by Anthony Paletta

Alejandro Jodorowsky, best known in the U.S. as a director, particularly for his psychedelic films El Topo and The Holy Mountain, has pursued a sixty-year career of astonishing variety. Born in Tocopilla, Chile, the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, his family moved to Santiago, Chile, where he met Pablo Neruda and Nicanor Parra and immersed himself in the city’s artistic community. In 1953, he moved to Paris, where he worked for Marcel Marceau and Maurice Chevalier, among others, before turning to filmmaking, a pursuit he continued in Mexico, where he attracted financial support from Allan Klein, John Lennon, and others. In the wake of Jodorowsky’s failed efforts to adapt Dune — the subject of a recent documentary — he took up writing comics and novels.

Most recently, Restless Books published Where the Bird Sings Best, a fantastical narrative of Jodorowsky’s ancestors, spanning from the expulsion of the Jews from Spain to his great-great-grandmother bedding Tsar Alexandar I of Russia; in June, it will publish Albina and the Dog-Men, in which an albino giantess with a taste for human flesh, a bearded lady, and a dwarf travel across rural Chile battling foes while searching for a magical cactus. Having turned eighty-seven in February, he’s currently at work on the second of a (hopeful) set of autobiographical films, Endless Poetry (following the first, The Dance of Reality, which was released in 2013). I recently spoke with him via Skype while he was at work editing Endless Poetry, which he filmed in Chile last summer and fall.

How is the movie coming along?

Well, it’s almost finished. The persons who see it, they’ve say it’s better than The Dance of Reality. They’ve say that and I am happy.

(I don’t speak English very well. I speak French, I speak Spanish, but I do what I can.)

This movie concerns the segment after The Dance of Reality — your time in Santiago, right?

Yes, I came to a street very far out of the city. It was a workers’ street, with thieves, criminals, drunkards, prostitutes. It was terrible! I discovered poetry there. I tell how I became poet and artist: That is history. How I fought with my father because my father believed only in business and I wanted to be an artist. My first love, my second love, and also the search for the meaning of life. Why do we live, no? Why do we need to die? Things like that.

Myself, I think movies are an art. I am not an industrial filmmaker. I understand a person’s needs to relax a little, have movies, have shows, have Superman. All those idiocies. But I believe in human beings — I really believe in that, after all these years. I think humanity is in danger now. The planet is in danger. We need to start to change the world. Not to change the world — it is impossible — but we need to start to change the world. To change the world we need to change ourselves. What will you do? I will give this richness, I will give everything I find to others — and that is art. Art is to show to others what they have, what they really have. Not to show to others, “You have an emotion, you drink something.” No.

The [film industry] created the star system, with a song to the ego. Myself, I think we have one ego, with an artificial pair of eyes created by the family, the culture, and the society. Then we have a real essence with a consciousness that is truly what we are. We need to go there to be what we really are. I don’t want to obey a lot of things. I want to be myself, like an artist. When I find this treasure inside of me I will show it to others. Everything I have others will have, that is what I am saying. I am searching for sublime. How you say in English, “sublime”?

Sublime.

That is what I am saying, sublime, sublimity — not about idiot feelings, ridiculous love. Love is something very important — it is not that that they are showing us. The stars are awful! Because it is the big ego exalted. We need to finish with that! It is not possible — it is an enormous industry that has made an invasion of all the world, the American movie industry. They are working for money, no? If a picture costs a lot of money, “Good!” If it makes a lot of money, then “it’s an Oscar!” All this history of price, you have a price and I fight for a price — why don’t I fight for the truth, why don’t I fight to make others better?

The fight in order to make a real art movie is enormous because everything is against that. It is an awakening of consciousness and all of the industry is against the awakening of consciousness. Then we are going to the end of the planet. We are going to the end of the world.

You returned to Tocopilla for the first time making The Dance of Reality. Had you been back to Santiago more recently? How was your experience there filming?

Santiago has changed because there is no poetry — every person is fighting to be a little United States, donc? They’re in business, and there is a big difference between rich and poor. Like all the world now. Poetry’s not there anymore. Only in young persons. The problem is the industry of books doesn’t want poetry because they don’t sell books — they are not a big success. Poetry is not a bestseller so then they cannot publish. A big bestseller of poetry is six hundred no more. But in my time to be poet was like being a doctor or being an architect. You were a professional. You were a poet!

Even drunks were reciting Neruda and Parra in Chile back then?

Neruda was very intelligent; he was a big poet, but he realized he could find an enormous public and he became a communist. He became a communist, and he lost his poetry but he became famous in the country and in the world. He did what he needed to do. But I say to you, an eagle doesn’t fight flies. When enormously famous, the eagle starts to dance with the flies, and then he became a clown. He became a big businessman like Spielberg! The cineaste Spielberg, he has a lot of talent, really, but what he did with that? A big, big business. Now he’s an eagle who dances with flies!

Now Parra was my master. When Neruda was a poet, a romantic Communist, he was the anti-poet. He made real poetry, he was very funny. He was my master. I love him like a poet. When I was shooting Poésie Sans Fin, he had a hundred years. I went to see him. He is a hundred and one, cien. He is alive and very intelligent as always — only working a little bit with difficulty. But he is a human being, and I was speaking with him. In my picture, I play myself sometimes as an old man of a hundred years. I went to see him and I said, “What can a man of a hundred years say to me?”

To get old is not a humiliation. You lose your money, your sexual glory. Your search for money, your search for sex. You lose everything and you become a butterfly of light.

I put that in my picture, his message.

After this you still have Paris and Mexico to cover — your next films?

I make a series of pictures. There was The Dance of Reality and this is Endless Poetry. I will make Poésie Sans Fin in Paris — all my relations with panic and surrealism and mime and things like that. I will make number four in Mexico. And if I am alive, number five will be my love history with my wife. Because I met her when I was seventy-four and now eleven years we are together. She has forty-five years less than me, and then I will die. She will be a widow for forty-five years and we want to tell that history — how you can love when you know you will die before?

You draw upon a number of traditions in your books, in your films, and in your graphic novels, like puppetry, and circuses from your own familial history. Do you feel that some of these traditions are more alive than others or have others sort of reached a limit?

Our civilization in the twentieth century would make only one thing. A telephone was a telephone. And now it is this [holds up iPhone]. What is this? it is a telephone, a television, a radio, everything. Calculation, numbers, messages, writing. Vibration, BZZZZZZ. If I get excited, I will masturbate with the telephone! You can do anything. Later, you have mobile telephone like a phallus, like a penis. Masturbate the telephone while you are speaking! It is a lot of things. In the twenty-first century, it is a lot of things together and the brain is that. The brain is not a telephone, the brain is an iPad. This is the brain [holds up iPhone].

For me, a comic is big art like a picture. A picture is big art like a painting, like a dance. It’s different. I do everything myself. Now I am making Endless Poetry like a picture. I am “shooting” Son of El Topo now, but drawing it in a comic! Then I work like a director. This year will come Son of El Topo in July, the picture I always wanted to do — the continuation of El Topo, but I do it now as a comic, because I don’t have the big money.

In an interview, you once said, “Movies are movement, a comic is immobility.” That might have been a translation of your comment, but did that make sense?

Mobility of the eyes — the eyes look, but not the mind. In a picture, they give you all of the movement they need to give to you, then you receive the movement, and you do nothing. But the mind goes with the picture. In the comic — immobile images — no? But you move the image, in your mind you move the image.

I guess my question is, is writing a graphic novel different from writing a novel or a movie?

It is different. Every time is different because you know I work alone. When I make a comic, I work with the artist who makes the drawings and the colors, and the editor who will pay us to do that. We are three persons only. We can be more. I made The Incal with three persons: myself, the big genius who was Moebuis, and… comme-ce? Humanoids. When I am making Son of El Topo, it is me and Jose Ladronn, a Mexican artist, who is a genius. We two are doing that with an editor.

When I make a picture, it’s an army: hundreds and hundreds of people who are working in a picture. When I am shooting, I am making the picture, the music, the decor, the costumes, the editing. It’s enormous. It’s like you make a child — it’s almost nine months working every day. When you are writing, you are working alone. Only you. Poetry is only you. When you are painting also. When I was directing theatre, it was the most difficult art because you work with actors. You create the show. When the show opens, you lose the play and the actors take the play and you don’t exist any more. And when the show is over you don’t exist any more!

Every art has another place, another forum. It’s not the same, but it’s a marvelous adventure. Every art develops another sense in you. The brain is enormous, you can do everything. Not only one thing. Also I make therapy. Psychomagic. Psychomagic is a new kind of therapy. I also do tarot, which is a kind of spiritual search. I make a lot of things. I work with the public to liberate the consciousness because the consciousness is perfect in every brain. Consciousness is the same. It is a fantastic brain with limits. The country makes limits, society makes limits, family makes limits, history make limits. You need to [explosion gesture] to take out the limits in order to get the freedom of your consciousness. That you need to do, to be free in the mind.

Americans are unfamiliar with psychomagic or psychoshamanism, particularly as an influence on your own work. Could you speak about that a bit?

Listen, how old you are?

I’m thirty-two.

I had a son of twenty-four who died of an overdose, who died at a party. They gave him, I don’t know what drug, but he died. It was a very big crisis for me. For ten years, I stopped making art because I said, “Why am I making art?” I would give all of my art for only one year of the life of my child. The life of a human being, of a child or your son, or of your father, or of the person you love is greater than anything you have. If life is bigger than art, why am I making art? Then I said, “I am not making art to give fun to people — I am not a clown, I am not a businessman making money. I am a human being. I am making art to heal myself; that is what i am doing and when I will heal myself, then I will start to heal others.”

For me art is to heal, to take out all the illness that you have because it’s impossible to get through. Truth is to be. The universe is so incredibly enormous. In the universe, there is a sun who is, I don’t know, ten million times bigger than our sun. How can you know the truth of the universe? But we can know what thing: what is beautiful. Beauty. We can come to it with a beautiful life. That is happiness. We can live and die with happiness. That is the mission of art. To teach to you how you can love yourself. That is art, and that is to heal.

The big illness of the world is ugliness. War is ugly. Political campaigns are ugly. Horrible. Awful campaigns. I am ashamed to see the politicians who fight like that, that horrible way. Like big clowns, horrible, imbecilic clowns fighting to be president. What will they do when this clown is president? Ugliness. The Hollywood pictures are ugly because they are not helping to heal the ugliness. They are helping to make idiot consumers, which is ugly.

Did you know I didn’t make a picture for twenty-two, twenty-three years because no producer wanted to give me money to make a picture? I economized for twenty-two years; I have two million dollars. I will take one million and make a picture. I will find two persons to give me one million dollars each to lose the money. I don’t want to make a picture to earn money, I will make a picture to lose money. I will lose the money! La Dansa de Realidad? I lose money because the cinema is full of thieves. Every person takes the money for themselves. The distributors, the owners of theaters. Every person is cheating you of the money. And then you, the artist, you make the product but you have nothing. That is the story.

Then I take the second million dollars I have and put in Endless Poetry. I will lose that money. I am happy to lose it, because I want to be the happiness — to help the world, to show the young person they can do whatever they want. It is a loss to want money for art. If God gives you sugar, you open the mouth — if my picture makes money, I will agree, because I will make more pictures. But I do not make pictures to make money. This is a creative position. Pictures are an art.

What do you want to know now?

Lately your work has been exploring your past, like in Where the Bird Sings Best…

I write it. It’s history. Metagenealogy. All my family. I discovered all this enormous adventure. It’s an enormous adventure. Enormous.

Like Tsar Alexander?

Yes, my name is Alexander, but Jewish. Not the Tsar Alexander, but from Alexander Magno, who was the old conqueror, who was very good with the Jews. They say in order to make you immortal, you will take your name and will give it to your descendant. They will call you Alejandro, the descendant. Alexander is a different sort of human being. Alejandro is andro — humanity. Ale is health — health to humanity, that is the meaning of Alejandro in Greek. I help the humanity. For that, I have this idea. Because my name is Alejandro. What can I do? A name is an influence on you.

So you’ve been turning your own past into myth. You seem to give your father a redemptive story that wasn’t in The Dance of Reality, I guess these more fantastical elements. The past — you can change this story in your head, if you could speak to that?

Listen, when you’re an artist, you do what you need to do and then you die. You go no farther. Maybe there is another life. Who knows? Maybe there is something. Who knows? When you are my age, because in three more years I will be ninety years old. When you are living for this space of time, you realize — the majority of my friends have died. Eighty, eighty-five, sixty. The person dies. And then you say, “Okay, what do you want? Why am I here? Why was I born with an artistic talent?” Because you can be a big footballer, you can be a genius businessman, be a big anything. All of us we have talent, but we are different. Myself, I have artistical talent. When I was four years old, I started with art. I am here in order to give to the world something, to help the world. To help to make the world spiritually more rich. That is my mission. I need to be here to help develop a spiritually liberative consciousness. If I have persons who follow that — good! But if nobody listens to me — good!

The triumph is not an Oscar — the goal is not a price. The goal is to do what you need to do and to die happy because you did what you needed to do. I am doing what I need to do. I am honest when I do an interview, because I say exactly what I think. I don’t say things in order to sell my books or to sell my pictures. Yes, I make promotions, but I make a good promotion because I am honest. I am not lying to you. I don’t know you. I don’t know where you will put that. How you will translate that, I don’t know. But I try to be honest. Not to be deceitful like the moviemakers. Not the artists, the producers — they are enemies of the art. They are terrible. We need the young persons to start to create their own way to make pictures, not to go to the theaters.

I was happy that they showed The Holy Mountain in the cemetery of Los Angeles at the grave of Rudolph Valentino. One thousand persons were there. That’s the thing. We need to escape the commercial ways in order to do something. Not for Oscars. Not for dollars. You need to do that in order to die happy. That idiocy.

That sounds great.

It’s true. I feel like that and I am doing that. With Endless Poetry, I will make another way to show the picture. I will not show the picture in the common way. If only ten persons see my picture, ten persons will see my picture. But if ten million see my picture, I will be happy also. It is the same. One person or ten million person is the same.

One more question. When is your next picture coming out?

Endless Poetry will go out in June. We will try to go out in the Cannes film festival. In Europe, in France, a picture can’t go into the world if they don’t show in Cannes. They show in Cannes! Then I have distribution with the best distributor, who loves my picture. And he’s very enthusiastic, he wants to show the picture. But I will open the picture the tenth of June in the Museo de Louvre.

I think that pictures are good for museums. That is the place I want to show my pictures. In the museum. Not because it’s serious, not because it’s famous, but because it’s art. And a good place for them is the museum. Why not! You show a painting, why not a picture? When you have a dream you need to dream something impossible — and then do it. You need to do what is impossible. I thought, “my next big picture I will show in the big museum of France,” and it happened. It was possible! You find where you want. And then you will open in a different way. We need to make things we never did. When you are depressed, change. Do something you never did, something new in another way. Yes?

Certainly.

I don’t know whether what I am saying is good. Maybe what I say when you write in your newspaper will make enemies.

Oh no I hope not.

I am happy you have my books and my comics. I am very happy because when I started to publish, I published in Spanish, but now they even publish me in Japanese, in a lot of languages. I had that dream when I was your age, and it took a long time. I needed to wait something like fifty years to make my dream, but I continue it. When I have a failure, I say, “Failure doesn’t exist.” You change the way, that is all. You cannot make a picture in the movies you make a comic. Then I started making comics, The Incal, all of that, what I cannot do in pictures.

Last question and we say goodbye.

Where you are? In New York?

I’m in New York. I… don’t have a last question.

Listen, what is your goal in life?

I haven’t quite figured that out yet.

But we are waiting!

I’m a writer right now? I think about this often, but I don’t quite know.

If you are a writer, what are you writing?

I write about culture some, I write about architecture often, I do a few different things. I’m …figuring out what I want to do most.

You know, in order to do something, you need to organize your time. It is very easy to do — you organize your time. You say, “One hour a day you will write. From this hour to this hour, I will write that. And even if I don’t have idea, one hour I write. Even a line. Even three words. But I write. Every day I write.” You organize your time and then you do whatever you want. You take your time like your friend and you don’t lose your friend. Because your time is your life and then you organize your life. I do that, everyday I do that.

When I finish with you now, I will start to write my new comic. It is a comic book about alchemy in the French Revolution. I will write that because I need to do that. Before I be with you, from 4PM to 8:30, I worked on the colors of my new picture. Post-production of the colors it is a big work, to pour the colors you want, like a painting. Then I run in a car, rented — very cheap because it is electrical — and I came to my house to make the interview with you. Then I will continue into the night to make comic. When I finish with my work, I will see a comic picture. You know what I will see?

What?

You will not believe! Zoolander 2! I laugh a lot with these guys. It is so funny! I laugh and I contract myself. It is contrary to what I ever would do because it is big business! But is so fantastic!

Tomorrow morning, I wake at ten in the morning, not before, and I make fifteen tweets, because I have tweets, which is an art form for me. Every day I send fifteen tweets. I have a million and two hundred thousand followers now. Speaking about art, philosophy, therapy, only that. No personal issues. Only creation, poetical creation. It’s an art. I am giving an art. It’s a creation. Every day I do that. Why? Because I want to help humanity. Only for that. Nothing more. Organize your time and you are happy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Most of you probably weren’t even sperm when the first Ramones record came out, so this Times oral history of “the story behind the debut” will also double as ancient history for you, particularly considering that all the principals are dead.

This track is so pleasant and unobtrusive that you barely know it’s there, but when you get to the end of it you feel a little lighter and you’re smiling for a reason you cannot understand. In that way it is the exact opposite of this week, which missed no opportunity to remind you that it was doing unpleasant things to you and will not walk out the door without a final “fuck you” and a poke in the throat. Even so, it cannot stick around for much longer, so just do what you have to do to make it to the evening. I know you can. Enjoy. [Via]

★★★★ Daylight played inside the apartment. The four-year-old complained that the fresh air coming through the windows, while the bacon was frying, made him too cold. Blue from the zenith gleamed on the curve of a dark steel curb facing underfoot. A yellowed haze gathered. Full sun fell on the forecourt, and one tree had unfurled tiny leaves. Every bench on the plaza was occupied. Little breezes had made their way down to the subway platform. The 1 ran late and jumped to express, overshooting the stop. People scrambled for the stairs toward a waiting uptown train, but the extra blocks of walking felt like luck, even on Sixth Avenue. In just a little while at a desk, though, the warmth and sun were gone. On the return trip through the forecourt, only one woman and child sat on the benches. Off over New Jersey the clouds were blackening and a dusky veil trailed from them. Lightning flashes played across the west. Planes heading into Newark came in low under the darkness, lights shining, against the orange horizon.

by Brendan O’Connor

Earlier this month, the new World Trade Center Transportation Hub opened to the public, seven years late and almost two billion dollars over budget. And it’s still not completely finished. Most recently, it was delayed by water leaks. Meanwhile, adjacent to the Hub’s swooping white spires, the erstwhile Two World Trade Center is looking for a major tenant to replace News Corp and 21st Century Fox, which unexpectedly backed out of a 1.3-million-square-foot deal a few months after it was announced with an intensely coordinated media campaign. The building, designed by Bjarke Ingels, looks like a precariously organized stack of boxes. “My first reaction was, ‘Wow, this building looks like it’s going to topple. It’s going to fall over,’” developer Larry Silverstein said during a panel last month. Perhaps, devoid of an anchor tenant, it will.

According to New York, when redevelopment of the World Trade Center and its immediate surroundings is complete, and all of the buildings find tenants, some one hundred thousand people will commute to work there. The Hub, which is run by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, includes a PATH station for commuters from New Jersey. (In January, the WTC PATH station served just under fifty thousand commuters daily — not significantly more than the far more humble station at 33rd Street.) The Hub is meant to inspire visions of a bird in flight — at the 2004 unveiling of his plans, architect Santiago Calatrava, sketched a girl releasing a dove. At its center lies a massive, open space, plunging one-hundred-sixty feet below street level to an open ovoid that measures three hundred and ninety-two feet long and a hundred and forty-four feet wide. The fifty-six thousand-square-foot floor of the Oculus, lit from above by a twenty-two-foot-wide window that stretches from one end to the other, is completely empty, “as functionally vapid inside as it is outside,” writes the New York Post’s real estate, restaurant, and architecture critic Steve Cuozzo. The Port Authority plans to use the Oculus as an event space. Presumably, when it does so, commuters will just have to…walk around the event?

Administrative costs alone on the project have exceeded $655 million, the New York Times reported in 2014, and even the Port Authority is feeling some buyer’s remorse. “We would not today prioritize spending $3.7 billion on the transit hub over other significant infrastructure needs,” executive director Patrick Foye said. Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman recently deemed the cost overrun “unconscionable.” (On the other hand, New York magazine reports, “The cost of beauty is often high.”) Calatrava, the artist, seems to think that those overly concerned with price tags are missing the point, pointing to universally beloved Grand Central Station, instantly lauded as “the greatest station, of any type, in the world” upon its opening in 1913. “Think about the person who was living in the suburbs 100 years ago, when this building opened. They enter here inside and see all these stone details, all these lamps, all these mirrors,” Calatrava told New York’s Andrew Rice last year. “You could say it is a luxury of the railway, but it is not true. This was a gift.”

Well, yes, Grand Central was a gift, in the sense that the city didn’t pay for it — the Vanderbilts did — and it cost about half as much as the Hub has cost, adjusting for inflation. That is all to say nothing of the development its construction stimulated in the immediate area; the Financial District, on the other hand, which has received more than $30 billion in public and private investment in the past decade, probably needs no further stimulation. But perhaps, as Calatrava implies, to fixate on the base, material concerns of how much it costs to build a train station is misguided: Downtown Manhattan’s real transit hub is Fulton Center, which recently completed its own pricey refurbishment.

Fulton Center, controlled by the MTA, lies a few blocks east, serving nine subway stops and three hundred thousand people daily. It and the Hub are connected by a three-hundred-fifty-foot tunnel, and also by the company that controls all of the retail space in both locations: the Australian mall operator Westfield, which, just a few months before the September 11 terror attacks, signed a ninety-nine-year lease on the retail portion of what would become Ground Zero. The sprawling Hub-Fulton Center labyrinth will function as much as a mall as a train station: Westfield expects the hundred and twenty-five different retailers ringing the Oculus to do between $700 million and $1 billion in annual sales. Businesses moving into the Hub will include Apple, H&M, Michael Kors, Victoria’s Secret, Kate Space, and Daniel Boulud. (The significantly higher-end Brookfield Place, a couple blocks to the west, houses Gucci, Equinox, and Hermes. Also, a Parm and a Black Seed Bagel, where, on Wednesday, I had a tuna melt; it was fine.) But, as I have reported previously, Westfield’s expertise is not only in working with retailers and restaurants, but also in creating Dynamic Brand Experiences From Morning Till Night and “delivering one-of-a-kind value propositions by creating ‘Complete Brand Experiences’ and ‘Domination Packages’ allowing brands to govern an entire visual landscape with style and sophistication.” Its strength is in “its ability to connect consumers with the best brands, creating communications that lead to a relationship,” according to one promotional video, which promises to make the World Trade Center into “the most alluring retail landmark in the world.”

As hectic as the World Trade Center has become again, as much building as has gone on, as towering and bright as 1WTC is, there is hardly a place in New York City so full of absence. This is the core idea of the 9/11 Memorial, after all: Water slipping continuously away and out of sight into a pair of bottomless chasms. (Bottomless, that is, at least so far as we can see from our place on the edge.) The memorial’s quietly commemorative emptiness is contrasted, now, with the roaring vacuum at the heart of the Hub, which, despite the architect’s avian aspirations, resembles nothing so much as the half-buried, sun-bleached ribcage of some forgotten behemoth — its center one more void, ringed with retail, that can never be filled.

by Ben Jackson

In September of 1883, Theodore Roosevelt was determined to shoot a buffalo “while there were still buffalo left to shoot.” He was twenty-four years old and had just completed his second term as the youngest assemblyman in the history of New York State. It had not been a good year: As the leader of a weak minority, he’d had little power in the House, so his legislative program got nowhere, despite his grandiose speeches. He was also mocked for his dandyish manner and expensive clothes; the press referred to him as “Oscar Wilde,” “his Lordship” and “the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt.” By the end of the year, he had a point to prove. “Give a sissy a gun,” Gore Vidal would later remark, “and he will kill everything in sight.”

Roosevelt went west to the town of Little Missouri in the Dakota badlands, where he hired a guide, Joe Ferris, and set out among the buttes and mesas. The conditions were atrocious. Torrential rain alternated with barren, hot stillness. While traversing a steep bluff, the sodden soil gave way under the hooves of his horse and Roosevelt went tumbling to the bottom. One night, they woke lying in four inches of water. Ferris rolled over to find Roosevelt sitting up, muttering, “By Godfrey, but this is fun!” After twelve days of almost unmitigated suffering and several missed opportunities, Roosevelt, as he recounts in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, finally bagged his prize:

There below me, not fifty yards off, was a great bison bull. He was walking along, grazing as he walked. His glossy fall coat was in fine trim and shone in the rays of the sun, while his pride of bearing showed him to be in the lusty vigour of his prime. As I rose above the crest of the hill, he held up his head and cocked his tail to the air. Before he could go off, I put the bullet in behind his shoulder.

Roosevelt followed the animal as it lumbered over the ridge, and in the next gully found it lying “stark dead.” He became delirious with joy and danced around the carcass letting out great whoops. “I never saw anyone so enthused in my life,” Ferris later recalled.

Despite the scarce buffalo, Roosevelt was so enamored of life in the West that he bought into a ranch and returned frequently to hunt or help with the cattle. His love of carnage — one hunting trip saw him land a hundred and seventy “items,” including several species of deer (“2 blacktail bucks with a single bullet”), two adult grizzlies, and a bear cub, which he proudly reported he shot “clean through… from end to end” — didn’t blind him to the fact that game and bird species seemed to be in continuous decline. During a hunting trip in 1887, four years after his first hunt, he noticed that the once-thriving herds of elk, bighorn, and pronghorn had been almost wiped out. There were no new beaver lodges, hardly any grizzlies, and many of the migratory bird species that Roosevelt enjoyed watching had failed to return for the season.

As he rode further into the badlands that fall, he found them virtually stripped of big game. Roosevelt’s long list of antagonists — on the left, people like Thomas Paine (a “filthy little atheist”), proponents of states’ rights like Thomas Jefferson (a “slippery demagogue”), and sheep (those “bleating idiots”) — swelled to include “unsportsmanlike” and “market” hunters: men who would shoot birds for the millinery trade, and big game only for their hides. He railed against those “swinish game butchers… too lazy to earn in any other and more honest way.” When he returned to New York, he was convinced that American big game was on the edge of extinction, and became determined to do something about it. It was the beginning of a process that would eventually lead him, as president, to protect over two hundred and forty-three million acres, one tenth of the entire United States — or an area four times the size of Britain.

On December 8th, 1887, Roosevelt organized a dinner for twelve wealthy men at his sister’s home on Madison Avenue. The company included his brother, Elliot; the son-in-law of John Jacob Astor, J. Coleman Drayton; and the editor of Forest and Stream (which would be absorbed by Field and Stream in 1930), George Bird Grinnell. Alongside Roosevelt, Grinnell was the driving force behind the evening. An experienced and strident conservationist, he had served as a naturalist on General Custer’s 1874 expedition to the Black Hills (he declined an appointment to the disastrous 1876 Little Big Horn expedition), and was later part of an early survey of Yellowstone National Park. In 1876, he founded the first Audubon Society, which gained a large and prominent membership, and was having some success in promoting the appreciation of birds. Roosevelt and Grinnell had been tossing about ideas on the subject of big game conservation since Roosevelt published Hunting Trips of a Ranchman in 1886. Their early discussions had been enjoyable, but useless. “We regretted the unnecessary destruction of game animals,” Grinnell wrote, “but we did not know all it meant, nor had we the vision to look forward and imagine what it portended.” Now, after his experiences in the West, Roosevelt believed he had been witness to an impending disaster, and that he knew what he had to do to prevent it. That evening, he proposed to his associates that they form a “fair chase” hunting club, devoted to “manly sport with a rifle.” More to the point, the club would “work for the preservation of the large game of this country, further legislation for that purpose, and assist in enforcing existing laws.”

The idea was met with enthusiasm, if not, at first, complete seriousness: According to Jonathan Spiro, one person suggested calling the club “The Swappers,” since they intended to spend their time swapping stories about their hunts. Roosevelt wanted to call the organization the “Boone and Crockett Club” after two of his Western heroes, Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett; he quickly won out, and the club set about formally organizing. By January 1888, it had a constitution that detailed its objectives and limited permanent membership to a hundred hunters who had each killed at least three American big game species “with the rifle, in fair chase.” These were all to be men who desired nothing more than to revive the struggling species of American big game — so that they could kill them. (“If there is to be any shooting there must be something to shoot,” as Roosevelt pointed out.) Roosevelt, of course, was named the organization’s president.

The club quickly became a hit in aristocratic social circles of the northeast. “The members of the club, so far as it is developed, are all persons of high social standing,” read an editorial in Forest and Stream (which Grinnell later admitted he made “the mouthpiece of the Boone and Crockett Club”). Permanent and associate members included artists, industrialists, military officers and political leaders: William Tecumseh Sherman was one of the Union Army’s most notorious Generals during the Civil War; Albert Bierstadt was a celebrated painter; Carl Schurz was the Secretary of the Interior from 1877 to 1881; and Henry Cabot Lodge, one of Roosevelt’s closest friends, was a member of the House who would go on to a thirty-one-year career in the Senate. These were the type of American patrician, Forest and Stream added, whose opinions were “worth regarding.”

The club directed its hostility wherever Roosevelt pointed. Unsportsmanlike hunters were especially disgusting — the type of men who would use lanterns to hypnotize game in the dark (“jacking”), or who would happily shoot an animal struggling helplessly through deep snow (“crusting”) — because they refused to understand that hunting was a matter of honour, not of economic imperatives; it was the quality of the chase, not the quantity of the carcasses, that counted. Members of the club got to work bringing these unethical hunters low, and with Roosevelt pre-occupied with government work, one man especially carried the fight: Madison Grant, who had been nominated for membership by Grinnell in 1893.

Grant was a young and charismatic lawyer who was deeply worried about the decline of forests and big game species in the United States. He was also an unconscionable racist, a white supremacist who warned of the decline of “Nordic” peoples. Among his works is The Passing of the Great Race, which was referenced by Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist, in his 2011 manifesto, and which Hitler referred to as his “bible.” Roosevelt thought it a “capital book,” and that Grant was a “good fellow.” Together they fretted about the new railways that were bringing the wrong sort of hunters to upstate New York and the Adirondacks. Grant, at Roosevelt’s suggestion, descended on the New York State legislature in Albany to fight for new regulations. He lobbied furiously to pass the Adirondack Deer Bill, which would ban practices like jacking and using dogs to drive game into lakes where they could be easily shot.

In opposition, an alliance of railroad companies, market hunters, and Adirondack guides formed. They framed their argument in populist terms: For the locals, hunting was a matter of subsistence. Why should a group of New York aristocrats be able to impose their will on the poor men of the Adirondacks? Grant was immune to such criticism. “He was not at all uncomfortable being labelled an elitist,” Jonathan Spiro notes in his account of Grant’s life, Defending the Master Race. Roosevelt, by contrast, liked to think of himself as a champion of the common man, but never on an issue of this kind, which not only pitted the common man against the wild things he greatly cared for, but also touched dangerous notions of states’ rights and nullification.

Grant continued to press his case through a number of defeats. It took him three years of lobbying, letters, and articles before finally, in 1897, his Deer Bill became law. Roosevelt wrote to him ecstatically: “I am extremely pleased with what you have accomplished.” From the club’s perspective, he was right to be. Deer populations began recovering, and beavers and bears moved back into the area. Soon, other state legislatures were following suit. “Grant,” Spiro writes, “had gone a long way toward ending unsportsmanlike hunting in the United States.”

The club had a number of other early successes. One of its preoccupations was Yellowstone National Park. The 1872 act that created the park had neglected to include any enforcement mechanisms, so poaching was rampant. Its second superintendent, Philetus Norris, ventured a guess that over four thousand elk were killed in the winter of 1874 in the Mammoth Springs Basin alone. “Their carcasses and branching antlers can be seen on every hillside and on every valley,” he wrote. Worse, by 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad had extended its line close to the border of the park, making it more accessible to the general public. Commercial hunters were moving in, and developers were starting to see the potential of using Yellowstone as a resort. Boone and Crockett members organized against the dabblers and the tourists, and in 1894, one member, Congressman John Lacey, sponsored a bill that, for the first time, gave the Department of the Interior the authority to arrest and prosecute poachers and other violators in Yellowstone.

Another of the club’s concerns was forests, and when the American Forestry Association started pushing for protection of Western woodlands, Roosevelt invited members to pile into the fight. Largely as a result of their efforts, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act of 1891, which stated that “the President of the United States may, from time to time, set apart and reserve, in any state or territory having public land, bearing forests… whether of commercial value or not, as public reservations.” Benjamin Harrison, who was president in 1891, used the act to declare thirteen million acres of forest as national reserves. Grover Cleveland added another twenty-five million acres and William McKinley proclaimed seven million. Roosevelt thought his predecessors’ achievements wholly inadequate. When he became president in 1901, he topped them all, setting aside more than a hundred and fifty million acres of forest as public reservations. It was, all things considered, one of the most significant pieces of conservation legislation in the history of the United States.

Roosevelt’s administration was marked by the influence of the Boone and Crockett Club’s philosophy and members. Most significantly, Gifford Pinchot, Roosevelt’s chief forester, pushed an attitude to conservation that was a kind of generalization of the Boone and Crockett Club’s attitude toward big game: American forests and natural resources should be protected so that their use could be enjoyed in perpetuity. Pinchot believed in the scientific management of natural resources so that they produced the greatest public benefit; he once called forests a factory for trees. This marked a great fault line in U.S. conservation: On one side Pinchot, and on the other, the Sierra Club, founded in 1892 by John Muir, which promoted the preservation of wilderness not as a resource, but as an object of almost spiritual reverence.

Roosevelt sided with Pinchot. He opened forest reserves up to agriculture and grazing where he considered it to be in the public interest. When Muir fought against the construction of a dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite (“as well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man”), Roosevelt could have objected to the decision of his Secretary of the Interior, James Garfield, to grant San Francisco the right to develop the Tuolumne River. He decided not to. Despite these decisions, Roosevelt and Pinchot together pushed a remarkable conservation agenda. They doubled the number of national parks in the United States, creating Crater Lake, Wind Cave, Sullys Hill, Platt, and Mesa Verde National Parks. They quadrupled the number of national forests; created fifty-one federal bird reserves; and passed the Antiquities Act, which allowed Roosevelt to create eighteen national monuments (many of which went on to become national parks). More than any other president, Roosevelt encouraged a shift from the disposal of land to settlers and private interests, to the protection of public lands as reserves.

But while we can rightly celebrate many of the club’s achievements, it’s as well to remember that they represented interests of a privileged few, and those interests remain embedded in many of the most important pieces of conservation legislation in the United States. The Boone and Crockett Club had its heyday before and during Roosevelt’s administration, but the club, its style of conservation, and the tone of its rhetoric has continued to be remarkably successful. “No attack on environmentalism, no proposal to loot the country’s natural assets,” Jim O’Brien, then an editor at Radical America, writes, “is complete without a phony-populist sneer at those who try to defend the environment.” But populism isn’t always phony: As Jedediah Purdy, a Professor of Law at Duke University, has written, “The major environmental statutes, such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, were written with no attention to the unequal vulnerability of poor and minority groups.” Only recently, with the rise of the environmental justice movement, which highlights the unequal share of environmental benefits and risks between peoples of different incomes or races, is this beginning to be addressed.

The Boone and Crockett Club also began the argument, alive to this day, that hunters can be conservationists too. This notion is especially prominent in the wake of modern trophy-hunting controversies, such as the international outrage at the killing of Cecil the Lion, a major attraction in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe, by an American dentist last July. Over the years, hunters have argued that trophy hunting helps local people through the sale of hunting licenses and by bringing rich hunters into an area. They maintain that this source of revenue dissuades locals from poaching animals, or converting important habitats into agricultural areas, and so helps wildlife populations. Opponents point out that encouraging safaris and other types of ecotourism achieves all these things without the slaughter; moreover, they find the notion of “killing to conserve” inherently repellent, in part because it allows conservation to become a fig leaf for bloodthirstiness. The Boone and Crockett Club, for its part, has stayed faithful to its founding philosophy: It promotes hunting, but opposes practices such as “canned shoots” (“often erroneously called canned hunts,” as the website puts it), in which the animal is kept in a confined area, a situation that offers the shooter “a certain or unrealistically favorable chance of a kill.”

Roosevelt never quite lost his love of hunting. On a trip to Yellowstone in 1903, he had to be talked out of a cougar hunt for fear of the bad publicity. In 1910, after he had left the presidency, he went on a long shooting trip in Africa with his son, Kermit; his party killed a total of eleven thousand, four hundred animals, including elephants, hippopotamuses and so many white rhinos that the Smithsonian, where Roosevelt was sending his specimens, had to start offloading their heads on other museums.

Seven years before the Africa hunt, Roosevelt went to Yosemite, where he took a backcountry trip with John Muir, who work him into fits of rage about the depredations of timber thieves who operated in the park. One night, when the conversation lulled, Roosevelt thought to entertain his guide with stories about big game hunts. In all his years, these had been reliable crowd pleasers, but Muir was underwhelmed. He asked Roosevelt if he had not yet gone beyond “the boyishness of killing things… Are you not getting far enough along to leave that off?” Roosevelt, looking over the campfire, had a moment’s pause. Then he said, “Muir, I guess you are right.”

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam understands
if you have to go to the bathroom.

If you tempt me with your smile,
I will encase you in gelatin.

I love you porkchop, you say to your porkchop.

I love you porkchop, you say to your doom.

You cast seed onto the field
and shape a soft maze.

The penguins’ speed is such that they shoot up
ten feet or more then plop down onto the ice.

Fifty million soup labels will buy them a basketball.

The ocean with three fish left.

We all sleep alone, says Cher.

The last box of low-salt Triscuits. Half full.

Jason Zuzga’s debut poetry collection, Heat Wake (Saturnalia Books), has just been published.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.

“Like me and probably many if not most of the people in this world, you have probably thought to yourself, more than once, that life is not fair. And indeed, it isn’t! I was very angry for a time that Hurricane Sandy had foiled my chances at running the New York City Marathon in 2012, for which I had been training for the better part of a year. That stroke of misfortune was, inarguably, unfair. Perhaps you have walked into someone’s fancy apartment and wondered how they were able, at the tender age of 28, to purchase said fancy apartment, and then you’ve learned that their mother invented slap bracelets, and it’s just like, well, fuck, what was my mom doing besides raising three kids and working full-time? Unfair.”
 — Awl pal Doree Shafrir’s entry in this year’s Morning News Tournament of Books is just a goddamn delight from start to finish. You may also enjoy the selections from Awl pal Maria Bustillos and Vox Media platform guru Choire Sicha.

If you’ve had one of those weeks where you thought it was Thursday all day only to find out that no, it was actually just Wednesday, I’ve got good news: It’s Thursday. For real. You’re so close. I know you’ll make it. (If you are having one of those weeks where you thought today was Friday I don’t know what to tell you except I’m sorry.) Hey, here’s some bright, trippy fun from Classixx. Enjoy. [Via]

★★ The rain had gotten under the scaffolds just enough to melt the dog turds without washing them away. A fresh gob of spit glistened on the pavement, its viscosity still distinguishing it from the background moisture. By afternoon, the wetness of the day had diminished to a clinging dampness. Late in the day sunshine found the building on the corner of 18th and Fifth. More brightness spread over the oncoming evening. The western sky was blue, with wispy pink contrails in it. In the dark, the clouds reconsolidated, into a luminous mass — and then, abruptly, after midnight, there was a lowering half-moon, haloed but with its surface detail etched clearly. Moments later there was just the shapeless glow again.