November 1, 2023 On Music The Art of the Libretto: A Conversation with Thulani Davis By Sophie Haigney Courtesy of Thulani Davis. X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is opening at the Metropolitan Opera on November 3. It originally premiered in 1986 at New York City Opera and is the result of a collaboration between three cousins—Anthony Davis, who wrote the music; Christopher Davis, who wrote the story; and Thulani Davis, who wrote the libretto. I spoke with Thulani Davis on the phone about the niche art of writing a libretto, how she transformed Malcolm X’s speech into arias, and the many American stories that might be operas. INTERVIEWER How did you first approach writing the libretto for X, back in 1981? DAVIS My cousin Anthony Davis asked me to write one, which he would then set to music for an opera. I had never written a libretto, so my first thought was, Oh my God, that’s a lot of poems. My first problem in 1981 was trying to figure out how much I could do in a day, alongside a full-time job. It was a challenging and deep learning experience. But having done a few of them now, I think it’s a better job for a poet than for a playwright. Poets usually don’t write plays, and playwrights don’t usually write in verse, so writing a libretto is a weird little niche. I used to read the librettos in the opera house before they had implemented the idea of putting the words on slides or screens above the stage—I was used to trying not to be heard turning pages at the opera. The only librettos I ever read as a result were in English, and they wouldn’t strike you as poetry. They were not felicitous reading. I wanted X to be more graceful. American English is a rhythmic language. Over time it has become more percussive, and more casual, so there are ways to have fun with it while still writing poetry. Read More
September 25, 2023 Dispatch Lost and Found By Sophie Haigney The MTA lost and found. Photograph by Sophie Haigney. I was thinking, recently, of a scene from the animated movie Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The island of lost toys, I remembered, was a place in the North Pole where the stuffed bears and Hot Wheels cars and waddling wind-up penguins that disappear from children’s lives ended up. They lived happily in their own colony, tinged only slightly with the sad shadow of their severance from their human caretakers. I went to look up this scene, and it turned out I had misremembered it and had been doing so for years. There is no island of lost toys. In the movie it is the island of misfit toys—all the more poignant, for the toys are not lost but abandoned, because they don’t quite belong. Children don’t want them and so they find one another. Eventually this odd cast of characters comes together to teach Rudolph a lesson about the beauty of being a misfit; as we all know, that particular story ends happily ever after. But if the misfits have found one another, where do the lost toys go? That question sort of answers itself: they’re lost. They’re unaccounted for. There are some possible explanations. Perhaps that treasured stuffed lion, worn around the ears, was forgotten on the red banquette at an Italian restaurant where the child was drawing in crayon on a paper tablecloth. Perhaps it fell between the seats of a Land Rover, or worse, into the bottomless netherland of “under the bed.” But even if these scenarios are plausible or true, they might be unverifiable, and so some things simply seem to be erased from earth. I lose things all the time—credit cards, keys, jackets, sunglasses, books, a necklace, two necklaces—actually, three necklaces, all of them gifts from people who loved me. Sometimes I joke that I practice nonattachment, the Buddhist thing, though the real explanation is that I am clumsy and careless. I do wonder where it is that my things have gone. I have always been bothered by this, so much so that it seems I invented and sustained a belief in a fictional Arctic island populated by reindeer where lost things might one day be restored. Read More
September 8, 2023 At Work Does Lana Del Rey Read The Paris Review? By Sophie Haigney Sam McKinniss, Lana Del Rey Reading The Paris Review, 2023, five-color offset lithograph with hot foil stamping on acid-free 352-gsm Sappi McCoy Silk, plate size 24 ½ x 18 ¾ in, paper size 30 x 22 in. The latest image in our recently relaunched print series is by Sam McKinniss and features the singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey—white-gloved, in a sun hat—reading the Review. The lithograph print, based on a painting by McKinniss, was made with the help of Dusty Hollensteiner at Publicide Inc.; on Friday, September 8, at 9 P.M., the print, made in a limited edition of twenty-five, will be made available for sale to the public at parisreviewprints.org. McKinniss and I talked on the phone a few weeks ago about his process, Lana’s latest album, and images of women reading on the internet. INTERVIEWER What led you to make an image of Lana Del Rey reading The Paris Review? SAM McKINNISS A friend of mine told me that once upon a time she was having a bad day, so her boyfriend bought her a copy of Lana Del Rey’s poetry book to cheer her up. It worked. Then I thought: What if Lana Del Rey has been photographed somewhere reading? I started googling for pictures of “Lana Del Rey reading,” and I found a photograph of her reading her own book of poetry. Based on that, I decided to make a picture of Lana Del Rey reading The Paris Review, which is not so hard to believe that she does, from time to time. INTERVIEWER What do you think she would be reading in The Paris Review? McKINNISS Poetry. Read More
July 19, 2023 Overheard The Final Dead Shows: Part Three By Sophie Haigney Black-and-white Bobby. Photographs by Sophie Haigney. Let’s start with the dark stuff. On Saturday night in San Francisco, after the second-to-last-ever Dead & Co. show, every single ATM near the ballpark was apparently out of cash, because people couldn’t stop buying balloons filled with nitrous oxide, huffing them on the street for just a few more seconds of feeling high. The bars nearby were overrun, quite literally, long after everyone should have been at home. People go down at shows—it happened right in front of us one night, the medics rushing in and carrying someone out. There are, not infrequently, overdoses. There is too much of everything, sometimes. “I’m at that point in a bender where beer isn’t really doing anything for me anymore,” I heard someone joke on day three of the three-show run. Read More
July 18, 2023 Overheard The Final Dead Shows: Part Two By Sophie Haigney A very cool van. Photographs by Sophie Haigney. We went to the lot. The lot, my younger brother observed—he was a first-time Dead & Co. show attendee—was “literally just a parking lot.” In fact it was a parking lot adjacent to the Port of San Francisco and near the SFPD headquarters, where I used to go for press conferences when I was a crime reporter. It was a vast parking lot, not far from the stadium where the second-to-last Dead & Co. show was going to start in two hours, and it was full of Deadheads. The lot is the scene outside every show, known colloquially as Shakedown Street. It’s more or less an open-air drug market, that phrase that gets thrown around a lot to describe other parts of San Francisco; it is also the locus of the vestiges of real hippie culture. There is nothing like it anywhere else. There are vans that have been on the road for months, vans painted with psychedelic mushrooms, vans covered in stickers that say “Make America Grateful Again” and “Thank you Bobby.” People sell T-shirts, an endless array of T-shirts in every imaginable version of tie-dye. People sell quesadillas. People sell nitrous oxide—lots of it; in fact, the unmistakable hiss of nitrous and the constant popping of balloons is one of the most disconcerting features of being outside a Dead show. People sell funny hats. People sell, confusingly, a lot of rocks. I saw a sign next to a big box of rocks that said BUY 1 GET 1 FREE. Read More
July 17, 2023 Overheard The Final Dead Shows: Part One By Sophie Haigney John Mayer looking good. Walking into a Dead & Company show is more or less how you imagine it would be: there are nearly forty thousand people converging on a baseball stadium wearing some of the worst outfits you have ever seen in your life. “This is really a lot of different types of white people, huh?” a first-time attendee said as we walked into the show at San Francisco’s Oracle Park (formerly AT&T Park, SBC Global Park, and PacBell Park.) On the street, a white guy with dreadlocks offered us mushrooms. Another white guy with dreadlocks held up a sign that said, “Cash, grass, or ass—I’ll take it all.” A friend, stunned by the famous Northern California fog, bought an ugly tie-dye sweatshirt at a makeshift stand outside the stadium for seventy-eight dollars. It was the first night of a three-night run of the final shows for this iteration of the Grateful Dead—the last tour ever, the last shows ever, though, as everyone knows, the Grateful Dead has been ending for nearly twenty years. When Jerry Garcia died in 1995, everyone thought that was the end. In 2015, many of the original band members played a tour that was literally called “Fare Thee Well.” And yet, miraculously, it continued. But this time: Bob Weir is seventy-five, and John Mayer, the unlikely force behind this version of the band, has other things to get on to. At the very least, this is probably the last time they’ll ever sell out huge stadiums. So this was a major event that I had flown out from New York to see with five friends. I had been hearing for days that SFO was “like Bonnaroo for Deadheads.” On another friend’s flight in, the pilot told them they were flying over a wildfire in Colorado. “Wow, it’s literally ‘Fire on the Mountain,’ ” someone behind her said. Read More