Playing It Real: Showcase and BBC America's Copper

Tom Weston-Jones in Copper

Whenever a television show set in a time period that is not present day comes on the air I'm always curious to see if the characters will be true to the era; or will they be so infected with 21st century sensibilities that, no matter how many period details they get right, the characters just don't ring true. That was in my mind when the first episode of the new series Copper on Showcase (in Canada) and BBC America (in the U.S.) hit the airwaves four weeks ago. So I could not have been more pleased when the pilot episode started with our ostensible hero, Irish-American Detective Kevin Corcoran (Tom Weston-Jones) and his crew, stopping a bank robbery. This is what they did: They waited for the bank robbers to emerge from the bank with their ill-gotten gain (they had received a tip beforehand) and then they followed them. When the robbers entered a secluded alleyway, Corky (as he's called) and his men bushwhacked them. They basically killed the men in cold blood and, before the chief detective can arrive, they pocketed half the money.

Undressing: Shakespeare and Romantic Comedy

Emma Thompson & Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing.

When Kenneth Branagh adapted Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing for the screen in 1993, he had the good sense to shape it like a romantic comedy. Romantic comedy may be a modern genre, but Much Ado has all the same elements – most importantly, two lovers who begin as antagonists and find their way through the friction to a romance that is deepened by the challenges they pose to one another. It also has some of the funniest romantic banter in the history of theater and Emma Thompson, as the unstoppably witty Beatrice, blazes through those lines with the exuberant physicality of an English screwball heroine.

Much Ado may be the forerunner to all romantic comedy, but there’s another association between Shakespeare’s comedies and the modern genre: that like the lovers in Twelfth Night or As You Like It, the characters in romantic comedies often court through disguise. From Ernst Lubitsch’s sublime Shop Around the Corner and Preston Sturges’ mischievous The Lady Eve to the rollicking cross-country romance of Jonathan Demme’s Something Wild with its notes of darkness, romantic comedies are about the roles we play to win love and the risks we take in finally shedding our disguises to earn that love. (Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve and Melanie Griffith in Something Wild both move through a series of disguises as the movie progresses and they fall in love with the men they try to con.) The love stories are quests for fulfilment, where the characters, through romantic surrender, throw off the defenses they have become all too comfortable in and with it the need for disguise.

Clare Danes & Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty.

Richard Eyre’s Stage Beauty (2004) is a romantic comedy about a Restoration staging of Shakespeare’s Othello where the cross-dressing disguises of Shakespearean comedy become the conceit through which the romantic partnership plays out. Set in London, at the moment when the ban against women acting on the stage was reversed, its lovers are Ned Kynaston (Billy Crudup), the last celebrity among actors who played the women’s roles, and Margaret Hughes, or Maria (Clare Danes), the first professional actress on the English stage. Stage Beauty makes those links between Shakespeare’s plays and modern romantic comedy explicit in a deliciously subversive and wittily postmodern exploration of the performance of gender and the enigma of sexuality and desire.

Bullet in the Face: Deranged and Violent, But Terribly Fun

Max Williams and Neil Napier in Bullet in the Face, on IFC

The TV universe is full of shows that seem designed to appeal to those who favour hallucination over reality. The Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim’s staggeringly long-running Aqua Teen Hunger Force (re-titled in recent seasons as Aqua Unit Patrol Squad 1 and this past summer, in its 9th season, as Aqua Something You Know Whatever) certainly seem to have embraced the coveted “too impatient for linear narrative, too stoned to change the channel” demo with some success – but it is rare for a live-action series to go that route. Enter Bullet in the Face: a Canadian-produced noir parody series, created by Alan Spencer and starring former pro hockey player Max Williams alongside veteran actors Eric Roberts and Eddie Izzard, which had its 6-episode first season air in mid-August on IFC in the U.S. and Super Channel in Canada, beginning on September 17th.

Williams plays Gunter Vogler, a German-accented sociopathic mob enforcer whose life takes a sudden turn when he gets shot in the face and wakes to find that an experimental medical procedure has left him wearing the face of a cop he recently killed. It's all part of an insane scheme by Police Commissioner Eva Braden (Jessica Steen) to use Vogler to take down her city's underworld in one fiery swoop. Of course Vogler turns out to be impossible to control and the plan leaves dozens of bodies in its wake, innocent and guilty alike. (A few samples of his general outlook: when his ‘partner’ tells him that the city is being torn apart because of lack of manpower, Vogler retorts “Then use children.” When asked if he ever “gets tired of being so relentlessly evil all the time”, he replies “Of course. That's why I take naps.”) Williams’ crazed energy more than carries the show through its manic plotlines, but Eddie Izzard, as the agoraphobic crime boss Tannhäuser, is given many of the show’s best and most over-the-top lines. (Asked at one point by a lackey to explain why he’s decided to blow up the city’s hospitals, Tannhauser explains that “It's what King Herod would have done.”)

The Pennultimate Challenge: Five Reasons Why Sean Penn Wanted to Give Up Acting and Become a Director (1996)

Sean Penn

Back in June, Mark Clamen wrote about a new Sean Penn film, This Must Be the Place, which had opened all over Europe, but had yet to have a theatrical release in North America. "This Must Be the Place turns out to be either the strangest road movie ever made or the single quirkiest Holocaust-themed movie since Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (although I should stress that Nazis notwithstanding the two films have absolutely nothing else in common)," Mark wrote. "The only reason I'd hesitate to call This Must Be the Place a Neglected Gem is that I’m hoping there's still time it will find the wider audience it deserves." Mark finally gets his wish when this Italian/French co-production opens next month in North America. Of Penn's performance, Mark wrote that "Penn plays the character with a low-burning intensity...[his] performance ultimately reveals an eminently likable man, but it takes much of the movie to get to know him." That "low-burning intensity" of Sean Penn became the subject of a profile written by Kevin Courrier in 1996 when he spoke with him at a Toronto Film Festival round-table when the actor, promoting his second film as a director, The Crossing Guard, was considering abandoning acting for the director's chair. In the piece, Courrier takes five of Penn's reasons for the career shift and examines their merit.

Full Carnival Drag: How Music Works by David Byrne

Musician David Byrne

Over the past couple of weeks I have been to a backyard concert featuring Jacob Moon and Suzie Vinnick; a Tribute to the Music of Pink Floyd at Hugh’s Room in Toronto; and led a discussion on the importance of music in the life of the church. We talked about the physical, emotional and spiritual aspects of music and experienced all of those aspects in the concerts. I also spent a long time trying to arrange a song on the guitar. Then David Byrne’s new book, How Music Works (McSweeney’s, 2012), appeared on the shelves. I bought it immediately.

David Byrne is the brainy and gangly leader of Talking Heads, a band which even during its lifespan seemed to exist outside the pop music world. Against contemporaries like The Clash, Elvis Costello and The Sex Pistols, the Talking Heads were…ummm…artsier and maybe even geekier. Byrne’s angular dance moves and odd vocalizing was, at times, off putting, but, with Tina Weymouth’s bass and Chris Frantz’s drums providing a funky bottom to the sometimes political lyrics, the band managed to successfully combine art school ideas, rock ‘n’roll rifts and whimsy. The whimsy and art were multiplied in Byrne’s solo career as he added influences from World Music and performance art to his resume. He has published a number of books, one on the use of Power-Point, another on his habit of taking a bicycle with him when he tours. How Music Works contains a chapter expanded from a TED.com talk, another one from an introduction to a picture book about CBGB, and yet another which began life as an article in WIRED magazine, and much more.

Shot Between the Eyes: Bob Dylan's Tempest

Bob Dylan performing at the Critics' Choice Movie Awards on January 12, 2012. (Photo: Christopher Polk)

After 35 studio albums, hundreds of songs and the so-called endless touring, does Bob Dylan have anything new to say? Or is he repeating himself?

On Tempest (Columbia 2012), Dylan's new album released today, the answer may lie in the writing credits, namely the contribution of Robert Hunter, lyricist with the Grateful Dead. Hunter made a serious contribution to Dylan's last album, Together Through Life (Columbia 2009), indicating a collaboration that may suggest Dylan is running out of ideas for songs. That said, the first single and opening track on Tempest,  “Duquesne Whistle,” offers the bittersweet story of love that presents yet another Dylanesque turn of phrase: "You're the only thing that keeps me going/You're like a time bomb in my heart." Strictly speaking, it's not the story of a relationship that gives him a “lethal dose” but it reflects a matured songwriter who may prefer to wax nostalgic. And if collaborating with Hunter frees up the artist, then so be it.

“Duquesne Whistle” speaks to me of trains constantly on the move and considering Dylan's hard work touring the world over the years, the superficial meaning isn't lost. But as the band shuffles beautifully along and Dylan repeats the phrase "that Duquesne train gonna rock me night and day," I can only come to that conclusion on first glance. (A deeper meaning may take some time to reveal itself.) Nevertheless, the ten songs on this record are strong on first listen.

Overplaying Shaw: The Millionairess at Niagara-on-the-Lake

Steven Sutcliffe and Nicole Underhay in The Millionairess (Photo by David Cooper)

The two productions of Shaw plays at the Shaw Festival this summer are both wearying. Eda Holmes, who directed Misalliance, and Blair Williams, who staged The Millionairess, seem to be laboring under the misperception that if you make these plays more frantic and emphatic, then somehow their ideas will be clearer and the texts will seem funnier, when in fact there’s no special trick to penetrating their ideas, and all the overstatement numbs out the comedy. And the concepts are puzzling. Holmes has set Misalliance in 1962, for unconvincing reasons that she lays out in a director’s note; the characters don’t sound remotely as if they belonged in the sixties (the play was written a few years before the First World War), so Judith Bowden’s sets – which don’t really seem to belong to any historical era – and costumes just make you scratch your head. The Millionairess is performed without English accents, so when one of the characters refers to an American with whom he got involved in a business deal, you just wonder what he’s supposed to be. Canadian?

Shaw bills The Millionairess as a “Jonsonian comedy,” which would explain the outrageous character names, but the cast performs it as if it were Kaufman and Hart, and it’s such a silly play that I don’t imagine it matters. I’ve seen it three times over the years at roughly twenty-year intervals and each time even the plot fails to stick in my brain. The main character, an imperious and impossible heiress named Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga, marries two men, one before the play begins and one just after the final curtain, both of whom manage to pass her late father’s test and make money out of the small pile she deeds to them. In between she throws another suitor down the stairs for making an unkind comment about her papa and takes over two businesses and turns them into triumphs. The narrative doesn’t cohere very well (probably that’s why I can never recall how it goes) but it makes a number of typically Shavian observations about economics. The best thing in it is the third act, wherein Epifania offers herself for a job at a sweatshop and starts to make improvements in it before she’s even begun work. It’s not in the same style as the rest of the play, and in the production at the Shaw it’s the only scene that’s largely performed (at least, by Michael Ball and Wendy Thatcher, as the sweatshop owner and his wife) with some restraint.

Reinventing the Vampire Myth: Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan's The Strain Trilogy

Pan's Labyrinth is a favourite film of mine from the last ten years. Director Guillermo del Toro crafted an adult fairy tale set in Spain near the end of World War II, which brought together realistic elements of the battle between the still-fighting Republicans and now-in-charge Fascists, and combined it with the fantasy world created by a lonely young girl who is brought to a Fascist stronghold by her mother. The mother has married the violent Captain in charge of the garrison and he has insisted they join him in the forest (the mother is pregnant with the Captain's child). To the little girl, the fantasy world is filled with magical creatures that are both good and malevolent (sometimes within the same creature). In this world, she is thought to be a lost princess who must perform various tasks to prove she is who they believe her to be.

Beyond being a wonderful tale that combines real horror (the violence perpetuated on each side in the Spanish battles is pretty brutal) with fantasy, del Toro created creatures that borrowed elements from stories we've heard before and gave them a mighty twist. The twists created a visual world unlike anything we've ever seen on film. He also created a fantasy world for the girl that is far closer to the original Grimm's Fairy Tales than the more sanitized versions that came out later. The fantasy world is no less disturbing and violent than the one in the real world, but here, at least, the young girl's importance is acknowledged where, in the real world, she is viewed as nothing more than a nuisance who is barely tolerated.

Talking Out of Turn #32: Barbara Branden on Ayn Rand (1986)

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, the executive producer 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.

In the chapter Icons Revisited, I included a number of writers who re-examined past iconic figures whose personalities still continued to overshadow the decade. Some of the writers included historian Doris Kearns Goodwin on the Kennedy family, John Malcolm Brinnin on Truman Capote, Heather Robertson's fictionalized biographies on former Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, former leftist activist (now neo-conservative) David Horowitz who, along with Peter Collier, wrote a riveting and complex study of the Ford family empire, and Barbara Branden on the controversial author Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead, Atlas Shrugged), a writer whose work has had a strong influence on the current Republican Vice-Presidential candidate Paul Ryan.

Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism illicits a strong reaction from just about everyone who reads her work (especially young adolescents who identify with her heroes' battles against conformity and mediocrity). Yet most of us know little of Rand's personal life. Barbara Branden, who along with her husband Nathaniel, became one of her early followers and closest friends in 1950. (Branden and her former husband also co-founded the Nathaniel Branden Institute which gave courses on Rand's philosophy.) In 1954, however, Nathaniel began a secret romantic affair with Rand with the reluctant permission of both their spouses (Barbara and Frank O'Connor). Rand terminated her association with Nathaniel Branden by 1968 however after she discovered that he had become involved with actress Patricia Scott more than four years earlier. She likewise disassociated herself from Barbara Branden for keeping this fact from her.

In 1986, Barbara Branden wrote a memoir, The Passion of Ayn Rand (Doubleday), that not only unveiled this polarizing figure, she also illustrated the perils of blind faith and idolatry. The book later became an Emmy-award winning film in 1999 with Helen Mirren portraying Ayn Rand, and Eric Stoltz as Nathaniel and Julie Delpy as Barbara.

The Usual Mixed Bag: Summer Movie Roundup

Over the years, the meaning of summer movies has changed. As a teen, I remember that about the only films released in hot weather were the blockbusters, the James Bonds, the Star Wars etc. Then things began to change and serious, foreign language, subtitled movies also were sent out to the populace. Nowadays, it’s a veritable smorgasbord of movies on view, though the biggest box office and attendant media coverage still accrues to tent-pole films like The Amazing Spider-Man, The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. And while it seems like the kids rule the roost because of all the publicity given to the younger skewing  movies (though many adults go to them, too), there really is a choice for all film tastes. Here is a look at some recent summer releases in Toronto, most still in our theatres and probably in yours, as well. It’s the usual mixed bag when it comes to quality.

The Bourne Series: A Touch of the Human

At some point fairly late in The Bourne Identity, the first (2002) film in the series culled from the Robert Ludlum bestsellers, the amnesiac hero known as Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) – using impressive secret-agent skills he’s continually startled to find he possesses – figures out that one of an apparently unending series of assassins sent out to hunt him down has located the house where he and his companion Marie (Franka Potente) have spent the night. So he quietly sends their host, an old lover of Marie’s, with his two little kids to safety in their basement, then grabs a rifle and leads the unseen hit man (Clive Owen) out into the woods for a face-off. It may seem like a trivial concern, but I was grateful to the director, Doug Liman, and the screenwriters, Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron, for having the decency to remove two innocent children from danger before we had time to get anxious over their well-being. It struck me as almost chivalric on the filmmakers’ part to consider the feelings of the audience – to recognize that you can tense up a thriller without making it a sadistic experience.

Cooperstown Culture (Part Two): American Impressionism at The Fenimore Art Museum

Fenimore Art Museum

In between my opera escapades, which I alluded to yesterday in my discussion of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars, I made time to stop by the Fenimore Art Museum on the outskirts of the village. In the late 1930s, Stephen Clark, a wealthy philanthropist, made an agreement with the New York State Historical Association to convert his newly-built mansion on the shores of Lake Otsego into an art museum (Clark also convinced Major League Baseball to build the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown; his brother Sterling founded the Clark Museum in Williamstown, MA). Today, the Fenimore houses one of the finest collections of Indian art and American folk art around. And the temporary exhibits it’s hosted in recent years, including 2009’s exhibition of American artists in Rome and last year’s Edward Hopper show, have been wonderful treats for this region. The current exhibit, American Impressionism: Paintings of Life and Light (on through September 16th), continues this trend.

Cooperstown Culture (Part One): The Glimmerglass Opera Company production of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars

The Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Nick Coccoma, to our group.

Thomas Wolfe wrote that you can never go home, and there’s a lot of truth in that. Once you’ve grown, you can’t experience home the way you did in youth. But one of the more pleasant surprises in life comes from experiencing your home in new ways, often through the eyes of first-time visitors. This revelation happened to me twice this summer when I returned to my place of origin in Cooperstown, NY – once with friends who had never been and, more recently, on my own. Cooperstown is, of course, famous as the home of baseball, the location of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. If baseball constitutes America’s de facto religion, Cooperstown is its Mecca. Each summer, some 300,000 zealots descend on this sleepy village of two-thousand residents to pay homage to their favorite ballplayers, immortalized on gold-leafed plaques in an atrium that’s got the unsettling feel of a shrine. I’m a baseball fan, but more in spite of growing up in Cooperstown than because of it. To those who live there, the baseball craze makes for an annoying sideshow suffered in what is just an ordinary place to work and raise a family.

And yet Cooperstown is special, but, as many others have come to learn, not just or even mostly because of baseball. Once an important meeting place and residence for the native Iroquois tribes, this region of central New York played an important frontier role in colonial and post-Revolutionary America. The scion of the town’s founder, James Fenimore Cooper, became America’s first novelist and made the Cooperstown area setting to many of his Leatherstocking Tales, of which The Last of the Mohicans is the most famous. In the 19th century, the county grew into the nation’s leader in hop production. It boasts great natural beauty, with the village’s quaint streets sitting at the southern shore of the nine-mile Otsego Lake, the source of the Susquehanna River. The longest river on the east coast, the Susquehanna contributes the largest amount of fresh water to the Chesapeake Bay of any single source.

Lola and Doc: Come Back Little Sheba at Shaw

Corrine Koslo and Ric Reid in Come Back Little Sheba at the Shaw Festival (All Photos by David Cooper)

William Inge’s reputation as a playwright seems to have outlived his plays; they don’t get revived much. But though he’s not in the class of our finest southern playwrights (Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers), his work, which embodies a 1950s realist esthetic, is interesting. The movie versions of Come Back, Little Sheba and A Loss of Roses (the film’s title is The Stripper) linger in the memory for the performances of the leading actresses, Shirley Booth and Joanne Woodward respectively, in the roles of profoundly disappointed women. That’s the Inge archetype; the spinster schoolteacher in Picnic, Rosemary, fits it too, though she’s a supporting character. One of the reasons that Picnic is Inge’s signal achievement – it’s considerably better than the popular 1955 movie suggests – is that it provides a wider spectrum of characters than the others. Still, I was pleased to see the Shaw Festival’s mounting of Sheba, even though Jackie Maxwell’s production is clumsy. It showcases two talented actors, Corrine Koslo as Lola Delaney and Ric Reid as her husband Doc, and unlike most shows it improves as it goes along: the second act is poignant, even gripping.

Dwelling in the Details: The Stuff of Thought by Steven Pinker

Author Steven Pinker

I’m often told I dwell too much on words. During many an impassioned discussion I’ve heard people scoff “Semantics!” with a dismissive wave of the hand, as if I’m being too picky about the details (although what they’re often frustrated by is, in fact, pragmatics...but, well, you get the idea). But why not focus on the details, on accuracy? Human language can offer such a glorious range of nuance and character, and it provides one of the most crucial of links between our individual worlds and thoughts. Though not without their limitations, words form so much of our daily life. Yet we often lose sight of exactly how language shapes us, or how we shape it. As Linguist Steven Pinker rightly puts it, language helps to form, and is crucially formed by, The Stuff of Thought.

The book serves as Pinker’s third volume in two separate trilogies: one about language and the mind (which includes The Language Instinct and Words and Rules) and another on human psychology (featuring How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate). Each of these titles themselves make metaphorical, yet bold statements about the nature of our species. The Stuff of Thought rounds out each series with yet another declaration, confidently stating the ways in which human nature gets reflected in our language. Pinker argues that the linguistic tools we use, often without thinking, show us a great deal about ourselves, from our mental models to our culture to naming conventions.

Beauty in Simplicity: John Abercrombie Quartet's Within a Song

Beauty in simplicity. It's a phrase that's been used to describe great musical performances that are unadorned and ego-free and reach the human heart. Within a Song (ECM, 2012) by John Abercrombie could easily be described in this way. It’s an album of music that specifically plays tribute to the sounds Abercrombie enjoyed while maturing as a guitarist. But rather than pay tribute to his favourite songs and musicians in a formal way –  that is, as mimicry – the guitarist leads his group away from nostalgia and into the present. It’s an arrangement that works beautifully.

The record opens with the standard "Where Are You?" by Jimmy McHugh. It's an appropriate choice as Abercrombie seeks to find the source of his inspiration and the muse that spoke to him in the 1960s and pulled him into jazz. Essentially, that's what this new album is about: the turbulent times in the art of jazz that reflected the social changes in the United States while uncovering new ground in the music. But it’s not a literal history – it’s impressionistic.

Continuum: The New Politics of Time Travel

Rachel Nichols stars in Continuum on Showcase

I’m a sucker for time travel stories. My first favourite film was Terry Gilliam’s wildly surreal Time Bandits: I was taken to see it for my 11th birthday, and can still vividly recall the delight I felt leaving the theatre that afternoon.  And I’m certainly not alone in my enthusiasm. There is something uniquely compelling about the time travel conceit, and there’s a good reason why it remains one of the more popular subjects in science fiction literature, film, and television. Time travel plots are eminently adaptable – they can be ridiculous or grave, simplistic or painfully complex. They can be camp (Time Bandits), philosophical (La Jetée), juvenile (Hot Tub Time Machine), geeky (Frequently Asked Questions about Time Travel), or can just plain mess with your head (Primer). From the giddy fun of the Back to the Future trilogy, to the patently movie-of-the-week quality of The Philadelphia Experiment, to the smash and grab Snipes/Stallone vehicle Demolition Man, I have eagerly consumed them all. The Harlan Ellison-authored original Star Trek classic “City on the Edge of Forever” set the standard for me at an early age – somehow covering many of the light and heavy aspects of time travel in one brief hour of television. But when it comes to series television, the results have been more hit and miss. From the Time Bandits-inspired, delightfully cheesy, perhaps rightfully short-lived Voyagers!, to the more human-centred (and often sublime) Quantum Leap almost a decade later,  the too-quickly-cancelled Journeyman on NBC, and the BBC’s magnificent Life on Mars, time travel is a challenging format for a continuing series. And so when Showcase premiered its new science fiction/police drama Continuum in late May 2012, I made sure to tune in.

Satan is Real: The Story of the Louvin Brothers

You will, if you are of a certain age and inclination, recall the conflicting sides of Donald Duck’s personality. They were represented by an angel and a devil. Each one gave him advice and encouragement and left him the free will to choose. This dichotomy has been displayed in literature, film, and parenting since time began. The Louvin Brothers (Charlie and Ira Loudermilk) were a pair of brothers who sang deep country music. Ira was the dark-haired handsome one who played the mandolin and sang the high tenor part. He was a womanizer, a drunkard, and had a bad temper. He was a scallywag with a beautiful voice. Charlie was the good boy – he didn’t drink, was married to one woman for decades, he played guitar and sang the low harmonies. The Louvin Brothers began their career in the 1940s. They called themselves the Louvins because people mispronounced Loudermilk. As the Loudermilk brothers they learned their harmonies from their mother who taught them old folk songs as they did their chores around the house, and from the sacred harp singing at the local church. The influence they had on country music is immeasurable. Satan Is Real was the name of their most iconic record album; it is also the title of Charlie Louvin’s autobiography.

A Concert of Epic Proportions: Bruce Springsteen in Toronto – August 24, 2012

Bruce Springsteen Concert - Toronto - August 24, 2012

Is it possible to have too much of a good thing? Is a three-hour and forty-five minute Bruce Springsteen concert just too much? Yes and no. I knew going in to last Friday’s Springsteen concert at Toronto’s Skydome (I refuse to call it the Rogers Centre because it sounds too much like a shopping mall) that that was what 40,000 of us were probably going to experience. But until you live through this emotional roller-coaster – the driven, full-on, balls-to-the-wall party which is a concert by Bruce Springsteen – you really don’t know what to expect. For years, Springsteen has maintained that if you pay good money to see him perform, whether the concert is in New York City or Poughkeepsie, you are going to get a show of equal skill, length and passion. (And unlike other performers – I’m looking at you, Madonna – who gouge their customers to see them “live,” Springsteen’s tickets are kept at a very reasonable price, and he and his band actually perform and sing live.) There’s no question he fulfilled that promise on Friday night.

Musical tastes change, and I basically stopped paying attention to Springsteen’s output in the mid 1990s. I’ve heard songs here and there over the years from after that period that I've liked (especially his fine 9/11 album, The Rising, and tracks from his new CD, Wrecking Ball), but I certainly wouldn’t describe myself as a fan anymore. I found myself at the concert more out of curiosity than as someone committed to his music. Our seats were of the nose-bleed variety, a scant seven rows from the top. We were also on an oblique angle to the stage. This was a problem because I don’t really think they properly figured out where to put the video screens. One was on far stage left (unseen by us); the big main screen was centre stage behind the band (again out of view); and then there was the one on stage right that we could see (or could have if it hadn’t been partially blocked by light scaffolding). And yet even with this huge limitation within the rotten, echoing sound of the Skydome, on this gorgeous night when the open dome made the sound even worse, this was one of the finest concerts I’ve ever seen.

Robert Hughes: Another Iconoclast Departs

Robert Hughes (1938-2012)

I first encountered the writings of the late art critic Robert Hughes, who recently died after a long illness at age 74, when he wrote for TIME magazine. As a long time subscriber to the magazine, I’d always paid attention to film, book and music and theatre critics, in TIME and elsewhere, but I had never really read or liked art criticism until Hughes came on the scene. Reading someone discoursing on artists I was mostly unfamiliar with – I wasn’t one for art galleries in my younger years – I sensed two salient points about him. One is that he didn’t suffer fools, or in his case bad art and bad artists, gladly, just like my other favourite curmudgeons, Harlan Ellison and the late Christopher Hitchens; and two, he brought the very highest standards of criticism to his writing. TIME has generally had critics a cut or two above the bland norm – currently Lev Grossman on books, James Poniewozik on television and Richard Zoglin on theatre fulfill that function adequately – but Hughes was something new. He was scathing – his critiques of artists like Julian Schnabel or Jeff Koons, whom he delightfully called 'The Princeling of Kitsch,' made an indelible impression on me. (Many years later I saw an exhibit by artist/ photographer Jeff Wall, a similarly themed modern figure, in Chicago and though I couldn’t entirely dismiss his oeuvre, I did feel that I was being confronted by a fraud. I suspect subconsciously Hughes’ trenchant criticism of modern art was percolating in the back of my mind.) But it wasn’t until I read his eye-opening book Culture of Complaint: The Fraying of America (Oxford University Press, 1993) – detailing the then corrosive effects of political correctness on the political and artistic climate in the United States – that I fully realized how gutsy, vital and important Hughes was to the current discourse on culture and politics among intelligent and open-minded people.

French Without Tears: The Popular Music of Another Time

The cast of French Without Tears at the Shaw Festival (Photo: David Cooper)

French Without Tears at the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake comes half a year too late for the Terence Rattigan centennial, but productions of this skillfully assembled entertainment are too rare for caviling – especially considering what a fine job director Kate Lynch and her (mostly) young cast have done with this one. It was the play that made Rattigan famous: the 1935 West End production ran for years and the play was filmed in 1940. To my knowledge he never wrote anything else like it. It’s a distinctly thirties mix of drawing-room comedy, junior division, and romantic comedy; the closest American equivalent would probably be something like Having Wonderful Time, the Arthur Kober play set at a Catskills adult summer camp that was filmed, quite enjoyably, in 1938 with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Ginger Rogers. French Without Tears is about a group of privileged young Englishmen living together in a villa in France over the summer and studying French in preparation for the Diplomatic Corps or international business. Except for the most juvenile among them, Kenneth (known as Babe and played by Billy Lake), whose haplessness at acquiring the language preoccupies him – the opening image, which gets repeated, is of him slamming his head against the dining-room table – the boys’ focus isn’t, of course, their studies, but women. One of them, Brian (Craig Pike), has been paying his attentions to a local (offstage) flirt named Chi-Chi. The others orbit around Babe’s sister Diana (Robin Evan Willis), who is officially dating Kit (Wade Bogert-O’Brien) but enjoys unsettling Alan (Ben Sanders), the most intellectually gifted of the crew, and the handsome newcomer Bill Rogers (Martin Happer), a naval lieutenant-commander a little older than the others. (The title of the play derives from a now démodé promise once offered by language instruction programs.)

Some Good Men and Women Feelin' Bad: Recent Blues Albums

Two guys named Anthony, at Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago  (Photo by D. Kidney)

I spent the week before last in Chicago, on vacation with my wife and another couple. We stayed at a beautifully appointed boutique hotel in the Gold Coast, easily within a short taxi ride from most of Chicago’s feature attractions. There’s the Shedd Aquarium, home to thousands of examples of sea life; the Field Museum, not as I supposed a collection of open-grassy spaces, but rather a natural history museum which featured a wonderful exhibit on the life of Genghis Khan. We saw both these attractions on the first day, separated by a lunch of homemade porchetta sandwich at the famous-on-TV Panozza’s Deli. The second day we took pictures of ourselves reflected in The Bean sculpture, and then studied the Roy Lichtenstein show at the Art Institute of Chicago. All those museums were getting a little tiring … after all here we were in the centre of the blues universe and we hadn’t heard any of that great Chicago music yet! For lunch we taxied over to Buddy Guy’s Legends for some Louisiana cooking and a healthy serving of the blues. Buddy himself was on tour in California, so we didn’t find him leaning against the bar, but Anthony Moser (and another guitarist named Anthony) provided the free music. They sang blues, and funky originals while we enjoyed the beer, gumbo and po’boys.

Neglected Gem #23: The Browning Version (1994)

Albert Finney in The Browning Version

The moment you see Albert Finney in the 1994 film of The Browning Version, you know you’re watching an actor in the grip of a great performance.  If you care about acting, you scarcely dare to miss anything Finney does, because you never know when he’s going to dazzle you:  in the British TV version of the Kingsley Amis ghost story The Green Man, for instance, or in The Playboys, as the alcoholic cop who’s strung up by his love for the independent woman he’s impregnated.  He’s even more amazing in The Browning Version – it surpasses anything I’ve seen him do, with the single exception of the 1982 Shoot the Moon. This was the performance of its year, but it was a trick to catch it on the big screen. Paramount – exactly the wrong studio to handle a British “prestige” picture – tried the movie out in Cannes, and when there wasn’t much response, they nearly dumped it. They didn’t bother screening it in New York or L.A. in time to make the long lead times of the monthlies, and when they opened it in the fall, they gave it a small ad campaign and a very limited release.  It was befuddling that no one at the studio figured out the audience for the Merchant Ivory pictures would happily troop out to see a film like The Browning Version if they knew about it, and even odder than no one could see Finney was a shoe-in for major award nominations if only his work was promoted.  (The Boston Film Critics gave him the Best Actor award despite the fact that the movie opened in the last-resort downtown art house – aborted by Paramount, it was ignored by Sony, the conglomerate that owned almost every theatre in the city at the time.) Ironically, Finney’s own (failed) performance in A Man of No Importance, a lousy movie about a gay bus conductor in fifties Dublin with an Oscar Wilde fixation, got far more notice.

Mike Figgis’s movie is the second film version of what is probably the best known of Terence Rattigan’s plays.  The script is built around the valedictory of an aging English schoolmaster named Andrew Crocker-Harris, a classics instructor at a ritzy boys’ school whose wife has come to despise him and whose students resent his old-fashioned doggedness and rigorousness, unleavened as it is by anything they can translate into humaneness.  In the course of the drama, Crocker-Harris suffers one indignity upon another.  When he finally gets a little pleasure – the one pupil with genuine affection for him gives him, as a retirement offering, Robert Browning’s edition of the Agamemnon – his wife ruins it for him by insisting that the boy was merely being shrewdly manipulative.  Rattigan’s play is small-scale and a little tight-lipped, but it’s poignant, and when Anthony Asquith filmed it in 1951 he had Michael Redgrave to march it through to greatness.  Redgrave laid a gently sibilant, slightly quavering voice like a skin over Crocker-Harris’s slivered bitterness.  As the performance proceeded, the teacher’s masterful control began to flake, and you saw what motivated the sarcasm and the misanthropy and the near-sadistic humiliation he leveled at his boys.  Probably no one in movie history besides Laurence Olivier has ever managed anything like the wit and elegant, intricate layering of Redgrave’s line readings, especially here and in Uncle Vanya and Dead of Night.  This first Browning Version isn’t the world’s greatest movie (it doesn’t contain a single memorable portrayal outside of Redgrave’s), but it is a great experience.

Klimt Revealed: 150 Anniversary Exhibition in New York City

"Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I," Gustav Klimt, 1907. Oil, silver, and gold on canvas.

It quite literally was a dark and stormy afternoon when I slipped recently into New York’s Neue Galerie, seeking shelter from a sudden summer downpour. I had never before ventured through the ornate doors of this tiny museum devoted to German and Austrian art, even though I had walked past the former 19th century mansion where the Neue Galerie is housed – close by the Metropolitan Museum of Art – countless times. I was again heading to the Met this past July when the clouds burst open, making me change my plans. I am glad that I did.

On show was the Gustav Klimt 150th Anniversary exhibition (until Monday, Aug. 27), the only large-scale tribute to the Viennese painter, born July 14, 1862, in North America. In Austria, tributes to the Symbolist painter known as one of the founders of the Vienna Secession movement, a uniquely Austrian interpretation of art nouveau, are more pronounced. There, several internationally acclaimed museums, among them the Albertina, the Belvedere, the Kunsthistorisches, the Leopold and the Wien Museum, continue to honour the painter with various exhibitions highlighting different aspects of Klimt’s artistic legacy. The Neue Galerie show is smaller, if not more intimate than these others, showcasing just 12 items in a multi-media show that includes the cufflinks made for the artist by the Austrian architect Josef Hoffman in 1906. 

I am not a Klimt expert, just a fan. Without intending to trivialize my interest in his work, for my wedding invitation – 17 years ago – I had used Klimt’s famous painting, entitled The Kiss, as the cover art. As a result, for years afterwards, well-intentioned friends sent me all sorts of Klimt memorabilia, thinking me Klimt-obsessed. (I had really just liked the image of lovers entwined in a sinewy embrace.) I now have in my possession a barely-used mug as well as stationary embossed with a reproduction of The Kiss. Like many artistic geniuses whose work has captured the popular imagination, Klimt has permeated the culture but with some of his work having the undesired effect of appearing as kitsch. With this exhibition before me, I all at once had an opportunity to judge for myself what all the fuss was about. What was Klimt’s enduring allure? 

Catastrophic Success: Bomber Boys - Featuring Ewan and Colin McGregor

The Avro Lancaster Bomber

Ten months ago, I wrote about a documentary made by actor Ewan McGregor and his RAF-pilot brother Colin about World War II fliers called The Battle of Britain. At the time, I praised the good, if slight documentary that examined how the men who flew the Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes saved the Allies' collective asses by preventing the Axis from winning the air war over England in 1940. Now comes the sequel, Bomber Boys (BBC/BFS Entertainment – 2012). Ewan and his brother are back, this time examining the successes and failures of RAF Bomber Command of what came after The Battle of Britain. It is also a love letter to what many consider the Allies best bomber aircraft, the Lancaster.

A Glimpse of the High and Mighty. And Greedy. And Gaudy.

Jackie Siegel, the Queen of Versailles

She is emblematic of everything that’s wrong and right with America. Jackie Siegel comes across as the antithesis of a feminist. At 43, married to an affluent dirty old man of 74 named David Siegel, the zaftig blonde has an obsession with cosmetic enhancements, is a compulsive consumer, and remains oblivious to the world’s realities. On the other hand, the ditzy woman is sweet and kind, quietly giving money to a high school friend in crisis. Those contradictions make her the ideal subject for a fascinating documentary, The Queen of Versailles. In the non-fiction film genre of human train wrecks – think 2003’s Capturing the Friedmans – this project directed by Lauren Greenfield zeroes in on a billionaire family’s fall from grace. And it once again proves that grace often can be a spectacular facade built on quicksand.

Ghost in the Machine: Jasper Johns at the Harvard Art Museums

Cicada (1979)

Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum this summer is a testament to the kind of close looking that small exhibitions make possible. With only twenty-one objects spread out in two galleries, the exhibition focuses in on the way Jasper Johns turns a technique from the printmaker’s arsenal – crosshatching – into a motif in his prints, and the resonant meanings that motif opens up. It’s a view of Johns’ oeuvre that you can drink in endlessly. The exhibition came out of an undergraduate seminar at Harvard in the History of Art and Architecture department, and it’s no surprise – the galleries crackle with the excitement of fresh discoveries.

Jasper Johns fills his paintings and prints with familiar symbols like numbers, letters and flags to strip them of their familiar significance and discover within them both a new range of meanings and a new way of making meaning, not by denotation but through allusions that take you into a rich and imaginative landscape. The crosshatch prints, from the 1960s and 1970s, work no differently. The crosshatch is a set of intersecting parallel lines used in engravings as early as the Renaissance to create the illusion of three dimensions through the modeling of shadow and light. By extracting and enlarging the crosshatch and turning it into a figure, rather than one of the miniscule forms out of which a figure is composed, Johns explores the culture of reproduction and mass production. The exhibition also includes works by Johns that relate to the crosshatch prints by engaging “the logic of print” in other ways, such as text, newsprint collage and letterpress.

an example of the crosshatch technique in engraving

Johns’ crosshatch works are love letters to printmaking: the riddle of process, with its precise calculations, and the sensuous variations and synthetic possibilities you can get out of different media. Scent (1976) uses a crosshatch scheme in purple, green and orange, but the sheet is divided into three sections, and in each Johns uses a different media – lithograph, linocut and woodcut – each with its distinct process and effects, modulating the continuous pattern. Cicada (1979), a screenprint, includes strips of newspaper in its crosshatch pattern, and the design is worked out to look as though it were applied by a cylindrical seal, rolled on so that the pattern could continue beyond the frame of the print. Here, Johns’ screenprint, a contemporary technique, evokes a long history of printmaking, from Mesopotamian seals (the pattern) to engraving (the crosshatch motif) to printing presses (the newsprint collage).

Ragtime at the Shaw Festival: History Lessons for the Already Enlightened

In his novel Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow uses the ragtime era – roughly the period between the turn of the twentieth century and the beginning of the First World War – to investigate the confluence of contradictory impulses as America begins to hog the world spotlight. Henry Ford and J.P. Morgan embody the American dream in its quintessential (Horatio Alger) form, but their domination implies the oppression of wage slaves and the muting of voices that aren’t white and Christian. In Doctorow’s narrative scheme, the white-bread, well-off New Rochelle family, which has no reason to expect to meet anyone who isn’t exactly like them, crosses paths with African Americans (Mother finds a black baby buried but still breathing in her garden and takes in both mother and child), Jewish immigrants (in Atlantic City, Mother makes the acquaintance of Tateh, the Latvian Jewish immigrant who brings his little girl to America and winds up becoming a filmmaker) and the forces of radicalism (Younger Brother, Mother’s sibling, hears Emma Goldman orate in Union Square and later volunteers himself as a bomb maker for the mightily abused black man Coalhouse Walker, a one-time ragtime pianist and the baby’s father).

Ragtime is a relatively compact book with an epic feel. Doctorow is fascinated by all of the strands of this chapter in American history; his modernist contribution is a rich sense of irony.  He juxtaposes opposites: Ford and Morgan with Goldman and Booker T. Washington (Coalhouse's hero); the industrial dream that Ford represents with Tateh's immigrant dream to pull his daughter out of poverty; Ford's automobile with Tateh's moving pictures -- both produced by a mixture of art and technology. He also juxtaposes Coalhouse's rags with the vaudeville show in which Evelyn Nesbit, a celebrity but not an artist, draws curious crowds. Nesbit's husband, Harry Thaw, has killed her lover, the architect Stanford White; this so-called "crime of the century" makes her a star -- at least, for a few moments. In the first phase of his coming of age, Younger Brother falls in love with her. When she rejects him, he turns to other obsessions. Goldman's oratory and Walker's ordeal politicize him, turning him from a callow would-be lover into a warrior for the cause of the downtrodden and disenfranchised. And Harry Houdini’s escape trick becomes a metaphor for the escape trick every successful immigrant masters – yet, like Houdini, never masters completely.

The Pleasures of Pop & The Expedience of Politics: Hanif Kureishi's The Black Album (1995)

Within our commodity-driven culture lies a substantially creative battleground between art and product, substance and trivia, liberation and oppression. In Hanif Kureishi's marvellous 1995 novel The Black Album, that ambiguous struggle between the pleasures of pop and the expedience of politics gets played out with a sly devil-may-care humour. The backdrop of the story (aptly named after Prince's famous and controversial bootlegged album which he recorded in 1987 and eventually released in 1994) takes place in London during the tense and horrendous period of the fatwah issued by the Ayatollah in Iran against Salmon Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses. 

Shahid Hasan is a young Pakastani student at a community college and an aspiring writer who falls in with a faction of conservative Muslims, led by a zealous poet, Riaz, who is given to delivering sermons with titles like "Adam and Eve, Not Adam and Steve." His true attraction, though, is for Deedee Osgood, a free-spirited and hedonistic ex-Marxist college lecturer, who appeals to his passion for the artistic, spiritual, and sexual freedom that pop culture offers him. (They both dig Prince.) The dramatic conflict at the heart of The Black Album is how Shahid becomes torn between the "appetite for the compelling exhilaration" that he feels with Deedee, and the more ordered and tidy existence put forth by Riaz which he sees as an alternative to the racist abuse continually suffered by Pakistanis under the British ruling class.