Dead On: Speechless and The Good Place

Kristen Bell and Ted Danson in The Good Place on NBC.

With many of the new network shows yet to air their first episodes, the 2016 fall television is still young, but comedy has already scored two solid wins: NBC's The Good Place and ABC's Speechless.

The Good Place (NBC) is a fantasy/comedy that stars Kristen Bell (Veronica Mars) as Eleanor Shellstrop, a perfectly terrible person who, after suffering a premature (and markedly humiliating) death, wakes up in an afterlife deemed to reflect a life lived in self-sacrifice and moral loftiness. As Michael (Ted Danson, Cheers, Damages), the region's designer and current administrator, tells her, only very few human beings ever earn such an agreeable eternity – with the remainder ending up in "the bad place." (Of the bad place, we learn tantalizingly little, except that that's where every artist, all American presidents except Abraham Lincoln, and a shocking disproportion of deceased professional basketball players end up.) For the rest of eternity, Eleanor will live in this posh, upper middle class hereafter, along with 300+ of the world's most morally impeccable individuals. But it quickly becomes apparent that, in this "good place," things aren't quite that simple. For one, Eleanor is clearly there by mistake: some sort of clerical error seems to have swapped her selfish, decidedly unaltruistic life for that of self-sacrificing death-row lawyer. Together with Chidi (William Jackson Harper), the bookish philosophy professor picked as her "soulmate," as her unwilling accomplice, Eleanor has to figure out how to keep herself from being discovered or risk being resettled to the "other" place.

One Hell of a Show: NBC’s The Good Place Returns

Ted Danson and Kristen Bell

Warning: This review covers the entire first season of The Good Place, as well as the premiere of Season Two. It contains extensive discussion of plot points from throughout the show’s run thus far.

Setting a television comedy in the afterlife seems like an excellent way to set yourself up for failure. Since there is, by its very nature, a distinct sense of finality about the place, it’s hard to see how you might tell a long-running story that’s set there. Furthermore, since most religious traditions view existence after death as primarily a matter of receiving one’s just reward or punishment for their actions on the mortal plane, it’s not clear how you might develop a sense of character, or achieve any sort of narrative progression or tension. However, that’s just what Michael Schur and the creative team of NBC’s The Good Place achieved on the first season of the show.

As Mark Clamen noted in his initial review of The Good Place’s premiere, Schur’s metaphysical comedy had a rather tentative beginning. I found myself watching the first few episodes primarily out of curiosity as to how – or if – the show’s premise would develop, as well as for the performances by Ted Danson and Kristen Bell. However, as the larger scheme behind Schur’s premise began to reveal itself, and as the characters who inhabit this decidedly off-kilter version of heaven became more fully realized, The Good Place became far more than a pleasant-enough entertainment with a veneer of philosophical sophistication.

Talking Out of Turn #14: Richard Ford (1989)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One of my favourite books of criticism is D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature (1924) in which he addresses the varied works of American writers James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. In this panoramic and illuminating study, Lawrence examines how a number of gifted authors came to terms with the experience of a young country still in the process of finding its identity. "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything," Lawrence wrote in the opening chapter. "It can't pigeon-hole a real new experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their very own selves." What he was describing was the elusive spirit of place invoked in the American literary experience. Some sixty years later, another American writer, Richard Ford, was also trying to invoke some idea of the American identity in the bleak landscape of Montana. It was there that he explored the sensation of being rootless and what that revealed of the American character in the eighties.

author Richard Ford

This particular chapter of Talking Out of Turn, curiously enough, was the only one to feature only writers (it also included Timothy Findley and poet Daphne Marlatt). As for Richard Ford, in one of my last radio interviews at CJRT-FM, we discussed that spirit of place in a series of short stories titled Rock Springs.

Nowhere Land: "Heartbreak Hotel" and "There's a Place"

On the 40th Anniversary of the release of The Beatles' Let it Be album, here is a lengthy excerpt from my book Artificial Paradise: The Dark Side of The Beatles' Utopian Dream (Greenwood-Praeger, 2008):

When rock 'n' roll first began its promise was pretty basic: good times lay ahead. With that primary assurance, a captivating pact was also struck with listeners. The world was going to be a different place than it was today. As early as 1954, Bill Haley's simple pledge told us we'd find our freedom by putting our glad rags on and rocking around the clock. But the song did more than just rock around the clock. Youth riots broke out in movie houses after it was featured in the opening credits of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), an otherwise cautionary story about juvenile delinquency. In the same year as Bill Haley, The Penguins, a quietly graceful doo-wop group with ultimately only one hit up their sleeve, promised us a world of feasible pleasures when they asked us in "Earth Angel": Will you be mine? In answer, people danced with their hips moving just a little bit closer to their partners'. When Elvis Presley first decided to shake his hips on national television, nations of eager teenagers were given permission to do likewise -- and shake them they did.

Running On: This Is Us and the Demands of Network Drama

When I wrote about This Is Us last year, I noted that the NBC drama, along with creator Dan Fogelman’s now-defunct Fox baseball show Pitch, represented a more adventurous approach to storytelling, at least for traditionally risk-averse network television. To a large degree, that’s just the nature of the medium; it’s hard to achieve the sort of narrative freshness and surprise that the most popular cable shows rely upon, because a network show’s season is almost always considerably longer. The typical network drama produces over 20 episodes, as opposed to approximately 13 for a cable drama like FX’s The Americans. At their best, shows like The Good Wife or Buffy the Vampire Slayer have made a virtue of necessity, employing a case-of-the-week format that allowed them to create compelling self-contained episodes, such as Buffy’s “Hush” and “Once More With Feeling,” or entries in the series that unexpectedly become launching points for major arcs, such as Good Wife‘s “Red Team/Blue Team,” which kick-started one of that show’s creative high points.

East Meets West: The Good, The Bad, The Weird

South Korean cinema seems to be caught up in the rapture of a cultural renaissance. Their films crackle with the energy and inventiveness of a newly successful moviemaking machine, like Pixar at its prime, from Oldboy (2003) to Pieta (2013). I’ve never seen a better example of this than Kim Jee-woon’s The Good, The Bad, The Weird, which owes its existence to Sergio Leone’s spaghetti tour de force The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, but diverges from this legendary source material in creative (and often hilarious) ways. It’s not really fair to compare the two – one is a literal masterpiece and the other is a fun period action feature – but The Weird models itself too closely after The Ugly to ignore the similarities.

The Good, The Bad, The Weird takes Leone’s southwestern epic across the Pacific and seventy years into the future, landing us in 1930s Manchuria, where a hitman (Lee Byung-hun, “The Bad”) is hired to rob a train of a Japanese treasure map. An enterprising thief (Song Kang-ho, “The Weird”) interrupts this scheme and escapes with the map. Meanwhile, a bounty hunter (Jung Woo-sung, “The Good”) arrives to claim the bounty on The Bad. The film plays out from there in a series of escalating (and increasingly ridiculous) chases and escapes, until The Bad, The Good, a gang of Manchurian bandits, and the Japanese Army are all chasing The Weird towards the treasure’s hidden location. Only the three title characters make it there, where they engage in a classic Leone-style Mexican standoff. So the plot is almost exactly that of The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, albeit with a shot of Eastern flavour (the film is actually referred to as an “Oriental Western” in the end credits). It can’t exactly be called a remake, because the basic plot structure and rough character outlines are pretty much the only things that are the same. The Weird simply takes The Ugly and injects it with adrenaline – it’s almost the antithesis of The Ugly in terms of pacing, speed, energy, and humour, all of which it provides in spades. Where Leone’s film was laconic, Kim’s is hyperactive.

When Canada Outdid Herself: Memories of Expo 67

Dedicated to the memory of Abraham Schwartzberg (1921-2007)

This summer marks 45 years since Canada and more specifically Montreal, in order to commemorate the country’s centennial, hosted the 1967 International and Universal Exposition, known to all as Expo 67. And thanks to my perspicacious father, I was privileged to be able to attend most of it. That might not seem meaningful but I was only 7 years old when the fair officially opened on April 28, 1967 (various V.I.P.s toured it a day earlier) – I turned eight on June 27, about a third of the way through Expo’s six month run – and, according to my Expo passport that my mother dug up in Montreal, the stamps indicate that I went to about 75-76 pavilions, which was most of them. There would been the odd duplication but knowing my father, he would have wanted to maximize the experience and see as much of the event as was humanely possible. Expo is on my mind this year, too, because journalist John Lownsbrough has written a book on Expo, part of The History of Canada series, entitled The Best Place to Be: Expo 67 and its Time (Allen Lane, 2012). It’s a bit dry - Lownsbrough doesn't bring Expo to vivid life as well as he could have - but it’s also comprehensive and a valuable corollary to my own admittedly limited memories of Expo, though I do recall much of what I saw that summer.

Over that eventful summer, my parents hosted about 45 houseguests, from the rest of Canada and the United States, including American relatives who came from Wisconsin, New York and New Jersey. My parents each went 35 times to Expo 67, and assumed the duties of alternately taking me along with them. Sunday was when the whole family, including my younger brother and sister went to Expo’s amusement park, La Ronde, for the rides and later on partook of hamburgers and French fries and soft ice cream, half vanilla and half chocolate, which I like to this day. It was a magical time. There was consistently good weather, or what my mother called ‘Drapeau weather’, a testament to Montreal’s indefatigable mayor Jean Drapeau (whose last name translates as flag in French). He became the friendly face of the exhibition to the rest of Canada and the outside world. 

But pretty much everything else, in addition to the weather, fell perfectly into place in 1967, for a remarkable, record setting event (over 50 million visitors, a record that stands to the day for exhibition attendance) that really did change the way Canada saw herself and how outsiders, particularly our American neighbours, viewed this relatively new country. In fact, so comprehensive and inventive was Expo that I remember, less than a decade later, watching the U.S. bicentennial celebrations, which were nice, on TV and thinking to myself that we did it so much better in our celebratory year. One upping the U.S. isn’t something that happens very often but Expo 67 trumped anything they came up with in 1976.

A Drama of History: The 40th Anniversary of Randy Newman's Good Old Boys

"It's hard to hear a new voice, as hard as it is to listen to an unknown language," D.H. Lawrence wrote in Studies in Classic American Literature (1924). "We just don't listen." Lawrence wasn't just talking about something as basic as the fear of something new. New ideas, as he later suggested, can always be pigeon-holed. "The world fears a new experience more than it fears anything," Lawrence explained. "It can't pigeon-hole a real experience. It can only dodge. The world is a great dodger, and the Americans the greatest. Because they dodge their own very selves." Lawrence was addressing here the varied works of American writers James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. A panoramic and illuminating study, the polemic examines how a number of gifted writers were coming to terms with the experience of a young country still in the process of finding its identity. For an artist who has barely registered on the public's consciousness, except in his movie music and his songs for Pixar pictures, singer/songwriter Randy Newman could be one of Lawrence's great dodgers – an Artful Dodger – and one who deliberately creates paradoxical narratives in his songs. And his music, like the writers of the previous century, has also been on a comparable sojourn. For almost half a century now, the country he depicts with both love and devotion is also riddled with broken promises, violence, paranoia, superstition and arrogance.

Translations and An Ideal Husband: Classic Plays by Irish Playwrights

Adetomiwa Edun, Colin Morgan, and Seamus O'Hara in Translations. (Photo: Catherine Ashmore)

Brian Friel’s 1980 Translations, one of the great works in the modern repertory, dramatizes the earliest phrase of the Irish “troubles,” nearly a century before the term was coined for the Easter 1916 rebellion. Friel’s play is set in the rural town of Baile Beag in County Donegal in 1833, where the British Army has sent an expedition to draft a new map of the territory that Anglicizes – and implicitly alters irrevocably – the old Irish place names, which memorialize locals long dead, incidents long ago fictionalized, a mythology as well as a history. I last saw the play in a first-rate production by Garry Hynes on Broadway in 2007; the new revival at the National Theatre, directed by Ian Rickson, is just as good, and thanks to the work of the set designer Rae Smith and the lighting designer Neil Austin (as well as Rickson’s expressive staging), it’s even more beautiful to behold. The hedge-school that Hugh (Ciarán Hinds), the aging, alcoholic classics master, conducts in his home with the assistance of his son Manus (Seamus O’Hara) is a downstage playing area in suggested-realist style that morphs into expressionism as the set takes us into the surrounding countryside beyond. As the characters enter, Austin’s lighting silhouettes them against flashes of red, which is especially striking when the British officers, Captain Lancey (Rufus Wright) and young Lieutenant Yolland (Adetomiwa Edun), who is in charge of the actual mapmaking, appear to introduce themselves. When the scene shifts to evening at the top of the second act, specials hover above the stage, creating strange, cylindrical metaphors for starlight, and the field upstage of the hedge-school is dotted with lanterns. Gorgeous.

A Quiet Place: Never Let Up

(from left) Noah Jupe, Millicent Simmonds and John Krasinski in A Quiet Place.

In the wittily titled post-apocalyptic horror picture A Quiet Place, most of humankind has been wiped out by blind monsters, fitted out with terrifying incisors and highly developed ears, that prey on anything they can hear. (These imaginatively designed creatures are the brainchild of animator Alberto Martínez Arce.) The focus of the screenplay by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck and director John Krasinski is the Abbott family, who have managed to survive by living a silent existence in their house at the edge of the woods and foraging there and in deserted stores during the day. They haven’t completely evaded the monsters: one killed the youngest Abbott child when he couldn’t resist trying out a battery-operated airplane he’d found in the Walmart toy department. Since then Lee (Krasinski), his wife Evelyn (Emily Blunt), their daughter Regan (played by the talented young deaf actress Millicent Simonds, who was Rose, the little girl in Wonderstruck) and their son Marcus (Noah Jupe) have managed to steer clear of them, complying with the complicated procedures and warning systems Lee, a technology expert (the film doesn’t identify his actual profession), has put in place, while he spends part of every day in the basement, trying to locate other survivors and working on a hearing device for his daughter. Regan is very smart and has begun to rebel against her parents’ dictates, which, of course, increases the already heightened menace. She also feels responsible for her younger brother’s death – she gave the airplane to him, not realizing he would pocket the batteries as well – and is sure that Lee blames her.

Jury’s Still Out: NBC’s Trial & Error

Nicholas D’Agosto and John Lithgow

NBC’s long-running sitcom The Office left its mark on contemporary television in a number of ways, not least in the sudden emergence of a number of mockumentary-style comedies, most notably NBC’s Parks and Recreation and ABC’s hit Modern Family. However, it’s striking that both of these shows seem to have essentially discarded the sub-genre’s main conceit: the idea that everything we see and hear is being recorded by a camera crew that exists within the world of the show. The Office spent a considerable portion of its final season acknowledging that there had been other characters, long familiar to the denizens of Dunder-Mifflin but completely unknown to us, present throughout the show’s run, and it dealt with some of the logical complications that might ensue from that situation. Parks and Modern Family, on the other hand, became almost Brecht-lite; characters speak directly to the audience, calling our attention to the show’s artificiality, but there’s rarely any pretense that they’re actually talking to a person behind the camera.

It’s hard not to think of the quirks of the mockumentary sub-genre while watching NBC’s new Trial and Error, which premiered on March 14 and airs on Tuesday nights. In large part, that’s because creators Jeff Astrof and Matthew Miller seem to have attempted to reverse-engineer the success of The Office and Parks and Recreation; the latter’s influence is especially evident from their attempts to quickly establish the show’s setting, a fictional South Carolina town called East Peck, as a quirky but lovable backwater, à la the equally fictional Pawnee, Indiana. Here, the conceit that everything that we see is the result of a camera crew following around the characters is frequently acknowledged, oftentimes to satisfying comic effect.

The Perilous Future of Bookstores

The recent announcement that Vancouver’s Duthie Books, which has been in business for 52 years, is closing shop at the end of February, has shaken book lovers in that city. While Duthie’s Cathy Legate admitted not owning her store was a liability and also blamed the strengthening Canadian dollar for her store’s demise, it was Chapters / Indigo and the Internet that took the lion’s share of the blame for Duthie’s demise. This view was expressed by both the press and Duthie’s loyal patrons, even though Duthie’s overeager expansion first led the company, which once had ten outlets, to declare bankruptcy in 1999 before rebounding with the one Vancouver outlet that was left.

Memories Are Made of This – Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me and A Band Called Death

The original members of Big Star: (from left) Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens, Chris Bell and Andy Hummel

Two imperfect but interesting current documentaries, Drew DeNicola and Olivia Mori’s Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me and Mark Christopher Covino and Jeff Howlett’s A Band Called Death, both available on Video On Demand, offer a chance to savor some of the complications and ironies of the rock music culture of the 1970s. That was the first full decade when bands were being formed by people who had grown up in the shadow of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and had come of age thinking of rock not as a get-rich-quick scheme or the next logical step in the evolution of rhythm and blues and country music and pop in general, but as a form of self-expression that had its own history and tradition and pantheon. It was also the age of the first generation of rock critics – college-educated working journalists like Robert Christgau, academics like Greil Marcus, unclassifiable mavericks like Lester Bangs – who thought that rock was a subject worthy of interest in itself, to be written about without condescension, and – a legacy of having been rock fans during the late ‘60s – that it might be both an art form and a trigger for social revolution. 

Hyde and C.K.

Louis C.K. performing on-stage in 2015. (Photo: Charles Sykes)

The current explosion of allegations of sexual abuse and predatory behavior by powerful men in the entertainment industry is a sign of health. A year after a solid minority of the American electorate chose as our president a man who sees women as accessory items to be bought, used, and judged on their looks – and who has sought to empower and has surrounded himself with misogynists, homophobes, and racists – people with stories to tell are coming forward, in some cases after decades of fearful silence, and exposing rich, influential, deeply entrenched power players as monsters. It's clear by now that a seismic shift in public perception and a redefinition of what's acceptable behavior – and not just the behavior of the predators themselves, but those who become complicit in their actions by keeping their secrets and giving them cover – is necessary if the toxic slime infecting the culture and impacting people's careers is going to be cleared away. Some of the ugliest behavior has been on the part of men who've been shaping the culture for more than a generation, like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein. But those two are also past their prime as movers and shakers and had plenty of enemies who were happy to see them fall. When it became general knowledge that Cosby is a serial rapist, the news had a special shock built into it because of the millions of TV viewers who, having first discovered him at the midpoint of his career, thought of him as a dispenser of paternal wisdom and family values, both in real life and as the star of The Cosby Show. And Weinstein worked hard at molding his sham image as a nurturer of talent and the businessman hero who made independent American cinema possible and popular. But did anyone in the year of our lord 2017 actually like them?

Talking Out of Turn #25: Neil Bissoondath (1988)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of CJRT-FM's On the Arts

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

In 1984, Paul Mazursky made Moscow on the Hudson, a poignant comedy about exile and homesickness, which starred Robin Williams as a Russian musician touring with the Moscow circus who spontaneously defects in New York City. The movie ostensibly deals with the complex set of emotions set loose when he finds his freedom. His actions trigger a mixture of homesickness, sadness, and the longings for a sense of place that come when (for political and ethical reasons) you are forced to leave home. With those themes in mind, I devised a chapter called Exiles and Existence where a number of artists (including Jerzy Kosinski and Josef Škvorecký) examined what it means to find yourself in a new land while looking back at the home you abandoned.

Neil Bissoondath

Author Neil Bissoondath, the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul and Shiva Naipaul, is from Arima, Trinidad and Tobago. Although he came from a Hindu tradition, he was schooled in a Catholic high school. During the seventies, political upheaval brought him to Canada where he initially settled in Ontario and studied at York University achieving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. But Bissoondath went on to teach English and soon became an award-winning author. When I spoke to him in 1988, his first book of short stories, Digging Up the Mountains, was just being published. In the book, he examines (as Mazursky did in Moscow on the Hudson) the pain endured when people are uprooted from their homeland.

Curiously, in 1994, he would stir up a significant amount of controversy with his book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, which called into question the validity of Canada's 1971 Multiculturalism Act. There are noticeable hints leading to his views towards defining ethnicity in our opening remarks. 

Origin Story: The Legacy of King Solomon's Mines

Author H. Rider Haggard, often credited as a pioneer of the "lost world" fiction genre. (Photo: Getty)

A group of men take off on a quest into the unknown, seeking a potentially mythical MacGuffin and using their unique skills to get into and out of scrapes, with a few good-natured comic interludes thrown in along the way. That’s a setup of many popular films, and that’s part of why I found my recent experience reading H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines so interesting. Combined with a rediscovery of George Stevens’s 1939 film Gunga Din, which I hadn’t seen since childhood, catching up with Haggard’s classic adventure novel has provided some perspective on the origins of tropes that have begun to feel overly familiar after appearing in one franchise film after another.

A Future Nostalgia: The Crucible of Paul McCartney

At the age of 71, Paul McCartney continues to build his legacy, never content to coast on the sizeable reputation he built as part of one of popular music's most significant groups. But as he goes forward, with a new album – called New – which John Corcelli will be reviewing in Critics at Large in a couple of weeks, it's curious how much McCartney draws from his past in order to move forward with a more contemporary sound. He performs as a man who knows full well that he can't out-jump his own shadow so by embracing it he casts his reflection forward. Yet just as he dabbles in keeping current, there is still a relentless quest in his music to get back, to seek a place of refuge while continually defining his musical future. (The latest album has four producers on it to help him do so.) Once was a way to get back homeward, he once sang confidently in 1969 on "Golden Slumbers." But for Paul McCartney, all his life, getting back homeward became an illusive task. As his career scaled musical heights not imagined, McCartney always looked to the past for some point of reference, or maybe for some profound meaning to make sense of how far he'd come as an artist. Who could blame him? With The Beatles, he not only was living out a dream, but the dream took on a life that made him feel larger than he truly was. His songs once had a power that they couldn't attain now that he was on his own. Writing in The Beatles was about more than just honing his craft. It fulfilled McCartney's ambitions and gave full shape to his creative impulses; it completed him. With the band gone after 1970, looking back could have seemed futile. But without a burning sense of the past, McCartney couldn't see a future in front of him.

Live Aid ‘85: 25 Years Later

In many ways, the immense Live Aid charity concert, which took place simultaneously in London, England and Philadelphia, U.S.A., 25 years ago today, was my Woodstock. (Joan Baez made a similar statement to the crowd at J.F.K. stadium in Philadelphia when she came onstage.) I was way too young to have been able to attend the seminal 1969 Woodstock, N.Y. concert, which crystallized the 60s in many people’s minds. So when almost everyone who was a who’s who in English and American rock and pop music got together, under the auspices of The Boomtown Rats' Bob Geldof and Ultravox’s Midge Ure, to raise monies for the starving millions in Ethiopia and Sub-Saharan Africa, I was psyched to lose myself in the music. And I certainly, like so many, was shocked at the images of starving children, in particular, facing death in the 20^th century. That this terrible tragedy could be happening in such a ‘prosperous’ world seemed almost inconceivable. At that time, I was working in a video rental outlet (remember them?) located in a department store in downtown Toronto, fortuitously right in front of all the televisions. So when I showed up for work that Saturday morning of July 13, 1985, I made sure all the TV sets in the department were tuned to the live broadcast of the concerts and also that the TVs were turned up loud. (I still remember one of the older salesmen holding his hands over his ears in silent protest at the ‘noise.’) Later on, after my shift was over, I headed off to a friend’s house to watch the taped ABC special commemorating the event. That whole day, twelve hours long at least, was all about the cause and the music.

Spies, Hackers, & Reality Stars: Summer TV Roundup

Shiri Appleby and Josh Kelly on Lifetime's UnREAL.

The growth of television over the last decade-and-a-half has been remarkable. A medium once derided for its vacuity has expanded to dominate much of high culture as well as low, with serious publications featuring detailed exegeses on the nuances of dramas such as Breaking Bad and comedies such as Parks and Recreation. At the same time, TV’s rise has resulted in an explosion of new programming, especially scripted content, leading major critics such as Linda Holmes and Alan Sepinwall to wonder whether, in the latter’s words, there is “too much good scripted television.”

One corollary of scripted TV’s rise has been its expansion to new platforms at the same time that the broadcast networks, once the only game in town, have become increasingly boring and formulaic. “Prestige” television is generally understood to have migrated to outlets such as premium cable, online venues such as Netflix and Amazon, and some basic cable channels such as FX and AMC. However, the proliferation of scripted TV hasn’t stopped there. One of the most notable developments of this past summer has been the appearance of a number of very good shows on unlikely or little-known basic cable channels. The appearance of these shows suggests that even networks that seemed to have found comfortable, if unambitious, niches for themselves are looking to add some of the luster conferred by a quality original series to their reputations. None of these shows represents a radical reinvention of the form, but all of them offer a fresh approach to the now-familiar tropes of television drama.

Life is a Game of Go: The Enigmatic Literature of Yoko Tawada

(New Directions.)

“It is the second job of literature to create myth. But its first job is to destroy it.”

--Kenzaburo Oe

Yoko Tawada’s beautiful and strange literary work is totally saturated with mythology, both the public and the private sort, mixed together through a frantic postmodern blender to shake up a truly startling smoothie of poetic insights about the odd sensations that accompany our situation as human beings in a weary century. True, Tawada’s novels, often written in both German and Japanese before being deftly translated into the only language I can access, are what we might quaintly refer to as an acquired taste. But then, so is sake. But sake, once tasted, and whether hot, chilled or room temperature, alters our senses forever after. And so it is with Tawada’s marvelous and marvel-filled stories. They have the capacity to inalterably change the open-minded reader, in the way that only great literature can, and after reading her surreal, dreamlike reveries about our relationship to words and language, most other literary beverages feel slightly bland by comparison. So we won’t compare them, any more than we would compare sake to tapwater.