How To Make A Documentary About ‘The History Of Concrete’:
As mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani has frequently demonstrated impressive media savvy, but arguably nothing has proved his genius for in-the-know promo more than a video, released in April, with the documentarian John Wilson.
The spot, in support of the mayor’s plan to reduce the presence of the city’s ubiquitous sidewalk sheds, suggested that either he or someone on his team was a fan of How To With John Wilson, the film-maker’s cult-beloved HBO series that remains a taste signifier for alt-humorous New Yorkers. And for good reason: over three near-perfect seasons, Wilson, armed with his ever-present camera and diffident, memoiristic narration, explored the city’s disintegrating streets with a singular eye for the weird and unintentionally hilarious, turning the most mundane of NYC preoccupations – public restrooms, parking spots, scaffolding – into profound meditations on the glories, indignities and absurdities of modern life.
It was because of that scaffolding episode, released in October 2020, that I, like some smart Mamdani staffers, began to perceive the sidewalk shed shadowing my block not as an inevitable fixed entity but an obtrusive, if well-intentioned, symptom of neglect. Shortly after the mayor’s video, said scaffolding miraculously came down – revealing, to my shock, a three square-wide swath of concrete that had not seen the sun in six years.
When I credit Wilson for this upgrade, in person at a film office in Manhattan, he reacts with a modest “I’ll take it,” as dry as the dusty footprints of the recently departed metal poles. Fitting, for though that newly revealed concrete, speckled with old gum and anonymous residue, is certainly better, if not exactly beautiful, perhaps only Wilson could see it as cinematic. His debut feature film, The History of Concrete, takes on the granddaddy of all urban materials, tugging wry insights on our terminal human condition out of the crumbling facades of New York’s most pervasive substance.
Only someone with the stuff cluttering Wilson’s headspace could make this. Here’s some of the stuff that ran through his brain:
Resistant to do something different for difference’s sake and in the absence of financing, Wilson went back to basics: pick up camera, leave house. “I just started to do things the way that I always did, and that was the most fluid way to get myself out of the house and, like, have anything to do and work on, because I was depressed,” he recalls. “For some reason, I need to keep reminding myself of the same basic idea, that you should not wait for anyone else to make the thing that you want. You just need to do it.”
“I was just caught in this trap again, of thinking that I needed permission,” he continues, eyes grazing the cinderblock poster. So I just went out to try to make it, and then I decided to incorporate all of these voices that were trying to get me to change and do whatever the market would reward.”
Said advice includes: make it sexy (he attends a brick-laying competition, where the winner receives a very sleek blue truck); make it a rock-umentary (he meets and follows an aging rocker at a liquor store); make it topical (expert testimony will leave you wary of driving under the crumbling Brooklyn Queens Expressway); make it celeb-adjacent (Wilson is among the few documentarians less comfortable in a room with Kim Kardashian than with a man preserving tattooed human skin). As with any Wilson project, the narrative wanders far away from the initial premise; Wilson wanders from Rome to the Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence race in which runners loop around a single block in Queens for a month, from an Ohio driver’s ed class to the set of Marty Supreme (whose director, Josh Safdie, served as an executive producer of Wilson’s doc).
My kind of brain. I’ve gotta seek this out.
In 2017, Paola Nogales-Ascarrunz, a biologist and National Geographic Explorer working in Bolivia, received a call from a local wildlife sanctuary that had just been given what they described as “a weird cat.” It came from a local man who found it as a kitten on a road near a forest. The man took the animal home, believing it to be a domestic breed. But after about a year of living with the clearly wild animal, he realized it would be better off at a sanctuary.
As the lead scientist and founder of the Bolivian Felids Research Program (Programa de Investigación de Félidos Bolivia), Nogales-Ascarrunz was intrigued. The animal had a small, scrunched-up face, short and round ears, and long whiskers. It was, indeed, too small to be a housecat, and, most notably, it was covered in leopard-like spots. So she went to visit the creature at the Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary on the subtropical flank of the Bolivian Andes.
“I took a hundred pictures of it,” remembers Nogales-Ascarrunz. “I was so fascinated.”
What she couldn’t know at the time was that this curious cat had a secret. It would become the first new species of felid (i.e. the cat family) discovered in over 100 years, according to a study published today in the journal Current Biology. What’s exciting is the discovery is not a validation of a species proposed in the distant past, nor a previously recognized subspecies raised to species status—which are both more commonly reported and important findings. No, this cat was something totally new to science.
“A Love Supreme” On The Eve Of John Coltrane’s 100th Birthday. Like so many others, “A Love Supreme” was my entrance into jazz. Like (I suspect) so many others, it came during my freshman year of college. (Because, regardless of what I thought, there was always someone hipper than me.) The immortal quartet–Trane, Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner and Jimmy Garrison. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before:
It’s a dangerous game, trying to understand music history as a succession of firsts and figures who reroute entire streams. Surely, some deeper commitment to spiritual expression through jazz music was in the offing by the mid-1960s, even if John Coltrane hadn’t made “A Love Supreme.”
But as it happened, after the album’s release at the decade’s exact midpoint, it became impossible to imagine the “spiritual jazz” movement — and the saxophonists who helped lead it, including Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler and Marion Brown, all of whom had studied with and played beside Trane — without him. And specifically without this suite, which was written as a devotional to the divine in a moment of overwhelming inspiration in 1964. More than to inaugurate a trend, “A Love Supreme” seemed to epitomize the task of divine communication through group exploration. Nothing could ever really match it.
“I just wanted to express something that I felt,” the preternaturally understated Coltrane — who would have turned 100 next week — told a French reporter in 1965. “I had to write it.”
The suite’s reach has only expanded in the decades since, passing from jazz heads to rock musicians, hip-hop producers, poets, dancers and many listeners who may not have known much about jazz, but recognized the sound of someone searching for something larger than himself. You can hear its influence everywhere, but especially in the ecstatic freedom of spiritual jazz — which is experiencing a revival of its own these days — and in the work of today’s underground. More than six decades later, “A Love Supreme” still invites us to listen harder, feel deeper and keep searching. Its spirituality remains open-ended, its intensity still startling.
This is what I’m talking about:
