Wesley Morris

I keep a file on my phone labeled Wellness. It’s got zero fitness tips and no meditation advice. It’s full, instead, of stuff about Gwyneth Paltrow movies. Like how, in “A Perfect Murder,” she buys Viggo Mortensen a fancy espresso maker and tells him, “You could use a little civilizing.” I called my Paltrow file Wellness because, last year, I thought it’d be amusing to find some overlap between her acting and Goop, her lifestyle brand. How many times had a Paltrow character tried to upgrade the lives of the people around her, just as a matter of taste, like that espresso machine or the matchmaking she tries to do in “Emma”?

But I had to stop, because eventually — and I mean after two movies — it was clear that the average Paltrow character doesn’t get to make anybody’s life much better because somebody’s always making hers worse. Imagine playing a pregnant woman who sits around a dingy apartment, as Paltrow does in “Se7en,” while Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt hunt the psycho who, at some point, removes your head then boxes it up like it’s a hat from eBay. Imagine playing the girlfriend of suspiciously missing Jude Law and having to run for your life, as Paltrow does in “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” because Matt Damon knows that you know he killed your man? And “A Perfect Murder”? It’s supposed to be hers!

Now, there’s a kind of person who’d remember her decapitation and feel kittens-on-the-internet happy, because there’s a kind of person who just doesn’t like Gwyneth Paltrow.

This person probably would have felt this way before there was ever a Goop. The tearful, gushing (utterly sincere) Oscar speech from 1999 would have set this person off. As well as the comedy about the loser who loves a fat version of Paltrow because he can see her true, beautiful inner self, and she’s skinny Gwyneth. And the fact that she dated Pitt and Ben Affleck, that she married the guy from Coldplay and named their first child after orchard fruit.

Maybe that kind of person dislikes the permanent pout of her mouth or her mild patrician drawl, the private-school privilege of it all. Maybe her brightness and ambient affluence are too “debutante” for them.

There’s a kind of person who watched the virus thriller “Contagion,” heard Paltrow’s grim opening line (“[cough, cough]”) and grinned: She’s so doomed. When two scientists peel back the top of her lifeless head (eyes still frozen in shock, mouth agape) so that it and her blonde hair cover half her face, there’s a kind of person who laughed out loud, not only because Steven Soderbergh shoots it so that it is kind of funny but because, again, they do not like Gwyneth Paltrow.

I am not that kind of person. I’m the kind of person who, when Paltrow collapses on her kitchen floor, gandered gravely at his watch (We’re only eight minutes in?); who, when she’s pronounced dead a minute later, seriously searched for the nearest exit — and this is a Soderbergh movie, one with Damon, Law, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard, Laurence Fishburne and Sanaa Lathan.

So, no: I am some other kind of person, the kind of who believes that Paltrow was, for a while, the best young American actor in Hollywood. She’s still among the very last generation of movie performers — including Cotillard and Cate Blanchett, Winslet and Nicole Kidman — for whom stardom and skill seem scarily, thrillingly natural.

I love the whine in Paltrow’s flirtation, the shock of her rage, how she can go from luminous to lost just like that, how she’s able to summon worry, misery and rue 70 different ways in a single performance. I was drawn to her intelligence and her radiance and the swings of her mood, improbably perhaps, but not really.

Lots of the women she’s played tend to exist on estates, in mansions and academia, but hers isn’t the acting of entitlement, the brattiness of privilege. If she laughed, I laughed. If she ached, I did, too. Damn the gentry. If Jessica Lange or Matt Damon is coming after her, I’m calling the police.

The end of the 1990s and start of the 2000s was High Paltrow. Everybody knew she was going to be major. They knew not because Harvey Weinstein, who made a string of Miramax movies with her, willed it but because people who went to the movies said so.

Noting that she made 15 films in five years is more weather report than adulation. But she made great weather — partly cloudy in “Sliding Doors,” partly sunny in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Great Expectations,” hazy in “Hush,” stormy in “The Royal Tenenbaums,” perfectly clear in “Shakespeare in Love.”

These were movies people liked (mostly). People seemed to like her in these movies. They gave her an Oscar for that last one, and something about that moment seemed to alter the forecast. Could it have been all the crying in the speech and the princess-pink Ralph Lauren dress? Or the idea that she beat Blanchett and Fernanda Montenegro, who complained to the Brazilian press that Paltrow won for being a “romantic figure, thin, pure, virginal”? Or the idea that Weinstein had manufactured her a win that came too soon, whatever that would even mean? Either way, something had changed.

That Wellness file of mine was a shallow excuse to write about a favorite performer who, in the last decade or so, appeared to lose her zest for performing. I, at least, had trouble making do with her alongside Robert Downey Jr.’s Iron Man, playing Pepper Potts, his assistant then partner then wife then co-Avenger then widow. She was breezy with him, but where was the beef?

Between Marvel movies, I’d take what I could get. That meant watching her, on the Goop site, slice pork with Jon Favreau, drink margaritas with Seamus Mullen; fry chicken with John Legend — well, he fried his; she baked hers. Was Paltrow hiding, taking a vacation, retiring, making absurdly savvy business decisions? She’s got a good part, as a mansion-dwelling mommy with a secret life, on a new Netflix show called “The Politician.”

The middle has gone out of the movies. And the middle was where Paltrow lived. Where else, besides streaming, would she even go now? Still, how could a person who seemed to act all the time, and at the height of her talent, gradually stop acting? Were there no roles that challenged her? She’s 47 now: Were there just no roles?

But last week, I finished “She Said,” a stressful new book by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey about, in part, how they broke the Weinstein sexual harassment story for The New York Times. In an epilogue there is a gathering of a dozen very different women (lawyers, a fast-food worker, Christine Blasey Ford) at Paltrow’s home where they talk about their experiences surviving and fighting back against a range of men. Among these women, she discloses the discovery that, even though she resisted him, Weinstein had been exploiting her success to prey upon women: How do you think Gwyneth has what she has?

“That has by far been the hardest part of this,” she tells the group, “to feel like a tool in coercion of rape.”

Weinstein’s effect on the many women he’s alleged to have harassed, assaulted and worse remains largely private. For the actors, maybe he actively cost them work. Maybe what he did to them changed their relationship to their work.

I’ve spent two years wondering whether Paltrow’s taste for acting had diminished because of that man, whether having his company seem synonymous with some of her strongest, most popular work compelled her to start a company of her own, one where the work concerned not acting but being, being whole, being better, being ridiculously better.

How much power does a female actor truly have in Hollywood? Not just autonomous power, but the power to completely protect yourself from predation? Why not build something that doesn’t control you because it’s yours? Intelligence is an essential component of Paltrow’s screen self. She rerouted that intelligence into the kind of workplace some people wish they had.

But I’ve spent a couple of years wondering about the work, too, her old work. I went back to a lot of it. And that dopey Wellness file became a catalog of the ferociously unwell. Melancholic widowhood in “Bounce.” Manic-depression in “Proof.” It’s true that somebody was always trying to kill Paltrow. But then she started trying to kill herself. Suicidal depression in “The Royal Tenenbaums.” Suicide in “Country Strong.” Drug addiction with suicidal depression in “Two Lovers.” A molten incarnation of Sylvia Plath in “Sylvia.”

It’s true that she was funny in her minute or so as Dixie Normous in “Austin Powers in Goldmember” and that she tried (too hard) to be, as a flight attendant in “View From the Top.” It’s also true that the dark parts were juicy and played to her capacity for making the most vivid music out of fraying psychological noise. Paltrow won that Oscar basically for playing the sun. But she’s even more astonishing in black holes.

But maybe you get tired of all that darkness, of the suffering, of the being made to suffer. Maybe you really do just want the lightness of celebration, the benefit of salves and powders and whatever a jar of ashwagandha purports to do for you.

Looking for personal clues in somebody’s acting is probably a folly. The words are a writer’s. And the direction usually comes from someone else. But I kept wondering anyway. Was this woman working through — working against — something else? I’m that kind of person, the kind who hears a theater full of people cheer half her face being covered by scalp and wants to cry. The excellence in her acting — even as a corpse — is a key in the lock of my humanity. It’s hard to watch her suffer. It’s hard to know she’s suffered — and that suffering has always felt bigger than any one character — or, really, any one actor. It’s felt representative.

In “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” Paltrow plays Marge, a 1950s coed, who starts off with some of Grace Kelly’s glamour and exits with lots of Kelly’s disillusionment. The movie is a Hitchcockian potboiler, a Weinstein production directed by Anthony Minghella, adapted from Patricia Highsmith’s novel and set in the poshest parts of Italy. At some point, Marge’s boyfriend, Dickie, vanishes, and she becomes increasingly certain that his creepy pal, Tom, is responsible. She discovers proof off camera and disturbs Tom’s bath to angrily confront him. He receives her wrapped in a towel, yells at her to shut up and when he tries to grab her, he drops the towel and exposes himself.

She jumps and gasps. One hand covers her eyes, the other an ear. He retreats to put on some clothes. But she stands there, her mouth still hidden by the fist she’s making, like a shocked little girl who’s seen a young man explode into a monster. She attempts to leave. Tom tries to talk her into staying, by bad-mouthing Dickie, by telling her that he loves her, better even than he loved Dickie, better than Dickie loved her. She backs into the door, and the closer he moves, the more terrified she becomes, weeping and shivering at the same time. His boyishness becomes psychotically serene. “Can I hold you? Will you let me hold you?” he asks, moving closer in.

It’s a scenario reminiscent of so many accounts by Weinstein’s accusers, including the one that Paltrow has told — the isolation, the menacing persistence, the terror. And here’s a cinematic version of it. Except Marge is saved when her friend, Peter, opens the door: “Get me out of here!”

Who knows what Marge will do after a boat drags her out of the movie, away from trying, uselessly, to beat a confession out of Tom? But she knows the truth. And the world doesn’t care. These are 15 of the best, most suspenseful minutes of Paltrow’s career. And they could stand in for all the shrewd, magnetic, unhinged work she’s done. There’s a kind of person who’ll remember her in this movie and maybe behold her on “The Politician” and hope it’s work she still believes is worth doing.

This article originally appeared in

(Critic's Notebook)

A Natural at Fusing Stardom and Skill

Once upon a time, we made do with less television. Three broadcast networks dominated everything. (Channels weren’t flipped so much as triangulated.) We had a local public station and whatever oldies a UHF signal could tune in. Now? Now, we romanticize our cable-assisted, internet-borne so-called golden age and carp about the galactic girth of the streaming era. Somebody even lent the girth a fretful name: “peak TV” — the “money can’t buy happiness” of screen life.

In retrospect, less television has come to imply lesser — by volume, by value, by verisimilitude. But what was “Friends” lesser than? There are 236 episodes of it, merely one fewer than a combined tally of “Game of Thrones,” “House of Cards,” and “Orange Is the New Black.” Most of those episodes are perfect as tidy comedies. Maybe it’s hard to think of “Friends” as perfect, let alone as great, because it looked easy.

Most “old TV” looked easy — even when characters broke up, bled and died. That’s because, even when they did, they were obviously not in a movie. TV now is the movies, so we love it more. We believe it more. For its entire existence, the American sitcom was anti-cinematic, beholden to the demands of advertisers.

Before there was too much TV, there was simply a lot, including a lot of NBC’s “Friends.” Think about the effort required to make about 24 episodes in a nine-month season (certain scripted shows somehow made more). This was impossible work that we at home took for granted. A network like NBC could turn “granted” into “mandatory” with maximal FOMO threat. “Let’s all be there,” it demanded in the 1980s. A decade later, we had to be there for “Must See TV.” Technologically, it was an uncertain age. If you missed an episode, who knew when you’d be able to catch it again?

“Friends” was easy TV at an elite level. So many jokes, so much body comedy, so many surprises and awwws, and squeals of live studio audience excitement. Hairdressers were doing — and not infrequently botching — the Rachel. Coffee shops became people’s second homes. Tens of millions of Americans watched all of that writing and directing and acting, all of that seemingly effortless effort, for all 10 of its years. That work and a country’s devotion to it feels like proof of a golden age of something.

Familiarity is the magnet of every decent American sitcom. The “com” can’t compete alone and neither can the “sit,” even though, together, they’re obviously quite the sandwich. But the many nights I’ve spent recumbent on my sofa laughing at, say, Ross and Phoebe debating evolution, or Phoebe, Joey and Ross impersonating Chandler, or Chandler blanching at Monica’s desperate new cornrows or Rachel taking forever to tell somebody who the father of her baby is — those nights have never really been about the situation comedy of “Friends.” They’ve only ever been about us — me and these six people — and my apparently enduring need to know what they’re up to and how they are, even though I’ve known for 25 years.

“Friends” debuted on NBC in the fall of 1994, ran for an entire decade, typically had around 25 to 30 million viewers a week (sometimes many more) and now airs in Nickelodeon’s Nick @ Nite block, which my cable conglomerate has stationed near the top of the channel pyramid. That means if you’re a chronologist like me, the five-channel trip from NY1 — past the local news, TNT and “The Simpsons” — always terminates at Chandler, Joey, Monica, Phoebe, Rachel and Ross. Laziness is a factor. (Do you use the number keys on your remote? I’ll bet you don’t even have a remote at this point.)

But, really, it’s simplicity. “Friends” actually is enormously easy to watch. The genius of “Seinfeld” (and “The Simpsons,” too) has everything to do with the “com” arising from the “sit.” What trouble will Jerry and the gang instigate? Whether you’re watching an episode for the first time or the 27th, the inciting premise is a major element of the pleasure. The premise of “Friends” is the friends.

Of course, the friends started out with a touch of the Jerrys. They, too, were a white cohort living in New York City (the West Village rather than Seinfeld’s Upper West Side). And many an early episode involved defending social etiquette (“Those are not the rules!” Ross barks at a foe in a laundromat) and trying out twisted dating schemes (Monica and Joey try to bust up a couple in order to have the newly single partners for themselves). But on “Seinfeld,” the city and the characters’ righteous belief in their own norms spurred them on to increasingly lunatic misanthropy. They were anti-socialites.

Matters of behavior and economic inequality only seemed to bring them together. Take the show’s 29th episode. Everybody goes out for a nice dinner to celebrate Monica’s promotion, and Phoebe, Joey and Rachel order the cheapest items on the menu, then balk at evenly dividing the bill. Income turns those three against the other three, until Monica loses her job and Joey valiantly offers to pay for her $4 coffee — with Chandler’s money. The theme song didn’t lie: They really were there for each other, punchlines and all. That thereness was the show’s intangible hook. The writers could engineer plots for the directors to orchestrate. But these six actors working together, on anything, on nothing — it was the highlight of many a person’s week. That thereness was phenomenally elastic, too. These were six people who could snipe at one another, who could fight and lie and practice what we’d now call radical honesty yet keep so many secrets, who can break up (many times, in many ways) but, as a sextet, keep snapping back together. I like them that way, as half a dozen. I like them in tandems and trios, as human math problems, as chemistry experiments. Maybe 10 times I’ve watched Chandler, Joey and Monica break down and confess to the other three that, yes, Chandler did pee on Monica’s jellyfish sting.

I don’t know how many takes that sequence took or how much caffeine was consumed. But it’s never less than a marvel of harmonized hysterics. That kind of exclamatory, high-energy comedy could happen in any configuration of the cast because it was the best such collection in the history of television. Other hall-of-fame comedies, like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Cheers,” had wits and jesters and clowns mixed in among the goody-goodies and grumps. Some, like “All in the Family” and the first few seasons of “Designing Women,” were all zingers, personality and delivery before the whole thing went to schtick. A few permanently watchable jewels like “The Golden Girls” and “Frasier” sneaked in a combo platter of slapstick, vinegar and fuzzies. But the proportions were bigger on “Friends.” They went for more, more often, and rarely missed.

For one thing, the actors had more to play with. The “Friends” friends started out as types. Rachel was a princess, Monica a control freak, Joey a dumb actor. But the types kept recombining.

Ross seemed like a geek because his paleontology was frequently mocked and there’s something gluey in the music of David Schwimmer’s whine. But Ross was sad, needy, insecure, quick to anger — dark, basically — and built like a jock. Phoebe evolved rapidly from hippie naïf to schemer, dreamer, peacekeeper, and pot-stirrer. In another era, she’d have been the “Three’s Company”-era Suzanne Somers of the bunch, a hapless bombshell. But Lisa Kudrow, with her akimbo intelligence, brought the part in sideways. Not far into the show’s run, actually, some of the six are watching TV and Chandler, in Matthew Perry’s contagious sardonic snark, says “I think this is the episode of ‘Three’s Company’ where’s there’s some kind of misunderstanding.”

“Then I’ve already seen this,” Phoebe snaps and turns off the TV.

“Friends” could easily have been “Three’s Company,” where “sit” and “com” strained credibility. Chandler was so frequently presumed gay that he could have been Jack Tripper, the faux-mosexual from the other show. And Matt LeBlanc played Joey like Somers but by way of Tony Danza. That probably would have made Courteney Cox the Joyce DeWitt of “Friends” — neutrally sane. For a few episodes at least, Cox, as Monica, seemed meant as the crux of the pack. Monica was Ross’ sister. Rachel was an old high school friend who became her roommate.

But halfway through Season 1, it was clear this boat had no captain, just a lot of oars. And the rowing Cox did has never received its due. She wasn’t as rubbery a funny person as Perry and Schwimmer or as radiant and tangy in her approach to comedy as Jennifer Aniston was as Rachel. She couldn’t physicalize sarcasm and shock with as much cursive and calculus as the other five. But athletic gumption launched Monica entirely beyond classification.

I mean, I guess her type was Type A. Monica made the most psychological sense, as a former fat person who’s holding onto whatever it took to shed the weight and keep it off. We can shake our heads now at the idea of the show’s laughing at her size through the fat suit Cox wears in flashbacks. These flashbacks also explain why she seemed to think everything was grist for competition, why winning and losing mattered so much to her, why control was so important. And Monica lost so much control, so much cool, so much coolness. Each actor managed to do a lot with intensity, but Cox made it a state of Monica’s mind.

People now ding “Friends” for all kinds of offenses — regarding homosexuality, mental health, race, interracial dating, ethnicity. (Here’s pregnant Rachel, exasperated by the surfeit of gift diapers at her shower: “What are we feeding this baby — Indian food?”) “Friends”-as-problematic disserves the show’s complex relationship to those issues. Sometimes it winked at them. Monica did a lot of winking, especially under a spell of casual blackness. Her cornrows and Chandler’s disdain for them were one thing. My favorite, though, is the time she comes down with a cold but refuses to give up on sex with Chandler. He’d rather not. She comes at him anyway, in a bathrobe as plush and scarlet as a Muppet, full of mucus and the R&amp;B; of Guy. “Are you saying,” she asks, thrusting her body at her man, “that you don’t wanna. Git. With. This?” It’s peak Monica: addicted to victory, unlimitedly white.

There’s a way to watch “Friends” so that its very whiteness — and the associated entitlement — is the problem. That magical casting configuration probably couldn’t happen now without considerable umbrage — umbrage I’d understand. For a great while during “Friends”-mania, Eriq La Salle, of “ER,” was just about the biggest star on a smash-hit show who wasn’t white. “Friends” gave you white people who leave infants on city buses without consequence, who only rarely face a challenge to their permanent spot at Central Perk (for many years, a “reserved” card rested on the coffee table). But I’m not sure this was the show to do the labor, to open those doors with the same alacrity.

“Friends” could never have had, say, Joey drop by a black party in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn and tell Chandler how strange or exhilarating an experience it was without it also becoming a Very Special Episode. For some of its run, “Friends” aired opposite “Living Single,” on Fox, a good, “Friends”-ish show that was also the black party. As it is, Ross and Joey did date nonwhite women without their race being even a point of interest in the 1990s and 2000s, and even if that seems willfully naïve, it actually did feel special.

“Friends” made most of its social bets on gender differences, the way men get away with being chauvinists and lust buckets and layabouts, and the women have to pick up the slack. But tweaking the stereotypes became a meaningful staple of the show. Once, the girls’ failure to know the boys as well as the boys knew them cost Monica and Rachel their apartment. To be fair: Do you know what Chandler does for a living? Nonetheless, their place suddenly belongs to Joey and Chandler. It remains a shocking turn of events. I watched the early years of this show with roommates in the dorm of a college where bad housing could ruin friendships. I wasn’t watching a comedy that night. I was watching a cautionary tale. The show knew our loyalties were with the women and that Monica might not survive making breakfast in a man cave. So it refused to shake the Etch A Sketch. She unleashes a scream of “no” fit for no sitcom. It belonged in “Hamlet.”

“Friends” left prime-time television in 2004, just as the culture began to distrust meaningful intergender adventure. Its offspring — “How I Met Your Mother,” “The Big Bang Theory” “The Mindy Project,” “New Girl,” the short-lived masterpiece of repartee “Happy Endings” — did their best. But “Sex and the City,” which hit HBO in 1998, and the movies that sprang from Judd Apatow’s laugh factory would so convincingly relocate the sexes into ladies’ nights and boys’ clubs that the culture never quite came to reinvest in the coed comforts of a Central Perk.

“Friends” wasn’t a fantasy during its original run. But I can see why so many people who weren’t alive the first time around have devoured the show on cable and streaming like it’s a tub of ice cream. (I know of a 10-year-old as “Friends” conversant as I am.) There are no sexual threats, just Monica, her robe and her cold; just a vengeful guest star, in Julia Roberts, stranding Chandler in a pair of her underwear as comeuppance for a preadolescent prank; just a last run of Rubik’s Cube hookups and occasionally vaguely funny lechery. Otherwise, the show was an oasis: adult women hanging out with adult men, with no monsters to fear, run from or prosecute. That could explain why droves of us are addicted to it. Sure, it’s excellent Easy TV — funnier, dirtier and more audacious than you heard it was, than you remember it being. But maybe, now, “Friends” is a fantasy. If you’re looking to restore some thereness to your life, maybe it’s more than must-see TV. Maybe it’s a clue.

'Friends' Is Turning 25. Here's Why We Can't Stop Watching it.

(Critic’s Notebook)

I come from a family with a history of zero fanciness. Cleaners and drivers and coaches and catch-as-catch-can. Few diplomas, fewer degrees. But the women liked to read. Gloria Naylor and Sidney Sheldon. Stephen King and Danielle Steel. A man once left my Aunt Marge’s place with her copy of “Roots” like it was a piece of Tupperware, and she cursed him for years. The book wasn’t for dinner.

Reading a novel was entertainment and a point of pride. Reading a Toni Morrison novel was group therapy. My aunts, my mother and her friends would tackle “Beloved” in sections then get on the phone to run things by one another. With all due respect to the recently deceased Judith Krantz, I don’t recall them needing to do that for “Scruples.”

They admired the stew of a Morrison novel, the elegant density of its language — the tapestry of a hundred-word sentence, the finger snap of a lone word followed by a period, the staggering depictions of lust, death, hair care, lost limbs, baking and ghosts. Morrison made her audiences conversant in her — the metaphors of trauma, the melodramas of psychology. She made them hungry for more stew: ornate, disobedient, eerie literary inventions about black women, often with nary a white person of any significance in sight. The women in my family were reading a black woman imagining black women, their wants, their warts, how the omnipresence of this country’s history can make itself known on any old Thursday.

I wanted to feel what my mother felt, to know what made her mouth crack open like that or her eyebrows arch toward her scalp like a stretching cat. So, in my senior year of high school, I stole her new copy of “Jazz,” from 1992, the time-shuffling love story (among a man, his wife, and his dead mistress) that Morrison wrote after “Beloved” and which therefore wilted, unfairly, in its shadow. Much of the writing, seen through the eyes of a wise-weary narrator, is an achievement of attitude. But of all the arresting paragraphs in that book, this one actually cuffed me.

“Anything that happens after this party breaks up is nothing. Everything is now. It’s like war. Everyone is handsome, shining just thinking about other people’s blood. As though the red wash flying from veins not theirs is facial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting. Glamorous. Afterward there will be some chatter and recapitulation of what went on; nothing though like the action itself and the beat that pumps the heart. In war or at a party everyone is wily, intriguing; goals are set and altered; alliances rearranged.”

My mother is gone now, so I’ll always wonder if this is a paragraph that put a smile on her face. Or maybe it was just the book’s very first words: “Sth, I know that woman.”

That “Sth” is the sound of a woman sucking her teeth. For me, it was the second coolest use of “onomatopoeia” after learning how to say “onomatopoeia.” It was also distinctly black. That the “s” wasn’t a “5” but a syllable of vernacular disdain brought me into a world that I didn’t want to leave. A life spent savoring Toni Morrison, both as a novelist and a scalding, scaldingly moral literary critic, makes clear that almost no one has better opening sentences.

“He believed he was safe.” (“Tar Baby”)

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” (“Beloved”)

“They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” (“Paradise”)

“The woman’s legs are spread wide open, so I hum.” (“Love”)

“It wasn’t my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and I have no idea how it happened.” (“God Help the Child”)

For all of the astonishing edifices she built, the woman knew what to do with a brick.

She also knew how to name. Baby Suggs. True Belle. Pallas Truelove. Joe Trace. Sixo. Guitar. Jadine and Son. Stamp Paid. Milkman Dead. BoyBoy. Florens. Ajax (lord, Ajax). Kentucky Derby. Pecola Breedlove. Dorcas. Maginot Line. And, of course, Sethe — no name I’d ever heard before “Beloved,” no name I’d ever pronounced. It described a woman I’d never encounter beyond Euripides, a figure of guilt and rage and anguish, with a name one letter short of “seethe,” a name you, too, can’t pronounce without a suck of the teeth.

Toni Morrison didn’t teach me how to read. But she did teach me how to read. Hers is the kind of writing that makes you rewind and slow down and ruminate. It’s the kind of writing that makes you rewind because, god, what you just read was that titanic, that perception-altering, that true, a spice on the tongue. These spasms of disbelief are so ecstatic that immediate rereading is the only cure — I get them from Nabokov and from her.

Morrison is dead now, her legend long secure. But what comedy to think how the writers and critics who loved her labored to get her mastery treated as majesty when she’s so evidently supreme. The women in my family knew that long before the Swedes threw her a Nobel party. So did the people who took up writing in her wake. She did for generations of writers what Martin Scorsese did for generations of filmmakers — jolt them, for better and worse, into purpose. Morrison didn’t make me a writer, exactly. What she made me was a thinker. She made the thinking seem uniquely crucial to the matter of being alive.

I grew up with a Bible open on a dresser in my bedroom. My mother’s idea. Not a religious one, per se. She felt that an open Bible was an illuminating guide, a protectant, this night light for the soul. From time to time, I read it. But mostly, I let it guide me. Who knows where that Bible is now? What I have instead is some novel by Toni Morrison, kept near my bed, whether or not I’m reading it. A night light for my soul. And, in every way, a Good Book.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/07/books/toni-morrison-death-remembrance.html" id="8e246207-00de-3318-ac75-6b052025c65d">The New York Times</a>.

You need to be able to read to be able to read. Especially if Toni Morrison did the writing. I at least thought I knew what it was for my eyes to sail across and down a page, through a flight of description or a feat of characterization. At 11, I thought I could read. Then I read her. My mother told me I wasn’t ready. Not for Toni. My Aunt Katie caught my little-boy eye on her brand-new, great big copy of “Beloved” and told me: <em xmlns="http://w...

Toni Morrison Taught Me How to Think

<h1>June was LGBTQ Pride month. July is national pride month — at least on the Fourth. And, in New York City, the pivot from one to the other isn’t much of a pivot at all. One flag comes down and another goes up. The performance of a queer self doesn’t seem that far from the performance of an American one, especially if you caught the president’s July 4 military pageant or got a glimpse of Nike’s just-canceled sneakers with the Betsy Ross flag. But this year, in queer land, the performance of pride was conducted with a flamboyance that rivals Independence Day.</h1>

Rainbows hanging in storefronts and as part of bank displays, undulating from fire escapes and car antennae. A Burberry banner evoked Gilbert Baker’s pride flag. In the Flatiron district, the kitchenware shop Fishs Eddy instructed people to “post your pride” and affixed to its windows a zillion rainbowed stickies upon which people had written everything from “Yasss” in big block letters to a concise: “Came out! August 1982.”

Sometimes flag mania tugged at your heart. In the West Village, a Rockette kick away from the Stonewall Inn, a plain-old pedestrian crosswalk was painted red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple — not by activists but by the Department of Transportation!

Sometimes the performance tipped into farce. Somebody showed me a sandwich board that read, “We take pride in our cheese,” with “pride” in all-caps and rainbowing. Sometimes it was stranger than that. Sometimes it was Tinder’s “Pride slide” in the Flatiron: a giant toy whose colored, curving 30-foot slide you could actually sled down, maybe in tandem, maybe holding a pride flag. Sliders were urged to “ride the rainbow.” It was not not a commercial for Tinder’s dating app. Like the company’s other superficially clever slogans (“Single is a terrible thing to waste”), this one was copped from other organizations. But the company said it would donate $10 from each ride to the Human Rights Campaign and urged everybody to support Senate passage of the Equality Act, which protects people against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. So basically: Tinder put its money where your butt was.

But the glut of performances could render you perplexed. Does this store’s tiny, odd, rainbow-colored thingamabob painted in the corner of an enormous window mean it’s less supportive than this other place, whose windows are so rainbowed that you can’t even see inside? And does a place with rainbow-nothing mean that nothing gay matters? And does having rainbow anything obviate having to ask that question at all? Is this store doing apathy or neutrality? And is that OK? Oh, and does so much consumerist ubiquity mean that what the flag symbolizes is now less political or are those politics just more widely endorsed? Are we being “pink-washed?”

It’s a migraine-inducing quandary: Is there such a thing as proper pride? After decades of all kinds of neglect, here was a luxury: Could gay people now have too much support? It became a question so big that it had to be worked out in two separate parades — the enormous, high-energy, emotional, eternal official one (WorldPride NYC) and the rougher, rawer, entirely confrontational, sponsor-free (and not tiny!) protest event that preceded it. That was the Queer Liberation March, which is more fun to say and, among other things, objected to the presence of corporations and cops. Both were powerful. Both moved me. And, eventually, even though it didn’t seem like the massive official one really ever would, both ended.

Suddenly, you’re back in Kansas. And yet the show does go on. I was cursing a bleating ambulance on Monday (I know; and may God forgive me). I cursed it until its swerve onto 40th Street revealed a pair of rainbow flags whipping in the rear, like wings, like afterburn. So to be fair to New York, its Oz is always showing. (Even the emergencies can seem queer.)

The robust commercial performance of pride meets an inevitable conclusion. It becomes someone’s job to scrape, peel, erase, hose off, take down, Windex, dismantle and trash the rainbow. It must feel weird, scrubbing “pride” from your storefront, sending rivulets of it crying down into the sewer. Grand opening, grand closing. But, in commerce, this is the way of all things. There’s more to be sold than a show of support. Just like that: Making your way around New York can feel lonely, like you’ve been scraped and Windexed, too, and being over the rainbow can mean something altogether different. Then, you remember that there’s a difference between giving a performance and putting on an act. One’s a talent. The other is a charade.

These are impermanent times. Nothing is supposed to last. But should the emblems of gayness feel as cheap and disposable as they have this year? Flux and fluidity are very queer. Erasure is queerness’ enemy. And yet Pride season did offer a gay performance that deserves to last. It gave us “Nails, Hair, Hips, Heels” by Todrick Hall. After your favorite business has moved on to Christmas, that song — and the video that comes with it — might be all the pride you need.

It’s one of those “you betta work!” numbers — a RuPaul-Beyoncé-Bob Fosse aerobics class. Hall wears a black bodysuit, with electric pink heels and matching belt, opera gloves and a Wilma Flintstone necklace. They accessorize nicely with the giant neon triangle behind him. He’s joined, in a warehouse space, by what must be three dozen male dancers in versions of the same outfit for some of the most committed group-choreography you’re going to see. The sashaying, spinning, and shimmying, the minivogueing, floor-sweeps and lascivious camera cruises: This is the performance you want for Pride. You want 30-plus dudes saying, with more than comedy, This isn’t a charade.We are one another’s support. We’re each other’s parade.

Lots of us probably spent too much time last month debating whether Taylor Swift’s embrace of LGBTQ folks made her Liza Minnelli or Bank of America. It was as though as if she were the Equality Act. But Hall represents something essential about Pride that can’t be peeled off, tossed out or pink-washed, something with old-school bathhouse hours, something open 24/7. “Ride the rainbow?” Listen: the rainbow is riding him.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/04/arts/pride-month-july-4.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

Where Do You Find Gay Pride When It's No Longer on Sale?

Sometimes flag mania tugged at your heart. In the West Village, a Rockette kick away from the Stonewall Inn, a plain-old pedestrian crosswalk was painted red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple — not by activists but by the Department of Transportation!

Where do you find gay pride when it's no longer on sale?

A bunch of small children line the stage and slap the hands of the giant players as they enter from backstage; then, flanked by parents, siblings or, yes, agents, the draftees head down to their table on the arena floor. This has proved to be an ingenious development. It gives a television show — a long one — some actual show. And what’s being shown (shown off) are the clothes.

You used to have to do some work to find a shot that took in a whole outfit. The scarcity of those images wasn’t because the players were too tall. It was because the networks didn’t seem to care about who wore what. Nobody’s here for fashion! But some of us were. Now the reporters and anchors are even cheering and jeering each other’s clothes.

This is to say that the broadcast of the draft that took place Thursday night, at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, is now of a piece with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the ball sequences on “Pose.” It’s a night of looks and shade and, in its way, extra-ness.

At ESPN, anchor Rece Davis noted that “the players are dressed for success, some very subtle and classy, others, making a little bit more of a statement.” As he spoke, the camera and editing rolled its eyes, first, at Mfiondu Kabengele, the ultimately snazzy eventual 27th pick (to the Brooklyn Nets), who was flashing his embroidered jacket lining. Then they found Ja Morant (picked second, by the Memphis Grizzlies), who was in pinstriped purple everything. That seemed a reasonable doubt. Even at Morant’s comparatively ordinary height (he’s only 6 feet 3 inches), all that purple was delightfully excessive, like watching the Joker audition to join a pack of grape Now and Laters.

Now, the broadcast of the walk to your seat really does put some pressure on how everything fits, how it all moves — for TV, which comes with stresses separate from Instagram’s. For Instagram, you’re dressing for followers. For TV, you’re dressing for anybody who happens to be at an airport or a Buffalo Wild Wings. You want things to pop. Yet you don’t want to poke out any eyes.

The looks were strong this year — bold, bright, sharp, flattering. A few were gloriously absurd. Some were courtesy of J.C. Penney. Just about all of the 24 dudes who walked onstage walked in loafers — loafers that glittered, loafers that, on Cam Reddish, embroidered as they were with the Versace medusa, hissed. The belching pocket square crisis of drafts past appears to have abated. Jewelry (necklaces, chains, crucifixes) is the new and, to my eye, improved hankie. And the hair — it poofed, billowed and geysered. (Morant’s basically twisted into bangs.) The wave cap is dead. Long live the hair sponge!

Going in, we’d all been prepared that the night’s star would be Zion Williamson, from Duke. He’d certainly be the top pick (selected by the New Orleans Pelicans). So somebody urged him to dress like the guy who’d go first. And what he wore is one way to do that: creamy tuxedo jacket, white shirt, silky and ribbed, open to the top of his chest. It was everything you want to see for an event that kicked off at 7:30 on a Thursday evening and was staged within spitting distance of a Best Buy, a Shake Shack and the DMV: glamour, confidence, swagger, a spritz of sex — but only a spritz. (A gold, diamond-studded cross dangled from his jacket pocket.)

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. Once you saw Williamson cross the stage in that star-making cream, you could see that his pants were giving him some trouble; they seemed to be bunching in the crotch.

It’s true that Williamson is the most exciting player to enter the league since LeBron James was chosen first 16 years ago. But some people, including the folks at ESPN, went too far. They saw Williamson and reached back to James’ get-up on his draft night in 2003. These are not — I repeat, not — comparable events. James wore a flouncy suit, as white as Noah’s dove. The jacket must have had 5,000 buttons. He looked as if he was trying to win a Boyz II Men marathon but only got to “End of the Road.” Williamson, on the other hand, was dressed like a man on his way to get new gadgets from Q.

Every year, I watch this thing and see the parades of gray and slate and concrete and charcoal, and I’ll say to the TV, “Oh, no. Who died?” The draft is not a job interview. It isn’t even really the first day of work. It’s a party. Get low, get bodied, get some colors. Take a risk.

But maybe not too much risk. You could wind up like Bol Bol, the 7-foot-2 son of NBA legend Manute Bol; he went 44th in the second round to the Miami Heat, who immediately traded him to the Denver Nuggets. Bol Bol could have worn anything, maybe by anybody. But Young Thug’s fashion brand got there first. According to Bol, it’s called Spider. So there was a splooge of white webbing right there on the whole left side of his black double-breasted number, which he wore over a blacker turtleneck. Not one ounce of it was complimentary. The jacket, for some reason, was cropped short enough to bring this poor fellow terribly close to “bellhop.”

Darius Garland, who went fifth and is off to Cleveland, was more like it. He wore a sandy kimono jacket and matching pants. Underneath was a white band-collar shirt, which had a medallion chain over it. He kept the robe open and basic, as if he wanted to push the envelope but didn’t want to have read what was inside. Maybe it was too casual, but you can’t be mad at a move like this. No one else did anything like it.

Well, Nickeil Alexander-Walker might have surpassed everybody in the “no, he didn’t” department. Gray suit in a reptile-skin print, bolo tie (with his initials), loafers. This guy — who went 17th, to New Orleans — could have been a used-car salesman in a “Men in Black” movie. But he wound up the winner of Chris Isaak night in Stankonia.

Are we sure Tyler Herro was here for the NBA draft? Because there are boxers and Ultimate Fighting Championship titlists who would have killed for all of the controlled chaos of his snug suit. It was a riot of flowering purples and blue-greens (worn tieless over a black shirt and glowing gold ropes).

R.J. Barrett went with a lilac-rose — by Indochino, I’m told — over a black shirt and tie. It seemed fit for the prom. But it grew on me. You could see how beautifully constructed it was. From certain distances, the pinkishness appeared to achieve the substance of cake fondant. And up close, it looked light enough to wrap a gift. The blazer flared a touch at the bottom, adding something princely and maybe even Prince-ly.

What would it mean for this night to end? Not just at midnight, but, like, forever? Since we’re in this era of re-examining people, places and things that get taken as granted, why not the draft? Here are a bunch of mostly black, mostly American athletes being paraded, bought and dealt by a league whose upper management is almost entirely white. And we call the people who own the teams, well, “owners.”

The players have no real say in what team they wind up on, which means no say in which city they live in, the bosses they report to or who they work with. The money and fame are nice. But what money can buy is sound mental health. The commissioner, Adam Silver, senses unhappiness. And the basketball press, namely in the probing work of ESPN’s Kevin Arnovitz, has wondered about the morality of a draft. No one really has to mention race or the history of slavery. Headlines and stories on the subject draw the parallel every time they use the term “abolish.”

Williamson symbolizes the dawning of a new age of freedom and choice for players. He can write his own ticket, we’re told, more than previous draftees could. In the meantime, the pageantry of what otherwise is a trade show serves a higher purpose than distraction. You’re watching mostly black men enjoy a night off from being called “beast,” “freak,” “monster,” “a big” and “specimen.” You’re seeing them consider their bodies in another way and, on one of the biggest occasions of their lives, express what they think of themselves and who, maybe, they think they could be.

So even if that person winds up looking like a superhero’s chauffeur or Prince the lollipop, it’s OK. They’re in the NBA draft. So who they also are is a winner.

How many more NBA drafts will the cable networks be able to put on? This is a moral quandary over equitable employment practices, mental health and, frankly, racial optics. It’s not a fashion question. As fashion, the answer is probably “forever!” The broadcasts have added a procession that gives some pomp to the circumstance.

A TV spectacle with uneasy undercurrents

Comfort is an essential component of a certain theatergoing experience. The seating should provide some comfort. Given the money a ticket costs, so, in some ways, should the show. It could be based on something known: television, the movies, the nightly news. It wouldn’t push too hard or be too strange or make people feel worse than they did when they got to that seat. The thing ends, and everybody stands up and claps.

But occasionally, a play ends and nobody really knows what to do, because it just took an audience to outer space, to the center of the Earth, to this new electric zone that knows what’s wrong with this country and isn’t afraid to personify it, laugh at it, behold it. Even though the work may take place at hospitals or in the presence of a shrink, it doesn’t care about comfort. It’s haywire, rude, blunt, poetic, self-reflective, sexually unpredictable, emotionally catastrophic, exhaustively acted, intelligent, searching and unafraid.

The work is also black — its blackness providing a lens through which to see and be seen. Its blackness is also what distinguishes it from other plays I’ve seen in the last year about race and racism. In less than 18 months a new class of young and youngish African American playwrights has established some kind of radical moment in American theater. Their work doesn’t need to exploit topicality (police shootings, this presidency, even the previous one, for the most part) in order to consider black life in this country as a simultaneous current predicament and historically endangered event. It’s responding — with anger, social acuity and structural chaos — to psychic devastation and national trauma, making roommates of today’s dismay and 400 years of horrors.

The authors have names like Jackie Sibblies Drury and Jeremy O. Harris and Aleshea Harris. And amazingly they’ve had six shows staged in New York over the past year and a half — difficult, apocalyptically messy productions where, especially for Drury’s “Fairview” and “Marys Seacole” and Aleshea Harris’ “Is God Is,” the process of cleaning up afterward, seven or eight times a week, would have seemed like a job for a hazmat crew.

In different ways, these playwrights are descendants of Pirandello’s freighted absurdism and Brecht’s theories of audience confrontation. But these three don’t feel radical just for the theater. They’d seem radical anywhere in American culture right now, different from a generation of, say, young black musicians trying to re-establish certain R&amp;B; traditions or honorably subvert jazz’s hefty history, different from an unprecedented influx of strong black filmmakers. What further distinguishes Drury, Harris and Harris is a belief in the possibilities of form that puts their ingenuity in the larger company of folks like the rappers Tierra Whack, a newbie, and Kanye West, a part-time underdog; and writer-directors like Boots Riley and Jordan Peele.

Two years ago, West would have been the only one of these people, working in their current mode, who made blips on my radar. Now they’re all part of a standard to which I’m holding all kinds of other artists, all kinds of other products. Is this thing I’m watching, reading, listening to going down deep enough, far out there enough, inward enough? Is it doing the most it can to provoke, unnerve and dazzle me? Is it awake to what else this country is — and has always been?

Jeremy Harris has had two shows in a matter of months: “Slave Play” and “‘Daddy.’” And “Slave Play” is the single most daring thing I’ve seen in a theater in a long time (and yes, I’ve been to “The Ferryman”).

It’s outwardly concerned with plantation erotics — naughty house slaves and horny white masters — until it reveals itself to be inwardly concerned with the psychosexual dynamics of plantation erotics. Side 1 presents three discrete slavery scenarios. Side 2 turns those scenarios into group therapy. Those psychosexual dynamics demonstrate what spells Harris can cast as a dramatist, dialogist, satirist and shrink.

“‘Daddy’” doesn’t knock you out in the same way. It’s a play about a young black artist and the older, white art collector he’s living with. It’s needier, full of monotonously needy people. It doesn’t have the four-dimensional self-revelation of “Slave Play,” or its sense of itself as a contraption. But both works show off Harris’s irreverence. Both works underscore his youth. (He’s 29.)

Drury’s “Fairview,” which just won the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and “Marys Seacole” are just as daring as “Slave Play” — and maybe more out there. “Fairview,” very loosely, is about a family dinner that gets dysfunctional after one act, farcical after two and like Armageddon after three. The meal being prepared and fretted over is restaged, but the dialogue in the repeated version has been replaced by the voices of white actors having an increasingly specific conversation about race. The mounting tension blows up in the finale, after which one of the show’s actors invites the white people in the audience to come to the stage so she can have a moment to herself with everybody else.

“Marys Seacole” — very, very loosely — is about a Jamaican caregiver, in both the 19th century and this one, whose ambitions exceed the white medical establishment’s interest in her. The show moves, among other places, from aristocratic old-world Kingston to a modern medical facility in the United States to a battlefield in Crimea. But the locations keep bleeding into one another.

The thrill of both plays is how metaphysical and structurally unstable they are. Drury likes repetition and circularity and how that circle is really more of a spiral and how, after two or three acts, the spiral starts to look an awful lot like the fuse of a bomb. For the audience, the stress (the riveting, delightful stress) comes from not knowing when this play is going to detonate — and how?

Aleshea Harris might be the biggest surprise of these three — her second piece is an ornate elegy called “What to Send Up When It Goes Down” — since her work is the least obviously polished. But to watch “Is God Is” is to see a playwright as lawless as any of her peers has been. It’s about twin sisters who fulfill their mother’s wish that they execute their father. (“Make your Daddy dead. Dead. Dead. All the way dead.”) In 90 minutes, it manages to get from somewhere in Atlanta to the American West.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a crude, physically one-dimensional production explode into something as emotionally and psychologically panoramic. It’s as if the artifice falls utterly away, and you’re wherever Harris insists you are. Decades of moviemakers, novelists and playwrights have been trying to unlock the mysteries of Sam Shepard. This woman is the first to convince me she’s got a key. “Is God Is” signals the arrival of a very good playwright. It also feels like the staking of a major claim.

Drury, Harris and Harris have classmates. I’d put Branden Jacobs-Jenkins among them, as being young and exceptionally good. But by bearing down on what is — and isn’t — human (or humane), his work — namely “An Octoroon” and “Gloria” — makes formally sophisticated, aggressively anthropological, unexpected challenges to what a black playwright is even “supposed” to be writing plays about. His answer appears to be whatever he wants.

The subject of all these plays — and of pretty much everything other black American playwrights have been doing for at least the last four years, in work both brilliant and boring — is trauma. Not just the pitiable state of this moment, but the centuries-long, hundred-car pileup that has always been being a black person in this country. Trauma is history with a head wound, and it’s what unites black artists across mediums — the legacy of racial pain, how to live with it, and, sometimes, how to wield it.

Trauma puts Drury, Harris and Harris in the company of esteemed peers like Tarell Alvin McCraney and, master elders like Lynn Nottage, Suzan-Lori Parks and August Wilson (whose mystic streak makes him a supernatural forebear), and once-radical, racial-confrontational stage classics like George C. Wolfe’s 33-year-old “The Colored Museum.”

What’s exhilarating about this moment is how it’s tethered to theater’s past but is freer to be more lunatic in its blackness. Jordan E. Cooper’s “Ain’t No Mo’” comes out of the “Colored Museum” tradition in its gathering of a handful of sketches around blackness in crisis. What the show lacks in ideological coherence and intellectual rigor it almost makes up for in ferocity, humor, pathos and lunacy. Cooper is 24. He’s still trying to figure out what to do with this pain.

Parks’ “White Noise” wonders whether the answer to trauma is to just make yourself a slave. That’s what her protagonist does after an incident with the police: enslaves himself to his white best friend. Parks can’t find a groove for the farce or a steady gear for the tragedy. The show is simultaneously about the presentation of surfaces and, as drama, superficial. Everybody in “White Noise” speaks in proscriptions and diatribes. They can present the aching, but none of them actually aches.

What Drury, Harris and Harris do with form as an expression of trauma is wild. Instability is built into the very structure of their plays. The sets are destroyed — trashed. But so is everything else. These plays trash living rooms, relationships, logic, hope. The weight of all that this country is and has done just cracks the works’ themes open. Knowing the history is traumatizing. And that knowledge terrorizes their comfort. Even coherence feels like a luxury — and it isn’t that we can’t afford it. These playwrights are saying we don’t deserve it. They’re not going to handhold and explicate. They won’t let you play dumb or give you Racism for Dummies.

They know how their extraordinary machines function. These are plays with abrupt changes of time and space. They’re built like trap doors, figurative ones, and with wormholes, through which everybody falls: characters, audiences, props. And those abrupt alterations of place and meaning function as indictments of an endless history. These are plays that know who, given the socioeconomics of theatergoing in cities like New York, is coming to see them. They know that nobody in the house is immune to the physics of the falling, and yet they sense that some of us might have farther to fall than everybody else.

And that might be why it’s been harder for audiences to leap to their feet at the end of “Slave Play” than for a travesty like “American Son,” a drama by Christopher Demos-Brown, who is white, that coasted on headlines about police shootings but lacked the moral imagination to do more than turn its invisible black victim into an anecdote. It’s easy to applaud when racism is a problem of law enforcement.

The thrill of this generation of black playwrights is that they’ve harnessed the true power of the theater. It’s their gamble on danger, their trust in risk that may explain why none of them has yet made it to Broadway. They don’t give a damn about your comfort.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/theater/african-american-playwrights.html" id="09b5ec51-76d4-35cc-a80d-8d26690c62c6">The New York Times</a>.

Blackness as a Lens for the Stage

This is to say that she’s also human. And she’s been that way for most of her long, indicting career, which is now in its fourth decade. The indictments tend to be aimed at oppressive systems, in Europe and South America (she was born in Peru), that excel at squeezing the humanity out of citizens and refugees alike.

But the only squeezing being done in “Buddy,” her newest movie — opening Wednesday at Film Forum — involves service dogs and the people they serve. The movie follows six people in the Netherlands who have come to rely on the professionalism and unconditional loyalty of their dogs. The animals help them cope with mood swings and depression, blindness and post-traumatic stress. One dog opens and closes kitchen drawers and can fetch paper from the printer. The movie is warm, observant, mildly philosophical and deeply curious about the daily and inner lives of both the people and their four-legged assistants.

Another director might have made something more explanatory: Here is how the service industry works. Another director might have attempted a rant about what doesn’t constitute qualification for canine service. Another director might have just given you 86 minutes of licks and snouts. But Honigmann gets right down to the matter of emotional connection in just a shot or two. She wants to understand the symbiosis between, say, young Zeb and his labradoodle, Utah. She asks him what Utah does for his autism, and he actually shuts off the computer game he’s been playing to do some ruminating on how his dog reroutes him away from anger.

The most compelling stories here are the two that occupy a majority of the film. One belongs to Trevor, a veteran injured on a tour of duty in Afghanistan. He witnessed horrors he can’t forget and now moves through the world in physical and psychological discomfort. But Trevor’s wife, Patricia, says his dog, a striking, powerfully alert sentinel named Mister, has been the glue that’s helped keep their family intact. Mister stands watch whenever they’re out together and, we’re told, can sense when Trevor’s on the verge of a flashback. The camera lingers longer on Trevor’s faraway looks than on any particular dog.

The other is that of a fit, 80-something woman named Edith, who for many years rode horses and lives with her dog, Makker. Edith lost her sight as a girl in an explosion in Germany, and some of the fascination she stirs arises from how independent she seems. (Friends, she says, have kept their distance because her life appears so ordinary.) But there’s also something about her resolve (and her energy). In one of the opening shots, she’s running on a wooded trail alongside Makker, like he might be walking her.

Honigmann asks questions both earnest and absurd yet doesn’t cut them, presumably because she knows, at this point, how to ask the right absurd question. Here, her inquiries yield good answers about love and devotion and dog heaven. And Zeb’s mother confesses to something that felt profound to me about what Utah can do for her son that she just can’t as a human being. The dog has more patience than she does.

I’m using “service dog” here. But we sometimes call these creatures guides, too. And Honigmann certainly shows them patiently guiding people to doctor visits and through crowds at a heavy metal festival, guiding them onto trams. But without a millimeter of overreach, her movie convinces you that the dogs have kept these people away from overwhelming bleakness by also guiding them into the light.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="424acecf-d73f-4771-af20-3af554aa5e00" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/19/movies/buddy-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Buddy' review: Who's a good pup? This pack of lifesavers

(Critic's Pick): Dutch documentary director Heddy Honigmann is a humanist. She listens to the ignored, sympathizes with the lonely and can ask questions so leading that when her subjects give her a skeptical look before trying to answer, she has to laugh, almost out of embarrassment.

<h1>“Babylon” is a 39-year-old nugget of a movie about young British Jamaicans and their itinerant reggae scene built around sound systems, freestyling and parties with rich, low lighting. </h1>

The film is making its American debut Friday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and it’s got an episodic vividness and blanket-load of warmth, but also a harsh view of day-to-day life for black people in South London — on its streets, in its public housing, at its video arcades. If police aren’t trying to shake down and beat up these guys, some fed-up white lady has come to their chill spot to complain (not unreasonably) that their music is too loud by telling them (unreasonably) to go back to their country and calling them “jungle bunnies.”

The movie is more interested in what feels real than what seems right. What was real, when the movie opened in Britain in November 1980, was the poverty and racism its characters dealt with. Apparently, it was too real. The movie arrived with an X rating, which, in Britain, was basically like an R. But it ensured that the young black people whom “Babylon” was primarily made for wouldn’t have been let into a theater to see it.

The thinking might have been that censors would have been saving young impressionable audiences from themselves. That kind of paternalism is, in some way, the force being retaliated against. The movie comprises a bunch of tangents (a minor music deal, some vandalism, an engagement ceremony). But a soulful, genial mechanic named Blue (played by Brinsley Forde, a guitarist in the British reggae outfit Aswad) provides the film’s spine: his rocky home life, love life and career prospects (he doesn’t keep his repair job for long; he dallies with a couple of thugs who lure then rob a gay white man). Blue’s close bond with a white kid named Ronnie (Karl Howman) and his love of reggae are just about all the stability he has. And once the racial stress of the neighborhood asserts itself into their group of friends, that bond seems rickety, too.

Franco Rosso directed “Babylon” from a script he wrote with Martin Stellman. And you can receive it as a toothsome scrapbook of a moment in time — a future Oscar winner, Chris Menges (“The Killing Fields”), shot the film, and reggae polymath Dennis Bovell did the music. Critics then — like, the filmmakers, white men — seemed to get the movie’s politics, immediately hailing “Babylon” as a crucial imaginative, representative step forward for a stagnant film industry, despite more than one writer feeling compelled to grapple with such an abundance of dreadlocks.

Both anger and wonder course through the proceedings, and I’m not sure Rosso and Stellman knew what more to do about either than observe them, more the way an Italian neorealist director would than a psychologist might. The film’s reggae culture makes it natural kin of Jamaican jams like “Rockers” and “The Harder They Come.” But “Babylon” is a British movie about disaffected British people (disaffected British men), and, as such, seems just as seminal an entry in the English “angry young man” sweepstakes as the plays, novels and movies about alienation made in the 1960s. The final five minutes are bleakly abrupt, like being dropped off a cliff.

And yet all of that observation in “Babylon” amounts to something that still feels new. You’re looking at people who, in 1980 England, were, at last, being properly, seriously seen.

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.

This article originally appeared in <a id="bd861ee5-8f62-4b4f-8fbf-23470cf235e2" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/07/movies/babylon-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

'Babylon' Review: A clear view of black Londoners when few films saw them

The movie is more interested in what feels real than what seems right. What was real, when the movie opened in Britain in November 1980, was the poverty and racism its characters dealt with.

He lived in defiance of physics and race and gender, and we just kind of lived with that. We ate it up. Just the odyssey of his nose from bulb to nub seemed somehow like a people’s journey. For so long, so much about Michael Jackson won our awe, our pity, our bewilderment, our identification, our belief that he was a metaphor, an allegory, a beacon, a caveat — for, of, about America. You need to do a lot of looking at him to feel this way. You also need to do a lot of looking the other way.

But, eventually, all the suspension reaches a logical end. You run out of hooks to hang things on. There’s a moment in “Leaving Neverland,” Dan Reed’s documentary about Jackson’s alleged pedophilia, where I simply ran out of hooks. The movie devotes itself to two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who claim, in separate accounts, that Jackson sexually abused them for years, from boyhood into adolescence.

And of all the allegations, the moment that really got me is the ring.

Now, this is 90 minutes into a four-hour movie, which HBO is showing in two parts starting Sunday, and I’ve learned how Jackson has ingratiated himself into two families, starting around 1987 or ’88, after the release of his album “Bad,” during his world tour. I’ve heard a recording of a mock interview Jackson does with Safechuck, a solidly middle-class Southern California boy, in which Jackson says the best part of a trip to Hawaii that he arranged for the boy and his mom was “being with James Safechuck.”

I’ve stared at a lingering shot of a photograph of Jackson, who would have been around 30 and Safechuck who was about 9 or 10, and Jackson is beaming in sunglasses and a military jacket, flashing a peace sign, and James, in a too-big baseball cap, is turning to the camera, looking alarmingly ruminative for someone whose life should be rumination-free. By the time you get to the ring, I’ve already heard how Jackson lured Safechuck into sex, by masturbation (James, again, is about 10), and how the closer he got to James on tour, the farther the parents’ hotel room would get from their son’s.

The way Safechuck remembers it, there was so much sex, and he says Jackson told him that if anybody found out about it, their lives would be over. I’ve heard about Michael buying the Neverland complex in Santa Barbara County, California, (mansion, amusement park, zoo!) and the elaborate system of doors and bells to alert Jackson of any encroachment on the lair in which some of the abuse supposedly occurred. I’ve seen Wade Robson, a doll-faced Michael Jackson impersonator from Brisbane, Australia, say he was 7 when Michael began abusing him, describing a grim scenario in which he was naked on all fours at the edge of the bed, poised — trapped — between his idol, who was masturbating to him, and a cutout of Peter Pan.

I’ve heard all of this — and a distressing deal more — by the time the documentary gets to the part where Jackson allegedly takes Safechuck shopping for a ring. But there’s something about the way the filmmakers reserve this scene for the back end of Part 1 that ices your bones, something about the way an adult Safechuck doesn’t seem to want to go back there. But here he is, talking in a TV documentary about the vows he says that he and Jackson exchanged. Here he is, forlorn, holding the ring that he’s kept, all this time, in a handsome box.

The story of the ring and the vows feels as graphic as the memories of masturbation and French kissing and nipple tweaking. If you happen to be the sort of person who’d try to balance, say, the multiple counts of child molestation Jackson was charged with in 2003 and acquitted of later with extenuating details from Jackson’s biography (Wasn’t he abused and too famous too soon and prematurely sexualized? He never had a childhood! He’s still a child!), if you partook in the steady diet of fluffy news stories about Jackson and some little boy (often identified as “Jackson’s friend”) and thought mostly that they were cute or banal and that Jackson just related to kids as kids — like, platonically — if you thought that he couldn’t know there was a real difference between adult passion and child’s play, then perhaps you’ll find Safechuck’s memory of the ring particularly shattering. I did. It’s so private and wrong, not just to us but clearly to Jackson, who makes up a story at the jewelry store that the ring is for a woman, even though Safechuck is there by his side.

He knew.

I’m staring at the coat rack looking for somewhere to suspend more disbelief, and there’s no more room. I have to hold this.

“Leaving Neverland” is long but delicately, patiently done — and so quiet; you can practically hear yourself listening. It’s not a feat of investigative journalism so much as an act of bearing witness. Reed sits, individually, with Safechuck and his mother, Stephanie, and with Robson and his mother, Joy, and his siblings, Chantal and Shane. It doesn’t try to make cultural or political sense of the allegations. It’s not a masterpiece saga about fame, race, gender, sexuality and the legal system; it’s not “M.J.: Made in America.” (For a long view, there’s “On Michael Jackson,” Margo Jefferson’s pungent, essential critical X-ray from 2006.) “Leaving Neverland” is about one man’s possible contribution to the ruin of two families and the anguish that still disturbs them and, in some way, how that ruin and anguish should disturb us.

The movie presents Jackson almost entirely from the two families’ points of view, in photographs, answering machine messages and a montage of lovey-dovey faxes he sent to his “little one,” which is what James remembers Jackson calling him. He even remembers the lullaby Jackson built around the phrase. The movie re-creates for us the haze Jackson cast over them. Its only moments of disputation arrive in the form of television, from, say, Jackson’s defense lawyers during the 2004-05 trial, and, in 1993, from Jackson himself, in a recorded statement against molestation charges brought by the father of Jordan Chandler. (It was nationally broadcast, as news.)

Reed appears to have encouraged everyone in the movie to try to be in the original moment as best they can. For James, Wade and the rest of the on-camera participants (Wade’s grandmother is here, too, as are, in Part 2, both men’s wives), they seem happy enough in the early telling, when everyone’s a little star-struck. So the movie has a real emotional arc — as well as an abundance of orchestral strings and too many handsome drone shots. The tears don’t come until well into hour four. James, though, appears to be reliving it all. He winces, cringes and grimaces; he does a lot of nervous neck scratching.

It’s here that I should offer the Jackson estate’s disclaimer. It vehemently denies what James and Wade allege, and is suing HBO for $100 million. The movie breaches a nondisparagement clause in a contract with Jackson from the early 1990s, according to the suit. Around 1993, James and Wade told authorities that Jackson didn’t molest them; and Wade testified in court on Jackson’s behalf in 2005. Several years ago, both men filed lawsuits against the estate that were dismissed because of statutes of limitations. And their suits are now under appeal. Fatherhood and, presumably, therapy have encouraged both men to reverse their stories, acknowledge what they believe happened to them and tell their families that they lied about not being abused.

This is a strategy that puts a lot of faith in the accusers and obviates the possibility of counterargument. Much is asserted and nothing is proven, and yet you docome to understand how a mix of showbiz and fandom brought so many boys into Jackson’s life. James starred in a 1986 Pepsi commercial with him. Wade’s uncannily sharp impersonation wins him some nights onstage during the “Bad” tour. Both Stephanie and Joy, the mothers, seem proud to have raised sons so appealing to the planet’s most worshipped person. He tells the Safechucks how lonely he is. And so, in an alarming throwaway detail, the family starts disguising Jackson to sneak him out of Hayvenhurst, his pre-Neverland estate, and into their normal, suburban house. It’s like he actually was E.T. At the Safechucks, Jackson could be a regular, what exactly, kid? We do see Polaroids of him sans makeup, doing funny faces, looking guilelessly happy, so yeah, sure: a kid.

Having Stephanie and Joy speak here as much as they do is a relief for any number of reasons. But let’s just focus on two. First, they’ve had some time to process all of this. They’re lucid. Jackson’s trial, conducted on behalf of a 13-year-old, Gavin Arvizo, featured testimony from Janet Arvizo, the boy’s mother, who spent five days on the stand and, by most accounts, was a terrible witness for her son. She claimed Jackson imprisoned her family, and yet she was allegedly free to leave Neverland to pamper herself? She snapped her fingers at the jury. The defense claimed she committed welfare fraud, for which she was later prosecuted. So we shifted the blame. What’s wrong with her?

The parents of any kid who passed through Neverland were more convenient to indict. How could you let your child sleep in an adult’s bed? It’s been 15 years, though. Someone should find Janet Arvizo and give her a do-over.

That brings me back to how crucial it feels to have Stephanie and Joy speaking in this documentary. (Neither man’s father is interviewed, although, in the case of James’, we never find out exactly why.) You can’t hear a parent wrestle with this blame question enough, whether it’s being asked in relation to R. Kelly or Michael Jackson, your pastor or your priest: How could they let their child spend that much time with an adult stranger? There’s never a “right” or “good” answer. But faith is usually a factor. And faith entails a suspension of disbelief.

The mothers both mention an early limit they set. For Stephanie, it was refusing to let James sleep in Jackson’s room on that trip to Hawaii. And Joy recalls vehemently nixing Jackson’s request to abscond with Wade for a year. But Jackson ultimately wins, anyway. He gets his way, in part, because he could be as manipulative as he could be affectionate, but also because each woman feels, in her way, maternal toward him. He was, both women more or less say, a member of their families. Both families defended him, in the moment, against detractors and accusers. Both boys denied that they were molested — Wade at the trial and to the news media; James to his mother and to a grand jury. So their sons’ falling under his spell — that required some suspension of disbelief. The mothers had fallen, too.

We all had. It was so easy to fall.

Nobody bought more Michael Jackson vinyl LPs than we did of “Thriller.” The euphoria for anything associated with that album was cross-racial and intergenerational. Upon visiting anybody’s house, I’d ask if they had a copy. If the answer was “no,” I’d turn into a 1980s sitcom kid and say something like, “What is your problem?” (I would have been 7, 8 or 9.) If the answer was “yes,” I’d ask to play it, and while it was on, I’d lay on the floor and take long drags on the album’s inside photo: Jackson, in a white suit, laying on his side, one leg bent, looking at us. On the knee of his bent leg is a tiger — a tiger cub. I stared with deep longing. He was so pretty, with his absurd curls and isosceles triangle of a nose and creamy brown face. I’m calling it a photo when, really, it was a centerfold. But what did I want from that picture? What did I want from Jackson? Friendship? A handshake? A souvenir? Ahug?

Pictures and TV footage of Jackson and other boys were easy enough to come across — him and Emmanuel Lewis, him and Alfonso Ribeiro, him and Sean Lennon (none of whom have accused him of any abuse), him and E.T., him and the boy I now know is James Safechuck. There were so many of him and James. Google didn’t make these images simple to find. Magazines did. Teen magazines. I wanted a picture, too. I wanted the warmth and surprise and serious, only-us closeness in some of those images, although James never looks entirely happy in many of them. The seriousness I identified in a lot of the boys’ faces is what adult-me would now call stress.

At the time, I wanted my friends to see Michael Jackson whisking me out of airports and into limousines. I didn’t do an imitation of him or anything, and I never begged my mother to take me to see him. She didn’t have money for that. MTV and “Entertainment Tonight” and the stray issue of Right On! would have to do. But what if I did beg and beg because I was really good at being Michael Jackson? Would that have made a difference? Would she have sacrificed our little family to make my 7-year-old’s dream come true?

Ideally, a parent is a backstop against innocent fervor; against foolish, zealous choices and blissful ignorance. So I have to believe that my mother would have saved me from the hazards of my desire. That was her job. But that’s what adult Wade and James think their mothers’ job should have been, too. What’s still eating each woman up, toward the end of “Leaving Neverland,” is that neither woman disagrees.

It’s entirely possible that we’ve spent the last 26 years preparing for a moment like this — for somebody to lay it all out, graphically, frankly; for somebody to tell us a story, their story. For a long time, the chief teller of any such story was Jackson himself. He would install his sense of persecution into music videos, like the one for “Leave Me Alone,” from 1989, the finale of “Black or White,” from 1991, and “Ghosts,” from 1997, into songs like “Why You Wanna Trip on Me?” (1991), “Scream” (1995) and “They Don’t Care About Us” (1996). Very good songs, mostly about his tribulations as a so-called weirdo (the tabloids named him Wacko Jacko) and, especially, as a black man.

He tried, in highly rated television interviews, to let us see him as wounded and vulnerable and, well, normal. In 1993, he let Oprah Winfrey grill him (about the boys, but also about his altered appearance). He would let Martin Bashir do an occasionally pseudo-vérité version of the same, in a roving two-hour, 2003 TV documentary (“Living With Michael Jackson”) that exposes him as being helpless against himself. (There’s a long, astounding passage, for instance, in which Jackson leads a caravan of children on a Neverland excursion, and he seems taxed by such an overwhelming — and overwhelmingly absurd — baby-sitting assignment. Yet he’s able to bring himself to have one of his park’s homemade snow cones, anyway. It’s like the parody of Jackson’s hapless eccentricity you can see in Harmony Korine’s celebrity-impersonator film, “Mister Lonely,” and in the “Teddy Perkins” episode of FX’s “Atlanta.”) Then, after his arraignment in 2004, Jackson even danced, for appreciative fans, atop a car. Five years later he was dead.

The story was that Jackson never molested anybody. And we stuck to it, and it stuck to him. And the question now, of course, is what do we do? It’s the question of our #MeToo times: If we believe the accusers (and I believe Wade and James), what do we do with the art? With Jackson, what can we do? Wade became a successful choreographer who’s made a career out of teaching his version of Jackson’s hydraulic bounces, whips, and stutters to Britney Spears, ‘N Sync, Cirque du Soleil and rooms full of aspiring dancers. “Look Back at It,” the big single from A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s No. 1 album from January, is built out of two Jackson hits. Michael Jackson’s music isn’t a meal. It’s more elemental than that. It’s the salt, pepper, olive oil and butter. His music is how you start. And the music made from that — that music is everywhere, too. Where would the cancellation begin?

Jackson provided us an early occasion to ask the question about the art without ever realizing it was being asked. We simply lived with it, with the possibility of his guilt, and the many compartments we make to contain everything he was: the conscientious enthusiasm for and the comedy of him, the tragedy he so obviously represents. Perhaps we can live it because it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether he was living with the contradictions himself.

There is something about the way Jackson morphed from pretty to disfigured, closer to Joseph Merrick, the medical case study whose “elephant man” bones Jackson swore he never tried to buy. The morphing could have been a result of the pigmentation ailment, vitiligo, that he told Winfrey he suffered from. But what if all of that change he so notoriously underwent, all the damage he seemed to wear on his body, all the creatures his videos turned him into (werewolves, zombies, a panther, a skeleton), what if his outward self became some semiconscious manifestation of a monster that lurked within?

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/arts/television/michael-jackson-leaving-neverland.html" id="2955416b-dac2-3b66-aa59-1a4082ae31f7">The New York Times</a>.

If the average cultural experience demands the suspension of disbelief, if we ought not think too much about this movie we’re watching, this novel we’re reading, this magic trick being performed right before our eyes, if being entertained means setting aside skepticism, logic and possibly a sense of morality, then what a magic trick we had in Michael Jackson.

Michael Jackson Cast a Spell. 'Leaving Neverland' Breaks It.

<h1>NEW YORK — You up to anything the next couple of days? You up for anything? Let me put it another way: Are you up for a little of everything — a cannon blast of ideas about blackness and gayness and representation, sure, but also about how to devastate and illuminate and deviate, with a camera, a soundtrack and editing, with finger snaps? I’m asking because the Brooklyn Academy of Music has got this weeklong Marlon Riggs retrospective, and it’s so good you’ll weep — and crack up and take notes (even if that’s not a thing you’ve ever done in a movie theater). If you’ve never heard of Marlon Riggs, you’ll wonder why not.</h1>

How could an artist this smart, this prescient, this frank, transparent, curious, ruminative and courageous — this funny — escape your notice? Why haven’t these trenchant, masterful video essays, with insinuatingly tangy names like “Color Adjustment,” “Ethnic Notions” and “Black Is ... Black Ain’t,” been a part of not just your movie diet but also your sense of self-understanding? How come nobody told me?!

For one thing, Riggs made them in the late 1980s and early 1990s, on video. And they’re short. The most famous — and notorious — of them, “Tongues Untied,” isn’t even an hour long. For another, this is 30-year-old work, and what it portends and breaks down and unpacks, what it depicts and imagines and celebrates, has largely been absorbed by the culture and by our politics. “Ethnic Notions” uses on-camera interviews with academics and an army of racist clips and old footage to explain, rigorously, how black has only recently been considered beautiful.

We’re openly queerer now. We’re blacker and browner. And if we’re not any angrier or more confessional now than we were 30 years ago, we’ve certainly got a lot more kiosks upon which to post our grievances and truths. That’s just the identity stuff, though.

Riggs was a formal innovator, too. His work invests a television-video format with alarming complexity: montages and interjections, ghostly palimpsests and these haunting rhythmic visual chants. “Tongues Untied” is Riggs’ unclassifiable scrapbook of black gay male sensibility (a hallucinatory whir of style, memory, psychology), and it includes a reminiscence that starts with Riggs’ round, balding head facing the camera musing on the euphemistic insult of the word “punk.” As the story unspools, he steadily intercuts his story with close-ups of mouths speaking other insults until he’s made music of all the slurs. And the opening passage repeats the words “brother to brother” until they become a wall of erotic self-protection. So it’s more like, “brothertobrotherbrothertobrotherbrothertobrotherbrothertobrotherbrothertobrotherbrothertobrother.”

This is storytelling that arises from joy and pain and pride (Riggs’ clearest emotional forebear is James Baldwin) and culminates in scores of assembled bits. Movie and dream, yes. But mosaic, too. Maybe it looks like the past. But it also looks like Vine, Tumblr and assorted corners of YouTube.

But what’s so electrifying about this BAM series is you watch these films now and discover that he didn’t innovate himself into obsolescence. This isn’t time capsule art. Instead of that fiasco of a news conference Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam held last weekend about his stint with blackface, he could have just played “Ethnic Notions.” It makes a lot more sense and, jarringly, it’s timeless.

The BAM series is called “Race, Sex &amp; Cinema: The World of Marlon Riggs.” And there’s nothing wrong with that “of.” But it’s the world according to and beyond him, too, the world he begat. The programmer of the series, Ashley Clark, has made sure to include movies made with his spirit, like Rodney Evans’ “Brother to Brother” (2004) and Barry Jenkins’ “Moonlight” (2016), with shorts by Cheryl Dunye and Su Friedrich.

How could an artist this smart, this prescient, this frank, transparent, curious, ruminative and courageous — this funny — escape your notice?

Wesley Morris

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