Bread and Circuses: Battle Royale, The Hunger Games and the Public's Bloodlust

A scene from Battle Royale (2000)

In the lead up to the release of The Hunger Games, many commentators repeatedly mentioned that the book and film were derivative of the Japanese book and film, Battle Royale (the book came out in 1999; the film in 2000), and its sequel Battle Royale II (2003). Having now watched the two Japanese films (but not The Hunger Games itself), the comment, though basically true, is completely beside the point. None of these films are terribly original, since their conceit – the spectacle of citizens watching or following for the purposes of entertainment the slaughter of a specific group of people – is as old as the Ancient Romans' gladiatorial games, and probably much older.

Although I know what my colleague Steve Vineberg meant in his review of The Hunger Games when he said he thought Battle Royale was loathsome, but I don't completely share that view. From a North American perspective, there seems to be no point to the slaughter that takes place in Battle Royale. For those who are unfamiliar with the plot: in an unspecified future, Japanese society has come unstuck with children rebelling against adult rules. As a result, the government passes the BR Act to try to bring the children back under control (and by extension, society). Once a year a middle school class is selected. On what they think is a field trip at the end of the school year, the children (or rather teens on the cusp of adulthood, as all are around 15 years of age) are knocked out by gas, kidnapped and awaken in a military camp on an island. They are told by their former teacher that they have been selected for the annual Battle Royale contest. The contest is simple. The children are released on the island, with various weapons, and, given only three days, must kill each other until only one is left alive. The survivor will be celebrated and revered by the rest of society. Needless to say, after much resistance, they are convinced that it is either play the game, or be executed right then and there (they all have a device around their necks that can be made to remotely explode at any time). So the game begins.

Pseudo Swindler: Ray Wylie Hubbard's The Grifter’s Hymnal

Some songwriters improve with age and experience. In the case of veteran Austin musician Ray Wylie Hubbard, the evidence is heard on his new release, The Grifter’s Hymnal (Bordello Records 2012), one of the finest albums of the year. It’s a testament to his excellent ability, through song, at storytelling. All of which is shaped by a career and life that’s had some interesting turns, both artistically and personally.

Ray Wylie Hubbard is originally from Oklahoma born 65 years ago. His first album was released in 1971 joining a new mix of Alt-Country singers such as Guy Clark. He’s also been associated with the so-called, Outlaw Country performers like Waylon Jennings, Steve Young or Willie Nelson. But unlike those hugely successful artists, Hubbard has been more of a journeyman, quietly recording whenever he can and maintaining his craft playing local venues in Austin, Texas, where he lives. In the past ten years he’s released five albums, The Grifter’s Hymnal, being the most recent.

Outlier: Paul Goodman Changed My Life

2011 was an exceptional year for documentaries about outliers: Bill Cunningham New York, William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, Magic Trip (about Ken Kesey), Public Speaking (about Fran Leibowitz), The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby. One of the most fascinating is Jonathan Lee’s Paul Goodman Changed My Life, a study of the prolific anarchist Paul Goodman. Goodman has now been largely forgotten but in the early and mid-sixties his 1959 Growing Up Absurd – one of Lee’s many interviewees, the Esalen Institute president Gordon Wheeler, assures us – could be found on the book shelf of every dorm room in every liberal arts college across the country. (By the time I attended one, in 1968, it had vanished: warmly embraced by the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, Goodman was démodé by the time campus protest turned uglier and more chaotic in the Nixon era.) Growing Up Absurd is part sociology, part philosophy and part politics. Its thesis is that young American men in the Eisenhower years were growing up cognizant of the corrupted state of their institutions – education, government, business, law – and in increasingly hopeless and desperate rebellion against them. It still makes compelling reading, and despite the selectivity of Goodman’s subject matter (he doesn’t address the condition of young women, writing as he does a decade and more before the women’s movement, and out of a peculiarly old-fashioned sensibility about gender politics), the bulk of his observations still seem relevant more than half a century later.

Wizard World Toronto Comic Con: Where Subculture Becomes Community

Comic Cons: fun for the whole family (Photo by Krystle Burkholder)

I’ve long wanted to attend a Comic Con, but the prospect of going to San Diego has always been too expensive, and Toronto’s epic Fan Expo runs in late August when I am invariably out of town. So when the opportunity came to attend Toronto’s Wizard World Comic Con this past weekend, I jumped at the chance. But I have to confess that – despite my long-standing desire – I had little idea of what the event might actually be like.

When I first found out that I was going to Wizard World, a friend of mine described to me his experience of Fan Expo as being like “a party at the end of the world.” I haven’t had the chance to ask him precisely what he meant by this, but the description immediately called to mind the last episode the most recent season of Doctor Who which aired this past September. In that episode, we find The Doctor stranded on Earth at a point when time itself has collapsed and flattened, resulting in a scenario in which all of history is essentially happening at once: Winston Churchill and Cleopatra hold high-level summits and Roman centurions have to negotiate with flying dinosaurs. In my mind, this is what the Con promised – a world without boundaries, a place of all things and all times, all at once. And on that level Wizard World didn’t disappoint. I wandered the floor of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre amidst Imperial Stormtroopers having cigarettes with Warrior Princesses, Ghostbusters and pirates standing in line for pulled pork sandwiches, and an array of tiny Darth Vaders and Iron Men drinking apple juice from their sippy cups. The feel on the floor – among the kiosks selling an endless assortment of Big Bang Theory t-shirts, Star Wars figurines, graphic novels, and medieval weaponry – was of an unapologetic and unselfconscious celebration of all things nerdy. Fandom, without prejudice. And, to be honest, it was awesome. After all, how many places are there in the world where you can bring young children and buy a broadsword?

Photo by Mark Clamen

But in one significant way my friend’s description didn’t quite hold, and my weekend was all the better for it: this convention – unlike the 80,000-plus population of Fan Expo – was less like a party at the end of the world than a "meet and greet" at the end of the world. There was all the content but little of the overwhelming chaos I actually expected to find, and which I honestly wasn’t looking forward to. (I’m no fan of crushing crowds, and even less of interminable lines.) And if the experience didn’t rise to that intensity, it is to Wizard World’s credit. They organized an event large enough to do justice to the full scope of all the overlapping subcultures (from comic books, to classic television, video games, and film; from the subtle and elegant artistry of the comic industry, to the giddy pleasure of faux medieval battles and pillowed swordplay) without losing the humanity of all involved. There was an intimacy to this weekend’s event that was as much a draw as the celebrity headliners.

Once and Next to Normal: Words and Music

Steve Kazee and Cristin Milioti star in the stage production of Once

The Broadway musical Once is an adaptation of the enchanting Irish not-quite-romantic musical film from 2007 written and directed by John Carney, with songs by the two stars, Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová. Carney used to be the bassist for the Irish band The Frames, and Hansard was its lead singer. (He also played the guitarist, Outspan, in the congenial 1991 movie The Commitments.) Hansard has a long, woebegone face pebbled with a rust-colored beard; his eyes are immense, with the peeled look of billiard balls. In Once he plays The Guy, a Dublin busker who holds down a day job at his dad’s vacuum cleaner repair shop and plays guitar and sings when the work day is done and there are still crowds on the streets he can entertain with popular standards. At night, when there’s hardly anyone around so he’s usually entertaining himself, he performs his own compositions, poignant ballads of romantic masochism delivered in a startlingly impassioned style that quavers into an expressive falsetto in the most intimate sections. During one of these twilight interludes he meets The Girl (Irglová), who hears one of his tunes, “Say It to Me Now,” and intuits that it was written for an ex-lover he hasn’t gotten over. The Girl is a Czech émigré who lives with her mother and her young daughter, sells magazines and roses on the street, and occasionally lands a job cleaning houses. But more importantly she’s a musician herself: she can’t afford a piano of her own but a congenial music-store owner lets her come by and play one of his models. When she and The Guy become friends she takes him by the store and plays a little Mendelssohn for him. He can see she’s the real thing – just as she could when she heard him on the street. So they play a duet, a song of his called “Falling Slowly,” harmonizing on the vocals. They sound so heavenly together that you’re sure they belong together, not just as musicians but as a couple, like Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon’s June Carter in Walk the Line.

Lens Wide Open: Adam Nayman Presents The Films of Stanley Kubrick at the Miles Nadal JCC

Director Stanley Kubrick is one of the more paradoxical of major filmmakers. A photographer who became a self-taught movie maker in search of a realist style (Killer's Kiss), Kubrick would eventually become a dedicated formalist making epics (Barry Lyndon). Although he was an American director who began by shooting in real locations (The Killing), he spent most of his late career in a self-imposed hermitage in England inventing locations for his pictures (Full Metal Jacket).While Kubrick is an acclaimed auteur (2001: A Space Odyssey), his films rarely got good reviews when they were released (Eyes Wide Shut). Controversy continually followed him (Lolita, A Clockwork Orange), too. 

Given the perplexities of Kubrick's relatively small body of work, Cinema Scope and Grid Weekly film critic Adam Nayman, who has previously lectured on other controversial directors such as Paul Verhoeven and Catherine Breillat at the JCC Miles Nadal in Toronto, tonight begins a fascinating epic exploration into the long contradictory shadow that Kubrick has cast over the last half-century of American film-making. The Kubrick series is being held every Monday night until June 25th from 7-9pm. Adam and I recently had the opportunity to talk about the series and why he believes that Stanley Kubrick's work still continues to matter thirteen years after his death.

Commemorating the Centenary of the Titanic Disaster

The sinking of the Titanic on April 14/15, 1912, may not have the emotional resonance for us here at Critics at Large that the 9/11 tragedy did, if for no other reason than none of us were alive at the time of that horrible accident. Still, it has implications that affect us all to this day. So, today and tomorrow, we have decided to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the sinking of that great ship in eight pieces that look at the tragic event from a cultural point of view. Ranging from an appropriate opening musical “overture” as selected by Kevin Courrier; to a combination memoir and critical overview of films and documentaries by David Churchill; to insightful commentaries on a variety of other films and music from Steve Vineberg, Mari-Beth Slade, John Corcelli, Andrew Dupuis, David Kidney, and finishing with a discerning look at the broader implications of the Titanic’s sinking from Shlomo Schwartzberg, we think you will find our overview fulfilling as we struggle to come to terms with what this disaster means and has meant. So, to our registered followers, whether via Facebook, Twitter, or email, please note you will be receiving eight notifications beginning with the first piece that will be posted at 11:40 p.m. EDT (the exact moment the Titanic hit the iceberg), and proceeding once an hour until 6:20 a.m. (we switch the post time at 2:20 a.m., to acknowledge the exact moment the great ship sank). As with all works on Critics at Large, the pieces are as individualistic as the people who crafted or selected them. Please let us know what you think by adding your thoughts to our comment section.

– The writers of Critics at Large

Titanic Overture

– Kevin Courrier is a writer/broadcaster, film critic, teacher and author (Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa). His forthcoming book is Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism. With John Corcelli, Courrier is currently working on another radio documentary for CBC Radio's Inside the Music called The Other Me: The Avant-Garde Music of Paul McCartney.

Family History: Titanic Memories

Thomas Burden at 27 years old (over ball), David Churchill's Grandfather

The job awaited him in America. He had already said his good-byes to all his mates in the local pub. Two or three young lasses quietly mourned the fact they were losing “another one” to America. Belfast didn’t hold much future for a Catholic, not in March 1912, so his decision had been made. His brother, Paddy, understood; his sister, Teresa, or Teesie as he called her, didn’t. His Da, James? He’d passed away some time ago. His Ma, Ellen, was resigned, though deeply saddened. 

As the date to sail in April crept closer, his Ma took ill. At first, he thought it was a cold, but then it got worse. He knew he’d never see her again, so after a couple of nights’ reflection, he cashed in his ticket. He would not have been able to live with himself if she passed while he travelled, or shortly after he arrived. He was still disappointed, because the ship was to be on her maiden voyage. He had even occasionally gone down to the Harland and Wolfe shipyards to watch her, and her sister ship Olympic, being built. He’d heard that even in steerage accommodations were acceptable, and the food was far better than he’d been eating recently. He would wait until his Ma was well before he booked again. In the meantime, he went to the telegraph office and sent a message to his prospective employer in Traverse City, Michigan that he would be delayed, he hoped, for no more than a month. 

So, on April 10th, the ship sailed without him. The next day, his Ma showed improvement, and by the 13th, she was well on the road to recovery. He thought nothing about the ship; all that mattered was that his Ma had recovered. On the afternoon of the 13th, he went to the ticket office and booked on a ship that was scheduled to sail in early May: the Lusitania. A good ship, he heard, just not new. He went to the pub that evening, and Mass the next day with his family. He was home and asleep early on the night of the 14th. 

He went to the telegraph office the next morning to let his American employer know when he would be arriving. The office was in an uproar with crowds of people outside. “She went down,” he heard one man say to another. “She’s gone,” said another. “Alfred was on board,” a woman behind him said before she broke into tears. He turned and asked another man outside the telegraph office what had happened. “The Titanic. She’s hit an iceberg and sunk. Over half of the passengers went with her.” Numbness hit his limbs and he felt himself wobble slightly. Another man grabbed his arm or he would have fallen. The man eased him onto a nearby stoop. “Ya all right, mate?” he asked. “I … I was supposed to be on that ship,” he said. 

Passenger Record from the Lusitania

That is Thomas Joseph Burden’s story. He is my grandfather – my mother’s father. Indeed he did have tickets in steerage on the Titanic. His mom did get sick and he cancelled his tickets and came over, finally, a month later on the Lusitania, about three years before it was sunk by a torpedo. Talk about the luck of the Irish. He never spoke much about it. All we knew was the basics: he had a job offer as a newspaper printer in Traverse City, Michigan; had tickets on the Titanic; his mother took sick so he cancelled; he came to America a month later on the Lusitania. So, what you read above is extrapolated from what little we knew. I believe the whole story, because a few years ago I dug through the Ellis Island electronic archives and indeed I did find his name in their records as an immigrant to the US on the Lusitania (see image). I was able to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt the Lusitania part of the story, so I have no reason to doubt the Titanic part.

Courage and Consolation: The Heroism of the Titanic’s Band

Bandmaster Wallace Hartley

On May 18, 1912, a funeral service was held in the small town of Colne, in Lancashire, England. It drew over thirty thousand people. It was the service for Wallace Hartley, violinist and Bandmaster of the Titanic. The hymn, “Nearer My God to Thee” was played during the funeral. Legend tells us that it was the last piece of music the Titanic band played as the ship went down.

Wallace Hartley was one of eight musicians who chose to stay on board until the very end, playing music to ease the anxiety of the passengers. For me, Hartley and his fellow players performed an inspired act of bravery. While consoling the survivors, their music was the last heard by those who perished in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. As Canadian historian Adrian Shuman has said “music makes sense of the tragedy” (from the CBC-Radio documentary, Hartley’s Violin). It offered the survivors an important link to the humanity of the story and a contemporary understanding of the power of music to reach out and connect us. Music has always played an important role in communicating and honouring the dead by expressing a deeper and more spiritual form of communion.

Sung Stories: Titanic Blues (illustration by David Kidney)

Illustration by David Kidney

As a boy, back in the Sixties, I used to sing a song called “Were You There When That Great Ship Went Down.” I’m not sure where I first heard it, maybe from my grandmother, or my great-grandmother who looked after my brother and me on Saturday nights. “Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives, were you there when that great ship went down?”

Then later, in 1986, Phil Alvin of The Blasters released a solo album called Un“Sung Stories” which had “Titanic Blues” on Side 2. It was not the same song, but rather an old blues tune that told the story of the Titanic disaster in only a few short verses. The boat hit an iceberg, it sank, and people died – kind of a Reader’s Digest version of the tale.

Remembering A Night to Remember

Adapted by novelist Eric Ambler from Walter Lord’s non-fiction account of the sinking of the Titanic and directed by Roy Ward Baker, A Night to Remember – now available in a newly remastered DVD print from Criterion – is a small classic of understated English filmmaking. It has an enormous cast, and the crowd scenes are impressively staged (and, in the moments when the passengers who haven’t been hoisted onto the inadequate number of lifeboats begin to panic, tense and frightening), but Baker manages to retain a feeling of intimacy. He works modestly, focusing as much as possible on individual characters and details. In the 1997 Titanic, James Cameron took three hours plus to tell a preposterously fictionalized version of the story – almost twice as long as it took the ocean liner to sink. Baker’s film is two-thirds the length of Cameron’s, most of it in real time, and he doesn’t make things up. He doesn’t need to, since the truth is far more dramatic and moving than anything Cameron could devise.

James Cameron and Titanic: Bigger, Not Better

Leo & Kate in James Cameron's Titanic 

This year marks the 100th and 15th anniversary of Titanic – 100 for the ship’s tragic sinking, and 15 for James Cameron’s sinking tragedy. Fifteen years ago, I was one of those teenage girls screaming “Leo!” and lining up at the multiplex to see the movie for the eighth time. Now, slightly more mature and discerning (albeit still with a soft spot for Leonardo DiCaprio), I thought I’d screen the film again. Despite winning eleven Academy Awards, Titanic is still a movie most people won’t admit that they enjoy. Even I was dreading the moment when the cashier at the movie store opened the DVD case and announced “Titanic” to the rest of the queue.

I persevered and brought home the three and a half hour epic. It turns out 15 years does a lot to change perspective. At 15, I thought Rose (Kate Winslet) did the noble and courageous thing by choosing Jack and his charisma over fiancé Cal and his millions. At 30, I question if choosing personal happiness over family responsibility is an act of cowardice, not courage. Although the movie is peppered with clever moments (flippant references to Picasso and Freud are chuckle-worthy), what struck me were the copious resources poured into the making of this film. Perhaps it is fitting that Cameron’s blockbuster came with a record 200-million-dollar price tag. After all, Titanic the ship cost an unprecedented $7.5 million to build back in 1912.

Sinking of a Different Sort: John Huston’s The African Queen

Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen

Contains spoilers.

Before the much swooned over romance of Jack and Rose in James Cameron's Titanic there was the real thing between Charlie and Rose on another doomed boat, the African Queen. John Huston's 1951 film of The African Queen could have been a hell of a downer. The thought of a missionary and a drunkard on a suicidal quest to sink a German gunboat at the dawn of the First World War just doesn’t jump to me as material meant for a sweet and tender romance. Thankfully, it doesn’t end up being a tragic love story. Instead, what’s offered in the story, acting, and tone propels a genuine onscreen romance rather than drag us down.

From the onset, we see the danger. There’s a sense of dread that casts its shadow over Rose (Katharine Hepburn) and Charlie’s (Humphrey Bogart) adventure. Rose loses her reverend brother (Robert Morley) and her mission, but not her faith. Within moments of burying her brother, Rose convinces the gin-soaked steamboat owner Charlie to attack an enemy ship, the Queen Louisa, patrolling an unnamed lake in German East Africa that is holding the British counteroffensive at bay. Their weapon? The African Queen herself, with a make-shift torpedo they crafted from an oxygen tank and explosives attached to her bow. It’s a doomed mission, but you’ll end up praying they sink that bastard gunship and live to celebrate their small victory. The German soldiers are vile, but it’s not Rose’s revenge we’re praying for. We want to see this journey through.

Titanic: Travelling Into the Dark Side

A scene from the recent Titanic miniseries.

Watching the new Titanic mini-series, just in time for the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the great ship, made me marvel anew at why this tragedy, out of so many in our history, is one that lingers on in popular culture and in our memories. After all, we’ve experienced more recent disasters, such as the 1986 Challenger Space Shuttle explosion, wherein seven astronauts perished when it blew up just after launch. But astronauts are something of a rarefied species among humankind – expert scientists and athletes – in a way, with skills that most of us don’t possess. The Titanic passengers were you and I, and, whether rich or poor, also ordinary folk undone by hubris on the part of the ship’s builders and those charged with steering it safely from Southampton, England to New York City. But the RMS Titanic was also testament to mankind’s reaching for the sky, and achieving what had been deemed impossible by so-called experts. But as with President John F. Kennedy, who could envision man landing on the moon and even predict which decade it would occur in, the folks who constructed the RMS Titanic could also dream big.

The ship was outfitted with state-of-the-art luxuries from wireless telegraphs available for personal use to on-board gyms, swimming pools, libraries and restaurants, not that different from cruise ships today. (Speaking of which, the recent Costa Concordia Italian cruise ship imbroglio carried plenty of echoes from the Titanic sinking. Unlike the captain of the Costa Concordia who snuck off the ship as it sunk, Captain Smith did the right thing and went down with the Titanic. However, it is believed his incompetence may have led to the ship hitting the iceberg, just as the Costa Concordia captain’s incompetence may have led to the wrecking of his ship. (Sound familiar?) Yet, due to outdated maritime regulations, the Titanic only had lifeboats for about 1200 passengers and crew, estimated to be a third of its total capacity. And due to human prejudices, while most women and children in First and Second Class were considered worth saving, and were rescued, most of the Third Class passengers in that contingent were not. Even among the men who were expected to be last off the ship, a higher percentage of First Class passengers (about 33%) survived versus 10-15% of the Second and Third Class group. Those class biases, prevalent among many of the rich passengers and directed against the poor immigrants, from various countries, stuck below decks, reflect man’s worst tendencies, but the venue where this all took place also symbolized the best of man’s inventiveness and genius. A contradiction reflected and acknowledged, I think, in much of the popular cultural adaptations centering on the tragedy, including even at times, in some scenes of James Cameron’s otherwise vapid 1997 Titanic film.

So Much Richer: The Diversity and Variety of Modern Music

It arrived later than the other music magazines but the French cultural/political magazine Les inrockuptibles’s Best of the Year music issue is an illuminating read and listen, both because it’s so different than the Anglo-American annual music lists but also because it provides incontrovertible proof that when it comes to music, unlike other art forms, the critics are on so many different pages.

Charmingly titled Best of Musique 2011 (an apt mix of English and French) and accompanied by a CD of 16 of the mag’s favourite tracks, entitled La bande-son 2011 (Soundtrack of 2011), Les inrockuptibles’ top 100 discs, 50 reissues and 100 tracks certainly offers a cornucopia of sonic richness. But I was especially intrigued by its deviations from Uncut and Mojo’s top of the year lists. Generally of the top 50 albums cited by those British music mags, about half or so of the CDs chosen differ from each other. They shared a common preference for such albums as Gillian Welch's The Harrow and the Harvest, Wilco's The Whole Love, Fleet Foxes' Helplessness Blues, Tinariwen's Tassili and Radiohead's The King of Limbs but Mojo also picked Glen Campbell's Ghost on the Canvas and Nick Lowe's That Old Magic as among their best discs of the year while Uncut went for the likes of Ry Cooder's Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down and Gil Scott-Heron and Jamie XX's We're New Here. But Les inrockuptibles went even further in charting its own path with some surprising choices on tap. I would expect them to choose some home-grown discs, from French artists François & the Atlas Mountains and Daniel Darc – the Brits tend to ignore most non-English music outside of Africa – but how did they come to focus on an Oklahoma group called Other Lives, which I don’t recall being mentioned by either Uncut or Mojo (who supposedly keep a close eye on the musical output of their Anglo cousins). Other Lives was not the only American band whose album (Tamer Animals) was mentioned by Les inrockuptibles as among the year’s best; other choices included both predictable ones from Bon Iver, Tom Waits and Fleet Foxes as well as left field choices, not picked by the Brits, like M83, Hanni El Khatib and Salem, American artists whom I’ve never heard of. Surprisingly, Paul Simon’s So Beautiful Or So What, though featured on both Mojo and Uncut's best lists, was absent from Les inrockuptibles's chart They also focused on Canadian artists like Drake and Timber Timbre who were shut out of the British magazine lists. (Feist's Metals made both the French mag and Uncut's top list but was overlooked by Mojo.) And of course being neighbours and all, lots of British choices, including the releases from Arctic Monkeys, PJ Harvey, Gruff Rhys, The Horrors, James Blake and Cat’s Eyes, not all of whom placed high in their local lists. Interestingly, Harvey's (overrated to my mind) Let England Shake was Les inrockuptibles's eighth best disc but placed number one with both Mojo and Uncut.

Notes From the Dangerous Kitchen

This summer is the 10th Anniversary of the publication of my book Dangerous Kitchen: The Subversive World of Zappa, a work that (looking back) was written in a danger zone not unlike its title. While fending off neighbours who seemed to love making excessive noise until all hours of the early morning, Dangerous Kitchen was written sometimes one sentence at a time. Often I was interrupted because of some melee in my building (usually someone trying to kill someone else) that I had to attend to. Nevetheless, my publisher ECW Press gave me the freedom to write a 600-page book about American composer Frank Zappa that allowed me to go beyond the misleading perceptions of him as this deranged freak who warned us not to eat the yellow snow. I was able to attempt a fascinating study that tied serialist classical music, blues, R&B doo-wop and rock & roll to an artist who fused all of those elements into a satiric artistic rebellion against the excesses of Romanticism. So in this act of shameless self-promotion, here is an excerpt from Dangerous Kitchen (which has continually gone in and out of print in the decade since its publication) that focuses on Frank Zappa's first LP in 1966 with the Mothers of Invention called Freak Out!

When Edgard Varèse died on November 6, 1965, Frank Zappa seemed bound and determined to pick up his fallen torch. Michael Gray writes in Mother! The Frank Zappa Story that Varèse's death "galvanized Frank into a stronger-than-ever determination that he was not going to just make records, but change the face of music." Freak Out!, a two-record set released in July 1966, didn't exactly change the face of music, but it had an incalculable influence on the pop scene. Until then, the only rock double-album was Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde (which had come out only two months earlier). Yet, unlike Blonde on Blonde, Freak Out! was designed conceptually. The songs weren't randomly gathered in the traditional manner of making an album. There was a strategy at work on this debut. Zappa was presenting a whole new gathering of diverse compositions that hadn't been heard all in one place in American pop.

A Song for a Lost Kingdom

A section of Queen Lili’uokalani's quilt, on display in the I’olani Palace in Honolulu

There’s a song everyone has heard. It’s a gentle song, written by a queen some 135 years ago. The queen had watched her sister parting from her lover (and future husband) and been touched by their affection for each other. The song has come to be a sad song of farewell, rather than the song of love it was intended to be. The lyrics are beautiful, although most people might only know the chorus if they know any of it.

Farewell to thee, farewell to thee                   Aloha `oe, aloha `oe
O fragrance in the blue depths.                     E ke onaona noho i ka lipo.
One fond embrace and I leave                      "One fond embrace," a ho`i a`e au
To meet again.                                             A hui hou aku.

Strong-Arming: Gary Ross' The Hunger Games

Jennifer Lawrence and Liam Hemsworth in The Hunger Games.

If there’s a more cynical slab of emotional manipulation at the movies these days than The Hunger Games, I haven’t seen it. Gary Ross’ movie version of the Suzanne Collins book, the first in a phenomenally successful series of young adult novels, centers on an enforced competition in the wild among teenagers in a post-apocalyptic totalitarian America (called Panem) in which the participants, chosen by lottery and called tributes, one boy and one girl from each of the twelve districts outside the Capitol (where all power resides), fight natural and genetically engineered adversaries and each other, while the country watches on TV, until all but one have been killed off. (Ross, Collins and Billy Ray co-authored the adaptation.) The Hunger Games pretends to be a social commentary. Its targets are not only the aristocrats who live off the commodities produced by the hard-working poor in the other districts and are immune to the process that eliminates twenty-three of twenty-four of their young annually – the tributes are a form of tribute paid to the Capitol three-quarters of a century after it put down a rebellion of the twelve districts – but also the voyeuristic mentality that makes Survivor and other reality shows such cash cows. In truth, though, the movie trades on that mentality, turning us into the kind of gladiatorial-combat-style voyeurs whose base instincts we’re supposed to disapprove of. And it’s a queasy argument anyway, since those who get voted off the island in Survivor don’t wind up dead.

Winners and Losers: Death of a Salesman & The Best Man

There seems to be a new production of Death of a Salesman every decade or decade and a half, and always with an actor you wouldn’t want to miss in the role of Arthur Miller’s psychically disintegrating third-rate drummer Willy Loman. Lee J. Cobb, with Mildred Dunnock as Willy’s long-suffering wife Linda, resurrected the play when they performed it on television in 1966, recreating the performances they’d given under Elia Kazan’s direction on Broadway in 1949. (The TV version, directed by Alex Segal and featuring George Segal and James Farentino as the Loman sons, Biff and Happy, was beautifully executed.) George C. Scott gave a frightening rendition of Willy as a walking time bomb in New York in 1975 opposite Teresa Wright. Directed by David Rudman, Dustin Hoffman reimagined Willy as a distinctly Jewish little man on Broadway in 1984; everyone else in the family – Kate Reid as Linda, John Malkovich as Biff and Stephen Lang as Happy – towered over him. (The TV movie adaptation is so badly directed by Volker Schlondorff that it manages to undercut Hoffman’s amazing performance, though it preserves the power of Malkovich’s.) Robert Falls brought a production to New York from Chicago in 1999 with Brian Dennehy that scaled up the expressionistic touches; it got laudatory reviews but it was misconceived, and Dennehy was hammy and self-serious. Now we have Mike Nichols’s revival with Philip Seymour Hoffman and a recreation of the famous 1949 Jo Mielziner set. And though some people (like Ben Brantley in The New York Times) have caviled about Hoffman’s age – he’s 44 and Willy is 62 – both Cobb in the original Broadway production and Dustin Hoffman in 1984 were also much younger than the character. (Cobb was 37, Hoffman 46.) Actually Philip Seymour Hoffman is superb. The trouble is that goddamn play.

Off the Shelf: Nine Queens, 3-Iron and Omagh

Given that it's a holiday weekend, our readers just might find more time to catch up on some movie watching. Rather than recommend some new titles, ones that will already be in demand at your better DVD stores, here are some perhaps less-in-demand foreign-language gems to cozy up to:

Nine Queens is a polished and vastly entertaining caper film that puts the sting back into the con. Argentinian director Fabian Bielinsky, in his award-winning feature debut, smoothly amuses the audience with a deftly elaborate shell game. He provides a divertingly sharp character study that cleverly examines the question of honour among thieves.

Juan (Gaston Pauls) is a small-time crook who gets caught conning a convenience store clerk. Marcos (Ricardo Darin), a big-time swindler, steps in to "arrest" him – with the hope of recruiting him for a bigger job. Soon Marcos's sister, Valeria (Leticia Bredice), contacts him from a luxury hotel where Juan and Marcos team up for a ruse to obtain a counterfeit collection of some extremely rare stamps known as the Nine Queens. Since they have a buyer already in mind, their plan seems airtight – until other scam artists and derailed strategies send their promising racket into comic episodes of misadventure.

Contains Almost No Robots or Explosions: The Internet is a Playground by David Thorne

When I was little, I often wished for a book with an infinite number of pages. It would simply carry on the story as I read it, it would never get boring, and it would provide my life with magic and amusement wherever I went. Of course at that age I didn’t realize that never-ending stories would be problematic, or that the web was about to be invented. These days people carry hundreds of volumes in their pockets, and hold in their phones a vast network of reading material that expands by the day. Whether the new forms of interactivity this lends to the once-humble book is for good or ill is a matter of debate, yet digital pages simply have more options than their static print counterparts.

Which is what makes The Internet is a Playground (Tarcher/Penguin, 2011) a rather ironic title to find in print. The volume amasses the emails, articles, and other written musings of David Thorne, an Australian satirist and design director. His blog, 27b/6, hosts most of these online exchanges, many of which have gone viral. The more notorious of these involve lost cats, pie charts, and Thorne’s attempt to repay monetary debt with a drawing of a spider.

Venus Rising: A Conversation with Kristin Scott Thomas (1995)

When Kristin Scott Thomas strides into a room, she holds her head proudly as if sniffing a rarefied air that only her lungs find pleasing. She is a regal beauty, turning the heads of all the men seated at the bar as she approaches my table, suggesting a darker, more exotic Grace Kelly. But do not call her 'aristocratic.' Mention that word and she winces as if lemon juice had just violated her taste buds. Thomas is an actor whose beauty is often accentuated by undercurrents which charge dramatically to the surface. She imbues British etiquette with teeth that hunger for something more than just shallow pleasantries.

Educated at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Thomas made her film debut in Under the Cherry Moon (1986) as an heiress who humanizes Prince's preening gigolo. She didn't, however, really step into the spotlight until she portrayed the cynical Fiona in the Oscar-nominated hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). Before she would become renown in The English Patient (1996), Gosford Park (2001), I've Loved You For So Long (2008), and more recently, Sarah's Key (2010), Thomas appeared in Angels and Insects (1995). In the picture, she played Matty Crompton, the impoverished relative of an aristocratic Victorian family. As a budding feminist, Matty attempts to define what independence means to her. It's a quality you could say that Kristin Scott Thomas, as an actor, has embodied all along.

A University’s Odd Universe: Where Damsels Go To Dance

Carrie MacLemore, Annaleigh Tipton, Megalyn Echikunwoke and Greta Gerwi star in Damsels in Distress

Mix 1930s screwball comedy with 1950s kitsch, while providing a wink and a nod to a smattering of contemporary concerns. What do you get? Damsels in Distress, the first film from writer-director Whit Stillman in 13 years. Back then, he was a young indie darling thanks to his award-winning Metropolitan (1990) and The Last Days of Disco (1998), with a less acclaimed Barcelona (1994) tossed in for good measure. Now middle-aged, his interests remain rooted in the discreet charm of the “urban haute bourgeoisie,” as a Disco denizen refers to her fading social milieu. This fascination may be the perfect fit for a filmmaker whose mother was a genuine debutante and whose godfather was the man who coined the term WASP to describe White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

There are at least two black students in evidence, including Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke), at Seven Oaks University, a fictitious New England school that is the focus of Damsels. But she’s British, so perhaps that releases her from the burden of U.S. ethnic divisions. The emphasis is on class – seemingly upper – instead of race, but Stillman certainly offers no examination of the American Dream like that found in, say, The Great Gatsby. Literary classics aside, money isn’t really mentioned in the screenplay, except when the self-exiled lead protagonist Violet (Greta Gerwig) briefly checks into a Motel 4 as a less expensive alternative to the low-grade Motel 6. Fluffy fun until the story begins to run out of steam, the Stillman picture both ridicules and celebrates its clueless, anachronistic characters.

Dusty Sings Newman: "I've Been Wrong Before"

Music critic Rob Hoerburger, in his illuminating liner notes for The Dusty Springfield Anthology (1997), described the husky-voiced artist's impact on popular music in this way: "Dionne Warwick was more polished and Diana Ross sexier and Martha Reeves tougher and Aretha, well, Aretha. But Dusty Springfield, the beehived Brit, was always the smartest, the most literate, the wisest." In a career that spanned more than 35 years, she was also one of the finest white soul singers to emerge in the Sixties. Springfield covered, in the most significant and delicate ways, the gamut of soul, yet she also extended herself to perform lushly orchestrated pop and disco. Dusty Springfield not only could mine the emotions buried within a song, she would sometimes find emotions that weren't even planted there. Like Jackie DeShannon, Springfield's roots actually began in folk music. The trio she began with her brother, called The Springfields, made an early success of "Silver Threads and Golden Needles" in 1962. But Dusty left the band early in 1963 to pursue a solo career. It wasn't long before she quickly climbed the charts with the exquisite "I Only Want to Be With You" in 1964, quickly followed by the majestic "Wishin' and Hopin'."

When she was recording her album, Everything's Coming Up Dusty (retitled You Don't Have to Say You Love Me in the U.S. after the title song became a huge hit) in 1966, which was sumptuously seeped in R&B, Springfield made a decision to include tracks by the great pop practitioners Burt Bacharach ("Long After Tonight is Over"), Goffin/King ("I Can't Hear You," "Oh No! Not My Baby"), and a new song by a West Coast songwriter named Randy Newman. (We were still a few years away from hearing the sly and subversive satirist of "Sail Away" and "Rednecks.") Since the mid-Sixties, Newman had been a songwriter-for-hire at Metric Music (the West Coast equivalent of the Brill Building in New York) churning out conventional pop tunes for just about anyone who'd sing them. But the Newman song Dusty Springfield chose to perform, "I've Been Wrong Before," turned out to be arguably his strongest, most memorable of those numbers.

Working Alone: Kenny Werner’s Me, Myself & I

American musician Kenny Werner is one of those slightly unsung piano players whose work as a sideman often goes unnoticed (even though he’s recorded with John Scofield, Dave Holland and led his own trio for many years). On his new album, Me, Myself & I (Justin Time, 2012), which is set for release April 10th, Werner is left to his own devices on a solo piano recording that is full of great humour, spontaneity and grace. It was recorded in Montreal last June during the festival at a small club called the Upstairs Jazz Bar and Grill.

The album contains seven compositions featuring a mix of the old and new. It opens with a mysterious study of Monk’s “Round Midnight” as Werner extends the track with a heady progression of melodic ideas. It’s an introspective version of the tune, where the rhythm and the musical idiosyncrasies of its composer sets up the listener for the entire album. Werner shows remarkable touch here, offering a distinctly sensitive rendition of the song.

On Being British: David Lean and Noel Coward

No filmmaker in the history of English cinema has ever devoted himself to the subject of being British as David Lean did. It was his great theme. He explored it in one way in his Dickens adaptations (Great Expectations and Oliver Twist) and in the comedy Hobson’s Choice, where the two main characters, a willful slob and his fierce, unyielding daughter, are as quintessentially English types as the figures who populate Dickens’s novels. His most celebrated and perhaps most indelible creation, Captain Nicholson in The Bridge on the River Kwai – played by his favorite actor, Alec Guinness – was a satirical portrait of the sensibility that upheld the crumbling British Empire, clinging religiously to tradition and regulations and choosing polish and follow-through over common sense. Lean’s final picture (and one of his finest), based on E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, directly addressed the issues of empire and examined the qualities of the colonial English by pitting them against the Indians and demonstrating the futility of their attempts to emulate their masters.

It seems fitting, therefore, that Lean’s first four movies were all collaborations with Noël Coward, the jack of all show-biz hyphenates (playwright-screenwriter, producer-director, actor-singer, composer-lyricist), who perfected a dramatic language built on English understatement, English middle-class and working-class English cliché, and that celebrated English repression of emotion that is in fact sentimental at its core. Coward is otherwise (and best) known for his high comedies, two of which, Private Lives and Design for Living, are masterworks of the genre, perfect specimens of how a prodigiously gifted playwright can subsume tragic depths in brittle, inconsequential-seeming farce. (The first is a portrait of the marriage of two people who are both profoundly in love with each other and profoundly unsuited to living with each other – or, most likely, in the world. The second is about a trio of true social revolutionaries, and it’s still shocking.) But many of his plays were depictions of bourgeois English life that reveled in presenting unexceptional characters caught in soap-opera situations, and it’s the paradox of his career that he was able to shift so easily back and forth between these two sorts of plays. And every now and then he paused to write an operetta.

In the Key of Studs Terkel: Craig Taylor's Londoners

Big Ben from Trafalgar Square - Photo by David Churchill

Over the years, I have been fortunate to visit cities considered some of the most exciting in the world: New York, Paris, Rome, Bombay and London. Like many before me, I fell in love with each one of them for their own unique reasons. Heck, Paris so inspired me during my one and only (so far) visit that it became the setting, and partial inspiration, for my first novel, The Empire of Death. But it is without question London that has its siren call still singing in my ears. I've only been there twice, but upon my return home each time I've longed to go back so I could continue to explore this great and historic city. Sure, two trips barely scratches the surface of this locale, but for whatever reason (perhaps because England is half my heritage – Irish being the other) it is a city I feel instantly comfortable and at home in, even if they don't seem to know they drive on the wrong side of the road.

Little Driver pub - East London - Photo by David Churchill

When I travel, the first thing I always do is toss my suitcases into my hotel room and go for a stroll around the neighbourhood. The last time I was in London in 2009, I stayed at a lovely little hotel in the east end near the Bow Street Tube station called City Stay (its appeal, beyond good rates, is that they had a kitchen you can cook your own meals in as long as you bring in your own food – it saved me a bundle). Across the road is a terrific working class pub, called Little Driver, which instantly became my local after a long day exploring. (I did an edit on The Empire of Death there while enjoying their perfect-temperature drafts of Guinness. Isn't that what pubs and coffee shops are for, drinking and writing?)

Craig Taylor - Author of Londoners

This is a very long way to introduce a wonderful oral history of London compiled by Craig Taylor, called Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now – As Told By Those Who Love It, Hate It, Live It, Left It, and Long For It (Ecco/Harper Collins – 2012), to give it its full title. The book is inspired by the work of the great American oral historian Studs Terkel (Working, The Good War, Hard Times, and many others). Taylor, an ex-pat Canadian living in London (ironically, he's lived there for several years before he felt comfortable to call himself a Londoner – he didn't think he'd earned it), like me became enthralled with the city, but unlike me he made the decision to make it his new home. As he walked around the city, he began to pick up conversations with the people all around him. He realized there were so many stories, so many voices, that he had to compile the voices in order to, as he says, give us a “snapshot of how London is now.” It sure took him a great deal of time. The project took five years: he burned through 300 AA batteries, and the transcripts took up almost a million words. With the help of his hard-working editor, Matt Weiland, he winnowed the hundreds of interviews down to 90 voices. I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been to roll this much data into a coherent and compelling text, but regardless of how he did it, he has succeeded admirably.

Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 and Bent: Comedy is Alive and Well in the Midseason

Krysten Ritter and James Van Der Beek in Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23

With the television season running year-round these days, the midseason is no longer the networks’ dumping ground for shows not strong enough to make the cut in the fall. Today I’m looking at two new, but very different comedies which more than prove the point that great television doesn’t always begin in September. (Let’s not forget that Parks and Recreation and even All in the Family were midseason replacements when they were first launched!) ABC’s Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 will premiere on April 11, and NBC’s Bent is already more than halfway through its short, six-episode freshman season.

Of Culture, High and Low – Footnote and Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness

Lior Ashkenazi and Shlomo Bar Aba in Footnote

It may seem like an unusual subject for a movie, but it’s apt that Joseph Cedar’s Israeli film Footnote – a provocative story of a father and son who are both scholars – deals with the specifics of academia and the vagaries of scholarship, since Israel is one country that values higher education, so much so that it punches above its weight when it comes to winning Nobel Prizes and the like. Footnote is also one of the more welcome Israeli features since it offers up a nuanced view of a country that is the sum of more than the divisive politics and tensions that seem to solely define it in most mainstream media coverage of the region.

Footnote, which swept Israel's top film awards (The Ophirs), garnered an Oscar nomination for best Foreign-language film, and won Best Screenplay at Cannes, also marks a maturation of Cedar’s talents. It is his most compelling, original and best-made movie yet, albeit one that falls short of the finest recent Israeli cinema. An Orthodox Jew, a rarity among the mostly secular filmmakers in Israel, Cedar began his career delving into the religious underpinnings of Israeli society. His debut movie Time of Favor (2000) was a slick but interesting thriller about a religious Jewish plot to blow up The Temple Mount, one of Islam’s holiest shrines, and the charismatic rabbi (Assi Dayan) whose sermons inadvertently inspired some of his more diligent students to interpret his words as a literal call to arms. Campfire (2004), based on Cedar’s time living in a religious settlement, was a choppy but fascinating look at the unique Jews who populate such places, seen through the eyes of a widow and her two young daughters who join a West Bank settlement. Beaufort (2007) was a powerful though admittedly familiar tale of an Israel Defense Forces unit about to vacate the high ground of a hard-won battle to capture a Crusader castle, a symbol of Israel’s ultimately futile invasion of Lebanon. Footnote (2011) goes further afield; it’s a drama that, though it deals with Talmudic discourse, is neither concerned with religion nor conflict, except through the passive aggressive one playing out between father and son.

Our Waking Dreams: Movies in the Digital World (Hugo, The Artist, & The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

While watching the Academy Awards this year, I was struck by an ongoing motif that seemed to run throughout the evening. Often it was impacted in the periodic jokes of host Billy Crystal, but I could also detect it in the asides by various presenters. There was a constant reference to the early origins of cinema being made just when technology has dramatically transformed the art form – and continues to do so at warp speed. Not only could a viewer detect some concern over whether the technology would come to diminish the quality of the dramatic material, the nominated movies seemed to embody the very argument that was at the heart of the show.

When I was growing up the only way you could watch movies was when they opened in theatres. Movies on television were limited then and they were often burdened by commercials. The limited window of opportunity that theatres offered you to see the picture was partly what built your enthusiasm and anticipation in going to the movies. If the picture was really good, you feared that once it abandoned the movie house you might never get to experience it again. (Part of what got me interested in collecting movie soundtracks was so I could listen to the dramatic score and evoke my favourite scenes from the film.) It was also true that when you saw something really bad, you got worried it might disappear from your city before you had a chance to try it again to test your first reaction to it. 

Taking Wing: The Seagull at the National Ballet of Canada

Sonia Rodriguez and Guillaume Côté in The Seagull. Photo by Bruce Zinger.

Think of The Seagull and the fowl metaphors immediately take flight. So let’s just give into them in describing a ballet that soars as a result of choreography that wings through time and dancers who so completely inhabit their characters they end up nesting inside the imagination, hatching ideas, feelings, and all sorts of artistic pleasure: A rare and beautiful bird.

Although I have not seen a fraction of the more than 200 ballets that the American-born choreographer John Neumeier has created since becoming director of the Hamburg Ballet in 1973,  I think this full-evening, two-act work has to count as among his best works.

Fighting Ageing Every Step of the Way: Ben Babchishin's Short Videos on Music and Ageing

Bill Bourne, in a scene from For the Record Featuring… Bill Bourne.

I first came across the filmmaker Ben Babchishin on the Internet. It’s complicated. Master folk muscian Bill Bourne was playing in town at The Pearl Company and I had agreed to go to see him. That day my wife was out of town, so when I got home from work I took her car to run a couple errands. I drove up to the used CD shop in town to pick up something I had ordered, and as I turned left I was t-boned by a teenaged girl who was late for work. “Don’t call the police,” she begged. It was her second accident in a month. As I looked at my wife’s car, the rear passenger door bent neatly in half, I was glad not to be hurt, but wondered how I would ever explain this. The car and I limped home; I spent 2 hours on the phone with insurance companies, and thought … I’m not going out tonight. Then I decided that music might be healing, and took my car to The Pearl Company. My ride there was tentative, every intersection a challenge … but by the end to the night, Bourne and his band had cheered me up. My wife’s car was still a mess when I got home.

I was taken by Bourne, bought his Bluesland CD, and found it enjoyable. I was searching for the name of his guitar player on the Internet when I discovered a DVD called For the Record Featuring … Bill Bourne. I contacted the site, and quickly had a reply from Ben Babchishin, the filmmaker. He offered to send me a copy. He asked me about other music I liked. He told me about another film he’d made for Bravo TV, Mae Moore & Lester Quitzau: In Their Own Backyard. When I told him that I knew about Quitzau and Moore he said he would send that film too. He told me about some of the roadblocks he encountered too. When he suggested to the producers at Bravo he wanted to do a documentary on Valdy, they had replied, “Unhunh … who’s Valdy?”

Animal Crackers: Hijinks

The cast of Animal Crackers with Mark Bedard (centre). Photo: Jenny Graham.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival production of Animal Crackers is scrappy but entertaining, and it’s fun to be reminded not only of the early days of the Marx Brothers but also of the freewheeling (and almost free-form) flapdoodle musical comedies of the 1920s. Animal Crackers opened on Broadway in 1928, before the Depression altered the style of the musical, seeding in elements of satire, urban sophistication and bittersweet elegance. It was written by two of the most skillful purveyors of loony-bin wisecrackery, George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, and no doubt it was rewritten many times in rehearsal to accommodate the Marxes’ improvisations. Marx aficionados know thick swatches of the dialogue by heart – most of it made it into the 1930 movie version, where it’s played at a dizzying speed that offsets the early-talkie staginess. (The Marxes’ film debut, The Cocoanuts, also began as a Broadway show.) What gets sacrificed in the Paramount version are the secondary romantic couple – no great loss – and most of the Bert Kalmar-Harry Ruby songs. The OSF production, which was directed by Allison Narver, not only restores them but tosses in a few others, like “Three Little Words” (one of the best known of their songs, and the title of the M-G-M musical bio with Fred Astaire and Red Skelton as the two tunesmiths) and “The Blues My Naughty Sweetie Gives to Me.”

A Cabaret of Emotion: Ndidi Onukwulu's Escape

The Vancouver songstress Ndidi Onukwulu (pronounced In-DEE-dee On-noo-KWOO-loo) integrates jazz, rhythm and blues, world, folk, and bluegrass – to name a few genres – into a sound that is silky and soulful, whimsical and relevant. You just have to picture a young Billie Holiday crossed with Cat Power. Escape (Emarcy/Universal Music) is her third album following up on the successful No I Never (Festival Distribution, 2008) and Contradictor (Outside Music, 2008). Recorded and released in France in 2011, Escape arrived on our shores last winter and offers listeners a continuation of Onukwulu’s natural niche for song. But this time with a more polished, mature, and even French togetherness.