The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 25: The Ballad of a Trump Fan, and the Little Mermaid Gets Dumped

Episode Date: April 8, 2016

This week, we look into the lives and careers of two giants of soul—Aretha Franklin and the late James Brown. From the campaign trail, Michael Friedman’s musical ode to a South Carolinian Trump supporter, and Jesse Eisenberg, along with his sister Hallie, performs the humor piece “Why I Broke Up with the Little Mermaid.” New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From WNYC Studios and The New Yorker with an apology to Walt Disney, this is why I broke up with The Little Mermaid by Jesse Eisenberg. Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the house and free, wish I could be part of that world. Look at this stuff. Isn't it neat? Not really. What is it? They're whos and what, silly. I got them from a yard sale.

Yeah, we don't need more stuff. can barely walk through the house. You want thingamabobs? What, you mean those vintage corkscrews? I got 20s. Yeah, where did you even find those? Estate sales. You've just been going around to estate sales?

And sometimes eBay. Okay, you can't keep buying this stuff. Oh, it's no big deal. It is a big deal. You put 17 washing machines on layaway at Sears. And I want more. Three Vitamixes were just delivered from Amazon. The blendomerales arrived?

How splendid! Yeah, they were $600 each. But they're the only kind of blendemoral that can mix up my who'sets and what'sets. Yeah, did you read that book I got you about the Easterland paradox? No, but I used the pages to make an origami bird. Right. Easterland posits that happiness isn't derived from the accumulation of material goods. In fact, newer studies show that amassing possessions will likely make you feel almost counterintuitively deprived. Stop reprimanding me. You sound just like Daddy.

Can you please not say Daddy? It sounds weird coming from an adult. That chavreland, they understand that they don't reprimand their daughters. Brand young women, sick of swimming. ready to stand Are you all right? You've been tossing and turning all night I can't sleep, I'm panicked What's wrong? Did an octopus steal your soul?

What? No. Is a Jamaican crab spying on you? No, what? No, I'm just feeling stressed out about work. The deadline for my book is next month. I haven't even started writing it. Well, that's not so bad. I have a splendid idea. Really? What if you trade a part of your body for a manuscript? Sorry, what do you mean?

I mean, we find an evil sorceress, and we ask, her to accept one of your body parts in exchange for a finished manuscript. I was really hoping to just talk through some of the plot with you. You don't need a plot, silly. You just need to think of a part of your body that you don't need that much, like one of your arms, or an eye, or maybe the sorceress will have her own suggestion. And then you trade it in for a finished manuscript. That sounds terrifying. Oh, silly, it's only terrifying if you don't get the book published within three days. Why? Then what happens? Then the sorceress will keep your book and your arm.

Okay, can't you just listen to me? I'm feeling anxious, and I need to get this off my chest. Oh, your chest! We'll trade in your chest for the book. How splendid! I'm not trading any part of me for the book. Well, then I don't know how else to help you. Turn off the lights, my bulb. I'm going to sleep.

Where the people are. I want to see... Want to see them dancing. Walking around on those... What do you call them? Oh, feet. Had the most splendid day. Great. Did you pick up the dry cleaning?

Well, I certainly tried to, silly. I went to the cleaners, but I forgot. I forgot what you asked me to pick up. What was that word again? Dress shirts? Right, your dress shirts. I'm sorry, sweetheart. I forgot. That's okay. I'll get them myself later. Did you make it to the pharmacy? Well, I knew I had to refill you or... What was that word again? Paxil?

Right, you're Paximalol. It's just Paxil. Right. Paxama Bob. How splendid! Okay. Did you get it? No. Okay. You forgot that too. Well, did you at least pick up our son? I tried to. I even went to his... What's that word again? School?

And I asked his... What do you call her again? Teacher. If she had my... What is he called again? Son! But she asked me for his... What do you call a... Name. And I told her it was, what do we call him again? Ryan.

Right, Ryan. No, I didn't get him. Hallie Eisenberg and her brother, Jesse Eisenberg, performing Why I Broke Up with the Little Mermaid. A piece Jesse wrote for the New Yorker Shouts and Murmors page. You're listening to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Today we're going to be talking about two giants of soul music, American music, James Brown and Aretha Franklin.

But let's start off with a very different kind of song. over the last couple of months, we've been following a composer named Michael Friedman on a musical journey. Friedman's on the campaign trail and he's been interviewing all kinds of people to see what's on their minds in this lunatic political moment

that we're right in the middle of. Then he takes these transcripts and he writes songs based very precisely on the words of those subjects. He was in South Carolina not long ago for the primary and the New Yorker Sarah Larson checked in with him. Hi, Michael. Hi, Sarah. How are you?

I'm pretty good. How are you doing? I'm doing great, thanks. This week, your song is about a voter in South Carolina. How did you find this voter? From Charleston, and when I was flying there, oh, you have to talk to my friend. And that friend then when I interviewed him said, you have to talk to my cousin. I like that it was a cousin-to-cous situation. Michael, when you're interviewing people, what kinds of things are you looking for?

Obviously, you're looking for a good talker. But what else makes an interviewee a good potential song? It's where somebody has a story that feels like it has a really good spine, a center. In this case, it was that the stories he was telling were almost kind of a Russian doll of stories. There was sort of a story, center of that story, another story. And when he finally got to that center story, I was like, and I see also in the case of this project, how it connects to things I was hearing from a lot of people in Charleston, which in a big year in America is a city that has been through the last year and a half.

Yeah, absolutely. And he's a Trump supporter, right? He is, well, he's confusing. Who he voted for is not necessarily who he's hated and into Trump. You can hear in the song, he says, I'm thrilled by Trump. And then he says, well, I mean, I've got mixed emotions. And then he follows up with a pretty huge diatribe about where America is now. He calls the country the Titanic headed towards the iceberg, and I think that is.

a pretty hardcore statement to make. I think it's safe to say that we're all very emotional about what's happening politically right now. I would agree with that, and I think that that's what's so interesting about this election is how the heightened of the emotions around it have become. Michael, you are not a Trump supporter. What's it like to get in the mind of a Trump supporter? Well, it's a funny thing I found in performing it. We had a really marvelous, I thought,

conversation and meal. Yeah. The little story at the center, which is the climax of this story, which is a really complicated, moving story. He uses, I in performing it, found that using the word myself in the character, not something that I was comfortable with. So how did you handle the N-word in the song? In the end, I, you'll hear, there's a little space, and the, as it were, the skanchion of it is in the piano, and there's just a space word. Yeah. Should we listen to the song? Great. from here. But I really grew up in the woods, as you can tell, by the way I talk. I think we have

too many rednecks here standing on their guns like me. I'm Kappa Alpha Robert E. Lee. Waving, stars, and bars, I mean growing up. As a kid, I was hunting all the time. Somerville, James Island, where my daddy was born. I used to hunt with my cousin. Well, my father's first cousins, so were second cousins three times removed, and one time dislocated, or something like that. He and I lived on the river, shot deer quail woodcock, rabbit's doves just about anything

that was in season. I just thank God I came along when I did. It was a beautiful time. These days you can hardly find any woods there. You can't hunt there anymore. And Michael, I'm just nuts about the fact

that character has gone to nothing in this country. And I don't know when you young folks are gonna wake to that. Well, something's gotta have I mean our country is the Titanic going towards the iceberg. I'm thrilled by Trump. I mean, I've got mixed emotions, but I'm glad that he's upset the apple cart.

Because so many politicians have made billions of dollars on being a politician, and it runs the gamut. Strong Thurmond was in there for life. Harry Reid, who was a pauper when he came in, is now worth millions of dollars, and people in this country are more interested in yelling and screaming. We all have these phones, and the next. next person who says to me, time is money, I'm just going to puke. Time is not money. To me, it all comes down to character. Like, how about the way we handled the tragedies last year? I mean,

with as many black folks as we have around here, even that terrible shooting in North Charleston, where the policeman shot Walter Scott, there was terrible outrage in the community about that The policeman is in jail and that family When they made that statement, We don't want all you political activists Coming here, you're not invited That just spoke volumes about the community. I mean when I was growing up,

The only black people you knew were servants. We had servants, 15 cents, and our servants, Otherwise they were just people who live somewhere up there. We had a maid, and we were not a wealthy family. We lived at 61B, Montague Street, we rented, but we had a maid. She lived uptown. Her name was Rina, and she was a black woman.

She was like another mother to me, and the most embarrassing thing I've ever faced in my life was I came out on the porch, and I had planted a Japanese plum tree that, you know, had plums, and kids always liked them. There were three little black boys. black boys up in the tree and I came out and saw that they were stealing from me and I yelled out you get out of my tree and Lena was emptying the garbage she came running around the front of the porch and grabbed me and she said let me tell you something you better think before you use that word again if I hear you again I will wash your mouth out with soap

our hearts to be able to see the fact that bringing down the flag in the state house of all things know it needed to come down and we can still have it in our house share the remembrance of it but you know it was time we've come a long way thank you lord for bringing michael into my life bless this oh michael it's a lot going on in the song It is such a beautiful song, and I'm so sad. Well, I can say one thing in Charleston, I was walking around with a historian, and he just said, you know, it's the, I think maybe this whole year is feeling that. Yeah. So let's talk about this guy.

He's very self-aware. He's very, very self-aware. And yet, he's clearly made a lot of progress in his thinking in his life. It was beautiful to hear him say that he was glad that the Confederate flag came down outside. the State House, but then... We can still have it in our house and share the remembrance of it. That just killed me. The good thing about interviewing people are talking about.

My job on this is to hear... I'm letting some things go that in other circumstances I might have combated a little further. Yeah. How old was he, by the way? He was in his 60s. So not elderly by any... No, no, no, not elderly by any stretch of the imagination.

The older I get, the younger, that seems. Yes, exactly. I would say he's a child of the 50s. Michael, where are you headed next? I'm working out trips to California and Oregon. What part of California do you think you'll go to? I'm going to do Los Angeles, though. There's a possibility I'll go north as well.

In Oregon, I'm planning to spend time in the eastern away from the coast and sort of in the inland. They had a militia holding up on the campaign trail. Well, there are clearly many songs to be written. There are a lot of songs to be. written and I'm excited to figure out what's next. Michael, this song was so beautiful and it hurts my heart, but in a really good way, I think. It was a hard song to write and a hard song to perform, but I'm excited to get people's reactions to it. Well, thank you so much. Thanks, Sarah. Good luck on your pleasure as always. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Bye.

Michael Friedman talking with Sarah Larson about songs from the campaign trail. We'll hear from him again in a few weeks. You know, when I think about how much music can express political sentiments and a much deeper sense of Americanness in our history. I'm put in mind of so many people, people like Woody Guthrie, Sam Cook, a lot of the hip-hop performers of today even. And now they were coming to the end of the Obama administration, I was thinking back on how it began. In January of 2009, a freezing day in Washington, the first African-American president about to be inaugurated. And Aretha Frank whose grandparents were sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta.

Here she was, stepping forward to the microphone, in that unbelievable hat with a huge gray bow, My Country Tisagree. It was unbelievably cold, if you remember, sub-zero temperatures, and her voice suffered from it. But it really hardly mattered. It was a historical moment more than a musical one. We connected that inauguration to a truer sense of American history in the moment.

If the last time you really thought about Aretha Franklin was that performance at the inauguration, you might have been taken by surprise as I was when you heard her on a video that went absolutely viral a few months ago from the Kennedy Center. She was singing in honor of Carol King who was receiving one of those Kennedy Center honors. She came out onto the stage wearing a full-length Ming coat,

an amazing, amazing look, put her pocketbook on the piano, sat down, and started banging out gospel chords, and singing the opening lines of You Make Me Feel like a natural woman in a way that I don't know how to describe it other than to say that President Obama was crying right away. Carol King was practically leaping over the railing,

calling in the song with her arms, waving it on. And I was a puddle too. I think millions of people were, whether they were watching it live or on the Internet. Carol King's song was in many ways a pop song. But in Aretha Franklin's mouth, of course, it had these elements of R&B, the blues, and of course gospel. Aretha Franklin was born to the Baptist Church,

and her father, C.L. Franklin, was one of the most charismatic and important preachers of his time. And his style of preaching was known as whooping, and it would begin with a kind of narrative of biblical explanation, and by the time you got to the second half of it, It was pure, ecstatic song. That style influenced Aretha Franklin's singing. And so too did the fact that she lived in a house in which Art Tatum was playing the piano,

and Duke Gellington would visit, and Mahalia Jackson would come and cook and then sing gospel in the evening and BB King would come by. It was a crossroads of American music and spirituality and the black church. And Aretha Franklin, who was really a child of privilege as a minister's daughter, was absorbing all of it. And when she was just 14 years old, he was already going on the road singing gospel with her father

and recording her first music. An amazing sound. Now, the great African-American historian and cultural analyst, W.E.B. Du Bois, writes in the Souls of Black Folk, which was published in 1903, that, quote, despite caricature and defilement,

the music of the black church still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and life and longing yet born on American soil. Du Bois could never have known how that gospel music would cross over into soul, rock, pop,

practically all of American music, but 110 years later, his point rings true. Here's Aretha in her early 70s on the stage of the Kennedy Center. She lets the mink coat drop from her shoulders in the most dramatic way possible. She spreads her arms wide to polish off this song,

marrying Sunday morning and Saturday, night, gospel in the blues, all in a voice and a style to make it seem like she's got the divine right to her title, the Queen of Soul. If there's anyone in the late 50s and into the 60s and 70s who could be called Aretha Franklin's great competitor in the marriage of Saturday night and Sunday morning, he was James Brown. There's a fantastic new book about James Brown that just came out, written by a first-class writer and musician, and I'll talk with its author in a minute. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick, and thanks for joining me for the New Yorker Radio Hour. I've got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of James Brown. I love

the live at the Apollo albums and so much more, but there's one, one moment, a 1964 concert on television called The Tammy Show that everybody's got to see, and it's on YouTube. It was an early point in his career, but everything we associate with James Brown is there, the energy, the yelling, the wildness of his dancing, the giant haircut. It's 18 minutes, but it's a performance that perfectly encapsulates the title of James McBride's new book, Kill Him and Leave, searching for James Brown and the American soul. McBride is a musician, a teacher, a novelist, and he won the National Book Award for the Good Lord Bird just a couple of years ago. He's now a biographer of James Brown.

Jim, how did James Brown think about performance itself and the whole idea of, he uses the word, killing an audience in a short period of time? Well, he was into soul and speed because he came up to that Chitland circuit where people were drinking and smoking and having a good time. They wanted, you had to go to the max right away. There's no meandering.

Yeah, there's no fooling around. I mean, you're sitting in a juke joint, you know, in Birmingham somewhere, Little Richard just finished burning the stage to senders. You better, you better bring it, you know. I think part of his expertise was that he could gauge an audience very well. And he knew the soft spots in an audience, and he knew when they were primed and ready for him to, you know, make love to them.

And he would just, he would go at it hard. You know, he was consumed. And a typical James Brown concert or show in the early days, in the peak days of 50s and 60s, would last how long? Oh, it lasts about three hours. It was like a Broadway show. You know, blacks didn't go to Broadway in the 50s and the 60s. James Brown was Broadway.

He was more than that. He was the essence of African American life. Well, this is the thesis of the book and at the core of the book, and you're trying to impress on the reader how important James Brown and James Brown's music and achievement and life were to the African American story. And why is that? Why is he so central and so kind of embodied this history? Because he was so weird and he was like the uncle who shows up from down south, who comes to the house, gets drunk, and takes out his teeth.

And you're just so embarrassed when he does it, but you know he loves you and you love him. And James Brown really epitomize, you know, the country black folk that a lot of northerners came from. The stage move that James Brown had was the whole business of somebody coming out, his guy would come out with a cape and trying to rescue him from his exhaustion. And James couldn't go on any longer. And then he resuscitate himself and rise from the dead and do another minute of the song.

And the whole stage act was amazing. I saw him with the Apollo and he was one year from dead or something. He was still doing this thing that he'd been doing for, I don't know how long, 40 years. Where does that come from? I think that he got it from the Pentecostal Church, United House of Prayer. in Augusta. United House of Prayer, if you ever had the opportunity.

It's a sanctified church. And the way they play music there is continuous, nonstop, with horns and everything. Even during the sermon. Even during the sermon. They just go at it and they play, I've never heard anything like it

in all my years on this earth. And they have these moments where people actually just lose it and, you know, possession. Possession. Yeah, they're speaking in tongues and so forth, you know.

Now, even a modest fan knows that A big part of James Brown's music was a time, time. Time. His attention to the one, the beat, the precision of the band, the most overused word in any discussion about music at a certain level is the G word, the genius word. Is that at the center of the genius of James Brown? Well, I would say innovator or pioneer, certainly.

I mean, the genius is someone like, you know, I consider a genius someone who is like perfect pitch and you can drop a quarter on the table and they can tell you the note, that's the kind of genius or Mozart or Coltrane. Well, he was pretty close. In terms of innovation and pioneering, he was an organic genius.

He was an organic tomato. Did he know it? Probably not. Probably not. He didn't know what he was doing. He was like most creative people. He just said, this sounds good. do this thing, you know. And also the other thing James Brown did that is unique is that his

use of the guitar and the bass and the other instruments as they blended, if you pull out the guitar part to a James Brown piece and listen to it contrasting against the other part. Because it's another drum or it's melodic aspect? Because it's both melodic and rhythmic. And usually they're two guitars and they play off against each other and they make perfect cassettes. They used to call it the washing machine thing. How do you mean? What does that mean? Because the old washing machines would make this shuk-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. And so they would, the sound that he was trying to create was the sound of these old washing machines when they, when you're moving your fingers now, like a saxophonist, which you are, by the way, have been a professional musician for a long time and a music teacher. When you try to play James Brown and the mode of James Brown, what's hard about it? It's impossible to do it right.

Really? Why? Because the sound of that band cannot be recreated. I mean, you just can't get these kinds. First of all, those guys grew up in the South. They grew up listening to Hank Williams and Country and Weston and Louis Jordan. And they just had a blend of love for blues, country, and jazz that I don't. Secondly, they rehearsed all the time.

Thirdly, they didn't have to read music or anything like that. They just played all the time. So the tightness of that band and the originality of that. And the originality of that music is just beyond my ability to even ape properly. John Coltrade played and played and played and played and played.

Sadi Rohn's the same thing. James Brown worked really hard, and he worked his band mercilessly, and you even make the point in your book that he's pretty cruel to the band. He was. He was tough. But again, the knife cuts both ways in that regard, because musicians are hard to handle.

Some of his band members were drunk, some, you know, smoked pot, and some could play. and others. He had two trumpet players who could hardly play the instrument, but they could dance well, and he just, you know,

he had a music director named Pee We Ellis who could shape all of these things. So he was smart enough to get the best cats and keep them with him as long as they could stand him. Would you have liked to have met him? No, no, I don't think so.

I don't know if he, because if he didn't like you, he was like Frank Sinatra, shame on you. But if he liked you, you know. So I'm not sure. for you to like me or not. One of the great chapters in the book is discusses the relationship of Al Sharpton

and James Brown, and we're laughing because, well, because. You know, because Al Sharpton has meant so many things over the years and sometimes he presents as a serious figure and sometimes less so. But that relationship was essential

to James Brown, and we kind of know a little bit of it. We'd go way deeper in this book. And what did it represent. Well, first of, I don't think people really understood that Al Sharpton is in some ways a creation of James Brown. Because when Al Sharpton was 17, you know, he got to know James Brown and he traveled. He left New York to go to go on tour with James Brown. And he left as a 17-year-old teenager. He came back as the Reverend Al Sharpton. But he was a, he was a nascent preacher even before that, right?

He was a boy preacher who was a kind of a little, you know, low-level preacher here in New York at a Pentecostal Church in Brooklyn. But he had done nothing. He was, he was, he was, he was, he was a boy preacher. He was, he was, he was a boyererer who was a kind of a little, you know, low-level preacher here in New York at a Pentecostal church in Brooklyn. But he had done nothing. He was unknown outside the Pentecostal church or apolitic church. But every time you see Al Sharpton, you see him talk, you're hearing James Brown talk. And he says it in the book, and he said it, you know, several times during interviews. Cermons or just the way he... No, just his whole approach to racism, white America, what black America needs, the business of injustice,

all of that was, you know, James Brown covertly. James Brown would never say some of the things Al Sharpton would say. Well, this is it. I mean, James Brown, sometimes you'd hear him give an interview. Or when you listen to him saying, it's more feeling than coherence. Whereas Al Sharpton is all coherence. I mean, you understand exactly what he's saying. Well, Al Sharpton was the guy who could talk for James Brown.

I mean, James Brown was a brilliant guy. He was very smart, but the way he talked, you know, He was a little self-conscious about it. He didn't talk like a man with a formal education. Whereas Al Sharpton could spin it backwards. Al Sharpton could go 360 degrees. He could swing with James Brown's henchman and he could talk to a president.

And James Brown loved that about him. James Brown's life was messy. It was a colossal mess. There are four marriages. Let's just say not all of them happy. When he died, a huge battle over his estate, ensued. I don't even know that it's resolved to this day. Not yet. Why did this happen? Why did he live in such a chaotic state? I think he made a mistake when he left his first wife, you know,

who was interviewed in the book. His first wife really understood him. And she let him go. She was married to him for 10 years, really technically more like 19, but she let him go and he never really recovered from that. Look, he knew he had done a lot of bad things in his life. He was a woman and I, so he didn't treat his band that well. He didn't owe the IRS any money, and he didn't know anybody. He made a great IRS settlement. At a certain point, the IRS, which felt it was owed $15 million, settled for a million dollars. Right. How did that happen? Because he met a great accountant. Yeah, I need that account. A good old boy from the South. Yeah, meet the you and I both. He met a good old boy from the South who figured it out and fought the IRS on his behalf.

And he suffered financially. He felt that he was getting ripped off all the time by the record companies, not just the government, by the whole musical establishment. Was he right? Heck yeah. All those old stars. Aretha Franklin, too. That's why she carries the pocketbook. You know, Aretha is a cash, you know, everybody knows.

All cash. She's all cash. Because, you know, you turn on the radio, you hear someone. playing ninth chords borrowed from your history or playing your song, you're not getting paid for it, you know. You know, it's hard not to be bitter when you hear, you know, these stories constantly about Nate Floyd Scott, who died, you know, James Brown guitarist.

With nothing. With nothing. He died. He was poverty-stricken. He was blind. He had no money. He was, he didn't complain. But he, at least, you know, he should have died with a little something.

One point that you make in your book that's really clear. and loud and clear, is that so much of black musical history is lost or fumbled or rewritten. And this is a central part of American cultural history. It's a huge percentage of it is an African-American music. Why the screw-up? Why the fumbled history?

That's a difficult question to answer, but it's sort of typified by James Brown's life because he even fictionalized elements of his history. because he felt white folks didn't care as long as you could sing and dance, it was fine. I think part of the reason for it is that it's really hard to delineate what's white and what's black in music

once it starts to get good. I mean, Tower Power is a band that is like James Brown's band on steroids. And they're mostly white cats. And they can, I mean, these cats can play, man. They really sound good, so you can't just say, you know, you're copying black music.

But on the other hand, Jaco Pistor is the great genius bassist. He was well known for a song called Chicken. That song was actually written by Pee Wee Ellis, who was James Brown's co-composer and co-musical director. Peewee Ellis can't make a living here. He has to live in London because he's totally unknown here. I think part of it is the media just can only accept

a certain number of people when it has this category of black. I mean, the categories of music as it's sold, in America by salesmen, creates these categories that only allow certain kinds of people to flourish. But James Brown did flourish in a sense, and so did one of his admirers and imitators,

Michael Jackson. And Jackson makes an appearance in your book at James Brown's funeral. That's right. He comes to the funeral. First, he spends the night with James Brown's body. He shows up around 11 o'clock at night, and he spends five hours in the funeral home

with James Brown's body. And he never sits down. He's there all night. And then he goes to the funeral the next morning. And he's one of the few stars who showed up in Augusta, Georgia. He loved James Brown. They had a lot in common, actually, because they were both lonely men who lived in a place

that few people understood. They were adored and somehow, in some ways, disliked. And mocked, too. And mocked by the public. And they both wanted to be seen as proper people. hair always combed, you know, always clean, always looking good. They always wanted to put forward their best face. And Michael Jackson understood his debt.

I mean, when he's doing the moonwalk, he's not trying to put it past anybody where that came from. Oh, yeah, he used to say when he was a boy and when his mother played James Brown on television, he was four and five years old, he was just knocked down. He loved James Brown. He really, and also, during the victory tour, when I first went out to L.A. and I was there for the first time, I saw that. this preacher standing out in front of Michael Jackson's house. And this guy said, I'm here because James Brown sent me. And I was like, who was this guy? He was Reverend Al Sharpton.

And he insisted during the course of the tour that he was there because James Brown sent him to help look after Michael Jackson's interests. Thank you. James McBride talking about one of the giants of American music, the late James Brown. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. week on the show, with all the flowers blooming and the trees budding, we sent Patricia Marks on a mission to make a salad using only ingredients picked in Central Park. It's an illegal and possibly deadly mission in urban foraging.

And still ahead today, two transgender filmmakers who've helped make the TV show transparent and authentic depiction of the life of a transitioning woman. That's in a minute on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Please stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome back. I'm David Remnick. And I'm David Haglund. About a month ago, Lily Wachowski, the co-director of The Matrix and several other movies, joined her sister, Lana, in coming out as transgender. She didn't want to come out just yet, not to the whole world, but a journalist from the Daily Mail had forced her hand. According to an open letter, she wrote, to the Windy City Times. In the letter, she explained what being transgender meant to her.

To be transgender is something largely understood as existing within the dogmatic terminus of male or female, she wrote. And to transition imparts a sense of immediacy, a before and after from one terminus to another. But the reality, my reality, is that I've been transitioning and will continue to transition all of my life through the infinite that exists between male and female, as it does in the infinite between the binary of zero and one. We need to elevate the dialogue beyond the simplicity of binary. Binary is a false idol. I love that. Yeah, the binary is completely dissolving, and I think that it's like we all have our own gender uniquely,

and that's not just trans people, that's everybody. That's Zachary Drucker and Reese Ernst. They're both co-producers on the Amazon series Transparent. Transparent is, I think, one of the best shows to come along in the last couple of years. It tells the story of Mora Pfefferman, who comes out as transgender to her kids at the age of 70. Are you saying that you're going to start dressing up like a lady all of those? I mean, all my life. My whole life I've been dressing up like a man.

The show's director, Jill Soloway, created Transparent after her father came out as a transgender woman. Early on, she sought out Zachary and Reese for help in telling a story about a transcarriage. because she wanted to get that story right. I met Jill Soloway at Sundance in 2012 when I had a short film that played at the festival. She was just beginning her kind of foray into directing herself, having come from a writing and producing background and television. As a woman in TV, she was not given the opportunity to direct for many, many, many, many years,

which is a very common story, as we all know. And we met kind of at that early kind of cusp of her coming into directing which was also around the time that her parent came out. I remember talking to you, Zachary, about, oh, this person's parent is trans, and we sent some links to some trans-related films, and we were just kind of sharing information and keeping in touch with Jill about this and that.

It was remarkable because I think that she was specifically looking to gain a knowledge base around trans issues and to become politicized, and that happened very quickly. You know, when Jill brought us in to talk about collaborating on trans-pans, I think that really what was underneath it was that she had the foresight to bring in trans people as early as possible into the process. So when she asked us to come in, the word she used was to talk about collaborating. And this was when the pilot was just a script. She was like, what do you think about Jeffrey Tambor for the lead?

And we were like, wow. And so we were having this conversation, but nobody had been cast. Nothing had been really put together or really committed to. It was no network. Yeah. Yeah. She was like, what about Amazon? We were like, what?

The bookseller? So what exactly is your involvement on the show at this point? What do you do? So our involvement starts each season with the writing. And as soon as there's outlines, as soon as there's any kind of version of a draft, we read everything in every single draft and give a lot of notes from the very start.

And then when production starts, or just actually pre-production, we start also by hiring trans-cruis. and gender non-conforming crew for all the various departments. And we also deal with a lot of casting of queer and trans roles. But yeah, when we're in production, every time there's any kind of scene that has anything to do with queer, trans, anything, we're definitely there.

And then that participation goes through post-production to the rough cuts and giving notes on everything and all the way to release and then press. But it's very much, I see it as shepherding the politics of representation. whilst also doing, you know, specific kind of producerial kind of hard tasks. But it's just being a part of the creative team. And our offices are just one door down from the writer's room. So we're in and out of there quite a lot, and we're in dialogue with the writers and all the guest directors in jail and the other producers on a daily basis. Is there a specific note you remember giving to kind of give us a sense of what that process is like and how it works?

I can think of a couple examples. One of them is inappropriate for the radio because it has a dirty word in it, which was actually the crux of the change. Dirty words are okay. Without spoiling anything from season three. I can think of season two, though. There's actually one example. There's an entire plot points that are things that we've kind of seen through to the beginning.

I remember both of us being really involved in the women's festival scenes. I mean, I think whenever there's like a storyline, we want to protect or really look at or really push forward. We'll take that on. I'm referring to the women's fest storyline where Mora goes with her daughters to a women's fest and learns that there's a no trans women policy or a women-born women-only policy. And the complex thing about depicting that storyline was that you really kind of want to honor both sides of the argument. Because on one side there's this turf argument that trans women shouldn't be included at a women's festival.

which I don't agree with personally. But, you know, the thing about an all-women's festival like that is that there's a real necessity and a sort of joy and a sort of protected space that that type of festival does indicate. Like, women who go to festivals like that say it's the only time they feel safe their whole year and they save up all year and it's really meaningful for people who go to these kinds of places. On the other hand, trans women have been disincluded and repressed and pushed out of these places sometimes almost even, almost violently.

Well, violently. Yeah, we could say violent. In many cases. So anyway, that was a scene and a storyline that we both really worked hard to kind of push and pull and eke out both sides of that argument. Yeah, well, here's to us.

Extremists. Here's to the last remaining extremists. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Just don't be starting any shi-sandy because Allie and Maura had no idea about the festival policy. Hey, Leslie, what is the festival policy.

Yeah, that was very simple. Women-born women. I don't mean to be rude, but what does that mean when you say women-born women? It means people who are born with a vagina and a uterus. First of all, is that mean if you have a hysterectomy and you're not a woman? Bingo, here we go with the hysterectomals. Come on, she brought up uterus, as I'm just saying, having a uterus doesn't crant you entry into this place. Look, I drove the plow. I cleared these woods and we did it with one thing in mind that we women could have.

one goddamn safe space in the world. No one's trying to take your woods away from you. I just feel that I have a right to be here, too, as a transgender woman. I think that this is more about, like, the nudity and the showers. This is about nudity? A lot of people here are triggered by penises. Why? Penises are triggering to many women.

Because we've all been raped. Everybody? Well, no. I was raped. I didn't rape you. It's true. She stopped raping long ago. See, this is where it gets really weird, because, you know, suddenly the conversation is all

around you and all of us are trying to make you comfortable. You're trying to make me comfortable? Yeah, we're trying to welcome you in. We're trying to explain it to you. And I don't give a shit about your goddamn penis. It's about the privilege. What privilege are you talking about? It was in way too much pain to experience what you're calling privilege.

Your pain and your privilege are separate. So you've been referred to as trans consultants. Is that a term you would embrace or do you bristle at it? I slightly bristle. I mean, when a project comes up that is interesting and worthy of that and there's a good partnership that can be made, I'm happy to jump in and do that. But, you know, my background is as a filmmaker and an artist, and I have a master's degree in filmmaking, and I've directed and produced a whole bunch of stuff. And I feel like I'm looking forward to being more known for that. But at the same time, the kind of trans consulting style work has actually opened up a lot of doors.

And I think it's creating a really important dialogue with the film and TV industry that wasn't really happening so much until recent years. So I definitely see the utility of it. But I don't know if this is too extreme, but I kind of hope that in the future, trans consultants will seem as silly as a title as black consultant. or women consultants on a film. And that instead of having a black consultant on your black issue film, that you actually have black filmmakers behind it, you know? And I think that's kind of the goal.

Ultimately, Ruth and I are about professional development, creating inroads for trans folks into an industry that has really kind of kept us out. It's so cool and so kind of heartwarming and incredible to see all these kind of grip guys and these transpotation. You know, the transpot teamsters and all this kind of.

huge trans advocates in the transportation team. The guys who drive the trucks are like more game to talk about trans issues. It's just amazing, though, to see how it can affect someone's worldview and really affect someone's life if they really consider and open up their minds and hearts to, like, what a trans experience is. Pretty much anybody who comes onto our production chain goes through a trans 101 session. Right. So when you two first started working together, you were in a, a relationship, a romantic relationship.

But that's no longer the case. Did you ever think you were going to stop working together creatively, or was that never a question? Yeah, when we decided to split up and end our romantic relationship, we were working together on season one of Transparent and, in fact, sharing an office. So we had to kind of deal with it for the sake of the work we were in the middle of doing, you know, try to be eageless and get over it and work together. Since then, it's been a couple of years, you know, But yeah, it's been a really good, humbling, challenging, rewarding experience.

Yeah, I think, well, it's something, it's honestly something that I think a lot of dissolved couples don't have the opportunity to do. But, like, the problems don't go away, but you're able to communicate through them in a way that you would never be able to do with a regular coworker. Like the kind of shorthand language that you have with a partner, the way that you can just, like, read micro-expression. on their face and kind of like, you know, I think that recently communicate really quickly and effectively. But, you know, it's interesting, too, that people now who don't necessarily know that we were a couple, like somebody on the crew the other day, thought you're my brother. Oh, really?

And I was like, no, he's not my brother. That's hilarious. But there's definitely like a sort of closeness and an ensankness that I think other people can sense and pick up on. Zachary Drucker and Reese Ernst, co-producers of Transparent. They've got a book coming out in May called Relationship, and they spoke with the New Yorkers David Hagland.

So before we're done, I'm going to pop down the hall and check in with one of my colleagues' staff writer, Alexandra Schwartz. She writes about politics and culture and books, and she's always got an ear out for some interesting stuff. So the first one is a documentary called Twinsters that I came across while browsing Netflix. as one does. It was made by this young woman, Samantha Futterman, who was adopted from South Korea by a Jewish family, New Jersey as an infant, and grew up, moved to L.A. to become an actress,

started getting some film parts, made some web videos, and she found her identical twin sister who had grown up in Paris. Neither of them had any idea that they had biological siblings, let alone an identical twin. And for me, it was like going. into this fantasy that has been written about in fiction a lot, this fantasy of finding, or in movies, finding your identical twin. But what's so nice about the documentary is they don't need to add any drama to the story that a novel or a fiction movie would have to add some kind of conflict, some kind of radical transformation. There's enough drama in this intense connection and also the need to forge a relationship from scratch that has always been there

to some degree. What else we've been reading and watching and looking at? Okay, so this year is the 500th anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch's death. So on my computer screen, I have up an interactive website that sort of the PBS of the Netherlands has made of the Garden of Earthly Delights, which is this very famous triptych by Bosch. The left panel shows Adam and Eve in Eden. The middle panel, kind of an exaggeration to say it shows Earth. It's a lot of naked people and animals cavorting around, but they seem happy. And then the right panel shows hell. The right panel shows hell.

So one thing about this, so you can go to this website, and if you double click, you can zoom in on any part of the painting you want. You get very high-rise images. So this painting is in the Prado. That's fantastic. I've never been there. I've never been able to see it in person. And even if I were, you wouldn't be able to see it like this. It's like sticking your face two inches from the painting, isn't it?

Exactly. So in Dutch and also now in English, there are a series of. of recordings that can tell you something about the painting. They're of variable quality, but we can listen to one. Should we click on one? You're curious, yeah. Yeah, let's do that. In hell, the owl again makes its appearance now acting like a demon from a nightmare.

With a pot on its head and jugs for shoes to sitting on a giant potty chair. Human bodies are being consumed and excreted simultaneously to go straight into the sewer. I got to tell you, the closer you look at this painting, and I've seen it before many times, it is this craziest, dirtiest, fantastic painting I've ever seen. It is so freaky. It is, and you would say it's like staring directly into someone's id, but who even has an id like this, it really, it is extraordinary. An id on acid before the invention of acid.

Exactly. And now how do I get this? What's the website? So, this is on, I don't know how to play. pronounce these words in Dutch, but if you Google Bosch interactive, you will find it immediately. Alex, you've written about France for us in many different ways, both in fiction and repertoire and the rest, and you have a book for us that comes out of that as well. One thing that drives me totally nuts in general is the idea that Paris is this super elegant

place, that it's the most refined, the highest culture, that that's all there is to it. I love anything that has to do with Paris's underbelly, the working class life that has been so vibrant in Paris throughout its history. So this book is called Paris Vagabond. It's by Jean-Paul Claibor. The writer had been a member of the Resistance. He actually had a great job in the Resistance. It was to hang out in a brothel in Paris and to gather information on the German soldiers who visited it. It's like a parody resistance job.

It was an important... part of the movement. No doubt. And afterwards, he spent a lot of time hanging around Paris and especially the city's, let's say, less fancy quarters. It tells so many stories of what he would call vagabonds, but really all sorts of men and women who are living a little bit below the radar in Paris. It is absolutely romanticized, but knowingly so. Alex, thank you. Thanks so much. Staff writer Alex Schwartz And that's it. That's the deal. Thanks for tuning in today

and I hope you'll join us next week. We've got a double header of Patty Marks, one of the funniest writers and one of the funniest people I know. If you're listening to us by podcast, we'd really appreciate it if you take one minute to rate the show on iTunes or wherever you get podcast. Thank you. And give us a shout on Twitter at New Yorker Radio.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tuneiards. This episode was produced by Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riann & Corby, Jill Duboff, Karen Frillman, David Krasnow, Sharon Machihe, Sarah Nix, Paul Schneider, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Alex Barron, Becky Cooper, Matt Fiddler, and Josh Rogeson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.