A Bittersweet Debut

well-trodden pathways between inner cities and upstate prisons, as expressed in “Dior” as well as in interviews, and the fact that the NYPD was on his back so much it literally had him removed from a festival bill. The tenuous relationship between New York hip-hop artists and police and elected officials pinched the tributaries that push local talent into the mainstream. For a while, the well dried up. Pressure on venues to avoid booking musicians with criminal records and bar owners’ reluctance to host rap fans complicated the path to stardom for artists in their own hometown. Couple that with the years it took chart authorities like Billboard to adjust to younger listeners who stream much, much more than they buy, and it explains why the past six years have felt like an explosion in the hit-making potential of New York rappers. Barriers to access lowered, the cost of making beats and videos dipped, and a new generation charged into the game. Pop Smoke spoke of writing songs on Meet the Woo in half an hour—sometimes improvising entire tracks in the studio. In less than a year, “Dior” went platinum.

“Dior” was supposed to be a game changer for Pop, whose life took breathtaking turns as he grew from a musically gifted church kid, to a streetwise voice of outerborough discontent, to a newly minted hip-hop superstar, to another bright spot in the constellation of rappers taken away too soon, all of this before his 21st birthday (which would’ve been celebrated with a king’s welcome this month). The murder of Pop Smoke in February, during a break-in at a house he was staying at in the Hollywood Hills, is a story many of us know all too well. We all know vibrant characters whose presence lifts spirits when they walk into a room, who seem so full of personality that it can barely be contained within one frame, who deserve better cards than they were dealt by the universe. An early death is a question mark. The hurting eases slowly over time, but the wondering what greatness went missing, what good times are gone, never leaves. The toll of what was lost is incalculable. The story always feels unfinished.

When a prolific musician dies, the art left behind is a gift, a window into thought processes and creative endeavors pursued at the time of passing, sketches of a possible career trajectory the artist may have navigated given time to carry out more plans. Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon, Pop Smoke’s posthumous debut studio album, is evidence of a star gaining his bearings, but as much as it is a product of a young and growing artist’s path toward refinement, it is also a document of his jarring absence. Shoot for the Stars was a work-inprogress when Pop passed; noble efforts by his label manager, Steven Victor, and his sometime erstwhile mentor, 50 Cent, help to make a collection of songs that weren’t necessarily done yet feel complete, but the guests brought in to pad out some of these song fragments cost the album a measure of the hometown feel of his Meet the Woo mixtape series. It’s far from a Biggie Duets situation, where people who don’t know the artist line up for collaborations, and the guest list—Quavo, Future, Roddy Ricch, Lil Baby, DaBaby, Swae Lee, Quavo two more times—makes sense for a mainstream rap album in 2020. None of the outside artists breaks anything. It just starts to feel too slick after a while.

It makes sense for 50 Cent to be involved with Pop Smoke’s debut album. In 2003, Get Rich or Die Tryin’ gave a coat of colorful melodies to the Queens rapper’s battery of threats and trash talk. The uncompromising grit of mixtapes like 50 Cent Is the Future carried over to the Interscope debut relatively unchanged. Smooth Dr. Dre beats and indelible hooks gave a distinctly New York City album a winning post-regional versatility. Shoot for the Stars tries a similar trick. The rapper anointed as the new voice of drill was itching to flex his dynamic range. Melodic Woo tape outliers like “Foreigner” and “PTSD” are the main thrust here as Pop proves the velvet low tones of his voice were adaptable for lighter productions. The album arrives on grim, foreboding cuts like “Aim for the Moon” and “44 BullDog” but drifts a little with every song. By the closing stretch, Pop is putting his own spin on late-’90s and early-aughts R&B staples like Ginuwine’s “Differences” (“What You Know Bout Love”), Tamia’s “So Into You” (“Something Special”), and Playa’s “Cheers 2 U” (“Diana”). He’s figuring himself out, seeing what works. There are too many guests, too much radio fodder, and not enough snide, rude, funny bars. The main artist feels profoundly missing.

This mix of present and future drill staples, textbook New York commercial rap anthems, and careful R&B exercises is smart career planning, though. Cuts like “Yea Yea” and “Creature” suggest that a “21 Questions” moment, where a toughguy rapper pivots flawlessly into romance, was on the horizon. Killer trap collabs with Roddy (“The Woo”) and Future (“Snitching”) would’ve silenced anyone who tried to accuse Pop of being a one-dimensional artist. The Karol G spot on “Enjoy Yourself ” should have been the first of many urbano excursions for a rapper who was clearly interested. The curse of a posthumous album is that it shows what roads an artist could have traveled that the artist can’t travel anymore. Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon ought to have been a steppingstone, not a capstone. If it itches as a final album, it’s because Pop Smoke should be here figuring out how to broaden his horizons and refine his craft even further. Still, you can hear him in the wobbling bass carried on the balmy New York summer wind. It’ll have to suffice. ■ picture a nation already gripped by political chaos that finds itself afflicted by a plague so new that no one understands its properties yet. Its ruler is a demented senior whose underlings use his decline as camouflage for enacting their own agendas. As citizens turn against one another, medical experts operating on the scientific method study the pandemic and present their latest findings to officials at every layer of government. They are met with indifference, stupidity, naked selfinterest, and craven pandering to higher-ups. Things keep getting worse. The body count rises. There’s no end in sight.

This is the world of Kingdom, an engrossing South Korean zombie series set in the 16th century. Watching its 12-episode two-season run right now is an eerie experience, because although it started shooting in 2017 and debuted on Netflix in January 2019, it seems to have predicted the future. On top of being a fast-paced horror epic in historical garb, Kingdom mirrors the disastrous mishandling of the 2020 pandemic (particularly in the U.S.) with such withering irony and pitch-black humor that

it seems to be riffing on headlines you read five minutes ago.

Written by Kim Eun-hee and directed by Kim Seong-hun (and Park In-je in season two), Kingdom starts in the royal palace at night. A servant is commanded to slip a bowl of blood under the red curtain of the king’s sleeping quarters. We hear guttural growls and animalistic shuffling and scratching. Then the young man gets yanked under the red curtain by the king, who has become a flesh-eating ghoul subsisting on servants and peasants. We soon learn that members of the king’s inner circle have been keeping his condition a secret and presenting their own schemes as the king’s wishes. The main focus of their treachery is Crown Prince Lee Chang (Ju Jihoon), the king’s son and anointed successor. The Queen Consort (Kim Hye-jun) is pregnant with the king’s child; if the prince gets whacked or imprisoned, her baby will assume the throne and allow her and the traitorous chief state councillor (Ryu Seung-ryong) to run things on the infant’s behalf.

The prince and his bodyguard, Mu-yeong (Kim Sang-ho), travel to a remote province to investigate reports of a strange disease that’s been spreading at the border, where they meet two physicians, Seo-bi (Bae Doona) and Yeong-Shin (Kim Sung-kyu), who have been researching a phenomenon that they identify as zombiism (although they don’t use that word). It’s here that Kingdom distinguishes itself as more than a rehash of the usual horror elements. This is a story about a pandemic that could be contained were it not for the selfishness and thickheadedness of the people running the country. Its real villains are authority figures who fail the people they’re supposed to protect.

The zombie film has been a petri dish for satire and allegory ever since George Romero bracketed the late ’60s and late ’70s with politically resonant midnightmovie classics: 1968’s Night of the Living

Dead (channeling Vietnam, domestic protests, and racial unrest) and 1978’s Dawn of the Dead (a satire of Me Decade selfishness and consumerism set in an abandoned mall). Subsequent practitioners like Zack Snyder and Jim Jarmusch chose their own distinct targets.

What makes Kingdom stand apart is its spooky prescience. Like all zombie stories, it’s a moral tale about society imploding because of a “disease.” And it’s about the choices the uninfected make to ensure the survival of their loved ones and civilization as a whole (or to protect their own interests). But because the standard ghoul-flick elements are framed by political satire and misanthropic humor, you come away thinking of it as the story of a plague made worse by officials’ corruption, incompetence, and refusal to listen to science. Despite the swords and horses and stovepipe hats, it feels like a nightmare of now—or a premonition of where we’d be just one year after its U.S. debut.

In Kingdom, doctors study a new disease’s victims, separate fact from speculation and rumor, and come up with suggestions that they believe will slow the infection rate. Then they present what they’ve learned to functionaries and military people, who thwart, ignore, or undermine them. When the doctors figure out that flesh-cravers have to be locked up to prevent them from biting the living, they’re laughed at, which of course leads to a zombie attack. One of the same men who ignored the doctors’ advice tries to blame them for the carnage and jail them. When the doctors figure out that the zombies hibernate during the day, they recommend reducing the zombie population by beheading and burning them in their sleep. They’re told that this is an impossible request because, according to faith, a dead person enters the afterlife with the same body they had when they passed on. After a long, increasingly desperate argument, the authorities offer a compromise: They’ll burn the bodies of the peasants and bury the nobles.

These scenes are as agonizing as they are appallingly funny—not just because we know from watching zombie films that certain things just aren’t done, but because we’ve seen our heroes putting in hard work only to have it ignored by fools. Men and women of reason keep getting kneecapped by laypeople who are in thrall to “gut feelings,” or who cling to existing laws, customs, and rules because they can’t accept that the world they once knew is gone. It’s impossible to watch these scenes without recalling how President Trump and certain U.S. governors decided months ago to declare the pandemic over and “reopen the economy,” even as the death toll rose and plague historians and pandemic scholars warned that impatience and overconfidence always lead to new infections. Despite Kingdom’s distant roots in actual Korean history, viewing the series in 2020 is as infuriating as reading the news, particularly in scenes where scientists concerned about the survival of a civilization are overruled by self-interest, superstition, and cronyism. The show might as well be set in Arizona.

True to science, the heroes learn that, like all diseases, this one mutates in response to human countermeasures, changes in climate and terrain, and other factors. Which means that what was true last week might change, necessitating a shift in tactics—and a new round of conversations with officials who belatedly accepted the last set of observations and believe that a change in the pandemic’s narrative must mean that the doctors didn’t know what they were talking about the first time.

The application of basic science to nightmare imagery lets Kingdom continue into a second season after reaching a satisfying stopping point at the end of season one. Of course, like any second season of a TV show, this one only exists because the first was a success. If you know anything about real-life plagues, however, it seems plausible that the ghoul disease would go dormant for a while and then return, because that’s what diseases do. Just ask polio.

A sustained critique of inequity binds the drama together. Disparities in social class and political influence let one group help itself to resources that were supposed to benefit everyone—as illustrated by a grotesquely funny scene in which a band of peasants flees a zombie horde and runs to a dock in hopes of boarding an escape ship, only to discover that nobles have already set sail on it. Ignorance, self-interest, and moral cowardice keep eclipsing science and reason. Kingdom’s greatest horror is its belief that plagues may come and go, but you can’t cure human nature. ■

singer-songwriter-actress and reality-TV star Brandy Norwood returns to recording with New songs “Baby Mama” and “Freedom Rings” prove the world-class vocalist hasn’t lost a step; expect her to touch on romance, loneliness, and mental-health struggles. c.j.

Get ready to have your socks knocked off. Thomas Erben Gallery, thomaserben.com, through July 31.

This sharp exhibition from outstanding art historian and curator Monika Fabijanska zeroes in on a cross-generational mix of pioneering and contemporary activist artists. From ecofeminist art of the 1970s and ’80s (so-called goddess art of the period), and later ritual performance, anti-nuclear work, and ecological land art, up through new Indigenous art and Me Too and Black Lives Matter, it’s about the social construction of gender and gender performativity. jerry saltz

It’s been a trip. HBO, July 24.

The final season of the anthology series delivers another batch of episodes set in the titular hotel room. Among the actors appearing just prior to checkout: Jillian Bell, Dave Bautista, Shannon Purser, and series co-creator Mark Duplass. j.c.

From Sundance. In select theaters July 31; Apple TV+, August 14.

The speed with which the student state-government program at the center of this movie becomes a microcosm of U.S. politics would feel on the nose if it weren’t a documentary. But it is, in fact, an enthralling exercise in nonfiction from filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, who seem to have cameras everywhere over the course of a weeklong exercise for Texas teens. The result is an examination, alternately amusing and upsetting, of the lessons Gen Z is taking from its elders with regard to how the country should be run—as well as the ones it’s trying, not always successfully, to leave behind. alison willmore

coming-of-age series, also originally a BBC offering, about a Welsh teen’s struggles. j.c.

listening

(an audience-of-one digital performance experiment), (a Zoom-enabled collaboration among Singaporean, Malaysian, and U.S. artists), and (Nehemiah Luckett, Alex Hare, and Zhailon Levingston’s musical about a megachurch in crisis). h.s.

A time-traveling suite. 92y.org, July 23.

In the spirit of shuffle mode and YouTube playlists, the pianist—mostly homebound like the rest of us—roams across the history of music in this livestreamed recital, tracing a thread of Baroque sensibility in composers of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries (Brahms, Ligeti, and Thomas Adès).j.d.

Spirited. VOD, July 31.

Gemma Arterton gives a delightful and moving performance as a standoffish small-town writer who is forced to house a boy who has fled the bombing of London during World War II. Struggling to connect with this young man while counting down the days until she won’t have to take care of him anymore, Arterton’s character is more than just a crabby introvert; she’s got some bittersweet memories she doesn’t quite know what to do with. Writer-director Jessica Swale’s film might seem predictable at first, but it goes to some genuinely surprising places. b.e.

Yiyun Li is primed for a breakout. Random House, July 28. Must I Go

Yiyun Li’s is bigger and messier and even more ambitious than 2019’s

In a nursing home, Lilia Liska pours through the posthumously published diaries of a former lover—she’s merely a footnote in a “great” man’s text. But Lilia’s copious annotations to the diary allow her to be the heroine of her own story. Through Lilia’s recollections, Li has crafted an epic story of a life full of regret but also of hope and perseverance and the importance of passing down our legacies.

Kermit goes off script. Disney+, July 31.

In yet another attempt to resurrect the Muppets magic for modern television, Disney+ places several of your favorite fuzzy friends in unscripted contexts. Part game show, part cooking show, and part talk show, hopefully, will also possess at least some of the spirit of j.c.

“An adventurous young orchestra.” caramoor.org, July 23.

Neither orchestras nor audiences can congregate anytime soon, but musicians can gather in small groups to play for empty halls and listeners around the world. And so a handful of the Knights performs the world premiere of a short work for solo cello and chamber ensemble by Anna Clyne, and Brahms’s String Sextet. j.d.

You’re waiting for a train. VOD; Vulture’s Friday Night Movie Club, July 31.

It’s still amazing to me that Christopher Nolan took a movie with this plot—a group of high-end thieves enter a man’s dreams to implant an idea, only to find themselves pulled deeper into the dream, with each dream level having its own logic, narrative texture, and speed—and turned it into an international box-office phenomenon, not to mention one of the most influential films of our time. The director’s existential heist flick has been the subject of raging debates since, like, a month before it opened. Now, we will revisit it as part of Vulture’s Friday Night Movie Club. Watch live with me on July 31 at 7 p.m. ET on Twitter. b.e.

They got the beat. Showtime, August 1.

This fun documentary about the pioneering allfemale band—which is still not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but very much deserves to be—traces the band’s evolution from punk rockers to pop stars and all the partying that came with it. j.c. she is mostly inaccessible. Up in the morning crushing Ambien into her coffee and complaining about the neighbor’s dog, out at night when a new veteran comes into the morgue. There are moments our contact feels thoughtful, the organic tampons that appear in my bathroom bound in twine, the want ads that appear on my vanity along with a red pen. There are also moments when I am reminded that her generosity comes with an asterisk. The way all her questions are instructions, texts asking if I can stay in my room while she meditates, queries about whether or not I know how to use a lawn mower and the cotton mask she gives me when I say the smell of fresh-cut grass makes me sick. she says, directing me to the lawn mower and adjusting the string on the mask,

and for the rest of the day I think of that, sick to my stomach, the lawn buzzed and alkaline, the vinegar in the wine and carnage in the dew, everywhere the perfume of things that want to live.

as former Trump official Sebastian Gorka called them), these people even held rallies to protest them. A county Republican Party chairman in Kansas who owns a weekly newspaper published a cartoon depicting face masks as yellow stars and the people bearing them as Jews forced into cattle cars.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, a Republican city councilmember announced, “I can’t breathe!” before dramatically removing his face covering. A Republican sheriff in Ohio, despite a statewide facial-covering requirement, declared, “I’m not going to be the mask police. Period.” The first day that Oregon governor Kate Brown imposed a requirement that residents wear masks in public, four police officers walked into a coffee shop in Corvallis mask-free, and when asked to comply with the order, they yelled, “Fuck Kate Brown!” In recent weeks, more than 20 county health officials have left their jobs in the face of protests, harassment, and threats. Georgia governor Brian Kemp went so far as to ban local governments from mandating masks.

In late June, Trump staged an indoor rally in Tulsa. His staff removed stickers on seats intended to space out attendees. Announcing his presence, Cain wrote, “Masks will not be mandatory for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. people are fed up!” (A few days after the rally, Cain tested positive.)

That many Americans would view public-health instruction with skepticism was understandable. The authorities had hardly covered themselves in glory. In the initial stages of the pandemic, many officials worried more about panic than complacency and insisted the pandemic might not be worse than a normal flu.

Faced with an initial shortage of masks, and fears that hoarders would buy up the supply and deny it to the essential workers who needed it most, public-health officials solemnly instructed people not to bother.

Public-health officials scolded anti-lockdown protesters for risking new outbreaks with their maskless demonstrations, but when anti-racism demonstrators poured into the streets, they emphasized the paramount importance of the cause. Even though Black Lives Matter demonstrators seemed largely to be wearing masks and attempting to practice social distancing, the contradiction rankled conservatives. Publichealth officials had one standard for marches against their policies and another for marches they agreed with.

But if these officials were struggling to communicate clearly, it was in large part because clarity was impossible. The conclusions scientists could propose about the novel coronavirus were often both subject to revision and less than absolute: The outdoors is safer than inside but not perfectly safe; masks reduce risk but don’t eliminate it. What’s more, the officials were operating under political pressure from a president who spent weeks insisting the virus would disappear or prove no worse than a normal flu and then attacked every countermeasure as a plot to undermine him.

Public-health officials found themselves in the terrifying position of simultaneously trying to get a handle on a pandemic and being the targets of a political smear. The hybrid role of Kate Winslet’s character in Contagion and Michael Dukakis’s character in the 1988 presidential campaign was as uncomfortable to pull off as it sounds.

Yet public-health officials in almost every economic-peer country managed to overcome scientific uncertainty and missteps. Both here and abroad, they are gazing with a mix of horror and confusion at the helpless, pitiful American scientific giant. One German expert told the Washington Post that Germany had used American studies to design an effective response, which the U.S. somehow couldn’t implement. American “scientists appeared to have reached an adequate assessment of the situation early on, but this didn’t translate into a political action plan,” observed another.

The limiting factor that has done the most to contort the domestic response to the coronavirus is the pathology of the American right. As of late May, only 40 percent of Republicans believed covid-19 was deadlier than the flu, and half believed the death count was overstated. One research study found that viewers of Fox News, which echoed Trump’s early dismissal of the pandemic, were less likely than the audiences of other cable news channels to engage in social distancing or to purchase masks or sanitizing products.

There has always been some question about the depth of sincerity with which conservatives hold their professed convictions. Did they believe that the Clintons murdered witnesses to their crimes and that Barack Obama faked details of his birth? Or were these statements expressions of partisan enthusiasm not to be taken literally? The coronavirus revealed the deadly earnestness with which the Republican audience accepts the guidance of the conservative alternative-information structure. As early as this spring, tragic stories began to appear of people mourning the deaths of loved ones who had angrily rejected public-health advice as a big-government plot.

The playbook for handling a publichealth crisis assumes some baseline level of rationality in the government. The administration is presumed to be working with, not against, its public-health experts; the news media to be informing the public, not actively disinforming it. The ranks of American government, academia, and the nonprofit sector are thick with experts in pandemic response, but very few of them ever trained to deal with a pandemic in Trump’s America.

rump, of course, will pass from the scene, perhaps by January. But the political culture that produced him isn’t going anywhere. And one dilemma it may present quite soon is what happens when a vaccine arrives.

If Trump pulls out of his polling swoon and wins reelection, he will have to persuade Americans to trust the vaccines his administration has produced, even though many of them distrust either vaccines or Trump. (Of course, if Trump wins reelection, vaccine take-up will be the least of our problems.)

A more likely scenario is that the first vaccine will come along after Trump has lost the election. If this happens before January 20, he’ll have little incentive to encourage his followers to take it or otherwise ensure an orderly distribution. If it happens afterward, Republicans will be engaged in the paranoid anti-government rage they undertake any time a Democrat holds office.

And they will be tapping into a deep vein of paranoia. Polls have shown somewhere between a quarter and a third of the public already does not intend to take a vaccine when it becomes available. In a country with a cult of self-reliance so ingrained that every new mass shooting propels more panicked arms purchases, is an act of collective, mutual security like public vaccination even workable?

The truly remarkable thing about the right-wing revolt against public health is that it has taken place under a president whom conservatives trust and adore. From the standpoint of running the government, these have been awful conditions for handling a pandemic. But from the standpoint of persuading citizens to cooperate, they have been almost optimal. When we look back a year from now at the frenzied, angry revolt against science, the spring and summer of 2020 may seem like halcyon days. ■

T

in flux. We can choose to make a different world, reordering our social compact and our political institutions and our relationship to the natural environment in ways that will protect us against, or at least mitigate the damage from, future plagues. Or we can recognize what was precious in what the plague took from us and seek to restore the status quo ante.

This plague comes, as the Roman plagues did, in a period of great climate change, and of near-peak globalization, which almost certainly means more epidemics are on their way. And it has already set precedents that imply a very different trajectory ahead. In the U.S., the federal relief has been extraordinarily generous by American standards, foreshadowing, perhaps, a debt-funded universal basic income and a big redistribution of wealth in the near future. The virus has also proved itself capable of finally cracking the cult of Trump. The president’s inability even to fake interest in or competence over the epidemic may well have made his reelection impossible, and his terrible tone in response to massive protests has rattled even his closest allies. The epidemic hasn’t ended polarization and may even have intensified it. But it has empowered the opposition in ways previously unimagined. And it may have tilted the balance sufficiently, at least in the short term, that onceinconceivable political change could take place here, in what seemed until just a few months ago an impossibly divided and politically sclerotic country.

In this respect, perhaps, covid-19 in America may best resemble the bubonicplague outbreak in London in 1665. It devastated the city that summer, prompting an exodus of the wealthy and connected, with perhaps 100,000 eventually dying in a city whose population was just under half a million. Worse, it was followed the next year by the Great Fire of London, which effectively razed the heart of the city, ruining many in the merchant class. But this catastrophe was subsequently seen as a chance to rebuild and renew, and many of the greatest landmarks of London were then constructed, as streets were widened, stone replaced wood, and the economy took off again. The pestilence and fire jump-started a revival not just in the economy and public health but also in the sciences and arts.

You can see the potential contours of a similar response today. This plague makes a strong argument for a more aggressive approach to public health, which would mean, at a minimum, extending health insurance to everyone in the country, as well as reform and renewal for the disgraced CDC and WHO. It could unleash a new wave of infrastructure spending to repair the immense damage to the economy. It could, and absolutely should, end the argument over preventing climate change—because it is so deeply connected to new viral outbreaks, as shifts to hotter weather portend a highly dangerous upheaval in the animal and microbial worlds. And while I worry that this plague could well usher in a new era in which traditional liberalism gives way to a freshly invigorated collective leftism, particularly around identity politics, it could also deeply wound the appeal of the populist right in America, which, once in government, failed the core test of preventing an openended, lengthy period of infection, sickness, and death.

Some existing trends might also intensify. It’s hard to see how a policy of mass immigration or free trade will survive public scrutiny for long in a world where viruses cross borders with such surpassing ease. The U.S.-China relationship, already tense, could deteriorate still further. Living online, with all the isolation and depression and extremism that can generate, is now an even stronger and widespread norm, as we avoid physical interaction even more than we did previously. Same with working from home: The atomization of our culture, the already increasing levels of depression, loneliness, and antisocial behavior could deepen further. The collapse of small retail has been accelerated, and the power of the giant tech companies is ever greater. And the epidemic has not assuaged the yawning gap between rich and poor. While covid relief has made a real, temporary impact, the stark social and economic inequality in the country looms as large as ever. Rates of suicide, drug abuse, and overdosing could climb even higher.

And the deeper reasons for our viral vulnerability have not gone away. Just as plague arrived with civilization, so our unprecedented 21st-century global civilization has made plague both more likely and more dangerous. We have opened up viral pathways in far more places than the Romans ever dreamed of and created transportation networks of unprecedented speed and dynamism across the entire world. Our unstoppable global economic engine, along with climate change, has prompted mass migration from the Global South to the Global North, the kind of disruption we know makes epidemics more likely. We have penetrated the rain forest and unfrozen the tundra; we are releasing long-buried pathogens whose impact on humans we simply cannot even guess at. We have disturbed the planet in precisely the ways that led to devastating consequences for humans in the past. But more so than ever before. Just in the past few years: Ebola, mers, sars, and covid-19.

And we are not in control. If you are still complacent that human science and technology have removed the potential for the mass extinction of humans, you should wake up. We have lucked out so far. covid-19 is extremely transmissible but not that fatal to most people, all things considered. But even those countries that are success stories didn’t see it coming in the first place and have experienced resilient breakouts. We still have no vaccine—it may be a year or more before we get one, and we do not know how effective it will be. Imagine the next pandemic pathogen as something as devastating as Ebola and as contagious as the flu. We are as defenseless as we have ever been. This relatively mild virus shut the entire world down for a couple of months. What happens when a much worse one shuts it down for longer?

Knowledge of a brutal new virus does not prevent its spread. Only a much more profound reorientation of humankind will lower the odds: moving out of cities, curtailing global travel, ending carbon energy, mask wearing in public as a permanent feature of our lives. We either do this to lower the odds of mass death or let nature do what it does—eventually so winnowing the human stock that we are no longer a threat to the planet we live on.

That’s the sobering long view. It is hard to look at the history of plagues without reflecting on the fact that civilizations created them and that our shift from our hunter-gatherer origins into a world of globally connected city-dwelling masses has always had a time bomb attached to it. It has already gone off a few times in the past few thousand years, and we have somehow rebounded, but not without long periods, as in post-Roman Europe, of civilizational collapse. But our civilization is far bigger than Rome’s ever was: truly global and, in many ways, too big to fail. And the time bomb is still there—and its future impact could be far greater than in the past. In the strange silence of this plague, if you listen hard, you can still hear it ticking. ■

“You’re a good boy,” she said with an accent, smiling.

n christmas eve of 1963, I stopped by Andy’s house. “I have some Christmas presents for you.”

“Ohhh, no.”

“We are not exchanging gifts, but you’ve given me so much, I want to give you something. Winter solstice, New Year offerings.”

I had three presents for Andy, all wrapped in colored paper.

The first was a pair of fine black leather gloves from Brooks Brothers. “When broken in, they’ll go well with your black chinos.”

“Ohhh, they’re so … ,” said Andy, caressing them with his delicate fingers.

The second was a paper collage that I made as a Christmas card using found images, pictures from magazines, some of them pornographic, and overlaid heavily with jewels from the Tiffany catalogue. “A Rauschenberg!” laughed Andy.

“Why not!”

The third present, wrapped in white tissue paper, was a gold wedding ring. There was a pawnshop next door to 222 Bowery, one of the last surviving ones on the street. In the window, on a blue velvet tray, were 20 or 30 old gold men’s wedding rings. They always caught my eye as I went to visit Wynn. For a Christmas present, I bought one for Andy. A thick, rich, glowing yellowgold wedding band.

“Ohhh!” Andy was shocked. “I don’t know!”

“I’m not asking you to marry me. I think it’s a really sexy gift.”

Andy looked frightened. “It’s so large, he must have had a big dick.”

I wondered if I hadn’t made a mistake. A dead man’s wedding ring or a failed marriage, but it was too late to take back.

“It’s so strong and sexy!”

“Did you get one for yourself?”

“Guys don’t wear wedding bands!” We hugged and kissed.

With a dusting of snow outside, Andy and I spent the evening together, an intimate and almost corny Christmas Eve.

Owe should make another movie,” I started saying to Andy after Sleep.

“Yes,” said Andy, laughing.

Time passed, and I said, “When are we going to make another movie?”

Finally, in early 1964, he said, “Let’s do another Screen Test.”

I half-thought he said it to shut me up. We had shot the first Screen Test in June 1963 and would shoot the second in March 1964. But it wasn’t enough. “Another movie idea! I want to be a movie star.”

“You are a movie star!”

I did not give up. “Andy, when are we going to make a movie?”

“There are so many ideas … What should we do? … How about Blow Job?”

“Blow Job. Yes! Brilliant! Totally great! It’s my part.”

“I thought so,” said Andy.

“You know what it looks like.”

“A tight head shot of your face, while you jerk off and cum.”

“It’s Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.” I was thrilled. It was my role.

Time passed, and nothing happened. Andy was busy, and kept putting it off, and I kept saying encouragingly, “When are we going to shoot the movie?”

“How about Saturday? On 47th Street.” Andy had just rented a loft on East 47th Street, the first Factory. It was still raw industrial space, a couple of months before his friend Billy Name put silver aluminum foil and silver Mylar up everywhere. There was no heat in the building on Saturdays and Sundays, which was when Andy liked to shoot, because it was quiet.

I met Andy at three o’clock on a bleak, freezing-cold Saturday afternoon in early February. The Factory was dismal. “Where are we going to do it?”

“In the back.”

We walked to the rear of the loft. There was a toilet, old and dirty, paint peeling off the walls, and graffiti. “A sleazy toilet! Andy, this looks gorgeous! It looks like a subway toilet.”

“Oh, I know!” said Andy, very pleased. He set up the camera and lights. I smoked a joint and a cigarette and we talked. It was cold. Andy was ready.

He crouched down on his knees on the dirty concrete floor and sucked. He was nervous. I relaxed affectionately, to make it easy for him, and I put my hand behind his head.

But it turned out he’d run out of film and had just been shooting blanks. “I’m sorry. You looked so great. I couldn’t stop.” It augured bad things.

in april, Andy made Blow Job starring somebody else. I was deeply offended. How could he have done that? It was going to be my starring role, and he gave it to somebody else. I was devastated and furious but did not let it show. I couldn’t help but see it as a sign, an early death knell signaling the end of our relationship. That fall, Andy and I were supposed to meet at Castelli’s for a Roy Lichtenstein landscape show. When I got there, Andy had already left. My heart sank. This happened often: He would tell me a time to arrive, but when I got there, I would have just missed him.

Andy was tired of me. And the new Factory was full of new people pushing their way in front of the camera. Edie Sedgwick was center stage, and I was last year’s news.

On November 21, Andy Warhol’s show of Flower paintings opened at the Leo Castelli Gallery. It was his first show at Castelli, where he had moved after his show of Brillo boxes at the Stable Gallery in April. It was a well-calculated, political decision suggested and advised by Henry Geldzahler, a big move up.

The Flower paintings were Pop Art at its most pure. Brilliantly conceived, it was a popular image, which could be reproduced endlessly. Andy said he wanted to be a machine, all identity dropped, the individual gotten rid of, made anonymous. That night, I had arrived at Castelli alone. Andy and I no longer went out together.

He stopped answering my phone calls and didn’t call back. I wasn’t told about parties. And when I saw him, he acted like nothing had happened. It was heartache. I loved Andy. I was his first superstar, and I was the first one he got rid of.

Over the years, later superstars complained endlessly about Andy exploiting and getting rid of them. They spoke of his cruelty, his sadism. This was possibly true, as Andy was only human. It also might have been the result of the amphetamines. But at the time, I had no context. I couldn’t understand why it was happening, and I felt only suffering and pain.

On September 25, 1965, Andy gave a party for John Ashbery at the 47th Street Factory. The literary and art worlds anticipated it for a week, but I wasn’t invited and I was devastated. Everyone was there and talked about it endlessly afterward. Because I was a poet, it was a double insult.

Two weeks later, I ran into Andy at a party and he had the nerve to say, “Oh, you didn’t come to John Ashbery’s party.” “I wasn’t invited.”

“I told Gerard to invite you.” That was it! I never called Andy again, not for years. I allowed my anger to blossom into big changes. Andy was dead for me. I almost never ran into him, and if I did, I avoided him or, of course, greeted him cheerfully and moved on. ■

Giorno died at the age of 82 last October, weeks after submitting his memoirs for publication.

New York

Crossword by Matt Gaffney

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