revisits

Last year the prolific and gifted Zadie Smith stumbled into controversy with the publication of “Shibboleth” in the New Yorker. She purportedly approached the white-hot Gaza demonstrations with the nuance and complexity they deserved and yet derided pro-Palestinian students at Columbia University as “cynical and unworthy,” stirring up a hornets’ nest among her young fans, who expressed their anger on various internet platforms. The controversy gained traction because of Smith’s record of championing the marginalized, citing theorists like Frantz Fanon while targeting empires and the omnipresent patriarchy. That she singled out one group of activists, many Jewish, at the very moment Arab toddlers were being blown apart by U.S.-funded bombs raised doubts about her touted values. Her conclusion was startling, her tone defiant: “Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward.” The lady doth protest too much?

“Shibboleth” appears in “Dead and Alive,” Smith’s collection of previously published essays, in which she assumes most if not all those roles she attributes to herself. Fanon is here as well, amid an array of artists and authors such as Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Philip Roth. Smith is arguing for the necessity of vigorous criticism and often makes her case. The book’s finest pieces wrangle, in elegant prose, with humanity’s contradictions; the weaker ones indulge in name-dropping, footnotes and op-ed invective.

Zadie Smith

(Ben Bailey-Smith)

“The Muse at Her Easel,” in the opening section, probes the relationship between English painter Lucian Freud and his model, Celia Paul, also a painter, via a review of her memoir. (Paul is the mother of one of 12 children he fathered outside of marriage.) Smith’s sly trick here is a bit of Freud-play: Lucian seen through the prism of his grandfather Sigmund, the family romance on steroids. Celia revolves around the artist here much as she did when he was alive, vulnerable and reflective, a moon to his sun. It’s both a restrained and overwrought essay, a cryptic tale of sexual politics, like her fellow Brit Rachel Cusk’s novel, “Second Place,” but one that urges us to think hard about abuses in the service of “museography.”

Smith brings an empathic eye to other artists, from the allegorical Toyin Ojih Odutola to the subversive Kara Walker. And she shines a bright light on numerous writers who have inspired her, particularly in remembrances of Didion (whose influence we sense throughout “Dead and Alive”) and the great Hilary Mantel. Her pieces on two books, “Black England” and “Black Manhattan,” excavate hidden histories of Black resistance and the painful compromises brokered to move forward. Her tone in “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction” is elegiac, as though smartphones have killed off the craft; yet it’s also a manifesto of sorts, and a declaration of her own aesthetics. “Belief in a novel is, for me, a by-product of a certain kind of sentence,” Smith observes. “Familiarity, kinship, and compassion will play their part, but if the sentences don’t speak to me, nothing else will.” Amen, sister.

Her forays into social commentary are more problematic. She’s strong on the weird population kink known as Gen X, squeezed between the larger boomers and millennials, and the switchback road we traveled to marriage and parenthood: “We all still dressed like teenagers, though, and in the minds of the popular culture were ‘slackers,’ suffering from some form of delayed development, possibly the sad consequences of missing such key adulting experiences as a good war or a stock market crash,” Smith asserts. “We felt history belonged to other people: that we lived in the time of no time.” She’s persuasive when she remains within her comfort zone, opining on race, gender and, occasionally, class. Not so much when she ventures into technology. In “Some Notes on Mediated Time,” she broods at length on the destabilizing effects of the internet, social media and the algorithm silos that shape our present. It’s tough to parse irony from self-congratulation. “I have to say how immensely grateful I am that the work I have been so fortunate to do these last twenty years — writing books — has also gifted me the opportunity, the privilege, of devoting the time of my one human life to an algorithm. To keep almost all of it, selfishly, outrageously, for myself, my friends, my colleagues, my family,” Smith writes. “There are memes I will never know. Whole Twitter meltdowns I never witnessed. Hashtags I will forever remain ignorant about.” Which raises the question: Why lament a social paradigm shift if you haven’t bothered with it in the first place? Something isn’t right. Elsewhere in the essay she claims that social media is “excellent for building brands and businesses and attracting customers.” Could the same be said of a disingenuous essayist?

She comes across as preaching to her peers rather than seeking converts, a whiff of Oxbridge elitism. Hence references to Derrida, Dickinson, Knausgaard, Borges, shout-outs to Booker laureates “Salman” (Rushdie) and “Ian” (McEwan). This level of self-regard in a writer and thinker as justifiably exalted as Smith may explain why our nation is turning on reading: aristocracies breed resentment among the proles. Then Smith steps into the muck of global conflicts. The moral bothsidesism found in “Shibboleth” splits the baby; she does herself no favors with Solomonic pronouncements and Pontius Pilate-like self-exoneration. (Elsewhere she indicts Trump and Netanyahu while neglecting the money and media that empower them.)

“Dead and Alive” does what it was designed to do: It gathers the author’s criticism, literary obituaries, a university address and an interview with a Spanish journal between two covers. The execution falters. Smith’s provocations are often stunning; her prose is thrillingly strident; but her fiction better captures the messiness of public and private selves at war with each other.

Cain is a book critic and the author of a memoir, “This Boy’s Faith: Notes From a Southern Baptist Upbringing.” He lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

The old stage at West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre looks as small as ever to Tim Curry. Back in 1974, the actor spent nearly a year strutting across its boards in fishnets and a snug corset as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the flamboyant, sexually ravenous mad scientist of the musical comedy “The Rocky Horror Show.”

Witnesses to that run of performances still marvel at the spectacle of Curry’s nightly entrance, as he marched from the lobby on a long catwalk, his high heels at eye level with the audience. He would then cast aside his Dracula cape to sing a personal theme song, “Sweet Transvestite.”

“It’s actually really nice to be here because it was another home for me,” says Curry, 79, looking up at the empty stage inside the Sunset Strip nightclub. “It became my stomping ground. I had to appear as though I owned it — and I kind of did.”

At the end of that same year, Curry was back home in England to shoot the feature film version, “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” a rock ’n’ roll send-up of old sci-fi and horror B-movies that became both a cult classic and a vibrant symbol for sexual freedom. It is the original midnight movie and is now being feted around the world for its 50th anniversary with a second life as the longest continuous theatrical release in cinema history.

Tim Curry, center, as Frank-N-Furter in 1975’s “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

(John Jay Photo / Disney)

The role changed Curry’s career forever, and he will be part of some of those celebrations, beginning with a screening of a newly restored 4K version of the film, along with a panel Q&A, at the Academy Museum on Friday.

At the time of the film’s original release in 1975, it tapped into a cultural zeitgeist that mixed glamour and androgyny, akin to the era’s glam-rock movement led by David Bowie. “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” ultimately found a cult of fans who gathered for weekly midnight screenings in costume as the movie’s outlandish characters, performing as a “shadow cast” in harmony with the film onscreen.

“It was part of the sexual revolution, really,” says Curry. “Experiment was in the air and it was palpable. I gave them permission to be who they discovered they wanted to be. I’m proud of that.”

Since a stroke in 2012, the actor has been in a wheelchair and most of his work has been in voiceover. He did appear on camera in a 2016 remake of “Rocky Horror” for television, this time as the criminologist. But it was as the lascivious, self-confident Frank-N-Furter that Curry made history.

On this afternoon, he is dressed in black, auburn hair slicked back. In the Roxy’s lobby is a portrait of Curry in character as the mad doctor in pearls. It was a role he originated in London, on the tiny stage upstairs at the Royal Court Theatre, where it first became an underground sensation.

“Even for the time, there was a lot of courage that went into that performance,” remembers Jim Sharman, who directed Curry in the original stage productions in London and Los Angeles and then onscreen. “Tim himself was actually a kind of quiet intellectual offstage, but onstage he really knew how to let it rip.”

Curry, center, in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

(Disney)

With a story and songs written by actor Richard O’Brien, who also played the skeletal, sarcastic Riff-Raff, “Rocky Horror” begins with a young couple caught in a rainstorm who approach a mysterious castle in search of shelter and a phone.

Played by then-unknowns Susan Sarandon and Barry Bostwick, the couple find Frank-N-Furter is hosting a convention of partying aliens in formalwear from the planet Transsexual in the galaxy Transylvania.

The mad doctor is also anxious to show off his latest experiment, the creation of a perfectly formed male, a personal plaything of chiseled muscles and blond hair, as he sings “I Can Make You A Man.” The scene leaves an impression.

“He takes no prisoners — it’s his world and you just happen to live in it,” Curry says with a smile of his Frank-N-Furter. “He doesn’t leave much air in the room. And I enjoyed that because it was so not like me, really.”

Notably, the film shares a 50-year anniversary with “Jaws,” and Curry remembers someone at 20th Century Fox placing newspaper ads that year for “Rocky Horror” with the film’s glossy red lips image and words promising, “A different set of jaws.”

“Jaws,” of course, was a record-breaking summer blockbuster, but as the longest-running theatrical release of all time, “Rocky Horror” really has no competition in terms of impact. It helped establish a culture for midnight movies in open-ended rotation, from David Lynch’s “Eraserhead” to Paul Verhoeven’s “Showgirls.”

At the customary hour of midnight, the restored 4K film will be premiering across the country this weekend, with special screenings and Q&As on Oct. 4 at Hollywood Forever Cemetery and Oct. 15 at the Grammy Museum. The film will then be rereleased on Blu-ray on Oct. 7, with a reissue of the official soundtrack album on Oct. 10.

Also landing in time for the celebration is a new documentary, “Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror,” directed by Linus O’Brien, son of “Rocky Horror” author and composer Richard O’Brien. The 90-minute film explores the making of the movie, the original stage musical and the decades of fan culture that followed.

“When a work of art survives this long, it’s working on many different levels,” says the younger O’Brien, who was a toddler on the set. “You want to live in that house and have those naughty experiences. [People] will be talking about it long after we’re all dead.”

The “Rocky Horror” journey from underground theater to feature film began after Los Angeles music impresario Lou Adler saw the show during a trip to London. Known as a manager and record producer (Carole King’s “Tapestry”), Adler was shaken from his jet lag, instantly recognizing “Rocky Horror” as a potential attraction for his recently opened L.A. club, the Roxy. Within two days, Adler signed a deal to host its U.S. premiere.

At the Roxy, the show was an immediate sensation, fueled by Curry’s wildly charismatic performance. Opening night brought out a crowd that included Jack Nicholson, John Lennon and Mick Jagger. L.A. Times theater critic Dan Sullivan compared Curry to various Hollywood grande dames (Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, among them).

“It was one of the great parties of all time,” Adler recalls during a video call from his home in Malibu. “The acceptance was unbelievable.”

Talk of turning the stage musical into a movie soon followed and a deal was made with 20th Century Fox, with producers Adler and Michael White guaranteeing delivery on a modest budget of about $1 million.

“I don’t know if 20th Century Fox ever understood the film,” Sharman says with a laugh, in a video call from Australia. “They might’ve been relieved that it was going on a low budget and being made on somebody’s lunch money.”

It was the first feature film for many of them. But Adler and White insisted on keeping the stage musical’s creative team together, including Sharman, costume designer Sue Blane and production designer Brian Thomson. With Curry firmly in the lead role, most of the cast members were drawn from the London production. Joining them were American actors Sarandon, Bostwick and singer Meat Loaf.

“I adored her,” Curry says of Sarandon. “She was a witty girl and so beautiful, and a real actress, I thought. You could tell that she had something.”

He also became friends with Meat Loaf, who appeared in the small but impactful role of Eddie, bursting out of a freezer on a motorcycle long enough to sing the manic “Hot Patootie, Bless My Soul.” In 1981, Curry hosted “Saturday Night Live” and appeared with Meat Loaf in a skit that had the actors selling “Rocky Horror” memorabilia. (Curry is still irritated by that one: “Dreadful.”)

Lou Adler, photographed at the Roxy in West Hollywood in 2023.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

“When the movie was a definite thing, there were several big stars who wanted to play the part,” Curry remembers. “Mick Jagger wanted to play it and he would’ve done a great job if you saw ‘Performance.’ But [director Sharman] said he wanted me to do it. I don’t think the studio was happy that he turned down Mick.”

Though Sharman was a very experienced stage director, he had made only one previous film, a 16mm feature called “Shirley Thompson vs. the Aliens.” For “Rocky Horror,” he says he was aiming for “a dark version of ‘The Wizard of Oz.’” He was also inspired by old B-movies and German Expressionism along with lessons learned from the stage. Interior scenes were shot at the old Hammer horror films’ Bray Studios just outside London.

“The reason we don’t have great anecdotes from the shoot is we didn’t have time for anecdotes,” adds Sharman. “It was shot in five weeks.”

Bostwick, appearing in one of his first film roles, remembers, “It felt like a very low-budget but colorful, bright and inspiring musical. You knew from the moment you were around the sets and costumes and lighting and makeup and camera people that they were at the top of their game.”

“The Rocky Horror Picture Show” evolved in some subtle but meaningful ways in its transition from the stage. For the live performances, Curry did his own makeup. “In the theater, I made it look a lot more amateur, deliberately, like he wasn’t good at it but was making a brave attempt and didn’t care much,” Curry says with a laugh. “In the play, it was just a lot trashier.”

For the film, French makeup artist Pierre La Roche was recruited to refine Frank-N-Furter’s exterior. La Roche had previously worked with Bowie during the Ziggy Stardust era.

“He was indeed very French,” says Curry, campily. “He was brilliant.”

An early sign of the challenges the movie would face arrived at an early screening of the completed film for Fox executives. Curry was there with Adler. “You could touch the silence at the end,” recalls Curry. “It wasn’t a very alive audience. There was really no reaction at all.”

Fox also hosted a test screening in Santa Barbara. The audience was a local mix of retirees and university students, and many of the older filmgoers began heading for the exit, until the theater was nearly empty.

But as Adler and a young Fox executive named Tim Deegan sat on the curb outside, they also met young people who were excited about the film. Adler credits Deegan for finding the “Rocky Horror” audience in an unexpected place: indie theaters at midnight.

Its second life began at the Waverly Theater in New York, where it began evolving into a happening that was both a movie and a theatrical experience. At the time, Curry happened to live within walking distance of the Waverly.

“It was a sort of guaranteed party,” he says of any potential moviegoer. “And if he didn’t bring a date, he could perhaps find one.”

On a recent weekend at the Nuart Theater in West L.A., barely five miles away from the Roxy, it’s approaching midnight and the lobby is filled with fans and volunteer shadow performers in “Rocky Horror” drag. Appearing as Frank-N-Furter is Kohlton Rippee, 32, already in his heels and makeup.

Like many here, he sees the film as both an outlet and a connection to a found family — a way “to see aspects of themselves represented in ways that they don’t see from traditional media. It’s like, ‘Oh, I can see myself in this and find this weird community to be around.’”

Bostwick first heard of the film’s second life from others and word trickled in that his every appearance onscreen was met with an affectionate callback from the crowd: “Ass—!” He didn’t see the phenomenon himself until later at the Tiffany Theater on Sunset.

“What do they say, that Disneyland is the happiest place on Earth? I’ve always thought that a Friday and Saturday night at a theater at midnight was the happiest place on Earth,” the actor says of the many raucous screenings he’s witnessed. “Everybody was just having a ball.”

After Walt Disney Co.‘s 2019 acquisition of 20th Century Fox, it turned the House of Mouse into the unlikely steward of “Rocky Horror.” Back in 1975, nothing could have been further from the Disney brand than a rock ’n’ roll musical about a cross-dressing scientist. That year, Disney released “The Apple Dumpling Gang.”

“I guess Walt is kind of revolving in his grave,” Curry jokes.

Even so, Adler says Disney has been a good partner on “Rocky Horror” and is supporting the multiple official anniversary events. “Walt was a breakthrough guy,” the producer notes. “He broke through and made a mouse a hero. So, in a way, he had his own Frank-N-Furter.”

On a wide, empty stretch of Venice Beach in 1980, seven Los Angeles architects — Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss, Coy Howard, Craig Hodgetts, Robert Mangurian and Frederick Fisher — gathered for a group portrait by photographer Ave Pildas. Clad in mismatched outfits and standing casually in the sand, they looked more like a rumpled rock band than the future of American architecture.

The resulting image, published in Interiors magazine, distilled a seismic moment in L.A.’s creative history. Those seven, gazing in their own directions yet joined in a sense of mischievous rebellion and cocky exuberance, represented a new generation that was bringing a brash, loose creativity to their work and starting to distance itself from the buttoned-up codes and expectations of the architecture establishment.

Each would go on to have a successful career, from Pritzker Architecture Prize winners to directors of architecture schools. And they and their compatriots would, for a while at least, help put a rapidly changing L.A. at the center of the built culture.

“That one photograph contains a whole world,” notes filmmaker Russell Brown, who recently directed a 12-part documentary series about that Venice architecture scene. “There was risk going on, and freedom; it was all about ideas.”

“It’s become a kind of reference point,” adds architectural journalist Frances Anderton, host of the series. “It just keeps reappearing whenever there’s a conversation about that period.”

The 1980 image is the jumping-off point for “Rebel Architects: From Venice to the World Stage,” produced by Brown’s nonprofit, Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles. Four of the architects — now in their 70s and 80s — gathered for a (far less brash) new photo and an honest conversation about their early careers in L.A., and what’s transpired since for the series, which began streaming monthly on FORT: LA’s website July 1.

A native Angeleno with a background in feature and documentary filmmaking, Brown conceived of the concept after a chat with architect Robert Thibodeau, co-founder of Venice-based DU Architects. After a deeper dive into the image with Anderton, the idea for a reunion was born.

“We thought, why don’t we restage the photo and then use that as an excuse to get the guys together?” Brown explains.

He preferred a spontaneous, lighthearted group discussion to the typical documentary, with its one-on-one interviews and heavy production.

Frances Anderton, from left, Frederick Fisher, Craig Hodgetts, Thom Mayne and Eric Owen Moss catch up for “Rebel Architects,” a 12-part series.

(FORT: LA)

“It’s about the chemistry between creative peers,” says Brown. “The real legacy of these architects isn’t just in the buildings. It’s in the conversations they started — and are still having.” He added: “There’s a spark that happens when they’re together … They talk about failure, competition, teaching, aging. It’s a very human exchange.”

Episode 1, titled “Capturing a Moment in L.A. Architecture,” opens with four of the surviving architects — Fisher, Mayne, Moss and Hodgetts — recreating that seminal photograph for Pildas and sitting down for an interview. (Howard was interviewed separately, Gehry declined and Mangurian died in 2023.) The group dissects the photo’s cinematic, informal composition, in which Pildas aims down from a berm, the neglected buildings behind the eclectic crew shrinking into the horizon, merging with the sand. And they remember a time in which the city’s messy urban forms and perceived cultural inferiority provided endless creative fuel, and liberation.

Pildas recalls how the original shoot came together at the request of British design editor Beverly Russell, who was looking to capture “Frank Gehry and some of his Turks.” (The international design press was gaga for L.A. at the time. Anderton notes that her move from the U.K. resulted from a similar assignment, on the “subversive architects of the West Coast,” for the publication Architectural Review in 1987.)

At the time, most of the architects were working in garages and warehouses, forming their studios and collaborating with equally norm-busting and (relatively) unheralded artists in the scrappy, dangerous, forgotten, yet exploding Venice scene. In a later episode, the architects start listing the art talents they would run into, or befriend, including Larry Bell, James Turrell, Ed Ruscha, Fred Eversley, Robert Irwin, Robert Rauschenberg and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to name a few.

Basquiat was then living and working in Hodgetts’ building. “It was a spectacular fusion of all this creative energy,” Hodgetts remembers. “There was no audience, there were no guardrails, and one did not feel constrained.” He adds, later: “We all felt like we were marooned on a desert island.”

Pildas, who had studied architecture before switching to design and, eventually, photography, was uniquely suited to capture the group. He had shot some of the small, quirky experiments of Mangurian and Mayne, and knew most of the others through social and professional circles. (He even knew Hodgetts from high school back in Cincinnati.)

The first attempt at the photo seemed stiff, says Pildas, so he took out a joint, which all except Hodgetts accepted, he says. The icebreaker worked. In a later image, says Pildas, Fisher is hugging Gehry’s leg, the others huddled around. “It got pretty friendly in the end,” he jokes.

Pildas argues that the photo is much more layered with meaning (not to mention nostalgia) now than it was at the time. “Back then, it was just another magazine shoot. Now, it’s history,” he says. Adds Moss: “Its relevancy, or not, is confirmed by the following years. Otherwise it’s gone.”

Frederick Fisher, from left, Thom Mayne, Craig Hodgetts and Eric Owen Moss recreate their famous 1980 photo.

(Ave Pildas)

Each episode explores the image’s layers, and the unfolding stories that followed — the challenges of maintaining originality; crucial role of journalists in promoting their work; maddening disconnect between L.A.’s talent and its clients, along with the mercurial, ever-evolving identity of Los Angeles. The tone, like the photo, is unpretentious and playful, heavy on character and story, not theory. This was not always an easy task with a group that can get esoteric quite quickly, adds Anderton. “I was trying to keep it light,” she laughs. “I don’t think I even have the ability to talk in the language of the academy.”

“They’re cracking jokes, interrupting each other, reminiscing about teaching gigs and design arguments,” says Brown. “There’s real affection, but also a sense of rivalry that never fully went away.” Hodgetts doesn’t see it that way, however. “It was really about the joy of creating things. We wanted to jam a bit, perform together; that’s really life-affirming,” he says.

There are some revealing moments. Mayne, whose firm Morphosis is known for bold, city-altering buildings such as Caltrans HQ in downtown L.A., reflects on teaching as a way of “being the father I never had.” (His father left his family when he was a young boy.) He tenderly discusses the seminal role that his wife Blythe — a co-owner of Morphosis — has played in his career. Fisher reveals that Gehry was the chief reason he dropped everything to come out to L.A. (At the time, he was working as a display designer at a department store in Cincinnati.) “I remember seeing this architect jumping up and down on cardboard furniture. I could see there was something going on here. Something percolating,” he says. Moss opens up about his struggles to negotiate the demands of the practical world, while Hodgetts performs brilliant critiques of the others’ work, sometimes to broad smiles, others to cringes.

Notably absent from the reunion is Gehry himself, who is now 96. “He’s at a point in his life where trudging through sand for a photo wasn’t going to happen,” says Brown. “But his presence is everywhere. He’s still the elephant in the room.”

One episode explores how Gehry, about a decade older than the others, both profoundly influenced and often overshadowed the group — a reality that was perhaps reinforced by his nonchalant dominance in the photo itself. “Frank takes up a lot of oxygen,” Mayne quips. Still, all admire Gehry’s unwillingness to compromise creatively, despite often heavy criticism.

Another prevailing theme is the bittersweet loss of that early sense of freedom, and the Venice of the 1970s, with its breathtakingly low rents and abandoned charm. Today’s architects — wherever they are — face higher stakes, infinitely higher costs and tighter regulations.

“The Venice we grew up with is completely gone,” says Fisher. “But maybe it’s just moved,” noted Moss. Distinguishing L.A. as a place whose energy and attention is constantly shifting, he wonders if creative ferment might now be happening in faraway places like Tehachapi — “wherever land is cheap and ambition is high,” he says.

While Pildas was capturing the seven architects 45 years ago, he was also busy chronicling the city’s street culture — jazz clubs, boulevard eccentrics, decaying movie palaces and bohemian artists. All were featured in the 2023 documentary “Ave’s America” (streaming on Prime Video) directed by his former student, Patrick Taulère, exploring his six decades of humbly perceptive, deeply human work.

After reviewing the recreation of the photo — the architects are still smiling this time, but their scrappy overconfidence feels eons away — Pildas wonders who the next generation will be, and how they will rise.

“Maybe it’ll happen that they’ll have another picture someday with a bunch of new architects, right?” he says. “This is a fertile ground for architecture anyway, and always has been.”

Exposing that “fertile ground” to Angelenos of all kinds is FORT: LA’s overarching goal. Founded in 2020, it offers architecture trails, fellowships and a surprising variety of programming, from design competitions to architecture-themed wine tastings. All, says Brown, is delivered, like “Rebel Architects,” with a sense of accessible joy and exploration — an especially useful gift in a turbulent, insecure time for the city.

“Suddenly, you kind of think about the city in a different way and feel it in a different way,” says Brown. “This is a place that allows this kind of vision to come to life.”