Ride On, In Iraq

On a chilly February morning – the after-effects of a surprising and significant rain shower – in Bismayah City, a small Baghdad suburb with low-slung Soviet-style block housing, a team of four girls proudly decked out in Iraqi team jerseys over long-sleeve shirts and leggings, ride hard on Turkish-made bicycles. Back and forth, around in circles, they pump hard and coast, repeating their loops as their coach Samed barks commands in Arabic from 20 or so metres away. Occasionally, a car or a taxi passes. Otherwise, the young girls – Lanyah, Sarmad, Rania and Malek – rode relatively unhindered, possibly for the first time all week.

The manager of the Iraqi National Women’s Cycling team, Basma Ayad, remembers those relatively carefree riding days, as well – back before the bombs started to fall. The daughter of secular civil servants under then-President Saddam Hussein, she would race the girls and boys in her neighbourhood and try out all the new bikes arriving in Iraq: mountain, hybrid, aluminium – basically whatever had two wheels and a seat. “I felt so free when I cycled,” Ayad said over cappuccino and cake at The Grinders, one of Baghdad’s new coffee shops springing up all over the resurgent city. “Even if it was just in our neighbourhood. We could see into the distance and imagine a better future.” While attending a local university in 2003, she met the like-minded Sura Alatar, also the daughter of non-religious, sports-minded parents (Alatar’s brother is former football player and coach at the University of Baghdad). Together they formed an amateur team and began com- peting against other clubs and universities.

But unbeknown to most young Iraqis who thought only of Hussein in passing, the dictator kept pushing the buttons of the George W. Bush administration after the September 11, 2001 attack. Two years later, the USA had its excuse: yellowcake uranium and Weapons of Mass Destruction. For the first six months, as 130,000 troops made their way from Basrah to Baghdad, “we were not able to even leave our houses,” Ayad says. Safety was the priority. Buildings would blow up and friends would disinte- grate in the rubble. Restive men and women would have their houses raided or get gunned down around them. From the outset, the USA couldn’t find legitimate leaders to take charge of the new Iraq – some had been killed by the regime; many had gone into exile; and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA)’s de-Baathification policy removed everyone with any civil service knowhow. The US military had already categorised Iraqis on three-by-five-inch cards as good guy (pro-America or Kurd), bad guy (anti-America or Arab) and other (students, mothers, children). “Good Iraqis received full support or money and respect. Bad guys got wrath: kill or capture,” according to Emma Sky, a British diplomat assigned to Iraq during the invasion. And the joke among the Americans about the CPA? Can’t Provide Anything.

Yet Ayad and Alatar and their nascent team kept pressing on, inventing races and raising money to travel to regional events in Jordan, Syria and North Africa, and compete. “I was an adolescent at this time and I didn’t understand really what was happening. Kids, they want to play, they want to cycle. I wanted to continue on my team,” said Ayad, a slender, dark-eyed modern mother of three. “After that, we tried to get on. We continued our studies, we took our cycles to different places in our neighbourhoods, in our little cities and we said, let’s make a cycle, let’s do it ourselves anyway.” Little did they know that they had started their own rebellion, which would later become Iraq’s first national women’s cycling team.

Known as the Iron Horse, the first bicycle started climbing Iraq’s roads in 1906 – during the Ottoman Empire’s (1534-1920) waning years. While the Europeans figured out how to make their two-wheeled mounts go faster, Iraqis used them mostly for basic transportation, especially in areas where fuel wasn’t available for motorcycles. Following the British Invasion, the fall of the Ottomans, the Middle East division and the installation of King Faisal II – the UK-installed local representative of the powerful Hashemite dynasty – all of Iraq’s provinces had thriving female athletic scenes, with active clubs in different sports. But although men’s cycling took off, women’s cycling stalled. Many families still held old-fashioned beliefs about cycling and virginity, as well as women’s freedoms, and patriarchal government officials prioritised men's clubs. Yet, despite the years of royal overthrows, revolutions and Ba’ath party domination, sport and cycling continued in Iraq, as the nascent country still dreamed – quixotically or not – of hosting the Olympics.

In 1980, Saddam provoked the Iran-Iraq War, however, and halted sport development for 10 years. Moreover, previous generations of secular and progressive women who hadn't been schooled past age 12 and had children as teenagers, prioritised education – not sport – as their daughters’ tickets out of a pugnacious state. “(The parents) say, ‘Education is the only thing we care about,’” says Sirwan Sami, the former head of the Nowruz Cycling Club, which formed outside Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan. “(Others) say if (the women cyclists) fall over and die, it's God's will... honour is more important.” Sami added that when girls joined his team, their families usually asked him to protect the girls’ reputations above all else. “The pro female cyclists on far-off roads outside the capital cities often experience shou ing and jeers, although men generally stop short of knocking off the pro women from their bicycles.”

While the USA went from hunting down Saddam, encouraging regime change and enforcing American democracy on a reluctant and quickly fractionalising populace, the women’s Al-Shaab Team formed by Ayad and Alatar found its first coach, Mahmoud Ahmed Fulayih. He saw bigger things on the horizon: men and women’s national teams, junior development and even the Olympics. “I was out at Al-Shaab club, and coach said, ‘You want to race?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ I fin- ished first,” Ayad said. “I was hooked. And so was Shura.”

But as elections loomed, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a once hard-drinking, womanising Jordanian street criminal radicalised in a Jordanian prison, descended on the beleaguered country with Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The terrorist group began a campaign of kil ing prominent sports figures, including the entire Davis Cup tennis team, professional footballers, Olympians, and anyone who dared compete in sport in public. In early December 2006, Al-Qaeda kidnapped Fulayih at his home at gunpoint – days after he had led the men’s team in its first successful Asian Games in Doha, Qatar – and killed him. Authorities found his body in the desert two days later. “A lot of sports women and coaches, they killed, just training in the road. But he was the first one to really believe in us and he became a martyr for it,” saiys Ayad, barely able to hold back tears 20 years later. “My cycling days at university and competing were the happiest days of my life. And after our coach died, I left cycling. I was too sad and my family was afraid for me.

“Of course, we thought about leaving. Shura’s family went to Jordan. We wanted to go to the States, but they didn’t accept the visa,” Ayad says. “We didn’t want to end up in a refugee camp, so we stayed.” But no sport, including cycling, could outrun the insurgents. Everything went underground.

While the Baghdad team recovered, other groups around mostly Kurdish Iraq, including the Nowruz Cycling Club, the Shabab Club, the Kahraba Club, and the Nasiriyah Club, started to develop organically. Liberal men began to encourage women to get on their cycles again, creating divisions joined to their clubs. Female cyclists started travelling regionally to compete under the Iraqi national flag again. But beyond the Kurdistan region, one ugly beast, Al-Qaeda, was defeated only as another one, Da’ash, or ISIS, reared its ugly head. “They just basically changed t-shirts,” said Ahmed Albasheer, an Iraqi comic. Still, as the Bush administration literally compared Iraqi regime change to taking the “training wheels” off a bike, Ayad and Alatar, who returned from Jordan, married, raised children in Baghdad and restarted their involvement in the national cycling association.

By that time, Sozi Dilshad, a cyclist from Sulaimaniyah in the Newroz Cycling Club, had already brought home a cluster of medals and trophies from regional competitions. “When I ride my bike I feel like I’m in a different world,” Dilshad told The Independent newspaper in 2015. “In a race, the only thing I am thinking about is getting to the finish line. We have to really focus, which requires energy, and we get very tired – but at the same time, the focus means I am not thinking about problems in my own life.” Dilshad had to convince both her father and her mother to continue, as all were torn about Da’ash and the economic strife the group caused. “As a female cyclist, the best thing is to have a degree and then you can be a representative for your country, go abroad and have an impact,” Dilshad says.

But Ayad and Alatar were already at work. The two successfully petitioned the Iraqi Cycling Association to form a wom- en’s professional team, in addition to fos- tering youth development. Both agreed to take unpaid positions as coordinators, thus handling all the training, entry forms, travel and support for the national team, as well as grassroots support for the up-and-coming junior cyclists. “My dream, in fact, is many things because Iraq is not perfect yet. I hope one day it will be alongside the developed countries and pay more attention to women’s sports,” says Laynah Hadi, one of the young prospects in Basmiyah City last February.

Today the national team is six women strong, and in three years, the cycling association has helped form seven women’s teams competing around the country, including in the annual Iraqi Road Cycling Championship in Erbil. And while the national team has yet to medal at the Asian Games – the regional qualifying event for the Olympic Games – it has remained competitive against the better-funded teams from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. One cyclist, Duaa Abbas Rukabi, has gone to the USA to train and compete on the criterium circuit. She was primed to take her first podium in May 2024 before a crash took her off course for a few months. Her previous best result had been 13th place in the Arab Road Cycling Championships in 2022. “I love that cycling is individual, but it’s also a team sport where we work together and support each other’s goals,” said Rukabi, a former mountaineer, from her training base in Texas. “But the Iraqi federation doesn’t support women’s cycling. I myself was promised an Asian participation – a Continental team involvement – and ended up getting nothing. I would say they are unreliable.

“We need to focus on the women’s team, and an overall strategic plan to develop the women’s team alongside financial support.”

Ayad and Alatar don’t disagree: “The men get the money from the government and they make a lot of races for them – boys from Iraq are very good – and just a trickle goes down to us,” Ayad said. “If given the support, we could be at the top; right now we have a very good team with potential.”

A new guard has rolled into the Iraqi Olympic Committee promising more attenion to its cyclists, however. Aqeel Meften, an Iraqi lawyer, owner and founder of the Iraqi Union Bank and now the committee’s ninth President participated in a race on International Cycling Day and made this statement afterward: “The Olympic Committee are determined to return the sport of high achievement to its rightful status after a long slumber.”

Cycling still has a long way to go, how- ever, especially in Baghdad, especially for women. City engineers, cyclists and envi- ronmentalists have complained about the complete lack of cycle lanes in the country. In order to train, clubs have to bus their teams far outside cities where threats of un- hinged drivers or hiding insurgents loom constantly. The government has a former football stadium – whose architect was Le Corbusier, no less – that could possibly lend itself perfectly to a track. Moreover, Iraq – ranked last on the Global Environmental Performance Index for its car pollution – is just not healthy for cycling lungs.

But Ayed and Alatar are not deterred, not even in the face of the USA’s newest as- sault on Iran. The region is again unstable and planned races face cancellation, includ- ing an August road race in Sulymaniyah and the Erbil competition. The Tour de France Femmes remains an even more far-away possibility. Yet, as every good freewheeler knows, slow and steady wins the race – with a touch of oomph toward the end. “I like cycling; I like my life in it,” Ayad says. “Now we have gone from nothing to something. We make races; we clear roads; we have a team. We are crossing barrier by barrier to now make our dreams a reality.”

Meter: Once a Marathon for Expats, Erbil Has Become the Refugees' Race

Meter: Captive Running

After five years as a political prisoner in an Iranian jail, Anoosheh Ashoori had almost given up hope.

Then he found running.

He completed this year's London Marathon to raise awareness of the struggles of ordinary Iranians at a time of massive political upheval. 

WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRIAN BRUNE

As he runs loops around London’s Greenwich Park, Anoosheh Ashoori’s mind is often in two places: the metropolitan surroundings on a clear autumn day, and the stark walls of Evin Prison just outside of Tehran, Iran.

It's just over five years since Ashoori, 68, first found himself inside the notorious interrogation and detention center for political dissidents — and almost exactly five years since Ashoori tried to take his own life out of despair and fear for his family. But somehow in the midst of his ordeal with the regime, the encouragement of his fellow inmates and two books saved his life and set him on his current path: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami and Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. 

“I would be in the prison doing my running and dreaming of being out in the park or with my family,” says Ashoori, a slight, bald man with a neatly trimmed mustache, wearing  a Hostages International t-shirt and sporting a neoprene knee brace for an achy tendon. “Now I am out here and imagining my friends next to me. 

“It’s a bit… what is that movie? It’s a bit like ‘American Werewolf in London’ when you are two people at once, or trying to see the comedy through the horror.” 

Sentenced to 10 years for spying in 2017, Ashoori, a British-Iranian entrepreneur who moved to the UK 20 years ago, was released with Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe in March 2022 after the UK paid a £400 million debt to the Iranian government. He completed the last of his training runs for the London Marathon on October 2nd with his son, Aryan, who was signed up but who could not run the marathon due to a Covid-19 diagnosis. Together they are raising money for Hostage International and Amnesty International, the two NGOs most involved with his family’s effort to free Ashoori. 

“I think a marathon is very similar to the process our family went through…” Aryan Ashoori has written on his TCS London Marathon donation page. “The step-by-step nature of the run and the need to focus on the present moment is similar to the day-to-day coping mechanism that we developed throughout our quest. The only difference is that we can train and prepare for it this time.”

The family’s quest for its patriarch’s freedom began, in earnest, nearly two weeks after Ashoori’s disappearance in August 2017. Ashoori, an engineer who was honored in the 1990s by the Iranian government and then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani for his invention of seismic-resistant concrete, had returned to Tehran to visit his aging mother. “After about 10 days there, I went to the market to have the zip of my suitcase fixed. When I reached the bottom of the hill where she lives, a car cut me off,” Ashoori says, as he sips his coffee. 

In his recollection, four men jumped out – agents of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) – and handed him a piece of paper before he was told to put on a blindfold and place his head in the lap of one to disorient him. “It was a warrant for my arrest. They had accused me of spying for the Israeli government,” Ashoori says. After two weeks of interrogation, followed by solitary confinement in a 4ft by 6ft cell with lights on 24/7 and the din of screams and moans, the MOIS confiscated Ashoori’s computer devices and turned him over to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IGRC) which held him for another two weeks. 

“One of the intelligence officers said he was as close to me as my own jugular vein,” Ashoori says. “I replied, ‘good, then you know you won’t find anything on me.’” But Ashoori was more worried about his wife and two children back in England. “If [the intelligence service] could kill Shapour Bakhtiar, [the former Iranian prime minister killed in Paris], they could get to anyone,” he says. Agents assured Ashoori they could, after showing him multiple photographs of his wife and daughter, Elika. 

The once heavy-set man decided he had one option to get himself and his family out of this situation. He would commit suicide. First Ashoori carved a shiv out of a plastic spoon. When guards saw the blood and took away his blankets for warmth, he opted for a hunger strike and went 17 days without food, taking as little water as possible to avoid a stroke. 

“Because of knowing who my dad is – very selfless, always optimistic – I never thought he would do something that would destroy us,” says Elika Ashoori. “To know that a regime could bring someone so positive to such a level caused me to reach my lowest moment. The level of rage within me was so much.”

Two things changed in this time. One: Ashoori was handed Murakami’s and Frankl’s books from fellow prisoners; and two: his family decided to go public with his detention. “I was moved to a new cell with three men and – Middle Eastern culture favors the guest – they kept saying, ‘if you do not eat, we will not eat.’ In that way they coaxed me back to health,” Ashoori says. Eventually, he started joining the other men in the yard for daily exercises, running for two minutes solid, then ten minutes, then 30 and so on… until he reached two hours and 20 minutes. “We had cakes and tea to celebrate.” 

Meanwhile, Ashoori’s family took a cue from Richard Ratcliffe, the husband of Zaghari-Ratcliffe, and started to undertake “empty chair” protests opposite Downing Street. “Because my dad was so apolitical, we didn’t say anything. We didn’t want to poke the regime,” says Elika Ashoori. “I was against that from the beginning and my one regret is that we didn’t go bigger sooner. I told my mother we cannot afford to be nice about this; we have to be loud; we have to be ruthless. We didn’t turn into activists overnight, but in hindsight, if we hadn’t been vocal he wouldn’t have got out.”

Ashoori’s UK lawyers also lobbied the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office – and former Foreign Secretary, now Prime Minister, Liz Truss – for diplomatic protection. By that time, the Iranians had openly linked the release of both Zaghari-Ratcliffe and Ashoori to the money owed to Iran by the UK for reneging on a mid-1970s weapons deal that went unfulfilled after the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

On the day Ashoori was released, he was still advocating for more names to be added to the flight manifest, among the dozen or so PhDs, artists, and writers who used to gather in Ashoori's corner to read, carve wood, exercise and talk. But at Mehrabad Airport, having exhausted his appeals, he boarded a nearly empty Omani Air Force plane with Zaghari-Ratcliffe at one end and him on the other. They finally spoke about their oredal when they landed at RAF Brize Norton. 

For three to four months, Ashoori says he was simply so “overjoyed at being released” that he took in whatever he missed — full English Breakfasts and his favorite beer — and rebuilt his body. When the London Marathon gave him and his son special dispensation to run, he began training in earnest: a routine that the retiree has said has helped ground him and stave away the inevitable anxiety that often comes from torture. While not aiming for a particular personal best, Ashoori nonetheless notched a 2:19 half marathon over the summer. 

While his daughter says Ashoori is not the same man as when he left that August day, she added that since he has been back, “he is so driven himself,  we are learning from him — getting inspired from him. 

“One of the hardest things in the past three years was to humanize my dad because of his background, his color, his former country. To see all the other people get behind him now is truly amazing — it’s inspiring.” 

On Sunday, October 2, Anoosheh Ashoori finished the marathon in 5:28:28 wearing his prison uniform, which he had smuggled out of Iran for the occasion, along with 3,000 pages of notes for a memoir. All in all, he raised £20,000 for his charities.

BOMB Magazine: Gay Enough for You?

From co-stars on The L Word to podcasting partners, forever best friends Leisha Hailey and Kate Moennig are now co-authors of a memoir. 

by Adrian Margaret Brune

June 19, 2025

Back in the halcyon days of the early aughts, a first job as a reporter for an LGBT+ newspaper in Washington, DC, wasn’t exactly a plum posting for a young lesbian writer just out of Columbia Journalism School in New York—no matter the prospects for dating. There were the four-article-per-week deadlines, the trips to Capitol Hill to report on the progress of George W. Bush’s Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, a disastrous war going on in Iraq, and, last but not least, the cultural desert that was Northwest Washington: the opposite of my life in 2001–2004 downtown New York City and Brooklyn. There, hanging at the lesbian bar Henrietta Hudson with the musician LP in her salad days as a bartender, watching friends gig at the Mercury Lounge, and meeting some up-and-coming writer or other at a Vanity Fair party were regular happenings.

But in the dead of winter 2004, a whisper campaign started among the lesbians in and around Dupont Circle and Adams Morgan: watch parties on Sunday nights, nine in the evening—sharp. Come to this person’s group house, which can afford the cable network Showtime, and BYOB. There was a new show out, The L Word, and it was about us! Lesbians! And supposedly it wasn’t another sexless indie shot in black and white or a documentary that explored the life of the lesbian in the wild. My young girlfriend at the time, an intern at the Washington Blade where I worked, received an invitation to one. Having seen the extra-large Showtime The L Word billboards around Times Square, I decided to tag along, you know, for posterity. Although the thought did cross my mind: What did some uppity Los Angeles series have to teach this lesbian journalist about this life? We had overpriced, diluted drinks; Lil Wayne–blaring lesbian nights on 17th Street; lots of awkward dancing; and dramatic breakups, too.

With all this swirling in my head, I walked into the living room of one of those houses on January 18, 2004, to find about twenty-five lesbians glued to the television, sipping Miller Lite, and shushing anyone who dared disrupt the dialogue or a sex scene. Pre–Blue Is the Warmest Color, The L Word was probably the most graphic lesbian lovemaking any of us Gen-Xers had ever seen outside of our own fumbling bedroom efforts. All of us that night took mental notes and told our girlfriends we could do it better. And then, of course, we laughed at the glamorous apartments, houses, and clothes these women managed to afford. Still, no manner of disagreement on plot lines; the writer character, Jenny; Shane’s looks; or Catherine Opie’s photography could keep us away, the following Sunday night, from joining the nine o’clock watch party at someone else’s group house with another gaggle of lesbians, drinking another six-pack, and watching the sturm und drang unfold.

My January night with The L Word franchise has now stretched into my longest lesbian relationship. After I returned to New York following a year and change in DC, I picked up some friends and drove them to packed L Word watch parties at Cattyshack, the hottest lesbian bar in Brooklyn, full of women who literally stopped dancing to watch the cast do it on television. I spent many a lonely night in my older (and also gay) brother’s East Hampton guest house with spirits lifted because I could click through The L Word re-runs and indulge in Dana and Alice’s short-lived love affair, dreaming that theirs could be mine, too. I have introduced French and Italian girlfriends to the delicious American pulp of LA lesbian life. And I have wagered money and personal pride on the odds that Kate Moennig (pronounced Men-ig) was gay and had heated discussions about the reasons why network execs would hire a known lesbian, Leisha Hailey, to play a bisexual. I wouldn’t exactly say that we East Coast lesbians lived The L Word, but man, did it get our attention.

Turns out, as I was having my own lived L Word experience, Hailey and Moennig were navigating the particulars of being two of the first lesbian cast members hired on a revolutionary series. Now, wait a sec: revolutionary is not flip, as illustrated in the pair’s new book So Gay for You: Friendship, Found Family and the Show that Started it All (St Martin’s Press, 2025), the original series’ five-season run on Showtime, and the three-round 2019 reboot called The L Word: Generation Q. Amid a topsy-turvy, turbulent, nearly ten years in total, The L Word introduced us all to the possibility of LGBT parenthood, the coming reality of transgenderism, the horror of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy in Iraq, power lesbians, and queer substance abuse, among many other things. And damn, besides Betty (a band I respected, but for which musically, I cared little), the show had some fantastic cameos: Sleater Kenney in its heyday, Snoop Dogg, the B-52s, Teagan and Sara, as well as non-band celebrities Gloria Steinem, Billie Jean King, the eponymous newspaper-ess Ariana Huffington, the veteran Black actor and civil rights activist Ossie Davis, comedian Sandra Bernhard, Lolita Davidovich, and Rosanna Arquette.

“The Pants pair continues to serve as an inspiration to lesbians around the world, from the twenty-somethings on the Hackney Women’s Football Club to the Gen-Xer, late-in-life lesbians raising children in North London.”

— Adrian Margaret Brune

Could Hailey and Moennig each have written their own memoirs? Both have the backstories—Moennig with her East Coast/West Coast “tale of two cities” and Hailey with her “down and out in [Lincoln] and New York”—to pull it off. But if each went her separate way in print, it just wouldn’t be true to the duo’s nickname and now brand, Pants, bestowed by Mia Kirchner, who plays Jenny in The L Word. As Kirchner said, “You can’t have one leg without the other.” As a result, So Gay for You—the book title is surprisingly off-brand—is told in a back-and-forth narrative (Kate says, Leisha says) that stays true to both actors’ voices: sweet Nebraska Midwestern for Hailey, with a wicked bite thrown in now and again, and Philadelphia street-tough, “youse, cawfee, Philly, Italian ice, Wawa” for Moennig. (On the podcast, Hailey does a hilarious imitation of Moennig and her East Coast judiciousness.) The pair have been asked countless times if they ever dated, and in reading So Gay for You, it’s pretty obvious that if so, they could have been the next Joan Didion/John Gregory Dunne or a cautionary tale for, ahem, The L Word.

The Pants book begins with Hailey recounting a 2003 barbecue in the Hollywood Hills and reminiscing about the days when her band, The Murmurs, had a hit record, a touring schedule, and a firm future. Moennig chimes in for chapter two and tells of her humble acting beginnings 5,000 miles away in New York—newly graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (Hailey attended six years before Moennig) and jumping from job to job to make ends meet. Both actors needed steady work; both had just auditioned for a pilot written by veteran TV producer and Golden Globe–winner Ilene Chaiken called “Earthlings”; both were competing for the same role: Shane, the libertine heartbreaker among a group of close-knit Los Angeles friends, lovers, frenemies, and exes. Hailey, blonde and femme-ish, put on her best butch and even brought a hair comb to prove she could play the straight-talking, hair-dressing Euripides of Hollywood. Moennig, who had come from a show-business family (her mother is former Broadway dancer Mary Zahn, her aunt is Blythe Danner, and her cousin is Gwyneth Paltrow), but who was also a lapsed Catholic schoolgirl rebelling against the Philly world of old-money Mayflower types, turned up as a version of herself.

Moennig nailed the role of Shane, and Hailey considered a return to music. But Chaiken called Hailey shortly after the audition. She had Hailey in mind for a role that suited the actor’s natural buoyancy better: Alice Pieszecki, a gossipy, bisexual alt-news journalist and the Laurel to Moennig’s Hardy. Early in the original series, the pair played the Greek chorus to the love lives of art curator Bette (Jennifer Beals of Fame notoriety, whose own photographic book about The L Word is now out) and movie-executive-turned-mother Tina (Laurel Holloman), as well as closeted tennis pro Dana (Erin Daniels) and, of course, aspiring writer Jenny, who sucked all the air out of the room as she struggled with being a nice, Jewish, Chicago girl gone gay. Eventually, Chaiken and showrunner Rose Troche brought Hailey and Moennig more into the series, and arcs formed around their own stories. When not filming, everyone was navigating the shoots in Vancouver, British Columbia, which subbed in as a cheaper Los Angeles, and the expenses of being jobbing actors. Hailey, Moennig, and Kirchner even saved money by renting a house together. “When I got to Canada to film the pilot, I was broke,” Moennig writes about her hand-to-mouth days. “I didn’t even have a credit card to put down for incidentals, just an ATM card with maybe forty dollars on it. Per diems were our saving grace.”

Hailey: “My first official task as Alice was to go for a wardrobe fitting. . . . Without much conversation, the costumer handed me a pair of pants with a stampede of horses across the leg and declared, ‘These are great!’ I walked the slacks back to my trailer with the enthusiasm of someone walking the plank of a pirate ship. . . . Was I allowed to say no? . . . I mustered all my courage and suggested to the costumer that we put the horses out to pasture.”

Already a tight, conscientious cast due to the nature of the controversy the show stirred up during a reawakening of hard-core right-wing America, Hailey and Moennig nonetheless became particularly close. Even before we gaydar-focused watchers and the media (both the LGBT and straight) speculated about, cajoled, and even harassed Moennig to publicly come out as gay, she had told her own parents, including her cancer-suffering father, the violin maker William H. Moennig III. “I genuinely thought my mom would be okay with it. I really did,” Moennig writes. After all, her mom had been in show business. “’You’re just being influenced,’ I recall her saying. ‘It’s just a phase.’ . . . I wish I had timed it all better.” Moennig blamed herself, despite knowing that everyone had their own “gay timeline.” A few months after the premiere of the show, William H. Moennig died, going from the ER to the ICU and never returning. Hailey was the best friend to pick up the pieces. She even became Moennig’s unofficial spokesperson. Leisha “knew the strain I was under and the grief I was barely dealing with. Losing my dad was not in the bingo card for 2004, and that struggle became intertwined with the process of coming out and the overnight attention the show was getting,” Moennig writes.

Hailey, who is Heartland friendly but also guarded, writes about her upbringing as an Air Force brat born in Japan, settling with her parents surrounded by small towns and, on occasion, smaller minds, then fleeing at age eighteen to New York to make music as fast as she could. Acting was a side hustle. For the first time, she speaks openly and candidly about her deceased mother and the wing-lifting effect she had on Hailey’s young life. “Living in rural Nebraska, a red state, you might assume my parents were conservative,” Hailey writes. But the opposite was true. “Although my dad was in the military, he was a guitar-playing, chess-loving bookworm who was also a proud atheist. And while I don’t think my mom would have referred to herself as a feminist, she instilled in me and my sister competence, independence, and a belief that we could do anything we put our minds to”—despite suffering from Multiple Sclerosis for most of Hailey’s life. That quiet resilience included not saying a thing when leaving her youngest daughter in pre-Giuliani-crime-crackdown New York, in the middle of a drug epidemic. Hailey’s mother, who resembled her daughter down to the shape of her eyes, died in 2017.

Over twenty years after The L Word’s premiere, the Pants pair has survived the ups and downs of network television’s show-business life through Covid, the SAG-AFTRA writers’ strike, and the unfortunate end of The L Word: Generation Q, all while hanging on with a New Yorker grip to their friendship and the Covid-project podcast, Pants. Since going on air, Hailey and Moennig have been through indie production company after indie producer, supporting the show with their own savings, courting Spotify, and then finally landing at Lemonada Media.

Some dish, which all lesbians love, is thrown into So Gay for You, including the public snog between Hailey and her Uh Huh Her bandmate Camila Grey that got both kicked off a flight on the runway in El Paso, Texas. The electro-pop band had not yet learned their lesson that no matter how inexpensive or faux friendly, never fly Southwest. But after it publicly blew up in the tabloids—and was reported by the Associated Press, of all media—Hailey vigorously campaigned for her right to kiss her girlfriends wherever she wanted. Other than that, neither explicitly identifies their various paramours before Moennig quietly backed out of the “is she or isn’t she gay” public debate and ended all talk by marrying filmmaker and musician Ana Rezende in 2017. Hailey finally disclosed her rekindled relationship with Kim Dickens of the AMC franchise The Walking Dead—an actor she first met and dated while living in New York City in the 1990s.

The book doesn’t have Hailey completing Moennig’s sentences or vice versa, as they pretty much do in real life. On a recent promotional podcast with Chelsea Handler, Moennig said: “I think the perception outside of our show is that it was so—it was only designed for the male gaze, and that was a lot of critique we always heard. Everyone thought, Oh, it’s only for straight men to get off on . . . and the irony is that the whole show is run by women.”

“And written by and directed by,” Hailey chimed in.

Moennig continued, “You said this before”—she points to Hailey—“and it’s true, that women can sexualize each other as well. It wasn’t just for—” 

“And objectify,” Hailey added.

“And objectify each other. And it’s not just for men. . . . We, on the show, always thought, That’s so off base actually to what’s really going on here.”

A book by Hailey just wouldn’t, at this stage in our lives, feel complete without Moennig, and vice versa. Together, the Pants pair has written a light, fast, entertaining book that elevates lesbians’ lives, just like the show that launched their public lives. And the thing that does matter about The L Word, the Pants podcast, and now the book is that they stand up against the second coming of right-wingers who (still) want to pull the LGBT community apart. The Pants pair continues to serve as an inspiration to lesbians around the world, from the twenty-somethings on the Hackney Women’s Football Club to the Gen-Xer, late-in-life lesbians raising children in North London. This Pants’ pocket is pretty much permanently attached.

Since 2001, A.M. Brune has reported and written hundreds of freelance articles from pitch to print for publications, such as The New Yorker, The Guardian, and The Spectator publications on a variety of topics, including world affairs, social justice, human rights and culture. A former UN press officer, Brune holds a BS in Journalism from Northwestern University and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University in the City of New York and an MA in Global Diplomacy from SOAS. She often brings along a camera on assignments.

The History Channel: How NAACP's Walter White Risked His Life to Investigate Lynchings

For Walter White, growing up Black and being able to “pass” as white empowered him to take on two identities that aided his work with the NAACP exposing racial injustice in the United States.

White was born blonde-haired and blue-eyed in 1893 in Atlanta, Georgia, to a family descended from enslaved Black people and white plantation owners. He grew up in an era in which the “one-drop” rule was enforced—a law that categorized anyone with one drop of Black blood in the family line as a Black person regardless of having a far greater percentage of European ancestry. Despite his European lineage, the future civil rights activist grew up as an African American man. His mother and father, both born enslaved, became middle class, earning degrees and working as a teacher and postal worker, respectively.

White came to understand that, despite his pale skin, he was “a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance in order that those whose skin was white would have readily at hand a proof of their superiority,” as he wrote in his 1948 autobiography, A Man Called White.

WHITE'S FAMILY FACES ATTACK DURING ATLANTA RACE MASSACRE

His identity as a Black man was never more clear than on September 22, 1906, the first day of the Atlanta Race Massacre. The carnage unfolded when a white mob, increasingly fearful that upwardly mobile Black residents were threatening the social order of Jim Crow, killed dozens of African Americans over unsubstantiated allegations of assaults on white women by Black men.

White, in his memoir, recalled when his father heard that a white mob was headed to the home where “that [n—] mail carrier lives” to burn it down. As his mother and sisters hid in the rear of the home, 13-year-old White held a shotgun in the front parlor with his father, ready to target any intruders. The mob retreated before attacking White’s house, but after the riot, White swore he would always stand up to racial oppression.

Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer and Columbia Journalism School professor, says White’s identity was shaped by a long tradition of “voluntary Negroes,” a term coined by Black history scholar David Levering Lewis. “White was shaped by his background in Atlanta, his Black neighborhood and Black church,” says Cobb. “His family also made the political choice that they would never hide or shirk their identity or treat it as shameful.”

WHITE INVESTIGATES LYNCHINGS

After graduating from Atlanta University, White lobbied to save a Black public high school and established a local NAACP chapter, when his work caught the attention of NAACP founder W.E.B. Du Bois and Executive Secretary James Weldon Johnson. He was soon offered a position as assistant secretary at the NAACP’s headquarters in New York.

The United States was in the middle of a lynching scourge when White arrived in New York in 1918. The NAACP had tallied 3,224 lynchings between 1889-1918, mostly targeting African Americans. White hardly had two weeks to settle at his new job before he left for Tennessee to investigate a lynching. From there, White, as he writes, “started a phase of work for the association which neither it nor I had contemplated when I was employed."

Investigating riots was a dangerous mission. To go undetected, White often pretended to be a white salesman or a white journalist, depending on the circumstance. For one of his first operations, investigating the hangings of 10 men, as well as the brutal lynching of a pregnant Black woman, White casually engaged a local merchant whom he suspected had participated in the murder. 

“As his manner became more and more friendly I ventured to mention guardedly the recent lynchings. Instantly he became cautious—until I hinted that I had great admiration for the manly spirit the men of the town had exhibited,“ White recalled in a 1929 article for American Mercury. Once the merchant felt he was in safe company, he freely shared his racist beliefs and enjoyment of the woman’s lynching, White added.

During the Red Summer of 1919, White posed as a white journalist from Chicago while investigating a race massacre in Arkansas when he received a warning from a fellow Black man who knew his true identity. Word had gotten out, he was told, and a white mob was after him. White caught the next train out of town. The NAACP office staff, who had heard White had been lynched, sighed with relief when they saw him return.

A COMPLICATED LEGACY

Walter White, former executive secretary of the NAACP, offers his views on an anti-lynching bill before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee, circa 1940. Bettmann / Getty Images

In 1931, White took over as NAACP executive secretary, urging President Franklin D. Roosevelt and later President Harry Truman to make statements against lynching and segregation. Most notably, White unleashed an ambitious agenda during his tenure that focused on turning the tide for Black Americans through Congress and courtrooms. 

He hired a young Thurgood Marshall to defend wrongfully accused Black people against charges of inciting race riots, empowering Marshall to start the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, filing lawsuits to desegregate government offices, the military and public schools, eventually leading to the groundbreaking case Brown v. Board of Education.

In 1955, White died at age 61 from a heart attack, leaving behind a complicated legacy. He may have achieved advances in racial justice, but his ability to straddle both racial lines at his convenience remained controversial among some African Americans. 

“Soon after White died, a new generation of African American leaders emerged, and for these leaders his pale complexion was an inconvenience,” wrote A.J. Baime in White Lies: The Double Life of Walter F. White and America's Darkest Secret. But the impact of White’s civil rights work was reflected in the many tributes he received upon his death.

As New York's African American newspaper The Amsterdam News wrote, “White’s cocky aggressiveness stayed with him as long as he lived—as did his boyhood vanity. But it was these very qualities that helped to make him the best lobbyist our race has ever produced, and one of the very best of any race."

Adrian Brune is a London-based American journalist who has written about everything from marathoning in the Middle East to searching for Shakespeare’s true likeness in paint. A native of Tulsa, Oklahoma, she has long followed Walter White and the history of U.S. race massacres.

Narratively: The Black Investigator Who Went Undercover as a White Man in the Jim Crow South

On a hot September day in 1919, Walter Francis White found himself running for his life.

In the two days since he had been in Elaine, Arkansas, White had seen the bodies of dozens of black men and women strewn across dirt roads. The ones who were lucky enough to still be alive remained hiding in the cotton fields.

White ducked down an alley, then picked up speed along the railroad tracks. Breathless and weary, he reached the station and climbed onto the platform just as the conductor announced the final call for the doors.

As recounted in White’s autobiography, A Man Called White, the conductor gave White an odd look before asking him why he was leaving before the fun began. “There’s a damned yellow nigger down here passing for white,” the conductor explained. “When they get through with him, he won’t pass for white no more!” he cackled.

What the conductor didn’t know was that the last-minute passenger he was talking to was in fact the very man he was talking about. White later wrote in his autobiography, “No matter what the distance, I shall never take as long a train ride as that one seemed to be.” When he finally set foot back in New York, his colleagues at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) sighed with great relief.

Walter White is one of the most important yet overlooked civil rights leaders of the 20th century. He played a key role in the Harlem Renaissance and led the NAACP to its zenith as its executive secretary. But what makes White stand out is the unusual method he used to achieve racial justice. His biggest secret? He was a biracial man who passed for white in order to help the NAACP investigate some of the greatest racial atrocities in post-Reconstruction America, helping to establish the organization as a veracious force for African-American justice and liberty.

In 1919, White was on assignment in Arkansas investigating the Elaine Massacre: the state-sanctioned murder of dozens of black sharecroppers under the order of Arkansas Governor Charles Brough. At the time, the Arkansas farming industry was dominated by white landowners, and black sharecroppers — frustrated by low wages — had formed the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. That September, the union met in a local church to discuss an upcoming lawsuit against white landowners, but their meeting was interrupted by gunfire from white vigilantes. The sharecroppers returned fire in self-defense. A white security officer was killed, and the town’s deputy sheriff was wounded.  

The body of a black person slain during the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas in 1919. (Photo courtesy the Arkansas History Commission)

When the news reached the Governor’s Mansion in Little Rock, Brough declared the event an insurrection. He called up 500 Arkansas National Guard soldiers from Camp Pike and instructed them to kill any black person who refused to surrender immediately. More than 200 African-Americans were murdered and an additional 200 were tortured and imprisoned. A century later, the Elaine Massacre remains the bloodiest occurrence of racial violence in Arkansas history and one of the deadliest in U.S. history as well.

Sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, being rounded up by troops and taken to a detention area, after they formed a union that was seen as a threat to white farmers. (Photo courtesy the Arkansas History Commission)

White traveled to Arkansas to advocate for those imprisoned sharecroppers. He planned to meet with the local sheriff and report back to the NAACP. But it was not safe for a black man to freely roam around Arkansas. So White devised a plan. He obtained fake press credentials through personal contacts, and impersonated a Chicago Daily News reporter, hoping everyone would assume he was white.

But right before his meeting with the sheriff, his plan backfired.

As White recounted in his memoir, while he was walking down the street, he was overtaken by a black man who whispered, “Mister … I don’t know what you are down here for, but I just heard them talking about you — I mean the white folks — and they say they are going to get you.” With that warning, White started sprinting to the train station and never looked back.

Walter White was born in Atlanta in 1893. His maternal grandmother is believed to have been the illegitimate child of William Henry Harrison, the ninth president of the United States and a slaveholder. White’s father, George, a postman, also had white ancestry. In the book Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America, author Thomas Dyja notes that while Walter grew up going to white schools, he always knew that he was different than his peers — and so did they. His white classmates threw rocks at him, while black peers often mocked him for his light complexion. But on September 22, 1906, White would understand that despite the lightness of his skin, he was not white.

A headline splashed across the front page of The Atlanta Evening News — “Bold Negro Kisses White Girl’s Hand” — would initiate the Atlanta Race Riot. The story sparked outrage, and mobs of angry white men began to attack African-American communities. In A Man Called White, White recalls watching a disabled shoe shiner being beaten until he died in a pool of his own blood. “We saw clubs and fists descending to the accompaniment of savage shouting and cursing,” White wrote. “A voice cried [out] ‘there goes another nigger!’”

Cover of “Le Petit Journal” depicting the race riots in Atlanta, Georgia, October 1906. The bottom title reads: “The Lynchings in the United States: The Massacre of Negroes in Atlanta.” (Image courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France via Wikimedia Commons)

White’s father, George, purchased a rifle, and as the mob neared the Whites’ home, he and his son positioned themselves at the parlor windows. George ordered Walter “not to shoot until the first white man stepped on the lawn, and once that man did, not to miss.”

“In that instant, there opened up within me a great awareness,” Walter White wrote. “I knew then who I was. I was a Negro, a human being with an invisible pigmentation which marked me a person to be hunted, hanged, abused, discriminated against, kept in poverty and ignorance in order that those whose skin was white would have readily at hand a proof of their superiority. … Yet as a boy there in the darkness amid the tightening fright, I knew the inexplicable thing — that my skin was as white as the skin of those who were coming at me.”

White never fired his gun that night. Just as the mob approached the lawn and the young man took aim, a salvo of gunshots thundered from a brick building next door. A group of the White family’s friends had staked out a position to protect the popular postman’s family, and White was saved from pulling the trigger — as well as the fate that likely would have befallen him had he fired.

After graduating from Atlanta University in 1916 and working as an insurance salesman, White caught wind of the Atlanta school board’s decision to close the only black public high school in the city. He decided to establish a local chapter of the NAACP in Atlanta to fight it. When NAACP Field Secretary James Weldon Johnson came to Atlanta, he was so taken with White that he hired him to be his assistant at the New York headquarters.

Young Walter Francis White at the beginning of his career, in March 1918. (Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

In February 1918, word reached the NAACP that a mob had brutally tortured, shot and lynched a black sharecropper named Jim McIlherron in Estill Springs, Tennessee. NAACP leaders met and discussed sending a protest letter to Tennessee Governor Thomas Rye, but they worried that a letter alone would not gain the attention that these incidents warranted. During the meeting, White made a decision that would launch and define his career: He sought permission to go undercover and make a firsthand investigation.

NAACP Executive Secretary John R. Shillady shut down the notion immediately. What would happen to White should Southerners discover that he was biracial and impersonating a white man to investigate on the behalf of the NAACP? White persisted, and eventually, Shillady relented. By the next day, the upstart activist was setting out on a mission that neither White nor the NAACP had ever previously even contemplated. White went undercover.

In Walter White: The Dilemma of Black Identity in America, Thomas Dyja describes how White assumed the identity of a land buyer when he stepped into Estill Springs’ center of activity: the town’s local general store. White had no intention of asking direct questions about the lynching, but before he could even approach the topic, it came to him. Members of the lynch mob were gathered around a fire crackling in the store’s stove, boasting about the details of the lynching. White, seated unassumingly near the men, got the full, gory details, right down to the moment when McIlherron was doused with coal fluid and prodded with a hot iron for 30 minutes until he died.

An anti-lynching banner outside the NAACP headquarters in New York. (Photo courtesy Library of Congress)

White would encounter many more difficult moments in this new line of work, as he gained an up close look at the casual callousness behind these vicious crimes. Once, while investigating a lynching in Georgia, he ran into the leader of the lynch mob while shopping in a general store. The mob leader, unaware of who White really was, recounted the whole event, chuckling and slapping his thigh throughout the entire story and declaring the lynching to be “the best show, Mister, I ever did see.” Throughout the conversation, White could barely contain his nausea.

White’s undercover investigations continued, providing valuable details to the NAACP in the battle to end lynching, which affected nearly every corner of the United States, but was most prevalent in the Deep South states where White traveled. (The Equal Justice Initiative’s 2015 report on Lynching in America revealed that more than 4,000 African-Americans were lynched in 12 Southern states between 1877 and 1950.) The NAACP published White’s reports and shared them with media outlets, including The Nation, where White published his seminal account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. White summed up that event as such: “A hysterical white girl related that a nineteen-year-old colored boy attempted to assault her in the public elevator of a public office building of a thriving town of 100,000 in open daylight. Without pausing to find whether or not the story was true … a mob of 100-per-cent Americans set forth on a wild rampage that cost the lives of … between 150 and 200 colored men, women and children; the destruction by fire of $1,500,000 worth of property … and everlasting damage to the reputation of the city of Tulsa … ”

In the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre, smoke engulfs buildings and the sky on Archer Street, 1921. (Photo courtesy Oklahoma State University-Tulsa Special Collections and Archives)

“How much longer will America allow these pogroms to continue unchecked?” White asked in his article. “There is a lesson in the Tulsa affair for every American who fatuously believes that Negroes will always be the meek and submissive creatures that circumstances have forced them to be during the past three hundred years.”

The City of Tulsa will commemorate the 100th anniversary of the massacre in May 2021, and it has commissioned the Oklahoma Archeological Survey to dig up a mass grave that many suspect contains the remains of dozens of black people killed in the massacre.

“The Black Dispatch” newspaper reports on the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Massacre, June 1921. (Image courtesy Oklahoma Historical Society)

White worked his way up from investigator to assistant national secretary to eventually leading the NAACP, serving as its executive secretary from 1929 to 1955, working on many prominent legal cases. Unfortunately, White didn’t get to fully realize his vision. He died 10 years before the 1965 Civil Rights Act, and America today is still struggling to execute the vision of racial equality that White dreamt of. But in 2018, two prominent African-American senators stood on the podium of the Senate floor to introduce a federal anti-lynching bill, which would mark a sort of culmination of White’s work.

Senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker’s Justice for Victims of Lynching Act seeks to classify any bodily harm on the basis of racial discrimination as a federal hate crime. “With this bill,” said Senator Harris, “we finally have a chance to speak the truth about our past and make clear that these hateful acts will never happen again.” The Justice for Victims of Lynching Act passed the Senate unanimously. On February 26, 2020, the Emmett Till Antilynching Act, a revised version of the Justice for Victims of Lynching Act, passed the House of Representatives, by a vote of 410–4. Because of the minor difference between the bill that passed the House and the one that passed the Senate in 2019, the bill must once more be passed by the U.S. Senate before it can go to the president for his signature and become law.

Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, Washington, D.C., June 1942. (Photo by Gordon Parks via Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Visual Materials from the NAACP Records)

Walter Francis White’s work on anti-racism and civil rights propels our current conversation about race in America forward. He was born into an ancestry that could not fully call itself white or black, but he fully embraced his African-American heritage. And instead of taking advantage of the privilege that came with his mixed race, he used it to unearth significant truths about black lives in the darkness before civil rights became a rallying cry.

Following his death, the Amsterdam News wrote that White’s “cocky aggressiveness stayed with him as long as he lived — as did his boyhood vanity. But it was these very qualities that helped to make him the best lobbyist our race has ever produced.”

Hyperallergic: London’s Castle Cinema Keeps the Magic of Film Alive

The theater’s Ciné-Real film club aims to preserve the beauty of celluloid in a consistently digitizing world.

Ümit Mesut, a longtime projectionist and owner of the film and video store Ümit & Son, changes the reel halfway through the showing of A Matter of Life and Death during his fortnightly film club Ciné-Real, which takes place at Hackney’s Castle Cinema (all photos Adrian Brune/Hyperallergic)

LONDON — On a dreary, rainy mid-January Sunday, a steady flow of people braved the weather, dismounted their single-speed bicycles, and shook off their Barbour jackets as they walked beyond the Spar convenience store, up a flight of stairs, and into the warm mid-century modern décor of the Castle Cinema. 

Although the symphony conductor biopic Tár (2022, dir. Todd Field) was on the bill, as was Babylon (2022, dir. Damien Chazelle), the story of Hollywood’s raging heyday, all the hipsters had come to see a movie that came out at least five decades before they were born — and originally shown by running three rolls of film through an original refurbished Philips Kinoton FP20 35mm film projector. A Matter of Life and Death (dir. Michael Powell), a 1946 British fantasy-romance film set during World War II in which British soldier-turned-movie-star David Niven plays a Royal Air Force pilot who must face a divine court to plead for his life, had long been digitized. But local film aficionado Ümit Mesut and his friend, filmmaker Liam Saint-Pierre, were showing one of the first Technicolor movies in three rolls, each about 30 minutes. 

“A Matter of Life and Death is an utterly unique fantasia from the production duo of [Michael] Powell and Emeric Pressburger  — it could be on a double bill with It’s a Wonderful Life or The Wizard of Oz — and the only way to really see and experience it is film,” Mesut explained to the audience before starting the film. “We purchased this one from the South End Film Club … In the olden days they had intermissions to change the reels. This is what it is; this is real cinema. We’ll have a main break to get a drink and a shorter one to run to the toilet.”

Twice a month, Mesut and Saint-Pierre set up the film machine, pluck out a different canister, and give the same speech before commencing their own version of Cinema Paradiso in Hackney. Their vision, Ciné-Real, aims to preserve the beauty of celluloid in a consistently digitizing world, as well as to bring cinema lovers out of their living rooms and back to the theater. 

It’s working. Every screening of a classic film hand-chosen from Mesut’s store on Lower Clapton Road has a full house, with people waiting for cancellations. This month, Ciné-Real will show another Powell & Pressburger film titled The Red Shoes and Fritz Lang’s masterpiece M. This spring, the duo will put on Raging Bull (1980, dir. Martin Scorsese) and Being There (1979, dir. Hal Ashby) — each advertised with a version of the original movie poster featuring an image of Mesut’s face digitally altered as various film characters, including Humphrey Bogart, Peter Sellers, Marlon Brando as The Godfather, and even Robert De Niro boxing. 

Near a storage room at the Castle Cinema in East Hackney, London. Owners Asher Charman and Danielle Swift have been running pop-up film events for nearly five years, including Ümit Mesut’s twice-monthly Ciné-Real showings and open-air screenings in Hackney with hot tubs for the audience.

In London, there are currently three cinemas that still show projector films: Rio Cinema, the Prince Charles, and Castle Cinema’s Ciné-Real. While only anecdotal data exists comparing the number of digital-only theaters with those that show both celluloid and digital, directors such as Christopher Nolan and Quentin Tarantino have championed the cause, printing recent movies such as Interstellar (2014) and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019) on 35mm. 

But Mesut has never abandoned his favorite medium, unlike George Lucas, the Star Wars director and founder of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic, whom he directly blames — and sometimes curses — for ushering in the digital era. “People come to me and say we’re making a film; we’re shooting film,” Mesut told Hyperallergic. “I say, ‘Well, you’re not washing, you’re not cutting, you’re definitely not printing.’ That’s film-making — at least for the last 210 years. Some people care; some don’t. People ask me, ‘Will film ever come back?’ No, it effing will not. You won’t get change when one copy of a 100-minute film on 35mm is $100,000 against 100-quid for the same on digital. If the film is a flop, what are you going to do? You’re going to melt it to get the silver out of it,” he said. 

The lobby bar of the Castle Cinema, a reconstructed theater built in 1913 as an independent single-screen cinema. Total seating reached 619 people before it was converted into a bingo hall in 1958.

As Mesut tells, however, he had the perfect childhood for a film aficionado. Growing up in Turkish Cyprus, he spent hours of his free time at his grandfather’s cinema, usually in the projection booth. “At the time I didn’t pay much attention to the images, I just loved the mechanical side of film projection,” Mesut said in a short film about his life made by Saint-Pierre. “The magical moment for me is when you strike the switch and the motor comes on and you strike ‘lamp’ and the lamp comes on and you’ve started the show.” After his parents moved to London in the 1960s, his father opened a little Cypriot café in Hackney and showed the young Mesut how to make “the little cups of coffee.” When Mesut collected £11, he invested in his first projector and put on his own “open-air” screenings. “I would make my own tickets, put up my own screen and run reels of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton hits,” he said. 

Not surprisingly, Mesut’s first job was at the Rio Cinema, a 1930’s Art Deco picture palace in Dalston, Hackney. “I kept badgering the manager Mr. Mustafa to give me a job, and when I turned 16, he gave me a job as rewind boy — that means I would wind back the film after it was shown and send the reels back to the next theatre or to the distributor,” Mesut said. “I got paid in Bruce Lee posters.”

Ümit Mesut stands behind the counter of Ümit & Son, the film and video store he owns on Clapton Road in Hackney, where he sells old videos, projectors, recorders and some cannister films. Mesut also repairs just about everything related to film.

Mesut soon climbed the ladder from apprentice projectionist to chief projectionist and eventually decided to open his own store — at first, a video/DVD store, a sweet shop and a grocery store, and then Mesut started to sell pieces of his own projectors and cameras. Initially, Mesut called his store Ümit & Son because his son worked in the store, but started to get more involved in “computer stuff,” but luck walked into the store one day in the body of Liam Saint-Pierre. 

Smarting from a recent breakup, in October 2011 Saint-Pierre decided to approach Ümit & Son about an old Super-8 projector that he had found lying in a bin. Amid videocassettes, Betamax, reels, and canisters, Mesut appeared, fixed the camera, and then talked Saint-Pierre into buying an old Bell & Howell with new belts for £250. “Inspired by the conversation, I decided then and there to set up a film night where we would show feature films projected on 16mm,” Saint-Pierre said. “I asked Ümit to be the projectionist.” 

There was just one hitch: Mesut said no. He couldn’t bring himself to talk in front of a crowd. But when “everything went wrong with the first screening  — Jaws — Mesut agreed to help … just once,” Saint-Pierre said. “That was 11 years ago, and since then, Ümit has been the projectionist at Ciné-Real, where we have shown 16mm films once a month, screening for crowds as big as 250 people.”

At first, the duo showed analog wherever they could set up a projector: under damp railway arches, small bars, and old working men’s clubs. But three years ago, after the newly opened Castle Cinema hired Mesut as the projectionist for an Anna Biller retrospective, the pair managed to talk the management into giving them two nights a month, which has ballooned to three and four nights and even some special events. 

But the regular viewings — and the shifting of attention from the latest and greatest in digital to the survival of celluloid — isn’t the end of Mesut’s crusade against the “all the money-grubbing so-and-sos who have taken away our choice,” he said. Mesut and Saint-Pierre have opened their own small screening room in the back of Ümit & Son, which Mesut rents out for personal showings and where he will start teaching master classes in filmmaking and projection. Lastly, Mesut has said that Tarantino has approached him about making a documentary about film’s re-emergence. 

“An old friend of mine used to say, this fight is very relevant because it’s not just what we look at, but how we look at it,” Mesut says. “When you play a film on digital and then put it on the film projector, it’s night and day; there is no comparison — the colors, the deep blacks, the depths. It just blows me away. I don’t want to do away with digital, but why do I need to pay 15 quid if I am just getting a large TV screen? It would be nice to have a choice.”

The back room of Ümit & Son, London’s mecca of Super-8, 16mm, Technicolor, and other celluloid material from days past. Owner Ümit Mesut says that he is fine with today’s digital projection, just that he wishes “the people had a choice.”

Postcards and flyers from previous Ciné-Real showings, which often feature founder Ümit Mesut’s face digitally inserted into a famous movie poster. The placards are a hit among young attendees who find them extremely quirky.

The screening room in the back of Ümit & Son, where Ümit Mesut puts on private showings for approximately 20 people for £250 (~$350) all-inclusive. The décor dates back to the turn of the 20th century.

An original velvet booth in the lobby of the Castle Cinema, a renovated movie house that shows both classic and modern films in the heart of Hackney, London. In March 2016, owners Asher Charman and Danielle Swift launched a Kickstarter campaign to renovate it and reopen to the public, raising more than £55,000 (~$66,097).

A Tour Through Tashkent’s Art-Filled Subway: Ballroom chandeliers, vast mosaics, and wood carvings await curious commuters.

Words and Text by Adrian M. Brune, 7 March 2023

TASHKENT, Uzbekistan — Tourists in most large cities across the world will pay a tidy sum of money to see some of the greatest artworks in national museums and private galleries. Yet, studied commuters of each of those metropolises have a secret among them: many wonderful creations reside in the metro stations. For the price of a ride from point A to B, New Yorkers can see William Wegmans and Roy Lichtensteins; Parisians can peruse the sinuous tropical flowers gates designed by famed architect Hector Guimard; and London tube riders can view such works as “Pleasure’s Inaccuracies” by Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie. 

Although the Metro of Moscow receives heaps of attention, the Toshkent Metropoliteni (or the Tashkent Metro) of Uzbekistan’s capital certainly deserves some due. Begun in 1972, six years after a major earthquake devastated the region, Soviet engineers and crews with pickaxes finished its first line — the second subway constructed in Central Asia — in 1977, with nine stations. Many pay tribute to the history of Uzbekistan, including its infamous cotton production, the first man and woman in space, and the city’s mosques and madrassas. Some Soviet throwbacks have been renamed, including the October Revolution Station, which is now dedicated to Amir Timur (Tamerlane), a 14th-century Central Asian military leader, as well as Maxim Gorky Station — now, the Great Silk Road Station. 

Under the dictatorship of Islam Karimov, whose 27-year reign ended with his death in 2016, the subway was used as a nuclear bomb shelter. Taking photographs inside Tashkent’s subway stations was therefore prohibited, with lingering guards at the ready to snatch cameras. But the current president, Shavkat M. Mirziyoyev, lifted the ban in 2018. Now, for the equivalent of 15 cents, shutterbugs can explore about 43 stations along 37 miles of track with more opening every other month. 

For a quick tour, below are some of the most stunning stations: 

Olmazor Station:  This station is dedicated to Red Army Major General Sabir Rakhimov, a Soviet war hero who broke through German lines in World War II and died from his wounds. Upon entering Omazor, walk under a large wooden bas-relief of a Soviet army helmet and gun at one end and a hammer and sickle at the other. Between them are a dozen or so red marble engravings of fighting and marching soldiers, as well as the mourning mothers of soldiers — all of whom lost their lives in the various wars fought by the USSR.

Chilonzor Station: Chilonzor’s dozens of ceramic murals depict scenes of traditional Uzbek life, from farmers in the field to men raising glasses of chai tea atop a tapchan, a covered outdoor couch. Along the concave ceiling are chandeliers of golden crowns and crystal lights reminiscent of a large hotel ballroom. Sharov Rashidov, the First Secretary of Uzbekistan’s Communist Party, made 18 trips to Moscow to gain the necessary permissions for the Tashkent Metro, and made sure that Metrogiprotens, the Soviet oversight agency, literally cemented the cultural legacy of the Uzbeks.

Alisher Navoi: Renowned sculptor Ahmet Shaymuradov spent four years creating the turquoise blue bas-reliefs that depict scenes from Khamsa — five epic, Turkic poems by Ali-Shir Nava’i, a 15th-century Uzbek “Renaissance Man” (poet, writer, politician, linguist, mystic, and painter). The station’s intricate domes resemble the mosques and madrassas built during the height of Uzbekistan’s Silk Road era.

Toshkent Station: Toshkent Station receives mixed reviews on its beauty, but high marks on its spectacle. Each entrance prominently displays an emblem of the city’s 2,200 years of history, including a mosaic of the national coat of arms: a Huma bird with outstretched wings surrounded by cotton and wheat, the country’s two main crops. The remainder of the station displays Greek-revival sculptures of daily Uzbek life. O’zbekiston, a sister station, uses ornate glass-and-steel street lamps in the shape of cotton balls to pay tribute to the Soviet’s main export.

Kosmonavtlar Station: Largely regarded as the most beautiful of Tashket’s stations, Kosmonavtlar’s brightly colored walls fade from blue to black, supposedly to “recreate all the stages of exploring space,” according to its designer, architect Sergo Sutyagin. Along those walls, blue ceramic medallions feature some of the pioneers of the Soviet space program, including Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first cosmonaut, and Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space. For the final touch, artisans painted the ceiling to look like the Milky Way. 

In September 2016, the Tashkent Metro Authority announced the construction of Sirg’ali yo’li (Yellow Line) a southern expansion that will be connected to all of the other metro stations with the ring-shaped Halqa yo’li (Circle Line). Sutyagin, for one, has said that he still rides the original lines daily. “Every time I see tourists taking pictures … I say to myself, ‘What a good job I did! What a good job we all did!’” 

Runner's WorldRacing the Clock to Help Women Runners in Afghanistan

Stephanie Case, the founder of NGO Free to Run, is working to get staffers and Afghan runners to safety.

Stephanie Case is used to making appeals. As the Canadian born-and-bred UN lawyer and founder of the Afghanistan running non-governmental organization (NGO) Free to Run, it’s part of the job.

But on August 15, Case posted an ask she might have never predicted, even as the United States and NATO forces made good on their promise to withdraw all forces from the embattled country as the Taliban entered Kabul: “Please help, the window of opportunity for us to get our (female-led) team to a safe location is closing fast.”

"For the last ten days, my kitchen table has turned into an operations centre, acting as a focal point for comms with Afghans on the ground and special forces from multiple countries throughout the day and night—responsibility for such efforts should never devolve down to this level,” Case told Runner’s World. “Those who have been evacuated— team members who are at risk, including female leaders and women’s rights activists, paralympic coaches, athletes with disabilities and others—still have a tough rough ahead as they navigate their way to their new homes, a process that could take many months. Free to Run is doing everything it can to ensure that our Afghan families have the resources they need, whether they be in Afghanistan, Qatar, Ukraine, Italy, France, or elsewhere.”

Case is not alone in her invocation. As reports spread that the fundamentalist group had, indeed, not been living up to its public promises for a peaceful transition and the protection of women’s gains—and as women in sporting groups such as cycling, climbing, skiing, football, and running started burning their own equipment to avoid harm’s way— many female NGO founders jumped into action. They are now working around the clock to not only evacuate their female staffs, but also regroup and resupply their charges when those women reach safe footing elsewhere.

“[In July], I flew back to Kabul to meet with our staff and participants. I wanted to let them know first and foremost that Free to Run will always stand by them, and to hear from them what they needed from us … in the face of such uncertainty,” Case wrote in a blog post. “The strength of our program has rested in our ability to adapt and respond. We have always been led by the needs of our participants and this will not change.”

For Case, an ultrarunner who founded Free to Run in 2014 as a way to use running to foster women’s well-being in regions of conflict, the first priority was to mobilize all potential resettlement sponsors, establish a JustGiving page to receive donations, and start pushing through the paperwork for exit papers and visas.

“We acted early, taking precautionary security measures concerning our offices, equipment and documentation,” Case wrote, whose background with the UN in both Gaza, South Sudan, and most recently, Kabul, gave her a context from which she could sense impending calamity. “A Taliban spokesperson has indicated that the group will respect the rights of women, and NGOs will be able to operate, but we will need … to shift, to adapt, and to change.”

Free to Run had been recently preparing for the Marathon of Afghanistan in October. The Marathon of Afghanistan is an annual race that took place from 2015 to 2019 near Bamyan—an area in the center of the country about 115 miles from Kabul known for its dramatic cliffs, bright blue lakes, caves and citadels, and the huge statues of the Buddha, before the Taliban destroyed them in 2001. The marathon, run by a travel agency called Untamed Borders, had steadily grown and added shorter racers to increase the popularity. At least 40 percent of the field were women, coming from more than a dozen Afghan provinces, in addition to a wide range of international countries.

The Marathon of Afghanistan, which varied its course and location from year to year—and kept identifying information privileged—also inspired a documentary, The Secret Marathon, which debuted in Canada in March 2019. It tracks the story of Zainab, the first Afghan woman to run a marathon in Afghanistan, and legendary marathon runner, Martin Parnell, who vowed to support her right after reading her story.

Case won’t say much more about the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan to protect the people involved with Free to Run. But the ultrarunner who is widely noted in the running community for her grit and tenacity ended her blog on this note: “There will be a way and we will find it with a bit of patience, creativity, and sensitivity.” She mentioned the phrase “we will not give up” three times.

How You Can Help Afghan Refugees

1. Donate

Case has set up JustGiving page to help evacuate and resettle the Afghan runners, and to ensure Free to Run’s ability to continue their ground-breaking programs. Currently, Case has raised $50,000 out of $100,000 requested. Free to Run also has the ability to set up a one-time or recurring donation through the Free to Run website or directly through Paypal.

2. Be a Free to Run Ambassador

Just this past summer, Free to Run launched an ambassador program, in which supporters received placement in the New York City Marathon and other marathons for raising $1,000 a year and wearing the NGO’s logo in races.

Also, if the country in which you live is not accepting Afghan refugees, call your local officials, parliamentary representatives, and others to tell them you support resettlement.

3. Volunteer your time and skill sets

Refugees need lots of services in their new countries: airport pick-ups, apartment set-ups, meal deliveries, and especially, trauma counselors, and immigration and human rights lawyers. This website founded by the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services directs people to needs and locales.

4. Amplify Afghan voices

Find appropriate—and non-identifying—stories about Afghans, their accomplishments, and their hopes, fears, and dreams across social media, but ensure that names are not used and faces are obscured. The Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, in partnership with Vital Voices, has set up a special fund to provide emergency evacuations, housing, resettlement, visa applications, and other emerging priorities through a 20-year-strong network of women activists.

The Calvert Journal: The battle to preserve Uzbekistan’s greatest art collection is moving online

"Gathering Cotton" (1931) by Alexander Volkov, the founder of Uzbek Avant Garde. The artwork is one of hundreds on display at the Nukus Museum

25 October 2021

Text: Adrian Brune

Claims of mismanagement have dogged the Nukus Museum for decades, as officials and art lovers fight between preserving Igor Savitsky's avant-garde art collection in the desert, or bringing its masterpieces to a wider audience. Now, a new project is putting tens of Savitsy's greatest works online — but the battle for the museum's future is far from over.

In early 1950s, Russian-born Ukrainian Igor Vitalievich Savitsky was on an archeological dig close to the Aral Sea. There, he started to stumble across old artworks that had been squirreled away: “paintings rolled up under the beds of old widows, buried in the family trash, in the dark corners of artists’ studios, and sometimes, even patching a hold in the roof,” Savitsky wrote to his family. Many were treasures dating back to Russia’s 1930s avant-garde, when artists had rebelled against state-enforced socialist realism in the arts. But, by creating work that did not conform to government ideals, doomed many of their works to destruction. Savitsky soon “ended up with a collection that no one in the Soviet Union would dare exhibit.”

Savitsky ultimately stashed the work inside his own home — a ramshackle two-story house in the heart of Nukus, in northwest Uzbekistan — and opened it to art buffs from across the world until perestroika, the political movement to reform the Soviet party, took hold in the early 1980s. Today, those same paintings form the basis of the Karakalpak State Art Museum, a grand state museum that houses the 90,000 items from Savitsky’s collection.

Currently, it’s the physical museum — also known as the Nukus Museum — that draws thousands of visitors to this remote corner of Uzbekistan every year. But now the Friends of the Nukus Museum (FoNM) have started the arduous task restoring, digitising, and categorising Savitsky’s acquisitions, of which 900 are on display on a new website. The project, as well as a planned contemporary art biennial and a tour of paintings to the United States, has been designed to “attract contemporary artists from around the world” and add Nukus to a “universal cultural heritage”, according to Tigran Mkrtychev, the former head of Moscow’s Roerich Museum of Oriental Art, who was named the Savitsky’s new director in 2019. “The Nukus Museum has a big problem with [the] restoration of [its] works,” he says. “We want to attract experts from around the world so that they can help create a restoration school.”

More importantly for many, this digital access also effectively engineers an end to the prospect of relocating the Savitsky treasure trove to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent — a prospect which has long loomed over the institution. “The Russian museums can’t live with the idea that such a wonderful collection was taken out of Russia and to this provincial place in Uzbekistan — God knows where,” says Savitisky’s former confidante and the Nukus Museum’s first director, Marinika Babanazarova, in a 2011 documentary on the Savitsky, The Desert of Forbidden Art.

But discussions on relocation were never simply a sign of injured pride. The newest museum structure, built in 2003, still does not have enough room to put all of its works on display, and remains in almost consistent disrepair. When I visited the Karakalpak State Art Museum, the paintings spoke to me of the yearning of Uzbek and Soviet artists to learn from the Western world, emulating the likes of George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton and Max Ernst, while putting their own spin on photographic realism, surrealism, and dadaism. Yet the artworks were hung in random pairings, among disjointed galleries and with scarcely an alarm system in sight, let alone a security guard.

The Nukus Museum has endured a significant amount of dissonance in recent years. The museum’s third new director in four years, Gulbahar Izentaeva, was ousted in summer 2019 in favour of Mkrtychev, who also worked as a fellow for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is now the fifth overseer of the Savitsky collection in just four years.

Prior to this rapid turnover, it was Babanazarova who headed “the Louvre of the Steppe” for more than 30 years. Then, in 2015, the Uzbekistani government accused her of involvement in the theft of five original paintings, worth around $225,000, and their replacement with fakes. She strenuously denies the claims. “The authorities were looking for reasons to get rid of me for years. They wanted their own people in the museum, not people loyal to Igor Savitsky and his mission,” Babanazarova said in an open letter to the Uzbek Art and Culture Development Foundation (ACDF). She claimed the story amounted to a smear campaign. “They were angry with me because I wouldn’t do what they wanted. There is no real evidence against me.”

Babanazarova had previously refused efforts to sell or distribute pieces in the Savitsky collection, especially after an article by The New York Times in 2011 had brought the museum under new media focus. “We had collectors coming from the West with their bags full of money, saying, ‘Why don’t you sell one or two paintings?’ [But] these artists found shelter in Nukus; selling them was not even thinkable to us,” she says in The Desert of Forbidden Art.

After Babanazarova departed, the museum loaned out 250 pieces to the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow as part of a test run. Russian president Vladimir Putin visited, along with Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

A pastoral scene by Uzbekstani artist Nikolay Karakhan. Currently on display at the Nukus Museum

Now that trend seems set to continue. Mkrtychev announced that a US delegation is set to visit the Nukus Museum later in 2021, with the possibility of a Savitsky loan to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “We wanted to send a good portion of the Savitsky Collection on tour to “show all [its] magnificence… in Europe and the United States.

“If God gives the strength, all will be well and the Nukus Museum will move from the top 10 unknown museums that you must visit to the top 10 in the world that everyone knows,” he said in a statement.

It will still be a struggle to put the Nukus Museum on the global art map. At present, a visit to the museum is about a two-hour flight or a 17-hour overnight train ride from Tashkent. But Savitsky devotees believe that such a journey is a small price to pay, and that the museum’s remote location is a homage to the spirit of its founder.

“For now, the near future of the Savitsky remains dependent on two balancing factors: its good karma with the Karakalpak regional authorities, and Uzbekistan President Mirziyoyev’s “open visa” programme”

After all, during the heyday of Soviet censorship, Savitsky would routinely disguise thousands of priceless paintings as simple luggage before loading them on trains and trucks for “archeological expeditions” to Nukus, according to the documentary. Even after Stalin and his successors Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, and Alexei Kosygin softened, Savitsky regularly put himself on the line for his collection. When a Soviet delegation declared that one of Savitsky’s favourite pieces — “Fascism is Advancing” by Uzbek artist Vladimir Lysenko — was anti-Soviet and therefore “degenerate”, he hid it for mere hours before putting it on the wall again. “It was too great a work of art to hide,” he wrote at the time.

Savitsky, who had come from a wealthy family of lawyers, saw “works by artists who stayed true to their vision at a terrible cost,” says his friend, Alla Efunni. “He had one suit on the hanger for visits to his bosses; the rest was not important to him: where to live, what to eat, his health, women, money. He did not care at all, except to pay the people he was buying the art from.” Savitsky continued to collect money from the state for “archeological expeditions” and gave it to the hungry widows of artists such as Sergei Bogdanov, a Moscow-educated painter whose self-portraits in “oriental robes” dazzled Savitsky; Alexander Volkov, whose paintings of cotton picker showed despair as the crop ruined central Uzbekistan; and Lyudmila Bakulina, who depicted industrial landscapes.

Ultimately, the “expeditions” that paid — and covered up — for Savitsky’s collecting were responsible for his demise. To clean pieces to bring back to Moscow, Savitsky used formaldehyde, which eventually destroyed his lungs. Forced to take up residence inside a Moscow hospital, doctors nonetheless gave Savitsky permission to make day trips for art’s sake. In the last weeks of his life, Savitsky collected two more containers of paintings and graphics, bringing his total to 44,000. He died in Moscow in 1984 at the age of 69, leaving historians to reconstruct the narrative of the Nukus Museum from diaries and letters in the state archives and through declassified KGB files.

"City" (1919) by Nikolay Grigoriev. Currently on display at the Nukus Museum

Activists hope that the creation of a digital open archive will provide a middle ground between two extremes: protecting Savitsky’s legacy and the museum’s unique location, while bringing the collection itself to a wider audience who will care for it. “When M.M. Babanazarova was fired, and a prosecutor checked on the alleged substitutions and theft of works… in the museum, the world media repeatedly expressed their fears for the future of the collection,” wrote the curators Boris Chukhovich and Svetlana Gorshenina. “It was concern for the preservation of the integrity of the museum collection that led to the establishment of the Alerte Héritage Observatory website which hosts the digital archive and the initiation of the Museum’s open public catalog project.

For now, the immediate future of the Savitsky remains dependent on two balancing factors: its good karma with the Karakalpak regional authorities, which allows it to show work critical of the Soviet and Islamist eras; and Uzbek President Mirziyoyev’s “open visa” programme to promote Silk Road tourism, an initiative to bring foreign tourists to the area. By keeping the Savitisky Collection near the Silk Road city of Khiva and the Aral Sea, the Karakalpak government makes the Nukus Museum a destination in which visitors don’t just “exit through the gift shop”, but get a real sense of Uzbekistan away from its major metropolises, Babanazarova says.

Most of all, those who love the museum hope to keep alive its founder’s singular goal, best articulated by Savitsky himself: “I like to think of our museum as a keeper of the artists’ souls; their works the physical expression of a collective vision that could not be destroyed.”

The Nukus Museum has invited its constituents, both professionals and amateurs, to use — and contribute to — the public open catalog Alerte Héritage, by far the most complete collection of reproductions of the works of the Nukus Museum ever published.

Daily News: Recommit to streets for us all

Every May, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine holds its annual “Blessing of the Bicycles” in which New York cyclists have their wheels consecrated — this year, on Facebook.

In 2019, the blessing didn’t seem to work, as the number of deaths stacked up to an all-time high of 29. But in June, cyclists had reason to hope: a proposal for a five-borough, 425-mile network of protected bike lanes. Experts say the project would resolve the city’s current debacle by physically separating the lanes with elevated curbs.

I disagree. I have been cycling the city from 2001, when getting “doored” was a rite of passage, through Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Safe Streets. From behind my handlebars, I can see that nothing will work to keep cyclists safer — not protected lanes, not signals, not citations — until New Yorker commuters of every stripe change their “Me First” attitude, for which the city is infamous.

I understand “Me First.” I can fall prey to the stake-your-ground attitude one acquires when pushed aside in a city of millions. I am even guilty of running occasional red lights and cutting off slower cyclists. But consider this: I am riding 18-20 mph in traffic and looking out for the errant car-share or middle-of-the-street pedestrian to apply enough force for a split-second brake.

Space for bikes, too. (Luiz C. Ribeiro/New York Daily News)

Otherwise, I am hit, hurled onto the street with a heap of metal on top of me. While I ride, when I am not thinking of my burning legs; I am thinking about getting out of the way.

Last year, getting out of the way on my daily commute meant using greenways or dodging Ubers and taxis pulling into the bicycle lanes. Post-pandemic, I have switched tacks, avoiding the greenways altogether. The main reason: Citi Bike.

In March 2019, Citi Bike operated 14,500 bicycles from 900 stations in four boroughs. That meant, at any given time, a tourist unfamiliar with Citi Bike particulars, a phone-pedaler or newbie rider — almost all of them without helmets — crossed my path. Citi Bike is looking to triple its inventory and add at least 1,000 electric-powered bikes. This strikes fear in my heart.

The second reason I have chosen the car-lined streets: pedestrians. When I am in cycling kit, I avoid the sidewalk. When I am laced in running shoes, I strictly stay out of the bike lanes. When pedestrians and runners use bicycle lanes, especially during rush hours, they cause bottlenecks. Bottlenecks cause wrecks.

There is a remedy to this transportation/recreation free-for-all, but it will require, as the Dutch call it, “woonerven” (living streets). In the Netherlands, kids are introduced to cycling by their schools, most by age 10 or 11. Simultaneously, Citi Bikers and other bike renters should take a skills course and pass a test before they take the pedals. This removes Citi Bikes from the grip of tourists and learners.

Secondly, New York needs to keep building real, protected bicycle lanes — wide enough to allow for cyclists of all speeds to travel in harmony, not painted-on roadways that run alongside parallel parking spaces. And although 0.5% of Dutch cyclists wear helmets, every cyclist in New York should be required to wear a helmet until the streets are safer; helmets cut the risks of severe traumatic brain injury by half.

Finally, a deputy transportation commissioner in charge of alternative transport would mark a sea change. This administrator could enact “We First” bike lane regulation, monitor the addition of Citi Bikes and safeguard the regulation of other motorized objects in bike lanes. The office could even oversee a force of park police that would pull over (now sidelined) Revel scooters on greenways, deter un-helmeted bicyclists from texting and keep pedestrians from group-walking in bike lanes — some of the things I encounter daily.

Unless some of these things are enacted, in lieu of blessing bikes each year, bikers that show up at St. John the Divine might as well be painting theirs white — to place as memorials.

Guernica: Employee of the Month

REVIEW ARTS & CULTURE

 March 16, 2016

Catie Lazarus’s new talk show asks all the right “wrong” questions about work

By A.M. Brune

Smantha Power had already withstood a tough day: over at the United Nations, she presented a draft Security Council resolution against North Korea that had created the toughest US sanctions regime in more than two decades. Back at the US Mission across the street, she signed off on an internationally brokered, yet very shaky, cease-fire agreement for Syria amid widespread doubts that it would bring peace to the fractured nation.

And at her Waldorf Tower penthouse on Park Avenue, her son Declan, six, had been complaining about her work schedule again: “Why is it always, Putin, Putin, Putin,” she recalled for a packed house at Joe’s Pub. But Catie Lazarus, host of the Employee of the Month show, on which Power appeared last month, saved her toughest question for the end of the interview.

“You once called Hillary Clinton a monster. I want to know, is she really a monster?” Lazarus asked Power. Power paused for thought and took her microphone: “We national security folk, we’re supposed to stay out of the thicket of politics,” she said diplomatically.

Lazarus served up a one-liner: “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m struggling over whether to vote for the monster I know and the monster I don’t.”

The line was archetypical Lazarus: adorably innocent with a hidden edge — or agenda. By playing on a curiosity and awe with all things social, cultural, and political, while simultaneously lampooning them, Lazarus has taken her Employee of the Month show (EOTM) – described by Lazarus as a show about work and the “special snowflakes who love what they do” – from relative obscurity to a sell-out show every month at Joe’s Pub. Among her big “gets”: Jon Stewart just after announcing his departure from The Daily Show; former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson revealing her tattoos; Lin Manuel Miranda performing the hip-hop Hamilton mix tapes; and most recently Samantha Power breakdancing.

“I created the type of talk show I want to watch,” Lazarus said after the show. “At least in the US, interviews on talk shows often feel like commercials for celebrities to shill their latest product. People, like Jon Stewart and Ambassador Power, who are highly selective about what types of interviews they do are deluged with their work and may find the pat questions from typical press junkets and glitzy talk shows mind numbingly painful…I ask questions my guests typically don’t get asked, offer a platform to speak candidly and have a bit of fun.”

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Powers, gets on her groove at an ‘Employee of the Month” show, previously at Joe’s Pub.

While the US Department of State portrayed Power’s appearance as just a regular stop – “Ambassador Power has worked with The Public Theater in the past on events surrounding performances of Eclipsed and Hamilton…of course she was inclined to do EOTM,” a spokesperson said – Lazarus had her eye on the controversial author and statesman for a number of years.

“I rarely invite politicians as they rarely engage in genuine conversations publicly,” said Lazarus, who interned at Voice of America while genocide unfolded in Kosovo and Burundi. “Ambassador Power made a name for herself critiquing the US government, but then chose to work within it. She’s also become a shrewd politician, willing to negotiate with Putin, even when her kids are fed up…a quintessential Employee of the Month Award winner.”

Although in hindsight, comedy may have seemed like a natural path for Lazarus – a descendant of the Midwestern Lazarus department store chain that folded into Macy’s – after finishing Wesleyan University in 1999, she enrolled in a doctoral program for Psychology. Following an impromptu improv lesson from Tina Fey at an Empower Program conference in DC, Lazarus dropped out of her degree and started doing comedy open mic nights at Stand Up New York. Duly emboldened, she went on to win standup contests across the city and perform storytelling at The Moth, The Rejection Show and Upright Citizen Brigade’s Asssscat, which features improv between UCB regulars and actors from well-known television shows and movies.

The off-the-cuff Asssscat most influenced Lazarus’s irreverent show. With more than 250 interviews since she began EOTM as a podcast in 2011, a turning point nevertheless took place in April 2015 when Stewart came on to talk about directing Rosewater, leaving Comedy Central and being fired from Woolworth’s by his brother.

“It’s so fun when people do stuff you might not know they can do. Martha Plimpton read this hilariously bad poetry she’d written for these pharmaceutical advertisements. Gloria Steinem tap-danced and is truly an excellent dancer. Bobby Cannavale sang his favorite karaoke song,” Lazarus said. The comedian books famous people almost solely by word of mouth, gaining references often from previous appearances.

In addition to the interviews, EOTM has a MC, Jelly Donut, a beatboxer named Shockwave and a house band led by Eric Biondo, all of whom play foil to Lazarus’s gags. She always opens with a monologue, usually a schtick on “cutting-edge employment news” – using PowerPoint. This time, before Power came on stage, she quipped about the new American Girl doll “Melody,” a black doll who is a “singer and a civil rights activist before the age of five.” Between bits, the band argued over who owned the intern.

Lazarus took Power back to her days as a journalist, producing a copy of her infamous book, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide (after announcing that it had gone out of print) and traced Power’s trajectory to UN Ambassador. “There are times when I wish I could have been heard more, but as anyone who’s had a boss knows, it’s hard to do what you want sometimes,” Power said.

“At the end of the day, however, I know President Obama wants me in the room duking it out and having a voice.”

After Lazarus’s asked Power to show off her talent, Power broke it down to “Rapper’s Delight,” which received a standing ovation and “prizes,” including a “Shakespearean Insult” mug and a Park Slope Food Coop bag. Lazarus’ third and fourth Employees of the Month, Tunisian singer Emel Mathlouthi and mockumentarian Michael McKean, “may not have known of one another’s work, or might seem different only on the surface, but are interconnected or are one another’s spirit animal,” she said. Indeed, Samantha Power had been an extra in a made-for-TV movie, A Father’s Homecoming, that McKean did in the 1980s. “It’s not one you’ll find on Netflix,” he joked after he and Lazarus watched her favorite scene from This is Spinal Tap.

“I live for genuine conversations,” said Lazarus, who handed out personalized “Employee of the Month plaques at the end of the show. “Every job comes with crap, but it’s fascinating to hear the particular perks, pleasures, perils and perversities of people’s particular paths.”

The L Magazine: The Neon of Old New York

by Adrian Brune and Micah Beree |

08/10/2009 11:33 AM

By the time Earle C. Anthony installed his iconic, luminous Packard neon sign — the first in America — outside his Los Angeles car dealership in 1923 the “liquid fire” that had already spread across Europe was taking hold in America. Throughout the Depression, WWII and Baby Boom years, neon signs invited patrons to drink, hawked goods and helped weary travelers find their way to the nearest inn. New York’s own vintage neon can be found from velvet rope venues and world-famous restaurants all the way down to $1.50-a-beer-dives. The greatest examples, of course, are the neon signs that have been pristinely preserved over the decades, whether by serendipity or a deep and sincere dedication by the owners who love them. In a city that has a history of bulldozing, then building over its past, there are just a few of these signs left around the neighborhoods of the five boroughs (P&G Café RIP), but they still shine prominently and continue to vie for the title of oldest and most treasured. Click through for some great photos of NYC’s best kept neon.

In 1921, John Carway, a transplant from Dublin, opened the doors to the Dublin House, a nondescript speakeasy conveniently located on the ground floor of an Upper West Side townhouse, to give his fellow Irishmen a furtive place to congregate and drink after work — just as they did in the old country without the hassle of Prohibition. Nearly 12 years later, with the end of the “noble experiment” Carway commissioned E.G. Clarke, Inc., to create one of the brightest and most distinctive signs of the era — a two-sided green harp (the national symbol of Ireland) continuously flashing “Bar” and “Tap Room,” to welcome old patrons and entice new ones. His endeavor worked as well then as it does now, where on any given Saturday night, customers can hear lively banter in thick Irish brogue over the din of the jukebox. “You come out of the subway and you’re instantly hit with the sign,” said Shamus Barnicle, sipping a Guinness. “It gives you a warm feeling when you’re so far away from home.” Although current owner Mike Cormican won’t disclose how much he pays to keep the sign prominently lit, he acknowledges it gets expensive to replace blown tubes after a wild snow or thunderstorm. But, he adds, the sign is worth it. “You can’t get that sign today — they don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” he said. “I hope it stays up forever.”

Known affectionately as Le Chateau Subway to locals, the brightly lit red neon of the Subway Inn sign shines prominently across from Bloomingdale’s art-deco flagship store, although it attracts a markedly different crowd to the corner of 60th and Lex. Located two stories above a hub of underground train activity, longtime owners of the bar put up the sign in 1937 — just before the neon craze of the 40s hit the city — to attract weary commuters in need of a drink to ease their MTA pain. These days, however, quite a few patrons (or former-patrons) complain that the 70-year-old sign is better cared for than the bar itself, which many say was likely last renovated and cleaned around the same time the sign went up. “People walk through the door and say that they used to come in here 30 years ago and just wanted to stop in and see how the place looked,” said Will Sutton, a somnolent bartender from Sunset Park. “They may or may not have a beer, but all agree that nothing about it has changed much.” Nor will it anytime soon, if the longtime drunks have anything to say. Though almost lost in the development boom of the past five years, the current economy and new owners of the Subway Inn promise the dive bar — and its sign — will continue to delight and annoy Upper East-Siders for at least a few more years.

Built in 1880 on the corner of Hudson and 11th Streets, the White House Tavern’s proximity to the docks of the Hudson River made it a longshoreman’s watering hole — not the literary haunt it later became. A Jewish sign painter from Russia named Charles Karsch would begin to alter the old tavern’s character in 1946 when he crafted the White Horse’s famed neon sign; but the bar’s reputation would forever change when a drunken Welsh poet named Dylan Thomas collapsed under that sign’s rosy glow shortly before his death in November 1953. For a generation — during some of the country’s most tumultuous times — the tavern and the sign, featuring scripted red neon letters and a giant horse’s head, drew the best and the most destructive writers from Jack Kerouac (who once discovered “Go Home Kerouac” scribbled on the bathroom wall) to Anais Nin, one of the few notorious female writers to cross the tavern’s threshold. Though the sign holds a special place in hearts of West Village passers-by, Thomas’ ghost will forever reign inside the tavern, his image eclipsing the lone watercolor of the sign in the very back of the bar.

When Polish immigrant Nathan Handwerker started hawking his special recipe frankfurters on the boardwalk of Coney Island 90 years ago, local lore has it that he paid bums in hot dogs to hang around his stand and attract customers. Ten years later, Handwerker settled on a different approach to advertising, installing the giant upright yellow-and-green flagship sign, the first of several large-scale neon beacons around the building. Today, the original Nathan’s stand on Surf Avenue is awash in vintage neon — some of the finest the city has to offer, according to aficionados. “New Yorkers already know the signs by heart, but when we have tourists come, they stand right under them to have their pictures taken,” said Bruce Miller, Nathan’s director of operations, adding that the company pays $25,000 a year to keep Nathan’s glowing. While redevelopment rumors at one point alluded to the replacement of Nathan’s and the signs — including the 1940s-era animated hot dog on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues – Miller says Nathan’s will remain “at the forefront” of Coney Island. “You just can’t get this kind of look anymore.”

Standing at 150 feet, Denos Wonder Wheel is already the centerpiece of the Coney Island boardwalk, but in the ride’s amusement heyday, owner Herald J. Garms and the Eccentric Ferris Wheel Company ensured the wheel’s conspicuousness with several neon banners, including the animated sign on Twelfth Avenue. Constructed in 1950 and featuring a wheel with circling neon cars, the sign guards a lightly trafficked entrance to the wheel, but has nonetheless protected its notoriety — and taken some hard knocks for it. “The sign’s been hit by 18-wheelers making u-turns on a number of occasions,” said Dennis Vourderis, the current co-owner of the Wonder Wheel. “We always put it back up because it draws people in and adds to the flavor of the park.” The sign’s also a land-marked piece of New York history – part of the package Vourderis’ father, Denos, pushed through the fastidious New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1989. Still, landmark status doesn’t always keep the graffiti artists away, or Mother Nature from exacting her wear-and-tear. “Just before we open every year, we have to do extensive work on the corrosion of the sign,” Vourderis said. “The previous owners had a mesh screen over the sign to protect it from vandals, but we pulled it off. It just took away from the sign’s beauty.”

American Lawyer: The Gold Standard

Debevoise & Plimpton is number one on The A-List—again. Here’s how the firm keeps rising to the top.

By Adrian Brune

MARTIN FREDERIC EVANS (everyone calls him “Rick”) has one of those sigh-provoking Manhattan views that makes you wonder how he gets any work done. From his forty-third-floor midtown perch, the Debevoise & Plimpton presiding partner can, as he puts it, “see the storms rolling in.”

Right now, however, the skies are crystal-clear for Evans and Debevoise. For the second consecutive year, the firm is number one on The American Lawyer’s A-list, our ranking of the nation’s best law firms. If its scores are any indication, Debevoise has hit upon the rarest of formulas: it makes money—a lot of it—while honoring its pro bono commitment, treating younger lawyers like human beings, and working, albeit with somewhat less success, at making sure its workforce is diverse.

We rank firms for The A-List according to their performance in those four categories: revenue per lawyer, pro bono, associate satisfaction, and diversity. You don’t have to be perfect to make it to the top. Among the 20 a-list firms, Debevoise ranked number seven in revenue per lawyer; number three in pro bono; number four in associate satisfaction; and number 12 in diversity. But you do have to be consistent. The firm had high enough scores across the board to carve out a 40- point lead over the number two firm on the list, New York’s Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler.

So how does Debevoise keep doing it? Is there something so different in its DNA? On the surface, at least, the answer would seem to be no. The firm is a lot like other elite New York players. It has the requisite band of tough corporate specialists and litigators. Its highest-profile cases won’t win it any warm-and-fuzzy awards. And not everything’s perfect in the partnership: earlier this year, for instance, Ralph Ferrara, who opened Debevoise’s Washington, D.C., office

and was a top gun in the securities bar there, took his $30 million book of business to LeBoeuf, Lamb, Greene & Macrae.

Yet current and former partners and associates say the firm has a key advantage: a culture that emphasizes collegiality, allows partners to experiment with new clients and business opportunities, and honors public service. In interview after interview, Debevoise lawyers use words like “integrity,” “intellect,” and, by far their favorite, the aforementioned “collegiality” to describe the firm. Even Ferrara, whose well-publicized jump to LeBoeuf battered the 20-lawyer D.C. office, describes Debevoise as “a spectacular firm, with spectacular people.”

What Ferrara didn’t mention—and what was reportedly an issue in his decision to jump ship—is the firm’s continuing use of a lockstep pay structure for partners. A top-earning veteran like Ferrara, who, according to our sibling publication Legal Times in Washington, pulled down $2 million a year, could see his salary double at a competing firm (and presumably did when he exited).

Even so, some of the firm’s biggest revenue-generators are the most vocal proponents of the lockstep system and say it is an absolute must in keeping the firm’s culture intact. The fact that the high end of the lockstep scale guarantees a $2 million–plus payday is probably one reason. Another, says Jeffrey Rosen, co-chair of the firm’s mergers and acquisitions group, is that lockstep keeps the firm “pleasant and efficient . . . a lot of firms have become much less of a partnership and become more of a mini–financial institution. We’re sort of anti-rainmaker here.”

ANTI-RAINMAKER, MAYBE, but not anti-money. The cornerstone of Debevoise’s A-List ranking is its financial results. In the last five years, despite a recession and rocky economic recovery, Debevoise has increased revenues 78 percent, from $269 million to $478.5 million, with revenue per lawyer climbing from $670,000 to $890,000. Profits per partner have followed suit, rising from $1.2 million to $1.5 million during the same period—not quite the $2 million of a few of the firm’s elite competitors (here, Debevoise lawyers might whisper “Cravath, Swaine & Moore”), but a top-of-the-profession return nonetheless.

Debevoise counts, in part, on a base of traditional corporate work for institutional clients, some of which have been with the firm for decades. Phelps Dodge corporation, the copper mining conglomerate, signed on with Debevoise 70 years ago; John Hancock Financial Services, inc., has been a client for 60 years; American Airlines, now a subsidiary of AMR corporation, for 50.

Yet the firm touts—and with some merit—its expanding M&A practice. A team of 32 partners and 100 associates work on approximately 100 deals per year, and in the past two years, Debevoise “has started swinging for the fences” in the terms of the breadth and scope of its corporate work, says Michael Blair, chair of corporate practice. Rosen represented General Electric Company’s NBC in its $14 billion acquisition of Vivendi Universal entertainment in 2004 [“Americans in Paris,” April 2004]. The firm also worked on the $2.4 billion sale of Kinko’s, inc., to FedEx corporation and financial services giant AXA Financial, Inc.’s $1.5 billion cash acquisition of The Mony Group Inc., a New York insurance and financial services company. Debevoise is currently advising Verizon communications inc. in its $8.5 billion acquisition of MCI, inc., and guiding the Dolan family, which wants to take private a portion of communications provider Cablevision Systems Corporation. “Corporate’s revenue growth in the four years 2000–2004 was 42 percent. The dollar amount of revenue growth in those four years actually modestly exceeded the dollar growth in department revenues during the booming 1996– 2000 period,” Blair says.

Litigation is also boosting revenues, bringing in $200 million last year from clients such as Merck & Co., Inc., the maker of Vioxx, which tapped Debevoise to head an internal investigation into charges that the drug contributed to heart disease and several deaths. The firm also has represented Global crossing limited in Securities and Exchange Commission and other matters relating to its 2002 meltdown, and was at Rosie O’Donnell’s side when the comedienne and talk show host was sued by magazine publisher Gruner + Jahr for walking away from her self-titled magazine in September 2002. (The case ended in a draw a year later.)

O’Donnell, in an e-mail exchange, says she came to the firm needing “the toughest, smartest female lawyer in NYC” to defend her: “one name—Mary Jo White—came up; I called for an appointment.”

White’s name comes up a lot, actually. The former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York has helped the firm jump into a series of what partner Mark Goodman, a former federal prosecutor who served under White, calls “big-mess cases.” Says partner Lorna Schofield, also a former assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District, “It’s the perfect storm. It’s a very trying time for corporations; that work is going to continue for a while.” White came aboard in 2002 following her eight-year star turn as U.S. attorney. As she stepped down, she was on the must- have list for firms hoping to build their white-collar practices. Debevoise had an advantage: The 57-year-old had been a partner at the firm before she became a prosecutor. After a quiet courtship (“They’re all smart enough to know . . . that a heavy rush is not the way to recruit me,” White says), she returned to the firm.

“[Debevoise] does have—and it’s not a negative on any other firm— what I think is a unique, heightened consciousness of the ethics of the practice of law,” says White. “Particularly in this day and age, conflicts of interest are everywhere. Here it’s ‘Should I make this argument?’ not ‘can I make this argument under the law?’ but ‘Should I make this argument; should I give this advice?’ you focus in on what you ought to be doing, not what you ought not to be doing. So, my tax partner on the thirty-second floor—I don’t have to worry if he has the same zeitgeist. It’s the zeitgeist of the firm.”

DEBEVOISE LAWYERS ALSO APPEAR TO BE on the same page about their commitment to pro bono work. Last year Debevoise lawyers performed 51,000 pro bono hours, and 278—65 percent—of the firm’s 430 U.S.– based lawyers did more than 20 hours of pro bono work per year. Debevoise also pitched in another $1 million in travel expenses and fees for experts and court reporters.

The point man for the firm’s pro bono effort is partner Christopher Tahbaz, a 40-year-old litigator who came to the firm as an associate from Donovan Leisure Newton & Irvine in 1994. He co- chairs the firm’s pro bono committee and says he spends about 200 hours a year administering pro bono issues for the firm. (In June, Debevoise hired a full-time manager of pro bono administration to help oversee a variety of pro bono administrative tasks, as well as some longer- term planning.) “As a firm, we believe that pro bono work is an essential part of a fully realized and satisfying law practice,” Tahbaz says. “We strongly encourage all of our lawyers to become involved in their own pro bono projects, and we support such efforts with the full resources of the firm. I think this commitment explains our success.”

Tahbaz himself has been at the center of one of the firm’s longest-running pro bono cases. Back in 1997, while he was still a senior associate, he took up a case with the Urban Justice center, a New York nonprofit that provides legal assistance to the poor and homeless. The center hoped to stop the city’s practice of putting mentally ill jail inmates on the streets without follow-up care,

and Tahbaz, who serves as a board member at the center, agreed to help. “I saw a terrific opportunity to make a real contribution, through my legal work, to the life of the city in which I lived and practiced,” says Tahbaz. For two years, Tahbaz investigated the facts, and in 1999, with Debevoise’s blessing, filed Brad H. v. City of New York—a class action against New York’s penal system that charged negligence on the part of the city. New York settled the case in 2003, agreeing to provide services to inmates before and after their release. “Our class members are no longer released during the middle of the night with $1.50 and two subway tokens,” Tahbaz says. “The best moment of my pro bono career was signing that settlement.” The work isn’t over, however. The city now pays for two independent, court-appointed monitors to oversee implementation of the settlement. They, in turn, are being watched by Debevoise lawyers.

HERE’S ANOTHER UPSIDE TO the pro-bono efforts: it’s good for recruiting and training talent. Take Catherine Amirfar, a fifth-year litigation associate. When she considered firms after New York University School of Law, she settled on Debevoise. The firm’s pro bono commitment “was one of the things that clinched the deal,” Amirfar says.

Associates at Debevoise, in our midlevel satisfaction survey, gave the firm nearly perfect scores for its pro bono work. In fact, associates awarded good grades across the board: They backed up management’s assertion the firm was a collegial place to work, giving high marks for associate and partner relations. They also lauded the firm for its training and guidance and benefits and compensation. Associates at Debevoise don’t necessarily have it easy. Any firm with million- dollar partner profits and double-digit spikes in revenue can safely avoid the label “lifestyle firm.” (According to last year’s survey of midlevels, associates at the firm bill roughly 2,200 hours per year.) Yet, Debevoise managers seem to reject the idea that an associate’s worth is measured solely in quantity of billable hours. They stress that they want the lawyers at the firm to have a life. The firm has no minimum billable hours requirement for associates, though managers clearly expect that work will get done. “Some months I’m working 80-hour weeks, others 50 or so,” Amirfar says. “I have friends whose lives out- side of work are diminished to nothing; I have a life outside of the firm.”

Partners appear to take a hands-on approach to man- aging junior lawyers: associates are each assigned a partner-adviser who monitors their progress. If they fall behind, the firm tries hard to work with them to reinvigorate their work, says partner Michael Gillespie, who serves on the firm’s recruiting committee. When it’s clear that an associate isn’t going to make it, “we will provide that associate with outplacement resources designed to enable a smooth transition to other career paths,” he says. There’s also something of a “no jerks” policy at the firm. Partners are expected to treat associates with respect, Gillespie says: “We simply don’t tolerate bad behavior at any levels of the organization.”

AS THE FIRM’S A-LIST SCORES ATTEST Debevoise isn’t perfect. Though it has a respectable diversity score—especially compared to its New York counterparts—Debevoise is still a largely white bastion. Just 15.2 percent of the firm’s U.S. lawyers and 3.4 percent of its partners are minorities. That breaks down to 27 African Americans (two of them partners); 34 Asian Americans, including one partner; and 13 Hispanic Americans, one of whom is a partner. Even so, that’s high enough to rank in the top 40 of our sibling publication Minority Law Journal’s annual diversity Scorecard, which ranks 260 law firms for diversity. (The most diverse firm in the survey, Miami’s Steel Hector & Davis, had a nearly 36 percent minority head count; Simpson Thacher & Bartlett had the highest minority percentage among New York–based firms: 23.9 percent.)

James Johnson, one of the firm’s two African American partners and a member of its diversity

committee, insists that a diverse workforce is one of the partnership’s primary goals. Debevoise, he says, recruits ethnic minorities at about 30 law schools around the country and that 22.2 percent of the associates hired in the New York office over the last five years were minorities. Johnson acknowledges that “all of us (New York firms) could do better. It may sound trite, but it’s often said that as our clients become more diverse and the world gets smaller, we need to be more diverse.” He cited a recent internal investigation conducted outside the United States in which a team of attorneys were interviewing Arab witnesses. “One of the lawyers not only spoke the particular Arabic dialect, but was also a practicing Muslim and was able to inform our approaches to the witnesses,” Johnson says.

IF THIS ALL SOUNDS VERY EARNEST AND YES, even nice, that’s the point. Debevoise lawyers say the firm has, from its beginnings, worked to foster a reputation as a law firm with a soul. Kenneth Nolan, an aviation attorney and managing partner of the New York office of Speiser Krause, heads the plain- tiffs committee for the families of 9/11 victims in a case against American airlines. Debevoise represents the airline. “They’re tenacious,” he says. “They leave no stone unturned—but they’re decent individuals.”

The firm was founded in 1931 by Eli Whitney Debevoise, a descendant of cotton gin inventor Eli Whitney and then a junior associate at Davis Polk & Wardwell. He was joined by another Davis Polk lawyer, William Stevenson, who was better known for his gold-winning leg on the 1,600- meter relay during the 1924 Olympics. A few years later, Francis Plimpton, father of the writer George Plimpton, came aboard.

The team had strong patrician leanings: Debevoise’s father was a top Wall Street lawyer and longtime counsel to Standard oil baron John Rockefeller, Jr., and the erudite Plimpton, who later served as a deputy representative to the United Nations under Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, was, according to a colleague quoted in a 1971 New Yorker profile, “the only person who can write an indenture in iambic pentameter.”

Despite their elite backgrounds, they worked to promote a strong commitment to pro bono and public service, and fiercely protected the firm’s culture. Lawyers grew up at the firm and were promoted to partner. Lateral hires were frowned upon (and still are; the firm has brought in just eight outside partners in the last decade). And the firm would hang onto lockstep compensation even as their competitors shifted toward merit-based pay systems.

Debevoise, who died in 1990, served as presiding partner into the 1970s and remains a strong influence on the firm. Partners cite him when they talk about the firm’s culture and pro bono work, and Evans tries to keep up some of his predecessor’s traditions. Every year, at the annual firm dinner, he says a few words about the firm’s best moments, something Debevoise did every year. Predictably, the speech is a mix of how well the firm did with business and pro bono clients. This year Evans described walking into the firm’s conference center, where lawyers were working on restructuring the finances for Delta Air Lines Inc.’s aircraft fleet: “I saw rooms of documents and lawyers, the lawyers diverse by any measure and working across specialties to deliver unrivaled service on a project of great commercial importance.” The second event took place on Election Day. “I went to see a conference room full of computer screens and telephones, as Debevoise lawyers played a leading role in the nationwide voter information and protection effort.”

Evans is in his forty-third-floor office as he relates the story. Both events, he says, “showed the firm at its best.” Three-quarters of a mile into the sky, the firm sits atop the profession, with nary a storm cloud on the vast and splendid horizon.

As appeared in the September 2005 edition of The American Lawyer.