese kid. Glenn sometimes teased him, saying things about
da nip-o-nese and what a disappointment Ford, who cared for nothing except surng, must be to his family. But
he rarely got a rise out of him. Ford had
a powerful inwardness about him. He
could not have been more different, I
thought, from the kids in my academic
classes. They looked to teachers, and to
one another, blatantly, fervently, for approval. I had become friendly with some
of the funnier girls, who could be very
funny indeed, but the social wall between us stayed solid, and their brownnosing in class still offended my sense
of student-teacher protocol. Ford, on
the other hand, was from my planet.
y fathers Hawaii was a big, truly

interesting place. He was regularly in the outer islands, herding lm
crews and talent into rain forests, remote villages, tricky shoots on unsteady
canoes. He even shot a Pele number on
a Big Island lava eld. His job involved
constant battling with local labor unions,
especially the teamsters and the longshoremen, who controlled freight transportation. There was abundant private
irony in these battles, since my father
was a strong union man, from a union
family (railroaders) in Michigan.
My dad gained enough sense of local
working-class culture to know that the
streets of Honolulu (and perhaps the
schools) might be a challenge for a
haole kid. If nothing else, there was
a notorious unofficial holiday called
Kill a Haole Day. This holiday got
plenty of discussion, including editorials
SKETCHBOOK BY ART SPIEGELMAN

(against) in the local papers, though I
never managed to nd out precisely
where on the calendar it fell. Any day
the mokes want, Mike, our In Crowd
chief, had said. I also never heard
whether the holiday had occasioned
any actual homicides. The main targets, people said, were off-duty servicemen, who generally wandered in packs
around Waikiki and the red-light district downtown. I think my father took
comfort in seeing that my best friends
were the local kids who kept their surfboards in our yard. They looked like
they could handle themselves.
He had always worried about bullies. When confronted by bigger boys,
or outnumbered, I should, he told me,
pick up a stick, a rock, whatever you
can nd. He grew alarmingly emotional giving me this advice. My dad
seemed scared of no one. Indeed, he
had a cantankerous streak that could
be mortifying. He wasnt afraid to raise
his voice in public. I found his combativeness intensely embarrassing. He
sometimes asked the proprietors of
shops and restaurants that posted signs
asserting their right to refuse service
to anyone what, exactly, that meant,
and if he didnt like their answers he
angrily took his business elsewhere.
This didnt happen in Hawaii, but it
happened plenty of times on the mainland. I didnt know that such notices
were often code for whites only. I just
60
quailed and stared desperately at the

ground as his voice began to rise.
Now, in Hawaii, I felt myself drifting away from my family. My parents
knew me only as Mr. Responsible. That
had been my role at home since shortly
after the other kids began arriving.
There was a substantial age gap between me and my siblings, and I could
usually be counted on to keep the little ones undrowned, unelectrocuted,
fed, watered, rediapered. But I resented
my babysitting duties, and the snug
fracas of the family dinner felt vestigial. Mom and Dad knew less and less
about me. I had been leading a clandestine life, not only at school but in
the water. Nobody asked where I went
with my board, and I never talked about
good days at Cliffs or my triumphs
over fear at Kaikoos.
his board in our yard. I was surprised.

Kevin was a terric swimmer. He had
been diving into the deep end of the
swimming pool since he was eighteen
months old. Pigeon-toed, he had a piscine ease in water, and was an expert
bodysurfer already at nine. He had always professed indifference to my obsession, though. It was my thing; it
would not be his. But now he paddled
out at Pattersons on a borrowed board
and within days was catching waves,
standing, turning. He was a natural. We
found him a used board, an old Surfboards Hawaii tanker, for ten dollars. I
was proud and thrilled. The future suddenly had a different tinge.
But one day at Pattersons I heard
people calling me from the shore. Its
your brother! I paddled in, frantic, and
found Kevin lying on the beach, people standing around him. He looked
badpale, in shock. Hed been hit in
the back by a board. Apparently, he had
got the wind completely knocked out
of him. Little John Kaulukukui had
saved him from drowning. Kevin was
still breathing heavily, coughing, crying. We carried him up to the house.
Everything hurt, he said. Mom cleaned
him up, calmed him down, and put
him to bed. I went out to surf some
more. I gured he would be back in
the water in a few days. But Kevin never
surfed again. He did resume bodysurng, and as a teen-ager became one
of the hotshots at Makapuu and Sandy
Beach, two serious bodysurng spots
on the eastern tip of Oahu. As an adult,
he has had back trouble. Recently, an
orthopedist, looking at a spinal X-ray,
asked him what had happened when
he was a child. It looked as if he had
suffered a serious fracture.
he surf changed as spring progressed. There were more swells

from the south, which meant more good
days at Cliffs. Pattersons, the gentle
wave between wide panels of exposed
reef out in front of our house, started
breaking consistently and a new group
of surfers materialized to ride itold
guys, girls, beginners. Roddys younger
brother, John, came out. He was nine
or ten, and fantastically nimble. My
brother Kevin began to show some interest in surng, perhaps inuenced by
John, who was about his age and kept
eventually learned to like the rights

at Kaikoos. The spot was often
empty, but there were a few guys who
knew how to ride it, and, watching
them on good days from the Black
Point rocks, I began to see the shape
of the reef and how to avoid, with a
little luck, catastrophe. Still, it was a
gnarly spot by my standards, and when
I bragged in letters to my friend in Los
Angeles about riding this scary, deepwater peak, I was not above spinning
tall tales about being carried, with
Roddy, by huge currents halfway to
Koko Head, which was miles away to

the east. My detailed description of
scooting through a big tubethe cavern formed by a hard-breaking wave
on a Kaikoos right contained, on the
other hand, a whiff of authenticity. I
still half remember that wave.
But surng always had this horizon,
this fear line, that made it different
from other things, certainly from other
sports I knew. You could do it with
friends, but when the waves got big, or
you got into trouble, there never seemed
to be anyone around.
Everything out there was disturbingly interlaced with everything else.
Waves were the playing eld. They
were the goal. They were the object of
your deepest desire and adoration. At
the same time, they were your adversary, your nemesis, even your mortal
enemy. The surf was your refuge, your
happy hiding place, but it was also a
hostile wildernessa dynamic, indifferent world. At thirteen, I had mostly
stopped believing in God, but that was
a new development, and it had left a
hole in my world, a feeling that Id been
abandoned. The ocean was like an uncaring God, endlessly dangerous, power
beyond measure.
And yet you were expected, even as
a kid, to take its measure every day.
You were requiredthis was essential,
a matter of survivalto know your
limits, both physical and emotional.
But how could you know your limits
unless you tested them? And if you
failed a test? You were also required to
stay calm if things went wrong. Panic
was the rst step, everybody said, to
drowning. As a kid, too, your abilities
were assumed to be growing. What
was unthinkable one year became
thinkable, possibly, the next. My letters from Honolulu in 1966 were distinguished less by swaggering bullshit
than by frank discussions of fear: Dont
think Ive suddenly gotten brave. I havent. But the frontiers of the thinkable were quietly, tfully edging back
for me.
That was clear on the rst big day
I saw at Cliffs. A long-interval swell
had arrived overnight. The sets were
well overhead, glassy and gray, with
long walls and powerful sections. I was
so excited to see the excellence that my
back-yard spot could produce that I
forgot my usual shyness and began to

ride with the crowd at the main peak.
I was overmatched there, and scared,
and got mauled by the biggest sets. I
wasnt strong enough to hold on to my
board when caught inside by six-foot
waves, even though I turned turtle
rolled the board over, pulled the nose
down from underwater, wrapped my
legs around it, and got a death grip on
the rails. The whitewater tore the board
from my hands, then thrashed me, holding me down for sustained, thorough
beatings. I spent much of the afternoon swimming. Still, I stayed out till
dusk. I even caught and made a few
meaty waves. And I saw surng that
dayby Leslie Wong, among others
that made my chest hurt. Long moments of grace that felt etched deep
in my being: what I wanted, somehow, more than anything else. That
night, while my family slept, I lay awake
on the bamboo-framed couch, heart
pounding with residual adrenaline, listening restlessly to the rain.
y parents were dutiful, if not

particularly enthusiastic, Catholics. Mass every Sunday, Saturday catechism for me, sh sticks on Friday.
Then, around my thirteenth birthday,
while we were still in California, I received the sacrament of conrmation,
becoming an adult in the eyes of the
Church, and was thunderstruck to hear
my parents say that I was no longer
required to go to Mass; that
decision was now mine.
Were they not worried about
the state of my soul? Their
evasive, ambiguous answers
shocked me again. They had
been fans of Pope John
XXIII. But they did not, I
realized, actually believe in
all the doctrine and the
prayersall those Oblatios,
Oratios, frightening Conteors, and mealymouthed Acts of Contrition that I had been memorizing
and struggling to understand since I
was small. It was possible that they
didnt even believe in God. I immediately stopped going to Mass. God was
not visibly upset. My parents continued to drag the little ones to church.
Such hypocrisy! This joyful ditching
of my religious obligations happened
shortly before we moved to Hawaii.

And so, on a spring Sunday morning, I found myself slowly paddling
back from Cliffs through the lagoon
while my family was sweating it out
at Star of the Sea, a Catholic church
in Waialae. The tide was low. My skeg
gently bumped on the bigger rocks.
Out on the exposed reef, wearing conical straw hats, Chinese ladies bent,
collecting eels and octopuses in buckets. Waves broke here and there along
the reef s outer edge, too small to surf.
I felt myself oating between two
worlds. There was the ocean, effectively innite, falling away forever to
the horizon. This morning, it was
placid, its grip on me loose and languorous. But I was lashed to its moods
now. The attachment felt limitless, irresistible. I no longer thought of waves
being carved in celestial workshops,
as I once did. I was getting more hardheaded. Now I knew that they originated in distant storms, which moved,
as it were, upon the face of the deep.
But my absorption in surng had no
rational content. It simply compelled
me; there was a profound mine of
beauty and wonder in it. Beyond that,
I could not have explained why I did
it. I knew vaguely that it lled a psychic cavity of some kindconnected,
perhaps, with leaving the Church, or
with, more likely, the slow drift away
from my familyand that it had replaced many things that came before it.
The other world was
land: everything that was
not surng. Books, girls,
school, my family, friends
who did not surf. Society,
as I was learning to call it,
and the exactions of Mr.
Responsible. Hands folded
under my chin, I drifted. A
bruise-colored cloud hung
over Koko Head. A transistor radio twanged on a seawall where a Hawaiian family picnicked on the sand. The sun-warmed
shallow water had a strange boiledvegetable taste. The moment was immense, still, glittering, mundane. I
tried to x each of its parts in memory. I did not consider, even in passing, that I had a choice when it came
to surng. My enchantment would
take me where it chose.
61
FICTION
62
ILLUSTRATION BY BORIS PELCER
n the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi, or
judge, of Seville and most recently the
personal physician to the Caliph Abu
Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Crdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas,
which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were
spreading like a pestilence across Arab
Spain, and was sent to live in internal
exile in the small village of Lucena, a
village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had
been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn
Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been
banned and burned, felt instantly at
home among the Jews who could not
say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf
Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push
the great commentator on Aristotle out
of town.
The philosopher who could not
speak his philosophy lived on a narrow unpaved street in a humble house
with small windows and was terribly
oppressed by the absence of light. He
set up a medical practice in Lucena,
and his status as the ex-physician of
the Caliph himself brought him patients; in addition, he used what assets he had to enter modestly into the
horse trade, and also nanced the making of tinajas, the large earthenware
vessels, in which the Jews who were
no longer Jews stored and sold olive
oil and wine. One day soon after the
beginning of his exile, a girl of perhaps sixteen summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not
knocking or intruding on his thoughts
in any way, and simply stood there
waiting patiently until he became
aware of her presence and invited her
in. She told him that she was newly
orphaned, that she had no source of
income, but preferred not to work in
the whorehouse, and that her name
was Dunia, which did not sound like
a Jewish name because she was not
allowed to speak her Jewish name,
and, because she was illiterate, she
could not write it down. She told him
that a traveller had suggested the name
and said it was Greek and meant the

world, and she had liked that idea.
Ibn Rushd, the translator of Aristotle, did not quibble with her, knowing that it meant the world in enough
tongues to make pedantry unnecessary. Why have you named yourself
after the world? he asked her, and she
replied, looking him in the eye as she
spoke, Because a world will ow from
me and those who ow from me will
spread across the world.
Being a man of reason, Ibn Rushd
did not guess that the girl was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of
female jinn: a grand princess of that
tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing
her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular. He
took her into his cottage as his housekeeper and lover, and in the muffled
night she whispered her truethat is
to say, falseJewish name into his ear,
and that was their secret. Dunia the jinnia was as spectacularly fertile as her
prophecy had implied. In the two years,
eight months, and twenty-eight days
and nights that followed, she was pregnant three times and brought forth a
multiplicity of children, at least seven
on each occasion, it would appear, and
on one occasion eleven, or possibly nineteen; the records are vague. All the children inherited her most distinctive feature: they had no earlobes.
If Ibn Rushd had been a scholar of
the occult arcana, he would have realized then that his children were the
offspring of a non-human mother, but
he was too wrapped up in himself to
work it out. The philosopher who could
not philosophize feared that his children would inherit from him the sad
gifts that were his treasure and his curse.
To be thin-skinned, farsighted, and
loose-tongued, he said, is to feel too
sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely.
It is to be vulnerable to the world when
the world believes itself invulnerable, to
understand its mutability when it thinks
itself immutable, to sense whats coming before others sense it, to know that
the barbarian future is tearing down the
gates of the present while others cling
to the decadent, hollow past. If our children are fortunate, they will inherit only
your ears, but, regrettably, as they are
undeniably mine, they will probably
think too much too soon and hear too
much too early, including things that

are not permitted to be thought or
heard.
ell me a story, Dunia often demanded in bed in the early days of

their cohabitation. Ibn Rushd quickly discovered that in spite of her seeming youth
she could be a demanding and opinionated individual, in bed and out of it. He
was a big man, and she was like a little
bird or a stick insect, but he often felt that
she was the stronger of the two. She was
the joy of his old age, but she demanded
from him a level of energy that was hard
to maintain. Sometimes all he wanted to
do in bed was sleep, but Dunia saw his
attempts to nod off as hostile acts. If you
stay up all night making love, she said,
you actually feel better rested than if
you snore for hours like an ox. This is
well known. At his age, it wasnt always
easy to enter into the required condition
for the sexual act, especially on consecutive nights, but she saw his elderly difficulty with arousal as proof of his unloving nature. If you nd a woman attractive,
there is never a problem, she told him.
Doesnt matter how many nights in a
row. Me, Im always horny. I can go on
foreverI have no stopping point.
His discovery that her physical ardor
could be quelled by narrative had provided some relief. Tell me a story, she
said, curling up under his arm so that
his hand rested on her head, and he
thought, Good, Im off the hook tonight, and gave her, little by little, the
story of his mind. He used words that
many of his contemporaries found
shocking, including reason, logic,
and science, which were the three pillars of his thought, the ideas that had
led to his books being burned. Dunia
was afraid of these words, but her fear
excited her and she snuggled in closer
and said, Hold my head while youre
lling it with your lies.
There was a deep, sad wound in him,
because he was a defeated man, had lost
the great battle of his life to a dead Persian, Ghazali of Tus, an adversary who
had been dead for eighty-ve years. A
hundred years earlier, Ghazali had written a book called The Incoherence of
the Philosophers, in which he attacked
Greeks like Aristotle, the Neoplatonists,
and their allies, Ibn Rushds great precursors Ibn Sina and al-Farabi. Ghazali
63
had suffered a crisis of belief at one point,

but had recovered with such conviction
that he became the greatest scourge of
philosophy in the history of the world.
Philosophy, he jeered, was incapable of
proving the existence of God, or even
of proving the impossibility of there
being two gods. Philosophy believed in
the inevitability of causes and effects,
which was an insult to the power of
God, who could easily intervene to make
causes ineffectual and alter effects if He
so chose.
What happens, Ibn Rushd asked
Dunia when the night wrapped them in
silence and they could speak of forbidden things, if a lighted stick is brought
into contact with a ball of cotton?
The cotton catches re, of course,
she answered.
And why does it catch re?
Because that is the way of it, she
said. The re licks the cotton and the
cotton becomes part of the re. Its how
things are.
The law of nature, he said. Causes
have their effects. And her head nodded beneath his caressing hand.
He disagreed, Ibn Rushd said, and
she knew that he meant the enemy,
Ghazali. He said that the cotton caught
re because God made it do so, because
in Gods universe the only law is what
God wills.
So if God had wanted the cotton
to put out the re, if He had wanted
the re to become part of the cotton,
He could have done that?
Yes, Ibn Rushd said. According to
Ghazalis book, God could do that.
She thought for a moment. Thats
stupid, she said, nally. Even in the
dark she could sense the resigned smile,
the smile with cynicism in it as well as
pain, spreading crookedly across his
bearded face.
He would say that this was the true
faith, he answered her, and that to disagree with it would be . . . incoherent.
So anything can happen if God decides its O.K., she said. A mans feet
might no longer touch the ground, for
example. He could start walking on air.
A miracle, Ibn Rushd said, is just
God changing the rules by which He
chooses to play, and if we dont comprehend it, it is because God is ultimately ineffable, which is to say, beyond our comprehension.
64
INGLENOOK
I live in the museum of

everyday life,
where the thimble is hidden
anew every week and often
takes ve days to nd.
Once it was simply lying
(laying?) on the oor
and I missed it,
looking inside my mouth.
A grease re in the inglenook!
That took a lot of soda!
Free admission, but guests
are required to face-wash
before entering and
tooth-clean before leaving.
Open daily, the doorknobs
are covered with curated
ngerprints, and pass
on the latest news.
Mary Ruee
She was silent again. Suppose I suppose, she said, at length, that God does
not exist. Suppose you make me suppose that reason, logic, and science
possess a magic that makes God unnecessary. Can one even suppose that it
would be possible to suppose such a
thing?
She felt his body stiffen. Now he was
afraid of her words, she thought, and it
pleased her in an odd way. No, he said,
too harshly. That really would be a stupid supposition.
He had written his own book, The
Incoherence of the Incoherence, replying to Ghazali across a hundred years
and thousands of miles, but in spite of
its snappy title it had not diminished
the dead Persians inuence, and nally
it was Ibn Rushd who had been disgraced, whose books had been cast into
the re, which had consumed the pages
because that was what God had decided
at that moment that the re should be
permitted to do. In all his writing, Ibn
Rushd had tried to reconcile the words
reason, logic, and science with the
words God, faith, and Quran, but
he had not succeeded, even though he
had used with great subtlety the argument from kindness, demonstrating by
Quranic quotation that God must exist
because of the garden of earthly delights

he had provided for mankind: and do
we not send down from the clouds pressing forth rain, water pouring down in
abundance, that you may thereby produce
corn and herbs and gardens planted thick
with trees? He was a keen amateur gardener, and the argument from kindness
seemed to him to prove both Gods existence and his essentially kindly, liberal
nature, but the proponents of a harsher
God had beaten him. Now he lay, or so
he believed, with a converted Jew whom
he had saved from the whorehouse and
who seemed capable of seeing into his
dreams, where he argued with Ghazali
in the language of irreconcilables, the
language of wholeheartedness, of going
all the way, which would have doomed
him to the executioner if he had used
it in waking life.
s Dunia lled up with children and

then emptied them into the small
house, there was less room for Ibn
Rushds excommunicated lies. The
couples moments of intimacy became
less frequent, and money was a problem. A true man faces the consequences
of his actions, she told him, especially
a man who believes in causes and effects.
But making money had never been his
forte. The horse-trading business was

treacherous and full of cutthroats, and
his prots were small. He had many
competitors in the tinaja market, so
prices were low. Charge your patients
more, Dunia advised him with some
irritation. You should cash in on your
former prestige, tarnished as it is. What
else have you got? Its not enough to be
a baby-making monster. You make babies, the babies come, the babies must
be fed. That is logic. That is rational.
She knew which words she could turn
against him. Not to do this, she cried
triumphantly, is incoherence.
The jinn are fond of glittering things,
gold and jewels and so on, and often
they conceal their hoards in subterranean caves. Why did the jinnia princess
not cry Open! at the door of a treasure cave and solve their nancial problems at a stroke? Because she had chosen a human life, as the human wife
of a human being, and she was bound
by her choice. To reveal her true nature
to her lover at this late stage would have
been to reveal a kind of betrayal, a lie,
at the heart of their relationship. So she
remained silent, fearing he might abandon her.
There was a Persian book called
Hazar Afsaneh, or One Thousand
Stories, which had been translated into
Arabic. In the Arabic version, there were
fewer than a thousand stories but the
action was spread over a thousand nights,
or, because round numbers were considered ugly, a thousand nights and one
night more. Ibn Rushd had not seen
the book, but several of its stories had
been told to him at court. The story of
the sherman and the jinni appealed to
him, not so much for its fantastic elements (the jinni from the lamp, the
magic talking shes, the bewitched
prince who was half man and half marble) as for its technical beauty, the way
its stories were folded within other stories and contained yet other stories,
folded within themselves, so that the
tale became a true mirror of life, Ibn
Rushd thought, for in life all our stories contain the stories of others and are
themselves contained within larger,
grander narratives, the histories of our
families, or our homelands, or our beliefs. More beautiful even than the stories within stories was the story of the
storyteller, a queen called Shahrazad or
Scheherazade, who told her tales to a

murderous husband to keep him from
executing her. Stories told to defeat
death, to civilize a barbarian. And at the
foot of the marital bed sat Scheherazades sister, her perfect audience, asking for one more story, and then one
more, and then yet another. From this
sister, Ibn Rushd got the name he bestowed on the hordes of babies issuing
from his lover Dunias loins, for the sister, as it happened, was called Dunyazad,
and what we have here lling up this
dark house and forcing me to impose
extortionate fees on my patients, the
sick and inrm of Lucena, is the arrival
of the Duniazt, that is, Dunias tribe,
the race of Dunians, the Dunia people,
which is to say the people of the world.
Dunia was deeply offended. You
mean, she said, that because we are
not married our children cannot bear
their fathers name.
He smiled his sad, crooked smile. It
is better that they be the Duniazt, he
said, a name that contains the world
and has not been judged by it. To call
them the Rushdi would be to send them
into history with a mark upon their
brow.
Dunia began to speak of herself as
Scheherazades sister, always asking for
stories, only her Scheherazade was a

manher lover, not her brotherand
some of his stories could get them both
killed if the words were accidentally to
escape from the darkness of their bedroom. So Ibn Rushd was a sort of antiScheherazade, Dunia told him, the exact
opposite of the storyteller of the Thousand Nights and One Night: her stories saved her life, while his put his life
in danger. But then the Caliph Abu
Yusuf Yaqub was triumphant in war,
winning his greatest military victory,
against the Christian King of Castile,
Alfonso VIII, at Alarcos on the Guadiana River. After the Battle of Alarcos,
in which the Caliphs forces killed a
hundred and fty thousand Castilian
soldiers, fully half the Christian army,
Abu Yusuf Yaqub gave himself the name
al-Mansur, the Victorious, and with the
condence of a conquering hero he
brought the ascendancy of the fanatical Berbers to an end and summoned
Ibn Rushd back to court.
he mark of shame was wiped off

the old philosophers brow, his exile
ended. He was rehabilitated, undisgraced,
and returned with honor to his old position of court physician, two years, eight
months, and twenty-eight days and
Theyre powered by Internet outrage.
O.K., Im readyyou can come in now.
nights after his exile began, which was

to say, one thousand days and nights and
one more day and night; and Dunia was
pregnant again, of course, and he did
not marry her, of course, he never gave
her children his name, of course, and he
did not bring her with him to the Almohad court, of course, so she slipped
out of historyhe took it with him when
he left, along with his robes, his bubbling retorts, and his manuscripts, some
bound, others in scrolls, manuscripts of
other mens books, for his own had been
burned, though many copies survived,
hed told her, in other cities, in the libraries of friends, and in places where
he had concealed them against the day
of his disfavor, for a wise man always
prepares for adversity, but, if he is properly modest, lets good fortune take him
by surprise. He left without nishing his
breakfast or saying goodbye, and she did
not threaten him, did not reveal her true
nature or the power that lay hidden
within her, did not say, I know what you
say aloud in your dreams, when you suppose the thing that would be stupid to
suppose, when you stop trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and speak the
terrible, fatal truth. She allowed history
to leave her without trying to hold it
back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it their own; and she went
66
on loving him, even though he had so

casually abandoned her. You were my
everything, she wanted to say to him.
You were my sun and moon, and who
will hold my head now, who will kiss
my lips, who will be a father to our children? But he was a great man destined
for the halls of the immortals, and these
squalling brats were no more than the
jetsam he left in his wake.
It is believed that Dunia remained
among human beings for a while, perhaps hoping against hope for Ibn
Rushds return, and that he continued
to send her money, that maybe he visited her from time to time, and that she
gave up on the horse business but went
on with the tinajas. But now that the
sun and moon of history had set forever on her house her story became a
thing of shadows and mysteries, so
maybe its true, as people said, that after
Ibn Rushd died his spirit returned to
her and fathered even more children.
People also said that Ibn Rushd brought
her a lamp with a jinni in it, and the
jinni was the father of the children born
after he left herso we see how easily
rumor turns things upside down! They
also said, less kindly, that the abandoned
woman took in any man who would pay
her rent, and every man she took in left
her with another brood, so that the Duniazt, the brood of Dunia, were no lon-
ger bastard Rushdis, or some of them

were not, or many of them were not; for
in most peoples eyes the story of her
life had become a stuttering line, its letters dissolving into meaningless forms,
incapable of revealing how long she
lived, or how, or where, or with whom,
or when and howor ifshe died.
Nobody noticed or cared that one
day she turned sideways and slipped
through a slit in the world and returned
to Peristan, the other reality, the world
of dreams whence the jinn periodically
emerge to trouble and bless mankind.
To the villagers of Lucena, she seemed
to have dissolved, perhaps into reless
smoke.
After Dunia left our world, the voyagers from the world of the jinn to ours
became fewer in number, and then they
stopped coming completely, and the slits
in the world became overgrown with the
unimaginative weeds of convention and
the thornbushes of the dully material,
until they nally closed up, and our ancestors were left to do the best they could
without the benets or curses of magic.
But Dunias children thrived. That
much can be said. And almost three
hundred years later, when the Jews were
expelled from Spain, even the Jews who
could not say they were Jews, the
great-grandchildren of Dunias greatgrandchildren climbed onto ships in
Cdiz and Palos de Moguer, or walked
across the Pyrenees, or ew on magic
carpets or in giant urns like the jinni
kin they were. They traversed continents
and sailed the seven seas and climbed
high mountains and swam mighty rivers and slid into deep valleys and found
shelter and safety wherever they could,
and they forgot one another quickly, or
remembered as long as they could and
then forgot, or never forgot, becoming
a family that was no longer exactly a
family, a tribe that was no longer exactly a tribe, adopting every religion and
no religion, all of them, after the centuries of conversion, ignorant of their
supernatural origins and of the story of
the forcible conversion of the Jews, some
of them becoming manically devout
while others were contemptuously disbelieving. They were a family without
a place but with family in every place,
a village without a location but winding in and out of every spot on the globe,
like rootless plants, mosses or lichens or
creeping orchids, who must lean upon

others, being unable to stand alone.
History is unkind to those it abandons and can be equally unkind to those
who make it. Ibn Rushd died (of old
age, or so we believe) while travelling in
Marrakesh barely a year after his rehabilitation, and never saw his fame grow,
never saw it spread beyond the borders
of his own world and into the indel
world beyond, where his commentaries
on Aristotle became the foundations of
his mighty forebears popularity, the cornerstones of the indels godless philosophy, saecularis, which meant the kind
of idea that came only once in a saeculum, an age of the world, or maybe an
idea for the ages, and which was the very
image and echo of the ideas he had spoken only in dreams. Perhaps, as a godly
man, Ibn Rushd would not have been
delighted by the place history gave him,
for it is a strange fate for a believer to
become the inspiration of ideas that have
no need of belief, and a stranger fate still
for a mans philosophy to be victorious
beyond the frontiers of his own world
but vanquished within those borders,
because in the world he knew it was the
children of his dead adversary, Ghazali,
who multiplied and inherited the kingdom, while his own bastard brood spread
out, leaving his forbidden name behind
them, to populate the earth.
A high proportion of the survivors
ended up on the great North American
continent, and many others on the great
South Asian subcontinent, thanks to
the phenomenon of clumping, which
is part of the mysterious illogic of random distribution; and many of those
afterward spread out west and south
across the Americas, and north and west
from that great diamond at the foot of
Asia, into all the countries of the world,
for of the Duniazt it can fairly be said
that, in addition to peculiar ears, they
all have itchy feet. Ibn Rushd was dead,
but he and his adversary continued their
dispute beyond the grave, for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no
end, argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools,
born of the love of knowledge, which
is to say, philosophy.
newyorker.com
Salman Rushdie on The Duniazt.
BOOKS
FRENEMIES
The combative camaraderie of Norman Mailer and William F. Buckley, Jr.
BY THOMAS MALLON
orty years ago, for a brief stretch

of my long, non-affluent slog
through graduate school, I lived at
30 Francis Avenue, in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, at the house of Professor and Mrs. John Kenneth Galbraith. In exchange for a small room
(no board), I walked the family dog
three times a day and did household
chores that included vacuuming the
basement, which was decorated with
some whimsical art work by Jacqueline Kennedy.
My general misery was alleviated
by what felt like a measure of Victorian benecence: I had the run of the
houses library. Still, I was so preoccupied with studying for my oral exams
(English, not economics) that I rarely
made it past the inscribed title pages
of those volumes by the living and the
famous which I plucked from the Galbraiths shelves. I recall one greeting
that appeared at the front of a collection
of essays by William F. Buckley, Jr.:
To Ken and Kitty, Once a day, for
dizziness. Love, Dr. Bill. The civilized
improbability of the Buckley-Galbraith
comradeship, sustained across an intellectual divide and upon the ski slopes
of Gstaad, made each into the others
best-known unlikely friend.
A half-dozen years after departing
Professor Galbraiths house, I began
writing frequently for National Review, the journal of his conservative
foil, even though most of my own literary lodestars were on the left. (I once
managed to praise, within the maga68
zines pages, the wit of Gore Vidal, an

object of fury and litigation for its editor.) Few writers glowed more brightly
for me than Norman Mailer, whose reportorial astonishments and overreachings had lit with meaning anything of the nineteen-sixties that I had
managed to glimpse through my freshman dorm window or on my blackand-white portable TV. There was, and
remains, a daring and a bigness to
Mailer, derived from his preference for
being knocked off balance instead of
dug in. Among American writers of
his day, he was alone in thinking that
a trip to the moon, even one funded
by the military-industrial complex of
the country that he sometimes called
Cancer Gulch, might be worth a book.
Buckley held Mailer in high, wary
regard. Fairly early in his busy career,
Buckley had given up on writing his
own big book; later, he conceded of
Mailer, Hes a genius and Im not.
Upon Mailers death, in 2007, only
months before his own, Buckley repeated his belief that the novelist had
created the most beautiful metaphors
in the language. By that point, it
scarcely mattered that Mailer, when
operating on more literal levels, had
advanced a view of the world that Buckley found in large part preposterous.
In Buckley and Mailer (Norton),
whose overstated subtitle is The
Difficult Friendship That Shaped
the Sixties, Kevin M. Schultz, a historian at the University of IllinoisChicago, sets out to reconstruct an
how biz, for which both men had

plenty of aptitude, rst connected
the two: John Golden, a young Chicago promoter, arranged to put Buckley and Mailer together in a public
debate, on September 22, 1962, which
quickly sold out.
Mailer was several months away
from turning forty. Having largely
amed out in ction after the success
of The Naked and the Dead, and
lucky to have escaped a prison sentence
for stabbing his second wife, he was
still in the early, shaky stages of a comeback second only in that era to Frank
Sinatras. It had begun with the self-referential miscellany Advertisements for
Myself (1959) and was continuing
with his Esquire pieces on the Kennedy candidacy (Superman Comes to
the Supermarket) and Presidency. Another half decade would bring him to
greatness with The Armies of the
Night, which won a Pulitzer, and
Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
Buckley, only thirty-six, was the
standout son of a large, rich, conservative Catholic family. (Vidal called
them the sick Kennedys.) He had
attracted notice for his own books
(God and Man at Yale, Up from
Liberalism) and for National Review,
whose rearguard crusades appeared to
have even fewer prospects of success
than those being waged on the farleft side of the political greensward.
Posters for Buckley and Mailers
Chicago bout promised the Debate
of the Year between the forceful philosopher of THE NEW CONSERVATISM
and Americas angry young man and
Leading Radical. Abbie Hoffman was
in the audience; folksingers provided
entertainment during intermission;
ABOVE: GUIDO SCARABOTTOLO
THE CRITICS
association that in fact had less warp

and woof to it than Buckleys friendship with Galbraith. John B. Judiss
biography of Buckley says that he was
friendly with but never very close
to Mailer. Still, Buckleys durable cordiality toward Mailer is more remarkable than his being amigos with Galbraith or belligerents with Vidal, and
it seems pardonable for Schultz to extend what ought to have been a magazine article into a book-length safari
in search of something signicant. Here
and there he even nds it.
Both were disgusted by the tepid consensus of American liberalism; they feared not that the center couldnt hold but that it would.
ILLUSTRATION BY BARRY BLITT
69
and Playboy held the rights to publish

a transcript. As Schultz notes, Buckley had less to lose than Mailer, whom
he had called, two years earlier, in National Review, a moral pervert. In the
event, he came away from the auditorium impressed, telling readers of his
next column that Mailer doesnt know
what it is he wants to say, but his desperate anxiety to say it, red by his incandescent moral energy, makes him
very much worth watching. There
may have been, along with the grudging admiration, a tinge of envy. As
Schultz notes, Mailer was a bold, quicksilver philosopher, whereas the far
less introspective Buckley always tended
to see himself as a mere salesman for
certainties he was duty-bound to make
obvious to others.
Mailer protested the subtitle that
Playboy printed with the text of his
speech: A Liberals View. Schultzs
account of the evening supports the
objection, as did Buckleys new awareness of Mailers bold, unxed positions. Mailer characterized himself as
a libertarian socialista label that
Mary McCarthy, another left-leaning

writer Buckley admired, had also applied to herself, demonstrating what
Buckley called her gift for oxymoron. But there was something more
elemental than synthetic in Mailers
attempt to have things both ways. In
speaking to the Chicago audience, he
put as much emphasis on self-realization as upon society, acknowledged
his belief in both God and the Devil,
and at one point, hamstrung by the
tit-for-tat quality of debate, cried, Im
trying to talk about the nature of man!
Buckley discerned that, show biz aside,
this wasnt an act. He also must have
realized the truth of the thesis that
Schultz works hard but usefully: the
common ground on which he and
Mailer stood was not inconsiderable. Both were disgusted with the
insipid aspects of American liberalisma tepid consensus, corporate
and bipartisan, that left each fearing
not that the center couldnt hold but
that it would. Buckley and I had
been attacking this Center from our
opposite anks, Mailer insisted. Even
Wasabi?
so, both were repelled by the violence with which it unexpectedly collapsed, and they were left cold by what
Schultz calls the rights-based model
of society, the beginnings of the identity politics that in the nineteenseventies started replacing the liberal
establishment.
In the meantime, each man gaudily challenged that establishment by
running for mayor of New York City
Buckley in 1965, Mailer four years later.
Both got beaten by John V. Lindsay,
but only after stealing the show with
campaigns of quixotic provocation.
Mailer told one audience that he was
running because I want to see where
my own ideas lead. He proposed that
New York become the fty-rst state
and give its neighborhoods a degree
of local autonomy undreamed of by
even such a small-government advocate as Buckley. Under his plan, Mailer
explained, a geriatric patch of the city
might wish to purchase massive police protection, while a younger, hipper one would be free to legalize LSD.
Buckleys campaign is remembered
chiey for what he said his rst action would be if he won (Demand a
recount) and for his proposal to ease
traffic and trim ab with an elevated
bike path, a then quirky idea that now
sounds almost blandly Bloombergian.
Schultz confuses what he calls Buckleys hatred of John Lindsay with
what was actually contempt; while
discussing Buckleys special animus
toward his liberal Republican opponent, he quotes his remark that Lindsay belongs in the Democratic Party.
Six years later, Lindsay joined it, and,
a few years after that, Buckleys old
campaign argument that New Yorks
politicians were approaching Washington as supplicants, begging it to
return to the City some of the income
it has taken from it, seemed worth a
second listen.
Throughout Schultzs book, Buckley tends to be held to stricter standards of morality and logic than
Mailer, whose moments of inspiration are more often indulged as yearning or lyrical. Schultz properly condemns Buckley for National Reviews
opposition to the civil-rights movement, which Buckley himself eventually recanted, only to note his having
harped on the Cold War, as if the

consideration of political enslavement and possible nuclear apocalypse
might have been keeping his audience
from something serious. Mailers more
grotesque momentsharanguing students with his own psychoanalysis of
Lyndon Johnson; his uncertainty
whether the children of those legalLSD neighborhoods would end up
creating castles or being two-thirds
dead of liver diseaseare pretty much
allowed to stand as instances of Norman being Norman. Evenhandedness
is not necessarily to be prized, but
Schultz is operating within what is so
much a rote political discourse that
he probably doesnt even know when
hes being less than fair. During Buckleys run for mayor, were told, the
white working class did not sound
like reactionaries when Buckley was
their mouthpiece. Its a coarse, nasty
characterization. Try reversing Schultzs
polarity so that a Yale-educated tribune of the black poorsay, Lindsayis called their mouthpiece.
Thats not a sentence thats going to
get written.
he Buckley-Mailer correspondence, not especially deep or voluminous, contains sprinklings of genial insult and even the record of a
contribution Mailer made to the
chronically empty coffers of National
Review. Buckleys fashionable wife,
Pat, called Mailer Chooky Bah Lamb,
an endearment shed got from her
Scottish nanny and which Mailer
threw into his novel An American
Dream; he called her Slugger. The
Buckleys were occasionally, though
not often, in the company of Mailer
and whomever he was then married
to, but the venues seem mostly to have
been crowded ones, such as Truman
Capotes 1966 Black-and-White Ball,
where Mailer got very drunk and had
to be kept from assaulting President
Johnsons national-security adviser,
McGeorge Bundy, over Vietnam.
The war was, for a time, a formidable obstacle to any deepening of fellow feeling between Buckley and
Mailer. In 1965, Mailer demurred at
the possibility of a personal gettogether: I think this is the wrong
time for us to have dinner, because
71
instead of having a nice calm quiet

and lively conversation about the future of conservatism, my left conservatism and your right conservatism,
thered be too much pressure to have a
screaming match. In 1968, when both
went to Chicago for the Democratic
National Convention, Buckley sided
with the police as reluctantly as Mailer
sided with the protesters. During that
violent year, Buckley declined the
chance to play a small role in Mailers
lm Maidstone, about political assassination; he was thus absent on the
day that one of the actors, Rip Torn,
struck the auteur with a hammer.
Mostly, though, it was the demands
of work and the logistics of celebrity
that kept Buckley and Mailer from
getting closer. The two were peaking
at just the same moment: Buckley appeared on the cover of Time two weeks
after the massive antiwar demonstration at the Pentagon that Mailer went
on to chronicle in The Armies of the
Night. Early in 1969, Mailer had to
turn down an invitation to help crew
Buckleys schooner on a weeklong sail
from Miami to New York: the moon
shot and then the mayoral race got in
the way. Though Mailer appeared three
times on Firing Line, Buckleys interview-and-debate program, the pairs
encounters were few and far enough
between that Schultz struggles to
thicken the broth of the friendship,
which sometimes seems more like a
motif than a subject. He even resorts
to comparing Buckleys playful and
provocative eyes with Mailers piercing and oceanic blue ones.
Theres something else Schultz is
up against: this is all getting to be a
while ago. If members of Generation
Z dont stumble over a YouTube link
to one of these writers, they may never
encounter them at all. (During a thesisadvising conversation a few weeks ago,
a ne creative-writing student of mine,
a college senior, politely asked me to
slow down and back up. Who is Norman Mailer? he asked.) So it may
seem reasonable for Schultz to provide extensive primers on Vietnam,
Selma, and In Cold Blood (a run-up
to the Black-and-White Ball). On
the other hand, does he imagine that
anyone already drawn to his highly
particularized book is going to need
72
the 101 on any of those sixties subjects?

In matters of style, Mailer seems to
have had more inuence than Buckley
upon their joint chronicler. Not all of
it is for the best. For Mailer, Schultz
writes, straining for the spirit of things,
the war symbolized everything that
was wrong with postwar America, the
conjoining of all the corrosive elements
snuffing out the honest American
heartand the price was being paid
in human esh. Apart from its virtuosic vocabulary, Schultz doesnt have
much sense of Buckleys prose. He describes How to deal with Norman
Mailer? as the rst ponderous sentence of Buckleys obituary for the novelist. But Schultzs aws are mostly ones
of exuberance, the jittery overcompensations of an academic in search of an
audience. (His previous book was TriFaith America: How Catholics and
Jews Held Postwar America to Its Protestant Promise.) Pumping up the jam
is understandable enough, but I couldnt
help thinking that both subjects deserve better sentences than Deepseated mistrust about large bureaucracies crept into the tenor of the nation.
Schultz, who is forty, could also do
better with the over-all feel, and some
of the facts, of his chosen era. He is a
year off on the Montgomery bus boycott; he refers to Ho Chi Minh as
Minh, and seems to believe that Oswalds Tale, Mailers footnoted account of Kennedys assassin, was a
novel. A few descriptions are plain odd
(Pat Nixons harsh reputation? Roy
Cohn a role model for even a certain portion of young people in 1962?),
and one or two are genuinely misleading: a reader will think from Schultzs
account of the Goldwater campaign
that the Senators biggest opponent
for the Republican Presidential nomination was the late-entering William
Scranton instead of his dogged foe in
the primaries, Nelson Rockefeller.
Mailer was the president of PEN not
in the nineteen-nineties but during
the mid-eighties, when he annoyed
many of its members by inviting George
Shultz, Ronald Reagans Secretary of
State, to address them.
This last solecism occurs during
Schultzs epilogic rush through the nal
decades of his subjects lives.To focus
on the sixties is ne, but, in arguing for
that decades centrality, the author ends

up condemning both Mailer and Buckley to a kind of premature inconsequentiality, claiming that by the early
seventies they were calcied; staying
busy as personalities and writers, they
removed themselves from the pitch of
battle, patron saints already. One can
understand a reluctance to dwell on
Mailers persistence through the nineties and beyondhis endless C.I.A.
novel, Harlots Ghost; the swollen
Picasso biographybut he was hardly
hors de combat.
The banishment of Buckley is even
more disputable. What had become
of the great conservative? Schultz
asks, suggesting that Buckleys support for the domestically liberal Nixon
was a political surrender rather than
a tactical feint in the long game he
was playing. Schultz sees the Buckley of the seventies as less involved
in the political fray, but the record
will show that the salesman was
steadily doing what he could to promote a candidate who nally delivered that great November day in the
futurewhat Buckley prophesied in
the face of Goldwaters impending
loss, in 1964.
Rather than giving his subjects the
hook, Schultz would have been better off with a coda that looks beyond
the Reagan yearsless transformative than Buckley wished and Mailer
no doubt fearedto the current moment. A half century beyond the sixties, when the self-actualizing plea to
be a name and not a number rst
attained urgency, Everyman, with each
click of the keyboard, now embraces
his digitization, sells his privacy for a
mess of algorithms used to orchestrate a world neither libertarian nor
socialist, an app-happy Cloud of anesthetized convenience. If one is going
to evaluate Mailers and Buckleys
complementary opposition to the liberal ethos of their time, one ought to
carry the examination toward a conclusion as grim as it is inescapable:
both men lost.
1
life in hollywood department
From the Los Angeles Times.
WANTED: Grade A-B celebrity to be the

face of new beverage in Australia. Please
call ASAP.
BOOKS
AMERICAN SNIPPER
New poems from John Ashbery.
BY DAN CHIASSON
But for years now Ashbery has been

writing poems like those in Breezeway,
short lyrics that begin anywhere and end
with a shrug, formed from a bricolage
of pop-cultural trivia and clich. They
arent closed works, as he has put it;
they are lengths of consciousness that he
will snip off at random intervals, like
licorice cut from a spool:
Someone said we needed a breezeway
to bark down remnants of super storm
Elias jugularly.
Alas it wasnt my call.
I didnt have a call or anything resembling one.
You see I have always been a rather
dull-spirited winch.
RYAN PFLUGER
ohn Ashberys latest book of poems

his twenty-sixth, not counting various compilations and re-issuesis
Breezeway (Ecco). As with most of
Ashberys work, its medium is composed partly of language foraged from
everyday American speech. The effect
is sometimes unnerving, as though
somebody had given you your own garbage back as a gift, cheerfully wrapped.
Ashbery is nearly eighty-eight; more
than ever, his style is a net for the weirdest linguistic otsam. Few others of
his generation would think to put
lemon telenovela or texasburger in
a poem, or write these lines: Thanks / to
a snakeskin toupee, my grayish push
boots / exhale new patina / prestige. Ex-
eunt the Kardashians. He has gone

farther from literature within literature
than any poet alive. His game is to make
an intentionally frivolous style express
the full range of human feeling, and he
remains funnier and better at it, a game
he invented, than his many imitators.
Its common for people to prefer a prior
Ashbery, though few can agree on which
one. There is the noncompliant poet of
The Tennis Court Oath, his 1962 book,
giddy in his deance of meaning; the poet
of childhood and its longueurs whom
we encounter in his seven-hundred-andthirty-nine-line poem The Skaters
(1966); the sublime meditative poet of
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975);
the elegist of Your Name Here (2000).
Ashberys poems anticipate but hold off death by transguring it into comic forms.
The style works partly by taking phrases

whose contours already exist in the
mindremnants of super storm Elias,
for exampleand substituting near-misses:
the verb to bark down is almost to back
down or to break down, which I suppose you might do when hit with a storms
debris; the meaningless adverb jugularly
might be jocularly or muscularly, misheard through the storms strong winds.
Youd rather have a winch than a wench
in a storm: the context implies the former,
the tone the latter. These poems conjure
a massive mental errata slip made up of
what they almost say and nearly mean.
Ashberys style prizes such mistakes
and misapprehensions, as though looking
for the word on the tip of the tongue. William James described consciousness as
the alternation of ights and perchings,
suggesting that we tend to overvalue the
perchings, the nouns or the primary
verbs in a sentence that steal the spotlight
from the little words, like in,and,but,
or, and of. It was James, a profound inuence on Ashbery, who coined the term
stream of consciousness, and who insisted on what he called a reinstatement
of the vague and inarticulate to its proper
place in our mental life. Jamess ights
and in-between zones nd, in Breezeway, a breezeway: a structure between
structures, a place to rest that is not a
resting place, a long Q & A period before the big event is adjourneda period
marked, as in the title of one poem, by deliberate Andante and Filibuster.
hese are late poems, working alertly

within the uncommon genre of
poems written in extreme old age, a
genre they in turn signicantly expand.
The poems anticipate death but hold
73
it offthey libusterby transguring it into comic forms. Before I looked

it up, I gured that Auroch was a parody of the fashionable names hipsters
give to their children, but Seven-YearOld Auroch Likes Thiswhile it
mentions a Brooklyn familyin fact
refers to aurochs, an extinct variety of
cattle. The bad news is that youre extinct; the good news is that youre only
seven. Switch this around, and you get
Ashberys plight: the species carries on
while you approach mortality. The feeling of renewal within doom, of gearing up for the last time, colors the poem:
Antique mud wrestlers shape up
for the last time, no scuttling of vain
things
left undone. When you get back Ill just
hit another menu, safe as a can of soup
in a mini-mart.
Saw you first on Masterpiece Theater.
I used to climb right in. That was funny
yet unbidden.
When you were alive they called him a
stooge.
My voice to young adolescents is like,
whom dya know,
hiding their accomplishments in bread?
I suppose we will all be faced with

the choice of whether to become an
antique mud wrestler, rotting in the
grave, or a can of soup, shelved in an
urn beside the others in some minimart mortuary. Am I reading too much
into these lines? Of course; but part of
the fun in Ashbery is nding how much
narrative sense can be pieced together
from these remarkable associative feats,
in order to appreciate the surplus above
and beyond the story they nearly tell.
In the afterlife, maybe well run into
all the people who were old when we
were young, like the stars of Masterpiece Theatre; in the meantime, just
trying to speak the language of adolescents is enough to kill a person.
Breezeway is partly about the contents of individual memory, so distinct
from the official cultural record. Its
Exeunt the Kardashians because, like
all the effluvia of the current moment,
the Kardashians replaced an earlier
canon of throwaway cultural artifacts,
and will themselves be replaced by
newer ones soon.
But this relentless tilling of culture
by culture does not erase our individual
memories. These poems are little lockboxes for all the forgotten material of
an idiosyncratic mind, from Mr. Coffee
74
Nerves to the Ritz Brothers to Klondike Scotty. The irony is that culture now
has a means of recalling these forlorn
details, in the form of Google and YouTube. For a poet of Ashberys predisposition, this nearly miraculous reappearance of things long thought lost and
now instantly available to anyone who
looks creates a new kind of old age, where,
instead of watching the bird feeder, a
person can watch the culture, his own
past ashing eerily before his eyes.
Now that we can view The Black
Cat or I Am a Fugitive from a Chain
Gang on our phones, we forget that,
for a person growing up in the nineteenthirties, seeing a particular lm might
have seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime
event. The movies were especially important if you grew up in a rural outpost like Sodus, New York, where Ashbery spent his childhood; they were
more important still if you were gay,
since they brought to you, sitting in the
dark, an entire palette of suppressed desire masquerading as straight romance.
The title of the poem Queer Subtext
suggests the way that you cannot help
but look for one when youre watching that kind of lm, even when confronted with young, freelancing, orangejuice-in-the-desert, / mythical ladies of
China. But subtexts generally arent
acknowledged in the titles of poems,
or at all; thats what makes them subtexts. The Ritz Brothers on Moonlight Bay plays this kind of game, hiding its secrets in plain sight:
A gay avalanche destroyed much of the
town.
Please, I thought we were winning.
Set the wolves, I mean the dogs
on her, that is, him.
The stalled investigation proved otherwise. . . .
Al and Harry had their moment in the
sun.
Oblivion swiftly followed, the universe
playing catch-up, as
it is wont to do. Oh, bugger
the attendance record! I see a long line
of attendees waiting, cock in hand.
Avalanches are gay and oblivion

is playing catch-up because these
features are ltered through the prerogatives of a horny kid, suddenly more
eager to bugger than to set the attendance record, though sex is another
kind of attendance, and offers another
opportunity to set a record. The long
line of attendees suggests a wake and

an orgy, the mourners gathered not hat
in hand but cock in handthough
the phrase could also modify the I,
whose fantasies govern the passage.
he nest lyrics in this book rank

with Ashberys best short poems:
Farm Hubbub, Supercollider, A
Breakfast Radish, the prose poem
Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (its title
taken from a 1906 silent lm, long impossible to nd, now easily available
on YouTube), Hand with a Picture,
as well as Listening Tour:
We were arguing about whether NBC
was better than CBS. I said CBS
because its smaller and had to work
harder to please viewers. You didnt
like either that much but preferred
smaller independent companies.
Just then an avalanche flew
overhead, light blue against the
skys determined violet. We
started to grab our stuff but
it was too late. We segued . . .
The speaker, probably dead from the

avalanche he described, remembers the
minute distinctions and gradations of
judgment that the living use to pass the
time. It struck me that all of Ashberys
recent work could be imagined as posthumous, xated as it is on the revealed
beauty of allegedly trivial experiences.
Which network you prefer doesnt
matter, until it matters, later, that it
once mattered. From his current vantage point, monitoring the past with a
gift as big as any American poet has
ever controlled, keeping an ear alert
for the invigorating ironies of the present, Ashbery must know he is one for
the ages.
The nal poem in this book, its title
quoting Robert Herrick, is A Sweet
Disorder. It ends with the great question that Keats asked at the end of
Ode to a Nightingale. Most poets
who live into their eighties must occasionally think of Keats, who died at
twenty-ve, and wonder what that
beautiful young mans old age might
have looked like:
My gosh, its already 7:30.
Are these our containers?
Pardon my past, because, you know,
it was like all one piece.
It cant have escaped your attention
that I would argue.
How was it supposed to look?
Do I wake or sleep?
BRIEFLY NOTED
GALILEOS MIDDLE FINGER, by Alice Dreger (Penguin Press). Blend-
ing investigative journalism and memoir, a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics chronicles a two-decade
career at the intersection of science and social activism. Dreger documents cases of scientists who come under re from
activists when publishing ndings on subjects including transgenderism, the causes of rape, and corrective genital surgery
in intersex infants. She is alarmed by what happens when research
clashes with doctrine. Some researchers have been the target
of smear campaigns, and institutions that might provide real
fact-checking (universities, the media, journals) allow misleading voices to shape public opinion, medical guidelines, and
legal denitions. In this age of disinformation, she writes,the pursuit of evidence is probably the most pressing moral imperative.
THE JOB, by Steve Osborne (Doubleday). When the author enters the police academy, a crusty instructor tells him, Kid,
you just bought yourself a front-row seat to the greatest show
on earth. During a twenty-year career with the N.Y.P.D.,
Osborne rose to commanding officer of the Manhattan Gang
Squad. When he retired, a little voice told him that he
needed to share his stories. This book is mute on current police scandals, but Osborne is a sly and humorous storyteller.
As he chases down criminals, he shares useful tipsAlways
cuff your perpand reflects that he never believed God put
me on this earth to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or even an astronaut. I always felt he put me here to stand over the dead guy
in the middle of the street, and to try to catch the person who
killed him.
LURID AND CUTE, by Adam Thirlwell (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).
The narrator of this artful novel is a self-declared hyperslacker. While his wife brings home the roubles and rupees,
he stays home developing the dogs personality and satisfying his urges of self-description. The plot rotates around intricate domestic arrangements (mostly threesomes), voyeurs,
and people who think too much. After a night of ketaminefuelled indelity with a complicated, aloof blonde, the narrator nds her unconscious in a pool of blood. But she recovers, and there are no consequences. Lying is lovely, he assures
himself, and his stream of consciousness rushes on, crammed with
reections on his friends zaniness and the nature of reality.
THE CHILDRENS CRUSADE, by Ann Packer (Scribner). In this novel,
Bill Blair, a young Navy doctor just discharged from Korea,
directs his postwar energies into a sprawling piece of land in
the undeveloped region south of San Francisco. The area is set
to become the booming center of Silicon Valley, and the property itself gives Bill a vision of a large, fullling family. The
books rst tragedy is that he and his wife are driven by different ideas. The plot, centering on a spousal chasm bursting
with poignancy, leads the reader through ve decades of typical family woes. The novels most refreshing quality is its
treatment of Silicon Valley, where the evolution of an essential modern setting is revealed through its reverberations.
75
A CRITIC AT LARGE
PROJECT EXODUS
Whats behind the dream of colonizing Mars?
BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
n March 27th, an American astronaut named Scott Kelly blasted off

from Earth and, six hours later, clambered onto the International Space Station. Hes been there ever since. Each
day, the I.S.S. orbits the planet fteen
and a half times, which means that after
a month Kelly had completed more than
four hundred and fty circuits. By now,
hes made nearly a thousand.
Kelly, who is fty-one, is shortve
feet sevenand stocky, with a round face
and a thin smile. If all goes well, he will
not return to sea level until March, 2016.
At that point, he will have set an endurance record for an American in space.
Even in brief bursts, space is tough
on the human body. Changes in intra-
cranial pressure can lead to eye problems.

Weightlessness induces vertigo. Fluids
collect in places they shouldnt. Muscles
atrophy and bones grow brittle. Astronauts internal organs drift upward and
their spines extend. It is expected that
by the time Kelly nally descends he will
have stretched to ve feet nine.
NASA has dubbed Kellys circular odyssey the One-Year Mission. As he spins
around the Earth, scientists at the agency
are tracking his physical and emotional
deterioration, monitoring, among other
things, his sleep patterns, his heart rate,
his immune response, his ne motor
skills, his metabolism, and his gut bacteria. Kelly has an identical twin, Mark,
who was also an astronaut. (Mark Kelly
Earthlings are fragile, demanding, and germy, not obviously suited to life elsewhere.
76
is perhaps best known as the husband

of Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman.) In the course of
the year, Mark will submit to many of
the same cognitive and physiological tests
as Scott, though without leaving Earth.
This will provide a glimpse into the
effects of space travel down to the molecular level.
Kellys One-Year Mission represents
a kind of dress rehearsal for a longer,
straighter, and even more punishing voyage. In NASAs Buzz Lightyear-esque formulation, its a stepping stone to Mars
and beyond. At its closest, Mars is
thirty-ve million miles from Earth, and,
under the most plausible scenario, getting there takes nine months. Owing to
the relative motion of the planets, any
astronauts who make it to Mars will have
to cool their heels on the red planet for
three more months before rocketing back
home. What NASA learns about Kelly
at least, so the theory goeswill help it
anticipate and overcome the challenges
of interplanetary travel.
But even as NASA rehearses for Mars
and beyond its actual reach has been
shrinking. The last time an American
made it as far as the moon was in 1972.
In fact, since the Nixon Administration,
no American has got past whats known
as low Earth orbit, or LEO. (The International Space Station, which circles the
globe in LEO, maintains an average altitude of two hundred and twenty miles.)
And nowadays even this is farther than
NASA can manage.
Since the retirement of the Space
Shuttle, in 2011, the agency has lacked
the wherewithal to get astronauts into
LEO. And so, before Kelly could embark
on the One-Year Mission, he rst had
to y to Baikonur, on the steppes of central Kazakhstan. There he spent a few
nights at the Cosmonaut Hotel before
hitching a ride with two Russians on a
Soyuz rocket.
Its true that even a journey of thirtyve million miles has to start somewhere.
Still, a reasonable person might ask:
Where are we headed? Is it really to Mars?
Or is it just to Kazakhstan?
everal recent books take up these

questions, some head on, others more
elliptically. Chris Impey is an astronomer at the University of Arizona who
studies the structure and the evolution
ILLUSTRATION BY SCRIPT & SEAL
of the universe. In Beyond: Our Future

in Space (Norton), he foresees a bright
off-Earth future. Within twenty years,
he predicts, there will be a vibrant
space-tourism industry, complete with
zero-gravity sex motels. In thirty years,
he expects small but viable colonies on
both Mars and the moon. And within a
century these colonies will have produced
a generation of space-bred babies. In
2115, he writes, a cohort will come of
age who were born off-Earth and who
have never been home.
Impey acknowledges NASAs current
difficulties. Prominently featured in Beyond is a graph showing how the agencys budget has changed over time. From
the late nineteen-fties through the late
sixties, it shot up, until, a year or two before the rst moon landing, in 1969, it
represented almost ve per cent of all
federal spending. Then, like a piece of
space debris hurtling toward Earth, it
plummeted. Today, NASA appropriations
make up less than 0.5 per cent of federal spending.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers, Impey
observes. And hes frank about the failures of the Space Shuttle program, which
resulted in two disastersthe loss of the
Challenger and the Columbia orbiters
and, with these, the lives of fourteen astronauts. Even when its vehicles werent
blowing up, the shuttle, Impey notes,
never functioned as advertised: the
launch rate ended up ten times lower
than originally planned and the cost per
launch twenty times higher.
But NASA is no longer the only game
in town. Impey is excited by the rash of
privately owned rms that are getting
into the space business. He cites the audacious plans of a Dutch entrepreneur
named Bas Lansdorp, whos been marketing one-way trips to Mars on the
Web. Lansdorp, he says, plans to nance
his venture by turning it into a reality
TV epicthink Survivor meets The Truman Show meets The Martian Chronicles. Other commercial ventures include
Jeff Bezoss Blue Origin, Richard Bransons Virgin Galactic, and Eric Andersons Space Adventures. Space Adventures has already carved a niche for itself
by negotiating visits to the I.S.S. for wellheeled amateurs. (Most recently, the company arranged a visit for the British soprano Sarah Brightman, at a cost of
fty-two million dollars; the singer has
now postponed her trip, however, and it

seems that a Japanese entrepreneur, Satoshi Takamatsu, will go in her stead.)
After years in the doldrums, space is
heating up, Impey writes.
Stephen L. Petranek, the author of
the forthcoming How Well Live on
Mars (Simon & Schuster/TED), is, if
anything, even more boosterish. By his
timetable, the rst people should be showing up on Mars just a little more than a
decade from now. Petranek is a journalist who served as the editor-in-chief of
the magazine This Old House before moving to Discover, a career path that perhaps explains his books focus on issues
like bringing the right tools to Martian
construction projects. Someone drilling
for water cannot discover halfway through
the process that they have failed to anticipate a specic problema mineral
deposit that requires a special drill bit,
for instance, he points out.
Petranek envisions a multistage settlement program. The rst pioneers on
Mars, not unlike the American frontiersmen, will have to struggle to survive. Just
to have drinking water, theyll need to
plow up the planets soilknown as regolithmelt down its ice, and distill the
results. To breathe, theyll have to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen,
then mix the oxygen with an inert gas
argon, perhapswhich theyll get from,
well, somewhere. Eventually, Petranek
imagines a shift in the balance. Instead
of adjusting to life on Mars, humans will
adjust Mars to their needs. They will
rengineer the atmosphere and warm the
planet. As the regolith thaws, ancient
streams will ow again and life will ourish along their ruddy banks. More and
more people will be drawn to Mars, until
there will be whole cities of them.
Mars, he writes, will become the new
frontier, the new hope, and the new destiny for millions of earthlings who will
do almost anything to seize the opportunities waiting on the Red Planet.
or another take on mans future in

space, theres Exploration and Engineering: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Quest for Mars ( Johns
Hopkins), by Erik M. Conway. Conway
is a historian of science at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is managed
by Caltech, and he writes in a style thats
as dry as the lunar landscape. Exactly the
sort of technical issues Impey and Petranek rush past Conway obsesses over.
(Much of Exploration and Engineering is devoted to valve types and navigational software.)
NASA has, of course, already completed several one-way missions to Mars.
Its also bungled several. Because no people were on board, the successes and the
ops tend to blur in the publics imagination. Conway wants to understand
what mistakes were made and what lessons learned from them. The results of
this analysis suggest that one might not
want to sign up for that rst manned
voyage.
Consider the case of the Mars Climate Orbiter. This was a craft that looked
like an oversized TV set. It was intended
to gather data on Marss atmosphere
and to serve as a communications link
for other probes. The hundred-andtwenty-ve-million-dollar orbiter was
launched from Cape Canaveral on December 11, 1998. It spent the next nine
and a half months travelling through the
solar system, until, on September 23,
1999, it was time for whats known in
spaceight circles as orbit insertion.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan when the craft slipped behind Mars and communication was interrupted. It was supposed to swing back
into the clear twenty minutes later, but
never did. Instead, it burned up in the
Martian atmosphere. Subsequent investigation traced the crash to Lockheed
Martin, a NASA contractor. A software
engineer at the company had neglected
to convert English units into metric ones.
As a consequence, estimates of the force
of the orbiters thruster were off by a factor of 4.5. There had been several chances
to catch the slipup, but all of them, according to Conway, had been missed,
owing to a combination of errors, oversights, and understaffing.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where
Conway works, handles Mars missions
for NASA. This means that he had access
to officials involved in the Climate Orbiter debacle, as well as to those involved
in more triumphant projects, like the
Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity,
or MER-1, which, in January, 2004, landed
at a site near the planets equator that
probably once held liquid water. (Opportunitys operational life has already
lasted more than forty times longer than
77

expected, and the rover continues to send
back data to this day.) Conway is sympathetic to the agencys problems and,
like Impey, traces them, at least in part,
to a shrinking budget. But, as much as
Impey and Petranek are eager to push
men into the beyond, Conway hopes
theyll stay put.
According to Conway, there is a disconnect between the desire to travel into
space and the desire to understand it. This
disconnect is a more fundamental difficulty for NASA than decades worth of
budget cuts. Its a contradiction thats built
into the agencys structure, which includes
a human exploration program on the one
hand and a scientic program on the other.
The planning for Mars missions so far
has been left largely to the science types,
but sometimes the human-mission types
have insisted on getting involved. Whenever theyve done so, Conway writes, the
result has been chaos.
Conway puts himself on the side of
science, and, as far as hes concerned, humans are the wrong stuff. They shouldnt
even be trying to get to another planet.
Not only are they fragile, demanding,
and expensive to ship; theyre a mess.
Humans carry biomes with us, outside and inside, he writes. NASA insists
that Mars landers be sterilized, but we
cant sterilize ourselves. If people ever
do get to the red planetan event that
Conway, now forty-nine, says he considers unlikely in his lifetimetheyll im78
mediately wreck the place, just by showing up: Scientists want a pristine Mars,
uncontaminated by Earth. If people start
rejiggering the atmosphere and thawing
the regolith, so much the worse.
The Mars scientists want to study
wont exist anymore, Conway writes.
Some other Mars will.
couple of weeks after Scott Kelly

reached the I.S.S., a privately owned
aerospace company, SpaceX, launched a
rocket loaded with supplies for the station. In the payload were electronic equipment and food for the crew, as well as
twenty live mice slated for dissection.
For the benet of an Italian astronaut
named Samantha Cristoforetti, there was
also a microgravity espresso maker.
(Consider it one small slurp for man,
and one giant slurp for mankind, the
Web site Daily Coffee News observed.)
The rocket carrying the payload had
been engineered so that it could be reused. After ring, its rst-stage booster
was supposed to return to Earth and
gently land on a ship parked in the Atlantic. This part of the launch did not
go as planned; instead of gracefully descending, the booster tipped over and
blew up. SpaceXs founder, Elon Musk,
in a tweet to his two million followers,
attributed the accident to a slower than
expected throttle valve response.
Despite several well-publicized mishaps, SpaceX has probably done more
than any other company to prove that

private space ventures can, as it were, take
off. This has made Musk, whose other
business endeavors include PayPal and
Tesla, the darling of Mars enthusiasts.
(How Well Live on Mars is basically
an extended Musk mash note.) Though
SpaceX has yet to get a single person as
far as low Earth orbitits supposed to
carry its rst astronauts in 2017Musk
has said that hes hard at work on a plan
for a Mars Colonial Transporter. Recently, he announced that he hoped to
reveal details about the transporters design by the end of this year.
For Musk, going to Mars is way more
than just cool. Are we on a path to becoming a multiplanet species or not? he
has asked. If were not, well, thats not
a very bright future. Well simply be hanging out on Earth until some eventual
calamity claims us.
Impey makes much the same point.
Humankind evolved over millions of
years, he observes. But over the last 60
years, atomic weaponry created the potential to extinguish ourselves. Sooner
or later we must expand beyond this blue
and green ball, or go extinct. So does
Petranek. There are real threats to the
continuation of the human race on Earth,
including our failure to save the home
planet from ecological destruction and
the possibility of nuclear war, he writes.
The rst humans who emigrate to
Mars are our best hope for the survival
of our species.
Why is it that the same people who
believe we can live off-Earth tend to believe we cant live on it? In a roundabout
sort of way, the connection between these
two ideas can be traced back to Enrico
Fermi. In 1950, Fermi, one of the fathers
of the atom bomb, turned to Edward
Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb,
and asked, Where is everybody? Further discussion of this question yielded
the so-called Fermi paradox, which runs
as follows:
The Earth is an unexceptional planet
revolving around an unexceptional star.
Given the age of the universe and the
speed of our own technological advancement, youd expect that some intelligent life-form from another part of
the galaxy would already have shown
up on Earth. But no such being has
been spotted, nor have any signs of one.
So where are they?
A decade later, a Harvard-trained astronomer named Frank Drake, pondering a related question, came up with a
way to formulate the problem in numerical terms. A key variable in whats become known as the Drake equation is
how long a civilization capable of building rockets and microgravity espresso
machines persists. If there are lots of
planets out there that are suitable for life,
and if life eventually produces intelligence, and if intelligent beings on one
planet are capable of guring out how
to communicate with intelligent beings
on another, then the fact that we havent
heard from any suggests that such civilizations dont last.
If you look at our current technology level, something strange has to happen to civilisations, and I mean strange
in a bad way, Musk recently told the
online magazine Aeon. And it could be
that there are a whole lot of dead, oneplanet civilisations. Of course, a galaxy
that contains a whole lot of dead, oneplanet civilisations may also contain a
lot of dead, two-planet ones.
n 1965, as NASA was preparing to

put a man on the moon, it funded
a study of mans best friend. The agency
was curious what would happen to
dogs plunged into the vacuum of space.
In groups of three, subject animals
were sealed in a chamber
and the air was pumped out.
Dogs are adapted to
(more or less) the air pressure at sea level. This means
that the gases dissolved inside their bodies are in equilibrium with the pressure
outside. Put Spot in a vacuum and this healthful balance breaks down. Cameras
trained on the vacuum chamber showed the dogs swelling up like
balloons or, as a paper summarizing the
studys ndings phrased it, an inated
goat-skin bag. (Interestingly enough,
the dogs eyeballs did not seem to show
the effects of this phenomenon, though
the soft tissue around them was often
grossly distended, as was the tongue.)
The pressure differential also had unhappy gastric consequences. The ballooning dogs expelled air from their
bowels; this led frequentlyand simultaneouslyto defecation, urination, and
projectile vomiting. The animals suffered

what looked like grand-mal seizures, and
their tongues froze. (This last effect was
a result of heat loss through rapid evaporation.) All told, a hundred and twenty-six dogs were tested in the chamber,
for varying lengths of time. Of those
which spent two minutes in simulated
space, a third died. The rest deated and,
eventually, recovered. Among those
which remained in a vacuum for three
minutes, the mortality gure climbed to
two-thirds.
I came across Experimental Animal Decompressions to a Near-Vacuum Environment while reading up
on the One-Year Mission. Maybe its
just a sign of my geocentric bias, but I
was struck by the correspondences. For
all his training and his courage, Kelly
is basically just another test mammal.
Like the dogs, hes been sealed in an
airtight chamber to see how much his
body can take. And in both experiments
the results, at least in their broad outline, are totally predictable.
Every sensate being weve encountered in the universe so farfrom dogs
and humans and mice to turtles and spiders and seahorseshas evolved to suit
the cosmic accident that is Earth. The
notion that we could take these forms,
most beautiful and most wonderful, and
hurl them into space, and that this
would, to use Petraneks formulation, constitute our
best hope, is either fantastically far-fetched or
deeply depressing.
As Impey points out, for
six decades weve had the capacity to blow ourselves to
smithereens. One of these
days, we may well do ourselves in; certainly were already killing off a whole lot
of other species. But the problem with
thinking of Mars as a fallback planet (besides the lack of oxygen and air pressure
and food and liquid water) is that it overlooks the obvious. Wherever we go, well
take ourselves with us. Either were capable of dealing with the challenges posed
by our own intelligence or were not.
Perhaps the reason we havent met any
alien beings is that those which survive
arent the type to go zipping around the
galaxy. Maybe theyve stayed quietly at
home, tending their own gardens.
79
THE CURRENT CINEMA
WOULDNT IT BE NICE?
Tomorrowland and Gemma Bovery.
BY ANTHONY LANE
Britt Robertson and George Clooney in a new movie directed by Brad Bird.
ime present and time past are both

perhaps present in time future,
and time future contained in time past,
but Ill be damned if I can work out
which is which. That is the upshot of
Tomorrowland, the new lm from
Brad Bird, which starts with Frank
Walker (George Clooney) revealing
that when I was a kid the future was
different. We then loop back to that
kidhood, and to the eager young Frank
(Thomas Robinson) attending the New
York Worlds Fair, in 1964, and lugging along a homemade jet packbasically, a modied vacuum cleaner with
straps. He enters an inventors contest,
where the judge, a man named Nix
(Hugh Laurie), looks at the jet pack
and inquires, How would it make the
world a better place? To which Frank
replies, Cant it just be fun?
Nix has a wise and smiling child with
him, presumably his daughter. Her name,
aptly, is Athena (Raffey Cassidy), and
though not a functioning goddess, she
has talents that prove, in the course of
the lm, to be more than human. One
of these is the ability to ferry souls to
Tomorrowland: a comely metropolis of
80
sparkling towers and swooping pathways, cheerily buzzed by airborne vehicles and staffed by genial citizens drawn
from every band of the racial rainbow.
The kind of joint, in short, where a jet
pack ts right in. You can get there in
several ways, and Frank tries two of them.
As a boy, at the Worlds Fair, following
Athena, he goes on a theme ride, aboard
a little boat that tips him downward
through a vortexshades of Alice and
her trip to Wonderland, in both the water
and the fall. Later, as an adult, he uses a
rocket that is cunningly concealed within
the Eiffel Tower. The quickest route to
Tomorrowland, however, comes at the
touch of a button, or, to be exact, of a
magic lapel badge. Graze it with your
nger, and you nd yourself amid a eld
of wheat, staring at the radiant city in
the distance, much as Dorothy gazed at
Oz. This is what happens to Casey (Britt
Robertson), a high-school student in the
present day. Her surname is Newton,
and, in case we dont get the point, we
see her toss an apple through the air.
Casey lives in Florida, near a NASA
launch site that is being demolished.
The dismantling pains her so profoundly
that she breaks in, by night, to sabotage

it. On the strength of that resolve, she
is recruited by none other than Athena,
who shows up, wondrously unaged, and
takes her to Frank, now holed up in a
farmhouse. What has befallen him, in
the intervening decades, we dont discover, but he has aged, ungracefully so.
Clooney is in full grumpy-shaggy
modea look that we have seen before, in Syriana, but further rumpled
here by a desperate paranoia. To be
honest, he looks miserable throughout the lm, as if badly wishing he were
somewhere else. That glumness sits
awkwardly in Tomorrowland, which
strives against the fad for dystopian
sagasThe Hunger Games, Divergent, and so forthand bravely asks,
Where did all the utopias go?
Brad Bird directed The Incredibles and Ratatouille before switching to live action, for Mission: ImpossibleGhost Protocol, the larkiest of
the sequels in that franchise. Eleven
years old when men rst landed on the
moon, Bird belongs to the generation
for whom the lunar module was the
shape of things to come. That is why
beautiful shapes infest his new lm,
the rst half of which pops and whizzes with everything he does best. One
sequence after another is streamlined
and clean-cut, and you sense that Bird
has a genuine affection for gizmos, not
just because theyre cool but because
they clear a path through the obstacles
of lifebecause, in short, they work.
Look at Casey, sending a mini-drone
over NASAs fence to mess with the security cameras; or the ercely barking
hologram that guards Franks house;
or the bathtub that doubles as an escape pod, hurtling skyward when he
wants to get out in a rush.
Even gizmos, however, need to lead
somewhere, and although Tomorrowland never runs out of objects or ideas,
its supply of dramatic fuel soon springs
a leak. Bird co-wrote the lm with
Damon Lindelof, who, as addled viewers of Lost, Prometheus, and World
War Z can attest, is more concerned
with setups than with payoffs. We get a
urry of chase sequences, and a crunchy
nal showdown, but you feel weirdly
unbothered by the result. The only thing
at stake appears to be the survival of the
planet, and thats always a cop-out. Give
ILLUSTRATION BY OWEN FREEMAN
me The Incredibles any day, with a

single family to root for, and a single
baddie to boo. The hitch, in the new
lm, is that Tomorrowland itself is so
fuzzily dened: Is it a real destination?
Is it a state of mind? No, its a superconcept! (Its also, of course, a zone that you
can visit at Disneyland, and Tomorrowland is a loyal Disney production.)
Toward the end, it falls to Hugh Laurie to keep a heroically straight face as
he inveighs against the people of Earth:
They didnt fear their demise. They repackaged it. Lord, what fools these mortals be! Thank heavens for Disney, which
is here to warn us against repackaging.
Other evils, the lm suggests, include
civil strife and climate-change denial,
but our fragile race may yet be saved,
apparently, by wind farms, busking guitarists, and paying attention in school.
Tomorrowland is a bright and pliable
sci- thriller that stiffens into a sermon.
Cant it just be fun?
here is little shame, and less surprise, in the fact that lmmakers
have stumbled in their effort to bring
the work of Flaubert to the screen.
Even those of the rst rank, like Jean
Renoir and Claude Chabrol, have fallen
short. One obstacle is the authors compositional mania, which led him to
cherish his commas in the way that ordinary people love their children. How
easily that suppleness of sound, patterned on the page, can clog into visual fuss. Then theres the herd of largely
uninteresting, often unlikable folk
whose fortunes we track in Madame
Bovary, and who would be alarmed to
learn that they were the raw material
of a masterpiece. No one wants to be

the victim of a plot. How do you dramatize dullards, weaklings, and nincompoops and not wind up with a
movie theatre full of gentle snoring?
The latest director to make the attempt is Anne Fontaine, who approaches
the problem sideways. Gemma Bovery is an adaptation not of Flaubert
but of a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, which toys with an unlikely
resurrection of the story in the modern age. An English couple, Charlie
Bovery ( Jason Flemyng) and his wife,
Gemma (Gemma Arterton), move to
a delightful, damp, and mouse-ridden
house in a small Normandy town.
Their arrival is noted by Joubert (Fabrice Luchini), the local baker, who lives
across the street. He is a rabid Flaubertian, and can scarcely believe that
his treasured book is being staged anew,
as it were, before his eyes. He dotes
on Gemma, corrects her French, and
schools her in the kneading of dough
(my yoga, he calls it), although his
ogling seems paltry when compared to
that of the camera, which carries out
regular inspections of Artertons nape
and breasts, in a succession of summer
frocks. Her character is vapid enough,
as the novel demands, but anyone who
hoped that Fontaine might unpick,
rather than fortify, the male gaze is in
for a letdown. Contrast the boldness
with which Renoir, in his movie of
1934, made Emma somewhat older
and plainer than custom dictates, and
thereby made us reect on the eyes of
her beholders, and on how provincial
myopia can skew the moral vision.
As Gemma goes through the motions
of her ctional counterpartboffing a

blue blood in his faded chteau, hatching an appointment in Rouen Cathedral, and so onwe are offered a handful of sketchy observations on the extent
to which art either does or does not
mimic life. These are, at best, unchallenging, and would have drawn barks
of laughter from the derisive Flaubert.
The only performer who seems at ease
is Luchini, eternally hangdog, who in
one juicy moment spies Gemma and
her beau-to-be, at a market stall, and
confesses not to envy but to a strange
kind of jubilation at seeing Flauberts
narrative lock into place. Such glee, however, pales beside the delicate daring of
Franois Ozons In the House (2012),
a study of similar xations, with Luchini
as a literature teacher at the Lyce Gustave Flaubert. And that, in turn, is no
match for The Kugelmass Episode,
written by Woody Allen for this magazine, in 1977, which transports a balding, henpecked humanities professor
into the midst of Madame Bovary:
Emma turned in surprise. Goodness,
you startled me, she said. Who are you?
She spoke in the same fine English translation as the paperback.
As for the ensuing scenes, which

spring Emma forward through time
into a suite at the Plaza, where she racks
up room service and complains, yet again,
of being bored (Watching TV all day
is the pits)well, read the tale for yourself. Just once, for a few delirious pages,
Flaubert got what he deserved.
newyorker.com
Richard Brody blogs about movies.
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81
CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST
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and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this weeks cartoon, by Mick Stevens, must be received by Sunday,
May 31st. The nalists in the May 18th contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the nalists in this weeks
contest, in the June 22nd issue. The winner receives a signed print of the cartoon. Any resident of the United States,
Canada (except Quebec), Australia, the United Kingdom, or the Republic of Ireland age eighteen or over can
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THE WINNING CAPTION
THE FINALISTS
Invent a job!
Andrew Seward, Frederick, Md.
They cant be that advancedtheres no bagel setting.
David Onken, Milwaukee, Wis.
Any new cave paintings?

Roger K. Miller, Menomonee Falls, Wis.
I have a plan to monetize your diet.
Jeffrey Dabe, Delaware, Ohio
THIS WEEKS CONTEST

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GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

Adam Gopnik on art-market records;

Questions surrounding an extravagant home.

WHOS HAPPY NOW?

Luanda endeavors to become the next Dubai.

How teen-agers are lured into Syrias war.

Lessons learned while surng in Hawaii.

Kevin M. Schultzs Buckley and Mailer.

Why people want to get to Mars.

Tomorrowland, Gemma Bovery.

has written twelve novels, including Two Years

salman rushdie (FICTION, P. 62)

wrote and illustrated the childrens book Dogs Rule

THE SCREENING ROOM: Short films we

PODCASTS: On the Political Scene,

love and the stories behind them.

POETRY: A reading by Monica Youn.

DAILY COMMENT / CULTURAL COMMENT:

Opinions and reflections by Jeffrey

Lounge, with Bob Mankoff, and

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015

The central tenet of Jill Lepores essay

I read with interest Charles McGraths

Letters should be sent with the writers name,

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015

production of Beauty, in London,

New York City Ballet

American Ballet Theatre

for an evening of new works. She

face. With Zo Kravitz.Anthony

emotional deprivation of near-feral

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015

Cameron Crowe directed

Reviewed this week in The

Reviewed in Now Playing.

Reviewed in Now Playing.

Reviewed in Now Playing.

Titles in bold are reviewed.

This Is Celluloid: 35mm.

Black & White Scope.

In revival. May 29-June 4

Films produced by Titanus.

movie OF THE WEEK

A video discussion of Peyton

mischiefand to get hold of her

THE NEW YORKER, JUNE 1, 2015

overrides, albeit briefly, the thinness

escaped, he teams up with Furiosa

An action film, directed

them, and Candys ex (Richard Kiley), himself a

lover. Trevor is a small businessman with a big

corn. Maclean reserves the best for last, in a quiet

The Red and the White

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ANT Fest 2015

A Human Being Died That

I different? Why am I bigger than

disdainful father, helping with chores

New World Stages

59E59. Through May 31.

The Way We Get By

Fish in the Dark