The Ghost Network

by Catie Disabato

  I know you’ve done some reading about the Situationists—so you know that to rigorously maintain the focus and driving force of the group, Guy [Debord] had to expel several members, including a few of his painter friends. I’ve exchanged a few e-mails with an academic named McKenzie Wark (under a pseudonym of course) who has just written a book about the Situationists, and has been asked to write the introduction to a collection of Guy’s correspondence. I convinced him to send me a few of the translated letters he’s working with and I read Guy’s own words on expelling members from the Situationists.

  It comes down to this: it was incredibly painful for Guy to break with his friends and oust them, but if he hadn’t done so, the Situationists would’ve crumbled. I won’t let my own efforts crumble. I’ve worked too hard and come to [sic] far. If Peaches didn’t mean to hurt the Urban Planning Committee and my pop career, I would be able to work with her—but she acted against me deliberately. I can’t deal with that. I won’t ever see her again. I don’t care if you maintain a friendship with her, but you can’t speak to her about the Urban Planning Committee. If you do, I’ll expel you too. I’m sorry to sound so strict with you. I love you. Any forcefulness behind my words is because I’m hurt and frightened of losing you as well.

  The first thing I want to do when I get back to Chicago is talk deeply and seriously with you. I miss you. I will see you when I return.

  Ali and Molly did speak “deeply and seriously” and Ali reassured Molly, who put the incident with Peaches out of her mind.s Molly stopped worrying, and Ali continued her friendship with Peaches.

  Meanwhile, Berliner and Molly had been working like mad on The Ghost Network, piling map on top of map at a frantic pace, as “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” started to get more and more airtime on Top 40 radio. To keep up their breakneck speed, Berliner often traveled from Chicago to wherever Molly was promoting her album and singles. Berliner enjoyed visiting Molly’s other world, her vibrant life as a steadily rising pop star, so they were together for the climax of the work on The Ghost Network, on the set of the “New Vogue Riche” music video.

  On August 31, 2008, more than a year after Molly and Berliner had begun building The Ghost Network, Molly’s dancers, entourage, and a film crew descended on a mansion in the affluent Los Angeles suburb of Westlake Village to shoot the music video for “New Vogue Riche,” Molly’s first EDM-influenced single. Molly conceptualized the video, which follows a girl who discovers a portal to her own city hidden inside the second floor of a fancy mansion. It is a sequel to her first music video, for “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas).”

  As she hadn’t yet proven she could record a hit, the label spent almost nothing on the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” video production. To direct, they had hired Danielle Skendarian (not yet as in demand as she is today, and therefore cheaper), rented a mansion, and told Joe Frank Parker to choreograph a “normal pop video dance.”t Parker obliged and developed a routine that combined sharp jazz movement with provocative hip-hop dance aesthetics, plus a few movements that would become dance signatures for Molly: a slinky walk with little flicks of her legs, her hands blocking her face, her whole upper body still; rolling into what, in yoga, would be called a “shoulder stand” and haphazardly peddling her legs; and overall jerking, rather than fluid, movements.

  SDFC had foisted upon Molly a concept for the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” video. It begins with Molly and her friends (Peaches and Ali) driving to a mansion on a hill, lit with teal and purple lights. During the chorus, they crash the party, and dance around as the guests dressed in Gatsby-esque costumes look on, perplexed. In a dazzling, back-lit close up, Molly lip-syncs her hook: “Don’t stop stop / stop never stop / Keep dancing, dancing / dancing ’til we drop.” She finds Astroman, the song’s producer, among the guests and gyrates against him, mouthing his lyrics: “Work, work, work your body / Pop, pop, pop a Molly.” The video ends with a long dance sequence on the mansion’s grand staircase. In the final shot, Molly laughs and runs up the stairs, an outtake edited into the video for its considerable charm. In later interviews, when SDFC was giving Molly more money and creative power, she called the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” video the intro to “New Vogue Riche.”

  Molly designed the “New Vogue Riche” video herself. On the concept, she took creative input from Momo Waxler, her creative director, and her choreographer, Parker. Though SDFC and Rappaport, Molly’s handler from the label, had to approve of the concept before they would fund the video, they did so without giving Molly any notes and approved her choice of Skendarian to direct again.u

  Unlike the “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” video, “New Vogue Riche” smacks of Molly’s own aesthetic, and despite the record company’s minimal involvement, it serves as a sharp marker of her new power within the music industry and her label in particular. “New Vogue Riche” begins where “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” left off, with Molly running up the giant staircase. At the top of the stairs, Molly’s costume transforms into a bodysuit outfitted with panels of LED lights.

  Ali follows Molly up the stairs, and they find abandoned rooms, the furniture covered with white sheets. During the first verse, while Molly sings about wanting to be Madonna when she was a little girl, Molly rips the sheets off couches and statues. She throws the white fabric, billowing, to Ali, who uses them as props in Parker’s ballet-inflected choreography.

  After the first chorus (“When I get money [New!] / I throw a party [Vogue!] / For everybody [Riche!] / New. Vogue. Riche. Dance.”), Molly uncovers a miniature skyscraper, the size of a child’s playhouse. As Molly removes the tarp, the skyscraper’s little windows glow purple. Molly wraps herself around the skyscraper, humping and licking it, and generally acting like a sexed-up King Kong.v After a verse, a door on the side of the skyscraper springs open.

  Dropping to her hands and knees, Molly Metropolis crawls into the skyscraper, with Ali at her heels. Molly then finds herself in a seemingly empty city, her costume transformed again, this time into a jet-black leotard with metallic sleeves. The map travels off the leotard and, in body paint, across Molly’s arms, legs, neck and face. Molly gazes at the sky, where the words Molly’s Metropolis dangle, a purple neon light attached to nothing in particular. In the giant neon words, all the O’s are rendered as small triangles, conforming to the visual ascetics associated with the ’80s-style Outrun Electro genre Molly détourns for many of her tracks.

  A few quick cuts later, Molly’s dancers come tumbling out of doorways and join Molly and Ali in the street. Molly dances energetically with the group through a few iterations of the chorus. The video ends with Molly beginning to explore her city.

  The “New Vogue Riche” music video received the best critical response of any of her videos and remains a fan favorite. I’m inclined to agree with the popular sentiment. The video is playful and fun, the choreography is top-notch, and the visuals are striking thanks to Benoît Debie’s candy-colored, glow-y cinematography.

  Molly’s video for “Apocalypse Dance” was the third chapter of this saga, and ended in a cliffhanger. Because Molly disappeared, the cliffhanger was never resolved.

  Molly invited Berliner to Los Angeles to sync their maps and to visit the set of “New Vogue Riche”; he pretended to be an old friend from high school whom she had met at summer camp. While on set, he met and hit it off with one of Molly’s dancers, Irene Davis. The two immediately began dating.

  Molly and her team shot the video over three days, from August 31 to September 2, 2008, during a particularly exciting time for Molly Metropolis and her General Council; “Don’t Stop (N’Arrête Pas)” was quickly climbing the charts and Cause Célèbrety had debuted earlier in the month to larger than expected sales figures. The dancers, Parker, and even the film crew, who had no long-term vested interest in Molly’s career, felt the energy and excitement on set. In between takes, the production assistants played LCD Soundsystem and M.I.A., and the dancers developed little dance moves fo
r “Paper Planes.” For the first time since Molly was dropped from her first label, she felt happy and secure in her career. In the minutes before the shoot began, she wept with happiness in front of the whole crew, then apologized to the makeup assistants for making them reapply her mascara. Molly was so emotionally overwhelmed, she didn’t realize her hold on Ali had begun to unravel.

  Without Peaches around to help, the weight of Molly’s intensity fell on Ali alone. She treated Ali passionately, but roughly. She had always done so. For example, in an early interview with MTV VJ Nani Cook, when Cook worked up the nerve to awkwardly question Molly about her “friends,” Molly answered, benignly, that they were her “followers and dancers.” Then she grabbed Ali’s jaw and shook her face. Ali didn’t otherwise move or react, but unedited footage of the interview shows Peaches gasping as it happened.w Cook quickly moved on to other topics. Ali thought about that moment often in the weeks leading up to the “New Vogue Riche” shoot, when Molly’s ferocity reached a fever pitch. Without Peaches there to help normalize the way Molly treated her, Ali realized that moment defined her relationship with Molly. Ali didn’t like that she had done nothing while Molly moved her. She felt like she was always standing perfectly still while Molly Metropolis shook her face.

  For the “New Vogue Riche” video, Molly asked Parker to leave part of the bridge—a repetition of the couplet “all you nouveau / do the new vogue” layered over pulsating ’80s-style synths—unchoreographed, so she could freestyle with Ali. With the cameras rolling, Molly told Ali to sit with her knees up and Molly draped herself over Ali’s legs. Molly pressed the front of her body against Ali’s legs, arching into her, and tightly wrapped her hands around Ali’s thighs, while Ali performed a modified version of Madonna’s famous arm choreography from the “Vogue” music video. Then Molly mimed a gun, pointed it at Ali’s head, and pretended to fire. Ali recoiled, then gracefully fluttered down, until she was lying on her back. Molly slithered over her body, then sprung up to standing and performed the Vogue-like arm choreography herself—she’d mimed killing Ali and stealing her dance moves.

  The theatrical violence shook Ali. Although she knew Molly Metropolis wasn’t actually trying to hurt her, she had a sinking fear that her relationship with Molly was toxic. Molly had already started telling Ali her ideas for her next batch of songs; she called it her “album for the end of the world” and Ali, in turn, started to see Molly as a world-ender. She found herself in the precarious position of being a monster’s henchman.

  Skendarian shot Molly and Ali’s violent dance on the first day of “New Vogue Riche” filming. After Skendarian wrapped shooting, a vulnerable Ali sought out Molly’s company. She suggested a late night spa treatment at the hotel, or maybe glasses of Scotch in the suite, but Molly told Ali she needed to spend her evening working alone with Berliner. With conspiratorial glee, Molly told Ali that she had a surprise for him: she had digitized the last of the L maps and The Ghost Network was complete. Ali took strong note of Molly’s wording, “working alone with Berliner,” and “a surprise for Berliner”—as if Ali’s involvement in The Ghost Network project meant nothing. For Ali, that was the last straw. She thought Molly considered her nothing more than a weight-bearing column, someone to lean on, but not someone who could contribute. She planned her defection.x

  Berliner and Molly drank champagne and toasted the completion of The Ghost Network, calling it the first step in the discovery of the New Situationists’ agenda. Meanwhile, Ali called Peaches. Ali aired her grievances with Metro; Peaches reiterated some of her own. Each girl allowed the other’s negative energy to intensify her own frustration. By the end of the conversation, Peaches begged Ali to quit and move back to New York. Ali had a better idea.

  “Peaches and I did a lot of work without a lot of real thanks,” Ali told me in our first interview, unapologetic and still angry, just like Peaches, despite the two years that had gone by since Molly disappeared. “Metro was appreciative, sometimes, but she didn’t let us in and neither of us was satisfied with doing the work without getting to participate in what came next. I could’ve just left, but that would’ve been turning my back on all the time I’d spent collecting information. I believed, and I don’t think I was wrong, that Peaches and I earned the gold at the end of the rainbow just as much as she and Nick did. None of us knew what we were looking for, so it didn’t seem like she deserved it more than us. She didn’t.”

  After the “New Vogue Riche” video shoot ended, while Berliner lingered in Los Angeles with Molly Metropolis’s crew to spend more time with Davis, Peaches secretly flew to Chicago and stole as many of the maps as she could; some eluded her, because Berliner had already moved them to his pied-à-terre, which Ali and Peaches didn’t know about, but most of them were stored in a small loft Molly rented for Ali and Peaches to use as a work/live space when they stayed in Chicago. (Luckily, Berliner had a backup. He had developed an intense paranoia after the New Situationists fell apart and had already made physical copies of the maps, which he stashed in a secret storage locker in Toledo, Ohio.) Ali applied for a license to carry a gun in New York.

  Half a week later, while Berliner was midair, flying back to Chicago, Ali texted Peaches to tell her that she had quit the General Council. Berliner visited his apartment later that night and found it ransacked. He called Molly, who informed him she had received an ominous series of text messages from Ali and Peaches:

  Metro—We thought it might be déclassé to break up with you via text, but to be perfectly honest, the thought of hearing your voice or seeing your face one more time was too much for us to bear.

  September 6, 2008, 10:26 p.m.

  Goodbye, we’ve started a counterinsurgency. We’ve decided to take what you want to have. Give our regards to Nick.

  September 6, 2008, 10:27 p.m.

  Watch your back.

  September 6, 2008, 10:27 p.m.

  Sincerely, The Society of the Children of the Atomic Bomb.y

  September 6, 2008, 10:30 p.m.

  To fund their fledgling “counterinsurgency,” Ali called Anthony Zavos, the son of a friend of her father’s: a thirty-year-old real estate lawyer and trust fund baby. Zavos was young, rich, and short—only five foot five. He often dated dancers and high-end fashion models who towered over him; if he was destined to be short, he would rather flaunt his height than hide it. He lived in Manhattan and dressed in slim, European-cut suits and men’s leather ankle boots. Zavos also couldn’t stand to be alone, so he’d spend most nights jumping from party to party, friend to friend, squeezing in a few hours of sleep between 3 a.m. and dawn, then heading to the office of his father’s investment consulting firm where he was quickly rising through the ranks.

  Zavos had money and an insatiable thirst for excitement; Ali was also one of his favorite late-night hangout buddies. She told Zavos her story about Molly Metropolis and the Urban Planning Committee, and about her plans to take what Molly wanted. Zavos thought going head-to-head with a pop star seemed fun and agreed to fund her operation. He opened a bank account with a generous line of credit.

  Peaches suggested they find a spy to keep track of Molly’s movements. She had someone in mind: a twenty-two-year-old SDFC intern named Tony Casares, who could feed Ali and Peaches information about Molly’s schedule and upcoming projects. Ali approved and, while Peaches spent her evenings recruiting Casares, Ali doubled down on the spy operation. She wanted to turn someone who had more day-to-day contact with Molly, someone who could report on Metro’s temperament and obsessions. Recruiting a dancer was Ali’s best bet; she’d been close with all of them. Ali cycled through a few options before settling on Irene Davis.

  Born in Michigan, Davis grew up in New York City, where she had lived in a Tribeca loft with her parents and her three brothers. Although she barely remembered Michigan, Davis preferred to think of herself as a Midwestern soul displaced on the East Coast. During junior high school, she was a lonely introvert, friendless except for her charismatic older broth
er, Aaron. She started dancing in high school, when her father enrolled her in modern dance classes. She made a few dancer friends, but she hated most of her classmates at Magen David Yeshivah High School and preferred to spend her time with Aaron. After Aaron was expelled for carrying on sexually with another male student, Davis got herself expelled as well, showing up drunk to class and smoking in the girl’s bathroom. With her new public high school’s less demanding course load, Davis focused more on dancing.

  Every afternoon after school, she danced for two hours: ballet on Mondays and Wednesdays, jazz on Tuesdays, hip-hop on Thursdays. On Fridays, she stayed out all night drinking with her brother and his various boyfriends, only one of whom made a lasting impression: Paulo Forlizzi, twenty-two, tall, skinny, handsome and, most importantly, a rising choreographer with a good reputation. Most of Davis’s dance teachers had felt the need to inform her that she could never be a professional dancer because her body didn’t fit the mold; Forlizzi told her to “fuck what she heard.” He spent his own time working on technique with her. He said she was never going to be a ballerina, but if she worked hard enough, she could have a good career in modern or hip-hop dance, as a performance artist or backup dancer. Even after Forlizzi and Aaron ended their romantic relationship, Forlizzi continued to coach Davis. A month before she graduated high school, he called in a favor and got her an audition with Molly Metropolis.

  Davis nailed it, and her body didn’t matter. Molly was looking for someone with personality and zing in her dancing, not someone bland that looked like they could perfectly execute choreography. She was building her General Council and she wanted it to be sparkly, creepy, dynamic; she preferred Davis’s sexy scowl, her curves, and her effortless grace to the legions of tall, skinny ballerinas with perfect extension.