The Big Questions: Walter Mosley’s The Right Mistake

Last week on Metro Morning, CBC Radio’s Toronto morning show, host Matt Galloway talked about a place he likes to go to get his hair cut. If memory serves, he said it is called Not Just A Haircut. What he said he liked to do was go in for a haircut, and then just hang out for two hours after and participate in the wide-ranging conversations that spring up. Sometimes, he said, it is simple things like the news of the day, or recent sporting events, but other times it takes on a more philosophical bent. His comments got me thinking about a book I read recently by Walter Mosley, a favourite writer of mine who’s best known for his Easy Rawlins series of character-driven mystery novels, including Devil in a Blue Dress (1990) which was made into a criminally underrated Denzel Washington film expertly directed by Carl Franklin in 1995. The novel, The Right Mistake (2008), is the third in a series of novels (though the first two – Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1997) and Walkin’ the Dog (1999) – were actually interlinked short stories rather than novels, per se) featuring ex-con Socrates Fortlow. (Laurence Fishburne played Fortlow in a 1998 HBO TV-movie of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned.) Fortlow lives in the tough region of Los Angeles called Watts. He  is a reforming violent man (‘reforming’, since, like an alcoholic, you are never completely ‘cured’ of violence) who spent almost half his life in prison for crimes he freely admitted he committed, including rape and murder. Violence is never far from his mind, but nor is redemption, forgiveness and reform, and not necessarily just for him.

Dousing the Fire Within: Oslo, August 31st

Anders Danielsen Lie and Malin Crépin in Oslo, August 31st

The gifted Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier may feel that he was born half a century too late. Both his features – Reprise, from 2006, and this year’s Oslo, August 31st – have the literate sensibility and allusive narrative approach of French New Wave movies, and they even draw on some of the same cinematic vocabulary. His subject matter is the young Oslo intelligentsia. The two protagonists of Reprise are writers who are best of friends but also competitors; while one (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) has already had critical success, the career of the other (Anders Danielsen Lie) has been sidelined by a nervous breakdown. The hero of Oslo, August 31st is Anders (Lie), a writer and heroin addict who has been living in a rehab facility outside the city. The movie chronicles the last day of his life, when he ventures into Oslo for an interview at a magazine, briefly re-enters his old social circle, and – inevitably – commits suicide with a drug overdose.

Trier and his co-writer, Eskil Vogt (who also collaborated on the screenplay of Reprise), work from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle’s novel Le Feu Follet, which also furnished the source material for Louis Malle’s 1963 film of the same name (known on this side of the Atlantic as The Fire Within). Malle’s version is about an alcoholic returning to his old Paris haunts before ending his life, and though it’s an adaptation of a French novel, in feeling it comes uncannily close to F. Scott Fitzgerald, especially his great short story "Babylon Revisited." Oslo, August 31st alters the aura by substituting a contemporary northern European milieu for Paris in the middle of the last century, but it’s a plausible switch. Like Malle’s hero (and Fitzgerald’s), Anders returns to a scene that has become poisonous to him, both because he has become the subject of his old companions’ gossip and because he can’t indulge safely in even the lightest partying without endangering his sobriety. Most of them have moved on from the excesses of their youth in any case. His best friend, Thomas (Hans Olav Brenner), is holding down a university teaching job and raising a child with his wife Rebecca (Ingrid Olava). When Anders drops in on a thirtieth birthday fête for Mirjam (Kjaersti Odden Skjeldal), with whom he once had a fling, he feels alienated from his former crowd. Their jokes about his behavior on one besotted occasion or another unsettle him, and when he tries to make friends with another young man who once made a play for his girl friend, the stranger’s bitter, insulting retort wounds him.

In the Shadow of Sgt. Pepper: We're Only in it for the Money

Last summer, I wrote in Critics at Large about how The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album, a lovely, masterful avant-garde pop confection, also represented a magical retreat from a counter-culture that was on the verge of turning dark and violent. Before that darkness fully overshadowed the utopian spirit of that record, though, many of The Beatles' contemporaries made valiant attempts to duplicate the wizardry of Sgt. Pepper, as if they were trying to decode a secret language. In 1968, for instance, The Zombies ("Time of the Season") matched some of Pepper's technical innovations while adding some rich textures of their own on the exquisite Odyssey and Oracle (which was also recorded, like Pepper, at Abbey Road Studios). The Moody Blues' Days of Future Passed (1967) developed precisely in the spirit of Sgt. Pepper. The album, which yielded two hit songs, "Tuesday Afternoon" and "Nights in White Satin," was conceived as a song cycle that spanned an entire day – from sunrise to evening – where every song provided a unique perspective from each member of the group. Days of Future Passed was an evocation of a pastoral mystical innocence worthy of poet William Wordsworth in the age of psychedelia.

The Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request

The Rolling Stones, a mere six months after Pepper, would concoct their own psychedelic conceit, Their Satanic Majesties Request, where they abandoned their R&B roots for exotic Indian rhythms, sound collages, and music hall pastiches. But because of their bad boy image, the record felt fake (despite its devious title) with its half-hearted flower power sentiments. There were many other lesser, now forgotten groups, who attempted to capture Sgt. Pepper's lightning in a bottle. One American artist who did respond to the seismic impact of Pepper, but didn't buy into the hippie ethos that blossomed out of The Beatles' landmark recording was Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention. This Los Angeles band, who coined themselves "the ugly reminder," may have had long hair but they didn't even come close to resembling the pretty groups sprouting up like flowers in a magical garden.

To paraphrase critic Nik Cohen, The Mothers suggested a band of motorcycle outlaws out to pillage your home and kidnap your daughter – though they were more likely to play her Igor Stravinsky (or maybe "Louie Louie") rather than sexually ravage her. Dan Sullivan in The New York Times once pointed up the significant discrepancy between The Mothers and The Beatles. "The most striking difference between [The Beatles and The Mothers of Invention] is not in their work but in their approach to their work – The Beatles' desire to please an audience versus The Mothers' basic distrust of one." Sgt. Pepper had celebrated the romantic ideal, offering the possibility that love could transcend all of our problems. But Zappa, who had already been railing against the 19th Century Romantic tradition of music, perceived something sinister lurking beneath the flowers, beads, and incense burning. Zappa saw the very concept of flower power evolving into nothing less than a successful fad. So on his 1968 album, We're Only in it for the Money, he decided to go after the fad rather than The Beatles' music. "Sgt. Pepper was okay," Zappa remarked to critic Kurt Loder in 1988. "But the whole aroma of what The Beatles were was something that never caught my fancy. I got the impression from what was going on at the time that they were only in it for the money – and that was a pretty unpopular view to hold."

He may have had a point. Contrary to the more generous ideals attached to the group, The Beatles' career was more often than not preoccupied by the power of money. By 1968, film critic Pauline Kael even shared some of Zappa's distrust when she reviewed the animated film Yellow Submarine. She felt that the problem of commerce undermined The Beatles' image, which by that time, began to change in the wake of all the promotional marketing tie-ins associated with the movie. "Wasn't all this supposed to be what The Beatles were against?" Kael asked. "There's something depressing about seeing yesterday's outlaw idols of the teenagers become a quartet of Pollyannas for the wholesome family trade." Yet, even as early as 1965, when interviewed by Playboy, John Lennon sarcastically remarked that they were moneymakers first and entertainers second. It was this particular aura that Zappa countered on his record.

For Good or Ill, What Might Have Been: Jeff Greenfield's Then Everything Changed

 "President Robert Kennedy", speaking on August 3, 1969

As a lifelong science fiction buff I must confess that my favourite sub-genre in the field is the alternate-history novel. Likely stemming from my interest in history and its many ramifications (I have a minor degree in it, to go with my major in Political Science) I’ve always been gripped by stories of the Nazis winning the Second World War – being Jewish makes that one more understandable, of course – or of the South triumphing in the US Civil War, among many other tropes. (Clearly I'm not alone, as these two “alternate realities” are the ones that have appeared most often in alt history novels.) That’s because, in my view, history can turn on a dime and one deviation from the norm can trigger any number of side effects or alternate history scenarios, which is absolutely compelling to someone who also likes reading SF as much as I do. (Imagine if Archduke Ferdinand had not been assassinated when he was; or if Adolf Hitler had not attacked the Soviet Union when he did, to name two of the most obvious examples of history changed by one specific action.) And now that the pivotal crucial American presidential election is merely two weeks away, it’s worth examining Jeff Greenfield’s latest book, Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics: JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan (G.P. Putnam and Sons, 2011) for a fresh take on the what-if basis of alternate history.

Greenfield’s book differs in significant ways from such classics as Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, or more recently Philip Roth’s (not quite classic) The Plot Against America – alternate American histories revolving around aspects of a different WWII timeline – in that Greenfield is not a fiction writer, but a political reporter who’s long toiled for television news, covering all the vagaries of American politics. So his book brings a more grounded, perhaps less fanciful look at a particularly pertinent present-day subject: the character of the man who would become President of the United States, or more specifically an imagining of a world where different men became President or were either catapulted into office earlier than expected or won elections that they lost in real life. The results of his literary musings are both fascinating and thought-provoking.

Living in the 21st Century: Now or Later and If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet

Tom Nelis and Grant MacDermott in Now or Later, at the Huntington in Boston. (Photo by Paul Marotta)

In Christopher Shinn’s Now or Later, currently on view in Boston in a production by the Huntington Theatre Company, the new president-elect of the United States (Tom Nelis) awaits what seems sure to be a victory in the 2008 presidential election. (He’s a Democrat but he isn’t a black man.) The play doesn’t focus on the presidency, though, but on the repercussions when first photos and then footage of his Ivy League son John (Grant MacDermott) cutting up at an off-campus costume party are leaked on the Internet. In the photos John is dressed as Mohammed and his best friend Matt (Michael Goldsmith) – who is sharing a hotel suite with John outside D.C. as the election results roll in – as a fundamentalist preacher whom John’s father, to John’s irritation, has collaborated with on a media event in the course of his campaign. The Mohammed costume is meant as a comment on the hypocrisy of the Muslim woman throwing the party. In class she accused John of racial intolerance because he didn’t think the students who’d put up cartoons of Mohammed around campus should be charged with hate speech and expelled. Yet in John’s view she’s a hypocrite who sees no contradiction between her unbending stance on how those whose objections to her buttoned-up religion should be handled and her willingness to stage a party where the guests cavort in various states of undress. The footage (which John was too hammered at the party to remember) displays him simulating oral sex on Matt. John is gay, but that’s not the issue for his father and his cohorts – though it is for John, who finds the attitude of all fundamentalist religion toward homosexuality intolerable.

The Right Stuff: Felix Baumgartner's Supersonic Jump From Near Space – October 14, 2012

Felix Baumgartner about to step into the void (Photo by Jay Nemeth)

"I know the whole world is watching now, and I wish the whole world could see what I can see: sometimes you have to go up really high to see how small you are."
                 –Felix Baumgartner, October 14, 2012, seconds before he jumped from 128,000 feet

Some weeks back, I wrote about Philippe Petite and Nik Wallenda, two high-wire walkers whose exploits had inspired me. I thought their achievements – walking between the two World Trade Centers in 1974, and walking across Niagara Falls this past summer, respectively – were awe-inspiring. Little did I know that some short months later, Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian pilot and BASE-jump specialist, would trump that in an earth-shattering, perhaps game-changing manner.

As a child, I was completely obsessed with space travel. Like so many people of my generation, I grew while attempts were being made during the Cold War to be the first man on the moon. All the lead up to that event occupied many of my waking hours (though some of it happened before I was four years old): Russia's Yuri Gagarin being the first man in space; Alan Shepard, the first American; Russian Alexey Leonov becoming the first man to walk in space; followed by Ed White, who performed the longest walk in space at the time; the tragic deaths of White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee in Apollo 1; then there was Apollos 7 through 10 that proved man could go to the moon and back.

As for Apollo 11 – July 20, 1969. Nothing more need be said.

Then followed the successful Apollos 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17. The near disaster of Apollo 13, and the herculean effort it took to get the men back alive. I remember mourning the demise of the moon landings, but became excited again when the shuttle missions started in April 1981. After a time, it too became all a little blasé because our astronauts and cosmonauts became, seemingly, little more than transport truck drivers in low-space orbit.

Frustrating & Fascinating: Pete Townshend’s Who Am I

It all started when I was about 14 or 15. My grandmother would travel to the USA for a couple of days to a bowling tournament, and upon her return would bring me a souvenir. This time, she arrived with an LP. It was called Happy Jack and it advertised on the back, “If you like this record you’re sure to enjoy these other Decca artists,” with pictures of Len Barry and Rick Nelson. Now, I mean no disrespect to the singers of “1, 2, 3” and “Traveling Man,” but they were no match for “A Quick One While He’s Away.” I became a fan of the Who immediately. They sang about stuff that mattered to me. They weren’t the walrus, they had “Pictures of Lily” under their bed. Me too! He spoke for my generation. I bought everything The Who released: singles, albums, rock operas, movie soundtracks, and books. I read Pete Townshend’s book of short stories, Horse’s Neck, and the interviews he gave to Rolling Stone (when it was the only place to find interviews with musicians). Now, years later, I awaited the arrival of Townshend’s autobiography with fierce anticipation. He had announced that he was writing it nearly twenty years ago. Could it possibly have taken that long? “It will have all the answers,” I thought. It doesn’t. But it sure asks a lot of questions.

Flights of Fancy – Flight: Volume One

A panel from "Maiden Voyage" by Kazu Kibuishi (collected in Flight, Volume One)

One of the greatest joys of the web is that it provides unprecedented access to art. The range and scale of projects online grows daily, and artists who might otherwise have been unable or unwilling to start out in print now have new options. Some seem content to stay and play in the digital space, while others can build their online reputation into a means to rise in the print world. Such was the case for the artists and writers of Flight: Volume One. Editor Kazu Kibuishi has amassed a wide range of art styles, stories, and characters, if a slightly smaller range of quality. The volume showcases twenty-two young comic artists, all early in their careers in 2004 when it went to print. While 'flight' is not always explicitly featured in the stories, themes of childhood, adventure, and fantastical whimsy pervade each one.

Hallucinatory Suspense: Brian De Palma's The Fury

Brian De Palma is hands down the most disreputable great American director. Sam Peckinpah got his due after he died; the movies that earned him the sobriquet “Bloody Sam” – not meant as a compliment – are now recognized as the work of a genius. But De Palma has always worked very differently from Peckinpah, burrowing slyly beneath the bristling, profane surface of pop. When he found his style in the late seventies and early eighties in movies like Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, his brash, dirty humor and his fascination with the tools of film exploitation alienated people (critics more than audiences: Carrie and Dressed to Kill were big hits) who couldn’t see that he was using those tools as a starting-off point. They missed it even when he announced his intentions at the outset of Blow Out: filming a parody of a sexy teen horror movie, a more sexually explicit version of something like Halloween, to fake out audiences and then cutting it off to segue into a political conspiracy thriller with the film-within-the-film’s sound man (John Travolta) as the protagonist. I think Blow Out is a masterpiece, but it wasn’t just misunderstood when it came out in 1981; it was willfully misunderstood. When I wrote in The Stanford Daily that it was one of the best political movies ever made by an American, I got incredulous letters from readers who denied there was a shred of politics in it – even though it’s about the assassination of a gubernatorial candidate, it contains allusions to Chappaquiddick and a character modeled on G. Gordon Liddy, it climaxes on an invented Philadelphia holiday called Liberty Day, and it’s color-coded in red, white and blue

You’d think that in an era when Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi are taken seriously as filmmakers, De Palma might catch a break for his pop sensibility, but Tarantino and Raimi don’t operate in the most dangerous area of violence, where it intersects with sexuality. Even Hitchcock didn’t. Except in Vertigo, which is a romantic melodrama – a genre De Palma essayed only once, in Obsession, and couldn’t get into – the sexual material in his movies is only there to play with us, lure us in so he can swap it for violence: Robert Walker coming on to Farley Granger in the opening scene of Strangers on a Train, Tony Perkins peeping at Janet Leigh in the shower in Psycho. (Spielberg takes a leaf from Hitchcock’s book, of course, in the opening of Jaws, where we’re led to think that the wasted kid on the beach is going to get laid in the water by the girl with the come-hither eyes, but the only orgasm is the bloody thrashing in the water as she’s scissored by the shark.) De Palma’s bravado in taking Hitchcock tropes into the truly forbidden places Hitchcock wasn’t interested in – the way he riffs on the Psycho shower scene as a way of exploring adolescent sexuality in the opening minutes of Carrie and middle-aged sexual longing and disappointment in the first scene of Dressed to Kill – branded him as everything from a misogynist to a plagiarist. It was fruitless to point out that artists have always built on each other’s work and that there are fewer portraits of female sexuality more sympathetic than these two pictures. In 1987, when he filmed David Rabe’s dramatization of the Daniel Lang New Yorker article, “Casualties of War,” about the rape and murder of a Vietnamese teenager by some American G.I.s, he came up with perhaps the most compassionate and devastating movie ever made about what happens to women in a war zone. His detractors, apparently confusing the film with its subject matter, called it pornographic.

Setting the Barre High: Ballet Jörgen's Swan Lake

Ballet Jörgen's Swan Lake (Photo: Kevin Vagg)

Bengt Jörgen has done a good thing. His new production of Swan Lake represents a breakthrough for his tiny Ballet Jörgen classical dance company, this year celebrating its 25th anniversary. The story, presenting some novel twists on the original 19th century plot involving a maiden transformed at night into a swan, flows seamlessly from start to finish. The choreography – using a traditional vocabulary stripped of pretence to allow for heightened clarity of movement – simply sparkles. By tackling Swan Lake – the soufflé of the ballet world – the Swedish-born ex National Ballet of Canada dancer shows with justifiable pride just how far his Toronto-based troupe has progressed since its origins in 1987 as an outlet for his dance-making talents.

Jörgen’s economically minded production – 23 dancers as opposed to more than double the bodies that usually make up a ballet company – benefits not just his Toronto-based dance troupe, the small ballet company that could, but also Canada as a whole, at least where classical dance is concerned. 

Featuring a multitasking set design by Cammelia Koo, and no-frill white Swan costumes by Robert Doyle, this Swan Lake is meant to continue that company tradition. It has been designed to travel. In November, the company launches a gruelling cross-Canada tour that will take Swan Lake to both major and minor cities across the country for the rest of this year, and well into next. (Go to www.balletjorgen.ca for the touring schedule.) Jörgen’s version of the dance classic is the one many Canadians will now be exposed to – another good thing.

Play, Unwind and Repeat: Elizabeth Shepherd’s Rewind

Before anyone carps about my lack of credentials, let me be explicit: I have no formal musical knowledge. I simply like what I like and appreciate what brings pleasure to my ears. Any attempts to impress on the basis of harmony, composition and clever arrangement are generally lost on me. What authority have I to review a jazz album, then? Ostensibly, I have none. But I’m remarkably similar to many of the consumers browsing HMV or surfing iTunes; I’m looking for an opportunity to escape the banality of life through something beautiful. So I hope most readers will find value in the words that follow. To you true jazz connoisseurs, I do apologize.

In the world of popular music, it seems all you need is a pretty face, appealing voice and good connections to be successful. Here, Elizabeth Shepherd’s handsome looks, classic voice and original recordings are an anomaly. Many fans were surprised to hear that her most recent album Rewind is, according to Shepherd herself, a collection of “songs that I have learned and loved and [that have] grown with me over the years.” In other words, it’s a cover album. However, Shepherd also promises to “treat them with my own sound to make them fully mine.” She succeeds.

New American Plays: Good People and The Motherfucker with the Hat

Nancy E. Carroll, Karen MacDonald, and Johanna Day in Good People (Photo: T. Charles Erickson)

In their Boston premieres I caught up to two worthwhile American plays I missed last season in New York. Good People is the latest by David Lindsay-Abaire, best known for Rabbit Hole – to date the only one of his works that has been made into a movie. Rabbit Hole focuses on a couple who are trying to handle life after the death, in a car accident, of their little boy. It’s one of those dramas (the Barbara Hershey-Geoffrey Rush plot in the fine Australian film Lantana is another) about the tension that the loss of a child creates between parents who mourn differently. (Both plays owe a debt to the great Robert Frost poem “Home Burial.”) I thought the play was banal but effective, and it felt authentic – as if it had come out of someone’s actual experience. The most surprising development, the friendship that grows up between the child’s mother and the teenager who, through no fault of his own, killed the boy on the road was the aspect of the narrative that worked the best, though in truth I believed in all of the relationships. But on stage the real show was Cynthia Nixon, who used that razor’s-edge anger she’s so brilliant at to illuminate the way a perceptive, intelligent woman deals with an unimaginable loss. The movie version was well done, too, but if you’d seen Nixon on stage you felt a void in the center because Nicole Kidman, who has a tendency to soften her characters, took over the part.

It’s Mourning in America (Again): Matthew Perry’s Go On

Matthew Perry stars in Go On, a new comedy series on NBC

“It was a car accident. She was texting. Janie …. was driving – not fast – but at that moment, and it couldn’t wait, she needed to tell me to buy a bag of coffee. So at least it was important.”
             – Ryan King (Matthew Perry), describing his wife’s death in the pilot episode of Go On

Last spring, NBC aired Awake, a fantasy-crime drama with a protagonist struggling with an almost unimaginable loss. As I wrote at the time, Awake’s rich ambitions and complicated narrative technique came as close to anything I’d ever seen on television to telling a sustained story from a mourner’s perspective. One reason was that the fantasy situation itself (its conceit that Det. Britten would effectively alternate one day to the next between two separate realities – one in which his wife had died, and another in which his teenage son had) gave weight and reality to the resistance one often feels in ‘moving on’ after suffering a comparable loss. Though Awake was unfortunately not renewed for a second season, its 13-episode first season still succeeds in telling a powerful, if prematurely abbreviated, story, and it is well worth seeking out.

What was so unique about Awake was that surviving the death of his family member wasn’t simply the situation that set the larger story in motion: it was essentially the substance of the story itself. Though Awake didn’t survive into this new season, it has a surprisingly inheritor in a new series on NBC, in of all things the new Matthew Perry comic vehicle, Go On. In Go On, Perry plays Ryan King, a minor local celebrity with his own sports radio talk show forced against his will into group therapy after the death of his wife Janie, where he finds a mismatched collection of others also trying to live on and survive their own stories of pain and loss. In character-driven sitcoms it is often the details that matter most, and even so early in the season, Go On has exhibited a knack for getting them precisely right. Among the otherwise underwhelming batch of new network comedies this fall, NBC’s Go On is one of the few bright spots.

The ABCs of Neil Young: Two Views of Waging Heavy Peace

This is the third or fourth book I’ve read about Neil Young. One was Shakey by Jimmy McDonough, which began life as an authorized biography and quickly ended up being done at an arm’s length (Shakey, or rather, Bernard Shakey is Young’s pseudonym). The next one was called Long May You Run (by Daniel Durcholz and Gary Graff), and it’s a good companion to have on hand while reading Young’s just-published autobiography, Waging Heavy Peace (Penguin Books), since it is an illustrated history filled with pictures, posters, memorabilia and more. Then there’ve been special issue magazines, and whole sections on Neil in books about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. But now we have the man’s own perspective. Neil Young’s own words … and, just like Bob Dylan’s long-awaited Chronicles (Volume One came out in 2004), it puts a whole new spin on what we know about its author.

When Mash-Ups Won't Mash: BBC's Exile

Jim Broadbent & John Simm in Exile

Exile is a strange hybrid. On one hand, it is a heart-felt family drama about the troubling nature of illness in the aged. On the other, it is a thriller whose main character tries to unravel crimes from the past in Ramsbottom, a town outside of Manchester, England. The biggest problem this BBC miniseries from 2011 (released on DVD last month by BFS Entertainment) faces is that it never finds the necessary connective tissue between the two genres they have mashed together. It is almost as if they don't have the faith that a story about a disgraced man, Tom Ronstadt (John Simm – the British Life on Mars), forced to come back to his childhood home and face up to the fact his once vibrant, talented newspaper-man father, Sam Ronstadt (Jim Broadbent – Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince), is in an Alzheimer's Disease death spiral, would be enough to hold an audience.

True Blood: Margaret & The Experience of Violence

Anna Paquin as Lisa, in Margaret

"I am seriously thinking of writing a play for the screen. I have a subject for it. It is a terrible and bloody theme. I am not afraid of bloody themes. Take Homer or the Bible, for instance. How many bloodthirsty passages there are in them – murders, wars. And yet these are the sacred books, and they ennoble and uplift the people. It is not the subject itself that is so terrible. It is the propagation of bloodshed, and the justification for it, that is really terrible! Some friends of mine returned from Kursk recently and told me a shocking incident. It is a story for the films. You couldn't write it in fiction or for the stage. But on the screen it would be good. Listen – it may turn out to be a powerful thing!"

– "A Conversation on Film With Leo Tolstoy" quoted in the appendix of film historian Jay Leyda's Kino: A History Of The Russian And Soviet Film (Princeton University Press,1960); and later reprinted in Roger Ebert's Book of Film (W.W. Norton, 1997).

In September 2001, it was my twentieth year as a film critic covering the Toronto International Film Festival. It was also the year of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Before the carnage took place, I'd already been seeing a number of pictures that dealt with the subject of violence. But my response to the violence was as varied as the films themselves. South Korean director Kim Ki-duk's drama Address Unknown, for instance, attempted to tackle the cultural stigma of Korean women who had had children out of wedlock with American USO soldiers stationed in Seoul. But the director quickly lost sight of the more ambiguous ramifications of the story. Kim's unbridled rage instead got the better of him. There were so many florid scenes of mutilation and brutality that it overshadowed any compassion we might have had for the characters. 

Then there was Patricio Guzman's documentary El Caso Pinochet (The Pinochet Case). The director meticulously put together a stinging indictment of the former Chilean dictator, who was arrested in 1998 and extradited for trial to England on charges of torture and murder. Guzman, a former Chilean exile, had been adamantly chronicling his country's turbulent history for over three decades. Ever since he filmed the coup of General Pinochet, which toppled the socialist Salvador Allende government in 1973, in his stunning epic 3-part documentary, The Battle of Chile (1975, 1976, 1979), Guzman had been making himself the caretaker of his homeland's national memory. While it lacked the accumulative power of The Battle of Chile, where we witnessed with horror as a cameraman captured his own death, The Pinochet Case was still a vividly personal and painful examination of the fallout from a nation's descent into totalitarian horror.

Urban Poetry: Film and Photo in New York at the Art Institute of Chicago

Louis Faurer. Times Square USA, 1950

In 1900, the Philadelphia-born painter Robert Henri moved to New York City to teach at the New York School of Art, where he encouraged his students to go out into the city streets with their sketchbooks and record what they saw there. Henri’s ‘quick sketch’ – a fast impression of urban life that could be worked up later into a print or a painting – sparked an era of American realist art as gritty and grimy and flush with everyday spectacles and stories as the city itself. Film and Photo in New York, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago through November 25, looks at the work of six New York City photographers between 1920 and 1950 who took Henri’s quick sketch to a new level by using a camera, instead of a pencil and paper, to record their urban vignettes. Pioneers of street photography, each of these artists – Paul Strand, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, Morris Engel, Weegee and Robert Frank – created images that were investigations of New York City as a dynamic, unruly, always-evolving subject, a kind of playground for the eye where a momentary glimpse could tap into a richly complex social experience. They also each experimented with film as a way of extending those investigations. The Art Institute’s exhibition looks at the way these artists approached the snapshot and the moving image as two ways of recording urban life.

Helen Levitt. New York, 1940

It’s a novel idea to examine this period of street photography by looking at how photographers used the burgeoning possibilities of film to elaborate on or enhance what they could do with still images, and the Art Institute certainly has the collection to support this topic. (All the works in the exhibition are drawn from the permanent collection, which includes a number of works that are on view for the first time.) The comparisons here are fascinating. Take, for example, the fiendishly accomplished and oft-neglected Louis Faurer, whose nocturnal photographs of Times Square are lit fantastically by the ambient light of billboard advertisements. The pictures have an almost surreal sheen, and, saturated with fragments of text from neon signs and theater marquees that create ironic and often funny counterpoints, they work kind of like found poems. By photographing the heart of Manhattan’s theater district, Faurer shows us a city that is itself marvelously and garishly theatrical – it’s always performing itself. (In this way they recall the New York City paintings and prints of the Depression-era satirist Reginald Marsh.) Meanwhile, the film by Faurer included in the exhibition, Time Capsule, a silent documentary shot in the 1960s, splices together movie footage of Times Square to provide a dazzling glance into the kinetic swirl of the city. Faurer’s flash impressions of the myriad incandescent bulbs that shoot the street full of light gives you the sense of a city vibrating with life. The subject is the same as in the photographs, but the movie camera allows Faurer to go even further in recording experiences in the process of unfolding, and to convey the sense of the artist folded into them, one among the crowd.

Neglected Gem #26: Just Tell Me What You Want (1980)

Ali MacGraw and Alan King in Sidney Lumet's Just Tell Me What You Want

Sidney Lumet's underrated caustic comedy Just Tell Me What You Want is one of the final gasps of the American cinema of the 1970s, the decade in which it was made, and another example of what was, in retrospect, the last Golden Age of American moviemaking. It was a time when the films were inventive, honest and, most significantly, made relevant commentaries on American society and its concerns.

Speedy: Hit and Run and Premium Rush

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard star in Hit and Run

At the end of August, while critics and buffs were bemoaning the arid movie summer, two blithely enjoyable entertainments, Hit and Run and Premium Rush, opened more or less unnoticed and died a quick death at the box office. Hit and Run, written by Dax Shepard and directed by Shepard and David Palmer, pays tribute to Steven Spielberg’s first feature film, The Sugarland Express, though it’s more closely linked to now-forgotten off-the-beam seventies road pictures like Slither and Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins. Like them it’s a whacked-out charmer. (It also reminded me in some ways of the terrific Elmore Leonard adaptation Killshot from 2008, which opened almost nowhere, though the tone of Hit and Run is much lighter.) Kristen Bell is Annie Bean, who lives in a dusty northern-California town with her boy friend Charlie (played by Shepard, who is also Bell’s main squeeze off screen). She teaches Intro to Sociology courses at a local college, but her chair, Debbie (Kristin Chenoweth), lands her an interview at an L.A. university for a job opening her own department in conflict resolution, which is what her doctorate is actually in. The job, if she wins it, would be a coup, since she designed her own discipline and so when she went on the market there were no teaching jobs in the country that might have allowed her to teach in her area of specialization. Despite Debbie’s insistence – she doesn’t want to Annie to end up like her, in a dead-end job, kept afloat on tranquilizers – Annie is reluctant to make the move because Charlie, who hails from L.A., is in witness protection after testifying against a pair of bank robbers. Still, Charlie insists that she go down for the interview; he even says he’ll drive her himself, despite the danger. When Annie’s ex, Gil (Michael Rosenbaum, the Lex Luthor of TV’s Smallville), finds out he goes into hyperprotective mode: he’s sure that Charlie’s situation hides a shady past and he’s under the delusion that he can get Annie back. So he gets his cop brother, Terry (Jess Rowland), to do some checking, finds out Charlie’s real name, and lets the men he testified against know where he is. Gil’s a jerk and an idiot, but he turns out to be right about one thing: unbeknownst to Annie, Charlie’s no innocent. The men he testified against were his partners; he drove the getaway car. And the only reason they aren’t in prison is that the brains behind the gang, Neve (Joy Bryant), was Charlie’s girl at the time – he turned state’s evidence in exchange for her release – which, as it turned out, rendered his testimony untrustworthy. Now she’s dating Alex (Bradley Cooper), the violent loony bird Gil gets in contact with in an effort to eliminate the man he still thinks of as his rival for Annie’s affections. He figures that once Alex disables Charlie, he can step in and drive Annie to L.A. himself, proving how indispensable he is.

Vegas, Revolution, and Elementary: Something Old, Something Borrowed, Something New

Lucy Liu and Jonny Lee Miller star in Elementary, a new drama series on CBS

The 2012 fall television season is in full swing – most of the new TV series have premiered and many old favourites are back with new episodes. Back at the beginning of September I have to admit that I was far less excited about the new shows than I have been in many years. Few jumped out at me, and for the first time in a while, there wasn’t a single standout show I was eagerly awaiting (as I had anticipated The Walking Dead and Awake in years past). It seemed like if anything, Fall 2012 was destined to be a season of more-of-the-same: a post-apocalyptic story with conspiracy undertones reminiscent of Lost and Terra Nova, an Americanized Sherlock, at least two Modern Family-inspired sitcoms, a new ode to Justified complete with a gun-toting cowboy/sheriff who plays by own rules, and yet another Matthew Perry comedy!

To my delight and surprise more than a few of these shows have far exceeded my admittedly low expectations. Today I’m looking at three network dramas – Vegas (CBS), Revolution (NBC), and Elementary (CBS) – which, while classic examples of some well-worn television tropes, have so far turned out to be remarkably rich variations on those themes. (Next week, I’ll weigh in similarly on some of the networks’ best new comedy offerings.) 2012 may not be a year for creative risk, but it may turn out to be the year of slow and steady, with more than enough solid network fare to keep you warm throughout the fall.

Neglected Gem #25: Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

William Finley as the Phantom

Director Brian De Palma has accumulated a long list of neglected gems (The Fury, Blow Out, Casualties of War, Redacted), but the one whose neglect makes the least sense is his ingenious satirical rock musical, Phantom of the Paradise (1974). Fiendishly clever and percolating with film-making fever, De Palma provides ingenious allusions to Phantom of the Opera, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Picture of Dorian Gray. (Last year, while teaching a class on Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, I had more angry responses to this picture than some of De Palma's more inflammatory work.) But this pulsing musical comedy is an exhilarating modern retelling of the Faust myth (with roots in Dante's Divine Comedy) wherein a man becomes so consumed by his thirst for divine knowledge that he sells his soul to the Devil. In Phantom of the Paradise, though, the thirst is for something perhaps a little less lofty: rock immortality.

As a parable, the Faust myth has fascinated a long list of artists from all fields (for maybe the obvious reason that the hunger for immortal acclaim is at its root). The allure of the story inspired Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, which was written as far back as 1591, three years before the author was killed in a street brawl. Mozart also caught the bug in 1775 when he composed his opera Don Giovanni, a Don Juan story that the composer was inspired to turn into a Faustian one. Hector Berlioz composed a colourful dramatic cantata, The Damnation of Faust, but (like De Palma's Phantom) it was greeted with little enthusiasm when it premièred in Paris in 1846. On the other hand, Charles Gounod, whose previous work had gone unnoticed, had his first major success with his opera Faust in 1859. Italian painter and composer Arrigo Boito, who found early fame writing librettos for Verdi's Otello (1886) and Falstaff (1893), turned to Goethe's Faust for higher glory in his opera, Mefistofele (1886). Even modernist composers couldn't resist the seduction of the tale. In Igor Stravinsky's 1918 chamber work, L'Histoire du Soldat (A Soldier's Tale), the Devil (in disguise) offers a soldier an old book filled with wisdom in exchange for his violin. American composer, Frank Zappa, who fell in love with Stravinsky's work as a teenager, reworked L'Histoire du Soldat in 1976 into a wickedly profane and funny oratorio, "Titties 'n' Beer," in which the Devil devours a motorcycle outlaw's girlfriend, plus his case of beer, which he says he'll return in exchange for the biker's soul.

Every Inch the Southern Gentleman: Quiet About It – A Tribute Album to Jesse Winchester

When I first heard about Jesse Winchester, back in the early ‘70s, his first album had not yet been released. Rumours flew that it was Bob Dylan recording under another name. It was probably down to the fact that he was managed by Albert Grossman (Dylan’s long-time manager), and was connected to The Band: Robbie Robertson produced his eponymously named first album. All it took was a look at the cover photo, and a listen, to know this was somebody new. Levon Helm played mandolin and drums on a track or two, the great unsung guitarist David Rea was present, but it was truly a songwriter’s record. I loved that first album, so much so that I have bought three or four copies of it over the years.

A year and a half ago Jesse was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. His friends decided to create the tribute album, Quiet About It, for him. He has some major friends. They appear here at their own expense. That’s right; they paid for their own sessions. Elvis Costello, Vince Gill, Rodney Crowell, Rosanne Cash, James Taylor, Jimmy Buffett and more. The album was released on Buffett’s Mailboat Records label. Jesse survived the treatments; he’s cancer free, but he moves a bit slower these days. After a recent concert I spoke with him. He was seated on a big old couch, out of puff, but every inch the Southern gentleman. The songs display the same generosity of spirit he showed that night. He spoke with everyone who had something to say, and signed CDs and LPs for 30 minutes. He deserved a tribute.

The (Funny) Way We Live Now: Modern Family

The cast of Modern Family.

Note: The following contains spoilers.

Modern Family (ABC), like The Big Bang Theory (CBS), is an excellent comedy that offers up likeable, compelling characters while not forgetting to make the viewer laugh. But while The Big Bang Theory is an old-fashioned – in style – comedy, with a laugh track, videotaped before a live audience with a two camera system, Modern Family is a more modern creature, a filmed on location, single-camera show without a laugh track. But just as The Big Bang Theory also uses hip lingo and au courant situations, Modern Family displays a taste for old-school humour, pratfalls, slapstick and the like. Melding those two disparate elements make it a very unique series indeed. The best two comedies on television both can claim that stature, allowing each to make their distinctive mark.

In so many significant ways, Modern Family is the finest exemplar of how we actually are today. Created by Steve Levitan and Christopher Lloyd (not the Taxi/Back to the Future actor), with nine other writers on the producing team, it centres on three Los Angeles, California-based families, who are related to each other in various ways. The traditional nuclear family, the Dunphys, are represented by Claire (Julie Bowen), a stay-at-home mother (yes, they still exist!), Phil (Ty Burrell), a real estate agent, and their three kids, Haley (Sarah Hyland), Alex (Ariel Winter) and Luke (Nolan Gould). Claire’s father, curmudgeonly business owner Jay Pritchett (Ed O’Neill) has a blended family, made up of his Colombian second wife Gloria (Sofia Vergara) and her preternaturally grown-up teenage son Manny (Rico Rodriguez). And Claire’s brother, Jay’s son, lawyer Mitchell Pritchett (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) also has a stay-at-home partner, Cameron (Eric Stonestreet); the couple recently adopted a Vietnamese girl Lily (Aubrey Anderson-Emmons). Each week, interspersed with one-on-one interviews by an off-camera individual for a purported mock documentary, Modern Family wrings smart and knowing episodes out of seemingly ordinary, even banal scenarios that nevertheless result in some of the funniest moments ever seen on network TV. It’s not surprising it dominated the comedy categories at last week’s Emmy Awards. (It won for Best Comedy series, and there were nods for Bowen and Stonestreet as Best Supporting Actress and Actor, respectively, and a Best Directing award for Levitan.). This is one show that deserves the accolades it regularly receives.

Excerpt from Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection by Deirdre Kelly

She is known world-wide as The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen, the only sculpture created by the French artist, Edgar Degas. She stands, defiantly, in ballet's fourth position, jutting her chin out at her audience, as if arrogantly telling her viewers to stand clear. Leave her alone. But since her unveiling in Paris towards the end of the 19th century, many instead have wanted a close up view of the statuette in order to understand the sitter's aura of smug self-possession. It is often – and widely – said that she is arrogant. A spoiled brat. But a close examination of the life of Marie Van Goethem, the real-life ballerina who posed for Degas, reveals that the dancer was spoiled alright – victimized by poverty and the sexual exploitation that ran rampant through her profession. When Marie was a young dancer at the Paris Opéra, the legendary theatre was known as the Brothel of France. Evidence shows that she was a gutter sylph who had tried to make good. But circumstances were strongly against her. Degas, it seems, pitied her. In rendering her as thin and anything but glamorous, he was, in his way, championing her cause. He immortalized her suffering. That look on her face is the look of a girl determined to fight off all predators. Unfortunately, for Marie it was a losing battle. This is her story:
 

The Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen by Edgar Degas.

The life of the ballet girl was indeed harsh, and the choices she had to make just to survive sometimes backfired on her and her family members, who had rested all their hopes for success on her malnourished shoulders. An 1859 article published in London Society entitled “The Ballet Girls of Paris” played up the flip side of the pleasure-seeking fantasy for those ballerinas who gambled with their bodies and lost, saying that they were to be found “in hospitals, in streets begging, or worse, in asylums, in gaols, at the solemn little Morgue by the banks of the Seine—very rarely that we do not hear of them in places of misery, in the somber realms of wretchedness. Their lives are frail and brittle, and break often under their burdens.”

Marie van Goethem was one of those girls.

Deirdre Kelly Discusses Her New Book: Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection

Deirdre Kelly (Photo: John Cullen)

Deirdre Kelly has been obsessed with dance and the ballerina since she was three years old. Much of her professional writing life has been devoted to looking at ballet and dance. Now, in her new book, Ballerina: Sex, Scandal, and Suffering Behind the Symbol of Perfection (Greystone Books: an imprint of D&M Publishers), she pulls back the curtain and gives us a rare peak behind the scenes at what it means in the past and the present to be a ballerina. She sat down with David Churchill recently to discuss her book and the history of the ballerina. Tomorrow, we will run an excerpt from her new book.

dc: What was the inspiration for writing the book?

dk: There's a macro and micro reason. I've been a professional dance critic for close to, gulp, 30 years. I truly have been fascinated by ballerinas from since the age of three. One of my first memories was incessantly drawing ballerinas together with flying fish and other powerful creatures of nature. Then I started writing about dance when I was 15 before taking creative writing in high school and going to University of Toronto. I first started to professionally cover dance at The Varsity, the University's oldest newspaper. Then I went to the Globe and Mail right out of university and was the dance critic there for 16 years. So, I actually identify myself as a dance lover, dance writer, dance critic. Someone who thinks about it a lot and writes about it.

There are other reasons I became fascinated with this topic. I was concerned with a kind of schizophrenia that I saw in this particular culture which came in the form of a major seed planted by the Kimberly Glasco case at the end of the '90s. [The late] Frank Magazine broke it, but I took that story out of the gate for the Globe and Mail and it became an international cause célèbre. It also sparked a national debate in Canada about just what the role of the ballerina was in the 21st century, and what was the role of the artistic director. However, I also learned that that wasn't the whole issue. At the time I remember being quite fascinated, saddened and horrified that while Glasco had a real right to voice her complaint about perceived injustices within the company, The National Ballet of Canada took umbrage. Now she was entitled to raise those concerns at board meetings as an elected dancer's rep, and yet, her company tried to silence her by firing her. But more to the point it was the reaction of the Canadian people that really surprised me. People seemed very uncomfortable about a ballerina opening her mouth to say anything, but especially to complain about injustices within her profession. I even saw headlines describing her as an “uppity ballerina,” and other almost antediluvian things said about her. It became an unbelievable backlash against this woman who opened her mouth. It was so antiquated and frankly quite shocking in this day and age. And it really did drive home that the iconography of the ballerina as the 'delicate, lilly-white being' is so deeply entrenched in the popular imagination that people cannot seem to brook a ballerina “stepping out of line/stepping away from the ranks.". It got me thinking about the metaphor of the ballet itself where it is celebrated as being a culture of uniformity and conformity.

Thriller: Donna Murphy on the Musical Stage

Donna Murphy in LoveMusik in 2007

We seem to be living in a golden age of musical-theatre women. The one whose name is most often on everyone’s lips is Kelli O’Hara, with her simon-pure soprano embroidered by often startlingly impassioned phrasing, whether the character she’s playing is fragile (The Light in the Piazza) or essentially conventional (South Pacific). Victoria Clark has a wide emotional range and suggests a complex response to the world deriving from accumulated experience; as O’Hara’s mother in Piazza, perhaps the best musical-theatre role ever written for a middle-aged actress, she managed to balance romantic skepticism (based on her own disappointing marriage) and optimism (based on an awakening awareness of the romantic possibilities for her damaged daughter). On the other end of the scale of middle-aged performers, Patti LuPone is a diva with grit in place of glamour, a gleaming sense of irony and an unerring instinct for how to make a song dramatic, whether in the old-fashioned Broadway manner (Gypsy) or in the Brechtian style (Sweeney Todd). Marin Mazzie, who’s been around since Ragtime and the marvelous Kathleen Marshall production of Kiss Me, Kate, has a warm soprano and an expansive presence that effortlessly fills a Broadway house. Sutton Foster has a more streamlined personality – she’s colder but more dazzling, and the best lead dancer around, as she demonstrated most recently in Marshall’s Anything Goes. Celia Keenan-Bolger is diminutive but she has a powerful core of feeling; she’s mostly attracted notice in comic roles (recently Peter and the Starcatcher), but she can be amazing in dramatic ones that call for arias of longing – Merrily We Roll Along, the Encores! revival of that Marc Blitzstein rarity Juno. Laura Benanti has a frisky, inventive wit: her show-stopping “Model Behavior” in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown is the funniest musical performance I can remember seeing on a stage since Angela Lansbury introduced “The Worst Pies in London” in the original cast of Sweeney Todd nearly three and a half decades ago. Among the clowns, Faith Prince seems to have been largely forgotten – she’s become a cabaret performer – but when she starred in a revival of Bells Are Ringing on Broadway in 2001, she proved to be almost a match for the original star, the late Judy Holliday, plus she made the lilting Jule Styne melodies sound sweeter than they ever had before. Kristin Chenoweth can be hilarious, but vocally there’s almost nothing she can’t pull off (her album, Let Yourself Go, is a virtuoso accomplishment), and she was heartbreaking in the revival of the Bacharach-David Promises, Promises a couple of seasons ago. And any era that produces Audra McDonald, owner of the most versatile and most expressive dramatic singing voice since Barbra Streisand, would need to be considered a golden age by definition.

I’d be hard put to pick a favorite, but no one thrills me more on stage than Donna Murphy. Movie buffs who recognize her name from the tiny parts she’s essayed in blockbusters like Spider-Man 2 and The Bourne Legacy have no idea what she’s like on stage, where she’s always a headliner. I first saw her in a production of Pal Joey at Boston’s Huntington Theatre in 1992, as Vera, the brittle, knowing older woman who keeps the ambitious womanizer Joey, but throws him out on his ass when he proves to be more trouble than she figures he’s worth. Vera is the high-comic element in the low-down, hard-boiled John O’Hara/Rodgers and Hart material, and Murphy’s confidence in the role was almost alarming; you wondered where she could have acquired it before she’d even turned thirty-five. Two years later she had her first Broadway lead, in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Passion. Since then she’s been seen as Anna in The King and I (my impatience with Rodgers and Hammerstein kept me away from that one); as Ruth in Wonderful Town (first at Encores! and then in a full-scale Broadway expansion, both directed by Kathleen Marshall); as Lotte Lenya in Lovemusik; with Victoria Clark in Follies; in a misbegotten and short-lived original piece called The People in the Picture; and as the Witch in Into the Woods, in Central Park last summer. She was a sensationally effective as Phyllis in Follies – sardonic yet wistful, giving that self-consciously clever poison-pen letter “Could I Leave You” much more a kick than it deserved, and exuberantly leggy, like a sleek version of Charlotte Greenwood, in “The Story of Lucy and Jessie.” But her finest work has been in Passion, Wonderful Town and Lovemusik.