ARTS ARTS BOOK REVIEW
Darrow Montgomery
Intergalactic Planetary Nine Shiny Objects
music education programs in area schools will create more young musicians who can play for bands. In the meantime, G-Magic is striving to establish his nonprofit, Magic’s Music, to develop young go-go artists with musical instruction. He is currently auditioning young musicians to launch an all-kids go-go band, The Young Drip, that will be produced by his Hitmakaz Production Group. “We’re going to show that D.C. has a new swag, not just old swag,” he says. The new group’s lead talker? Lil Kelz. “He has a lot of potential,” G-Magic says. “Right now everybody has seen that video, and we call him the little Rapper, the little RahRah,” he says, referring to Chris Black, the legendary rapper for the Northeast Groovers who is now the lead mic and owner of WHAT?!. “I’m 120 percent sure Lil Kelz will be a future legend if he keeps at what he’s doing.” Petey also has plans for Mikael, hoping to play in a band featuring his grandson as lead talker. “The name of the band will be Mikael and the Boys,” Petey says. “I feel so good to know that he’s following in his grandfather’s footsteps. His ambition is serious and he loves go-go. We going all the way with him.” This summer has been particularly difficult for many in the go-go community: Along with all the financial hardships that have accompanied the COVID-19 pandemic, the loss of young lives due to street violence has been deeply painful. “Go-go has always helped keep kids off the streets,” G-Magic says. “The times I could have been doing wrong, I was at home practicing.
“I really feel like I’m on a mission because this will not only impact the lives of these children, it will also keep the culture alive,” G-Magic continues. “Go-go is our culture and our heritage. You won’t know where you’re going ’til you know where you been. I tell kids all the time, ‘I want to take you off the streets and onto the stage, because any person can be whatever they want to be if they put their mind to it.’” For Big G, seeing Mikael at DMV & Beyond represents a glimmer of hope in a heart-wrenching summer. “This is a perfect example of the energy and love the kids have for being positive and doing something great that puts them in a vibe where they can win instead of losing,” he says. “We still got our kids that still really love go-go. Seeing that boy up onstage doing his thing made me feel so good inside. It was a feeling out of this world, just to look at what God did to continue our tradition of real go-go music in our city.” For Mikael’s father, who is awed by his son’s ability, seeing him perform at DMV & Beyond evoked profound pride. “He’s 5 years old and he can get down like that,” Murray says. “The whole show was dope. I’m like damn, my son is gonna keep this beat alive. I’m still watching the video over and over, and I’m getting all kinds of calls.” For Coleman, her son’s performance that night signified all that—and one other notinsignificant development for the mother of an extremely energetic young boy: “He must have worn himself out,” she says, “because when he came home, he got into the shower and went right to sleep.”
By Brian Castleberry Custom House, 319 pages Nine Shiny Objects begins like a science fiction novel, or maybe a Stephen King book. In the summer of 1947, Oliver Danville, a drifter and washed-up actor with gambling debts, leaves Chicago for Washington state. He’s chasing the famous “nine shiny objects” that private pilot Kenneth Arnold saw hovering over Mount Rainier, a real event that kicked off a Cold Warera obsession with UFOs. They moved like saucers skipping over the water, he told the papers, and they ran with it, calling them flying saucers, kicking off Danville’s quest for the aliens inside— and he doesn’t doubt, even for a second, that there are “people” inside, he says. As he hitchhikes westward, he picks up a couple who follow him to Washington, exhibiting the same reverence. Then we lose them. The thrust of the book is that Danville becomes the leader, called the Tzadi Sophit, of the UFO cult the Seekers, who dream of a utopic, integrated society. But the reader is never privy to the world of the Seekers or their prophetic vision. Instead, the book flips through eight points of view after Danville’s, jumping ahead five years at a time, covering four decades of richly described American life. The perspectives hop across the country as the Seekers do, almost like a collection of short stories. A narrative begins to unfold, slowly: The Seekers leave for Long Island, where they hope to build a racially diverse, radically equal society. But the neighbors in the community up the hill are thoroughly against this kind of living. One night, a dinner party erupts into unseen but devastating violence, and the Seekers are left with a shattered dream. But that dream continues to resonate with those touched by it in the two decades
after—most notably in the seedy ’70s warehouse commune that Max Felt, just a teenager at the time of the attack, ends up running, where the shiny objects worshipped are sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Felt’s failed utopia is another cult we don’t see much of. Instead, as with the Seekers, the chapters inhabit the perspectives of the people whose lives have been shaped by these groups’ ideas and hopes. Even after the Seekers are reduced to a tiny group, even after the Sophit is assassinated, they continue to resonate across generations. On just the level of the writing, the book is a triumph. Author Brian Castleberry’s ability to inhabit each character’s mind, giving each distinct tics in their thought and speech patterns, makes their self-righteousness, confusion, guilt, and hope achingly legible. A plot like this one, where details are spooled out slowly via clues and recollections, could easily leave readers frustrated and disinterested, but Castleberry keeps up the momentum with ease. He draws the book’s social web across decades and thousands of miles, giving the readers plenty of time and space to connect how the characters in each chapter are related—and when there are surprises, they’re earned, and you’ll kick yourself for not catching them sooner. Most masterfully, Nine Shiny Objects makes the tragedy of the Seekers clear without tripping over itself to answer all the questions their history raises (especially in the final chapter, where the book returns to the promise of its otherworldly premise). Hidden behind the facade of a book about UFOs is a novel about 20th century America, its flaws and its fears. The world changes around the chapters and characters of Nine Shiny Objects like a rolling offscreen force, but very few of the people depicted are the ones doing the changing. Instead, social progress is seen as an inevitability, not the result of work and struggle. That gives the book a blinkered perspective, but in that narrow focus is a clear-eyed look at the reactionary American mind and the resentment and confusion that so many adopt as a coherent political position. —Emma Sarappo
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