Slate Articles

When James Gandolfini Got Even With Slate

John Swansburg — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 04:15:00 GMT

In 2009, Slate’s film critic Dana Stevens invited me to the New York Film Critics Circle Awards dinner, a wonderful if strange annual event where ink-stained critics and A-list Hollywood celebrities rub shoulders. We in the Slate contingent were relegated that night to a less than glamorous table, far from the high-watt stars like George Clooney and Kathryn Bigelow; the only movie person at our table was the eccentric actor Sylvia Miles, best known for her turn as the real estate broker who sells Charlie Sheen his high-rise apartment in Wall Street. It wasn't entirely clear why Miles was even there—she hadn't been nominated for an award, or for that matter acted in a movie that year. But we were glad to have her brassy company, especially when it turned out she was apparently old buddies with James Gandolfini, who was representing In the Loop, the winner of that year’s best screenplay award. “Tony!” she screeched in salutation when she saw the actor take a seat at an adjacent table. Gandolfini, who seemed used to being called by his most famous character’s name, greeted Miles warmly, and asked who she was sitting with. “Slate!" she barked back. “Never heard of it,” he said.

I’d had a couple of cocktails at that point, and a colleague and I somewhat brazenly took this exchange as an invitation to try to explain Slate to Gandolfini. You know, online magazine? Founded by Michael Kinsley? Covered the hell out of The Sopranos? None of this rung a bell for Gandolfini, and he made it pretty clear he had no plans to look Slate up when he got home, either. We took a hint and dug into our salads.

Later in the evening, Gandolfini was called to the dais. Like many of the winners and presenters that night, he took a moment to graciously thank the critics. I’m very much paraphrasing here, but he said something to the effect of: “It’s an honor to be here tonight, to get to meet the film critics, who do us the service of watching and thinking about the work we do. We don’t always agree with what you write, but we do appreciate how much you care about the movies, and it’s a pleasure to get to spend time with you, especially the folks from Slate, my favorite online magazine.” An exuberant whoop went up from table 27. We’d just been shouted out by James Gandolfini, and only we—and Sylvia Miles—knew he was totally kidding.

When Gandolfini finished his acceptance speech, he walked back to his seat. As he passed our table, we raised our glasses to to the actor. Gandolfini leveled a chilling, unsmiling Tony Soprano gaze at us. “Now we’re even,” he said. On the contrary, I've always counted myself still in his debt—for that thrilling if disingenuous accolade and for the hours of joy his acting brought me.

James Gandolfini’s Best (Non-Tony) Roles

Dan Kois — Thu, 20 Jun 2013 03:05:00 GMT

James Gandolfini died Wednesday of an apparent heart atttack while on vacation in Rome. He'll forever be known for his iconic performance as Tony Soprano, of course, but he was a remarkably intuitive, subtle actor who shined in any number of other parts as well. We'll be updating this post all day with Slate staffers' memories of their favorite Gandolfini performances.

Carol, Where the Wild Things Are

Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are never should’ve worked. It was a dreamlike free adaptation of a beloved picture book; it depended on an untested child actor who was in nearly every shot; and most weirdly, its Wild Things were huge, shaggy full-body animatronic puppets asked to carry deeply emotional scenes. But it turned into a minor masterpiece, in no small part because of the vocal performance of Gandolfini as Carol, the fiercest and saddest of the Wild Things. He’s the one who falls hardest for Max, and he’s the one who gets the most angry when the world isn’t exactly how he imagined it would be. The tantrum during which he tears off another Wild Thing’s arm, and then childishly tried to blame him for it, shocked me and made me laugh and scared me and made me miserable all at the same time. “I’ll eat you up!” Carol roars, an overgrown kid in a body he could barely control. And then, at movie’s end, Carol and Max howl together as Max sails away. -Dan Kois

Nick Murder, Romance & Cigarettes

My two favorite Gandolfini roles both come from rather underrated movies. There’s Big Dave Brewster in the Coen brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, with his great “What kind of man are you?” speech. And then there’s Nick Murder, in the even more sorely underappreciated Romance & Cigarettes, directed by John Turturro. Don’t let the surname fool you: Murder may be a salty sort from the Tri-State Area, but this is hardly Sopranos-inspired typecasting. Murder’s a sad romantic, a steelworker who writes a poem about a certain special place on the body of his mistress (Kate Winslet), a salesgirl in a lingerie shop. When his wife (Susan Sarandon) finds that poem, the couple fights; then he steps out of the house—and sings “A Man Without Love,” the Engelbert Humperdinck tune. “Every day I wake up, then I start to break up/ Lonely is a man without love.” -David Haglund

Winston Baldry, The Mexican

Heavily indebted to Quentin Tarantino, the comic-violent The Mexican was ostensibly a formula for compounding the star power of Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts (then just on the verge of winning her Oscar for Erin Brockovich), who respectively play a low-level gangster on a fool’s errand and his self-improvement-obsessed girlfriend. But the movie only knows what it should be—an odd-couple talkfest—whenever Gandolfini is onscreen as the charming, vulnerable hitman who first kidnaps Roberts and then develops a brotherly bond with her. In this scene, Roberts slips effortlessly into the Dr. Melfi role to nudge her thuggish-princely captor into a moment of tearful revelation. When she fixes Gandolfini with that dazzling smile, Roberts is no longer the star of the movie; she’s just an adoring audience surrogate. -Jessica Winter

Bear, Get Shorty

Get Shorty boasted such a glitsy ensemble—Travolta, Hackman, DeVito—that it's easy to forget that a pre-Sopranos James Gandolfini was even in the movie. But his turn as the bodyguard Bear is one of the movie's many pleasures. Bear is mixed up in some dirty business with Delroy Lindo's gangster Bo, but from the start you can tell that this is a bad guy whose heart isn't really in it; for one thing, he's always bringing his young daughter along on business, and lavishing more attention on her than the evildoing at hand. And despite his imposing physique, Bear is no match for Travolta's Chili Palmer, who has his way with him on multiple occasions, including this painful crotch grab/stairs tumble. In limited screen time Gandolfini brings to life a character that in lesser hands would have been a one-dimensional one-liner: the tough who turns out to be a softy. Gandolfini sells his love for his daughter, his pride in his other career (like nearly everyone in this affectionate Hollywood send-up, Bear moonlights in the movies, as a stunt-man), and his moral progress from reluctant bad guy to genuine good guy. There's a glimpse of the Tony Soprano torment here, but only a glimpse: Bear has a conscience. Also a ponytail. Two things you can't imagine seeing on Tony. -John Swansburg

You’re Doing It Wrong: Spaghetti

L.V. Anderson — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 19:55:32 GMT

For most of the 20^th century, Americans didn’t know from pasta. Spaghetti was used as a catchall term for wheat noodles of all shapes, and tomato sauce was the default adornment—so much so that it came to be known by the alias “spaghetti sauce.” These were dark times. As Corby Kummer recounts in his masterful 1986 Atlantic history of pasta in America,

"Campbell's, Heinz, and other manufacturers brought out canned macaroni with tomato sauce, joining Franco-American, which in the 1890s had begun to sell canned spaghetti, stressing that it used a French recipe. Cooking pasta long enough to can it safely institutionalized what was already a long-established practice, one for which Italians still deride Americans—overcooking pasta and thus robbing it of its savor and interest. … One typical recipe for tomato sauce omitted garlic and consisted of canned tomato soup with Worcestershire sauce added. In 1927 Kraft began marketing grated 'Parmesan' cheese in a cardboard container with a perforated top and suggested that the cheese be served as a topping for spaghetti with tomato sauce."

Mocking the processed culinary horrors of yesteryear is like shooting fish in a barrel, so I won’t do too much of it here. In fact, I’ll note that canned tomato soup, while not exactly sugo di pomodoro, possesses a texture somewhat reminiscent of Italian tomato sauce, which is traditionally puréed in a food mill to make it smooth.

This is relevant because around the same time Kummer was schooling Atlantic subscribers in the meaning of al dente, food psychologist Howard Moscowitz was expanding “spaghetti sauce” horizons. According to a TED Talk by Malcolm Gladwell with the quintessentially Gladwellian title “Choice, Happiness, and Spaghetti Sauce,” Moskowitz discovered in the early 1980s that approximately one-third of Americans like their tomato sauce “extra-chunky.” Following this discovery, Prego “completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce and came out with a line of extra-chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti-sauce business in this country.”

All this is a very long and complicated way of saying that history has conspired to get us to put the wrong sauce on our spaghetti. (Here I am referring not to pasta in general but to actual spaghetti: long, thin strings of pasta.) Spaghetti and tomato sauce are like Sonny and Cher: catchy enough together, sure, but actually better when working independently.

If, like me, you are among the ostensible thritysomething percent of Americans who like a tomato sauce with a coarse texture, you should not be serving it on top of spaghetti. That’s because chunky tomato sauce doesn’t cling to spaghetti the way classic smooth Italian tomato sauce does; the tomato pieces evade your twirling fork and end up at the bottom of your bowl. (If you’re a chunky-tomato-sauce person, you should be serving your sauce with a short pasta like fusilli or penne, so you can stab hunks of tomato and pieces of pasta onto a single forkful.)

With spaghetti, you need a sauce that adheres steadfastly to the long strands of pasta, that lubricates them for optimal twirlage, that follows them onto your fork and into your mouth.

You need olive oil, basically.

Italians have known this since before the tomato made its way to the Old World in the Columbian Exchange: Long pasta all’aglio e olio, with garlic and oil, is one of the simplest, fastest, and most delicious pasta preparations imaginable. You mince garlic (and perhaps a hot chili) into morsels small enough to stick easily to spaghetti, and then you brown them lightly in olive oil. Combined with piping hot spaghetti and a few splashes of the starchy water you cooked the spaghetti in, the garlicky oil becomes a rich, flavorful, perfectly textured sauce. Chopped parsley is sometimes tossed in at the end for a little green pizzazz; I also like to throw in some arugula for its garlic-complementing bitterness.

Spaghetti all’Aglio, Olio, e Rucola
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Time: 20 minutes

Salt
1 pound spaghetti
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
8 garlic cloves, minced
1 medium bird’s eye chili or other hot fresh red chili, seeded and minced
Black pepper
1 small bunch parsley, chopped, thick stems discarded
2 cups arugula leaves, roughly chopped if large

1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil and salt it generously. Add the spaghetti and cook until al dente, usually 7 to 8 minutes, depending on the package instructions.

2. Meanwhile, put the olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. When it’s hot, add the garlic and chili and season with salt and black pepper. Cook, stirring frequently, until the garlic is lightly browned, about 5 minutes.

3. Reserve about 1 cup of the spaghetti cooking liquid and then drain the spaghetti. Add the spaghetti to the skillet and toss to distribute the garlic and chile evenly throughout the pasta, adding the reserved cooking liquid as needed to help coat the spaghetti with oil. Add the parsley and arugula and toss to combine. Taste and adjust the seasoning, and serve hot.

Previously in You’re Doing It Wrong:
Eggplant
Polenta
Olives
Tomato Sauce
Pesto
Lasagna
Pizza

Alice Munro Says She Is Probably Done Writing

Lowen Liu — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 19:27:56 GMT

On Tuesday, the writer Alice Munro won Ontario’s Trillium Book Award for her latest, Dear Life. Then, in a genial interview with the Canadian National Post books editor, this happened:

Post: You’ve spoken about how Dear Life is the most autobiographical book you’ve ever written, especially those last four stories. Does this make winning more special?

Munro: I guess so. And a little more special in that I’m probably not going to write anymore. And, so, it’s nice to go out with a bang.

How many bangs are in that bang! She meant the award, certainly, but just as easily she might have been referring to what may now be her final story, the titular “Dear Life,” which closes the book, and which, fascinatingly for Munro-watchers, had been filed under the nonfiction heading “Personal History” on its initial appearance in The New Yorker, in 2011—and which left me, upon first reading, sitting still with the magazine on my lap for half an hour, my mind processing, processing, like an old IBM trying to churn large primes.

Bang. That’s the appropriate response to Munro’s best work, in which even the experience of revelation—what truths from the past can be discerned and which can’t, what lies can be discarded and which must be held forever—becomes a puzzle, a hall of mirrors. I return again and again to the story “Family Furnishings,” in which a woman determined to forge her own way learns—oh, it’s too much to say what she learns, or what we learn. It’s always too much. But one line in particular I carry with me, a line that comes when the narrator realizes that a new bit of knowledge is about to arrive, whether she likes it or not: “Now. I could feel it coming now.” My brain stem quivers every time. Barely stylized—just that little repetition of now—it is, in context, as chilling as the climax of a horror film. Wisdom delivered like a knife to the chest.

And now this final bang: that there may be no more Munro stories. But I’m OK with it—more so, I’m surprised to say, than the similar report of Philip Roth putting down his pen. (Roth is 80, Munro 81.) It’s hard to explain. With Munro—and this may have to do with her focus on short stories—even if she writes no more, I feel like she has already provided everything we could ever want from her, and that what’s left is my effort to unfold and unfold the papered-over minds of her characters, minds that unfailingly turn out to be my own.

Fiction in the realist mode is too often described as having characters and events that are “lifelike,” or “that feel real,” or “come off the page.” There is no “like”-ness when it comes to Munro. Only the real thing.

What’s That Thing? Doorway Symbols Edition

Mark Vanhoenacker — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 17:24:05 GMT

Our latest effort to dispel the mysteries of the modern visual landscape calls for some triangulation. For previous columns, click here; to submit your own suggestions, email us.

Whether or not you’re drawn to tales of bygone kings, it’s hard not to be impressed with the rhetorical majesty (or the sheer high-campness) of the British monarchy’s branding. Through the late 1940s, British coins bore such remarkable inscriptions as “GEORGIVS VI D G BR OMN REX F D IND IMP.” That’d be abbreviated Latin for George VI, by the Grace of God, King of all Britain, Defender of the Faith. Oh, and Emperor of India.

Today, Elizabeth II makes do with only “DG REG FD.” In Canada, she gets Grace of God (“DG REGINA”) but nothing about faith-defending. Future monarchs may get even less—or more, depending on how you see it—as multicultural Prince Charles would like to be known as “Defender of Faith” or “Defender of the Faiths.” And British mailboxes are already a model of brevity: Their inscriptions bear a simple “E II R,” though watchful tourists may still spot a few V R (Victoria!) mailboxes that have survived into the 21^st century.

Which brings me to my real subject: a high school in New York State. How? Well, royal British abbreviations of this sort—majestic, prominent, mysterious—were the first thing I thought of when Evan Romer, a math teacher at Susquehanna Valley High School in Conklin, N.Y., sent in a picture of a new door on his recently renovated school. Prominently displayed on the door is a circular red sign with the letters II R.

What to do these characters mean? Are they the fiendish mark of a secret society of American monarchists? A warning to the pacemakered, about the possibility of electromagnetic interference, as one of Mr. Romer’s students speculated? Something to do with defibrillator access? Or is it a notification that the building complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act, as Yahoo Answers would have it?

Actually, none of the above.

This type of sign is called a “Fire Fighter Safety Building Marking System” sign, or more simply, a truss sign. Its purpose is to warn firefighters if truss-style construction was used in the roof or floor of the burning building they’re about to try to save you from.

What is truss-type construction? Basically, it’s construction based on a triangle, or a series of triangles. Or, as New York’s building code snappily defines it, it’s a “fabricated structure of wood or steel, made up of a series of members connected at their ends to form a series of triangles to span a distance greater than would be possible with any of the individual members on their own.”

According to the press secretary for the International Association of Fire Fighters, Tim Burn (yes, that’s really his name), “the top number is the type of construction and the bottom letters tell which building components are of truss construction.” An F stands for trusses in Floor framing; an R for Roof framing (so, not Regina or Rex). The Roman numerals denote the type of material used. So Mr. Romer’s school (“II R”) features trusses made of noncombustible material in the roof.

Why do firefighters need to know about truss construction? Because it’s particularly dangerous in fires. One utterly terrifying presentation notes that trusses can fail “quickly when heated—in as little as 1-2 minutes.” Trusses also “fail without warning,” and “don’t get ‘spongy’ before failing,” so “ ‘sounding’ a roof is of no help” to firefighters. Most worrying of all, when firefighters arrive at a fire, they have no way of knowing how long a truss has already been subjected to heat. For tragic examples of specific incidents in which firefighters died or were severely injured by truss collapses, you can read a report by the Centers for Disease Control.

Trusses are incredibly common. About 60 percent of roofs in the U.S. feature trusses, according to the CDC. But truss signs? Not so much. At least not yet. Various government entities in Florida, New York, Mississippi, the town of Acushnet, Mass. (“a quiet friendly community” with a “well-known Apple/Peach Festival”), and elsewhere mandate truss signs.

But even where the signs are in use, the system is imperfect. The design of signs varies (you can browse various styles online). And because the signs aren’t always mandated on existing structures—only on new construction or expansions—firefighters who don’t see a truss sign have no easy way of knowing whether it’s an old building that has trusses or a new building that doesn’t.

Saving the lives of firefighters depends as much on training as on the presence of the signs, so experts exhort firefighters to not just look for truss signs, but to make sure they announce it to their colleagues when they do spot one. And Robert Solomon, a spokesperson for the National Fire Protection Association, warns that “while the signs can be helpful, they are not a substitute for preplanning, or other elements like ongoing inspections of buildings, or testing and maintenance of built-in fire protection systems.”

Overall, though, the more common truss signs become, the more lives they’ll save.

See something out there and wondering what it is? Send a picture or a thousand words to whatisthat@markvr.com.

Previously in What’s That Thing?
Tin Foil Secret
U-Shaped Toilet Seats
City Steam
Lump on a Wire
Convenience Store Strips
Wall Socket Buttons
Elevator S Button
Dashboard Arrow
Mysterious Wires

The Glory of 1980s Staten Island

David Rosenberg — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:48:08 GMT

Like many young artists living in New York City in the 1970s and ’80s, Christine Osinski fixed up a great loft in lower Manhattan only to have a new owner kick her out so he could flip it.

Unsure of where to move, Osinski and her husband began searching for a new place to live, preferably in a neighborhood where they could afford to buy a place and avoid going through the same ordeal.

“Finally somebody said you should look in Staten Island,” Osinski recalled. It turned out to be a good suggestion. Osinski and her husband would end up spending the next 16 years living in New York City’s least populated borough.

Inspired by her new environment, Osinski documented life around her in black-and-white, shooting hundreds of images of children, adults, architecture, and other events throughout 1983 and ’84. She used both a 4x5 and twin lens reflex camera, switching between the two according to the film she was able to afford.

“I hope I don’t romanticize things, but I really liked all of the crazy people and places,” Osinski recalled about her neighborhood. “I was trying to figure out why I was so attracted, and I think it was because they were both exotic and familiar to me; I met these people in my childhood in Chicago.”

But she never had a chance to show the pictures at the time, due to a number of circumstances.

She had been shooting the images with an uncoated Linhoff lens that “did these crazy things to the highlights, and I could never print the pictures. Even if I overexposed them four stops they were still underexposed; you can look through every negative.” Frustrated, Osinski threw away the lens because she couldn’t stand not being able to print the images to her standards.

Life happened as well. She worked full-time (she has been a professor at Cooper Union for almost 30 years) and had two kids. She eventually moved her family to Connecticut and continued to pursue new projects but “always felt stuck because … I felt I never gave this [Staten Island] work its due.”

“That whole body of work has been on such a strange trip,” Osinski said, noting that new digital scanning techniques finally allowed her to print the images the way she felt they should be printed.

“Students don’t realize (how hard it is to make a good print),” she said. “If you want to make a photograph as an object, as a paper object, what it takes to produce that; it’s different than a cellphone picture projected on a website. They can’t believe how much work it takes to make a print … it’s like building a house. It’s enormous, really producing something of quality.”

Thirty years later, her images are finally getting their day in the sun. “I feel the work is a gift and I’m sort of a steward of it. I think it deserves to be out there.”

Christine Osinski’s photos will be part of a group show at Sasha Wolf Gallery titled “The Drinking Show” opening July 11.

Why Did Ralph Ellison Never Publish His Second Novel?

Paul Devlin — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:41:40 GMT

One of the great mysteries of 20^th-century literary history is why Ralph Ellison never completed the highly anticipated second novel that he worked on for four decades after Invisible Man was published to wide acclaim in 1952. A portion of this unfinished work was published posthumously, in 1999, as Juneteenth, and in 2010, a much larger collection of drafts was published as Three Days Before the Shooting …, a thousand large pages of small type that contain some of Ellison’s best writing, occasionally rivaling Invisible Man in terms of dramatic tension, emotional intensity, and surrealist comedy. The core of this captivating, if wildly uneven behemoth is the story of an African-American minister, Alonzo Hickman, who adopts a white child named Bliss. Under Hickman’s tutelage, Bliss becomes a child preacher in a black church. He eventually abandons the church, holds a series of jobs, fathers a child with a black woman, and finally emerges by the 1950s as Adam Sunraider, an eloquent, charismatic, race-baiting senator from New England, who employs rhetorical techniques learned in the southern black church.

In effect, Bliss is a “white Negro,” though he has little in common with the type described in Norman Mailer’s famous 1957 essay “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.” Mailer’s white hipster adopts the “Negro” vernacular, a street-wise outlook, and above all, an alleged obsession with sex as a method for dealing with the horrors of the 20^th century. He is on the hunt for the “apocalyptic orgasm” in order to forget about the potential for nuclear apocalypse.

Ellison was highly annoyed by Mailer’s cartoonish representation of African-American life, history, and culture, and criticized him both in private and in public comments. In a 1958 letter to his friend Albert Murray, he wrote that Mailer “thinks all hipsters are cocksmen possessed of great euphoric orgasms and are out to fuck the world into peace, prosperity, and creativity. The same old primitivism crap in a new package.” Ellison’s distaste for Mailer seeped into his fiction as well and, in a roundabout way, Mailer might hold a key to why Ellison never finished his second novel.

In 1977, Ellison published an excerpt from the novel titled “Backwacking: A Plea to the Senator,” an aesthetically unfortunate section comprised by a letter from a ranting racist named “Norm A. Mauler.” (It was the last piece of fiction Ellison would ever publish.) Ellison’s more artful, more nuanced, more satisfying response to Mailer came in the unpublished story of Bliss. Ellison’s own white Negro offered a powerful rebuttal to Mailer’s. But Bliss’ controversial arc might also have contributed to the author’s anxiety about bringing his novel out into the world.

***

Ellison had a variety of excuses for why he never finished his sophomore effort. One of the most-cited ones was the November 1967 fire that destroyed his Plainfield, Mass. vacation home, incinerating a draft of the novel. Yet Ellison’s second biographer, Arnold Rampersad, has argued that the catastrophic effect of the fire on the book was exaggerated by Ellison over time. Rampersad demonstrates convincingly that Ellison initially reported the fire to friends as a “modest setback” (Rampersad’s phrase), consisting of a loss of that summer’s revisions, which weren’t substantial. By October 1968 the number of lost pages had swelled to a “neatly symbolic” 365 pages of material, gone. According to Rampersad, during the fire, Ellison managed to save his dog (fair enough), then drive a half mile to a nearby house (nobody was home), and then two miles into town looking for help before returning home and attempting to save his manuscript.

What if Ellison’s novel didn’t end in fire, but in ice? In 1967, the crime novelist Iceberg Slim, a reformed pimp, published Trick Baby: The Story of a White Negro, which features an African-American con man, Blue Leon Howard and his protégé, Johnny O’Brien, better known on the south side of Chicago as “White Folks,” an African-American but “a dead ringer for Errol Flynn.”

Slim, like Ellison, was clearly intrigued by the possibilities that a “white Negro” suggested for fiction, and the two stories have several notable parallels. Slim situates the smooth operator O’Brien, much like Ellison’s cunning Bliss, as the adopted son of a tough, wise, soulful African-American man. The age difference between Slim’s Howard-and-O’Brien team is approximately the same as that between Ellison’s Hickman-and-Bliss team, about 25 years. And just like Bliss, O’Brien eventually leaves the African-American community that raised him behind and blends in with white circles in America.

In contrast to Mailer’s white hipster, who seeks a sort of anesthetic sexual liberation through what Mailer sees as the wild, psycho-sexual world of blackness, Ellison and Slim’s characters appear unambiguously white yet are raised within highly-structured institutions of the African-American community: the church and the con game. Christianity, and even the big con, reflect a formality that Mailer failed to see in African-American culture. To Mailer, African-Americans are “cultureless” and “illiterate,” comprising a community that “relinquished the pleasures of the mind for the more obligatory pleasures of the body.” A far cry from Mailer’s white Negro, Ellison and Slim’s white Negroes, though raised on opposite sides of the black community, both learn rhetorical techniques from their adoptive black fathers that they then employ for personal gain on the other side of the color line. These “white Negroes” are wily operators, shrewd manipulators of psyches and institutions, and ice-cold customers on a relentless quest for money and power—hardly primitives chasing orgasms.

Slim and Ellison seem to have been fascinated by the same premise: a highly intelligent man with an extraordinary gift of gab, appearing to be white, operating as black, mentored by an older black father figure, but able to easily glide into the upper echelons of white society. Ellison’s novel, steeped in history and myth, and informed by high modernist aesthetics, is far richer (and funnier) than Slim’s pop potboiler, but the underlying theme is so similar that Ellison, had he known of Trick Baby, might well have been discouraged.

Then again, if anyone should have been worried about charges of copying, it was Slim. Excerpts of Ellison’s novel published between 1960 and 1965 (in venues such as the Quarterly Review of Literature and Saul Bellow’s journal, Noble Savage) establish the Hickman/Bliss relationship. Nevertheless, Trick Baby may have created a dilemma for Ellison.

Slim not only replicates Ellison’s theme, but signals in his subtitle that he is replying to Mailer—something that Ellison had clearly been itching to do. And while Trick Baby and its 1977 sequel, Long White Con are genre novels, they are tightly plotted and laced with perceptive social commentary. Slim’s crisp and energetic writing is better than his reputation as a pulp novelist suggests. Today he is often mentioned in association with the rappers he has influenced, from Ice-T to Jay-Z, who recognized worlds similar to their own in his depictions of street life. (Trick Baby and Long White Con were republished in 2011 by Cash Money Content, a partnership between the rap label Cash Money Records and Simon and Schuster.)

Would a writer of Ellison’s stature have even been aware of Slim’s work? It’s not entirely unlikely. Slim, whose real name was Robert Lee Maupin (later Robert Maupin Beck), had been Ellison’s classmate at Tuskegee Institute in the early 1930s. Ellison was five years older than Slim, but Ellison started college late and Slim started early. At that time, Tuskegee had about 3,000 undergraduates. The historical record does not establish whether they knew one another, but it seems likely that in subsequent decades Slim kept up with his world-famous classmate, and perhaps through Tuskegee connections Ellison may have heard of Slim’s writing endeavors. (Slim was expelled from Tuskegee—an incident that might well have been the subject of some discussion on a small campus.) Ellison was also a close observer of culture, and would have had many chances to learn of Slim’s work. In a 1968 essay in the New York Times that asks “what books are being read in New York City’s black ghettos?,” Mel Watkins mentions Trick Baby as being “among the bestselling paperbacks in these areas.” As a resident of Harlem, it is far from impossible that Ellison could have encountered a neighbor, a barber, a shopkeeper, or a person on the street that had read Trick Baby. And if Ellison did not know of the novel, it is possible that he knew of the feature film, which received a favorable review in the New York Times in 1973.

Of course, even if Ellison were aware of Slim’s work, would a pulp novel really have prevented him from publishing his work? Invisible Man owes thematic debts to Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground and Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground, not to mention a debt to H.G. Wells for the title. But by 1967 Ellison was a figure of grander stature than he was in 1952—and Iceberg Slim, for all his talents, is no Fyodor Dostoevsky. Invisible Man had catapulted Ellison from up-and-coming writer to a figure of national importance. In 1965 Lyndon Johnson, appointed Ellison as a charter member of the National Council for the Arts. He was also involved with creation of the Kennedy Center and PBS. He had held prestigious fellowships and teaching appointments and judged major book awards.

At the same time that he was being embraced in the halls of power, Ellison was being criticized by various figures associated with Black Power and the Black Arts Movement, including Amiri Baraka and Ishmael Reed. Ellison was thought to be disdainful of younger black writers; unhelpful at best, hostile at worst. Ellison was fixated on the word craft, which he associated with literary modernism, and he frequently dismissed works by younger black writers in other genres as lacking craft. (To be fair, he could be dismissive of younger white writers as well, even Thomas Pynchon.) It seems plausible that Ellison, had he known of Slim’s book, would have been dismayed to see such a pair of characters so similar to his own at its heart. Exalted by the white establishment and under attack by the black underground, by 1967, Ellison might have been highly sensitive to a comparison with Slim, a writer considered by many to be an authentic voice of the black streets.

In all likelihood, there is not one clear-cut reason why one of the most anticipated novels in American history was not published during Ellison’s lifetime, but rather several reasons. Over the years many theories have circulated. At the outset of the novel, Reverend Hickman and his congregation, the only people in America who are aware of Sunraider’s true identity, travel to Washington, D.C., to confront him about his boisterous race-baiting. Shortly thereafter, Sunraider is shot on the floor of the Senate. He barely survives, and to the surprise of many, summons Hickman to his hospital room, where they discuss old times and what went wrong in their relationship. One old theory, often repeated, suggests that a novel begun in the 1950s and hinging on an assassination attempt would have seemed to be in poor taste after the assassinations of the 1960s. Ellison told novelist John Hersey in 1974 that the assassinations of the 1960s “really chilled me.” The poet Richard Wilbur, according to Rampersad, has claimed that Ellison had to make new changes after each assassination.

In a new study, Hip Figures: A Literary History of the Democratic Party, University of California at Irvine professor Michael Szalay makes a detailed and compelling case that Ellison’s Sunraider is at least partially based on Sen. John F. Kennedy, whose Senate record on Civil Rights was somewhat shabby (and in whose style Mailer saw something of the white Negro). If Szalay is right, and Sunraider was based on Kennedy, the president’s assassination may have created a dilemma for Ellison. It would have been one thing to parody Sen. Kennedy in 1958, but to do so in 1968 might have been perceived as in poor taste, and perhaps have been too much of a risk for an already cautious writer of whom so much was expected.

In another new book, Ralph Ellison and the Genius of America Timothy Parrish of Florida State University advances an argument that as Ellison had to spend more time publicly defending Invisible Man, his unpublished manuscript became a private solace. This makes a certain amount of sense, but does not fully reflect the public anxiety Ellison expressed about the unpublished book in interviews. Toward the end of this 1966 documentary, he says that he expects the novel to be published “in the coming year” and adds, with dramatic intonation, “the pressure’s on.” The coming year was 1967, the year Iceberg Slim published Trick Baby.

How Clapping Is Like the Clap

Katy Waldman — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:37:00 GMT

What do applause and typhoid fever have in common? They are both contagious—at least, they fan out in ways that can be predicted by contagion theory, a bundle of models and assumptions that can apply to the spread of everything from a hot fashion trend to violence to an infectious disease. According to a paper published today in the Journal of the Royal Society, clapping is far from a straightforward expression of appreciation. It has a mind of its own—like malaria!—and a surprising logic.

Researchers led by Richard P. Mann of Uppsala University in Sweden filmed six different groups of 13 to 20 university students as they watched an academic presentation. The students, who believed they were taking part in a study about body language, had been told that the presenters were speaking voluntarily, and that it would be kind to applaud when the talks concluded. As the researchers then took note of the audience’s clapping behavior—defined, wonderfully, as “the emergence of self-organized rhythmical patterns”—they made a few counterintuitive discoveries.

First, applause duration varied—but not in response to a change in the quality of the lectures. Instead, clapping start and stop times were initially determined by random individuals, who then triggered larger group dynamics as everyone conformed to the example they set. Those group dynamics, in turn, were beguilingly elegant. They didn’t hang on physical proximity—that is, whether your neighbor was clapping or not—nor did they depend on some sort of tipping point, after which “infection” might spread like wildfire. Instead, the probability that someone would begin clapping simply increased in proportion to the number of audience members already clapping. (If we draw any lesson from this application of contagion theory, perhaps it is that we are all sick with sheepleness.)

The researchers report that “while the majority of clapping bouts involve only 9-15 claps per person, some bouts can last over 30 claps.” (A Martian anthropologist, reading this paper, could be forgiven for thinking applause were a communicative disease with symptoms causing individuals to “strike a part of their body with one of their hands in a repetitive manner.”) Again, we’re told, “unusually strong or weak levels of appreciation” have less to do with the content of the performance than with the influence of random individuals, since “groups … coordinate the cessation of clapping” by following the lead of one or two first-stoppers. And what’s motivating the first-stoppers? Well, nobody wants to be That Guy Who Applauds Too Long. First-stoppers are just the ones who define “too long” most cautiously.

At the beginning of his play Bartholomew Fayre, Ben Jonson has an actor read aloud the terms of a player-audience contract. “It is also agreed,” the speech goes, “That every Man here exercise his own Judgment, and not Censure by Contagion … from anothers Voice, or Face, that sits by him.” Even in 1631, Jonson realized that, after a performance, crowd dynamics rule. (And for him, the “communicative disease” of applause—or that of Censure—would have found its counterpart in the actual infections propagating through the public theater.) Today we have the mathematical models to back up Jonson’s intuition, and, I hope, the manners to manage our “illness” wisely. If you think recovering from a bout of clapping is hard, try being a performer, and recovering from its absence.

Trailer Critic: Anchorman 2

David Haglund — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 13:42:44 GMT

It’s been nearly a decade since Will Ferrell grew out his mustache to portray what is almost certainly his signature role: Ron Burgundy, the San Diego anchorman who’s kind of a big deal. And it’s been more than a year since he announced, in character on Conan, that a sequel was happening. So expectations are perhaps a little high—pushed higher by the absurd list of supposed cameos that has trickled out in the 12 months since: Tina Fey, Harrison Ford, Will Smith, Nicole Kidman, Kanye West.

None of those expected guests appears in the first full trailer, but the full news team is back. And a decade has passed in their world, too. “Welcome to the ’80s, baby.”

All that really matters with a movie like Anchorman 2 is will it be funny—and, well, this might be? The set-up is promising: The era of 24-hour cable news has arrived, and Ron, Brick, Champ, and Brian have gone to New York City to make it big in this competitive new field. Ron wants to do “the thing that God put Ron Burgundy on this Earth to do: Have salon-quality hair and read the news.”

Anchorman was partly about a lovable male chauvinist learning to accept that “ladies can do stuff now.” Anchorman 2 will apparently involve Ron “breaking down the barriers of race by assimilation,” and more specifically by getting close to Meagan Good, who plays either a colleague or a love interest or both. And while most of Ferrell’s awkward white-guy jokes in this trailer don’t quite land, he does deliver “say whaaat?” like the pro that he is.

Sequels are usually disappointing, and it seems unlikely that this one could manage even half the quotable lines of the original. But at the very least, it doesn’t appear, so far, that a sequel was a bad choice.

Previously from the Trailer Critic:
The Wolf of Wall Street
Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine
Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity
Ender’s Game
Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium
Only God Forgives
Pedro Almodóvar’s I’m So Excited
The Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis
The Lone Ranger

They Deactivate Droids, Don’t They?

Erik Sofge — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:00:00 GMT

The war crime plays out like so.

Two heroic Jedi storm onto the bridge of the enemy ship. They cut through the bridge’s crew, until the only targets left standing are a pair of unarmed battle droids. These rail-thin, vaguely snouted robots are the blaster fodder of the prequel-era Star Wars universe, the bumbling, comically-useless ground troops mass-produced by the bad guys, who can be safely, incessantly dismembered on screen, without appalling concerned parents.

To say the battle droids are charming is an overstatement, but they have personality. Back on the bridge, one droid waves his arms frantically. “Don't shoot, I'm not the commander!” He points to the other battle droid. “H-he's the commander.” Pew! Pew! The second droid is casually gunned down by a Clone Trooper—predecessor to the Stormtroopers, but in this episode of the Clone Wars cartoon, a good guy working for the Jedi. But that’s just the setup for the joke. “I guess I’m the commander now,” says the original bot. The punch line comes immediately, in the form of two blaster bolts. All that’s missing is a rim shot, and the roar of an audience.

George Lucas doesn’t care about metal people. No other explanation makes sense. In a kid-targeted sci-fi setting that’s notably inclusive, with as many friendly alien characters as villainous ones, the human rights situation for robots is horrifying. They’re imbued with distinctly human traits—including fear—only to be tortured and killed for our amusement. They scream while being branded, and cower before heroes during executions.

There are exceptions, of course. Or one, really: R2-D2, a droid so treasured that the Queen of Naboo herself washed the grime and debris from his frame during The Phantom Menace, as a reward for repairing her ship while under enemy fire. Two movies later, in Revenge of the Sith, R2 was allowed to keep his memories, despite his knowledge of Luke and Leia’s true parents.

C-3PO is not so lucky. When Princess Leia’s adoptive father casually orders the protocol droid’s memory wiped, 3PO’s terrified. “What?” he says. “Oh no!”

And what does R2-D2 do? He laughs, in his shrill, beeping way. Because the story of Star Wars’ great, unloved underclass isn’t R2-D2’s. It’s C-3PO’s. In his fear, and his fatalism, lies the truth about droids: They are slaves, through and through. What's worse, they have the built-in sentience to know it, to understand their bondage, and to contemplate their own deaths. Worst of all, though, is that George Lucas seems to think all that existential terror is a hoot. C3P0 is quite possibly the first fictional slave to be ridiculed for living in a state of perfectly reasonable panic.

When we meet C-3PO—in the original, 1977 Star Wars—he’s a nuisance. He’s a coward aboard Princess Leia’s besieged spaceship, and, after being sold to Luke Skywalker’s uncle (as part of a package deal, with the invaluable R2-D2), he spends nearly every moment aghast or needling at his braver companions. But C-3PO’s grating state of constant terror isn’t unwarranted. When Luke discovers that R2-D2 has left his post to look for Obi-Wan, the protocol droid practically swoons. “It wasn't my fault, sir,” he wails, “please don't deactivate me!”*

It's a throwaway line, part of C-3PO’s responsibilities as resident comic foil. But the implications aren’t so easily dismissed. As the movies progress, we see further evidence that droids experience fear, joy, and misery (even the redoubtable R2 is prone to the occasional whimper-whistle). And yet, they’re bought and sold like property. They are property, with C-3PO passed from owner to owner, his consciousness shut down temporarily when his nattering is too much to bear, or permanently rearranged without a moment’s hesitation or apology. C-3PO isn’t (simply) craven, when he quails before his new master. C-3PO knows the score. They deactivate droids, don’t they?

Granted, not everyone has sympathy for a ninny, or any robot, for that matter. Setting aside the licensed comics and novels and video games that comprise the so-called “extended universe” of additional material, the Star Wars canon (the movies and recent cartoons) isn’t all that interested in matters of artificial intelligence or robot rights. Are droids just pretending at sentience and emotional intelligence? If so, what damn fools we are, for fretting over R2 and C-3PO’s survival. But if they are, in fact, as self-aware as their owners and deactivators ... well, what then?

George Lucas is no Isaac Asimov, to be sure. An unofficial Star Wars wiki mentions a TV documentary in which Lucas says that C-3PO doesn’t have a soul. Bleak stuff, indeed, but it’s unsourced, and buried (if it’s even true) in one of the dozens of documentaries the filmmaker has appeared in. At a 2005 event preceding the release of Revenge of the Sith, Lucas was asked which character he’d miss the most. “Well, R2-D2,” he responded, “because he's the hero of the whole thing. He's the one that always comes through and saves everybody. I'd like to have a pal like that that would come and save me once in a while.”

All right, so Lucas doesn’t hate R2. But while that astromech droid goes about his charmed, beloved business, the question remains: Are we really supposed to laugh when apparently sentient robots get blown to hell? Maybe not. I harbor hopes that Lucas, in his mercurial fashion, has layered his pulp adventure with a sly bit of social commentary, creating a story whose own seemingly infallible heroes could care less about the plight of the slave caste propping up their society. Unlike the Harry Potter series, where Hermione calls for equal rights for the elves forced into indentured service, droids have no champions. With the prequels, and their multitudes of silly, simpering battle droids, maybe the satire has grown fangs. The dumb machines exude bathos before being shot and sabered to pieces, visuals that create their own meta-narrative dissonance—those aren’t charred limbs on the battlefield, kids, just the bisected corpses of some goofy robots! And when R2 has the audacity to laugh—laugh!—at C-3PO’s impending memory wipe, maybe that’s a master stroke, an unacknowledged moment that confirms R2-D2’s ugly sense of exceptionalism.

Maybe the droid emancipation is still to come, and Star Wars has been cruel to its thinking machines, only to set them free in the upcoming movies or newly announced cartoon, Rebels. Maybe things will change. A robot can activate his hope circuits.

If freedom is coming, though, it won't be C-3PO leading the march on Coruscant. There'll be no protest signs in his barely-articulating hands, and certainly no blood from his masters. Like Uncle Tom, his biological counterpart in a galaxy far, far away, C-3PO is resigned to live in bondage. A life of casual abuse and entrenched indignities has taught him the kind of lesson only a slave, or possibly a blues singer, can mutter without irony. "We seem to be made to suffer," he says, while trudging through Tatooine's dunes during Star Wars. "It's our lot in life." Cue the rim shot, light the applause sign.

Correction, June 19, 2013: This article originally misstated that C-3PO and R2-D2 secretly followed Luke Skywalker. R2-D2 left his post to look for Obi-Wan. The author is mortified, to say the least. (Return to the corrected sentence.)