Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XXV

There was always a sly self-deprecation and a sweet sensuality in pianist Fats Domino's voice which added great warmth and emotional intensity to his work. After building a solid rapport with black audiences in the early fifties, he infiltrated the white charts later in the decade with a succession of crossover hits including the moody "Blue Monday," the rollicking "Whole Lotta Loving," and the subversive "Blueberry Hill." Since Fats (who went to spirit in 2017) didn't possess in his voice the swagger of Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, he preferred seduction to aggression and the words would often be couched in innuendo. Randy Newman learned much from Fats Domino in both style and humour. He also did some of the arrangements on Fats is Back!, Domino's 1969 comeback album. Fats returned the favour by covering Newman's Domino-inspired "Have You Seen My Baby?" from 12 Songs. One can't imagine Domino covering, as critic Scott Montgomery once mused, Newman's songs about sex and arson ("Let's Burn Down the Cornfield"), a genteel rapist ("Suzanne"), or suicide by way of a beach cleaning machine ("Lucinda"). But "Have You Seen My Baby," which borrows its opening line from Ernie K-Doe, is right in Fats's wheelhouse. It's a playful romp that easily takes its place in the canon of great New Orleans rhythm and blues – especially with shrewd Newman lines like "I say, 'Please don't talk to strangers, baby' / But she always do / She say, 'I'll talk to strangers if I want to / 'Cause I'm a stranger, too.'"

Delectable Samples: A 2017 Arts Roundup

Robert Lepage in 887.

Since I rarely write about the arts, I welcome the opportunity to briefly comment upon what I enjoyed most this year, even though several of the pieces below have been reviewed by colleagues at Critics At Large. Apart from, perhaps, television, my sampling from the arts scene is relatively small yet I did experience some wonderful aesthetic moments. – Bob Douglas

Two theatre productions I attended this year were outstanding. Auteur Robert Lepage’s one-man bravura performance in 887 unspools the interplay between the fragmented recollections of his family life and the perils of collective Quebec memory from the 1960s to the present. 887 was the number of the apartment building on Murray Avenue in Quebec City where Lepage spent his formative years. The staging is jaw-dropping: a revolving set showing the interior of his current apartment and the exterior of his childhood home that reveals a doll’s-house replica of that apartment complex, toy cars, puppets and hand shadows. The catalyst for these reveries occurred in 2010 when the organizers of a cultural anniversary invited Lepage to recite by heart a 1968 poem, “Speak White.” He found that he could not learn the lines until he had explored his family history, particularly his relationship with his absent father, and how the personal dynamics intersected with the larger world of nationalist politics.

Podcast: Interview with Poet Marilyn Bowering (1984)

Marilyn Bowering, in 2016. (Photo courtesy of marilynbowering.com)

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1984, I sat down with Canadian poet, novelist and playwright Marilyn Bowering.

Marilyn Bowering published her first book of poetry, The Liberation of Newfoundland, in 1973. When we spoke in 1984, her seventh, The Sunday Before Winter, had just been released. The book would earn her a nomination for a Governor General's Award later that same year. She went on to garner a second nomination in 1996 for Autobiography. Bowering's most recent book of poetry, entitled Threshold, was published in 2015.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Marilyn Bowering as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

Embodied Meanings: The Haunting Worlds of Joseba Eskubi

Untitled #1, 2016, by Joseba Eskubi. (20 x 29 cm, acrylic).

"He who fights with monsters should be careful. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Aphorism 146, Beyond Good and Evil

This artist’s visions are almost indescribable. But not quite. His style used to be known somewhat as biomorphic abstraction. But not quite. The Spaniard Joseba Eskubi works with soft, amorphous and organic forms in a universe of perpetual decay, entropy, erosion and healing. They are exquisitely beautiful as well as terrifying. Perhaps all the most beautiful paintings, when it comes right down to it, are also closely aligned with terror. His paintings appear to occupy a surreal world. And yet they are nonetheless accurate depictions of the realms and domains we all travel to in dreams. His work is often focused on a single organic figure which appears to be filled with dark secrets, low, hidden movements and peculiar metamorphoses, and they are often overflowing with the kind of tension which arises from staring frequently into the abyss. In fact, perhaps, his charming little diagrams are maybe the way the abyss sees us when it stares back.

Black Day in July: Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit

Will Poulter and Anthony Mackie in Detroit.

There certainly couldn't have been a more timely film released last summer than Kathryn Bigelow's Detroit, which dramatized the 1967 five-day race riots in the Motor City that left 43 dead and close to 1,200 injured. Besides commemorating the 50th anniversary of this ugly tragedy, Detroit is also a powerful, unsettling and politically prescient piece of dramatic realism that creates a reverberating link to a number of contemporary events. As we've seen, race relations in the early stages of the Trump era have deteriorated so badly that within weeks of the movie's release neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched openly and defiantly in the streets of Charlottesville, Virginia, shouting racist and anti-Semitic slogans without fear of recrimination.The fact that Detroit disappeared from screens – without a whisper – within weeks of Charlottesville, amply demonstrates that the picture is still in need of a hearing.

Richard Wilbur, 1921-2017: Molière’s Emissary

Richard Wilbur passed away on October 14, 2017, at the age of 96.

Among the many achievements of the poet Richard Wilbur, who died in October, perhaps his least recognized is the work he did as a translator of neoclassical French playwrights – Racine, Corneille and especially Molière. Wilbur translated ten of Molière’s plays, originally written in Alexandrine couplets (six beats to the line), into iambic pentameter, which is a more natural meter for English speakers, as my wonderful undergraduate Shakespeare professor, Alan Levitan, liked to illustrate with the spontaneous iambic line, “Give me a chocolate ice cream cone with sprinkles.” In his introduction to his first interaction with Molière, The Misanthrope (1955), Wilbur argues, “The constant of rhythm and rhyme was needed, in the translation as in the original, for bridging great gaps between high comedy and farce, lofty diction and ordinary talk, deep character and shallow. . . . [W]hile prose might preserve the thematic structure of the play, other ‘musical’ elements would be lost, in particular the frequently intricate arrangements of balancing half-lines, lines, couplets, quatrains, and sestets. There is no question that words, when dancing within such patterns, are not their prosaic selves, but have a wholly different mood and meaning.” By way of example, he offers a prose translation of one speech from the play, adding, “Even if that were better rendered, it would still be plain that Molière’s logic loses all its baroque exuberance in prose; it sounds lawyerish; without rhyme and verse to phrase and emphasize the steps of its progression, the logic becomes obscure . . . not crystalline and followable as it was meant to be.”

The Best of CAL 2017

Critics at Large Summer Meeting, August 4/17 (l.to r. Kevin Courrier, Danny McMurray, Steve Vineberg, Devin McKinney, Justin Cummings, Bob Douglas and Mark Clamen)

Back in January 2010, David Churchill, Shlomo Schwartzberg and I came up with the idea of Critics At Large. We envisioned a daily online arts journal that would provide for us the freedom to write – a freedom we were beginning to lose working in magazines and newspapers. Growing rapidly tired of plying our trade in a field where desperate careerism was taking the place of collegiality and editors were beginning to reward expedience, we wanted to remain more true to the pleasures of critical writing. We also wanted to discover what kind of reader we could cultivate and who they might turn out to be. Over the last eight years, many things changed in both our writing and in our audience. For one thing, Critics At Large became less a haven for frustrated writers and more an accomodating home for a diverse and hopeful group who saw the magazine as a possibility. We began attracting a motley crew from various backgrounds who helped change Critics at Large for the better. A number of men and women, young and old, experienced and not, came to shape our identity rather than take on the one we already had. Along that path, we also attracted veteran arts critics who wanted to continue to address the work that inspired them, but we also drew inexperienced writers trying to find the true value of having a voice to speak with. When I read individual pieces each day, I marvel at the sheer range of material and the keen passion each writer brings to their subject. As for our readers, not only have they been rapidly growing, but the diversity of opinion in the magazine has helped us reach out to a much wider audience.What became most important for me, as one of its co-founders, was watching Critics At Large grow beyond my own expectations into a continually morphing organism that embraces the freedom our writers bring to it. For those who believe that arts criticism isn't about having the right opinion, but instead is a means by which the writer and reader mutually discover their own personal relationship to the arts, I think we are succeeding in getting there. As a way to celebrate that goal, and, I suppose, to amply demonstrate it, here is a look back at some of my own favourite pieces from 2017. They aren't presented in any order of preference. Rather than commenting on the writer and their work, I've selected specific quotes that I think best reflects their value to me as critics. As I continue on as editor, writer, and reader, I can truly say that I'm proud to call them colleagues.

Kevin Courrier
Editor-in-Chief
Critics At Large

Activism and Art: Looking Back on the Free Southern Theater with Seret Scott

Seret Scott

Political activism and art have always had a complicated relationship: art can enhance the power of an activist message, while the sense of purpose imparted by a political message can elevate a work of art. However, the imperatives of creating great art and serving an activist agenda often conflict, diluting the political themes of a given work or rendering it painfully didactic.

In normal times, the task of reconciling these contradictory impulses might not feel as urgent. However, as virtually anyone who’s vaguely familiar with contemporary politics in the United States is aware, these aren’t normal times. The election of Donald Trump and the emergence of a distinctly fascist strain of politics in the world’s most powerful democracy has led to the politicization of nearly everything, from late-night talk shows to professional sports leagues.

Podcast: Interview with Poet Dionne Brand (1984)

Dionne Brand, in 2016. (Photo: Andrea Karr)

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1984, I sat down with Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist Dionne Brand.

Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Dionne Brand emigrated to Canada in 1970. In 1978, she published her first book of poetry,  Fore Day Morning: Poems. When we spoke in 1984, her fourth, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, has just been published by Williams-Wallace. Brand was Toronto's Poet Laureate from 2009-2012 and she was admitted to the Order of Canada earlier in 2017. Her most recent publication was the novel Love Enough, published in 2014.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Dionne Brand as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

Best Games of 2017: Anime, Automatons, & Adventure

Yoko Taro’s Nier: Automata was released in February.

The impulse to categorize, rank, and quantify games is a natural one, given the sheer volume that’s available to play in any given year. But it’s also antithetical to deeper thinking and incisive critical analysis; it’s the same petty list-making that has turned film discussion on the internet into a virulent Petri dish of tribal toxicity. “Best of Year” discourse is small-minded, superfluous, and uninspired – but dang if it isn’t a lot of fun, too.

I’m not above a little treat now and then. Here’s a list of the best games I played in 2017. Happy Holidays!

–  Justin Cummings

Some Dark Holler: The Oxford American Annual Southern Music Issue, Winter 2017

This year’s 19th annual music issue of The Oxford American features alt-country musician Sturgill Simpson on the cover with a defiant, rebel-like smirk suggesting the music from his home state, Kentucky, is back with an in-your-face attitude. But the cover portrait is nothing but a gentle ruse because this 99th issue is an ambitious collection of essays about finding “the middle ground,” that is, where artists remove themselves from their physical environment to find their voice while acknowledging the pull of home. The Kentucky music scene, like most of the southern United States, is shaped by the rural geography and its urban centers, which is why this particular issue is so passionate about discussing the contrasts between the socioeconomic backgrounds of the musicians who call the state home.

Illyria: Stage Folk

John Magaro and Fran Kranz in Richard Nelson's Illyria. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Richard Nelson must be the most prolific playwright in America. Within the last several years he wrote the four Apple Family plays and the three Gabriel plays; the published texts of his work take up most of a shelf at the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. And though I haven’t liked everything of his that I’ve seen or read, much of his work is first-rate, including some – like Nikolai and the Others, his 2013 portrait of the community of émigré Russian artists in New York after the Second World War, with Michael Cerveris and John Glover as Balanchine and Stravinsky – that deserved much more attention than it received. There hasn’t been much chatter about his latest, Illyria, which received a fine production at the Public, directed by Nelson himself, that closed a couple of weeks ago. Illyria is about the young Joe Papp, struggling to keep his first Shakespeare festival, in Central Park, alive in 1958 despite poor houses, fading finances and the menacing political climate: when the play begins, Papp (John Magaro, in a gruff, vivid performance) has just been fired from his job as a TV producer because the House Un-American Activities Committee has shown an interest in him. It’s a good play – well constructed, with a stage full of interesting, articulate characters whose conversation is well worth tuning into. And for theatre buffs, this glimpse into the scrambling, scrapping lives of young, idealistic, would-be-world-beating thespians of six decades ago has a special appeal and a special charm.

Who’ll Remember The Buns, Podgy? The Beatles’ Christmas Records

Happy Christmas Beatle People! The Christmas Records, a vinyl collection, was released on December 15.

The interwebs – lately anxious over the coming monetization, courtesy of the Federal Communications Commission, of the entire internet; and dispirited as Donald Trump and the GOP delivered a historic largesse to themselves and to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans – were lit up for a few happy hours earlier this month. Via YouTube and other outlets, a recording few had ever heard, and almost as few believed to be real, came to light: an 18-minute remnant of Unforgettable, something put together in late 1965 by Paul McCartney for the sole enjoyment of his fellow Beatles. I and many others first learned of this item in All Together Now (1975), by Harry Castleman and Walter J. Podrazik, the first attempt at a complete Beatles discography, where (in a section on “Bootlegs”) it was generically dubbed Paul’s Christmas Album. “Perhaps the rarest Beatle recording in existence,” the authors called it. “It’s a special treat for the other three. Paul recorded a special album in which he appears as an announcer, a singer and a comedian. Only four copies were ever pressed.” For years I doubted this: it sounded too much like something dreamed up by a fan, floated as a joke, and then transformed via rumor from fetish to fact. (After all, the same section of the same book asserted the existence of such unreleased Beatles songs as “Pink Litmus Paper Shirt,” “Colliding Circles,” and “Four Nights in Moscow” [!]; only in 1999 was it revealed that most of these titles were the prankish inventions of a Beatle bystander.)

A Year of Reading: My Favourite Books of 2017

Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of We Were Eight Years in Power. (Photo: Gabriella Demczuk)

With the exception of A God in Ruins, all of the books discussed below were published in 2017. I did not realize until I assembled this list that every entry consists of either at least two historical timelines or the bleeding of the past into the present either through investigative reportage or by way of past memories surfacing into the present consciousness of characters. – Bob Douglas

Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow is the most outstanding book I read this year, original and beautifully written, spiced with a soupçon of Tolstoyan flavour. A Russian Count juxtaposes his early life in Czarist Russia with his current life; he was sentenced in 1922 to permanent house arrest at the Metropol Hotel. Through his impeccable manners and urbanity, he skillfully negotiates alliances that will result over thirty years later in a courageous attempt to dramatically alter the life of a young woman who has become his de facto daughter. A book to be savored and reread.






Kate Atkinson’s A God in Ruins is a most satisfying novel, punctuated with drama, poignancy and humour. Superior to its predecessor, Life After Life, which played too promiscuously with the concept of time, allowing its protagonist, Ursula Todd, to constantly relive her life, A God in Ruins focuses on a single life, that of Ursula’s younger brother, Teddy, narrated in out-of-order chapters. Teddy never fulfills the promise that he briefly showed as a minor character in the earlier novel, apart from one major exception. He excels as a skipper for a crew of bomber pilots during World War Two, and these chapters, which have been impeccably researched, are among the most powerful in the novel. His civilian life afterwards never reaches that level of intensity in part because no one wants to hear him talk about the war and partly because of circumstances. His less-than-satisfying marriage is tragically cut short and he is left with a ghastly daughter, Viola, who turns out to be a ghastly mother. Late in the novel we are given a major clue to Teddy’s fraught relationship with Viola. By the time we finish reading, we realize that Atkinson has pieced together a beautifully rendered mosaic that is deeply moving.

Podcast: Interview with Canadian Novelist David Adams Richards (1988)

 David Adams Richards in 2008. (Photo: Bruce Peters)

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 writers and artists from all fields. In 1988, I sat down with Canadian novelist, essayist, and screenwriter David Adams Richards.

At the time of our conversation, Richards's novel Nights Below Station Street has recently been awarded the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction. Nights Below Station Street was the first book in his Miramichi trilogy, which includes Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace (1990) and For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down (1993).

Born in Newcastle, New Brunswick, Richards has over the course of his career published 16 novels (the most recent being 2016's Principles to Live By) and works of non-fiction, including Lines on the Water: A Fisherman's Life on the Miramichi, which won the Governor General's Award for non-fiction in 1998. This past August, he was appointed to the Senate of Canada by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with David Adams Richards as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

A Moving Gallery: Faces Places

Agnès Varda and JR in Faces Places.

On the surface, Faces Places, the new documentary gem co-directed by famed Belgian-born French filmmaker Agnès Varda (Cléo From 5 to 7, The Gleaners and I) and the French artist/photographer who goes by the name JR -- wherein the pair traverses the French countryside taking pictures of various villagers, blowing them up and then pasting them on walls and buildings -- may not seem like much. But despite its seemingly simple skein, Faces Places is a remarkable document, a poignant rumination on tradition, modernity, mortality, love, perception, imagery and many other subjects. It’s a film that you won’t soon forget.

Smashing The Mirror – Star Wars: The Last Jedi

Mark Hamill in Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi.

Note: This review contains major spoilers for Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi.

I’ve shed a tear or two in a movie theatre in my time. A lump in the throat, a welling in the eyes. It’s been known to happen. But until now, I had never fully cried in a theatre. I’d never been in a situation where a film cracked open the floodgates and allowed undignified public weeping to overtake me. I’ve learned that it’s not sad stories that trigger this for me, but rather stories of hope and love, stories of support and cooperation. I didn’t cry at the sad endings of Logan or Blade Runner this year, but you put on The Return of the King? It’s A Wonderful Life? I’m a guaranteed mess. I honestly was not prepared for Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi to cut me so deeply, and it has as much to do with the way the film challenges the legacy of Star Wars and my connection to it as it does with the film’s own smart, subversive, deeply emotional storytelling.

From Stax to Daptone and Back Again: Rob Bowman's Soulsville, U.S.A.

Jim Stewart and Estelle Axton (the ST and AX, respectively), ca. 1957, founding Stax Records.

Canadian music journalist Rob Bowman has given all of us soul music lovers a wonderful gift in the form of his deeply researched book, Soulsville, U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records (Schirmer Trade Books, 2003). It’s the inside story of the men and women behind what came to be known historically as the legendary “Stax sound.” His book, which he took twelve fetishistic years to compile, and which has made him the premiere expert on both the music and the business operations of a truly iconic label, simply has to be one of the most in-depth studies ever conducted and published on a single record company. In it, he explores the music, of course, but also the politics inside the organization, its finances, lawsuits, interracial harmonies and discords, studio location in an urban black neighborhood, key staff members, promotional strategies, distribution, every hiring or firing and, most importantly, the creative interplay between the soulful musical artists and their gifted producers. And what producers they were.

Time Has Come Today: Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Denzel Washington in Roman J. Israel, Esq.

Of all the great contemporary actors, is it possible that Denzel Washington is the most mystifying? As the defiant private who stood up to his hated sergeant in Norman Jewison's A Soldier's Story (1984), Washington sent currents of electricity through the film. But though he seemed a perfect fit for the charismatic black power leader in Spike Lee's 1992 Malcolm X, he resembled a lifeless icon. His spellbinding matchmaker, Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, in Kenneth Branagh's 1993 adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing was answered later the same year with the dull and earnest attorney who finds redemption defending a lawyer with AIDs in Philadelphia. When he plays the snappy private investigator Easy Rollins in Carl Franklin's crackling Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), Washington has some of the quick reflexes of Bogart's Sam Spade, but when he portrays the wrongly imprisoned boxer, Rubin Carter, in The Hurricane (1999), his energy gets sucked up by the character's nobility. Washington is exciting to watch when he gets to fill a role using a card shark's bravado, as he did as the hostage negotiator in Spike Lee's 2006 Inside Man, or when he underplayed the veteran railroad engineer trying to stop a runaway train in Tony Scott's Unstoppable (2010). But more recently, in Fences, he adds little imagination to the role of the embittered sanitation worker. That's because the character is completely worked out in the soapbox speeches playwright August Wilson wrote for him, and when the part is already fully thought through, Washington seems to simply fall back on his actor's skill and leave out his personality. He either becomes part of the scenery or he ends up chewing it. But if the role leaves more room for him to move, he can find surprising corners of the character that can magnetize the camera – and the audience. That's what he does in Tony Gilroy's new picture, Roman J. Israel, Esq., where he has plenty of space to be inventive. He gives an exciting and original performance – even when the film eventually gets muddled in dramatic confusion.

Young Marx: Catch as Catch Can

Laura Elphinstone and Rory Kinnear in Young Marx at London's Bridge Theatre. (Photo: Manuel Harlan)

The big news on the London theatre scene this fall was the opening of the Bridge Theatre near London Bridge, the first new commercial theatre in the city in eighty years, under the artistic direction of Nicholas Hytner (who held that position at the National Theatre during its most recent prestigious period). The Bridge’s inaugural production is Young Marx, a new play by Richard Bean – whose One Man, Two Guv’nors was a gigantic and deserved hit for the National – and Clive Coleman. Hytner has directed a cast led by Rory Kinnear, in my estimation the most talented English actor of his generation, as Karl Marx, Oliver Chris (memorable in One Man) as Frederick Engels and Nancy Carroll (last seen in the splendid Woyzeck at the Old Vic) as Marx’s Prussian-aristocrat wife Jenny Von Westphalen. I caught the show in the NT Live series a couple of weeks ago, and I had a pretty good time. It’s juicy and sumptuous, and the action on Mark Thompson’s revolving Dickensian set (the setting is 1850 London) moves at a clip, though Mark Henderson has underlit it excessively. The ensemble is flawless, with all three of the principal actors cavorting in high style. The problem is that it’s not a very good play.