Sex, Hype, and Abstract Painting: The Secret Life of Willem de Kooning

Elaine and Willem de Kooning. (Photo: Rudy Burckhardt)

A married couple, the painters Willem and Elaine de Kooning had what might be called an open relationship. From their wedding in 1943 until Elaine's death by lung cancer in 1989, both de Koonings were known for their sexual promiscuity. He had several partners, but she had many, many more. Their bedroom was overcrowded, which is perhaps why author Lee Hall used a plural noun when she called her 1993 book about them Elaine and Bill, Portrait of a Marriage: The Lives of Willem and Elaine De Kooning.

As Hall details in her controversial but thought-provoking biography, Elaine’s conquests were as legendary as her drinking, and her gift for inspired – and inspiring – chatter. Said by all who knew her to have been a legendary beauty and feisty femme fatale, she had no trouble bedding whomever struck her fancy. But there was method to the sexual madness: Mrs. de Kooning slept primarily with men who would advance her husband's career. Elaine’s lovers included Harold Rosenberg, the influential art critic, Tom Hess, the trend-setting editor of Art News, and Charles Egan, a leading New York gallery owner. By sleeping with these men Elaine ensured that her husband was crowned the king of Abstract Expressionism. Merit seems to have been beside the point. In Portrait of a Marriage, Hall quotes an anonymous dealer that "if Elaine had slept with different people – or, God forbid, if she had remained faithful to Bill – the whole history of American art would be different."

What to Listen to if You Like to Cook (and Eat) – Part I

Cherries! (Photo: Dean Morley)

I like to listen to food podcasts while I’m cooking and also – maybe this is ironic – while I’m exercising. And there are a lot of podcasts out there to choose from. The two described here are actually radio shows, but they’re available as podcasts, so you can download them and listen to them anytime, anywhere.

Neglected Gem: Mondays in the Sun (2002)

Luis Tosar (left) and Javier Bardem (right) in Mondays in the Sun. (Photo: MUBI)

The title of the Spanish movie Mondays in the Sun sounds like a reference to people who live a life of ease. In fact, it’s ironic: the men whose stories comprise the narrative used to be co-workers at a portside dockyard until they were laid off, so now they spend weekdays lying in the sun because they have no jobs to go to. They are Santa (a thickly bearded Javier Bardem); José (Luis Tosar), whose wife Ana (Nieve de Medina) currently brings home the only household money; Lino (José Angel Egido), so scared he’s losing potential work to younger men that he dyes his hair when he goes down to the unemployment office; and Amador (Celso Bugallo), a drunk whose wife has left him, though he pretends she’s out of town visiting relatives. Rico (Joaquin Climent) and Reina (Enrique VIllén), who used to work alongside their friends, were laid off a year later, when the dockyard finally shut down. Rico took his severance pay and opened a bar, while Reina has managed to land work as a security guard, which makes him, relative to his companions, flush – at least, enough to buy them drinks. (Santa’s pride resents this gesture, just as he resents his former co-workers’ signing an agreement with their employers that he and others opposed.) Then there’s Sergei (Serge Riaboukine), a Russian who emigrated to Spain when the Soviet Union collapsed and his career as an astronaut came to an abrupt end. Now he’s among the Spanish unemployed.

Steinbeck in Sunglasses: A Novelist Named Dylan

Bob Dylan and the Nobel Prize for Literature. (Photo: CNN)

“Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody, 
When I paint my masterpiece . . . "
Robert Zimmerman, a.k.a. Bob Dylan

In my 2008 book entitled Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer Songwriter, I had a chapter on Mr. Dylan, who, apart from various differing personal tastes, most people can now agree is one of the pre-eminent artists of our era, of several eras in fact. His chapter opened the book for obvious reasons: he etched the template for what a singer-songwriter in the contemporary age is capable of achieving, assuming that songwriter lives long enough to become an elder statesman of his or her ancient craft, as he has done. The chapter on him was called "The Storyteller: To Be On Your Own," and it encapsulated for me, without my even realizing it ten years ago, what made him not just a pop/rock star but also both a novelist and an island unto himself.

A Country, Traumatized: Samuel Maoz's Foxtrot

Lior Ashkenazi in Foxtrot. (Photo: TIFF)

Israeli Culture Minister Miri Regev’s recent attack on Samuel Maoz’s movie Foxtrot, on the grounds that it’s a slur on the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), is both misguided – only a very narrow reading of the film could come to that conclusion – and ominous in that it suggests that future government-funded movies may now be the possible victim of pre-censorship, if Regev decides to vet future projects on what she thinks they should or shouldn’t do. (She’s floated the idea of ‘loyalty’ oaths for artists.) Fortunately, she doesn’t seem to have put a dent in the success of Foxtrot, which cleaned up at the Ophirs (Israel’s Oscars) and is now wending its way through North America to almost entirely positive reviews. The movie deserves them, too, as it’s quite an impressive achievement.

New Plays by Major Playwrights: Good for Otto and Mlima's Tale

Ed Harris and Rileigh McDonald in David Rabe's Good for Otto. (Photo: Sara Krulwich)

David Rabe’s Good for Otto premiered at the Gift Theatre in Chicago in 2015 but only now is it receiving a New York production, off Broadway at the Pershing Square Signature Center – and with an amazing cast that includes Ed Harris, F. Murray Abraham, Amy Madigan, Rhea Perlman, Mark Linn-Baker and Laura Esterman. Rabe’s 1971 The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel is one of my favorite plays, and I love his screenplay for Brian De Palma’s Casualties of War (1989), but his other well-known theatre pieces – In the Boom Boom Room, Hurlyburly, and the second and third parts of his Vietnam trilogy, Sticks and Bones and Streamers – feel rigged to me, and compulsively overwritten. He doesn’t get much attention these days, and I’m afraid I stopped following his work long ago. (The last play of his I saw was Those That River Keeps when American Repertory Theatre produced it in 1993 with Jack Willis and Paul Guilfoyle.) Clearly I should have been watching more closely. Good for Otto is messy and overlong – it runs just over three hours – but it’s a lovely, full-hearted play, and Scott Elliott’s vibrant, varied staging and the marvelous work of the actors showcase it affectionately.

Masculine Toxicity in Dirk Kurbjuweit's Fear

Author Dirk Kurbjuweit (Photo: Julian Nitzsche)

About halfway through Dirk Kurbjuweit's unsettling psychological thriller, Fear (translated from the German by Imogen Taylor and published by the House of Anansi Press, 2017) the narrator, Randolph Tiefenthaler, a Berlin architect, recalls a Christmas dinner he and his wife, Rebecca, hosted for his extended family a few years earlier before the central narrative occurs. His sister was dating a Romanian, a supporter of the dictator, Ceausescu, who, having fled his country after the 1989 revolution, ended up in Berlin as the owner of a gym. As a supporter of self-justice, he dismissed Germans, declaring that their only interests were "stuffing their faces and watching their pensions," that there were no "real men" with "the guts to defend themselves." His bravado constitutes a litmus test for what defines manhood.  At the time, Randolph is silently contemptuous of this disdain for civility and of his "ignorant, brutish view of democracy."

On the surface this fascinating tableau is inconsequential as the Romanian exile never reappears, but it does highlight an important theme in the novel: the tension between the values of civility and the rule of law pitted against vigilante justice when there appears no other option for a family terrorized by a stalker. Kurbjuweit, the deputy editor-in-chief of Der Spiegel, was inspired to write Fear based on his own experience of being stalked.

Somebody Needs a Hygge: ABC's Splitting Up Together

Jenna Fischer and Oliver Hudson in Splitting Up Together. (Photo: Eric McCandless)

“When did comedies become half-hour dramas?” complains Billy Eichner in the second season of Julie Klausner’s recently-canceled Hulu show Difficult People . It’s a question that tends to come up more often in the context of half-hour-long shows on cable and streaming services, which have long been outlets for writers and showrunners to test how much serious material, in terms of both content and tone, they can get away with incorporating into a format that’s traditionally skewed towards delivering relatively uncomplicated laughs. I’ve found myself thinking of that question a lot as I watch the early episodes of ABC’s new sitcom Splitting Up Together, a comedy (ostensibly) with a decidedly downbeat premise and some baffling tonal issues.

Me In Particular: The Reappearance of Oscar Z. Acosta

Oscar Z. Acosta, as photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

In his roughly 39 years of life, Oscar Zeta Acosta recreated himself more than once. From a typical barrio kid growing up in the working-class Mexican-American community of Riverbank, California, he became a clarinetist in the US Air Force marching band; a Baptist missionary in the jungles of Panama; a creative writing student in San Francisco, mentored by famed baseball novelist Mark Harris; a law-school graduate and member of the California bar; and a Legal Aid Society advocate for the impoverished of East Oakland. And that only takes him up to the beginning of his first book, The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo (1972), which ends with his transformation into a budding Chicano militant. 

Most of us have known Acosta only as “Dr. Gonzo,” the fire-breathing, drug-scarfing, knife-wielding sidekick created by Hunter S. Thompson in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1972), and portrayed by Benicio del Toro in Terry Gilliam’s 1998 film of that book. Yet Acosta deserves to be remembered as more than a featured player in the Thompson legend; he left a legacy both historically important and all his own. That legacy is the subject of Phillip Rodriguez’s The Rise and Fall of the Brown Buffalo, an hour-long documentary which debuted last month on PBS as part of the VOCES series on Latino arts and culture. The film is a mishmash, frankly imaginative and affably unpretentious, in which the skimpy visual evidence of Acosta’s life (mostly candid photos and news clips) is fleshed out with scripted reenactments played in period costume against sets that suggest workshop theater. The first-person narration is derived from Acosta’s two books, and aside from the compelling footage of the subject addressing protest rallies or courthouse cameras, the documentary’s chief value is that it inspires – in a way that Thompson’s portraiture never did – a curiosity to read the man’s own words.

Inventory Management, Vol VIII: A Pirate's Life for Me!

Rare's Sea of Thieves, released in March 2018. (Photo: The Verge)

Sea of Thieves is the latest game from Rare, the developer formerly known as Rareware, who changed their name (and lost most of their intrepid founding members) when their company was absorbed by Microsoft Studios in 2002. Once the undisputed ruler of console gaming in the mid-to-late 1990s, with watershed titles like Donkey Kong Country, Goldeneye 64, and Banjo-Kazooie to its name, Rare’s acquisition by MS cast a dark cloud over the future of the studio. A series of clunkers in the early 2000s (Grabbed By The Ghoulies, Kameo: Elements of Power, and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts chief among them) followed their '90s hot streak, which tainted their legacy and spoiled the good will they’d earned among fans. (Several key developers responsible for those earlier, beloved titles would splinter off to form their own studios like Playtonic Games, which released the Banjo-Kazooie spiritual successor Yooka-Laylee in 2017 to decidedly mixed reviews.) The Rare logo on a product was once a symbol of definitive quality, a sign that no matter what genre or style the game was, it was sure to have been made with wit, care, and charm. That promise has since lost its credibility, and so Sea of Thieves, which was released in March for PC and Xbox One, had an uphill battle to fight before it even hit store shelves.

Gypsy at Heart: Peggy Seeger's First Time Ever

Peggy Seeger performing in Long Acre, London in the late 1950s. (Photo: Getty Images)

The best part of any story is in the telling, and so it is for Peggy Seeger’s memoir, First Time Ever (Faber & Faber) which was published last December. Seeger, the half-sister of legendary folk artist Pete Seeger, has written about her life with wit and sentimentality. Her story features a large cast of characters including family members, friends and musicians. Though she has amassed many accomplishments as a folk musician, most people may only know of Seeger as the partner of Ewan MacColl, the songwriter, historian and composer of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,”, written for her in the first year of their liaison. But her achievements as an artist go much further and now, in her 82nd year, we get to enjoy the stories of her life from the front row.

Fake Blues: ABC's Roseanne

Roseanne Barr as Roseanne Conner in ABC's revival of Roseanne. (Photo: Adam Rose)

One of the truest and weirdest signs of the changing attitudes towards television is the central role that “reboots” of classic shows have taken on in critical discussions of the state of the art. (Everyone is a pop-culture critic now, and that’s truer for TV than it is for most things.) Most of the reboots that have attracted the most attention are of shows from the 1990s, such as The X-Files, Twin Peaks, Full House, and now Roseanne. It’s easy to see why: they’ve been gone long enough to inspire feelings of nostalgia, but are still recent enough that most of the key members of the casts can be tracked down and put back to work without the aid of walkers or jumper cables. (Netflix’s Mystery Science Theater 3000 should probably be counted a remake, like the current version of Hawaii Five-O, because its main cast is new, but players from the original version, notably show creator and star Joel Hodgson, have turned up in cameos to give their blessing to the new kids on the block.)

Romance and Regret: The Age of Innocence

The cast of Douglas McGrath's adaptation of The Age of Innocence (Photo: T. Charles Erickson).

I returned to Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence before seeing Douglas McGrath’s stage adaptation, the latest collaboration between Hartford Stage and the McCarter Theatre Center, currently playing a run in the former space. It’s a diverting read but it’s never been one of my favorites. Wharton retraces Henry James’s steps and, coming seventeen years after The Ambassadors, her book feels shallow and a little obvious. In The Ambassadors the characters’ motivations are concealed behind exquisite screens that keep shifting, and you have to catch those motivations during the shifts, through the minute shafts of light that vanish moments later; his feat is to raise our stake in discovering the truth of these human interactions so high that the epiphany at the end, which is devastating for the hero, Strether, is devastating for us as well. Wharton also builds her novel around a blind American, half-stiffened by his upbringing, who is seduced and altered by the whiff of European exoticism and mystique, in the form of Ellen Olenska, an émigré New Yorker who returns home on the lam from a disastrous marriage to a count. But Wharton spells everything out for us. And her protagonist Newland Archer, who is about to marry the Countess Olenska’s cousin May Welland, doesn’t synthesize our own conflicted feelings, the way Strether does; he comes across as a boob.  When Ellen falls in love with him, you wonder what on earth she could see in him.

A Sweet Concoction: Meditation Park

Cheng Pei Pei (left) and Sandra Oh in Meditation Park.

I must confess, I’ve pretty much given up on English-Canadian cinema in recent years. Too many of the movies seem centered around addictions or dysfunctional families, subjects already tilled and brought off successfully by so many filmmakers. And since I don’t trust Canadian film critics on our movies – their raves are suspect as they are generally quite soft on the merits of the local product; I wrote a piece on this subject many years ago where our (then) leading reviewers admitted as much – I’ve opted out of attending  most of those releases. I was impressed by Andrew Cividino’s tough- minded coming-of-age debut feature Sleeping Giant (2015) – he’s a director to watch – but that was about the only one I think I checked out. Until now, when I dropped by my local multiplex a few days ago to see Mina Shum’s Mediation Park – on its last showing there, alas – mainly because it featured two of my favourite Canadian talents, Sandra Oh and Don McKellar, and because I had fond memories of Shum’s own feature debut, Double Happiness (1994), which starred Ms. Oh, in her own feature film debut as a  struggling Chinese Canadian actress attempting to balance family expectations against her own wishes to carve out an original path in life. Mediation Park flips the script with the character at its core, an elderly woman, as Oh’s mother, but, like the heroine of Double Happiness, still trying to deal with how to live and be happy. As with Shum’s debut, the film is also a similarly sharply etched, well-acted character study that is utterly engrossing.

Podcast: Interview with Robert Leuci (1985)

NYPD detective and novelist Robert Leuci, aka "Prince of the City." (Photo by Don Hogan Charles/New York Times)

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 former New York City police detective and novelist Robert "Bob" Leuci.

A police officer for the NYPD (working alongside officers like Frank Serpico), Leuci rose to national attention after becoming an informer for widespread investigation into police corruption in 1971. His controversial role in that investigation was documented in Robert Daley's 1978 book Prince of the City, which was later adapted into Sidney Lumet's 1981 film of the same name. (In the film, Treat Williams plays a fictionalized version of Leuci.) At the time of our conversation, Leuci had retired from the NYPD and had just published his first novel, Doyle's Disciples. He would publish seven more novels in the years to come, as well as a critically acclaimed 2004 memoir, All the Centurions, which chronicled his two decades as a narcotics detective. Robert Leuci passed away in 2015 at the age of 75.

– Kevin Courrier

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

The Assassination of Art Nuko by the Curator John O’Brian

Cruising down the Rideau in Ottawa by Carl Chaplin.

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Kirk Tougas, to our group.

Obviously an exaggeration, but a Vancouver artist has been "disappeared" by guest curator John O’Brian in BOMBHEAD at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Rephrased, perhaps an alternate title could be Shadowboxing with History: How Curators Can Erase Artists, but between erasure and assassination, let’s settle on the latter.

Jaegermeisters – Pacific Rim: Uprising

Jaegers charge into battle in Pacific Rim: Uprising.

I have no cynicism in my heart for a film like Pacific Rim. Unlike most movies – even those that aren’t city-smashing kaiju-mecha blockbusters – it knows exactly what it is and what it aims to achieve, and does so with gleeful enthusiasm. It’s hard for that enthusiasm not to rub off on you as yet another one of Guillermo del Toro’s twisted fantasies splashes across the screen like a meteor of colour and violence, and even without del Toro’s direct involvement, a sequel set in the world he established in 2013 is a welcome addition to cineplexes trapped in the late-winter doldrums.

A Quiet Place: Never Let Up

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

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

Mirror Mania: 68 and 18

Memphis March, Beale Street (Memphis, Tennessee, March 29, 1968).

“History may not repeat itself but it often rhymes.” – Samuel Clemens (supposedly)

“Now if 6 turned out to be 9, I don't mind . . . ” – Jimi Hendrix (definitely)

I know, it seems hauntingly familiar to me too: the year 1968 and its warped twin brother, 2018, appear to be the weird mirror images of something both good and bad at the same time. Like Chuck Dickens once almost said, it was the best of times and it is the worst of times. 1968 was already, all by itself, a totally paradoxical blend of the best that humanity was capable of as it faced a hopeful future and the worst it was still saddled with as it dragged its ragged past forward. Two images in particular sum up for me the bizarre irony of the state of Western civilization in that magical year, and because I suspect everything that occurs to us is the result of our own binary fixations and polarities, such dueling images often encapsulate our condition with woeful accuracy.

If the 20th century could stand up and walk into a psychiatrist’s office, lie down and describe its dreams, what would be the best way to determine its obvious neuroses and even its underlying psychoses? We might ask the 20th century, once it settles down on the couch, which might take a while considering how restive it was: by the way, whatever happened to beauty and harmony, what has become of some semblance of an orderly consensus on what constitutes truth or reality? Why does the contemporary world look and sound so strangely off-kilter, so inordinately stressed out and so . . . discombobulated? How could “we” be so advanced that we actually traveled to the moon and yet be so primitive that we still harboured mind-boggling racial hatreds?

Three Tall Women and Anna Christie: Pulitzer Prize Winners

Glenda Jackson, Alison Pill and Laurie Metcalf in Three Tall Women. (Photo: Brigitte Lacombe)

Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994, but the original production was off Broadway (at the Vineyard Theatre), and until Joe Mantello’s luminous new revival with Glenda Jackson, Laurie Metcalf and Alison Pill – in the roles created by Myra Carter, Marian Seldes and Jordan Baker – it has never been performed on Broadway. I saw the Vineyard show and liked it quite a bit, though I remember finding the writing in the second act rather theoretical and pre-arranged. In act one the three characters – one in her early nineties, one in her early fifties, and one in her late twenties – have specific, realist roles, despite the fact that Albee calls them A, B and C. A is a wealthy, fading widow, estranged until recently from her son, incontinent and subject to sudden tantrums, childlike behaviors and episodes of dementia. B is her caregiver, whose mordant humor buoys up her worn patience with A’s erratic conduct. C is an emissary from A’s lawyer’s office, summoned because C’s affairs are in deplorable order. But in act two the old woman has had a stroke and lies unconscious in her bed while A, B and C embody her as an ingénue, as middle-aged and as a dowager, the two older women warning the youngest one, with a mixture of wisdom and perhaps a little sadistic glee, what she’s in for.