Madame M

PABLO CINGOLANI

Madame M'boka, Madame M., es una mujer imponente y de edad indescifrable. Dicen los que saben que fue amiga de Lumumba, el jefe marxista leninista que quiso socializar medio continente negro, y amante de Bokassa (Kapuściński dixit), el chiflado que se coronó a sí mismo como emperador de Centro África. Dicen los que saben que ella es la dueña de una fortuna cuantiosa —y cuanto más copiosa, se sabe o se especula: más turbia— y la propietaria del restaurante más chic y estrafalario al sur del río Níger.

Madame M'boka, Madame M., es un mito y una leyenda. Dicen los que saben que fue amiga de Arafat y de Gadafi, que Gorbachov y Raisa le obsequiaron un colmillo de mamut que colgó en un baño junto a un cuadro de Klee, que el papa Juan Pablo II la convenció para que deje a un lado su animismo y se convierta al catolicismo, que Mick Jagger se emborrachó en el bar de su local y una noche de camaleones que saltaban por las mesas, se puso a cantar Light my fire a grito pelado con unos mochileros suecos que andaban por ahí.

También se rumorean historias extravagantes como que Rihanna, beoda, hizo pis en un acuario de pirañas que Madame M. tiene en el centro de una sala al lado de su colección de baobabs bonsái y unos cactus alucinógenos que importó de Arizona o que Obama le escribió un e-mail agradeciéndole las gentilezas que tuvo para con Michelle cuando estuvo de visita en Ghana y que en gratitud le envió una caja sellada de habanos cubanos o, en fin, que Lula la obsequiaba con orquídeas del Ceará y Brad Pitt la iba a visitar a cada tanto y se quedaba leyéndole poemas de Rimbaud hasta la madrugada.

Tal vez todos sean cuentos, pero son buenos cuentos más cuando la ves a esta mujer enorme y de edad infinita luciendo una sonrisa espléndida de dientes cuidados y de alabastro y un collar de esmeraldas y en el centro, un rubí genuino, generoso y tan grande como una bola de ping-pong (que me dejó tocar. Creo en el poder de las piedras).

Madame M'boka estuvo de paso en el aeropuerto internacional de Viru-Viru, en Santa Cruz de la Sierra (no averigüé ni de dónde venía ni hacia donde iba, ¿acaso importa?) y, gracias a labios amigos que siempre aparecen en el lugar indicado y en el momento indicado, pude abordarla para sostener un diálogo sin brújulas y sin burbujas, por momentos delirante, y que aquí memoro en su parte sustancial:

—¿Y qué fue lo que le molestó de Graham Greene?

—El muy perro y el muy borracho, me dijo que me vaya de África… ¡es más me imploró para que lo hiciera!

—¿Y usted que le contestó?

—Andate vos— su gesto de disgusto fue evidente—es más, si fuera por mí, le aclaré, ¡te podés ir de África y te podés ir también a la mierda!—su carcajada tuvo tanta fuerza que varios pasajeros se dieron la vuelta para contemplarla mientras ella cascabeleaba sus gemas. Pero luego volvió en sí, y con sus ojos de color violeta incrustados en los míos, arrojó esta sentencia:

—Dicen que soy exótica pero yo soy africana, bien africana… ¿entendés, no?—Y sí, yo entendía, pero quería confirmar un dato que me había soplado un amigo clarinetista de la Orquesta Sinfónica de Leeds, así que le pregunté:

—¿Y es cierto, Madame M'boka, que Julian Barnes estuvo en su restaurante?

—Mirá, todo el mundo que aparece por el centro de África, cae o resbala por mi local. No te lo digo por jactarme pero tiene el bar mejor surtido entre la línea del Ecuador y el desierto del Sahara y cuando yo te sirvo un whisky, te sirvo whisky, no ese pis de dromedario que embotellan en el Chad o esos asquerosos brebajes de hierbas que preparan en el Senegal y que los babosos venden como licores típicos,licores originarios de África —subrayó estas últimas palabras. Luego, tomó aire y prosiguió ametrallándome:

—Como ese polaco demente que publicó que yo era la amante oficial de Jean-Bédel [NdelR: se refiere a Bokassa], ¿de dónde carajos habrá sacado eso?

—¿Habla de Kapuściński?— Efectivamente, décadas atrás, uno de los periodistas más celebres del mundo había publicado una crónica sobre el emperador centroafricano en un periódico de Boston que luego fue material de descarte cuando apareció Ébano, su libro más famoso. Pero Madame M'boka, Madame M., no se olvidaba.

—Sí, sí, el mismo: ese polaco desagradecido al que le di de comer tres días y tres noches y que entre la lluvia y los tiros, no sabía cómo llegar a Brazzaville…

—¿Y?

—Y que yo le puse a uno de mis muchachos cameruneses, de esos que llegan a cualquier parte con los ojos vendados y con un brazo atado, para que lo guíe a través de la selva… aparte, y entre nosotros, decir que Jean-Bédel fue mi amante, ¡qué despropósito! Mi amante fue Jacqueline Bisset, con la que fuimos a escalar el Kilimanjaro a ver si encontrábamos los huesos del leopardo de Hemingway… mi amante fue Donna Summer con quien nos bañábamos desnudas en las nacientes del Nilo, ¿a ver si yo voy a tener un amorío con ese caníbal desquiciado? ¿A quién se le ocurre?—y siguió con el mismo énfasis un par de minutos despotricando contra Kapuściński y narrándome sus aventuras con sus ex amantes, todas mujeres. A mí me seguía intrigando la geografía literaria, así que para reencauzar la charla, corté por lo sano y le dije:

—Madame M'boka, mi estimada Madame M'boka, me imagino que es así pero le insisto, ¿Julian Barnes se arrimó a su boliche?

—Sí, comió mabaka y sushi del Ubangui y se empujó dos botellas de Old Parr, una conmigo y con hielo y la otra, pura y con una angoleña millonaria que fue la que terminó pagando la cuenta…

—¿Qué es mabaka?— Carezco de cualquier noción seria sobre la comida de África.

—Mabaka es un plato que cocinaba mi abuela cuando nos comían los piojos. Barnes se deleitaba con él y me decía que era delicioso “ese extraño sabor del lenguado”, fueron sus propias palabras, y que le hacía acordar a uno que había comido en Crimea. Yo lo miré extrañada y le afirmé: no es lenguado. Y él, convencido: es lenguado. Y yo, al borde de un ataque de epilepsia: no es lenguado. Y él, volcánico: ¡es lenguado, que es lenguado! Y yo, agarrándome el vientre de tanto agitarme: ¿sabés qué Julian? Mabaka se prepara con raya, esto es raya —y hacia que señalaba el plato con un mano y con la otra se agarraba la panza— son unas apestosas rayas que los chicos pescan en un arroyo de acá cerca, las pinchan con un palo afilado y luego con un cuchillo le cortan el aguijón y me las traen hasta acá, a diferencia de mi abuela que tenía que ir ella a traerlas, y yo las desmenuzo, las espolvoreo con harina de sésamo, les pongo harta pimienta roja, las frío y ¡eso es mabaka! ¡No es lenguado! Barnes pidió disculpas y luego salió rápido para el baño…— Madame M'boka estalló de nuevo.

Seguí preguntando por la dieta del británico: el sushi elaborado con peces capturados en el río Ubangui, a cuyas orillas se encuentra Bangui, la capital de la República Centroafricana —una herencia del colonialismo francés en el corazón continental— y sede de operaciones de Madame M., es una de las especialidades culinarias más celebradas del restaurante de marras. Otra son los caracoles del bosque de Muko (sic), cocinados en salsa de hibiscos, índigo y naranjas. El otro detalle que me ofreció mi contertulia fue que éste último era el plato favorito de la sobrina del presidente de la China. Madame M'boka, Madame M., no quiso decirme el nombre de la millonaria de Angola, sólo me dijo que mercaba con diamantes y drogas, dos rubros de negocios donde ella jamás osaría introducirse. Prefiero lo seguro y que no me vengan a limpiar ni los de la CIA ni los comandos israelíes, me confesó en un susurro.

—¿Sabés una cosa?— me miró a los ojos con fijeza felina— Antes África era más bonita… Un viento de saudade refrescó el aeropuerto. No quise sumergirme en ese lado tan emotivo como peligroso: África me duele a mí también. Insistí con Barnes:

—¿Y qué hablaron con Julian mientras se empinaban el ámbar?— me costó hacerle entender esa alusión metafórica al escocés.

—Me tomó de la mano y me confesó que la inspiraba y que escribiría un cuento donde uno de los personajes sería una ballena gigante y negra, dueña y monarca de las aguas del Ubangui y a la cual los nativos adoraban y rendían culto, hasta que llegaba un hombre blanco y todo se iba al carajo…

—Un remake de Moby Dick en clave africana…

—No sé, andá a saber… con lo ebrio que estaba podía volver a escribir la biblia al revés—y otra vez la carcajada sacudió Viru-Viru. De pronto, tuve un rapto de sinceridad y le aseguré que me gustaría ir a conocer Bangui, y volver a conversar con ella en sus dominios.

—Y si querés venir, vení, pero mirá que allá la cosa está espesa, hay baterías antiaéreas y nidos de ametralladoras por todos lados, ya casi no se puede caminar por la calle porque te tropezás a cada rato. El otro día, de un morterazo, me bajaron un cuadro de Picasso que tenía en un cuartito de póker y a balazos ya me agujerearon un Kandinsky, un Ugalde y un Botero, y no te podés imaginar lo que quería a esa gorda! Así que vení, cuando quieras, pero vení armado porque ¡Bangui es un quilombo!—y hasta ahora, no puedo olvidar esa risa con la que Madame M'boka, Madame M., se despidió de Bolivia y de mí.

____

Fotografía: Bangui

FIRE-EATERS/The search for the hottest chili.

LAUREN COLLINS

In mid-December of 2011, Brady Bennett went out drinking at Adobe Gila’s at the Greene, a Mexican restaurant in Dayton, Ohio. After two beers, the bartender offered him a free shot. Bennett chose Patrón tequila with apple schnapps. Soon, he recalled, his throat began to swell. He struggled to breathe, and his nose, mouth, and lungs “felt as though they were on fire.” He called for an ambulance, moaning, and was taken to the hospital. A year later, Bennett filed a lawsuit against Adobe Gila’s, claiming that the bartender had spiked his drink with extract of the bhut jolokia, or ghost chili. (Adobe Gila’s denies the allegations.) “It wasn’t as if they gave him a little Tabasco,” Jeff McQuiston, Bennett’s lawyer, told the Dayton Daily News. “This stuff is lethal.” The bhut jolokia is a hundred and fifty times hotter than a jalapeño. Gastromasochists have likened it to molten lava, burning needles, and “the tip of my tongue being branded by a fine point of heated steel.” Yet, at more than a million Scoville heat units—the Scoville scale, developed by the pharmacist Wilbur Scoville in 1912, measures the pungency of foods—the bhut jolokia is at least 462,400 SHU short of being the world’s hottest chili pepper.

“Chili pepper” is a confusing term, another of Christopher Columbus’s deathless misnomers. (Columbus and his men classified the spicy plant they had heard being referred to in Hispaniola as aji—farther north, in Mexico, it was known by the Nahuatl word chilli—as a relative of black pepper.) Chilis belong to Capsicum, a genus of the nightshade family. Horticulturists consider them fruits, and grocers stock them near the limes and cilantro. Most chilis contain capsaicin, an alkaloid compound that binds to pain receptors on the tongue, producing a sensation of burning. Sweet banana peppers are usually neutral. Pepperoncini (approximately 300 SHU) produce just a flicker of heat, while cayennes (40,000) are to Scotch bonnets (200,000) as matches are to blowtorches. Capsaicin is meant to deter predators, but for humans it can be too little of a bad thing. Because capsaicin causes the body to release endorphins, acting as a sort of neural fire hose, many people experience chilis as the ideal fulcrum of pain and pleasure.

In recent years, “superhots”—chilis that score above 500,000 on the Scoville scale—have consumed the attention of chiliheads, who debate grow lights on Facebook (“You can overwinter with a few well-placed T-8s”), swap seeds in flat-rate boxes (Australian customs is their nemesis), and show up in droves at fiery-foods events (wares range from Kiss My Bhut hot sauce to Vanilla Heat coffee creamer). Chilis, in general, are beautiful. There is a reason no one makes Christmas lights in the shape of rutabagas. Superhots come in the brightest colors and the craziest shapes. Their names, evoking travel and conquest—Armageddon, Borg 9, Naga Morich, Brain Strain—sound as though they were made up by the evil twins of the people who brand body lotions. Trinidad 7-Pots are so called because it’s said that one of them is enough to season seven pots of stew.

Like computers, superhots are evolving at a rate that embarrasses the phenomena of just a few years ago. In 1992, Jane and Michael Stern observed, in this magazine, that five thousand Scoville units “would be considered very hot by most people, but even that is piddling compared with the blistering fury of the habanero pepper, which can reach three hundred thousand.” (The Scoville test originally measured how many drops of sugar water it would take to dilute the heat of a chili; pungency is now determined more reliably by high-performance liquid chromatography, whose results can still be reported in Scoville units.) From 1994 to 2007, the Red Savina—a scarlet, heart-shaped pod rating 570,000 SHU—held the Guinness World Record for hottest chili pepper. Then the bhut jolokia, the existence of which had been whispered about for years among chiliheads, as though it were a vegetable Loch Ness monster, surfaced on the international scene. In 2000, R. K. R. Singh, a scientist at a Ministry of Defense research laboratory in Assam, India, where the bhut jolokia is widely grown, submitted some samples for analysis. The test results, which indicated that it was significantly more powerful than the Red Savina, made their way to Paul Bosland, a professor of horticulture and former sauerkraut expert who, for the past twenty-two years, has run the Chile Pepper Institute, at New Mexico State University. Bosland was skeptical of the Indian scientists’ numbers, but he managed to obtain some bhut jolokia seeds, which he grew into plants. In January of 2007, he filed with Guinness, which awarded the C.P.I.’s bhut jolokia (1,001,300 SHU) the new world record.

In February of 2011, Guinness confirmed that the Infinity chili, grown in Lincolnshire, England, by a former R.A.F. security guard, had surpassed the bhut jolokia by more than sixty-five thousand SHU. Only two weeks later, a Cumbrian farmer named Gerald Fowler introduced the Naga Viper. At 1,382,118 SHU, it was, Fowler said, “hot enough to strip paint.” He told reporters, “We’re absolutely, absolutely chuffed. Everyone complains about the weather and rain here in Cumbria, but we think it helped us breed the hottest chili.” He posed for the Daily Mailwearing a sombrero.

Chiliheads are mostly American, British, and Australian guys. (There is also a valiant Scandinavian contingent.) Chili growing is to gardening as grilling is to cooking, allowing men to enter, and dominate, a domestic sphere without sacrificing their bluster. “I can’t remember eating anything spicy before the parrot came along,” Fowler, a big man with a brushy mustache, told me, in July. The chili world is full of garrulous, confiding, erratic narrators who say things like “before the parrot came along.” In Fowler’s case, the parrot belonged to his father’s brother. “Uncle Jim wanted another parrot, and his wife said, ‘Nope, you’ve got a parrot, and that’s it.’ So he made up this story that my dad wanted a parrot, and next time he visited us he brought one.” The parrot, named Murphy, came with a chili plant. (Birds can’t taste capsaicin.) Fowler quit fishing and started growing habaneros in his bedroom. Soon, he had left his job as a Web designer and founded the Chili Pepper Company, through which he sells seeds, sauces, powders, and products such as Kiss the Devil, a mouth spray made with chili-infused alcohol. “You can have just a little bit before you go to the gym, to get your endorphins up,” Fowler told me.

Chilis have become an attractive business. According to a report by IBISWorld, a market-research firm, hot-sauce production is one of America’s ten fastest-growing industries, along with solar-panel manufacturing and online eyeglass sales. Last year, the Los Angeles hot-sauce company Huy Fong Foods sold more than sixty million dollars’ worth of sriracha. (Americans bought so much sriracha in 2007 that there was a three-month national shortage.) Chilis are the male equivalent of cupcakes, tempting entrepreneurial amateurs with dreams of a more flavorful life. Gerald Fowler said, “In the last five years, you find somebody’s been made redundant, he likes chili, he’ll set up a chili business.” The month after the Naga Viper got the Guinness record, Fowler made an extra forty thousand dollars.

At the moment, there is no definitive claimant to the title of world’s hottest pepper. Lacking a central authority, the chili community finds itself embroiled in a three-way schism. In June of 2011, a group of Australian growers captured the Guinness record with the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T (1,463,700 SHU). Less than a year later, Bosland’s Chile Pepper Institute issued a press release: “When it comes to bringing the heat, there’s a new king of the hill.” Bosland claimed that a C.P.I. chili called the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion had exceeded two million Scoville units.

Then, in August of last year, Ed Currie, of the PuckerButt Pepper Company, of Fort Mill, South Carolina, unveiled a new contender. Currie announced, “The PuckerButt Pepper Company has raised the bar for hot pepper heat intensity by producing an amazing hot pepper, the Smokin’ Ed’s Carolina Reaper, which surpasses the current world record holder, the Butch T Trinidad Scorpion.” The Carolina Reaper’s recommended uses, according to PuckerButt’s Web site, included hot sauces, salsa, and “settling old scores.” Steven Leckart wrote in Maxim that eating one was “like being face-fucked by Satan.”

Currie’s announcement divided opinion among chiliheads, a fractious lot. His associates—battling trolls (and baiting them, too)—made their allegiances known. Joe (Pepper Joe) Arditi, who runs a seed company in Myrtle Beach and is one of four venders licensed to sell Currie’s chili, wrote in his online catalogue, “Do we need a new World’s Hottest? I think so. We have the Super Bowl, World Series, Grammy, and Oscar awards for new champs every year.” (Pepper Joe, who was offering Carolina Reaper seeds at ten dollars a pack, vowed to enforce “a strict 3-pack max” per customer.) He declared the Carolina Reaper “now the reigning King.”

On GardenWeb.com, a commenter wrote of Pepper Joe:

He has disrespected Guinness and the creator of thecurrent world record holder by putting ed’s pepper at #1without substantiation, abusing the Guinness name forpersonal gain. That is misrepresentation and theft.
But he knows, there is one born every minute. My two cents? Don’t be the one born in the next minute! . . . Welcome to the circus.

Eating, more than breathing or sleeping, lends itself to competition. There are bake-offs, wing wars, contests to see who can eat the most hot dogs, bratwurst, Twinkies, tamales, cannoli, apple pies, buffalo wings, ribs, oysters, pastrami, sweet corn, deep-fried asparagus, ice cream, pancakes, pepperoni rolls, and boiled eggs. Superhots are the most accessible of thrills—fugu straight from the garden. For the culinary extremist, or exhibitionist, they provide an outlet for impulses that might have compelled his adolescent self to drink a concoction or try to swallow a teaspoonful of cinnamon. (A recent study found a positive correlation between chili-eating and “sensation-seeking” behavior.) As a leisure activity, superhots offer some of the pleasures of mild drugs and extreme sports without requiring one to break the law or work out. They are near-death experiences in a bowl of guacamole.

Chief among the chilihead’s occupational hazards is getting burnt up. In layman’s terms, this means eating a chili that causes one to experience profuse sweating, redness, nausea, ear-popping, abdominal cramps, vomiting, or all of the above. Getting burnt up can happen by accident (underestimation, misidentification) or on purpose (dares, pranks, curry). At the Engine Inn, a pub a short walk from Gerald Fowler’s house in Cumbria, I sampled the Naga Viper Curry, “made with officially the world’s hottest chili pepper and served with pilau rice, mango chutney and a giant poppadum.” “Tastes like heaven, Burns like hell,” a chalkboard read. “594 curries sold, 397 finished.” Though the waitress had warned, “We do it almost inedible,” I made 398. Never has a runny nose been so enjoyable.

Chilis are believed to have health benefits. Four show jumpers were disqualified from the 2008 Olympics for having treated their horses with creams containing capsaicin, which can act as a stimulant. Traffic cops in China hand out chilis to keep drivers alert. In 2008, when Katie Couric asked Hillary Clinton how she kept her stamina up on the campaign trail, she replied, “I eat a lot of hot peppers.” But, according to Paul Rozin, of the University of Pennsylvania, who studies the psychology of taste, the salutary effects of chilis aren’t substantial enough to account for their appeal to humans, the only mammals that eat them. With his theory of “benign masochism,” Rozin frames the allure of chilis as an emotional phenomenon. He writes, “We may come to enjoy our body’s negative responses to situations when we realize that there is no, or minimal, actual danger. In the case of the roller coaster, our body is scared, and sympathetically activated, but we know we are safe. Similarly for our crying in sad movies, and the burn we feel with chili pepper.” Chilis, in other words, are slasher flicks we can eat, bite-size Cyclones.

Ted Barrus, a custodian from Hammond, Oregon, has made a second career as Ted the Fire-Breathing Idiot, a friendly jackass and “chili reviewer.” Barrus started rating chilis because he liked the attention. “I still don’t really eat spicy food except when I’m doing reviews,” he said. “A typical meal for me is a regular old American meal—a burger and fries. Very rarely do I eat salad. You know, I’m a fat guy. I like fat-guy food.”

Barrus consumes whatever people send him, from raspberry-chipotle fudge to ranch-dressing soda. Armed with a jar of peanut butter and gallons of milk (casein, a protein in dairy products, can alleviate the effects of capsaicin), he regularly sets himself such stunts as eating twenty-one of the world’s hottest peppers: seven bhut jolokia, five Trinidad Scorpion Butch Ts, four Douglah 7-Pots, three Trinidad Moruga Scorpions, two Jonah 7-Pots. (He made it through eleven of them.) Last June, he and a friend decided to try the Carolina Reaper.

In the video that Barrus posted on YouTube (41,960 views), the camera homes in on a pair of pods, positioned starkly on a tabletop as though they were hand grenades seized by sheriffs’ deputies in a weapons bust.

“It looks like something from ‘The Simpsons’ or some horror movie,” Barrus says. “It’s very, very heavy and dense.”

Each of the two, Barrus and his sidekick, stuffs a whole chili into his mouth and begins to chew.

“It’s the most immediate tongue burn I’ve ever had,” Barrus says. “It’s immediately frying my tongue.”

A few seconds go by.

“Wow. My gums are on fire.”

“Urrgh, the gut burn is intense!”

“That was hell, boy. Hell in my mouth.”

When I asked Barrus, over the phone, what he thought was the world’s hottest chili, he replied, “I always say, ‘Guinness says the Butch T, New Mexico says the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, and Ed Currie says the Carolina Reaper.’ ” He continued, “It’s very complicated. It’s not cut-and-dried.”

The chili industry is rife with conflicts of interest—Currie, for instance, recently flew Barrus to a convention—but Barrus insisted that he was a reliable gauge of heat. “I go by my own burn,” he said.

According to Barrus, “most chiliheads feel you have to respect Guinness,” even though its authority is less than absolute. Guinness doesn’t perform tests itself; it just certifies results that conform to its requirements. In Barrus’s opinion, growers have reason to be secretive about their methods. He said, “The problem is that you have so many people who test who are affiliated with venders. Some people who create these crosses are afraid venders are going to get the seeds, grow them out, rename it, and call it their own cross.”

He was unconvinced by the claims of the Chile Pepper Institute, saying, “You know, I’ve eaten Moruga Scorpions that were no hotter than a habanero.” As for the Carolina Reaper, he acknowledged that Currie’s association with Pepper Joe, who had a reputation for slick salesmanship, had “hurt his credibility.” (Pepper Joe, for his part, said, “I’m a marketer—that’s my DNA.” He added, “We positively have the data. We took a new pepper and in fourteen months made it a household recognizable name, and to me that’s just short of astonishing.”) Barrus said, “Ed partnered up with him for the release of the Carolina Reaper. So some people look at Ed like, how much can you trust Ed Currie?”

Several weeks later, I was in South Carolina, standing in the middle of a field with Ed Currie. Currie had picked me up at my hotel in a GMC van. I had immediately started coughing—chili fumes. Currie rolled down a window.

Currie has a beard and an excitable yet downbeat manner. He was dressed in jean shorts, a T-shirt that said “Tree Hugger: I Will Cling to the Old Rugged Cross,” and a gold-and-silver Tag Heuer watch. He surveyed his plants, which were shoulder-high and stretched in lush rows back to a spring-fed pond. “Less talking, more working!” he yelled to some bare-chested workers who were picking pods under the sun. He turned to me and said, “I don’t really care much for the spotlight, but God’s doing it, and I’ve just got to keep on going.”

Being a North Carolina native, I asked Currie if he was from the area. He explained that he had grown up in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where his father was the chief financial officer of a division of the John Hancock insurance company. Currie continued, “I went to the University of Michigan, and I got kicked out. Before that I was at Eastern Michigan. I never went to one class—I just took the tests, which I could do because I’m a genius. My family had a history of heart disease and cancer, and all this time I’m studying how not to die, never quite correlating that the amount of drinking and drugs I was doing might lead to premature death. I was just reading, looking at places where they had low incidences of illness.” Currie developed a theory that spicy food might be good for you. “In 1982, I went to a Vietnamese restaurant in Orchard Lake, Michigan, and I said, ‘I want to eat hot chilis. What’s the hottest you’ve got?’ And they said, ‘No, no, no,’ and I said, ‘Yes, yes, yes.’ ” He smiled. “I got high as crap!”

Currie started making hot sauces. “When you’re bored, you’re bored,” he said. He went to seven different schools and eventually graduated from Central Michigan. Meanwhile, he was drinking and doing drugs. He got a D.W.I., lost his driver’s license, went to jail, got married and divorced. By 1999, he said, “I had five different liquor stores delivering to my house. I was a big fat sloppy drunk pig, and I decided I wanted to die. It was winter, and I left the door open—snow was coming in the house—and then an angel came in and said, ‘You’ve got to get to the hospital.’ ” Currie waved a forearm in front of me and rolled up his sleeve. “See? Goosebumps.”

We got into the van. Currie, who has been clean for fourteen years, worked in the trust department at Wells Fargo until January, when he turned full time to chilis. He fielded a flurry of calls on his iPhone as we drove to his house. Eventually, we parked next to a modest white A-frame with an extravagantly landscaped garden: palm trees, cattails, a seven-foot-tall cosmos. “Look, palms are only supposed to bloom in the springtime,” Currie said. “I get them to bloom all year long.” He added, “I know about nutrients, I know about plant reproductive cycles—I grew pot in Michigan in the middle of wintertime!”

There was something strange about the street Currie lived on: while the front yards on the block, except for Currie’s, were largely barren, many of the back yards appeared to be as lush as tropical jungles. Currie, it turned out, had turned the neighborhood into an extended chili farm. “I might or might not have about thirty-five yards that I lease out for the summer every year,” he said. “It’s all camouflaged,” he continued, slipping behind a house to check up on a test plot. “No one knows where it is. People have come into my yard and tried to steal stuff.”

Currie first suspected that he had a very hot chili on his hands in 2002, when he crossed a habanero (he got the seeds, he says, from a former co-worker who was from St. Vincent) with a Pakistani Naga (these came from a Michigan friend—“a Pakistani prince” whom he used to babysit, and whom he says he can’t say more about “because of his job”). Horticultural protocol requires that a new chili self-pollinate for five to eight generations before it can be considered stable and, therefore, a distinct variety. Currie says he grew his plant to five generations and then took it to nearby Winthrop University for tests. In 2010, Cliff Calloway, a chemistry professor at Winthrop, certified that the chili, which was then called the HP22B, averaged a heat of 1,474,000 SHU. The next year, the report somehow came to the attention of the local media. “It went viral,” Currie said. “People were trashing me on every forum. Ted Barrus called and said, ‘You’ve got to get on here and defend yourself.’ Apparently, I didn’t ask the pepper gods if it was all right for me to be cross-breeding chilis.”

In June of 2011, Currie wrote to Guinness:

Hello, my name is Ed Currie and I own the PuckerButt Pepper Company. We have been testing a pepper I hybrided at Winthrop University for the last several years and have a pepper that’s weighted average over the years is 1,474,000 scoville. I have attached a chart one of the grad students used for her part of the project. I actually have a pepper that is closer to two million consistently, but I am waiting on the results from this year and making sure the seed is consistent. How should I proceed and what data do I need to provide. . . . It would be great to have the US on the map for heat.
Thanks for your help.
 
Sincerely
Smokin Ed

Currie paid six hundred and fifty dollars to Guinness to “fast-track” the application, but, for one reason or another, the proceedings stalled. Guinness says that it has never received the proper paperwork from Currie. “We keep asking for documentation and he says he’ll send it, but we still haven’t got anything,” Sara Wilcox, a spokesperson for Guinness, told me. Currie argues that Guinness has failed to keep track of the documentation he’s sent—when the person he was originally dealing with left the company, in 2012, he was forced to start afresh—and that Guinness keeps changing the rules for the category.

“I don’t think they want to give the record to an American,” Currie said. “That’s just my personal opinion.”

Given the stalemate with Guinness, Currie decided late last year to declare the chili the world’s hottest on his own authority. First, he changed the HP22B’s name to the Carolina Reaper. “God brought a couple of guys into my life who used to work at Pepsi,” he told me. “They’re all about the corporate marketing thing.”

Currie’s critics question the long-term viability of the Carolina Reaper. Ted Barrus explained, “There’s a lot of controversy over Ed Currie’s chili because in Europe some people got the Reaper, they grew out the seeds, and their chilis don’t look like anybody else’s. They’re saying it’s no longer stable.” Currie acknowledged that some customers had got weird results, but the problem, he said, stemmed from a few contaminated seed packs. (Currie has recently furnished Guinness with a letter from a biology professor at Winthrop attesting that his plants are stable.) Besides, he said, the Carolina Reaper was, at this point, almost an anachronism, and he was persisting in trying to win recognition for it merely as a point of pride. “The Carolina Reaper’s the mildest of the peppers I’ve crossed,” he said, looking me in the eye. He had goosebumps again. “We have one hundred and sixty-two hotter ones yet to come.”

“F or over 1 year now, the Reaper has been so close to getting a record,” Jim Duffy wrote to me recently. “Do you think people in the Industry are tired of hearing about it almost getting it over and over again? Is it the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ and now Industry people are just ignoring it?”

Duffy, of Refining Fire Chiles, in San Diego, is Ed Currie’s arch-frenemy and sometime business partner. They pray together on the phone every day, and tend to preface their criticisms of each other by saying, “He’s a good friend of mine, but . . .” (As hybrids go, the chili world would make an excellent setting for both a Will Ferrell movie and an adaptation of “Julius Caesar.” Among the pejoratives the chiliheads I spoke with used to describe each other were “clown,” “joke,” “Johnny-come-lately,” “whack job,” and “palooka.”) Duffy says that he’s not a record-chaser, but his beef with the Carolina Reaper may owe something to the fact that he gave Paul Bosland and the Chile Pepper Institute the seeds they used to grow the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion, which they proclaimed “the hottest pepper on the planet” in February of 2012. Duffy said of it, to the Associated Press, “Like Cabbage Patch dolls right before Christmas or Beanie Babies, it’s, like, the hot item.”

According to C.P.I. data, the Trinidad Moruga Scorpion averages only 1.2 million Scoville units, but its heat peaks at more than two million. To assert its primacy, its boosters have devised a novel argument: the chili record should be determined by maximum, rather than mean (the scariest wolf ever, rather than the scariest wolf most of the time). To some chiliheads, this constitutes a curious reversal of methodology—only six years ago, the C.P.I. claimed the Guinness World Record by citing the bhut jolokia’s mean heat.

“It drives me nuts!” Alex de Wit, an Australian grower who is part of the team that holds the current Guinness record for the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, told me. “I think if you want a world record, you have to do it according to the rules.” De Wit e-mailed me later, “If they would beat me and did it exactly as supposed to do, well done and good on them. I am the first to applaud and clap my hands. . . . Anything else is just loose sand to my opinion, and not based upon facts but fiction.” De Wit was equally upset by Ed Currie’s claims about the Carolina Reaper: “I really do not have the time or energy for dicks (excusez le mot).” He closed his e-mail, “I wish you a spicy day.”

Jim Duffy dismissed such criticism. “Does a runner win a race on the average, or does he win it by being the fastest?” he said, when we spoke on the phone, his voice gaining Scovilles by the second. “Is any record won by the fastest, the hottest, the tallest, the biggest, or are records given for the average? Who cares about the average?” He concluded, “Every record in the history of man has been based on the high.”

Duffy and Bosland have yet to secure independent recognition for the Trinidad Moruga. I asked Duffy if the use of maximum numbers amounted to, as some chiliheads had complained, a misleading focus on outliers.

“Well, I’ll tell you, dear, you can come out here to San Diego, and you can walk in my field, and you can bite into a Reaper and you can bite into a Moruga, and we’ll see which one you walk away from,” he said. “My grower Daniel, he’s got Reapers in his dehydrator, and he eats them like potato chips.”

After we got off the phone, Duffy sent me an e-mail that contained a list of ten questions to ponder. The ninth suggested that some of his competitors might be using substances that artificially inflate the capsaicin content of their chilis. “There is no test out there that can detect the use of these nutrients in the pepper,” Duffy wrote. “Yes, Virginia! Peppers can be juiced!”

Butch T, of the Trinidad Scorpion Butch T, is Butch Taylor, a plumber in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 2005, Taylor got some Trinidad Scorpion seeds from a guy named Mark in New Jersey, who had got them from a local nursery. Taylor recalled, “When I grew them down here, they just grew unbelievable. I got three plants out of five seeds, and every plant I grew was dedicated to seeds. The first time I tasted it, I just thought, This is the hottest thing I’ve ever seen.”

Taylor kept growing the plants, selecting at each generation for the hottest specimens. He gave the seeds away to chiliheads all over the world, sticking a little label that said “Butch T” at the bottom of each packet, so that absent-minded recipients would be able to keep track of where they had come from. Besides that, he didn’t think much of it. “I didn’t have any money to pay for testing—I didn’t even know how to have them tested at the time,” he told me. “And since I was growing the seeds, not selling them, I couldn’t see the purpose of setting the record.” He learned that his namesake chili was the hottest chili in the world, according to Guinness, the day that the record was announced. The Australians who developed Taylor’s strain into a winner had named it after him. “It took me a while to get my head around it, because I’m a little more shy, unless I’ve been drinking or something,” he recalled. “I thought that was very decent of them.”

Butch Taylor is spoken of in reverent tones in the chili community. A human bhut jolokia, he doesn’t travel often to chili conventions, and his Web site is dormant. He can be a little hard to find, but, in recent years, he has maintained a steady presence on Facebook, advising fellow-enthusiasts on how to deal with fire ants or sharing observations about pod phenotypes. In January, he posted his “2013 (incomplete) grow list,” a document that included sixty-one types of chili and was pored over as though it were a Vatican encyclical. Christopher Phillips, another veteran chilihead, wrote, “Congratulations Butch. You have now officially set yourself up for 52,390 seed requests come harvest time? LOL. Nice list!!” Taylor likes blues piano and L.S.U. football. He misses the taste of glue on stamps. He even has his own groupie—a woman who sends him pictures of herself posing next to plants grown from his seeds.

A few years ago, Taylor and his wife, Shirley, whom he met when he was thirteen, were living in a farmhouse that they built with their own hands on some land that Taylor’s family has owned for years. The farm is about an hour north of Baton Rouge, in Wilkinson County, Mississippi. When the economic crisis hit, gas cost too much for them to make the commute every day, so they started spending the week in a travel trailer that they park in the driveway of their daughter’s house. On weekends, they drive out to the country.

One day in September, Butch and Shirley picked me up at the Baton Rouge airport. Taylor did not look exactly like the picture he had sent—it was of Brad Pitt—but he welcomed me warmly. His eyes are bright blue. He was wearing shorts and a blue polo shirt with white stripes. “Hush, baby!” Shirley, who has strawberry-blond hair and a deep, honeyed voice, said to their shih tzu, Laila Habanero, as I climbed into their truck. A chili-pepper ornament dangled from the rearview mirror.

A couple of hours later, Taylor was standing in the kitchen of the farmhouse, softening shallots in butter for a crawfish étouffée. “I’ve cooked since the time I could lift a skillet,” he said. Taylor had his first chili by accident. “I ate a tepín that I found growing in a flower bed when I was eleven,” he said. “It burnt me up.” As an adult, he started growing tomatoes; chilis followed. “This is based on an old recipe I came across in a preserving book from the eighteen-hundreds,” Taylor said, picking up a jar of pepper brandy that was sitting on the counter. Chilis take on a metaphysical dimension in Taylor’s telling. “I don’t find peppers,” he said. “Peppers find me.”

The following morning, Taylor put on his boots and went outside. Next door, his mother’s chickens were clucking in a pen. Hummingbirds darted past a pecan tree. Taylor unplugged a homemade electrical fence and stepped into his chili field. “This used to be a dog yard,” he said. “My stepfather ran the hounds at Angola State Penitentiary. He used to feed them deer carcasses. The grass grew so thick that you could barely run a motor over it, so I thought it would be a good place to put a garden.”

Taylor walked through rows of plants, gathering ripe pods in a wooden basket. His plants hadn’t done particularly well this season—they were smaller than usual, and their leaves were a sickly yellow. (He thought he had got a bad batch of fertilizer.) Still, even in early fall, they were yielding chilis galore: chilis in the shape of bugles; chilis that glowed like Chinese lanterns; chilis that, Taylor pointed out, resembled pit bulls’ teeth. When I asked him the big question, he hedged. “What I believe is the hottest pepper? I don’t know,” he said.

Still, he couldn’t resist a tiny dig. “This is a Trinidad Scorpion from Australia,” he said, fingering a bumpy bright-red pod. He handed it to me. “Notice a resemblance to Ed’s?”

Taylor allowed that chiliheads were a competitive bunch. “Of course, I have an unfair advantage,” he said, indicating the sun beating down overhead. “It’s kind of like bringing a Ferrari to a Volkswagen race.”

Taylor led me to a white outbuilding that serves as a dedicated hot-sauce kitchen: eight-gallon pots, nitrile gloves, face mask, radio, a de-seeding stool embellished, like a hot rod, with flames. Every year, he makes a few sauces, which he sells mostly to his plumbing buddies. “I’ve been trying to convince myself that I have to sell more stuff to pay for all the different stuff I want to do,” he said. “I just can’t get into it.” Taylor has a theory about the economics of chilis: like hemlines, they rise when times are tough. “The deal with the hot sauce is that nobody has the money to eat out, so they stay home and start cooking again. After a while, you think, Well, there’s got to be something different I can do with this.” The only problem, Taylor said, is that nobody ever buys a bottle of superhot sauce twice.

Eventually, we walked back to the house.

“How were they lookin’, baby?” Shirley asked.

“I’ve got a lot of peppers out there to pick this weekend,” Butch replied.

He had brought a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T in from the field. The pod had a bulbous cap and a tapering tail that recalled the stinger of a wasp. Its skin was pebbly, like the nose of a drinker. It looked as though it had been made of melted wax from the candles at an Italian restaurant.

Taylor took a knife and whittled off a flake no larger than a clove. I put it in my mouth and chewed. The capsaicin hit loud and fast, a cymbal clang of heat. My face flushed. My eyes glassed over and I started pacing the kitchen, as though I could walk off the burn. It took twenty minutes and a can of Dr Pepper to banish the sensation of having a sort of tinnitus of the mouth.

Before we came inside, Taylor had shown me his greenhouse, where he tends his most precious plants. A single bush dominated the small hut. Hanging from its branches were an assortment of pods, some of them deep red and some of them a faint green. The plant, which was not yet stable, was the third generation of an accidental cross of a 7-Pot Jonah and, most likely, a Trinidad Scorpion Butch T. Taylor was calling it the wal—the Wicked-Ass Little 7-Pot. He shook a branch, unleashing a swarm of flies, and picked a pod from the stem. “Just off the top of my head, the first one I tasted, I’d say two million Scovilles,” he said. “But it may just be a freak of nature. You get those now and then.” ♦

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De THE NEW YORKER, 04/11/2013

Imagen:New varieties of “superhots” provide near-death experiences in a bowl of guacamole. Photograph by Grant Cornett.

LOU REED, 1942-2013/Outsider Whose Dark, Lyrical Vision Helped Shape Rock ’n’ Roll

BEN RATLIFF

Lou Reed, the singer, songwriter and guitarist whose work with the Velvet Underground in the 1960s had a major influence on generations of rock musicians, and who remained a powerful if polarizing force for the rest of his life, died on Sunday at his home in Amagansett, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 71.

The cause was liver disease, said Dr. Charles Miller of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, where Mr. Reed had liver transplant surgery this year and was being treated again until a few days ago.

Mr. Reed brought dark themes and a mercurial, sometimes aggressive disposition to rock music. “I’ve always believed that there’s an amazing number of things you can do through a rock ‘n’ roll song,” he once told the journalist Kristine McKenna, “and that you can do serious writing in a rock song if you can somehow do it without losing the beat. The things I’ve written about wouldn’t be considered a big deal if they appeared in a book or movie.”

He played the sport of alienating listeners, defending the right to contradict himself in hostile interviews, to contradict his transgressive image by idealizing sweet or old-fashioned values in word or sound, or to present intuition as blunt logic. But his early work assured him a permanent audience.

The Velvet Underground, which was originally sponsored by Andy Warhol and showcased the songwriting of John Cale as well as Mr. Reed, wrought gradual but profound impact on the high-I.Q., low-virtuosity stratum of punk, alternative and underground rock around the world. Joy Division, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, R.E.M., the Strokes and numerous others were descendants. The composer Brian Eno, in an often-quoted interview from 1982, suggested that if the group’s first album, “The Velvet Underground & Nico,” sold only 30,000 copies during its first five years — a figure probably lower than the reality — “everyone who bought one of those 30,000 copies started a band.”

Many of the group’s themes — among them love, sexual deviance, alienation, addiction, joy and spiritual transfiguration — stayed in Mr. Reed’s work through his long run of solo recordings. Among the most noteworthy of those records were “Transformer” (1972), “Berlin” (1973) and “New York” (1989). The most notorious, without question, was “Metal Machine Music” (1975).

Beloved of Mr. Reed and not too many others, “Metal Machine Music” was four sides of electric-guitar feedback strobing between two amplifiers, with Mr. Reed altering the speed of the tape recorder; no singing, no drums, no stated key. At the time it was mostly understood, if at all, as a riddle about artistic intent. Was it his truest self? Was it a joke? Or was there no difference?

Mr. Reed wrote in the liner notes that “no one I know has listened to it all the way through, including myself,” but he also defended it as the next step after La Monte Young’s early minimalism. “There’s infinite ways of listening to it,” he told the critic Lester Bangs in 1976.

Not too long after his first recordings, made at 16 with a doo-wop band in Freeport, N.Y., Mr. Reed started singing outside of the song’s melody, as if he were giving a speech with a fluctuating drone in a New York accent. That sound, heard with the Velvet Underground on songs like “Heroin” and “Sweet Jane” and in his post-Velvet songs “Walk on the Wild Side,” “Street Hassle” and others, became one of the most familiar frequencies in rock. He played lead guitar the same way, straining against his limitations.

Mr. Reed confidently made artistic decisions that other musicians would not have even considered. He was an aesthetic primitivist with high-end audio obsessions. He was an English major who understood his work as a form of literature, though he distrusted overly poetic pop lyrics, and though distorted electric guitars and drums sometimes drowned out his words.

Lewis Allan Reed was born on March 2, 1942, in Brooklyn, the son of Sidney Reed, a tax accountant, and Toby Reed, a homemaker. When he was 11 his family moved to Freeport, on Long Island. His mother survives him, as does his sister, Merrill Weiner, and his wife, the composer and musician Laurie Anderson.

Generally resistant to authority and prone to mood swings, Mr. Reed troubled his parents enough that they assented to a doctor’s recommendation for weeks of electroshock therapy at Creedmoor State Psychiatric Hospital in Queens; in 1959, while beginning his music studies at New York University, he underwent further treatment.

After transferring to Syracuse University, he fell into the circle around the poet and short-story writer Delmore Schwartz, one of his English professors. Mr. Reed would later resist being pigeonholed, but his college profile suggests a distinct type: an early-’60s East Coast hipster, a middle-class suburban rebel in love with pre-Beatles rock ‘n’ roll, jazz and street-life writers: William S. Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr., Raymond Chandler, Allen Ginsberg.

He clearly absorbed and, at least at times, admired Bob Dylan. (“Dylan gets on my nerves,” he said in 1968. “If you were at a party with him, I think you’d tell him to shut up.” Twenty-one years later he would tell Rolling Stone, “Dylan continuously knocks me out.”)

While in college he wrote “Heroin,” a song that accelerates in waves with only two chords. It treated addiction and narcotic ecstasy both critically and without moralizing, as a poet or novelist at that time might have, but not a popular songwriter:

I don’t know just where I’m going

But I’m gonna try for the kingdom, if I can

‘Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man

When I put a spike into my vein

And I tell you things aren’t quite the same

When I’m rushing on my run

And I feel just like Jesus’ son

And I guess that I just don’t know.

After graduation Mr. Reed found work in New York as a staff songwriter for Pickwick International, a label that capitalized on trends in popular music with budget releases by made-up groups. Among his credits for Pickwick were “Johnny Won’t Surf No More” and “The Ostrich,” written for a nonexistent dance craze and sung by Mr. Reed himself.

When Mr. Reed met Mr. Cale, a musician working with La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, they wanted to combine early-1960s rock with the drones of classical minimalism. They jammed with the guitarist Sterling Morrison, one of Mr. Reed’s Syracuse friends, and the poet and visual artist Angus MacLise on percussion, who was soon replaced by Maureen Tucker, the sister of a college friend of Mr. Reed’s. With Mr. Cale playing viola, keyboards and electric bass, they named themselves the Velvet Underground after the title of a book by Michael Leigh on practices in nonstandard sexuality in the early 1960s, and played their original music at Café Bizarre in Greenwich Village; the filmmaker Barbara Rubin came by with Andy Warhol, who quickly incorporated the band into the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a touring multimedia performance-art happening with dancers, film projections and the German singer Nico.

The group’s association with Warhol lasted from late 1965 to late 1967, and Mr. Reed thereafter was generally full of praise for Warhol, whom he saw as an exemplary modern artist and New Yorker. A proud New Yorker himself, Mr. Reed squared off against West Coast rock and declared his hatred for hippies. In a 1968 interview he characterized the San Francisco bands of the time, the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane especially, as “tedious, a lie and untalented.”

In mid-1970 Mr. Reed left the Velvet Underground and moved to Long Island, where he worked for two years as a typist in his father’s firm. He made a disappointing solo record toward the end of 1971, but David Bowie, a Velvet Underground fan when there weren’t many, helped advance Mr. Reed’s career: he started playing Velvet Underground songs in concert and helped produce Mr. Reed’s album “Transformer” in London. It rose to No. 29 on Billboard’s Top 200, but as with nearly everything Mr. Reed did, it took time to spread through the culture.

“Walk on the Wild Side,” a quiet, jazzlike single from the album about the hustlers and transvestites around Warhol at the Factory, introduced a new character in each verse and included a reference to fellatio that slipped past the censors; it became an FM radio staple and Mr. Reed’s only Top 40 hit.

In 1973 he married Bettye Kronstadt, a cocktail waitress; the relationship ended during the making of “Berlin” that summer. For several years after that Mr. Reed, whose sexual identity seemed to be as fluid as the songs from that time suggested, was romantically involved with a transvestite named Rachel, whose last name has long been uncertain; she was private, but their relationship was public. Rachel, it was assumed, inspired much of his album “Coney Island Baby”; she is also pictured on the cover of “Walk on the Wild Side,” a greatest-hits album.

Mr. Reed’s look toughened in the mid-’70s, toward leather, bleached crew cuts and painted fingernails. He revisited his rickety, strange and vulnerable Velvet Underground songs on the live album “Rock N Roll Animal,” making them hard and slick and ready for a new order of teenage listeners.

By the end of the ‘70s his interviews and songs were full of a drive to change his way of living. In 1980 he married Sylvia Morales, who became his manager and muse. She was the subject of, or at least mentioned in, some of his most forthrightly romantic songs of the 1980s. But their relationship ended toward the end of the decade, and he met Ms. Anderson in the early ‘90s. They lived together in the West Village for more than a decade before marrying in 2008. They continued to live in the West Village as well as in Amagansett.

In middle age Mr. Reed became a kind of cultural elder, acting in films by Wim Wenders and Wayne Wang, befriending the Czech leader Vaclav Havel (who smuggled a copy of a Velvet Underground LP into Prague after a visit to New York in the late 1960s), creating multimedia stage productions with the director Robert Wilson. His own work moved between mature, elegiac singer-songwriter reports on grief, tenderness and age and wilder or more ambitious projects.

“The Raven,” a play and album, was based on writings by Edgar Allan Poe and included the saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the singer Antony Hegarty. For the album “Lulu,” an aggressive collaboration with Metallica based on Frank Wedekind’s play, he found himself in a “Metal Machine Music” redux, once again attacked by critics, once again declaring victory.

He got together with Mr. Cale, Ms. Tucker and Mr. Morrison for a one-off Velvet Underground reunion in 1990 and a tour in 1993. (Mr. Morrison died of lymphoma in 1995.) And he eventually returned to his dark anti-masterpiece: the saxophonist Ulrich Krieger transcribed “Metal Machine Music” for an electroacoustic ensemble in 2002, and in 2009 Mr. Reed performed improvised music inspired by that album with a group, including Mr. Krieger, called Metal Machine Trio.

Sober since the ’80s and a practitioner of tai chi, Mr. Reed had a liver transplant in April at the Cleveland Clinic. “I am a triumph of modern medicine, physics and chemistry,” he wrote in a public statement upon his release. “I am bigger and stronger than ever.”

But he was back at the clinic for treatment last week. Dr. Miller, who performed the transplant, said Mr. Reed decided to return home after doctors could no longer treat his end-stage liver disease. “We all agreed that we did everything we could,” Dr. Miller said.

Just weeks after his liver transplant, Mr. Reed wrote a review of Kanye West’s album “Yeezus” for the online publication The Talkhouse, celebrating its abrasiveness and returning once more to “Metal Machine Music” to explain an artist’s deepest motives.

“I have never thought of music as a challenge — you always figure the audience is at least as smart as you are,” he wrote. “You do this because you like it, you think what you’re making is beautiful. And if you think it’s beautiful, maybe they think it’s beautiful.”

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De THE NEW YORK TIMES, 28/10/2013

Fotografía: Lou Reed en concierto

Mi hermana y yo

Mariano García

J.R. Ackerley (1968). My Sister and Myself. The Diaries of J.R. Ackerley. Edited by Francis King. London: Hutchinson, 1982.

Libro sombrío desde la introducción de King, que cuenta cómo el día que murió Ackerley su hermana lo llamó y él acudió para encontrarlo como dormido en su cama. Después de haber sufrido tanto con esa hermana loca, ella estaba destinada a sobrevivirlo.

Aunque se trata de un diario, es un diario muy particular, como si hubiera hecho una selección para su publicación, ya que todas las entradas son significativas y están escritas en forma impecable y dramática. No hay ningún momento insignificante. Tal vez la manera de ser de Ackerley lo impulsaba a anotar algo sólo cuando creía que valía la pena.

Como sea, hace un retrato pavoroso de su hermana Nancy en primer lugar, de Siegfried Sassoon, de su tía Bunny (aunque la quiere y la defiende en todo momento de los ataques de Nancy) y en cierto modo de sí mismo. Quedan fuera de la lista negra la inefable Queenie, su gran amor, la perrita que le inspiró dos de sus cuatro libros famosos, Forster, a quien estima y respeta como amigo y como ser humano (es algo así como su modelo intelectual y moral) y alguno que otro amigo. Cerca del comienzo hay una escena muy sorprendente, una especie de menage à trois entre él, su ex amante Freddie y Queenie (que originalmente pertenecía a Freddie). También es muy linda la descripción que hace de un almuerzo (o cena, no recuerdo) en casa de este, una imagen familiar, con Freddie sentado con su hijito junto al fuego, y a cuyos pies duerme echada una gatita preñada. Fuera de estos toques y las largas y placenteras caminatas con Queenie por Wimbledon commons, aunque éstas también se agrían para él cuando su árbol favorito –su altar- es destruido, el resto es dedicado a la sórdida vida de Nancy, que al tenerla vacía proyecta sus celos y su histeria sobre el pobre Joe. Es un notable retrato de mujer, hecho por un notable misógino. Hay algunos apuntes interesantes, y crueles, sobre la vejez y la decrepitud.

Sobre Sassoon:

“I like him very much, there is something very touching about his aged, beautiful, worn face, the light in the eyes dimmed from constant looking inwards” (167)

Detalle sobre el habla de Freddie: según  Ackerley la clase obrera se regodea en describir y repetir sus reacciones físicas frente a los acontecimientos (36)

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De microlecturas, 28/01/2013

Foto: Ackerley y su hermana Nancy

Crónicas de una pluma olvidada

Rocío Ponce

Holly Golightly, pero con cerebro. Así era Maeve Brennan (19171993). No hay certeza absoluta de que el personaje deTruman Capote en Desayuno con diamantes estuviera inspirado en la excéntrica periodista y escritora de la revista The New Yorker, pero hay muchos indicios que apuntan en esa dirección. De Maeve Brennan nadie se acuerda, pero muchos han podido conocerla o al menos una parte sin saberlo gracias a esta reconocida novela.

Brennan y Capote se conocían, trabajaron juntos en varias publicaciones como Harper's Bazaar y la propia The New Yorker. Holly Golightly comparte muchas de sus principales características las que precisamente la han hecho convertirse en un icono literario y cinematográfico con Maeve Brennan: amor por los gatos, por las grandes gafas, la moda, el alcohol y el tabaco. También las dos parecían reacias al amor y acabaron locamente enamoradas.

Ambas se distinguían por su buen gusto al vestir, vivían solas, se peinaban con recogidos altos y eran consideradas como mujeres adelantadas a su tiempo. Un par de modernas con pantalones en los cincuenta, ese tipo de chicas que conseguían captar la atención del resto, con o sin intención de obtenerla. Parecían dos neoyorquinas más, sabían dónde ponían los mejores martinis y las tiendas con los objetos más exclusivos. Y aunque ninguna de las dos había nacido en la ciudad de los rascacielos, ambas estaban locas por ella.

Según la escritora Isabel Núñez, Capote creó a Golightly "quitándole el cerebro de Maeve y dejándola con su parte más frívola". Angela Bourke, biógrafa de Brennan, apoya esta teoría: "El personaje le debe bastante (a la periodista)". Incluso hay planos de la película de Blake Edwards, por ejemplo, uno de Audrey Hepburn junto a una tienda, que tiene un parecido indiscutible con algunas instantáneas de Brennan.

Destino o casualidad. Isabel Núñez cree que fue una conjunción de ambas la que hizo que hace diez años se topara con el libro que recogía las crónicas de Nueva York de Maeve Brennan. Ella buceaba por las ocho millas de libros de la librería Strand en la Gran Manzana buscando un regalo para una amiga. La periodista irlandesa, "olvidada" por editoriales y medios, se convirtió en la inspiración de la escritora catalana para un ciclo de conferencias que rescataba a escritoras y fotógrafas. De esa admiración también nació un libro, Sinrazones del olvido (Icaria), escrito por Núñez junto a Lydia Oliva.

Una editorial para Brennan

Durante todo ese tiempo, Isabel Núñez paseó las crónicas de Brennan por editoriales españolas sin resultado. "Les gustaba, pero no se decidían. Incluso alguno me dijo que si los anglosajones no la reeditaban por algo sería", explicó aPúblico. "En España cuesta encontrar quien te escuche cuando vienes con algo que no es muy reconocido", dijo Núñez, que opina que a las editoriales les falta ser "más atrevidas y tener más criterio".

Núñez estaba convencida de que los artículos que Brennan publicó bajo el seudónimo de The Longwinded Lady (La mujer prolija o densa) en la sección The Talk of the Town del The New Yorker entre 1953 y 1968 volverían a ver la luz. Y así fue. Crónicas de Nueva York (Ediciones Alfabia) ya puede comprarse en las librerías, con traducción y prólogo de la propia Isabel Núñez.

Si algo llama la atención de las crónicas de Brennan es su acusado olfato para encontrar aquello que pasa por alto en Nueva York. Una ciudad que atrapa con sus grandes edificios, sus rincones cinematográficos, sus luces incansables, su actividad frenética y su insomnio constante. Para la periodista, Nueva York era la gente que la vive, la pasea, la trabaja. Sus crónicas acababan convirtiéndose en pequeños relatos sobre personas (una pareja de enamorados, un hombre de un bar...) y sobre las pequeñas historias que le podían ocurrir a ella o a cualquiera que se le cruzase. Los suyos eran siempre protagonistas inconscientes. Tres personas irritantes que ensucian la atmósfera de una librería, encontrarse un billete, qué ocurre cuando se te rompe un tacón en la calle o qué responder cuando te ceden el asiento en el metro.

Sus relatos, atemporales, demuestran una forma de mirar el mundo que tan pronto se muestra divertida como irónica o reflexiva. Imaginen a una joven Brennan pendiente de cada detalle de una pareja que pasea por la Sexta Avenida. Camina, ávida, con la siempre presente rosa en su solapa izquierda, los labios pintados de carmín rojo y un elegante abrigo negro. Cuando hubiera perdido de vista a la pareja entraría en un bar donde, sola y sin prejuicios, se sentaría a escribir frenéticamente. "Ella escribía en bares y restaurantes", recuerda Núñez. También se caracterizaba por pasarse horas en su casa perfeccionando sus relatos: "Era una maniática de la prosa".

Maeve Brennan nació en Dublín en 1917 en una familia católica marcada por la persecución política que vivía su padre. Situación que cambió drásticamente cuando en 1934 le nombraron primer embajador de Irlanda en Estados Unidos y la familia se trasladó a Washington. Maeve estudió Literatura y Biblioteconomía, y cuando su familia volvió a Irlanda ella aprovechó para mudarse a Nueva York. Estaba empezando su vida.

Sus primeros pasos como periodista los dio en la revista de moda Harper's Bazaar, y en 1949 consiguió un puesto fijo en The New Yorker. Ahí conoció a Clair McKelway, un redactor conocido por su afición a la bebida y su errático comportamiento, con el que se casó en 1954 y del que se divorció solo cuatro años después.

Los sesenta los vivió sola y escribiendo esporádicamente por culpa de los brotes psicóticos que comenzó a padecer. Brennan acabó viviendo en la calle y rechazando el techo y la comida queThe New Yorker le ofrecía. "Solo aceptaba alojarse en el lavabo de señoras de la revista e increpaba a quienes entraban", recuerda Núñez. En su cuento El terror sagrado, una señora irlandesa se comportaba de igual manera. La periodista, inconscientemente, terminó convirtiéndose en un personaje de sí misma.

Tras rechazar ser hospitalizada, acabó viviendo como una mendiga más. Murió en 1993 en un asilo, sin recordar que una vez había sido una brillante periodista y escritora. Durante las dos últimas décadas de su vida no escribió ni una palabra. "Esa precoz desaparición de la escena literaria y social consolidó su olvido", concluye Núñez.

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De Público.es, 01/10/2011

Fotografía: Maeve Brennan