Talking Out of Turn #3: Margaret Drabble (1987)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM 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 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large. (See some of the others here and here.)

author Margaret Drabble

During the eighties, England was going through the trauma of no longer being able to maintain the power and the glory it once possessed when it was an Empire. So (just as in the United States) England also elected a leader, Margaret Thatcher, who (like Ronald Reagan in the U.S.) promised to restore those "glory days" at any cost. Of course, Reagan and Thatcher, both larger than life figures, never came close to restoring anything glorious. But they did both change the political landscape dramatically. In their midst. many spoke out against their policies - including author Margaret Drabble (The Radiant Way). 

In one section of Talking Out of Turn, I looked at England during that decade. And I wanted to include individuals who both predated Margaret Thatcher and were also contemporaries of her. At CJRT-FM, I was lucky enough to have spoken to author Alan Sillitoe (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner), film directors Lindsay Anderson (If...) and Stephen Frears (My Beautiful Laundrette) and they helped flesh out the past and the present. But Margaret Drabble was a writer who crossed over from both the Seventies to the Eighties. She not only became an outspoken critic of the Thatcher government, she also understood the price her policies would exact in the future. In this 1987 interview, Drabble delved into the effect of Thatcherism on human values. The Radiant Way, her study of three friends begins right on the eve of the Thatcher era. It was her first work of fiction in seven years.

Rescue Me: Flawed But Arresting

The following blog contains spoilers.

Is Rescue Me the best flawed show on television? I’d argue it is, but ever since its debut in the summer of 2004, the FX series (from the same cable network that brought you The Shield, Nip/Tuck and Damages) has divided audiences, who either like its incisive drama and outrageous humour or decry its juvenile tendencies and perpetually adolescent characters. Actually, they’re both right as this maddeningly uneven TV series can be as frustrating as it is engrossing.

Centering on the actions of the firefighters of Ladder Company 62 (aka 62 Truck), a Harlem-based firehouse, post 9/11, Rescue Me is an ambitious show that tries, and often succeeds, in capturing a specific moment in time: that of the slowly recovering shell-shocked New York City and the attendant worries, fears and attitudes held by those brave heroes who paid such a high price during the September 11 terrorist attacks. (An estimated and unprecedented 343 firefighters lost their lives in the collapse of the Twin Towers.) But this is no reverent show, extolling people only at their heroic best. The firemen, led by Tommy Gavin (Denis Leary) are a profane, womanizing and, in the case of Gavin, an alcoholic lot, as apt to cheat on their partners as they are to risk their lives by running into a burning building.

Classy Affair: Charlie Haden's Quartet West's Sophisticated Ladies

In 1992, Charlie Haden's Quartet West released a remarkable jazz album. It was called Haunted Heart and it featured the bass player’s quartet with Ernie Watts on tenor sax, Alan Broadbent on piano and Larance Marable on drums. The album was a soundtrack to Los Angeles, without the pictures, although it portrayed L.A. in a cinematic way. The album opens with the Warner Brothers fanfare composed by Max Steiner and segues into a composition called "Hello My Lovely" played by the quartet. Even better was the use of period recordings from the 1940s. Songs by Jo Stafford, Jeri Southern and Billie Holiday were brilliantly woven into the texture and tone creating a moving picture in the mind.

Two years later, Quartet West released a follow-up album called Always Say Goodbye featuring a thematic presentation based on The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler. This time the quartet was featured playing period recordings by sax great, Coleman Hawkins, Jo Stafford, Chet Baker and the Duke Ellington Orchestra featuring Ray Nance on violin. A musical excerpt from the Warner Brothers movie, The Big Sleep, including dialogue between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, concluded the album. This album also created an interesting concept rarely tried in jazz: the mash up.

This new release, Sophisticated Ladies, further re-interprets the past, but this time featuring the contemporary voices of Melody Gardot, Norah Jones, Cassandra Wilson, Diana Krall, Renee Fleming and Ruth Cameron, Haden's wife. Of course, with this much talent crowding the room, the results are uneven. But it's still remarkable what some singers, if they're prepared, can bring to a song. Therefore, the successful tracks on Sophisticated Ladies are by the better singers. Namely, Wilson, Krall and Fleming. The other three fail to dazzle my ears and perhaps it's because the material isn't suitable to the vocalist. For instance, Norah Jones does her best with "Ill Wind," one of the best torch ballads in the American Songbook, but I'm not convinced the wind is blowing her "no good." As for Melody Gardot, on "If I'm Lucky," a rarely recorded song by Edgar De Lange, she seems to be getting bad vocal coaching. Her vibrato styling on this song spoils the purity of the melody.

Talking Out of Turn #2: David Cronenberg (1983)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM 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 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. 

With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

The horror film genre in the eighties had grown significantly more popular because horror writers, like Stephen King, were pumping out books that were already infused with a film sensibility. But the success of thillers like Friday the 13th and The Nightmare on Elm Street also brought on a deluge of dread-inducing suspense pictures that were essentially about people bent on, what my friend Alex Patterson once called, head-pulling rampages. Although these films and their imitators were often lauded for their subversiveness, they were actually quite morally conservative, fitting snuggly into the Reagan era. After all, in those movies, why was it the sexually active teenagers who always got snuffed out and it was the virgin who became the hero that vanquished the killer? Many of these horror movies did more to re-enforce our fears and prejudices than help us come to terms with transgression. 

David Cronenberg.

What true horror became in the eighties and what it began to mean in artistic terms was part of a discussion I had with one of its practitioners, David Cronenberg (Shivers, Rabid, The Brood), in 1983. As a Canadian director who began his career in the seventies making low-budget thrillers, Cronenberg was just about to release his first big-budget commercial movie, The Dead Zone, which was adapted from a best-selling Stephen King novel. He was also about to be honoured at the Festival of Festivals (the original name of the Toronto International Film Festival) and had programed a series on science-fiction films for that year's event. We began the interview talking about the changing face of horror right at that moment when, in retrospect, he was beginning to move beyond the genre.

Remembrance: Canadian Military Disasters on Film and TV

Every Remembrance Day, between 1990 and 2007, I used to ask men of a certain age (usually in their 70s to 80s) if they had served in World War II. I wasn't buttonholing old men on the street, they were either those selling poppies or, since I worked in retail during the first ten years of that time period, some of my regular customers. Most of them told me that they had. I always said “thank you for what you did for all of us who've come since.” Some smiled and said they were glad to have done it. Others acknowledged my response and said nothing else. One year, however, a dear customer of mine, who I will call Mr. Clark, came into the store. I asked him that question and when he said he had, I thanked him. He looked at me and said, “I'm not proud, David, of what I did in the war.” Before I could stop myself, I asked him why and he answered, “I was a bombardier in the war. On more than one occasion I knew that our targets were strictly civilian. I knew we were deliberately bombing innocent women and children. And on more than one occasion, I managed to convince my pilot to divert over rail yards or factory areas, and not continue targeting the innocent. If our CO had ever got wind of it, I would have been court martialled.” Court martialling in World War II meant prison and disgrace.

A Well Not Dry: Philip Kerr's Field Grey

If this were (and I'm not saying it is) the last book in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther books, I would still be a very satisfied reader. It's not that Field Grey is the best of the now-seven novels, but there's a mournful, elegiac quality to this book that suggests a fascinating road perhaps leading to an end. The majority of the book is set in Germany in 1954 as Gunther tells stories to interrogators. This one begins shortly after the close of the last novel, If The Dead Rise Not (2009 – reviewed by me here). Gunther is not-so reluctantly coerced into helping a pretty, young female Castro rebel escape from Cuba to Haiti (Gunther, in the best noir tradition, has always been a sucker for a pretty face). During the journey across the Caribbean, Bernie's boat is captured by the American Coast Guard. Through slightly contrived circumstances, Bernie is identified, arrested and imprisoned first in New York, then Germany. He is suspected of war crimes.

Gunther has always been a fascinating character. A detective before and during the Nazi years in Berlin, he is no Nazi (he despises them – well, actually, Bernie hates pretty much everybody: Americans, British, Russians/Communists and the French, particularly the French), but he is a survivalist, so he didn't always stand up to Nazis. The times he didn't step up, he would have certainly been killed if he had. Sometimes he witnessed and even participated in some pretty bad things, but his moral code of trying to do the right thing as much as possible repeatedly saved both his skin and his soul. Bernie did some of the things he is accused of (shooting unarmed partisans in Eastern Europe during the war), but only after they had slaughtered many innocents themselves.

The Walking Dead: Zombies Matter Here

Vampires might get all the good press, but the fact is that zombies have also been enjoying a renaissance of late. There have never been so many quality zombie films: beginning with the phenomenal success of Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2003, Edgar Wright’s riotous Shaun of the Dead in 2004, the triumphant return of zombie-auteur George Romero with Land of the Dead in 2005, and Andrew Currie’s biting satire Fido in 2006. In the book stores, we’ve got Max Brooks’ The Zombie Survival Guide (2003) and World War Z (2006). (The film adaptation of the latter is now in pre-production, with Brad Pitt in the lead role.) But there has always been one realm the zombies have failed to successfully (de)populate: the small screen. With the Halloween premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead, the zombies have finally come to our living rooms.

Last year, AMC retired its original motto “TV for Movie People” and introduced its current slogan, “Story Matters Here.” In the 90-minute pilot of The Walking Dead, both principles are in full effect. Developed for television by Academy Award-winning filmmaker Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), and adapted from Robert Kirkman’s long-running black-and-white comic series of the same name, The Walking Dead is set in the weeks after a zombie apocalypse decimates the human population. While it is unclear how much the show will be following the plot of the comic series (now in its seventh year), its writer Robert Kirkland is on-board as a writer for this first season. Darabont himself wrote and directed the first episode, and it is a masterpiece of restrained storytelling. True to the comic book source material, Darabont lets the visuals tell the story. The early scenes are given hardly any incidental music, and long stretches of the first episode pass without a word of dialogue. This slow, cinematic build-up—as eerie as it is suspenseful—lets the landscape reveal itself, both to the viewer and to our lead character, on its own terms. Check your zombie expectations at the door: there are no cheap scares, no cartoonish violence, and no pounding music. The Walking Dead is a show about character and story: this is a story about the living, not the dead.

Lasting Impressions: Interview with author Ross King (Defiant Spirits)

When we generally think of The Group of Seven, we envision a group of naturalist landscape artists enraptured and captivated by the Canadian shield. Rarely does the idea ever cross our mind that these artists, who included Tom Thomson (who died in 1917 before the Group formally began in 1920), A.Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, Franklin Carmichael, Arthur Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and Frederick Varley, were not solely defined by the Canadian wilderness.

In his book, Defiant Spirits (Douglas & McIntyre, 2010), author and art historian Ross King does argue that that far from being woodsy ruralists the Group was more aethestically shaped by the explosion of modernist Impressionism in Europe, which included the work of Cézanne and Van Gogh. Furthermore, while the notion of being defiant and rebellious is seldom associated with being Canadian, Defiant Spirits explores how the dynamic paintings of the Group revealed a group of divergent painters who flaunted convention and were driven to interpret the rugged landscape of their country.

Besides writing Defiant Spirits, Ross King, who won the Governor-General's Award for The Judgment of Paris, a study of French Impressionism, also curated a show of the Group of Seven at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (which runs until January 30, 2011) in Kleinberg, Ontario. The purpose of the exhibition, as with his book, is to dig deeper into the idealized mythology of their work and explore instead the eclectic blend of styles that made them a part of the international avant-garde in the early 20th Century. We began our conversation at the Douglas & McIntyre office in Toronto by having Ross King first define the myth of the Group of Seven and why it developed.

Of Sound Mind: Tackling In Treatment

If my head ever needs shrinking, I’d know which guy to trust. He’s Irish, lives and practices in the same Brooklyn brownstone, has a gift for listening, does not hesitate to provide insights and has been through enough misery himself to understand the suffering of others. Unfortunately, this psychoanalyst is merely a fictitious character named Paul Weston on In Treatment, an HBO series now in its third season. I have to admit I’m addicted.

The minimalist drama is derived from BeTipul, a popular show broadcast in Israel for just two years. The American version’s 2008 and 2009 episodes essentially were just translations from the Hebrew scripts into English. For 2010, original material is required. So far, the process has been seamless, thanks to writers such as Rodrigo Garcia, son of Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and author Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake got her a 2003 Pulitzer Prize). Actor Mark Wahlberg is an executive producer. The fine casts have included Hope Davis, John Mahoney, Blair Underwood, Laila Robbins, Josh Charles, Alison Pill and Embeth Davidtz. In addition, directors such as Melanie Mayron (Melissa on thirtysomething), Chris Misiano (Law & Order), Terry George (Hotel Rwanda) and Paris Barclay (NYPD Blue) contribute to the classy credentials that set In Treatment apart from so much television trash.

Broken Sidewalk: HBO's Boardwalk Empire

Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire.

Now 8 episodes into its 12-episode run, HBO's Boardwalk Empire (created by Terence Wintner, a writer on The Sopranos), is an unfocused mess. Telling the story of Enoch 'Nucky' Thompson, king of Atlantic City in the 1920s, Boardwalk Empire tries to embrace both the mantles of The Sopranos coupled with the period cool surrounding another Soprano alum's show, Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. But it just doesn't work for an untold number of reasons. Thompson was a real person who was simultaneously a crook and a politician (better crook than politician). Well, he's almost real. Based on Eunuch 'Nucky' Johnson, Thompson is not the problem with the show. As played by perennial supporting player, Steve Buscemi, 'Nucky' is actually a compelling character to have at a show's centre, and Buscemi is quite wonderful in the role. Buscemi has made a career out of playing second-banana weasels in innumerable movies, but this is his first legit lead and he makes the absolute most of it. You can actually believe that, because of his power, a man as unattractive as 'Nucky' can and does have innumerable women throwing themselves at him.

The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest: A Lame Ending For The Stieg Larsson Film T‏rilogy

The following review contains spoilers.

It doesn’t end well. The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, the third adaptation of the famous Stieg Larsson trilogy, is probably the least of the three movies, which is a big disappointment considering that its predecessor, The Girl Who Played With Fire, finished on a high note.

The last film in the series, begins like the book, immediately after the events of The Girl Who Played With Fire, with a grievously wounded Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in the hospital and her friend, journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), getting ready to expose the Swedish higher-ups who subjected the mohawk-wearing punk hacker, both directly and indirectly, to all manner of abuse over the years. As Blomkvist and his allies tighten the net around the rogue government agency behind Salander's tribulations, the subject herself, set to go on trial for attempted murder of her abusive father, tries to cope with her injuries. She’s also seeking revenge on her tormenters. Larsson’s final novel upped the ante in all the themes that had gone before in a nail biting fashion but the film version, directed by Daniel Alfredson, who also helmed the previous movie, plods where it should move and concludes on a decidedly underwhelming note.

Lasting Value: Jason Moran Trio's Ten

On Ten, Jason Moran's trio works the music with cohesion and commitment. Like Keith Jarrett's group, with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette, Moran's music takes you on an imaginary excursion and returns you safely to home. Their kind of symbiosis, if you will, can usually take years of playing in order to perfect. But they are now inheriting the kind of experience that Jarrett's trio has been earning since the early 1980s.

For Jason Moran, Tarus Mateen and Nasheet Waits, the unity is almost fully developed which comes as a surprise considering the leader’s age of 35 years. But the band has had 10 years honing their chops playing together, off and on, since the release of their Moran's second record, Facing Left (2000).

Ten offers a mix of original music and a couple pulled from the jazz songbook. "Crepuscule with Nellie" is one of Thelonious Monk's most eloquent ballads dedicated to his wife. It's not intended to be a tune a band can riff on; it's meant to be played straight without soloing. But this trio has the skill to change the song anyway they like and they succeed. It's a very bold interpretation of the music, but it works because of the great inter-play by the band and Moran's arrangement. It's still Monk but with a little extra.

Talking Out of Turn #1: Jerzy Kosinski (1982)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM 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 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

Jerzy Kosinski

The interview with author Jerzy Kosinski (The Painted Bird, Being There) took place in 1982 while he was promoting his novel, Pinball. The book was written in response to the murder of John Lennon a couple of years earlier. It's the story of a female fan who hunts down a popular rock star by seducing a former classical pianist to help her in the search. The novel examines the motivations of the pop fan: Is she moved more by the artist, or his art? Our talk also came shortly after the release of Warren Beatty's Reds (1982), which examined the life of the American Communist journalist John Reed (Ten Days That Shook the World) who covered the Russian Revolution. In the film, Kosinski played the Soviet ideologue Zinoviev.

Jerzy Kosinski was a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust by living under a false identity. He wrote about that experience in The Painted Bird (1965). Many of his books took up the theme of anonymity and invisibility which, ironically, came to a head in the late eighties when he was being accused of plagiarizing some of his work. He ultimately committed suicide in 1991. His final note read: "I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity." Before Eternity knocked, we discussed the subject of anonymity and visibility.

Be of Good Cheer: Levity Lives!

I would have loved to attend the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on October 30th in Washington, D.C. Glued to my TV for three hours, it seemed clear that Comedy Central’s extravaganza on the National Mall was a truly delightful experience for those 150,000 or so ardent fans of civil discourse.

The crowd’s signs were clever, evidence of the intellect and wit that energizes viewers of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. “I doubt this sign will change your opinion” is one I spotted. “Death to nobody!” read another. Pop culture references abounded with absurdist placards such as “Soylent Green is people” and “Mr. Obama, what are you doing about Twilight?”  My personal favorite: “Ruly Mob.”

The Beat Goes On: William S. Burroughs: A Man Within & My Queen Karo

William S. Burroughs

Unquestionably, the Beat Generation of the 1950s blazed a trail for hippies to follow a decade or two later. So we’ve essentially got the idiosyncratic subject of William S. Burroughs: A Man Within to thank for the dangerously unbridled youngsters of My Queen Karo, a Dutch feature set in Amsterdam during the early 1970s. In both films, the zeitgeist involves questioning authority, resisting conformity, criticizing the establishment and expressing a sometimes forced a joie de vivre.   

Burroughs comes across as a contrarian whose dour demeanor does not indicate much joy in a life plagued by heroin addiction. More happily, he is heralded as the godfather of the post-World War II movement that witnessed legendary figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Gregory Corso busily expanding the boundaries of American culture. But first-time director Yony Leyser layers on one too many talking heads: Patti Smith, John Waters, Iggy Pop, Laurie Anderson, Jello Biafra, Diane DiPrima, Gus Van Sant and a number of biographers, among others. Some, but not all, offer valuable insights into an enigmatic person few really seem to have known very well. Also on hand is David Cronenberg, whose 1991 big-screen version of Burrrough’s Naked Lunch stars Peter Weller, who serves as narrator of the 90-minute documentary.

Mind Out of Time: Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010

For close to fifty years, Bob Dylan has transformed himself into any number of incongruent characters while keeping his fans both baffled and infuriated in the process. Critic Greil Marcus is one of those baffled and infuriated fans. But rather than worship at Dylan's altar, or burn him in effigy, Marcus has instead assembled a fascinating chronicle of reviews, stories, asides and rumours about Dylan that he has written over the last four decades. In Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 (Public Affairs, 2010), Marcus has created a riveting and imaginative collection of criticism where he not only traces a popular artist's erratic career through a chronology of pieces, his book also becomes an engagement where sometimes the hunter gets captured by the game.

While Marcus shapes the arc of Dylan's work, as one would untangle a long, convoluted mystery, we also witness how Dylan has equally shaped him as a writer. "I was never interested in figuring out what the song's meant," Marcus writes in the introduction. "I was interested in figuring out my response to them, and other people's responses. I wanted to get closer to the music than I could by listening to it - I wanted to get inside of it, behind it, and writing about it, through it, inside of it, behind it was my way of doing that."

Although Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 bears some resemblance to Marcus's last book When That Rough God Goes Riding (see Critics at Large review here), which took us through the equally uneven career of Van Morrison, that book shifted back and forth through time as if Marcus was randomly picking Morrison's albums from the shelf to see if they still added up. By contrast, Bob Dylan is a more linear tale. Yet the very nature of Dylan's art has a way of pulling the rug out from any assumptions concerning what happens next, so Marcus's book becomes (to invert the title of one Dylan album) a mind out of time.

Heavy Fog: Bryan Ferry's Olympia

Bryan Ferry

I have a lot of respect for Bryan Ferry, a vocalist who's always had a flare for the glamour of the music business. He is classier than David Bowie, for instance, yet not too pretentious. Roxy Music, a band I've been fond of since the late '70s, offered music that was glam-rock, but with atmospherics thrown in for good measure. Recognizing his role as the front man, Ferry chose the high road by presenting himself without any theatrics, in spite of the pink suit he once wore when I saw the band in 1978. The band may have appeared stiff on occasion, but Ferry would soften the group with a dedicated vocal and presentation that was at once romantic and hip. Inspired by the music of Stax artists such as Sam & Dave and Otis Reddin et al, Ferry loved the notion of presenting his music as big as possible, with female back-up singers and reeds usually played by Andy MacKay. 

Defying the Mainstream: Margarethe von Trotta’s Vision

Apparently a renaissance nun in medieval days of yore, Hildegard von Bingen displays a protofeminist impudence in writer-director Margarethe von Trotta’s Vision. The protagonist stands up to the good old boys club of mean priests who run the hermitage that houses her Benedictine order. For example, she insists that her promotion to magistra -- a sort of mother superior -- be subject to a democratic vote by the sisters. This being the early 12th century, however, the woman stops short of any pro-choice notions when a young novice is impregnated by one of those good old boys. The poor girl is expelled, even though returning to her family means shame and probable abuse.

As the backstory unfolds, we first see Hildegard at age eight -- destined to become a “little bride” of Christ, according to her parents -- delivered to the cloister in a lush German forest. After a few brief scenes depicting her youth, she’s suddenly 38 and played by frequent von Trotta muse Barbara Sukowa with typical grace. The audience is given few clues as to how the adult celibate has evolved into a remarkable Christian mystic, playwright, composer of liturgical songs, author and healer in a doom-and-gloom era when people regularly flagellated themselves. Somewhere beneath her devout Catholicism lurks an enlightened pagan who worships nature, but the ecclesiastical vows dominate.

Passages: Fathers and Sons

The bond between fathers and sons is always fraught with ups and downs. As his sons grow, the father tries to understand these independent creatures that live under his roof. The sons try to comprehend the 'old man's' archaic attitude. It is a centuries old struggle that continues to confound all father/son relationships. This was not dissimilar to my own relationship with my father, Ken Churchill. Last Sunday morning, he passed away at age 87 and it got me ruminating about my own bond with my Dad.

Over the years, I'm convinced he often times had no idea what to make of his artsy son. Here was a man who climbed hydro poles in the early part of his career, and continued working for Ontario Hydro, in a variety of positions, for almost 40 years. To his children – myself and my older siblings, Neil and Teresa – my Dad was a good father. Unlike most fathers in Parry Sound, he played with us and the rest of the neighbourhood kids (touch football, street hockey, etc.) He taught us to swim (it was a bit of struggle with me, his sink-like-a-rock youngest son), fish, drive a boat, drive a car, ride a bike, skate, ski (downhill and cross country – I sucked at downhill, but I was a pretty good X-country skier) and tie knots (he was in the Navy during WW2). Yet, when it came to the arts, my obsession, I think he was at a loss.

Soap: The Granddaddy of Continuity Comedy

In this age of DVD box sets, Youtube, and Hulu, television fans finally have full and immediate access to their favourite TV series, even ones that have been off the air for decades. As good as current television often is, sometimes the most satisfying viewing can come from settling in front of the TV, or computer, and immersing yourself in a classic series. Last week, frustrated by the lack of innovation in this fall season’s new sitcoms (and with all due respect to the continuing efforts of William Shatner), I pulled a much-loved series off the shelf and looked back at it, for the first time in decades. The series that caught my eye this time was Soap, which aired on ABC from 1977-81.

Soap was prime time television’s first serial comedy. The brainchild of the production team of Susan Harris, Paul Witt, and Tony Thomas (perhaps most famous for creating the immensely successful Golden Girls in the 80s), Soap was a parody of daytime soap operas which wove together the serialized and often sensationalized narrative of a soap with the conventions of a weekly situation comedy. The result was like nothing television had ever seen before, and quite frankly, since. I have always remembered the show fondly but, having watched it mainly as a kid, few but the most exaggerated details of it remained in my memory. What I recalled were the over-the-top characters, the zany situations, and, well to be honest, the ventriloquist dummy. What has surprised me in the past week has been the brilliant writing, the stunning comedic acting, and the depth and humanity of all of its characters. Some sitcoms don’t age well, while others become more impressive even decades after their original run. The best of them fall into two camps: groundbreaking ones which change the genre forever, thereby setting the stage for the success of many subsequent series, and other shows which are so startlingly original that they have produced no real successors. Norman Lear’s All in the Family (1971-79) falls firmly in the latter camp: though the show is largely credited for the sudden boom in ethnic sitcoms of the 70s, none ever approached the stark political frankness of the show that inspired them. Even today, almost 40 years later, any episode from the first season of All in the Family can leave a contemporary television viewer speechless in terms of the bluntness and honesty of its political content. I’m now convinced that Soap, despite its disarming lack of pretension and apparently narrow mandate, falls into that same category.

Songs We Refuse to Sing

Toronto Mayor-elect Rob Ford

While walking home from dinner with a friend last evening, I had the Toronto Civic Election on my mind. This year's Mayoralty race had been a bitterly fought battle between Rob Ford, a right-wing demagogue from the suburbs, and George Smitherman, a provincial Liberal Party politician, who entered the race to bring fiscal responsibility and social awareness to a metropolis where its suburban citizens were angry with our current Mayor David Miller. Many were enraged over high taxes, political entitlement, waste and an ill-functioning transit system. During his campaign, where he vowed to "stop the gravy train," Ford marshalled that fury into a frightening populist froth. He resembled the late comic Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, acting out his character of the suburban Ralph Kramden, a big lug always in a state of continuous fulmination.

Hitch-22: An Iconoclast Looks Back On His Life (So Far)

Christopher Hitchens

Hitch-22: A Memoir (McClelland & Stewart), the entertaining and enlightening ruminations of controversial writer Christopher Hitchens, is quite a gentle book, even though the British-born, American writer has plenty to be angry about. I met him at a book signing in Toronto a few years ago and he came across as a kind man. But those folks, maybe the majority, who see Hitchens solely as the rabble-rousing provocateur, who’s as apt to tell his adversaries to fuck off as he is to spout bon mots, will glean from Hitch-22 that his combative public image and persona is more removed from the genuine article than they’d think.

It’s not that Hitchens doesn’t stand up for what he believes or goes against the grain. He certainly does. But Hitch-22 is largely a reflective, soft-spoken book wherein he (mostly) sets the record straight on his life, including his famous friendships and his adversarial politics. It’s the latter he's become best known for, particularly from the days right after 9/11, when he rejected the left’s moral equivalence between Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush and their justification for the terror attacks on America. He came out in support of the Iraq war and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, which led to Hitchens being ostracized by the anti-war left. While he's not necessarily embraced by the right, who are suspicious of his anti-religious diatribes and criticism of past American foreign policy, Hitchens is determined (as always) to stake out territory as an iconoclast who thinks solely for himself.

Chop the Tomahawk Chop: Atlanta Braves Fans' Cheer

I, for one, was so grateful that the Atlanta Braves were eliminated by the San Francisco Giants, in the Major League Baseball NLDS, because their fans' cheer, the Tomahawk Chop, is more irritating than any stadium-filled South African World Cup vuvuzela drone-fest. The first time I heard this grating noise was during the 1992 World Series between the Braves and Toronto Blue Jays. This chant is a parody of the supposed Native American war dance song from thousands of Hollywood western movies.

The Tomahawk Chop drone is topped off with the fans waving cartoon foam red tomahawks in a vaguely menacing 'I'm going to scalp you' motion. Whenever the Braves come to bat and have a chance to score, or whenever their pitcher is about to get the third out, the drone commences, taking over the entire soundscape and proceeding to crawl under my skin. Why the fans think this noise is actually helping their team is beyond me. Sure, under manager Bobby Cox, the Braves have been a perennial playoff team (something the Jays sure haven't been for 17 years), but they've only managed to win the World Series once (and that was in the post-strike-shortened 1995 season). Perhaps their fans' insistence in continuing this ridiculous drone is a factor.

Jazz of La Mancha: Kenny Wheeler's Windmill Tilter: The Story of Don Quixote

Windmill Tilter: The Story of Don Quixote (BGO Records), originally released in 1969, is a welcome re-issue. It was the first record by Canadian composer and jazz musician, Kenny Wheeler, who was born in Toronto in 1930. Wheeler was raised however in St. Catherines, Ontario, a small city in the Niagara Region of the province. His father Wilf, played trombone in dance bands that traveled around the country, but he eventually settled in Montreal. Due to his father’s nomadic occupation, Kenny studied music and learned to play trumpet at an early age, but his most significant influences were composers, John Weinzweig and Richard Rodney Bennett.

Wheeler actually moved to London, England in 1952 to study with Bennett. Working in England, proved beneficial to his career, which was significant because most jazz musicians went to New York to play be-bop. Wheeler continued to play in British dance bands earning him a chair in the trumpet section of the John Dankworth Orchestra. Dankworth, who later became the leader in mainstream jazz out of England, inspired Wheeler to compose for his orchestra. The result was Windmill Tilter: The Story of Don Quixote, a suite written for large orchestra and small group. After its first release on the Fontana label, it was forgotten for many years, until now.

Promise Broken & Promise Kept: The Promise & Trigger

When Bruce Springsteen’s fourth album, Darkness on the Edge of Town, was released in the late spring of 1978, it seemed to make everything else around it seem insignificant. “This isn’t just a great record,” The Who’s Pete Townshend exclaimed upon first listening to it. “It’s a fucking triumph.” Darkness not only arrived after a three-year period of contractual war with his former manager Mike Appel, one that forced the artist into a self-imposed hermitage, it also came on the heels of his worldwide hit album, Born to Run (1975). The consequences of furious expectations and the frustrations of a musician trying to maintain his integrity led to an album that was not only a powerful rock & roll record but also a stunning work of self-revelation.

Rather than simply provide a random collection of songs, Springsteen and his E Street Band crafted a work that took the early aspirations of rock & roll (which they celebrated on Born to Run) and uncovered the possible consequences of acting on those aspirations. As a result, songs like “Racing in the Streets,” which took Martha Reeves & the Vandellas’ infectiously hopeful call of “Dancing in the Streets” and The Beach Boys’ pining reassurances of “Don’t Worry, Baby,” and revealed the grim realism beneath the hope. Sometimes a memorable and exciting rock hook, like the guitar intro from The Yardbirds’ “Heart Full of Soul,” would be used to slice the voyeuristic lust of “Candy’s Room” in half. In songs like “Badlands,” “The Promised Land” and “Prove it all Night,” Springsteen stripped pop drama down to the basic task of one man’s desire to speak of only what feels true to him; to bring adolescent dreams into adult realities.

Off The Shelf: Edward Yang’s Sublime Yi Yi

It’s a sad irony that Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang died of prostate cancer, at the young age of 59, just when his final film, Yi Yi, was garnering him the best reviews of his career, not to mention his first American distribution deal and the Best Director award at the 2000 Cannes film festival. The death of Yang is really one of the most devastating losses to hit the film world, as there’s no question that he would have gone on to make many more significant features. Unfortunately, curious movie buffs won’t be able to find any of Yang’s other six films on DVD in North America, which is a real shame as his contemporary urban dramas Taipei Story (1985) and The Terrorizers (1986) are first-rate and his four hour opus A Brighter Summer Day (1991), a meticulous period piece that recreated a scandalous murder from his youth, is magnificent. But at least, Yang’s last feature is available for their enjoyment and illumination.

Dream Pop: "Be My Baby" & "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

The other morning while having breakfast, I put my Mp3 player on shuffle because I always enjoy the element of surprise. After all, you never know what to expect from song to song. As I was preparing my coffee and cereal, I was first treated to an excerpt from Anton Webern's beautifully spacious Symphony op. 21, which was followed by The Channels' elegiac 1956 doo-wop song, "The Closer You Are," and then the LA punk band, X, with their propulsive 1982 track "Blue Spark." While it's always enjoyable to create a virtual time machine out of music, where you can be dropped any place in time, these three tracks didn't pull me out of the moment of making my breakfast. They instead added something new to the daily routine, an incongruent and appealing soundtrack which roused me from slumber. Once the brittle harmonies of John Doe and Exene Cervenka stopped their song cold, though, the next track to follow was The Ronettes' "Be My Baby." At which point, I forgot what I was doing and breakfast went into suspended animation for a little over two minutes.

Book: Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

Though I’m a great lover of French cinema, I must confess that I’ve never been to Paris. It’s a trip I still intend to take some day. Having just finished reading Graham Robb’s fascinating Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (W.W. Norton and Company), he's helped to firmly cement that desire. In Parisians, Robb, an Oxford-based Englishman who writes on all things French (Balzac: A Biography, The Discovery of France: A Historical Geography from the Revolution to the First World War), has crafted a gripping, rich and provocative history of the city and its inhabitants. It begins around the time of the French Revolution in 1789, right up to the present reign of President Nicholas Sarkozy and the part he played in the city’s recent race riots. Robb’s does this in 20 chapters, roughly corresponding to 20 different arrondissements (districts) of the city. In the process, he describes the intricacies of the City of Light in a way that has a novelistic veneer to it. In short, it’s a history that almost feels like a fiction, which incidentally is a good thing.

Groovy Hooks: Small Sins' Pot Calls Kettle Black

I’m a sucker for musical hooks be they guitar licks, trippy bass lines, or vocal gymnastics. In most music I listen to today, no matter what genre, just to hear one of these hooks would be enough for me to consider a whole album. But Small Sins' Pot Calls Kettle Black, on the Indie label Arts&Crafts, has all three going for it making it one of the freshest pop records of the year. No drudgery, or moody revelations typical of a lot of independent bands out of Canada, Small Sins is about pop music in its purest form: bright, positive, filled with appealing grooves (and all under 4 minutes).

Small Sins is led by Thomas D’Arcy, the bass player and principal songwriter for this group from Toronto. His work has been called “wistful chamber pop … [as if] Jack White had a crush on Kraftwerk.” This is the third album from the band and it’s got everything you want from a so-called chamber pop band: up tempo R&B dance tunes and delicate synth-pop ballads with a lot of charm.

Promises That Can And Can't Be Kept: Grant Goodbrand's Therafields

Grant Goodbrand's Therafields: The Rise and Fall of Lea Hindley-Smith’s Psychoanalytic Commune (ECW Press, 2010), the story of one of the largest and influential therapeutic communes during the sixties and seventies, is an absorbing, insightful and contemplative study of the failure of good intentions. Therafields, an experimental psychotherapeutic collective was formed by British-born lay therapist, Lea Hindley-Smith, in the mid-sixties. The commune was part of that period’s utopian spirit to create an alternate society which, by the end of the '70s, came apart in division, death and suicide. “The experiment had ended in tragedies and bitter animosity, traumatically turning friend against friend in ruptures that never healed,” Goodbrand writes. Therafields might have been sparked by an egalitarian impulse, but it was one that was undone by false expectations, fantasies, idolatry and promises that couldn’t be kept. In Therafields, though, Grant Goodbrand keeps his own promise by trying to heal the breach in that history.

Triggered Times: Remembering "Pearl"

An October 4 New York Times story revealed that Janis Joplin – gone at that point for exactly 40 years – is on the verge of a comeback. Although she has remained a music icon since overdosing on heroin in the fall of 1970, her family never groomed the singer’s legacy the way relatives of other rock stars have. But now a “professional estate manager,” who already has done wonders for the equally deceased Jim Morrison, Peter Tosh and Gram Parsons, intends to relaunch her image. There’ll be new books, vinyl collector editions of her albums, a line of Janis-like clothing and jewelry called Made for Pearl (her nickname and the title of her posthumous record). Plus, he’s planning a feature-length documentary that will include rarely seen footage shot by her road manager John Byrne Cooke.

Boxed In: Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried

In Rodrigo Cortés’s modest thriller Buried, Ryan Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, a civilian truck driver in Iraq who is hijacked and buried alive. The drama takes place entirely within the confines of his wooden coffin. When I first heard about the picture last summer, my instincts told me that while this formal exercise in claustrophobia would likely be effective (after all, who isn’t afraid of being buried alive?), where could it possibly go dramatically? But then I started reading all the critical praise it received when it premiered at TIFF in September. So I decided to check it out when it opened.

I should have trusted my first instincts.

Life After Dr. Horrible: A Rough Guide to Original Web Programming

The story goes like this: it was late December 2007 in Hollywood, and Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly) was walking the picket line during the 100-day WGA writers’ strike when he began to think about how he could bypass the studios and networks altogether and self-produce a TV show which could be delivered directly to his fans. Walking the line with him was Felicia Day, an actor/writer who Joss knew from the 7th season of Buffy. At the time she was halfway through the first season of her own web series, The Guild, which had become particularly successful. Inspired by her experience, Joss’ little idea grew more and more ambitious. And thus the world’s first Internet musical, Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, was born.

Together with his younger brothers, screenwriters Zack (now writing Rubicon) and Jed, and Jed’s then-fiancée (and now wife) Maurissa Tancharoen, the musical and the acting talents of Neil Patrick Harris (How I Met Your Mother), Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Castle), Simon Helberg (The Big Bang Theory), and Felicia Day herself, Whedon filmed Dr. Horrible in just four days, with its cast and many of its crew working for free. With no marketing budget to speak of, originally posted online (in three, 14-minute acts) for free download and subsequently going on sale on iTunes and as a DVD, Dr. Horrible was a critical and commercial success by any standard. For media gurus, the summer of 2008 was indeed the season of Dr. Horrible. That fall, despite never having been broadcast on any network, it would go on to win an Emmy, and the “Direct-to-Web Supervillain Musical” was even named #15 in Time Magazine’s ‘Top 50 Inventions of 2008’. Television, it seemed, would never be the same. Here’s how the story was being told: before Dr. Horrible, the major studios and networks could only see the Internet either as a vast delivery mechanism for their large and growing back catalogue of previously produced content or for web tie-ins for established series. The idea of studios producing new, original content for the web simply wasn’t on the table—more than enough money could be made by offering older and recent shows on sites like Hulu, Youtube, and on network websites. (In fact, this lucrative money stream—the majority of which never made its way back to these shows’ writers and creators—was one of the main sticking points leading to WGA strike in 2007.) But now, with Dr. Horrible leading the way, the Internet was suddenly revealed to be a wide-open landscape rich in creative and commercial potential.

Off The Shelf: The Cup (1999)

The Cup, which I first saw at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1999, has a deceptively simple plot. Based on a true story, the film focuses on a couple of teenaged monks training at a monastery in India who become completely obsessed with the 1998 World Cup soccer tournament. While desperately trying to hatch plots to rent a TV and a satellite dish, they also have to convince the monastery abbot to give them permission to watch the final match. Drawing much of his influence from Iranian cinema, writer and director Khyentse Norbu creates an unassuming parable where within it hides an assortment of rich and provocative ideas.

Melancholy Prequel: Caprica

During the production of the last season of Battlestar: Galatica (2002-2009), they announced that a new series, a prequel, called Caprica, set 58 years before the Cylon rebellion depicted in BS:G, would be broadcast. Generally, I've always hated prequels because they lack surprise, innovation or imagination. Each effort comes across like a huge cash grab (hello, George Lucas). And in 98% of cases, that's all they are (hi there, George). Their worst crime is that they tend to be pretty boring because the prequel usually tells us things that – if we've been paying attention to the original TV show or movie – have already been revealed. So, though I loved the reconfigured BS:G, I must admit I had some reluctance about watching Caprica for the reasons stated above. The first eight episodes of Season One ran last year; the next nine just started broadcast on Space last Tuesday.

Vintage: Clapton

Now at the age of 65, Eric Clapton has nothing left to prove as a singer, guitarist and icon of rock music. So it may come as a surprise to learn that he's finally let go of all the pressure from the so-called rock press and die-hard "Layla" fans to live up to his icon status. This record, simply entitled Clapton, is more of a vintage work: balanced, laid-back and sentimental. Surrounded by musical friends such as J.J. Cale, Jim Keltner, Willie Weeks and producer Doyle Bramhall II, what you'll find here is a musical mix of blues, gospel and jazz standards (that's right, Irving Berlin's "How Deep Is The Ocean" and "Autumn Leaves" make the cut). Clapton also went to New Orleans and added Wynton Marsalis, Trombone Shorty and Allen Toussaint to the band for a swinging version of "My Very Good Friend The Milkman" and "When Somebody Thinks You're Wonderful." These tracks stand out on the album because Clapton, the great imitator in some people’s minds, has reverently captured the flavours and street feel of New Orleans.

Playing War: The Wooden Gun (1979)

Part coming of age drama, part political allegory, and part social commentary, Ilan Moshenson’s The Wooden Gun (Roveh Huliot in Hebrew) is a small gem. Set in Tel Aviv in 1950, it tells the story of a juvenile gang war between two small groups of adolescent boys. Against the backdrop of Israel’s first years, the story it tells is far vaster and much richer than it may first appear. With a small budget and primarily adolescent casts, this 1979 Israeli feature also dramatizes the striking differences between these young first-generation Israelis and their European-born parents, most of whom are still living in the shadow of the Holocaust. Raised on the glories of war, soldiers’ honour, and nationalism, the boys have little sympathy for or understanding of the world that their families left behind in coming to the newly-created State of Israel. Between the distracted silence of parents and the unthinking (and often confusing) idealism of educators, the children don’t appreciate the dangers of real violence. The boys' world is no larger than the battlefields of the schoolyards and streets of their small neighbourhood, and the impotent efforts of their parents and teachers to contain their escalating violent activities only serve to isolate the boys all the more from the older generation. An early scene in the film offers a perfect snapshot of this confusion of values: their teacher, a war veteran himself, pauses to briefly admonish Yoni for his continued fighting with his peers, then turns without a beat and leads the rest of the students on a charge up the hill of a former battlefield, rat-tat-tatting imaginary machine guns at an invisible enemy.

Shining On: Celebrating John Lennon's 70th Birthday

It was the most perfectly hallucinogenic day of my life. I had been more stoned on previous occasions – it was the 1960s, after all – thanks to a variety of experiments with consciousness. In early April of 1969, however, magic mushrooms and a certain song transformed my world while tripping in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “And we all shine on/ like the moon and the stars and the sun...,” John Lennon was singing in the headphones covering my ears. I had ingested two little brown, wrinkled pieces of fungus that rendered the music extraordinary. The lyrics were speaking to me; I suspected they might contain the most important message of the 20th century: “Instant karma’s gonna get you/ Gonna knock you off your feet/ Better recognize your brother/ In everyone you meet...” Although I easily could have continued listening to Lennon again and again, my three similarly wasted friends persuaded me to accompany them on a walk. Outside, everything looked even more beautiful than could reasonably be expected. I smiled at every stranger we passed and they all appeared to smile back.