Breaking the Proverbial Fourth Wall: Soulpepper's Production of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

Ted Dykstra & Jordan Peddle

In the middle of Act II of Soulpepper Theatre's new production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Rosencrantz (played by Ted Dykstra) ponders the feeling of being buried alive and comes to the conclusion that “life in a box is better than no life at all…I suppose.” Such is the dilemma of two minor Shakespearian characters brought to life in one of Tom Stoppard’s most popular plays. Written in 1966, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead was an immediate hit and once you’ve seen it, you’ll know why. First, it’s a wide-ranging comedy featuring a consistent series of pratfalls matched by some of the wittiest dialogue ever written for the theatre. Second, it makes fun of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved tragedies (Hamlet) as seen through the eyes of two of its minor characters. The rest is an imaginary ride into the unknown as notions of being are seriously considered by the leading characters: Why are we here? Where are we going? And what is the point of all this? The play also offers up cogent ideas central to the art of theatre: What is the difference between acting and reality.

One of a Kind: A Woman Like Me by Bettye LaVette

Bettye Lavette at the San Jose Jazz Festival in 2009 (Photo by Andy Poupart)

Bettye LaVette has been waiting a long time to tell this story. In fact she has been waiting a long time to have anybody care about the story she tells. Her success in the last couple of years has seen this remarkable singer move to the top of the world. Elvis Costello, Pete Townshend and Paul Shaffer are all quoted on the back cover, raving about the book. They all mention her voice in their blurbs. They’re not only talking about her singing voice either. That voice stands on its own as one of the finest R&B instruments in use today. They are referring to the voice she uses to tell her story: a raw take-no-prisoners voice that is not afraid to tell it like it is.

Pills and Thrills: Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects

Jude Law stars in Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects

Steven Soderbergh’s Side Effects opens like a horror movie, with a tantalizingly eerie scene of bloodstains, and bloody footprints, on the floor of a New York apartment. While the audience is perched on the edge of their seats, waiting to find out what’s happened, the action flashes back to the events that brought us here: a young, would-be Master of the Universe (Channing Tatum, the smooth operator who was the central focus of Soderbergh’s previous film, Magic Mike) is released from prison after serving four years for insider trading, and is greeted by his mousy wife, Emily (Rooney Mara). Emily, who appears to be unmoored and suicidally depressed over the change in her family’s fortunes, begins seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Banks (Jude Law), and is put on a (fictional) new drug called Ablixa, whose manufacturers have a financial arrangement with the good doctor. (Basically, he’s trawling among his patient base, looking for willing guinea pigs.)

By the middle of the movie, we come full circle and find out how that apartment floor got so red and messy, and it’s a horrific event, all right. But although Side Effects is, in essence, a kind of murder mystery, the murder itself isn’t its main engine for generating suspense. It’s just the plot device needed to get the Law character in a position to worry about being professionally humiliated and discredited, to such a degree that it costs him everything: his reputation, his business (his partners are quick to dump him when things look bad), his income stream, even his marriage (to an expertly tart Vinessa Shaw). Part of what makes Side Effects such a modern American movie is that its hero, whose life never seems to be in danger, qualifies as being in dire peril because his career might be heading for the drain. 

House of Cards: Netflix Deals Us a New Hand

"You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment." – Kevin Spacey stars in House of Cards, on Netflix

On February 1st, the entire first season of the new American version of House of Cards became available on Netflix worldwide. In light of these unique circumstances, I should emphasize that this post only contains very minor spoilers for the first of the show’s 13 episodes.

A little over a year ago, Netflix launched its first original program, making the first season of Lilyhammer available to its subscribers. The Norwegian-American co-production was big hit in Scandinavia and a moderate critical success here in North America (it’s light, but uniformly enjoyable, fare). It was by no means a quiet rollout, but compared to the press and enthusiasm of the Kevin Spacey/David Fincher produced House of Cards, in retrospect Lilyhammer seems almost like an open secret. (A second season of the Steven Van Zandt series, it is worth noting, goes into to production in March).

Last January, when Lilyhammer was first being rolled out, there was some talk about Netflix’s entry into original programming, and even more talk in recent weeks since House of Cards’ much publicized launch on February 1st. Certainly, House of Cards deserves the press – it is actor Kevin Spacey (American Beauty) and director David Fincher’s (The Social Network, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) first foray into television, and it is much more ambitious both narratively and artistically than Lilyhammer, but all talk of revolutions notwithstanding, it isn't likely to herald a new age of television by itself. But let’s just say this: House of Cards is worth watching. What else does a viewer really need to know?

The Gothic Mode in That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden

On Thursday, March 7th, between 6 and 8pm, at Ben McNally Books 366 Bay St. (Richmond and Bay) in Toronto, Bob Douglas of Critics at Large launches the second volume of his study of the Gothic mode in history, That Line of Darkness: The Gothic from Lenin to bin Laden. Today we feature a specially prepared excerpt from the new volume.

When you cross over that line of darkness, it’s hard to come back. You lose your soul.

– Former CIA officer. Quoted by Jane Mayer

Gothic is a mode – perhaps the mode – of unofficial history. 

– Literature of Terror by David Punter.

Gothic texts frequently chart the trajectory of individuals who suppress or lack the capacity to empathize with others. Similarly, when individuals in the larger world succumb to an ideological virus, neither experience nor reality can disrupt their single-minded quest to achieve utopia. Their narrative often includes sanctioning the emotional humiliation and the physical assault upon people they consider non-persons. If intended victims are regarded as vermin or parasites that must be eliminated, moral restraints to cold-blooded violence are atrophied, if not abandoned. The Gothic mode employs filters – the demonization of the other, the double or a sinister duality, psychic vampirism, the obsession with bloodlines – to explore how individuals and groups inspired by an ideology or opportunism can lose their moral compass and descend into a gray if not dark zone. In Gothic fiction ethical codes “operate at best in distorted forms.” The same can be said of totalitarian states and the militant Islamists. In a chapter from The Dictators titled, “The Moral Universe of Dictatorship,” Richard Overy argues that the Nazis and the Stalinists adopted an extreme moral relativism that subsumed individual conscience into the collective will, one that was driven solely by ideological imperatives. Just as moral elites like the church and the law were co-opted or destroyed by Nazi and Soviet ideology, the original meaning of the Quran is lost, even repudiated by the actions of militant Islamists.

Politics and Poker: Fiorello! at City Center

Danny Rutigliano, center, as Fiorello LaGuardia in Fiorello! (Photo by Sara Krulwich)

One of my earliest musical-theatre memories is of seeing Fiorello! on Broadway with my parents in 1960, after it had won the Pulitzer Prize. I can still remember some of George Abbott’s staging, most vividly the big “The Name’s LaGuardia” number in the middle of the first act, where the title character, Fiorello LaGuardia (Tom Bosley), campaigns fervently in English, Italian and Yiddish to secure the Republican vote for a Congress seat in a district nailed down for years by Tammany Hall. It’s a marvelous show-stopper, one of the most memorable pieces in the musicals of the late fifties, like “Ya Got Trouble” in The Music Man and “The Telephone Hour” in Bye Bye Birdie. This musical bio of the man who became one of New York City’s most beloved mayors – the diminutive but fierce character known as the Little Flower – is a terrific show; the original cast recording captures its brio as well as the melodic range of Jerry Bock’s music and the wit of Sheldon Harnick’s lyrics. (It was their first hit, predating She Loves Me by four years and Fiddler on the Roof by five.) So I was in a state of joyous anticipation from the moment Encores! announced that Fiorello! would be the show to open its twentieth season. (The series began with the same musical in 1994, but I missed it.)

The Hindsight of Time: Ben Affleck’s Argo

Ben Affleck's Argo

There are a number of good reasons why many of the post-9/11 movies (In the Valley of Elah, World Trade Center, Reign Over Me) have failed to come to terms with the aftermath of that tragic moment and the subsequent wars that followed. Besides depicting those events through conventional melodrama employed only to stir audience empathy, these films actually leave little to the imagination.While trying to make sense of a time that is still being played out, each movie leaves scant room for reflection. This might be why Zero Dark Thirty, a movie about the mission to kill bin Laden, fails to resonate with the power the subject warrants. Despite all the heated debate about the picture’s point of view on torture, for example, director Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) actually backs away from the dramatic core of that subject.

While I think it’s clear that she isn't endorsing waterboarding as a means of getting information, she also isn’t delving into why it would be a considered means of interrogation for tracking down the mastermind of 9/11. Her picture simply depicts the steps of that quest, the full facts not withstanding, but she leaves out the dramatic ambiguities that would give the story a quickening pulse. The performances in the movie are also so attenuated, so inert, that the actors can't take us into the larger, more disturbing questions which means they never get engaged (despite the media hoopla). Zero Dark Thirty fails, for instance, to even bring to light how national policy has changed significantly from the era of the Cold War (where two superpowers with the ability to incinerate the planet tried to avoid that catastrophe) to the post-9/11 period (where the enemy isn’t concerned with what happens in this world, but rather the possibility of salvation promised in the next one). These uneasy examinations of interrogation, international security and the subject of terrorism (which has a whole different cast when seen in the context of religious fundamentalism instead of the secular kind offered by Communism) are not being explored in these 9/11 movies because the thinking in them hasn't moved past the tropes of the Cold War years. They may be contemporary films about post 9/11 but they end up feeling stuck in the past.

Hit and Miss – Beethoven: The Symphonies w/ the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Franz Bruggen, conductor

A certain rite of passage is writ large for conductor and orchestra when it comes to Beethoven’s nine symphonies, their commercial interests notwithstanding. What was once a serious musical statement has now become a novelty. Since the advent of recorded sound, there are dozens of Beethoven Symphonic cycles, including such prestigious conductors like Herbert von Karajan (4 versions), Bernard Haitink (3) Arturo Toscanini (2) and more recently Emmanuel Krivine's in 2011, the latter on so-called, period instruments dating back to Beethoven’s era.

For Frans Bruggen (b. 1934) the Dutch-born musician and conductor, whose recent set was released last year on the Glossa label, he had the desire to re-create the sound of Beethoven’s music. When he formed the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century in 1981, he sought to reproduce something close to the original instrumentation. As listed in the All Music Guide, “All its members play instruments either built during the Baroque or Classical eras, or on modern-built instruments that are replicas of authentic period instruments.” The orchestra was originally set up to perform a few times a year due to the international make-up of its members.

In the early 80s, the period instrument concept was the new wave of classical music. Suddenly it wasn’t just a modern orchestra playing Baroque and 18th Century music; it was an orchestra looking to re-create sounds that once filled the concert halls of Vienna, London and Berlin, 200 years ago. Bruggen and the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century made a safe start with their early recordings on the Philips label, featuring compositions by Mozart, Haydn and selected works by J.S. Bach. Meanwhile, similar period-instrument ensembles released several Beethoven symphonic cycles: Monica Hugget and the Hanover Band (1982), Roger Norrington and the London Classical Players (1986) and John Eliot Gardner and the Revolutionary and Romantic Orchestra (1993).

Bruggen and the Orchestra of the 18th Century first released the complete symphonies of Beethoven in 1994. In spite of the competition, it made the musical world wake up and listen anew. Bruggen’s careful research into the instrument tuning; tempo markings and the composer’s intentions were critically acclaimed. Suddenly the battle between the modern orchestras and period orchestras was on. It wasn’t so much about the differences in orchestration, as it was the shapes, colours and emotional content of Beethoven’s music that was revealed to listeners. I’m happy to report that this new complete collection of Beethoven’s Symphonies has quite possibly surpassed Bruggen’s recording 18 years earlier, and timing has a lot to do with it.

In 2011, in a dedicated effort to present the Beethoven Symphonies as a whole, the orchestra was booked in Rotterdam to perform a Beethoven cycle like no other: all nine symphonies in ten days from October 6 to 16th. Individually the symphonies aren’t that long, except for SY 9, which is usually over an hour. So it is possible to play 2 per night depending on the length of the program, which is exactly what they did. This new collection, released last October, captured those performances and for the most part, the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century delivers the goods. But with every Beethoven "cycle" some hit and some miss.

I tried to recreate that Rotterdam experience by listening to the entire symphonies within 2 weeks. These are my impressions in numerical order:

Hearing History: Peter Whitehead's Charlie is My Darling

Toward the end of Charlie Is My Darling – Peter Whitehead’s documentary of the Rolling Stones’ 1965 Ireland stopover, recently recovered, restored, and released on DVD – bassist Bill Wyman is informed that a young female fan fractured a leg in the mob rush that followed that night’s show. “Oh,” he sighs, appearing as genuinely distressed as it is possible for someone as inexpressive as Bill Wyman to appear. His response calls back the moment in Gimme Shelter (1970), chronicle of the group’s 1969 US tour, when Mick Jagger, after viewing footage of the murder that occurred while the Stones performed at the Altamont festival, murmurs, “Oh. It’s so horrible.” From a fractured leg to a knife in the back: the arc of the ‘60s is there, if you are into arcs. Other moments in the Whitehead film likewise seem ripe for omen-spotting – like the interview with Brian Jones, his speech articulate but his eyes gazing from some decadent darkness to the drugged and drunken ending he met in his swimming pool less than four years later; or the little riot that devastates a Dublin concert stage, as neatly-dressed lads and lasses maul their idols in a grade-school run-through of uglier scenes to come.

Many of us enjoy reading history backward in this way, and investing innocence with auguries of corruption. Maybe these moments aren’t really there. Maybe Charlie Is My Darling is only what it seems – an unlikely retrieval from the period just before rock ‘n’ roll celebrity collided with general apocalypse, and glimpsed its true soul in Keith Richards’s rotting tooth.Yet Whitehead too is clearly tempted to see a dark future foretold in his footage. The Charlie DVD contains three separate versions of the film – a new, 65-minute cut; the director’s original cut (35 minutes); the producer’s original cut (49 minutes) – and the Dublin fracas climaxes all three; but it is most lengthy in the newest, post-Altamont cut. And Wyman’s suggestive sigh is missing from the two earlier iterations.

Goin' Down the Road, Feelin' Numb: Two-Lane Blacktop

Laurie Bird, James Taylor, and Dennis Wilson in Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

    After the Altamont concert disaster in December 1969, when a fan was killed a few feet from the stage where The Rolling Stones were performing, psychedelia lost its middle-class appeal. More unpleasant news followed in 1970 – the Kent State and Jackson State shootings, the Manson Family trials, the deaths by overdose of famous rock stars. And even more quickly than it had sprung up, the media fascination with the counterculture evaporated. 

    But the counterculture, stripped of its idealism and its sexiness, lingered on. If you drove down the main street of any small city in America in the 1970s, you saw clusters of teenagers standing around, wearing long hair and bell-bottom jeans, listening to Led Zeppelin, furtively getting stoned. This was the massive middle of the baby-boom generation, the remnant of the counterculture – a remnant that was much bigger than the original, but in which the media had lost interest.

 – Louis Menand, “Life in the Stone Age” (The New Republic, 1991)

A few years ago, the Criterion Collection came out with a box set devoted to the movies produced by Bert Schneider, Bob Rafelson, and Steve Blauner’s BBC productions in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, including Easy Rider, Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, the Monkees vehicle Head, and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show. The set established that the ‘70s renaissance in American movies resulted in a fair amount of unwatchable slop – both Henry Jaglom’s debut film A Safe Place and, for anyone not enjoying an acid flashback, most of Easy Rider qualify – but, taken as a whole, those movies represent a thrilling moment in popular culture, a time when a group of people who’d been excited by the French New Wave and other breakthrough European films in the ‘60s tried to bring something new to American movies, while keeping one foot in the studio system.

There might be another box set waiting to be assembled from the product of Universal’s “youth division,” which was set up in direct response to the success of Easy Rider and other counterculture hits that the studio bosses of the time simply found bewildering. Under the supervision of youthful studio executive Ned Tannen, a motley assortment of filmmakers, including two heavy hitters from Easy Rider, were basically given about a million dollars apiece and instructed to go nuts. The results – including Dennis Hopper’s The Last Movie, Peter Fonda’s The Hired Hand, Milos Forman’s Taking Off, Frank Perry’s The Diary of a Mad Housewife, John Cassavettes’s Minnie and Moskowitz – were, again, a mixed bag, but they add up to a snapshot of a fascinating time in American history and movie culture.

Laurie Bird and Warren Oates

The experiment also yielded one strange, near-masterpiece: Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, which Criterion brought out in a gorgeous two-DVD set in 2007, which has now been upgraded to Blu-ray. The movie looks great. That said, I discovered Two-Lane Blacktop in the ‘80s, when the local CBS affiliate in New Orleans, which started showing all-night late movies back when round-the-clock TV broadcasting was still a novelty, used to run it in the late-late night, early-morning hours, its final moments leading directly into Sunrise Semester. I was living in Mississippi then, and the movie, snippets of which were jammed in between commercials for Al Scramuzza’s Seafood City and PSAs for animal adoption and those little informative booklets from the U.S. government, used to get fuzzier and fuzzier as dawn approached and the signal began to die. A part of me will probably always feel that this was the ideal way to see Two-Lane Blacktop, and not just because the movie ends with the film appearing to catch fire in the projector, so that it ends by literally burning itself out.

Conversations in Color: French and Japanese Prints at the Smart Museum of Art

Kanae Yamamoto, Bathers in Brittany (1913)

When Japan re-opened trade routes to the West in 1854 after two centuries of economic seclusion, the influx of Japanese art into Europe and the United States was transformative. You can hardly look at the major Western painting and printmaking movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries without factoring in the influence of Japanese woodblock prints; Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Art Nouveau and Cubism all took inspiration from the forms, styles and techniques of ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” adapting the new possibilities these prints provided for color, space, decoration and illusion to startlingly different effects.

France was the cauldron of artistic innovation during this period, and Japonisme was everywhere in the culture. The canonical nineteenth century writers and literary critics Edmond and Jules de Goncourt were avid collectors of Japonaiserie; so was the composer Claude Debussy, who reproduced a detail from Hokusai’s famous print “The Great Wave” from the series Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji on the 1905 cover of the sheet music for his symphonic work La Mer. The ukiyo-e-inspired lithographs of artists such as Edouard Vuillard and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec were commissioned for the playbills and posters of Parisian theaters, cafes and cabarets. The exhibition Awash in Color: French and Japanese Prints, which was on view this fall at the University of Chicago’s Smart Museum of Art, looks at the conversation between French and Japanese prints during this decadent period of artistic flowering. 

Interview with Matt Dusk and Steve Macdonald

Singer Matt Dusk's new disc is called My Funny Valentine: The Chet Baker Songbook

Talented singer Matt Dusk continues his exploration of the great songs of a bygone era with his new disc, out today, My Funny Valentine: The Chet Baker Songbook (EOne Entertainment). Dusk doesn't call the album a 'tribute' record, which would suggest a copy or aping of Baker's soft singing style, something that Dusk accurately maintains would not fit his crooner voice. Rather, he takes on Baker's catalogue, and finds a happy ground between how he normally swings and how Baker sings. Dusk sat down with Critics At Large's David Churchill to discuss extensively the making of the CD. David also wanted to look a little behind the scenes of how the live performance side of Dusk comes to fruition, so he asked for Steve Macdonald – Dusk's sax player, musical director and “wing man” – to sit in and offer his insights into that side of putting out a disc like this, and ultimately performing the material live.

Picnic: Sexual Confusion in a Small Kansas Town

Sebastian Stan, Maggie Grace and Ellen Burstyn (back) in Picnic (All Photos by Joan Marcus)

William Inge was a medium-range playwright with a talent for getting at the way sex makes people of all ages restless and sometimes desperately unhappy. That was his subject, and he explored it in different forms in Come Back, Little Sheba and the movies The Stripper (fashioned on his failed play A Loss of Roses) and Splendor in the Grass. But he never got closer to it than in Picnic, which was a hit on Broadway in 1953 and again two years later as a movie starring William Holden and Kim Novak. (Joshua Logan directed both, but his inexperience behind a camera gives him away in the movie, which is clunky and overwrought.) Picnic, which is currently enjoying an engrossing revival, directed by Sam Gold, at the Roundabout Theatre, is set on Labor Day (the occasion of the annual local picnic) in a dead-end Kansas town where the dry laws and the banning of “degenerate” books like The Ballad of the Sad Café from the local library reflect the repressed, restricted lives of the disappointed characters. The play is about sexuality in the days just before rock ‘n’ roll and Elvis Presley brought it to the surface of American culture. A twenty-ish Arkansas-born drifter named Hal Carter (Sebastian Stan, who played Bucky Barnes in Captain America) wanders into town, hoping he can land a job with the help of his moneyed college roommate, Alan Seymour (Ben Rappaport, in the role that Paul Newman originated, in his stage debut). Alan was the only person who ever treated him decently at the fraternity that only admitted him to benefit from the prestige of having a gifted athlete on its roster. Hal immediately draws the attention of Alan’s girl friend, Madge Owens (Maggie Grace, of TV’s Lost). She’s working-class and she’s employed at the five-and-dime, but she’s the prettiest girl in town, so – as her mother, Flo (Mare Winningham), understands – she has a ticket into the local aristocracy if Alan marries her. (The play’s secondary subject is class.) But Alan doesn’t turn her on the way Hal does.

Ellen Burstyn, Ben Rappaport and Maggie Grace

The cast of characters in Picnic is mostly female, and Hal’s appearance sends all the major ones into a tailspin; he’s like a rock that cracks the surface of a serene-seeming pond, sending ripples all around it. When Flo’s next-door neighbor, Helen Potts (Ellen Burstyn), hires him to clean her yard for the price of a home-cooked breakfast, she’s dazzled by the sight of his glistening torso as he works bare-chested in the sun. (Stan mines the comic possibilities of the scenes where he gets to show off his muscles.) Helen lives alone with her nagging invalid mother – a voluble offstage presence – whom she’s never forgiven for wrecking her one chance at happiness, when she had Helen’s runaway marriage annulled. But she’s not a bitter woman; she enjoys the presence of young folks without resenting them for reflecting her own dashed hopes. Her opposite number is Rosemary Sydney (Elizabeth Marvel), who teaches secretarial skills classes at the high school and boards with the Owens family. Rosemary’s good-time-gal humor and forthrightness mask – not very well – her terror that, at about forty, she’s let romance pass her by. She makes self-deprecating jokes about being an old-maid schoolteacher and crows that she sends her beau packing as soon as they get serious. But when, in a holiday mood, Hal starts to dance with Madge, Rosemary gets so furious that he’s not paying attention to her that she paralyzes the boy with a vicious tirade, oiled somewhat by the illicit booze her shopkeeper boy friend, Howard Bevans (Reed Birney), has smuggled in.

A Walking Museum of the Blues: Dave Van Ronk Remembered

As music luminaries prepare to strut their glitzy stuff at tonight’s Grammy Awards, I am thinking back to a 20th-century hopeful who was the antithesis of glitz and who died on this date in 2002....

Why now, in particular?” a bewildered Dave Van Ronk asked rhetorically, a few days after learning about his Grammy nomination for a 1995 album titled From...Another Time & Place. “I made something like 26, actually closer to 30 records but nobody noticed before.” Well, hardly nobody. The blues performer had been in the game for four decades at the time of our January 1996 pre-Grammy interview. He was a legend whose career had returned to the kind of cutting edge made possible by that curious what-goes-around-comes-around law of the universe.

Ironically, the Brooklyn native, a grizzled guy with a gravelly voice, found himself in the same awards category – Best Traditional Folk Album – as a longtime colleague from the same New York City borough, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. “That puts me in a helluva position,” Van Ronk quipped. “If I win, I’ll feel guilty. If I lose, I’ll tear his throat out.” Elliott won for South Coast but still has his throat intact at age 81. Van Ronk succumbed to complications from colon cancer treatment when he was 65. Both men gained fame, if not fortune, back in the salad days of the folk revival during the early 1960s, when Greenwich Village musicians were doing the hootenanny thing. Elliott, a self-styled hobo of the Wild West in cowboy garb, and Van Ronk, never a slave to fashion, were pals with a younger talent who went by the name of Bob Dylan.

The Alternative World in Stephen Carter’s The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln

One of the most popular leitmotifs of the what-if alternative historical novel focuses on delineating an imaginary world had the Nazis won the Second World War. Two outstanding examples are The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick set in 1962 America and Fatherland by Robert Harris set in 1964 Germany. In the former, most of America is living under fascist rule, most American Jews have been murdered and the main characters gladly embrace the new reality. (A compelling subplot is about a banned underground novel reputedly written by an individual in a fortified castle who writes an alternative history about the Nazis losing the war. Readers are entertained but consider it farfetched.) In the latter, the Nazis, who are in perpetual war with the hordes of Russia are preparing for the visit of the American President, Joseph Kennedy, and an agreement that would signal a rapprochement between the world’s pre-eminent powers.

Another leitmotif is how would America be different had the South won the Civil War. One gem for this alternative history is the 1953 publication of Bring the Jubilee by Ward Moore. In the novel’s first sentence, the narrator states, “Although I am writing this in the year 1877, I was not born until 1921.” It must be one of the strangest sentences in American fiction. But it makes sense when the novel is mainly set during the first half of the twentieth century. Moore’s conjured America is one of bleakness and of hopelessness with a hobbled economy and heightened social tensions. Confederate citizens rule over Northern subjects. Blacks, Asians and Jews are pressured to emigrate and indentured servitude prevails in the industrial centres. The major character, Hodge Backmaker, is fortunate to spend seven years living in a communal haven of creative people who would have been regarded as pariahs in the coarser society beyond its confines. As a history scholar specializing in the “War of Southrun Independence,” Hodge is given the opportunity to time travel to the site of the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, the decisive battle that, in this alternative history, ensured southern victory. He is, however, warned that he must remain an observer. Inadvertently, he does become involved and with one altercation he wipes out his own personal history and changes the course of the war. Unlike the protagonist school teacher in Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (Simon & Schuster, 2011), who is able to retreat from 1963 America to the present, Ward’s time traveller cannot return to his former life living with his wife and fellow intellectuals. He is destined to live out his life in an America that resembles the historical reality of the late nineteenth century but one wherein he feels estranged and is regarded as an oddball eccentric.

author Stephen L. Carter

With the caveat that The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011) is not about the south winning the Civil War, it does follow in the tradition of writing an alternative history. Its premise is that Lincoln recovered from his wounds inflicted by John Wilkes Booth but his vice president Andrew Johnson did not. Failing to become a martyr, Lincoln becomes politically vulnerable. Like his weaker successor, the historical Johnson, Carter’s Lincoln becomes the target for an impeachment trial led by the Radical Republicans who contend that the “tyrant” did not sufficiently protect the freedmen and that he intended to usurp the powers of Congress. As he did with his previous four novels, Carter combines a murder mystery, a spy thriller and a courtroom drama. Part of the trial itself adheres to the historical record of Johnson’s impeachment trial, and sometimes the novel feels weighted down by the rules of evidence and the minutia of the court proceedings that Carter as a Yale law professor intimately knows.

Coming Full Circle: Richard Thompson's Electric

The "Melancholy Galliard" of the 21st Century has to be Richard Thompson. His latest release, Electric (New West, 2013) features the troubadour in great form with songs about love and loss, broken relationships and heartfelt soul-searching. It's a record full of Thompson's first-rate guitar playing and arrangements, but what is most noticeable is the pathos in Thompson's vocals, a subtle device that truly defines his distinct baritone from the rest of the pack. Electric is Thompson's 42nd release in a long career that marks his place in 2013: present but mirroring the past as only he can see it. Perhaps it's because he's never been afraid of expressing himself regardless of age, or because his prolific songwriting is finely tuned, he's never lost touch with his muse. Regardless, this new album finds his songs matching his style, wit and technical skills. It's an excellent album without clutter and that clarity of purpose is the key to the success of Electric. Produced by Buddy Miller, at Miller's house/studio in Nashville, the album features a trio setting (Michael Jerome, drums; Taras Prodaniuk, bass guitar) and this smaller band seems to have lifted Thompson's performance immeasurably. It’s also his touring trio and he specifically wrote the songs on Electric for the band.

Damp Squibs: Parker and Bullet to the Head

Jason Statham stars in Parker

Movie lovers can spend the first couple months of a new year scanning ten-best lists and catching up on recent films they’ve missed, or reviewing the classics, or tinkering with their DVD libraries, or, if they don’t mind giving their loved ones cause for concern, get involved in the Oscar race. (They can even spend January happily wallowing in Turner Classic Movies – although in February, the channel limits itself to movies that were nominated for Academy Awards, and tumbleweeds blow through its schedule for days at a time.) One thing they can’t do very often is have a good time checking out new movies; long ago, a shared understanding developed between the studios and the audience that January is dumping ground for movies nobody has much hope for, and the dumping period keeps getting extended, in the same way that the start of the summer blockbuster season keeps getting pushed up earlier and earlier every year. At some point, the two periods will meet, and whoever can tell the difference between the last movie that the studios want to wash their hands of and the first one that everyone’s beach house is riding on will be officially recognized as the Antichrist, or at least the editor-in-chief of Entertainment Weekly. In the meantime, people desperate to get out of the house currently have their choice of some expertly gummed-up little action movies that give the frustrated film freak a chance to at least commiserate with talented directors who are stuck in the dumping season of their careers.

When We're Older Things May Change: Janis Ian's "Society's Child" (1966)

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, declaring that children wouldn't "be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character." The Freedom Movement, which fought the early battles for desegregation in the South and voter registration for black Americans, was extending a call for a shared vision of interracial harmony. King, the political and spiritual leader of the civil rights struggle in the United States, called for the country to abandon the bitter legacy of slavery. King's speech, that hot day in August, hit like a bolt of lightning, and suddenly a vision of hope and possibility spread throughout the country. Critic Craig Werner persuasively describes that promise in his book A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. "For people of all colours committed to racial justice, the Sixties were a time of hope," he writes. "You could hear it in the music: in the freedom songs that soared above and sunk within the hearts of marchers at Selma and Montgomery; in the gospel inflections of Sam Cooke's teenage love songs; in Motown's self-proclaimed soundtrack for 'young America'; in blue-eyed soul and English remakes of the Chicago blues; in Aretha Franklin's resounding call for respect; in Sly Stone's celebration of the everyday people and Jimi Hendrix's vision of an interracial tribe; in John Coltrane's celebration of a love supreme. For brief moments during the decade surrounding King's speech, many of us harboured real hopes that the racial nightmare might be coming to an end."

Deliriously Inventive: Leos Carax’s Holy Motors

Denis Lavant in Holy Motors

There’s a scene in Leos Carax’s enticing Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986) that still resonates for me more than 25 years later. The film, a futuristic fable about a disease that is transmitted when people make love without actually feeling love, has a young man, played by Denis Lavant, express his love for a young woman by dancing to David Bowie’s "Modern Love." Lurching down the street, in a spastic manner reminiscent of Joe Cocker, and clutching his stomach as if he’s ill, he suddenly breaks out in a full run before just as quickly stopping as the infectious song is suddenly truncated, an abrupt conclusion to a man gripped by the fever of love.

Earlier, he and the girl, played by Mireille Perrier, pass by a disco but we only see the patrons’ feet moving frantically on the dance floor.  Working simultaneously as science fiction, romance and drama, Mauvais Sang was a perfect introduction to Carax’s off kilter, unique and highly inventive mode of filmmaking. Holy Motors (2012), his latest film and only his fifth feature since his  impressive1984 debut with Boy Meets Girl, is a timely reminder of how strikingly original Carax is. It’s also the most exciting movie I saw last year, proof positive that there are still a few directors out there who know how to use the medium in clever and imaginative ways. For the most part, Holy Motors is like nothing you’ve ever seen before.

Family Happiness: Tolstoy on the Rack

Ksenia Kutepova and Alexey Kolubkov star in Family Happiness” (Photo: A. Sergeev)

Whatever has secured the reputation of the Moscow Theatre-Atelier Piotr Fomenko as one of Russia’s best theatre companies certainly isn’t in evidence in Family Happiness, which I caught on the Boston leg of its American tour. The production, which premiered in Moscow in 2000 and is performed in Russian with English supertitles, is an adaptation (no playwright is listed) of Tolstoy’s beautiful novella tracking the arc of a marriage between a recently orphaned eighteen-year-old girl, Masha, and Sergey Mihailovich, her neighbor and guardian. The marriage begins in a kind of other-worldly bliss but reaches a point of crisis when, after they have begun to raise children, Sergey takes Masha to St. Petersburg and reacts with revulsion as she gets caught up in the social whirl that their provincial home has denied her. The story is about the way the cracks in a relationship that have been covered up by romantic optimism can suddenly appear, focusing the partners on incompatibilities they’re shocked to discover have been in place since the outset. Masha and Sergey’s marriage somehow endures the crisis and passes into a third, compromised phase that Masha (who is the narrator) sees as true “family happiness”:

That day ended the romance of our marriage: the old feeling became a precious irrecoverable remembrance; but a new feeling of love for my children and the father of my children laid the foundation of a new life and a quite different happiness; and that life and happiness have lasted to the present time.