Defining Race: Raoul Peck's I Am Not Your Negro

author James Baldwin

"Trumpcare was never about the well-being of Americans," actor Jeffrey Wright recently remarked as President Donald Trump continued to dismantle the former president's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. "It was about trying in vain to erase Barack Obama from the history books." Given the erratic nature of Trump's actual policies, where everything is put in direct opposition to Obama's legacy, Wright's claim isn't rhetorical. What he does is open a door into what the early days of the Trump era are all about: inducing social amnesia. The one consistency that both elected Trump and has sustained him so far has been the continuous fermenting rage over having had eight years of America's first black president. Even the term – Obamacare – when it springs forth from the lips of many Republicans, sounds like they're describing some kind of plague or pestilence that has swept the land and needs to be gotten rid of, denying both the intent of the Act (despite its deficiencies) and the political integrity of the man who put it forth. Obamacare never was allowed to be a piece of legislation, which is why the Republican alternative isn't even a sufficient improvement, or close to being a reasoned response to it. During the tenure of his presidency, I think Barack Obama knew that he was a lightning rod for both the unrealistic expectations of his followers and the irrational hatred of his adversaries. He also understood that any daring move on his part to fulfill those two terms in office would have likely led to a cataclysmic outcome given the nation's unresolved racial history and its string of assassinations. So he worked carefully (and with precision) to be both a visible and an invisible presence. Out of office, Obama is still a projection of America's torn psyche, an ineradicable reflection, one part of the nation wishing to bury the whip of slavery while the other refuses to confront and transcend this unsavory legacy.

Looking Back: The Sergeant (1968)

Rod Steiger in The Sergeant (1968).

The Sergeant, poor cow of a movie, never had a chance. The critics of 1968 – faced with Rod Steiger’s miserable Army lifer, Sergeant Callan, pursuing John Phillip Law’s dewy-eyed Private Swanson on a godforsaken supply post in 1952 France, and then killing himself – were unanimous in panning it. “In the context of today’s liberated movie-making,” Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, “this study of repressed homosexuality seems almost quaint. It also is basically confused.” Steiger, Canby felt, “comes on with all the subtlety of a drag queen,” while Law seemed “remarkably dense.” In The New Yorker, Pauline Kael made more or less the same complaints, while voicing regret for the loneliness and pathos she believed were the homosexual’s lot in life. New York’s Judith Crist, with a sensitivity typical of herself and her peers, dismissed it as “a sleazily commercial film [about] a fag non-com.”

For straight critics like these, The Sergeant was mainly an offense against two hours of their time. Later, with queer critics to the fore, it became an offense against gay liberation: a mainstay on the list of “daring” sixties Hollywood movies that were seen as retrograde, even toxic in their sexual politics, with a preponderance of gay or lesbian characters either killing themselves, killing others, or getting killed. (Among the others were 1961’s The Children’s Hour, 1962’s Advise and Consent, 1967’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1968’s The Fox, The Killing of Sister George, and The Detective, and 1969’s Staircase.) In Screening the Sexes (1973), the first study of homosexuality in the movies, critic Parker Tyler placed The Sergeant in the “Homeros in uniform” subgenre, calling it “a clean-cut, well-tailored movie like an expensive suit that has had only one wearing, then been relegated in a plastic wrap to the closet, where it will stay indefinitely.” By 1981 and The Celluloid Closet, Vito Russo’s definitive history of gayness in cinema, the AIDS holocaust was imminent, and The Sergeant’s stock was even lower. Rather than suggesting that homosexuality might be associated with anything healthy, The Sergeant dealt “only in sexually motivated manipulations, spitefulness and petty jealousy, most of it unconscious and unexplored. The result is caricature.”

Feudal Fury: Team Ninja’s Nioh

Nioh was published by Koei Tecmo and Sony Interactive Entertainment in February, 2017.

I've talked a lot about FROM Software's Dark Souls series. It's about time I talked about its clones.

A series as monumentally successful as the Souls games –whether it's the direct entries in the Souls franchise or stand-alone spinoff titles like Bloodborne – is obviously going to spawn legions of imitators. These games seemingly connected with players at a molecular level, crafting worlds in which we became profoundly immersed and which we yearned to visit again and again. They married deep combat design with beautifully realized narrative, and through sheer quality of execution and polish they gained a singular reputation. Like the watershed titles in other genres – DOOM, Grand Theft Auto, Street Fighter, Super Mario Bros – they evolved our ideas about what games could accomplish, and inspired countless creators to take up their mantle … often with diminishing returns.

But that's not to say that Dark Souls was born into a void. The series is not without its own myriad influences, not just in gaming, but in other media as well. FROM Software president Hidetaka Miyazaki famously drew inspiration from the Western fantasy novels he found in his local library as a boy, filling the gaps in his understanding of English with his own outlandish imaginings. The exaggerated, hyper-stylized depictions of knights, dragons, monks, castles, magic, and ancient slumbering foes that appear in the Souls games are a reflection of Chaucer, Tolkien, Lovecraft, and Dante – just as games like Lords of the Fallen, Salt & Sanctuary, or Hyper Light Drifter are muted shadows of the Souls series. And though younger gamers – or those with short memories – may point to Miyazaki's Souls games as the progenitor of the "crushingly difficult action game" genre, they were hardly the first to offer this kind of experience. Perhaps the most well-known series to spark this flame, beginning with a landmark NES title in 1988, was Tecmo's Ninja Gaiden – and now, in 2017, Tecmo is back to reclaim their throne from Miyazaki with an action-RPG called Nioh. And lemme tell you: they're back with a vengeance.

The Art of the Impossible: How Post-Truth Doubt Hypnotized Us

“Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best thing.” – Otto Von Bismarck 

“Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.” – Frank Zappa

Throughout the crucible of recorded history, politics has always undergone a dramatic shift in form, focus and intent with each new technological development. But today, its very core definition has practically altered beyond recognition since the advent of the digital domain we currently inhabit. Towards the end of the 20th century, a century of the most drastically amplified creative inventiveness and the most viscerally enhanced horrors, approximately around 1998, in fact, we entered a realm almost as theatrically shape-shifted as the transition from the medieval period to the so-called Renaissance. Technics, the skillful utility of tools, has always been the hallmark for every decisive change in our concept of reality as sentient beings. Now, however, reality has blurred irrevocably.

In many respects in fact, we are either still in the late Renaissance proper, or else perhaps even odder, still in the late Medieval era per se. The Renaissance itself, we should always remember, was largely an advertising campaign for the Medici family, one whose glittering product, liberal progress, is still always up in the air. It may always have been only a chimera, a mirage, a beautiful propaganda campaign selling a new psychological product.

This is a very fragile condition made all the more palpable with the recent American election of a practitioner of what used to be quaintly referred to as realpolitik. We therefore need to re-think realpolitik in light of recent and current developments both socially and technologically. Reality and its reflective presence in social life and politics suddenly became utterly interchangeable.

Danger in the Drawing Room: James Kudelka's Love, Sex & Brahms

Bill Coleman, Evelyn Hart and Ryan Boorne and the cast of Love, Sex & Brahms. (Photo: Jeremy Mimnagh)

Actors who move. It's an image Canadian choreographer James Kudelka had in mind when creating Love, Sex & Brahms whose world premiere took place at Toronto's The Citadel Theatre on March 16. Set to the Intermezzi for Solo Piano which composer Johannes Brahms created late in his career, the work is more costume drama than dance, focusing on the emotional underpinnings of the characters more than on the spiralling spurts of their bodies hidden behind the Victorian-era dress created for them by Toronto fashion label Hoax Couture.

A Tissot painting come to life, the work is an expanded version of the two-time Dora Award-winning #lovesexbrahms which debuted in April, 2015. The new hour-long version now has 10 characters compared to the original 8 and more than twice as many scenes. Coleman Lemieux and Compagnie, the critically acclaimed and community-based dance organization where the award-winning Kudelka has been choreographer-in-residence since 2008, both produced and danced it. Among the performers for the run that ended on March 19 were company founders Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux and independent dance artists Danielle Baskerville, Tyler Gledhill, Luke Garwood, Victoria Mehaffey, Louis Laberge-Côté, Ryan Boorne, Andrew McCormack and Daniel McArthur.

Unexpected Treasures: Twelfth Night at the National Theatre

Doon Mackichan and Tamsin Greig in Twelfth Night at London's National Theatre. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

The finest production of Twelfth Night I’ve ever seen was by the Théâtre de Soleil at the Olympic Arts Festival in L.A. in 1984. It was as leisurely as a conversation with good friends that trails late into the night. Visually it was plush: every new scene was signaled with a quilted backdrop that tumbled down in front of the previous ones. The director, Ariane Mnouchkine, embroidered the big comic moments so they were like inspired vaudeville or silent-comedy routines, but the play paused to frame the melancholy ones, too, so the cumulative emotional effect of the evening was rich and overpowering.

I thought of Mnouchkine’s Twelfth Night at several points during Simon Godwin’s staging of the play for the National Theatre, which the invaluable NT Live series has been sending out around the world in HD. It’s a banquet of a production, and startlingly fresh. Godwin has given it a contemporary setting – Olivia (Phoebe Fox) and her female staff, led by Maria (Niky Wardley) and the clown Feste (Doon Mackichan), live in a sort of girls’ club environment, while Orsino (Oliver Chris, whom I admired in One Man, Two Guv’nors) helms what feels like a fraternity for the rich and entitled. One of the rooms in his castle is a gym where he spars with Cesario, the male persona Viola (Tamara Lawrance) has adopted, spar, and Godwin has turned one of his scenes into a fortieth birthday party, complete with balloons and party hats, that points up how slow he’s been to attain maturity. (The emphasis on gender division links the play to Shakespeare’s earlier romantic comedy, Love’s Labour’s Lost.) Even Malvolio, Olivia’s steward, is a woman: Malvolia (Tamsin Greig), though unlike the other females in the house, she most emphatically does not party. The twenty-first-century setting allows for her infatuation with Olivia, of course, and it lends a tender quality to the love that Antonio (Adam Best) exhibits for Viola’s twin brother Sebastian (Daniel Ezra), who is so grateful to Antonio for his many kindnesses, after the shipwreck that separated the siblings, that we see how much he wishes he could reciprocate – but he just can’t. It also permits a lightly homoerotic flavor to Orsino’s friendship with Cesario that enhances this comedy of sexual confusion.

A Storm is Coming: Starz's American Gods

Ian McShane and Ricky Whittle in American Gods. (Photo: Jan Thijs/Starz Network)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for the first episode of Starz's American Gods. It was written before the airing of the show's second episode last night.

"The Universe is made of stories,
not of atoms."
- Muriel Rukeyser, "The Speed of Darkness" (1968)

"Without our stories we are incomplete."
– Neil Gaiman, from The View from the Cheap Seats

Shadow Moon is having a very bad week. When we meet the protagonist of Starz's American Gods, he has just been released from three years in prison (served for a crime he hasn't committed), only to find out that his wife and his best friend have been killed in a car accident, taking with them any promise of a return to normalcy. Even before arriving at the funeral and learning some of the more gruesome details of their deaths, he meets a mysterious man calling himself Mr. Wednesday, who offers him a job as a kind of bodyguard, errand boy, Man Friday (so to speak) – and things quickly go from weird to worse, as Shadow falls headlong in an epic battle between forces struggling for the souls of America.

Adapted from Neil Gaiman's award-winning 2001 novel, and developed for television by Michael Green (Kings) and Bryan Fuller (Dead Like Me, Pushing Daisies, Hannibal), the first episode of American Gods premiered last Saturday night – landing with a gritty and glorious bang. Gaudy and beautiful, messy and poetic, it steps headlong into a compelling vision of a vibrant and contradictory America made of big skies and flashy neon. In a different era, Gaiman's sprawling, ambitious novel would have definitely fallen into the "unadaptable" category. The story the book tells, though set in the narrative's present era, is broad, allegorical, and clearly too big for anything but a thinly told feature film that would probably be generously labelled as "inspired by." But when it comes to bringing to novels to the screen, television has dethroned film and small is the new big – and so the time of American Gods has finally come.

Late-in-Life Renaissance: Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Brett Dalton and Jason O'Mara (foreground), with Elizabeth Henstridge and Clark Gregg (background) in a scene from the 4th season of Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Every once in a while, I find myself stopping in the middle of an episode of television and asking (occasionally aloud): “Why am I still watching this?” It’s a question that I’ve wrestled with before on this site, and one that has sometimes nagged me throughout the run of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., which is in the final episodes of its fourth season on ABC. Originally conceived as a spin-off of Marvel’s juggernaut superhero franchise, the show boasted an impeccable lineage, as it was a co-creation of Avengers director and Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon, his brother Jed, and his sister-in-law Maurissa Tancharoen. The show also featured Clark Gregg, rather implausibly reprising his role as Agent Phil Coulson, who served as a liaison between his shadowy organization and its super-powered allies and who appeared to have met an untimely fate in the first Avengers movie.

When it premiered in 2013, S.H.I.E.L.D. was the most anticipated new series of its season. It met with a fair amount of critical acclaim and featured frequent tie-ins with the ongoing movie franchise. I found it an enjoyable but somewhat disposable entertainment: the early episodes felt cautious and non-essential, with a case-of-the-week structure, an appealing but rather anonymous cast, and an awkward need to serve a promotional role for whatever major theatrical release Marvel’s movie arm was cooking up. However, that latter function helped the show to make a startling leap late in its first season, when S.H.I.E.L.D. was destroyed in the course of the events depicted in the second Captain America film. The development highlighted some of the show’s quieter achievements, such its ability to build complex relationships among its various characters, and the fallout from that series of episodes helped to set in motion long-term conflicts that significantly raised the stakes and my emotional investment in those characters.

Podcast: Interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe (1982)

Author Guy Vanderhaeghe, with Canadian Governor General David Johnston, receiving his third Governor General’s Literary Award, in 2015. (Photo: Sgt Ronald Duchesne)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) 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 1982, one of those guests with Canadian short story writer (and soon-to-be celebrated novelist) Guy Vanderhaeghe.

When I sat down with Vanderhaeghe in 1982, he had just published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled Man Descending. That volume would go on to win the Governor General's Award for Fiction, making him one of the few first-time authors to achieve this. He won this award again in 1996 for his novel The Englishman's Boy. In 2015, his most recent published work, Daddy Lenin and Other Stories, was similarly honoured.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Guy Vanderhaeghe as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1982.

Real to Reel: In Conversation with Documentarian Tony Palmer

Filmmaker Tony Palmer is the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award at Toronto's Hot Docs festival.

Legendary British documentarian Tony Palmer is the recipient of the 2017 Outstanding Achievement Award being handed out tomorrow, May 5, at Toronto’s Hot Docs Festival, and for good reason. Born in 1941 and the creator of more than 100 masterfully crafted arts films ranging from The Beatles and Cream to Igor Stravinsky, Richard Wagner and Ralph Vaughan Williams, Palmer is a director/editor as prolific as he is gifted and brazenly insightful. A critic once said of him that he is the poet of documentary filmmaking, and it is an apt description. His work is magnificent, poignant and honest. Through showing and not telling, it preoccupies itself with the stories of individual performing artists and the times in which they lived. Palmer, who has many accolades to his credit, including 12 Gold Medals from the New York Film Festival, draws a direct connection between environment and art making. It is what sets his movies about culture far above the mainstream.

This week, Toronto audiences can see for themselves why he is a giant in the field. Besides honouring his more than fifty years as a celebrated filmmaker, Hot Docs is showcasing a curated retrospective of Palmer’s extraordinary body of work, selected by programmer Michael McNamara and screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox until Sunday. Titles include Margot, Palmer’s 2005 searing analysis of the life of famed English ballerina Margot Fonteyn (Sunday May 7), Bird on a Wire, a behind-the-scenes look at Leonard Cohen on tour in 1973 which only now is getting theatrical release after being lost for more than four decades (Friday May 5 and Saturday May 6) and All My Loving (1968), Palmer’s groundbreaking BBC series on pop music (which John Lennon personally requested he make) featuring Eric Clapton, Eric Burdon, Jimi Hendrix and others against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and other explosive political events rocking the 1960s (Friday May 5).

In Toronto this week, and away from the home he shares in Cornwall with his Italian-born wife, a calligrapher, and their three school-age children, Palmer is introducing his films and, post-screenings, is signing copies of his work on DVD, among them The Beatles and World War II, his brilliant anti-war film, set to iconic Beatles songs as re-recorded by the likes of Tina Turner, Elton John and Jeff Lynne, just released last year after languishing in the vaults since the 1970s (when it was released as All This and World War II). It screened at Hot Docs on Wednesday, for one blistering showing only.

In advance of Wednesday’s screening, Palmer took time out for coffee and a chat touching on his early days as music critic for The Observer, his apprenticeship with Ken Russell and why Frank Zappa remains the bane of his existence. Here’s an edited version of that conversation:

Take it As it Comes: The Doors at 50

The Doors, Venice Beach, CA, 1969 (Photo: Henry Diltz)

On January 4, 1967, The Doors debuted with their self-titled album on Elektra records. To celebrate the 50th anniversary this year, Rhino, in association with Elektra (Warner Bros), has released a 3 CD + LP limited edition collection featuring the album in mono on LP and CD, the stereo mix and a previously unreleased live performance from the Matrix club recorded in March 1967.

The Doors’ recordings have never been out of print and, considering the number of hits they had that peppered FM radio after Jim Morrison’s death in 1971, their music continues to engage us. Their history has been well maintained in countless books, magazine articles, a feature film by Oliver Stone and documentaries. The most recent doc, 2014's People Are Strange, droopily narrated by Johnny Depp, is a chronological visual study of the group’s earliest years, their growing fan base and outrageous concerts. Consequently, Morrison, the charismatic, chemically altered front man, remains one of the most popular singers in the history of rock and, in my opinion, would remain so even if he hadn’t died in 1971 at the age of 27. His songwriting was unconventional, serious and rooted in the most peculiar places. He wasn’t a Florida beach boy dreaming about girls in bikinis or interested in drag racing. This was a guy who read the poetry of William Blake and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche while dabbling in the mescaline-infused writings of Aldous Huxley, whose book The Doors of Perception suggested the name of Morrison’s band. All this by the time he finished high school and enrolled in the UCLA film school.

The Filmmaker Next Door: Jonathan Demme (1944-2017)

Filmmaker Jonathan Demme passed away last Wednesday, April 26, at the age of 73.

For a solid stretch of ten, maybe twelve years, Jonathan Demme had the distinction of being both the hippest and kindest film director in America. To appreciate the enormity of this accomplishment, it helps to concede that it’s somewhat paradoxical. There are no hard and fast rules for rating moviemakers according to their hipness, but the ones to whom the label sticks are likely to have an air of cultish exclusivity to them; interesting music choices help, but so does a challenging, threatening edge, a sense that, say, Jim Jarmusch or Alex Cox or Aki Kaurismaki is not from these parts, and may be talking over the heads of, or having a laugh at the expense of, those who do not get their work. Compared to them, Demme always had an open, smiling, corn-fed quality.

So did David Lynch, arguably the greatest and most original American director to cement his reputation in the 1980s, but after Blue Velvet hit, Lynch began to cultivate his own paradoxical public image as Captain Strange from Middle America. No doubt Lynch’s personality is his own – “authentically” his own, as the kids would say – but a man who unveils a movie as drenched in perverse sexuality and nihilistic violence as Wild at Heart at the Cannes Film Festival while releasing a press bio consisting of the four words “Eagle Scout Missoula Montana” is a man who knows that press attention helps to keep his career going and who has learned how to use what seems weird about him as a conversation starter. Demme never stopped seeming like the genuinely nice boy next door. He was just the boy next door who had more wide-ranging interests and better taste in music and movies than anyone you’d ever met.

Groundhog Day: Angling for the Big Score

Andy Karl in Groundhog Day. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

The 1993 movie Groundhog Day, written by Danny Rubin and director Harold Ramis, is a one-of-a-kind existential comedy with an inspired premise. Phil Connors, a misanthropic, self-involved weatherman, gets stuck in a time warp, reliving the same day over and over again. The day is February 2, and the setting of his private eternity is the tiny town of Punxsutawney, PA, where his bosses have sent him for the fifth year in a row, with a cameraman and an associate producer, to cover the Groundhog Day festivities. (It’s the town’s pet groundhog, also named Phil, whose annual encounter with his shadow the northeast looks to in order to determine how much is left of winter.) Of course Phil’s being forced to face the same day over and over again has a point. After he’s gone through a hedonistic phase – recognizing that his actions have no consequences because all remnants of them are erased with the dawn – and a phase of despair – he stages a series of elaborate suicides to release himself from his fate, but they don’t take either – he finally moves on, past himself, to a love affair with the citizens of the town and an embracing of the repetition of the day’s events. He realize that he can use his foreknowledge to help those around them over small and large obstacles and give his own life meaning.

Verve and Verisimiltude: Adrian McKinty’s Irish Police Procedurals

Crime novelist Adrian McKinty.

If we were to read only the sixth and most recent entry of Adrian McKinty's Sean Duffy series,   Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly (Seventh Street Books, 2016), and his previous Rain Dogs (2015), we would be gripped by his outstanding opening chapters. In Police at the Station, we are dropped into a tableau that could have emerged from The Sopranos – except it is 1988 in Ulster, during the Irish “Troubles,” in which, over the course of thirty years, 3,600 people were killed by Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, and the Security Forces. Detective Sean Duffy is being prodded forward with guns to his back through a patch of woods to dig his own grave. (The 2009 film, The Crying Game, is perhaps a better comparison.) He knows this scene well. He has been the responding officer on “half a dozen bodies found face down in a sheugh, buried in a shallow grave, or dumped in a slurry pit on the high bog." Before the reader can wonder whether this series is coming to an end, the next chapter veers back to the beginning of the mess in which Duffy finds himself, the investigation of the murder of a drug dealer shot in the back with a crossbow. In Rain Dogs, Mohammad Ali is visiting Belfast on a "peace tour" and Duffy is on security detail. Ali did visit Ireland twice, and this fictional scene has the feeling of verisimilitude, given McKinty’s description of the boxer and his face-to-face with a bunch of skinheads opposed to him on the grounds of the colour of his skin. It is a marvellously constructed opener even though it has nothing to do with the plot that follows.

Ghosting: Olivier Assayas' Personal Shopper

Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper

In the last few years, when attending various parties and gatherings, I started noticing some unusual new social behaviour among people (often women) that I'd never encountered before. When engaged in a conversation that took on its own momentum from the various subjects it raised -- as opposed to the more careful chatter where familiar anecdotes and social gossip provided ample protection from revealing yourself -- there would reach a point when the person I was talking to would simply disappear without a word. Unlike in the past, where a fascinating conversation could lead to friendship, a relationship, or simply a nice evening that the person you were talking to recognized as she disappeared from your life, these folks would simply vanish. There was no way to discern whether it was something you said, fear of a particular kind of intimacy, or even a perfectly legitimate need to move on. The simple courtesy of closing a conversation was replaced by what someone who had acted towards me in this manner justified as 'ghosting.' The point of 'ghosting' seems to be to remove yourself from a conversation without acknowledging that you are in the process of having one. By asserting control in a situation not predicated on needing it, you can protect your sense of self by making yourself disappear. You experience each encounter as one in a series with equal value, where nuance and feeling are erased, or perhaps never even considered. It 's as if the conversation left no residue because the person who does the ghosting never offers a clue to why she needs to disappear. Just as I've started to wonder how much technology and social media and phone texting have had to bear on this capacity to control the uncontrollable, Olivier Assayas's new picture, Personal Shopper, picks up on this new phenomenon in a fascinating way.

Dancing Machine: Antony Hamilton & Alisdair Macindoe's Meeting

Alisdair Macindoe & Antony Hamilton in Meeting, at Toronto's Berkeley Street Theatre until April 30. (Photo: Gregory Lorenzutti)

In Meeting, man doesn't just encounter a machine; man is like the apparatus itself, a whirring, ticking, mechanized instrument measuring and maneuvering through space. Created and performed by Australian choreographer Antony Hamilton together with fellow Aussie Alisdair Macindoe, designer of the 64 custom-made robotic instruments encircling the performance on the stage floor, the roughly hour-long dance is a showcase of mental and physical stamina, utterly fascinating to watch.

Part of Spotlight on Australia, a six-week festival of interdisciplinary dance, theatre and circus art which Canadian Stage is presenting through May 7, Meeting opened this week at the Berkeley Street Theatre – the same night as Tamara Saulwick's Endings, an evocative and elegiac theatre piece about death. Meeting closes on April 30, and is a must-see for anyone interested in knowing why dance from Down Under is in a class of its own.

Driving It Home: The Fate of the Furious

Dwayne Johnson in The Fate of the Furious. (Photo: Matt Kennedy/Universal Pictures)

Thank god for The Fate of the Furious. Thank god for stick shifts, nitrous, and roaring engines. Thank god for fisticuffs, explosions, and cheesy one-liners. Thank god for beautifully toned bodies and huge flexing muscles. Thank god for Dwayne Johnson! Thank god that one of the highest-grossing worldwide franchises is as sensational, self-aware, and exciting as this. If you’re not on board, I understand – it’s easy to be cynical about the blockbuster movie market, and sometimes it’s hard to just relax and have a good time. But boy oh boy, are these Furious movies ever a good time. I don’t understand exactly how they keep getting better and better… but they do!

Palimpsest: The Overlapping Visions of Hans Sieverding

Untitled 16.1.2017 by Hans Sieverding. (Acrylic on Canvas, 2017)

“Like a great poet, Nature knows how to produce the greatest effect with the most limited means.” – Heinrich Heine

The accomplished Germany-based painter Han Sieverding is a senior-career artist whose overall body of work indicates both a purity of intention and a persistence of invention. The continuity in his image-making practice is very impressive in that it reveals an ongoing and restless search for new forms of expression which are all embodied within the tightly disciplined aesthetic approach of modernism. He possesses a vitality and energy which younger artists can only dream about as they struggle with their perpetual appetite for newness and novelty and are seduced ever further into the digital domain and its post-sensation agenda.

These vividly alive paintings palpitate: one can almost feel them breathing beneath their swirling liquid surfaces as they flow across the canvas and arrive at their whirlpool-like destinations. Executed in acrylic on canvas, a water-based medium that arose in the 60's and permitted more rapid drying and thus more effective ways of creating transparency and more multi-layered viewing experiences, they simply prompt me to call them palpable. They are definitely immersive and deeply sensorial: we are surrounded and enveloped by their presence and become drawn into their drama, which often appears to almost memorialize the moment in which they were made.

Out of Vogue: Joan Juliet Buck and The Price of Illusion

Joan Juliet Buck and her father, Jules Buck, in London, 1968. (Photo courtesy of Joan Juliet Buck)

The shiny surfaces in The Price of Illusion reflect a high-gloss world of celebrity and glamour which the author, former Vogue and Vanity Fair editor and writer Joan Juliet Buck, has polished to brittle brilliance. As the title of her recently published memoir suggests, the book is less a hedonistic romp through a high life made fabulous by the ubiquitous presence of Hollywood royalty and designer labels, and more an archly ironic reflection on the pitfalls of vanity and a preoccupation with appearances. Witty and stylishly written, it is an absorbing and entertaining read, a richly sashed window looking onto a whirlwind time. It has just the right amount of A-list love affairs (Donald Sutherland and Brian De Palma figure large) mixed in with insider fashion gossip concerning the likes of Karl Lagerfeld, Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé and André Leon Tally, to make it juicy, even as the narrative skirts the edges of personal tragedy.

"It is a morality tale," says Buck, 69, during a recent telephone call from her home in the Hudson Valley countryside outside New York. The bucolic setting is deliberate. Buck recently chose it over Manhattan to be as far away from her former life in the fast lane as she could comfortably get. A pop-culture chronicler whose four-and-a-half-decades-long career started at age 23 when she became the London correspondent for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine and then features editor for British Vogue and a foreign correspondent for Women's Wear Daily the same year, she speaks through drags of an ever-present cigarette, a habit picked up around the time a young Tom Wolfe made her the subject of "The Life and Hard Times of a Teenage London Society Girl," his essay about the 1960s counterculture. Her voice sounds dry, and slightly gravelly. But her intelligent commentary is as sharp as her prose. "I was always looking for the truth,"she exhales. "But growing up I didn't have many guidelines."

Iconic Shows of the 1960s: Hello, Dolly! and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead

Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly! at Broadway's Shubert Theatre. (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Hello, Dolly! opened in January 1964 and stayed open for just under seven years. It wasn’t the best musical on Broadway in those years – it was no Fiddler on the Roof – but it represented, and continues to represent, the end of the golden age of Broadway musicals. It was a big, brassy star vehicle, built around the rather specialized talents of Carol Channing but flexible enough to be refitted for the long line of older women who made comebacks in the role of the widowed matchmaker Dolly Gallagher Levi. (The source material for Michael Stewart’s book was the Thornton Wilder comedy The Matchmaker.) There was some controversy when Barbra Streisand, at only twenty-seven, inherited the role in the 1969 movie, but her stupendous performance was its lifeblood; the movie, directed in a stifling, museum-piece style by Gene Kelly, would have sunk under its own weight without her. And it contained one of the great moments in movie-musical history: in the middle of the title song – certainly the best-known item in the Jerry Herman score – Streisand, decked out in a golden Gay Nineties gown with feathers on her head, harmonized with Louis Armstrong, whose cover had been as big a hit as the show itself.

The new revival, starring Bette Midler as Dolly and David Hyde Pierce as Horace Vandergelder, the wealthy but parsimonious Yonkers shop owner who is supposedly her client but really the object of her own romantic machinations, arrives with more anticipation than any Broadway show in years. Advance hype aside (and God knows there’s been plenty), how could it not? Midler hasn’t appeared in a book musical since she played one of Tevye’s younger daughters in the original run of Fiddler, before she became famous; aside from the (non-musical) solo performance I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers in 2013, her only New York appearances have been in a couple of revues – one of which, Clams on the Half Shell, I was lucky enough to see back in 1975. Her Broadway comeback, at seventy-one, is not going to disappoint her legion of fans. She plays Dolly with one foot firmly planted in the Jewish vaudeville tradition, grinning that famous cat-that-ate-the-canary grin, and the highlight of her performance is indeed culinary: in the middle of act two she dispatches a stuffed chicken with dumplings at a table stage right with hilarious gusto while most of the rest of the ensemble, gathered in a courtroom upstage after the evening’s hijinks at Manhattan’s Harmonia Gardens Restaurant, waits for her to finish so the plot can take its final turn. And she could hardly have landed a funnier scene partner than Pierce, who revivifies a role that has generally brought out little in the men who’ve played it besides a side of undernourished, overbaked ham. Pierce’s first-act number, “It Takes a Woman,” performed with a male chorus, is one of the evening’s surprising highlights – the choreographer, Warren Carlyle, has staged it wittily – and “Penny in My Pocket,” written for the original Horace, David Burns, but cut out of town, has been restored to give Pierce a second-act number.