Love, Death and Rock & Roll: Rich Cohen's The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones

"Menace is most effective when its limits are not known. [Mick] Jagger's 'demonic' persona was not enhanced by the death at Altamont, as some people have supposed; it was destroyed. In the face of one man's real death, Jagger's 'demonic' posture was shown to be merely perverse."

- George Trow, "Eclectic, Reminiscent, Amused, Fickle, Perverse." The New Yorker, May 29 and June 5, 1978.


In his 2012 documentary, Crossfire Hurricane, filmmaker Brett Morgen (Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck) showed how the impudent rebellion of The Rolling Stones' music and their volatile stage performances in the Sixties, which inspired riots everywhere, came from the adolescent impulse to run the table. Unlike The Beatles, who were a still center in a swirling hurricane of love, The Rolling Stones sought out the high winds. They gleefully fanned the flames of discontent until the sweet kick of revolt became a turbulent act of mutiny. But once death greeted them with the passing of co-founder Brian Jones in 1969, and violence and murder answered them at the Altamont Speedway later that same year, the chickens finally came home to roost. From there, it was childhood's end. Their bad boy behavior quickly became a corporate brand of sanctified naughtiness. That branding not only insulated them from the tumult their concerts had created, but it would also rob their music in time of its pulsing vitality. Crossfire Hurricane, taken from the lyrics of their scorching masterpiece, "Jumpin' Jack Flash," is in many ways a coming of age story about the taming of artistic danger.

There's also an urgent quest to peel open the riddle behind that artistic danger (and its taming) throughout author and journalist Rich Cohen's (Tough Jews, The Avengers) captivating new book, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones (Spiegel & Grau, 2016), and it coils through the narrative like an electrical current seeking ground. Having been drawn to their music at ten, by an older brother who was exiled to the attic of their parents' home with his music, Cohen would ultimately become a writer and journalist covering The Stones as they toured in the Nineties (right at a time where their music was long passed the potency that once stirred him as an adolescent). Using the subject of time as a key metaphor to parse brilliance from longevity, The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones (a gift title from Keith Richards who realizes that The Stones have been a constant in this young writer's life) is made up of fan notes that are cured in a quick critical eye. Cohen fully understands how the distance his generation has had from The Stones' greatest moments is both a handicap and a blessing. "Time would always separate me from these guys, from this generation," he writes without a trace of bitterness for being born at the wrong time. "Above us, the baby boomers., who consumed every resource and every kind of fun. Below us, the millennials, the children of the baby boomers, who've remade the world into something virtual and cold. The boomers consumed their childhood, then, in a sense, consumed our childhoods, too. They overimbibed, lived to such excess there's nothing left for us but to tell the story." Cohen's story has the power to shrink time so that each song he invokes quickly regains its ability to shock and surprise.

Broadway to the Small Screen: Early TV Musicals

Keith Andes and Barbara Cook in Bloomer Girl (1956)

In the heyday of live TV (the fifties), weekly and monthly series regularly offered abridged versions of plays, and between 1954 and 1956 one show, Max Liebman Spectaculars (a.k.a. Max Liebman Presents), which aired every fourth Sunday evening, produced ninety-minute adaptations of Broadway musicals as well as variety showcases and a handful of original musicals. (Liebman was better known for producing the inspired Sid Caesar-Imogene Coca sketch comedy, Your Show of Shows, one of the high-water marks of early television.) Surprisingly NBC preserved these musicals on kinescope, and several have surfaced on DVDs from Video Artists International, which has added to its repertory a couple of the early Hallmark Hall of Fame musicals and one from Producer’s Showcase. The result is a treasure trove for musical-theatre aficionados like me – especially since some of these shows have never been picked up by Hollywood (Bloomer Girl, A Connecticut Yankee and Dearest Enemy) and others were seriously altered – plots rewritten, scores decimated – in the movie versions. One Touch of Venus, for instance, reached the big screen with only a handful of the delightful Kurt Weill-Ogden Nash tunes intact; the Victor Herbert operetta Naughty Marietta and the Oscar Strauss import The Chocolate Soldier were retooled as Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy vehicles. (You wouldn’t know from the movie of The Chocolate Soldier that it was originally a musicalization – OK, a bowdlerization – of Shaw’s satirical romantic comedy Arms and the Man.) There is a crummy movie musical called A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court starring Bing Crosby, but the longer title, which replicates the name of the Mark Twain comic novel, alerts owl-eyed movie buffs that it isn’t based on the hit show by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, which was produced on Broadway in 1927 and revived in 1943, at the very end of their collaboration.

The Obsessions of George W. Bush: Jean Edward Smith’s Bush

(l.to r. Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, President George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld)

“I am the commander. I don’t need to explain. That’s the interesting thing about being president. I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”

– George W. Bush

In the first full-fledged biography of the forty-third President, Bush (Simon & Schuster, 2016), the first sentence of the preface, reads: “Rarely in the history of the United States has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.” The reader may well ask who is the author and is he credible. Jean Edward Smith is not a left-wing critic of Bush but a respected scholar who has written several well-received biographies of Ulysses Grant, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, General Lucius Clay (the military governor of occupied Germany after World War II and hero of the Berlin airlift), and John Marshall, the distinguished Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the early nineteenth century, an oeuvre that inspired the conservative pundit, George F. Will, to describe Smith as “America’s greatest living biographer.”

Given these distinguished credentials, I was intrigued to read Smith’s hefty volume at eight hundred pages. Besides, I had spent months years ago reading and writing about Bush’s responses to 9/11, his invasions into Afghanistan and Iraq and I did wonder whether I got it right. Based on Smith’s exhaustively researched and fluidly written biography, I did feel affirmed. If anything Smith’s judgments on “Asleep at the Switch” – the chapter title for Bush’s lack of attention to security before September 11 – his overreaction to that tragic day by his decisions to invade two countries, the erosion of civil liberties and “The Torture Trail” – another snappy chapter heading for which Smith excels – constitute a more devastating critique of Bush’s years, especially with regard to foreign affairs. Yet there are surprises as Smith credits Bush with a number of achievements. By mining the important secondary sources, the memoirs of the historical actors, numerous periodicals, government records, and speeches, and – apart from Bush himself – several interviews with key participants, Smith has skillfully synthesized them into a three-dimensional portrait of Bush.

Popular History: Nathaniel Philbrick’s Valiant Ambition

Author Nathaniel Philbrick.

The American Revolution never really goes out of style as a subject for works of both fiction and popular nonfiction, but its popularity does move in cycles, based on either external events or the emergence of especially popular dramatizations of particular episodes from its history. One example of the former came with the rise of the Tea Party early in President Obama’s administration, which sparked an ongoing debate over what the legacy of the Founding Fathers (and the slaves, women, and members of the lower classes whom their prominence tends to obscure) means for the United States today. More recently, the smash Broadway hit Hamilton has offered a new perspective on those same individuals, adding some nuance in its depiction of their sometimes petty infighting and frequent hypocrisy on matters of race.

Nathaniel Philbrick has been one of the best chroniclers of colonial and early American history, including the Revolution. His Bunker Hill (Penguin, 2013) was a thrilling exploration of a series of episodes from the Revolution’s early days that had formerly seemed overfamiliar to anyone with even a passing interesting in the birth of the republic. Philbrick combines a talent for developing a strong narrative drive and well-defined sense of character with respect for the meticulous work of historiographical research. The end result was a book that was both a compelling read and a sharp reappraisal of some of the founding myths to which Americans cling. For instance, his account of the Battles of Lexington and Concord revealed that, far from a glorious victory that showcased the natural skill of plain American militiamen, it was a much more confused and ugly affair in which the Minutemen as often as not came off as inexperienced and woefully inadequate. Philbrick hardly needed to make clear that such an unpalatable truth stood as a contradiction to a certain political orientation’s tendency to see the gun-toting common (white) man as the origin, backbone, and last sure defense of American liberties. Philbrick’s new book, Valiant Ambition: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and the Fate of the American Revolution (Penguin, 2016) tries to do some similar myth-busting, but it’s marred by odd narrative choices and a rushed, truncated conclusion. As the title suggests, Philbrick frames the book as a sort of double biography of Washington and Arnold during a particular period of the war, starting in the summer of 1776 and ending soon after Arnold’s spectacular betrayal of the Patriot cause in 1780. It’s often a thrilling read: one of the late chapters features a detailed account of the attempts made by John Andre, the British officer who was one of Arnold’s contacts, to escape Patriot territory and make it to British-occupied New York City. A last-minute error led to the revelation of Arnold’s treachery and hairsbreadth escape to British lines, while Andre was ultimately executed.

Kicking and Screaming: The Lifeguard

Kristen Bell in The Lifeguard.

In The Lifeguard, Kristen Bell plays Leigh, a not-quite-thirty-year-old who, reeling from linked disappointments in her Manhattan journalistic job and in her personal life – she feels that her contributions are undervalued at the paper and her editor, whom she’s been sleeping with, turns out to have another, more serious romantic attachment – decides to leave New York. She returns to the small Connecticut town where she grew up, moves in with her parents (Amy Madigan and Adam LeFevre), and gets back her old job as a lifeguard at a community pool. Leigh thinks she’s retrenching, but she’s actually retreating. She reconnects with her best friends from high school, Mel (Mamie Gummer), who’s now vice-principal and married to John (Joshua Harto), and Todd (Martin Starr), who’s gay and single. When Leigh starts to hang out with a pair of disaffected teenagers, Little Jason (David Lambert), the son of the pool maintenance man, Big Jason (John Finn), and his friend Matt (Alex Shaffer), who are making plans to quit school and move to Maine, Mel and Todd, too, get caught up in the seductive limbo of not-quite-adolescence, not-quite-adulthood. Mel is nervous about compromising her authoritarian status vis-à-vis the boys, especially when Todd and Leigh agree to buy beer for them and ask them to score them some pot in return. But Mel is experiencing her own terrors about moving on with her life: though she and John have been trying to get pregnant, suddenly she gets cold feet, worried that she’s inadequate to take on motherhood. Her realization that Leigh and Little Jason have become lovers puts her in an untenable position, and she responds hysterically. For Leigh, the affair is the most radical turn in her defiance of the clock and a sort of glue that makes it harder than ever for her life to get unstuck.

Blind Spots: A Conversation About Don't Breathe

In August 2016, Sony Pictures had an advanced screening of Fede Alvarez's new horror flick, Don't Breathe. Justin Cummings and Danny McMurray both jumped at the opportunity. Instead of fighting to the death over who got to cover the film – as is tradition among critics – they opted instead to try to co-author a review....and the following is the result. Critics at Large is not responsible for any adverse effects that may result from reading this spoiler-heavy conversation between two semi-sober, horror-loving sickos…

jc: Hi Danny!

dm: Hi Justin!

jc: This is strange. I’ve never done anything like this before.

dm: Same! I make a point of never conversing with people so this is new and uncomfortable territory.

jc: It’s okay, horror films about murderous rapists are what bring us together! To start, tell me about your horror background. We both get jazzed up about these kind of films; what are some of your go-tos?

dm: The first horror film I can remember watching is The Silence of the Lambs. Could we call that a horror movie now? Nonetheless, I was probably 7 and was properly horrified. I had to turn it off. As I got older, the tides turned and horror became probably my favourite genre. The good ones get deep into your head and that's kind of cathartic sometimes. The bad ones are hysterical. Wherever a horror movie sits on the good-to-bad spectrum, I love that anything can happen at any time; horror films consistently boast the least predictable kind of storytelling. I watch them all – Asian horror, zombie films, 90s slashers, smaller indie pieces. My favourite is probably 1974’s Black Christmas. How about you?

jc: Much respect for Black Christmas, what an esoteric choice! You're right on the money with your description of what the genre does best, too – its mandate to surprise and move the audience at all costs is what I think makes it an incredibly pure form of cinema. Ultimately, no matter what the movie is, we're all sitting in that dark room together because we want to experience something that jolts us out of our humdrum lives. For me, the ones that provide the juiciest jolts are things like Suspiria, Ringu, Alien, and even recent fare like It Follows. It's gotta get under my skin for it to work.

dm: Yeah, It Follows was a brilliant little gem! Tight storytelling, great camera work. Lately, I've noticed a trend toward these smaller indie companies telling these very minimalist stories. Small cast, small set, very focused plot. It Follows did that really well. It didn't mess around with the spirit world or demonology or any of these massive plot points with endlessly messy implications. Recently, I found both Green Room and Hush were really great examples of minimalist horror movies. They succeeded by doing less. I think Don't Breathe tried to do what they did...

jc: … and didn’t quite hit the mark?

Frozen Music: John Ballantyne’s Persistent Reality

John Ballantyne's Tower Stairs.

“Music is constant. Listening is intermittent.”– John Cage.
 

Paintings such as John Ballantyne’s are invitations to a ritual of looking that engages our imaginations far above and below the apparently straightforward substance of the images represented. They are what they appear to be: placid architectural spaces, portraits of both interiors and exteriors, still life’s with rooms and buildings instead of fruits or flowers, designed and built landscapes at once tightly contained and yet fully open to conjecture. As such they also aspire to be accurate diagrams of something impossible to behold, something which the poet Goethe once offered as an ideal definition of what architecture is and what it does: frozen music. In Ballantyne’s work we witness a certain kind of mathematical precision which is not strictly realistic per se but in fact actually arrives at quite a different destination: a metaphysical dwelling place for the frozen music of form and content. Another primary and recurring focus of his work is the frequent element of illuminated objects which remind of us of the original meaning of the word photo-graphis: drawing with light.

Fiat Lux! some of these images seem to whisper, let there be light, and the purity of Tower Stairs is a good place to begin contemplating the precious qualities not only of painting with light but also paintings of light itself as a subject, and of its palpable yet often invisible personality in our lives. The artist has observed that he sees painting as a tentative step towards realizing “the self”, and to express that process he uses “simple exteriors or interiors of buildings accentuated with light, light as a metaphor, a means of illuminating the subject and, at the same time, symbolizing enlightenment”. But just as enlightenment is not actually as complicated as it first appears to be, these lux meditations are definitely not quite as simple as they first appear to be. He investigates what lies beneath the surface of things and arrives at what the philosophically inclined might call things-in-themselves. This artist is building a staircase to heaven without ever leaving the earth. While Ballantyne’s kind of themes and these accurate depictions of the recognizable world around us are often called photorealism or pictorial realism, I find it more accurate and rewarding to perceive them as magic realism. Either way, the artist’s persistent commitment to capturing the essence of appearances and the mysteries below the surface is laudable in an age still avidly absorbed by both the abstract and the conceptual. As for their visual references or aesthetic geneology, while some viewers may tend to identify a resonance with the Canadian realists Colville or Pratt, or the Americans Wyeth or Hopper, I tend to veer toward their affinity with other more magic realists such as Fransoli, Guglielmi or Helder. They are similarly crisp and tidy, presented in bold outlines, with forms defined by soft but stark lights and gentle but profound shadows.

Doing Time: HBO's The Night Of

John Turturro and Riz Ahmed in HBO's The Night Of.

Note: the following post contains some spoilers.

In HBO's eight-part procedural drama, The Night Of, which concluded this past Sunday night, everyone is doing time. This temperamental thriller, which is based on the 2008-09 BBC series, Criminal Justice, is about the grinding wheels of the system and how it wears down its servants as much as it does the suspects. Unlike True Detective, which imposed a weary existentialism on a conventional crime story, The Night Of reaches inside the conventions of the detective genre to create a darkly lit tone poem where justice becomes merely a flicker of light. The mini-series, written by Richard Price and Steven Zaillian, is clearly set in post-9/11 New York with its mood of suspicion and fear regarding race and religion, but it also reflects an exhaustion where ideals and purpose have been replaced by expedience. That exhaustion contributes to some of the dramatic weaknesses of The Night Of, but if the story sometimes falls into a kind of stasis, the characters don't. The Night Of is about people who've been lulled to sleep but slowly get woken by a dawning nightmare of what they've become.

Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea

Helen McCrory in The Deep Blue Sea. (Photo by Richard Hubert Smith)

Helen McCrory gives an exquisite portrayal of Hester Collyer, the shattered heroine of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 The Deep Blue Sea, in Carrie Cracknell’s fine production at the National Theatre. (Audiences can see it worldwide in the NT Live series in September and October.) Filmgoers on this side of the Atlantic might or might not recognize McCrory from some of her character work in the movies, but in England she’s a star, and deservedly so. This is the third major performance I’ve seen her give at the National: she was the drifting, wounded daughter in Stephen Beresford’s The Last of the Haussmans and an unforgettable Medea (also under Cracknell’s direction). McCrory is an almost frighteningly intelligent actor, and perhaps her most distinctive feature is a wry wit that can be withering; amusement transforms that porcelain face – breaks it up, lends it an almost mandarin quality. As Hester, the wife of a judge who left him nearly a year ago for a younger man with whom she lives in a middle-class apartment house, pretending for reasons of propriety to be married to him, McCrory uses that wit as a means of showing the acuteness of her character’s self-understanding. She’s profoundly and irretrievably in love with a man she knows is incapable of reciprocating because he lacks depth and because his masculine pride and need to protect himself get in the way. I’ve seen two other masterful actresses in this role: Vivien Leigh in Anatole Litvak’s 1955 film version and Blythe Danner in a revival at the Roundabout Theatre in 1998. Leigh brought the role the wracked romanticism for which she was famous; it may be the only one of her post-Blanche DuBois performances that truly showcased her gifts. Danner made the sexual nature of Hester’s feelings for Freddie Page audaciously explicit. McCrory, like Danner, delves into the character’s passion; what sets her apart is a divided consciousness – the sense that Hester is watching herself in a mirror, bewildered by the recklessness of her own actions. It’s the combination of her helplessness and her awareness that make McCrory’s Hester heartbreaking.

B-Movie Fun On TV: FX’s The Strain

Note: the following post contains some spoilers.

I don’t know if the shortened ten episode third season of FX’s The Strain, (less than the first two 13 episode seasons), which begins tonight, signals the end of the series’ run. If it did, it would match up neatly with the trilogy of books written by filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) and Chuck Hogan, which I have not read. (The authors, who are executive producers on the series and wrote the intriguing pilot which Del Toro also directed, have indicated that a three to five season run of The Strain would be optimum.) I do know that I look forward to seeing if the motley group of defenders of New York City, beset by a plague of gruesome looking vampires, will prevail in the end, even as the metropolis seems slowly to be falling to the undead. If season one of The Strain introduced the concept, where a plane landing in New York from Germany is found to contain almost an entire load of dead passengers and crew, except for a few mysteriously alive (and infected) survivours, who begin to infect the populace at large, season two upped the ante as a specific group of (anti) heroes united to fight off the invaders, even as a second faction of vampires, with their own agenda, claimed to be aiding the humans in their fight. Season three, from what I gather, will suggest that the city as a whole has been written off by the outside world, which makes the fight to save it all the more desperate and crucial. Whatever the case, I hope The Strain will continue to offer up its unique brand of B-Movie (TV) thrills, social commentary, humourous asides, and, yes, a bit of acceptable silliness in the process.

Tarzan in the 21st Century

Samuel L. Jackson and Alexander Skarsgård in The Legend of Tarzan.

David Yates’ The Legend of Tarzan is the latest in a long line of Tarzan pictures that goes back a century. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Tarzan of the Apes in 1912 and it was such a sensation that he penned twenty-three subsequent Tarzan adventures, some of which were published considerably after his death in 1950. (There were also a couple of collaborations, which I take to mean that other writers completed narratives that Burroughs left unfinished.) Tarzan of the Apes tells the story of the protagonist’s being raised, after the deaths of his English parents in the African jungle, by an ape who has just lost her own baby; of his leaving the community of apes and teaching himself to read English (from the books in the hut where his parents died); of his falling in love with an Englishwoman, Jane Porter and then learning of his heritage – that he is John Clayton, the present Lord Greystoke. The first book ends with Tarzan’s keeping mum about his identity as an act of self-sacrifice – so that his cousin, whom Jane is set to marry, can continue to believe himself the rightful heir to that title. (You have to read the sequel, The Return of Tarzan, to get the happy ending to the Tarzan-Jane romance.) Tarzan of the Apes is a full-hearted, engrossing entertainment. It’s also ingenious: a pop-cultural gloss on the age-old nature versus nurture debate and a way of bringing a Romantic fable into the modern age. In the early chapters Burroughs keeps juxtaposing the African jungle with the England Tarzan belongs to by birthright but has never even seen, as in this passage:

With swelling breast, [Tarzan] placed a foot upon the body of his powerful enemy [a lioness], and throwing back his fine young head, roared out the awful challenge of the victorious bull ape. 

The forest echoed to the savage and triumphant paean. Birds fell still, and the larger animals and beasts of prey slunk stealthily away, for few there were of all the jungle who sought for trouble with the great anthropoids. 

And in London another Lord Greystoke was speaking to his kind in the House of Lords, but none trembled at the sound of his soft voice.

Throughout the novel Burroughs refers to his hero alternately by his jungle identity, Tarzan of the apes, and his civilized identity, Lord Greystoke, to remind us that in fact he is both these men in equal measure. He has the fighting strength and speed and survival instinct of a jungle animal (and the airborne flexibility of the particular genus of animal that brought him up) but the intellectual capacity of an exceptional human being and the character of an ideal Edwardian gentleman – which is the source of both his courtly treatment of Jane, though she’s thrilled by his jungle side, and his willingness to bow out in the competition for her love when he senses (incorrectly, as it turns out) that it’s his cousin she truly loves.

You Probably Don't Even Hear It When It Happens: The Sopranos & The Death of the Gangster Hero

“The way the thing builds with the music and everything. To me, it gets me and makes me want to cry,” creator David Chase said recently of the controversial scene which concluded HBO's The Sopranos after six seasons in 2007. That moment, which begins in a New Jersey diner with the pop horror of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’”playing on the jukebox and ends with an abrupt cut to black, has been debated for years and continues to be. People still argue about whether mob boss Tony Soprano was whacked just before he could sink his teeth into some onion rings, or whether the quick shift to dark simply left his fate to our imagination. Whatever audiences chose to believe, David Chase's decision wasn't an arbitrary one. Which is partly why his emotional reaction to its conclusion is not as simple as waving goodbye to a successful franchise. “It’s not because, ‘Oh, there goes the show. There goes part of my life.’ It has nothing to do with that. It’s what’s on the screen.” What's on the screen is an assured understanding that viewers had been inside mob boss Tony Soprano's head for the full duration, just as audiences had once been in the heads of Edward G. Robinson's Little Caesar, Cagney's Tom Powers in The Public Enemy, Muni and Pacino's Scarface and Brando's Godfather. But there's a significant difference this time around. Much had changed in both the gangster genre and our relationship to it.

Vaulting Ambition: No Man's Sky

In the gaming industry, hype can be a deadly thing. As a developer you’re never going to please everyone, no matter how hard you try, but crystal-clear communication from the marketing side – about exactly what your game is, what players will be able to do, and how they will be able to go about it – has become an absolute necessity if you want to avoid the pitfalls of excessive player anticipation. Promise one thing and deliver another (or, god forbid, don’t deliver on it at all), and you’re sure to be crucified upon the hilltop of self-entitlement and petulant rage that is the gaming community. Indie developer Hello Games, known only for their sidescrolling racing games in the Joe Danger series, learned this lesson the hard way this month in the lead-up to the release of their hotly-anticipated spacefaring exploration survival game, No Man’s Sky. Their relative inexperience in the quote-unquote “big leagues” of the gaming market is being sorely tested now, as they scramble to repair one of the year’s more disastrous game launches.

Short Stories: Early Americans by Jane Ira Bloom

In talking about jazz nothing warms my heart more than hearing from a musician who says she loves the notion of being off balance, playing in the moment, and has a keen sense of rhythm. And so it goes for composer and soprano sax player Jane Ira Bloom and her marvelous new album Early Americans (Outline, 2016). The album features 13 tracks all less than six minutes, which is quite the feat for a group of musicians who love to improvise. On this record, Bloom’s 16th as a leader, she’s joined by Mark Helias, bass and Bobby Previte, drums yet it’s only her first trio album. To put out an album of soprano sax, bass and drums immediately tells you that Bloom and her band mates are fearless by not including a piano player or a guitar player to round out the chords that put music into harmonic context. By the same token Early Americans isn’t a wild and crazy record of free jazz that, unless you’re in the room, has a tendency to be self-indulgent. Bloom’s record is much more formal with 12 original compositions and one beautiful cover (“Somewhere” by Leonard Bernstein) gracing the disc. Each work has an emotional appeal and stands self-assured creating a short story aspect to the album.

Fireball Career: Peter L. Winkler's The Real James Dean

Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean in Giant (1956).

Humphrey Bogart once said of James Dean that he “died at just the right time,” explaining that “If he had lived, he'd never have been able to live up to his publicity." Bogart makes a cameo appearance in Peter L. Winkler’s The Real James Dean (Chicago Review Press, 2016), trying to “carry on a gentleman’s conversation” with the new kid in town while the shy, “starstruck” Dean stares at his feet and mumbles. According to Merv Griffin, Bogart finally grabbed Dean by the lapels and called him “a little punk” and a “two-bit nothing” for being so discourteous as not to look him in the eye when spoken to. Given the generational divide as well as the differences in personality between the two men, it’s possible that Bogart thought he was being patronized when he complimented Dean on his technique and got back the response, “Yeah? That’s okay by me.” Their mutual friend Joe Hyams points out that Bogart, having become Bogart by this point, kept his “insecurities” to himself, while Dean, the Method man, wore his on his sleeve, the better to keep them handy for when he needed them to fuel his work. The Real James Dean (subtitled “Intimate Memories from Those Who Knew Him Best”) makes two things very clear: Dean, however much he may have flirted with exhibitionism and self-indulgence onscreen and enjoyed the rewards of success and celebrity off it, was a heroically committed actor who saw himself as an artist, and that side of him is only part—maybe not even the biggest part—of the reason for the impact he made on the culture, and why it continues to reverberate. This isn’t a biography or a critical study but a smartly chosen selection of things written and said about Dean by those who knew him, worked with him, loved him, revered him, are still conflicted about him. It’s fascinating to take in Dean’s life and career through the eyes of so many people who knew him at different times in his life.

The Crooked Timber of Humanity: J.T. Rogers’ Oslo

Jennifer Ehle, T. Ryder Smith, Jefferson Mays and Henny Russell in Oslo. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

True political theatre – in which issues are dramatized rather than just personified by characters embodying contrasting views and the text explores a political subject rather than proselytizing - doesn’t come naturally to American playwrights. We tend to look to the Brits for this kind of writing, which is why J.T. Rogers’ Oslo, which recently completed a run in the intimate Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center, in a gripping and poignant production staged with masterly resourcefulness by Bartlett Sher, feels like a particular triumph. (The play will transfer to Lincoln Center’s large space, the Vivian Beaumont, in the spring; the Beaumont is a Broadway house, so the play will be eligible for Tony Award nominations next season.) Rogers’ Rwanda play, The Overwhelming, is modest but effective, at least on the page (I haven’t seen it performed); its virtue lies in its restraint, its refusal to fall into melodrama, and to that end he places an American family transplanted to Rwanda in the center of the play and filters the horrors of the genocide through their response to it. Rogers has written two plays about Afghanistan; the one I’ve seen, Blood and Gifts, which Sher also directed at the Newhouse, is set between 1981 and 1991, and its historical focus is part of what makes it so unusual and intriguing. Rogers is clearly interested in boiling-point locations, but he’s a humanist, not a polemicist, and I think he keeps getting better as a playwright.

The Long Shadow: Carol Anderson's White Rage (Part Two)

President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act as Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, look on.

Carol Anderson’s examination of the backlash against the 1960s Civil Rights legislative achievements during the Nixon and Reagan eras constitutes perhaps the most controversial sections of White Rage. It is no exaggeration to assert that the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, initiated by Lyndon Johnson – whom Anderson rightly acknowledges as an enlightened figure even before he became President – facilitated seismic changes. The new laws did much to curb overt discrimination, open up job opportunities, close the racial gap by the doubling of college enrollment for blacks, and exponentially increase black suffrage. Consider that before the 1965 Voting Rights Act, only six percent of blacks could vote; within three years that jumped to sixty percent. It is significant that these gains rekindled white resentment, and the courts and the governments at the federal and state level found ways to exploit that sense of grievance. Nixon was able to appoint four new Supreme Court judges who reflected his conservative philosophy. The Court continued to undercut the 1954 Brown vs The Board of Education decision by arguing that vast disparity in public funding between white schools and inner city minority schools did not constitute racial discrimination and that the constitution did not guarantee education. State governments found ways to dilute the power of the black vote through gerrymandering, a process in which city, county, or state officials redraw district lines to ensure that Republican candidates are elected. All levels of government slashed the government payrolls that have long served as sources of black employment. Republican administrations sullied African Americans by linking them with drugs and crime. In a recent article in Salon, Anderson cites a 1994 Harpers’ article in which Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, cynically acknowledged the race baiting deployed by the Nixon administration: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be against black[s], but by getting the public to associate. . .blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing” the drug “we could disrupt those communities, We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” This is an example of white rage writ large.

Play It Again: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Jamie Parker as Harry Potter, in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

The more you think about Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, the odder it becomes. It’s a two-part play, which serves as the long-awaited sequel to J.K. Rowling’s blockbuster series of books about the world of a young wizard (as well as the often excellent movie adaptations), but it’s not entirely clear to me why it seemed so essential to Rowling and her collaborators that this be the case. The play is credited to Jack Thorne, who recently adapted the film Let the Right One In for the stage. However, Thorne, Rowling, and theatre director John Tiffany all share credit for the story. It’s currently running in the West End in London, and a Broadway transfer seems inevitable.

Still Bourne: Paul Greengrass' Jason Bourne

Matt Damon in Jason Bourne.

Jason Bourne is the fifth installment of the espionage franchise and the third in which Matt Damon and director Paul Greengrass have teamed up (the fourth, a spin-off, saw Jeremy Renner in the lead). It's been an exhilarating partnership so far, producing the most taut chase scenes, desperate hand-to-hand struggles, and precision minimalist acting from an ever-expanding cast of characters. I'm happy to report that the latest film retains these features. Greengrass' action direction is uncanny, with several bravura sequences that will leave you slack-jawed. In one, Bourne races through the streets of Athens on a motorcycle in the middle of a full-scale popular uprising, replete with Molotov cocktails, tear gas, fire hoses, and pitched battles between rioters and armored police. It is a staggering, visceral piece of direction. Your sensory apparatus can hardly register the kinetic movement. The only thing I've ever seen that surpasses it is the final minutes of Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men and perhaps Joe Wright’s Dunkirk sequence in Atonement. Damon continues his disciplined approach to the role; Tommy Lee Jones effortlessly steps into the shoes of the villain, nefarious CIA chief Robert Dewey; and Alicia Vikander gets the acting style of the franchise just right in the role of Heather Lee, Dewey’s protege.

But despite this craftsmanship and professionalism, Jason Bourne lacks the human conflict that lay at the core of the previous Damon films, a struggle that connected all of the movies’ elements into a tightly congealed ball. If you recall, the first movies trace the story of how Bourne--suffering from amnesia--comes to remember his past life as a CIA assassin even as he evades the Agency’s desperate attempts to eliminate him. His identity crisis was a moral crisis--he wanted to know the truth of his life so as to atone for the murders he committed. The problem was, he couldn’t escape being an assassin--he kept being forced to use his deadly abilities on the various black ops agents that came after him. Despite his desire to lead a quiet life, he had to keep killing, for the those agents would never have arisen if it weren’t for Bourne himself. He was the prototype, the first experiment in Dick Cheney’s 'dark side' operations. And so killing those agents and exposing their superiors was the only way to undo his painful legacy. That it fit in with his identity quest is what made the movies deeply compelling. This emotional weight lent a further urgency and excitement to the action sequences: the stakes were high.

A Feeling of Magic: Pete's Dragon

Pete’s Dragon was not on my radar. I have little patience for Disney’s current scheme to remake its classic properties in live action, being the kind of curmudgeon who still clings to the belief that these stories are better told through animation, and that CGI will never achieve the same impact and charm as practical effects. I guess I should have learned by now that they know what they’re doing.

If any of those properties were ripe for remaking, Pete’s Dragon fits the bill. The 1977 Disney original, about a boy who escapes his abusive hillbilly parents to live with a dragon in the woods, was a flop in every regard – so much so that it’s widely forgotten as part of the Disney canon. This 2016 update instead makes Pete (Oakes Fegley) the victim of a car crash that kills his parents and strands him in the woods, where the dragon – which he names Elliot, from the dog in his favourite book – befriends and takes care of him. Pete’s not the only one who’s seen Elliot before: tales abound in nearby Millhaven of dragons that haunt the forest, and resident coot and spinner of tall tales, Meacham (Robert Redford), has always claimed to have seen one. He insists there was a feeling of magic when he met the titular beast. It was a feeling that snuck up on him, making him drop his rifle and simply stare in wonder, and a feeling that forever changed the way he looked at the whole world. It takes a while, but Pete’s Dragon slowly begins working that same magic on you, and the moment that you see Pete soar into the air astride his furry friend – both of them whooping, howling, exulting in the sheer joy of it – you’re as entranced as Meacham was.

Palpable Poetry: The Works of Pierre Coupey at the Odon Wagner Contemporary Gallery

Pierre Coupey's After Rilke IV.

The piece below is an edited excerpt from his catalogue essay.

If seeing is believing, then surely two vibrant and dynamic works such as After Rilke III and After Rilke IV, intensify belief, occurring as they do in the almost operatic space where poetry becomes a palpable presence. They are among the few works by Pierre Coupey that have a literal or suggestive title, serving as a signpost to their destination. It’s not that they veer too closely to the programmatic, or offer a concrete story for the viewer to “read,” if only because they reference one of the most hermetic poets of the last century, but they do offer a tantalizing piece of spiritual bait for those of us who enjoy our mysteries served with a hint of metaphor. After all, Rilke is the keen-eyed observer who first interpreted the aesthetic purpose and historical importance of Cezanne when he remarked on that great painter’s work that, “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.” And like the poet they reference, these two works, along with their companions, take us immediately to the place where they were made: the very edge of pictorial expression, where no one can go any further, as if arriving at a coast where the land itself disappears.

Although Coupey’s roots and sources derive from Montreal, his point of origin, his major work has been done in Vancouver and he could be considered a West Coast artist. Upon closer inspection, however, one sees that his work eschews any dualism of east and west, and moves from a “third coast” of the mind. There is after all, no east or west in dreams, and his paintings evoke the retinal charms of a certain optical abandon associated with the unconscious. Finally we can envisage a ticket to that ultimate foreign country which Rosalind Krauss identified as the optical unconscious, and which another poet, Wallace Stevens, evoked so magically in his poem “Of Mere Being,” in which he called upon us to imagine “the palm at the end of the mind beyond the last thought” and to listen carefully to the creatures that dwell there in that distance, singing in the palm a song without human meaning, a foreign song. That is what these paintings are singing, a song without words in a language of free-floating forms. All, or most, of this gifted senior painter’s works are untitled and identified numerically, and with good reason: on the third coast of the mind, and in the palm of the mind that makes such works, language pales by comparison to the outright clarity of declarative statements made by each piece. As the artist himself puts it: “The majority of the works in this show are titled Untitled and numbered –– to put the stress on just the bare facts of the paintings themselves: how they were made, what forces went into their desire to be clearly themselves. To relieve them of words, of these words. To let them be paint.” Letting them be paint is the essence of letting us see what we are seeing, just that and only that. Yet language still seductively tempts us to approach the works, with its paltry ammunition in hand, as a kind of talisman that refuses to help us grind the images down into literal, or literary, meaning. Instead they playfully unfold in that Rilkean danger zone of extremity while we adjust to their absolute flatness and utter absence of illusion. If anything, they are all about the meaning of meaning itself, not merely about one meaning or another from the menu available to the modernist canon. They are, perhaps, exactly the drastic measures our drastic
times require.

The Deal with Art in The Art of the Deal: Funny or Die’s Donald Trump “Biopic”

Johnny Depp and Michaela Watkins in Funny or Die’s Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie.

Although one would be hard pressed to say Donald Trump is a stranger to popular media, February 10th 2016 brought the celebrity businessman a seemingly unprecedented level of attention. For starters, he had just won the New Hampshire Republican primary by a landslide, defeating rivals Kasich, Cruz, and Jeb Bush while simultaneously baffling reasonable people everywhere. To coincide with this momentous (and frankly kind of horrifying) occasion, Trump was in the headlines of digital media outlets for a second reason: he had been portrayed in a new biopic by no less than Johnny Depp himself. Collaborating with a team of famous faces, director Jeremy Konner (Drunk History) and writer Joe Randazzo (The Onion) bring the story of Trump’s humble beginnings to the small screen. Or so production company Funny or Die would have you believe. Unbeknownst to people born after the year 1987, Donald Trump once wrote a book. More accurately, I should say “Donald Trump” once “wrote” a “book.” While he denies it through his teeth nowadays his book, Trump: The Art of the Deal, which sold well despite being largely bullshit in light of his numerous bankruptcies, was mostly (if not entirely) written by journalist Tony Schwartz—who describes the experience, in retrospect, as “put[ting] lipstick on a pig.” In Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie, Funny or Die crafts an outlandish 50-minute satire, presenting it as a long-lost companion piece to Trump’s and Schwartz’s bestseller. (Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie, formerly available for free on Funny or Die’s website, was exclusively launched on Netflix on August 1, 2016.)

Issues: And No More Shall We Part and Wild

Jane Kaczmarek and Alfred Molina in And No More Shall We Part. (Photo by T. Charles Erickson)

In And No More Shall We Part, the final show at Williamstown’s Nikos Stage this summer, Jane Kaczmarek and Alfred Molina play a married couple, Pam and Don, struggling with her decision to commit suicide after her treatment has failed to halt the progress of her cancer. She is resolute, while he is reluctant, but against his better judgment he’s agreed to help her. The play begins on the night she has earmarked as her last and flashes back to the day she first broached the subject with him; their most volatile argument on the topic; and the special last dinner he’s arranged for her, when he learns that – against his express wishes – she’s cancelled the invitation to their grown-up kids (fearing that including them might make them legally liable for aiding her in taking her own life).

Molina and especially Kaczmarek give measured, intelligent performances under Anne Kauffman’s direction, but the drama itself, by the Australian playwright Tom Holloway, is painfully banal and uninspired. I’m sure Holloway is sincere and has deep feelings about the material, but he’s got nothing to contribute to the subjects of assisted suicide and the trauma of bidding farewell to a loved one except warmed-over sentiments. The two actors’ best efforts don’t produce much more in the way of character than Pam’s steadfastness and exhaustion, Don’s terror of abandonment and tendency to mask the brutality of the truth; Holloway doesn’t even provide a sense of what their various relationships with their two children might be like, since the kids, offstage presences, are merely a device. (The play doesn’t bother to tell us how the kids responded to the news of their mother’s decision, or what it might have been like for them – or for Pam – to say their ultimate goodbyes.) Since it’s a realist play, these pretty obvious omissions are a little bizarre. Moreover, the placement of the flashbacks feels random. The single moment in the play that’s truly poignant, i.e., poignant because of the way it’s been created and not because of the subject matter, is one where, after Pam, having taken the pills, persuades Don to leave her alone in bed to drift off over a book, and he camps outside the closed bedroom with his hand caressing the door. (The idea is that he won’t re-enter until the morning, when he can report truthfully that he simply came in and found her dead.) At this point, however, Holloway cuts to the flashback of their last meal together, which undercuts the emotional effectiveness of the image of Molina with his hand on the door and seems to have no dramatic logic.

MOR: Showtime's Roadies

The Showtime series Roadies is an ensemble comedy set amid the barely controlled chaos surrounding a tour by a successful, veteran stadium-rock group, the Staton-House Band. The series was created by Cameron Crowe, who directed the first three episodes and wrote the pilot, and it represents his return to conquered territory after a string of projects—the pretentiously vapid Vanilla Sky and the theoretically more audience-friendly Elizabethtown and Aloha—that bombed with critics and audiences alike. Although Roadies is set in the present day, its set-up and tender, hagiographic attitude towards rock and roll as a cultural force hearken back to Almost Famous (2000), Crowe’s semi-autobiographical ‘70s nostalgia trip about a 15-year-old rock journalist (played by Patrick Fugit, currently driving out demons on Cinemax’s Outcast) coming of age while on the road with a band called Stillwater.

In Almost Famous, the hero was mainly focused on the rock stars, and their groupies; this time, the central figures are those wonderful people working behind the scenes to make sure the fans get to see their musical heroes. But even if you’ve never seen a movie about the music business before, you’ll be familiar with these characters. Carla Gugino is Shelli, the perpetually over-worked production manager who’s always dashing from one crisis to the next, who’s just enough older than most of the people working under her for her sexy warmth and glowing smile to have a faint maternal tinge. The one-man fireworks display at the center of it all is the veteran tour manager Phil, a grinning, all-embracing bear of a man who dispenses advice and anecdotes in a way that tells you that he’s the spirit of the music incarnate. The “Blue Collar Comedian” Ron White has a firm handle on his character and has no trouble communicating Phil’s self-image and infectious love of his own bullshit, but Crowe doesn’t have much faith in the audience’s ability to figure anything out for itself, so White is required to growl, “When you’re lookin’ at me, you’re lookin’ at rock and roll in America!” (He is, someone says, “being paid a lot of money to hug people and make them feel good about the old way.”)

The Right Thing: Our Kind of Traitor

An episode of Law and Order called “We Like Mike” featured Frank John Hughes as an ordinary joe who helps a stranger change a tire and then becomes the chief suspect when the man is murdered. He’s exonerated, but the D.A. presses him to give the testimony that can convict the real killer, and though he’s still smarting from the treatment he received from the cops, he agrees to do it because he knows he should. It’s been years since I’ve seen this small-scale portrait of a man who’s instinctively drawn to do the decent thing, but it came to mind during Our Kind of Traitor, Susanna White’s gripping movie, adapted by Hossein Amini from the John Le Carré novel. Amini, one of our most skillful literary dramatizers, wrote the screenplays for The Wings of the Dove (Henry James), Killshot (Elmore Leonard) and The Two Faces of January (Patricia Highsmith), which he also directed. (The Wings of the Dove is a model of how to shape an entirely interior book that seems to
resist dramatizing at every turn.)

Podcast: Musical Chairs (A Radio Pilot, 1990)

In March 1990, Donald Brackett and I were growing concerned that music programming on the radio was becoming more niche driven. Since both of us grew up in an era when radio often turned you on to a vast palette of diverse genres, we wondered if we could create a show that – given these limiting programming changes – might accommodate more broad selections of music. We came up with an idea called Musical Chairs where we would create an identifiable theme of interest to a larger audience and then use that as our laundry line in which to hang a vast assortment of musical styles. The first show, which John Corcelli produced in the studios at CJRT-FM, was an examination of music that characterized the city as a homeless and hostile environment rather than the romantic vision heard in songs like "Chicago" and "New York, New York."

The selections included Charles Ives' "Central Park in the Dark," Ornette Coleman's "Skies Over America," Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City," Bernard Herrmann's score for Taxi Driver, Bruce Cockburn's "Inner City Front" and concluded with Aaron Copland's "Quiet City." We also added the prospect of interviews on the show by including one with writer Timothy Findley talking about Toronto while in town promoting his book of short stories, Stones. Since I was just beginning work as one of the producers at CBC Radio Prime Time, I didn't have the time to promote the pilot, but Donald sought out interest both in Canada and the States. No one nibbled enough to take it on. So despite coming up with ten other episode ideas, we only got this far in what you might describe as a map of what we might have accomplished.

– Kevin Courrier

The full radio pilot of Musical Chairs can be heard here.

If At First You Don’t Succeed, Fail, Fail Again: David Ayer's Suicide Squad

I think the disparity we’re seeing in online reactions to Suicide Squad since its release, with critics absolutely blasting the film (it currently sits at 26% on Rotten Tomatoes) and fans defending it tooth and nail, boils down to the fact that critics showed up to this film to see a film, whereas the whiners wanted something much more difficult to provide – namely, validation for their obsession with a comic book brand. One such irate fanboy actually created a petition on Change.org suggesting Rotten Tomatoes be taken down entirely, due to its tendency to give the DC Extended Universe films “unjust bad reviews," which he saw as dangerous because that “affects people’s opinion even if it’s a really great movies [sic].” He has since retitled his petition to “Don’t listen to film criticism” and removed any references to specific films, no doubt thanks to a torrent of chortling commenters reminding him that Rotten Tomatoes is owned by Warner Bros, who produce the DCEU movies. To me, it’s an absolutely hilarious situation, which made sitting through the ugly, dull, reprehensible mess that was Suicide Squad ultimately worth it. For Warner Bros execs, I imagine the situation is far more serious.

Poetic Despair: Michael Kiwanuka's Love & Hate

If it’s possible to write an album about despair then Love & Hate (Polydor) by British singer and musician Michael Kiwanuka is about as poetic a statement one can make on the subject. The singer’s second album, whose density of emotion is dressed with an equally dense score, can also be a little demanding. Yet it is probably one of the most engaging records I’ve heard all year. And while it delivers a slightly dark message, I’m entranced by Kiwanuka’s bold pallet of sound matched by his inspired performance. Love & Hate is so full of sadness and resignation that at times it's almost too heavy to enjoy. But Kiwanuka’s album effectively succeeds in pulling you into his world and after awhile it’s not such a bad world to experience.

Love & Hate was recorded in both Los Angeles and London some four years after Kiwanuka’s highly touted 2012 debut album, Home Again. That record drew quick comparisons to soul singer Bill Withers and was nominated for the UK’s Mercury Prize. To me, the new album will probably garner similar comparisons to Marvin Gaye’s unforgettable disc, What’s Going On (1971). But the difference is that while Gaye was expressing his anger and astonishment with an often brutally changing America, Kiwanuka is completely self-centered in his observations. The first five songs, which are slow grooves, have a natural intensity balanced by light string arrangements and plenty of Hammond B3 organ to soften the mix. The opening track “Cold Little Heart” is just over ten minutes long, and it takes a few musical liberties, but the music shifts in tone and texture so much that the risk is worth it. Clearly his producers, Danger Mouse and Inflo, are interested in creating a larger musical pallet. Some critics have compared that composition with Pink Floyd, but Love & Hate is not a “concept album.” Yet the opening track does suggest something like Pink Floyd’s conceptual “Shine On You Crazy Diamond.” But I think Kiwanuka is simply reaching for something beyond the 3-minute pop song and if it takes a 10-minute opener to draw the listener into his world then why not open with something long?

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XIX

Comedian Lenny Bruce, who died fifty years ago, once wrote, "People should be taught what is, not what should be. All my humour is based on destruction and despair. If the whole world were tranquil, without disease and violence, I'd be standing in the breadline – right back of J. Edgar Hoover." I was first introduced to Bruce in 1970 while in high school where we were learning 'what should be.' Standing around in gym after class, where getting hassled by hyper-masculine athletic jocks comprised 'what is,' a long haired soul who appeared equally big and intimidating named Tony Sloggett handed me a book –The Essential Lenny Bruce – and said, "You might like this." Then he walked away.

The Essential Lenny Bruce was a collection of this equal opportunity offender's best routines and many of them made me laugh – if not uneasily – because they didn't exactly provide comfort for my own views. At times, they weren't entirely understandable, either. In satirizing the straight world, Bruce employed both the argon of the hip and (since he was Jewish) Yiddish. Many of the hip words were pretty clear, but Yiddish was way out of my league. That left me chasing down the only Jewish guy I knew at my school, the straight arrow Mel Raskin, who was also a daily victim of the thugs in gym class. I'm still trying to imagine what must have been going through his mind as I followed him down the street asking things like, "Mel, what does shtup and putz mean?" (Mel has since, in a twisted irony known only to God, become a radio broadcaster of Oshawa Generals hockey games.)

When Bruce began to build his reputation as the "King of the Sick Comics," he took on everyone – from the Pope to Jimmy Hoffa. When he was a guest on Hugh Hefner's after-hours TV talk show, Playboy Penthouse, he did a television first – he blew his nose on camera. Bruce satirized and tested the prudishness of the audience. His daring wasn't in the romantic portrait Dustin Hoffman provided in Bob Fosse's Lenny (1974), where he was seen as the misunderstood rebel, but in his fearless approach of all that was sacred – even to liberals – and combining with that the performer's fervor in getting a rise out of the audience. We were as much the butt of his jokes as we were participants in them. One such example, which was one of the first routines I read in The Essential Lenny Bruce, was his outrageous "Christ and Moses" below in The Carnegie Hall Concert.

Two Musicals and a Two-Hander

The Pirates of Penzance at the Barrington Stage Company (Photo by Kevin Sprague)

Musical theatre buffs are treated these summer days in the Berkshires, where Berkshire Theatre Group and Barrington Stage Company have been mounting exceptionally well produced shows just a few blocks from each other in Pittsfield. Both BTG’s Little Shop of Horrors and BSC’s The Pirates of Penzance are winding down their runs. Pirates, directed by John Rando and choreographed by Joshua Bergasse (the team responsible for the best production I’ve ever seen of On the Town, which began at BTG and transferred to Broadway), revives the version of the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Joseph Papp had a hit with at the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1980. I saw the Papp Pirates in L.A. with Barry Bostwick as the Pirate King, Clive Revill (the original Fagin in Oliver!) as Major-General Stanley, and Andy Gibb and Pam Dawber as the lovers, Frederic and Mabel, and though Wilford Leach’s staging was erratic and the energetic mugging was sometimes a bit much, it was great fun. After years of sitting through G&S shows that dutifully mimicked the D’Oyly Carte traditions, it was refreshing to see a Yankee take on the operetta that parodied an entirely different set of conventions – out of American musical comedy, silent movie comedy and swashbucklers. (I wouldn’t put them on the same level, but the effect reminded me of Peter Brook’s marvelous 1953 film of The Beggar’s Opera, where the sources of the burlesque were twentieth-century operettas and swashbucklers.) The Papp Pirates was televised on PBS, but I’m sure far more people saw the 1983 movie adaptation, a loud, charmless mess that had only one thing going for it: Kevin Kline, who, recreating his stage performance as the Pirate King, sent up Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and every baritone in American operetta from Dennis King to Howard Keel.

Much as I enjoyed Pirates back in 1981, Rando is a better director than Loach, and his production, though certainly athletic and loaded with music-hall bits, is more graceful, the onstage chaos more controlled. The hamminess – a mainstay of the Papp revision – is perhaps overstated in the first act, and for me, at least, though Will Swenson’s Pirate King and his crew’s flirting with the women in the audience is a surefire crowd-pleaser, a little of that sort of hijinks goes a long way. But the show is extremely pleasurable, and it’s paced like lightning. Swenson digs into his hearty baritone to offer up “Oh, Better Far to Live and Die,” and David Garrison, a musical-theatre veteran whose career began around the time of the Papp Pirates, dispatches “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” the most famous of the G&S patter songs, with cool finesse, tossing off a light buck and wing at the top. The otherpatter song, “Now for the Pirates’ Lair” early in act two, performed by Swenson, Jane Carr as the “piratical maid-of-all-work” Ruth and Kyle Dean Massey as Frederic, is just as much fun. Massey, whom Nashville viewers will recognize as Chris Carmack’s on-again-off-again soulful songwriter boy friend Kevin Bicks, is handsome and boasts a well trained voice, and he’s lucky enough to have Scarlett Strallen as his Mabel. She has personality and the wit as well as the chops to pull off a bull’s-eye parody of the typical trilling operetta soprano (on “Poor Wandering One”) – and then in act two, when she’s handed one of those gorgeous Arthur Sullivan arias, “Sorry Her Lot,” she turns around and performs it straight, with genuine feeling. The seven other Stanley daughters, which include a pair of identical twins, Alanna and Claire Saunders, are entirely winning. Phillip Boykin, the barrel-chested bass who was a memorable Crown in the recent Broadway revival of Porgy and Bess, enriches the ensemble in the small role of Samuel, the Pirate King’s lieutenant.

The Long Shadow: Carol Anderson’s White Rage (Part One)

“We just need to open our eyes, and our ears, and our hearts to know that this nation’s racial history still casts its long shadow upon us.”

- Barack Obama speaking in Selma on March, 7th 2015 at the fifth anniversary of the famous march


During the week of the Republican Convention when Donald Trump proclaimed himself as the candidate of law and order, and reading Carol Anderson’s historical catalogue of white resistance to black progress, White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide (Bloomsbury, 2016), two thoughts came to mind. Rightly denouncing the murder of police officers, he said nothing about the murder of black men by the police, even the murder on November 26, 2014 of twelve-year old Tamir Rice who was killed in Cleveland, the city where the convention was held. No charges were ever laid against the officer. Secondly, I wondered whether Trump was aware that he was retrieving Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy that pandered to racists during the 1968 presidential election. Nixon was another practitioner of dog-whistle politics: a coded message that appears innocuous to the general public, but has an additional interpretation meant to appeal to the target audience, for example, to racists. According to Anderson, one of Nixon’s most trusted aides, H.R. Haldeman, Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” Another Nixon aide, John Ehrlichman, noted after the candidate saw an ad that showed entire cities burning without ever mentioning blacks, Nixon chortled, “It’s about law and order and the damn Negro-Puerto Rican groups out there.” By not acknowledging the African-Americans killed, Trump expressed a similar contempt for African-Americans at the 2016 Republican Convention.