The Poetics of Space: The Big, Big Pictures of David Burdeny

David Burdeny, Rockpool, Australia 2016, 5 x 5 feet.

 “The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche." – Gaston Bachelard

Well, I know that “they” always say that size doesn’t matter, and also that we know others who counter that with a rhetorical flourish and an easily understood "Size does matter." Both are clearly true. But in the case of visual art after the official invention of photography in about 1840 – and subsequently the inception of an art form that I consider to be not just a highly pertinent part of formal art history but actually its progressive culmination, leading eventually to the ultimate medium of expression, cinema – size tends to impact our perception in very valid ways.

Burned in Memory: Napalm Girl Kim Phuc’s War Story

Phan Thi Kim Phuc, with Nick Ut's 1972 photo. (Photo: Stephen Uhraney and CNW Group/MISTMA Consulting Inc., 2012.)

Kim Phuc was just nine years old when, on June 8, 1972, a U.S.-sponsored air attack on her village of Trang Bang, about 30 minutes north of Saigon, engulfed her in flames.

Running naked down a road, her arms outstretched and her mouth open in agony as napalm burned holes through her tiny body, she, in that moment, moved from the anonymity of a rural peasant existence and into the spotlight of international headlines.

Associated Press photographer Nick Ut (himself Vietnamese) captured her horrifying image in a shot that would become one of the century's most infamous portraits of wartime suffering.

Just how much that little girl suffered that day has often been left to the imagination. Kim, who today lives in a bedroom suburb of Toronto after coming to Canada in 1991 as a political refugee, has rarely spoken of the depths of her ordeal, nor discussed the full extent of her victimization. That is, until she she opened up to Canadian writer Denise Chong, bestselling author of The Concubine's Children (1995), who put the first authorized account of Kim Phuc's story into a book as remarkable as the subject herself.

Load Checkpoint: Metal Gear Solid 3 (2004) – Virtuous Mission

"Naked Snake" in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater.

“Light is but a farewell gift from the darkness to those on their way to die.” – The Boss, Metal Gear Solid 3

The release of Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater in 2004 was met with the same fevered anticipation that many franchises experience on their third entry: trepidation about the new material that’s needed to keep the series fresh, hope that missteps from the second installment might be addressed, and general excitement at the property's being back at all. By this point, whatever its perceived flaws, the Metal Gear series had established itself as one of the most singularly creative and expressive franchises in video-game history. Anyone with even a passing interest in the industry looked to Snake Eater’s release with wide-eyed curiosity. How could director and writer Hideo Kojima possibly follow up the expansive, mind-bending experience of Sons of Liberty?

Podcast: Interview with George Miller (1985)

Tina Turner in a scene from George Miller's Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985).

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 1985, I sat down with Australian filmmaker George Miller.

With George Miller celebrating his 73rd birthday earlier this month, it feels timely to revisit this conversation from 1985, which took place as the director was promoting the release of his third Mad Max feature, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Mad Max (1979) marked Miller's debut as a feature-film director. His other credits include the "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" chapter of Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), The Witches of Eastwick (1987), Babe (1995) and Babe: Pig in the City (1998). In 2006, he won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature for Happy Feet. In 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road garnered him Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with George Miller as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

The Cinema of Stillness: Painting With Film

Above: some of the uncanny overlaps between frames from films by the Russian cinema poet Andrei Tarkovsky (left) and the great American realist painter Andrew Wyeth (right).

"What is art? . . . Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that reflects the true meaning of life – love and sacrifice."
– Andrei Tarkovsky

Recently, culture critic and film scholar Hava Aldouby illuminated a unique zone of viewing pleasure by reminding us that the great Federico Fellini professed a desire to create “an entire film made of immobile pictures.” For me, the most tantalizing of films are those that draw extensively on art history, and particularly painting, as a reservoir for their highly retinal and idiosyncratic visual imagery. David Lynch, for example, said he liked making “moving paintings.” Something like Goya in action.

Hello, Dolly! Redux

Bernadette Peters in Hello Dolly! (Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

I had a great time watching Bette Midler and David Hyde Pierce in Hello, Dolly! last fall, but Bernadette Peters and Victor Garber, who have replaced them in Jerry Zaks’s gleaming Broadway revival, bring something new to the roles of Dolly Gallagher Levi and Horace Vandergelder: heart. Up to now my favorite Dolly has been Barbra Streisand in the otherwise bloated and worn 1969 movie version. She gave a sensational showmanlike performance – like Jimmy Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy or Robert Preston in The Music Man. But she was so absurdly young to be playing the widowed Dolly, who fastens on Yonkers shopkeeper Vandergelder as a way to refurbish a life grown dull, that the semblance of naturalism that’s meant to undergird musical comedy, even in something as stylized as Guys and Dolls, vanished utterly and you watched Streisand as if she were starring in her own revue. (And that certainly wasn’t the case with Cagney or Preston.) Peters, who, like Midler, is the right age to play Dolly, gives her a core of vulnerability from the get-go – from the moment she apostrophizes to her beloved dead husband, Ephraim, that she’s tired of living life as she has since he passed on. Both Streisand and Midler played Dolly’s bid for remarriage to Horace as situation comedy and farce; Peters motivates it psychologically.

Crime, Politics and Spectacle: Netflix's Babylon Berlin

Severija Janušauskaitė as the cross-dressing singer Svetlana Sorokina in Babylon Berlin.

 "The rise of the Nazis, and the devastation of WWII and the Holocaust, have been widely depicted in film and TV. Rarely seen is the period just before, when democracy – in the form of the idealistic, if flawed, Weimar Republic – was still fresh in Germany and the country was in the midst of a cultural, political and social revolution."

                                           – Tom Twyker, a director of Babylon Berlin

Babylon Berlin (on Netflix) is an exhilarating, gritty sixteen-part series that is a mash-up of genres. On the most basic level, it is a propulsive police procedural and political thriller that has been adapted from the crime novel of the same name by Volker Kutscher (Picador, translated in 2016), the first in a series planned by the author that will culminate in the 1938 Kristallnacht. More importantly, the drama – reportedly the most expensive German television production to date, involving three directors in every episode – is a vivid evocation of 1929 Berlin a few months before the crash of the American stock market, accented with film noir. Ten years after the end of the Great War veterans still carry its scars; the war's consequences accelerate extremist politics from the left and the right, threatening the rule of law and destabilizing the fragility of the Weimar Republic; pockets of poverty in the city remain with its attendant political and social ramifications, particularly for vulnerable women. And the attempt to blot out a humiliating defeat and, for most Germans, a shameful peace treaty explains in part its frenetic cultural, social and sexual life. Very little of the political, social and cultural tapestry of Berlin portrayed in the series is based on the novel. The series' other strength is its focus on character development, which enables the actors to grow into their roles and deliver strong performances.

Romantic Comedy at the End of the Millennium: The Last, Brief Golden Age

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).  

Why is it so difficult for Hollywood to make decent romantic comedies in the twenty-first century? Every year brings a handful, but by my count there have been only five in the last decade worth looking at: Ghost Town and Vicky Cristina Barcelona in 2008, Letters to Juliet in 2010, Top Five in 2014 and – a special case – Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (with a contemporary setting) in 2013. And you could put David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on that list, too, since it’s a murder mystery that only gets solved (as Kevin Courrier argued convincingly on this website) when the two protagonists, a brilliant journalist with an analog background and an IT whiz, pool their intellectual resources (while becoming lovers). As Whedon’s movie reminds us, Much Ado is the granddaddy of modern American romantic comedy. It pioneered the structure – a hero and heroine begin as adversaries but, by passing a series of tests and proving they’re open to compromise and change, they gradually earn each other’s love – that Hollywood adopted in the 1930s and that proved hardy and resilient through the rest of the twentieth century. It was the ideal solution to the issues posed by Hollywood’s self-censorship code (the Production Code, known popularly as the Hays Code), which bore down on American filmmakers in 1934 and held sway for roughly the next twenty-five years. The romantic-comedy structure enabled writers and directors to make movies that were sexy and witty, even though the narratives were forced to banish actual sex. Audiences loved smart entertainments like It Happened One Night (the first of these), My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Easy Living, The Moon’s Our Home, Bringing Up Baby, The Shop Around the Corner, His Girl Friday and The Lady Eve. And they responded to the form itself, which was a dramatic metaphor for the process of falling in love.

A Cut Above: In Conversation with Beatles' Hairdresser Leslie Cavendish

Leslie Cavendish cutting George Harrison’s hair. Leslie Cavendish has never forgotten the day, just over 50 years ago, when as an employee of Vidal Sassoon’s revolutionary London hair salon, he styled Jane Asher’s strawberry-blonde mane and became entangled with The Beatles. The British actress had been a regular at Sassoon’s Bond Street location, a celebrity magnet attracting all the fashionable women of the day. But on that particular Saturday, September 3, 1966, to be exact, Asher’s regular stylist, Roger Thompson, later Sassoon’s first-ever international creative director in New York, had fussed too much with an earlier client’s hair and had fallen behind. He asked young Cavendish to do the wash and blow-dry, and absolutely lived to regret it when that little twist of destiny ended up catapulting his trainee – and not him -- into the orbit of The Beatles’ fame. After taking extra care, and ensuring that she liked what she saw looking back at her in the mirror, he listened in astonishment as Asher asked him would he mind doing a house call to cut her boyfriend’s hair. Her boyfriend happened to be Paul McCartney. Asher scribbled his address on a piece of paper pulled from a notepad in her handbag. He recalls the moment vividly in The Cutting Edge, his scissors-sharp 2017 memoir whose North American edition comes out today at The Fest for Beatles Fans in New York. “When she passed it over and I saw the address, 7 Cavendish Avenue, I said: ‘What a coincidence. My surname is Cavendish.’ ‘It must be fate, then, Leslie,’ she said with a smile. ‘Don’t you think? I’ll tell him you’ll be over at about six.’ It certainly was fate. My life would never be the same again.”

Don't Look Back In Anger: Netflix’s Everything Sucks!

Jahi Di'Allo Winston and Peyton Kennedy in Everything Sucks!, now streaming on Netflix.

Luke: . . . you're out of focus.
Kate: I know. I'm trying to fix that.
                   – from Episode 1 of Everything Sucks!

Television shows and films about how horrible high school can be are plentiful – just as plentiful as shows set in the 1980s and ‘90s seem to be currently. And so, recognizing none of the actors in the main cast and knowing nothing at all about the show’s creators and main writers (Ben York Jones and Michael Mohan), I showed up to Netflix’s new coming-of-age dramedy Everything Sucks! with low, and pointedly narrow, expectations – anticipating at best a brief dip into a new, and ultimately forgettable, guilty pleasure (along the lines of MTV’s clever, but scatological  and sophomoric, The Hard Times of RJ Berger), or a mildly amusing nostalgia project designed to flatter a coveted Millennial demographic. As a result, I was genuinely unprepared for how poignant, sincere, and generally affecting the series is.

Podcast: Interview with Michael Ondaatje (1982)

Author Michael Ondaatje. (Photo: Linda Spalding)

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 1982, I sat down with Canadian novelist and poet Michael Ondaatje.

At the time of our conversation, Ondaatje's fictionalized memoir Running in the Family had just been published. Born in Sri Lanka in 1943, he emigrated to Montreal at the age of 19. His writing includes over a dozen books of poetry and six novels, including In the Skin of a Lion (1987) and Anil's Ghost (2000). His 1992 novel The English Patient was adapted into an award-winning film in 1996 by Anthony Minghella. (Minghella's acclaimed film, starring Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, and Kristin Scott Thomas, would go on to win numerous Academy Awards – including Best Director, Best Picture, and Best Supporting Actress for Binoche.)

Michael Ondaatje is one of Canada's most celebrated writers, winning the Giller Prize, the Booker Prize, and the Governor General's Award on five occasions. In 1988, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. Michael Ondaatje's most recent novel is The Cat's Table, published in 2011.

– Kevin Courrier.

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

Inventory Management, Vol VII: Battling for Supremacy

Dragon Ball FighterZ was developed by Arc System Works and published by Bandai Namco Entertainment in January.

I’ve had a rocky relationship with the super-popular anime series Dragon Ball over the course of my life. When it was airing on television in the 90s, I never caught enough of the story for any of the shouting and fighting and flying around to mean anything to me, so I largely ignored it. Later, having never really watched it, I nonetheless felt comfortable deriding the series as a brainless assembly of fight scenes broken up by long, tedious stretches of exposition. In my first year of university, however, a group of my new peers – horrified that I’d never given their favourite childhood TV series a fair shake – cemented the early days of our friendship by watching the show with me in our down time, making the shared enjoyment of this hyper-dramatized, aggressively-plotted story a ritualized, almost sacred event. Its quality meant very little in that context, since the social aspect of those viewings was far more important than the show itself, but still I enjoyed it far more than I ever thought I would. To this day I’ve never watched the entire series, but I treasure the memories of those early seasons, and still nurse a great fondness for the world of Dragon Ball.

Another activity that my dorm-mates and I would regularly engage in was the friendly competition of fighting games, from Mortal Kombat to Super Smash Bros. I was never much good at these types of games, not being a terribly competitive person by nature, but again, they were far more effective as a catalyst for fun socializing than anything else. Apart from the occasional indulgence (the Soulcalibur series being a decadent favourite) or the odd title picked up in a bargain bin (like my much-loved Xbox copy of Marvel vs. Capcom 2), I never went out of my way to buy fighting games for myself, much less practice them or follow their competitive scenes. So it must have been a subtle yet potent bout of nostalgia, powerful enough to overcome my general indifference to the genre, that prompted me to purchase this year’s Dragon Ball FighterZ for Playstation 4.

The White Card: Be White, Baby

Patricia Kalember and Karen Pittman in The White Card. (Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

For the production of Claudia Rankine’s play The White Card, about race in contemporary America – a co-production of American Repertory Theater and Arts Emerson – scenic designer Riccardo Hernandez has built a black-box space inside the stage of Boston’s downtown Emerson Paramount Center. Except that it’s a white box, with the audience seated on painful white chairs, tennis-court style, on either side above the narrow cream-colored playing area (with matching furniture). The symbolism is painfully obvious. Moreover, having wriggled back and forth on those goddamn chairs for eighty intermissionless minutes, perhaps I may be permitted to advance the theory that the level of discomfort, too, is deliberate. Could this be director Diane Paulus’s take on Brechtian theatre – keeping the audience alert at what amounts to a droning lecture on white privilege by literally making us squirm?

Lingering Darkness – Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams

Hank Williams performing on The Perry Como Show (November 14, 1951).

The worst part about reading a biography of country-music legend Hank Williams is that if you know anything about the history of music, you know how his story ends. Mark Ribowsky’s new biography, Hank: The Short Life and Long Country Road of Hank Williams (Liveright), was published last year. It’s thoroughly researched and thoroughly engaging because the author is deeply connected to his subject. In fact, Ribowsky’s tome is constantly looming on the dark side of Williams’s life, yet he succeeds in telling the tale of the beloved son of Alabama, who, in spite of his alcoholism and ramblin’ lifestyle, was “fresh, taut, [and] vibrant” on his recordings. To him Williams was a man who had “an instinct for turning pain into commercial gain” and expressing that pain with a degree of authenticity few of his peers, such as Ernest Tubb and Eddie Arnold, possessed. For Ribowsky, Williams changed the sound of country music, bringing “hillbilly” to the mainstream of American culture by wearing his heart on his sleeve. Yet his talent couldn’t save him from his inner struggles often expressed by his destructive, mood-swinging behaviour.

Make Politics Boring Again: Political Podcasts and the Trump Era

The NPR Politics Podcast

On February 28, Matt House, Communications Director for Senator Chuck Schumer, pointed to a correction in The New York Times regarding a meeting between Donald Trump and Congressional leaders: “An earlier version of this article misstated the timing of a similar televised meeting. It was in January, not last year.” “The media pace of this presidency is captured perfectly” by the correction, he commented, and it’s hard to disagree. The relatively staid pace of normal politics has been swept aside and replaced by what feels like a bad plot from a later season of 24. Sickening though such developments might be for those of us who are living through them and wondering how they might turn out, they have at least been fodder for a host of podcasts that aim to combine the compelling narrative drive of non-fiction hits like Serial with analysis of the constant torrent of disturbing new headlines.

Given that the presidency has been debased to the level of a cut-rate reality-TV series, it’s fitting that attempts to recount and make sense of developments in Washington have themselves often come to resemble shows that recap something like Big Brother or The Apprentice. Some, like FiveThirtyEight’s Politics Podcast or The NPR Politics Podcast, tend to focus primarily on summarizing recent events. FiveThirtyEight’s emphasis on analyzing the news via a data-driven approach tends to make it rather drier, and at times it gets bogged down by founder Nate Silver’s tendency to focus on criticizing media organizations who adopt a less quantitative approach to politics than his own outfit. By contrast, NPR’s podcast plays it straight and earnest, particularly in their weekly episode, typically produced on a Thursday, in which they summarize the past week’s events and offer additional analysis for listeners who might need additional context for some of the discussion. The latter approach is more effective, allowing the rotating cast of reporters and editors who host the show a chance to delve into important stories without alienating those whose knowledge of politics might be somewhat more superficial.

When Housewives Were Chemists

Photo by Nicki Dugan Pogue.

Not many foods deserve a biography. Those that do generally either date back to prehistory (bread, wine, beer) or were among the essential building blocks of empire (tea, sugar, bananas). But chemical leaveners, including baking powder, had humble origins and, not terribly long ago, they altered the way we eat dramatically. Imagine no cookies, cupcakes, pancakes, waffles, biscuits, doughnuts, or quickbreads. Okay, now stop imagining that: I don’t want to traumatize anyone. But chemical leaveners made all of them possible.

With Baking Powder Wars, food historian Linda Civitello has recovered the forgotten story of how chemical leaveners changed the way we eat – the story of an “indispensable, invisible ingredient.” Its protagonists are, at the outset, American women. This is because, though baking was largely professionalized in Europe, in much of North America it was the domain of housewives. In fact, Protestant moralizing on this continent associated baking with feminine virtue. Before the advent of chemical leaveners, baking meant bread, and bread meant yeast. Even the rare cake was leavened with yeast.

The Empty Place Inside: Alex Garland’s Annihilation

Natalie Portman in Annihilation.

I enjoyed the hell out of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation, but I was skeptical it could be effectively translated to the silver screen. Big surprise, I know, but this particular story, in its abstract, expressionist horror, seemed like it would be uniquely difficult to adapt. Unless, of course, there was a great sci-fi craftsman like Alex Garland at the helm. That would change things.

And change things Garland did, making choices in writing and directing a film version of Annihilation that clarified the novel’s abstractions, crafting a story (which, at its heart, is itself about the agony of change) that is very different from its original form, partly to appeal more to a broad audience, and partly because a good deal of interpretation is required in order to bring VanderMeer’s oppressively vague prose to a more concrete visual medium. Annihilation is not going to appeal to most audiences, but then, neither did the novel. I think what Garland achieves with his adaptation far surpasses his source material, as he finds a way to take a gloomy Lovecraftian horror story and mine it for a shattering emotional payload.

Iconosphere: Cinema in the History of Art

William Holden, Sunset Boulevard, 1950.

“Movies are magic” – Van Dyke Parks

When I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, growing up in the wasteland suburbs outside Toronto (Don Mills was, by the way, among the first such planned outliers in North America; it looked rather pleasant and was a splendid locale for experimenting with Aldous Huxley’s spiritual vitamins) and where I spent much of my time watching television like most of my fellow baby boomers, I was also treated to a rather unique experience that my fellow truants were not.

While whiling away the dreamy hours in front of that magic flickering box I would occasionally be taken aback by the sight of my own surname on the screen as the writer and producer of many a classic black-and-white film being screen on the new medium of TV.

There was, in those days, an almost total absence of the specifically programmed content we take for granted today, and instead the new-born networks would recycle movies from the early age of cinema for unsuspecting viewers such as myself. And when I asked them who this “Charles Brackett” was, their perhaps too-casual, somewhat innocent suburban response was something along the lines of “Oh ,yeah, I think he was part of the American branch of the family who had something to do with Hollywood.”

Something to do with Hollywood? He was, in fact, a member of Hollywood royalty, having also been a member of the Lost Generation in Europe along with Hemingway and Fitzgerald (both of whom he knew and nursed through their hangovers) before coming to New York and being a member of the Algonquin Room circle along with Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley (more help with hangovers, Charlie being teetotal) while also serving as the drama critic for The New Yorker.

Like other talented writers (including of course, Fitzgerald and Faulkner) he was eventually financially lured to Hollywood, where he was teamed up by Paramount Studios with a recent émigré from Austria who barely spoke English, to write screenplays for the great Ernst Lubitsch.

Mark Morris's Pepperland: Getting High

Mark Morris Dance Group in Pepperland. (Photo: Gareth Jones)

Pepperland, American choreographer Mark Morris’s latest work, is a new Beatles-inspired dance and, to paraphrase the Fabs, it takes you on a boat on a river to travel back to a not-so-distant time when patchouli scented the air and love was all you needed to change the world. Inspired by Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band but taking its title from the George Martin instrumental in the animated film Yellow Submarine, the Beatles project which soon followed the 1967 record that Rolling Stone calls the greatest rock album of all time, the nearly hour-long work reimagines the Swinging Sixties as a Technicolor dream. That's how Paul McCartney once described the decade he and his bandmates not only dominated but redefined. Accordingly, the mood is nostalgic in a sunny, giddy, carefree sort of way. The dancing, dexterously and whimsically performed by 14-members of the Brooklyn-based Mark Morris Dance Group, skips and leaps and somersaults. The direction is up.

Murder on the Orient Express on Stage: Riding High

David Pittu, Leigh Ann Larkin, and Evan Zes in Hartford Stage's Murder on the Orient Express. (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

What two sets of filmmakers (screenwriter Paul Dehn and director Sidney Lumet in 1974, screenwriter Michael Green and director Kenneth Branagh in 2017) couldn’t manage to do – turn Agatha Christie’s 1934 mystery Murder on the Orient Express into entertaining dramatic stuff – playwright Ken Ludwig and director Emily Mann have managed with seeming effortlessness. The production from the McCarter Theatre Center (where Mann is artistic director), currently playing at Hartford Stage, is charming, funny and stylish. The veteran Ludwig, whose long list of credits includes Lend Me a Tenor and the book for Crazy for You, the Gershwin musical that began life as Girl Crazy, has taken a light, parodic approach to the famous Christie material, her tenth Hercule Poirot adventure – which begins when the eccentric Belgian detective, with the aid of his train-line director friend M. Bouc, cadges a last-minute seat on board the unexpectedly crowded Orient Express from Aleppo to Istanbul. The first night of the trip, an American gangster calling himself Samuel Ratchett is stabbed to death in his compartment. The next day, while Poirot is interrogating the other first-class passengers and the conductor, the train is immobilized by a snowstorm – and in both the Lumet and the Branagh versions, the movie follows suit.