Nerd Culture: HBO’s Silicon Valley

T.J. Miller and Thomas Middleditch in Silicon Valley on HBO.

As I wrote in my most recent review for Critics at Large, it seems these days as though the nerds have won. In both economic and cultural terms, many occupations and enthusiasms that would once have been looked down upon, or at least greeted with incomprehension, are now both mainstream and quite lucrative. In the TV world, the result has been a wave of new(ish) shows that reflect their cultural dominance, from the rapidly multiplying horde of superhero shows to darker fare like USA’s Mr. Robot. By contrast, a show like The Big Bang Theory feels almost quaint in its depiction of its nerdy protagonists as social outcasts whose goofily eccentric interests and behavior are virtually incomprehensible to the nice, normal Americans who watch network sitcoms.

However, not many shows have attempted to tackle the economic side of the rise of nerd-dom, at least not before the appearance of HBO’s Silicon Valley, which is about to wrap up its third season. Co-created by Mike Judge (of Office Space and Beavis and Butt-head fame), John Altschuler, and Dave Krinsky, it’s a remarkably funny and perceptive comedy that takes satiric aim at the industry that’s come to dominate so much of our daily lives.

Garage Freak: All the President's Men at 40

Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford in All the President’s Men (1976).

Just recently, my wife and I took a road trip through Virginia, and on our itinerary was an outwardly unremarkable building in Arlington. Meaning to complete a kind of circle begun 15 years ago – when a friend who’d attended college in Washington D.C. took me over to the Foggy Bottom neighborhood to see the Watergate complex – I wanted to visit a parking garage at 1401 Wilson Boulevard. It was here, in 1972 and 1973, that Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward met the anonymous source who a Post editor called “Deep Throat,” after the Linda Lovelace porn movie then in circulation.

In a nutshell: On June 17, 1972, five burglars broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate. From that starting point, over the next year, Woodward and his partner, Carl Bernstein, assembled leads from hundreds of sources into an escalating, expanding narrative of corruption centered on the dark heart of Richard Nixon’s White House. “Woodstein” and the Post were not alone in doing heroic Watergate work, but they were the ones who kept the story going when everyone else assumed it was nothing but (in the words of Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler) “a third-rate burglary”; it was their tenacity that effected the slow public unraveling of Nixon’s black-souled presidency.

Lost Man – O.J.: Made in America

O.J. Simpson with his award as college football's outstanding player of 1968, in Jan 1969. (Photo: Bill Ingraham)

If there's one prevailing image of O.J.Simpson – a leitmotif forever defining his life – it is of a man constantly on the run. It doesn't matter whether he rapidly escaped the projects of Potrero Hills, in San Fransisco, as an adolescent, or dazzled crowds with a game tying 64-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter of the 1967 playoff between his team USC and UCLA (an unforgettable play that inspired Arnold Friberg's famous oil painting, O.J. Simpson Breaks for Daylight), Simpson is always seen in perfect flight. As a striving track athlete, he broke records with his speed at the NCAA track championships in Provo, Utah, in 1967. When he was drafted by the Buffalo Bills in the NFL in 1969, he would set new marks for rushing. (In 1973, he became the first player to break the 2,000-yard rushing mark in scoring 2,003 total yards with 12 touchdowns.) Because of his lightning reflexes, he even acquired the sobriquet 'Juice' because of the electricity he generated on the field. He was swift of feet moving through a brief film career that included clunkers like Capricorn One (1978) and the popular Naked Gun trilogy in the Eighties, just as he was rapidly bounding through airport departure lounges in numerous Hertz television ads. O.J. Simpson never seemed to stand still so we could get a fix on him. Not at least until he went on trial for murder in 1994 in the death of his estranged wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman.

In Ezra Edelman's riveting five-part ESPN documentary, O.J.: Made in America, we get a penetrating examination of a star athlete who captured the public's imagination with the swiftness of his charm. But behind that mask of winsomeness was a lost man and a cipher who became a tragic projection of America's greatest stain – racism – where through his veil of celebrity, he could manipulate his image (and, in turn, be manipulated by others) into anything he needed it to be. O.J.: Made in America is a searing piece of political journalism and it has some of the runaway stature of Norman Mailer's best work and maybe Randy Shilt's ...And The Band Played On, where the larger social themes emerge out of the drama and with a startling immediacy. Although it was purely coincidental that O.J.: Made in America premiered on television days after the death of Muhammad Ali, you can't separate one from the other. If Muhammad Ali was a powerful and discomfiting figure who dramatically brought the issues of racism and celebrity into the forefront of popular culture (and even rubbed our faces in it while boasting about his strength and beauty as he knocked out Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson), O.J. Simpson in Edelman's work becomes the anti-Ali, a star who desperately chose to become the invisible servant of a nation that offered him celebrity success if he could be a black man who wished to be white. At Ali's funeral, there were many who preferred to remember him as floating like a butterfly rather than stinging like a bee. That's possibly because he not only – as Cassius Clay – took on the religion of segregation, the Nation of Islam, and changed his name, but he also stood up to the Vietnam War and refused to be drafted. As a proud black man, he wouldn't go fight in a country where "they didn't call me nigger." Ali relinquished his championship title, and urged other black athletes to stand up for their rights (as John Carlos and Tommie Smith did when they raised their black-gloved fists at the award-winning ceremony of the 1968 Mexico Olympics). He even risked going to jail for his actions. The celebrity of Muhammad Ali was borne out of the defiance of one man holding America accountable for its broken promises. But O.J. Simpson, who sped through the doors that Ali opened, ignored the country's dashed ideals and went for the gold. Unlike Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, where the author visibly railed against being both ignored and turned into an expedient symbol, in O.J.: Made in America, we see the reverse happening. O.J. Simpson is a visible celebrity athlete who turns into an invisible man by allowing himself to become an expedient symbol for whatever and whoever will make him accepted and loved.

For the Horde!: Warcraft

The world of (Duncan Jones') Warcraft.

It’s been common in recent years for big blockbuster films to enlist low-budget directors whose indie cred can ensure the success of a new franchise, which is a trend I find sort of fascinating. Disney, in particular, has proved itself fond of this tactic: Colin Trevorrow and Rian Johnson both only had a small feature or two to their names when they were scouted for the second and third films in the new Star Wars trilogy; James Gunn’s IMDB page boasted only a few forgotten genre titles like Slither (2006) and Super (2010) until he launched a global phenomenon with Guardians of the Galaxy; and Joss Whedon stepped up to the plate for The Avengers with nothing but some beloved cult TV shows and a few screenwriting credits under his belt (and managed to hit a total home run, not only making that film a box office smash, but defining the tone and style of most Marvel titles to follow). At this point, I’m fully expecting to see Alex Garland direct a reboot of Masters of the Universe or something.

The latest addition to this club is Duncan Jones, whose expertise at crafting smart, intimate, independent sci-fi films like Moon (2009) and Source Code (2011) has somehow qualified him to direct a $160 million fantasy epic based on Blizzard’s Warcraft series of computer games. I’m not complaining, because the formula continues to work in his (and our) favour: while Warcraft is big and loud and heavily plotted, with cringeworthy dialogue and limited characterization, it’s also shot through with the passionate, quietly surprising intelligence that typifies Jones’ work. It’s a crazy mess of a film, but I kind of adored it.

Podcast: Interview with Robert MacNeil (1986)

Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil (right) in 1973.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields.

Montreal-born Robert MacNeil is probably still most well known for the two decades he spent alongside Jim Lehrer as co-anchor of PBS's The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. When I sat down with him in 1986, however, he was also co-writer of the soon-to-be Emmy awarding-winning documentary series The Story of English, then airing on PBS and BBC. He, with co-authors Robert McCrum and William Cran, had also co-written an accompanying book of the same name.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with  Robert MacNeil as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1986.

Broken Couples: This Is Living and Elegy

Tamla Kari and Michael Socha (right) in This Is Living, at London's Trafalgar Studios. (Photo: Alex Harvey Brown)

This Is Living by Liam Borrett, a first play that began at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and wound up in the tiny space upstairs at London’s Trafalgar Studios, is a lovely two-hander about a young man, Michael (Michael Socha), who communes with Alice (Tamla Kari), the wife he adores, after she’s dead. The setting is the edge of the Thames, where she was drowned in an effort to rescue their three-year-old daughter; a passing couple pulled them both out and managed to save the child but not Alice. The time frame is the few days between her death and her funeral. In different ways the play, which intercuts the strange, haunted series of conversations between a living man and a dead woman with flashbacks to their relationship, recalls Brian Friel’s early one-act Winners (about a teenage couple in the hours before their deaths), Anthony Minghella’s movie Truly Madly Deeply (where a woman’s grief over her deceased lover brings him back to her) and certainly Nick Payne’s Constellations. This last presents a series of alternative scenes involving a couple whose relationship is about to be derailed by her untimely death from cancer. Borrett is certainly conversant with Constellations; if he knows the other two as well, then the wonder is that he’s absorbed them – as he’s absorbed the work of absurdist playwrights who pointed the way for him, Pinter especially – and then created something entirely original, with its own sort of mournfulness and its own bittersweet portrayal of the intimacies of young love and marriage. You have to listen carefully to pick up all the narrative details (and the two actors have thick Shropshire accents); I bought a copy of the script to double-check my first impressions, and it’s lucky I did. The difficulties the language poses – and this, I think, is where Borrett both derives from Pinter and diverges from him – remind us of the private space of any marriage that outsiders can’t infiltrate, the familiar games they play with tacit rules, the language that couples speak between themselves that doesn’t translate for anyone else.

Rolling With the Punches: Randy Newman's Land of Dreams (1988)

For many years, as a singer-songwriter, Randy Newman had avoided writing songs about himself. In the Eighties, he was also chiefly occupying his time composing scores for motion pictures, as his uncles had decades earlier. But, by 1988, Newman hadn't released a new album of pop songs since Born Again in 1979. What prompted the return to songwriting? Perhaps it was the innocuous Hollywood scores he was doing, music that faded with the pictures they accompanied. Or perhaps it was a need for a passionate reply to the conclusion of the Reagan era. In general, the Reagan years were a reaction to the dissipated idealism of the Sixties, which had given way to recession, Watergate and the Iran hostages in 1979. Ronald Reagan offered a quick remedy to America's sinking morale with eight years of cheap nostalgia. Public discourse couldn't have been more glib, poisoned by a new cynicism and cheap B-movie style dialogue that turned politics into an ugly game polarizing the saved from the damned. It was a spiritually unpleasant time concealed by a cheerful portrait of a false America that never was, and maybe never should be.

So, in 1988, after years of writing incongruently funny songs about the kind of country Reagan preferred to ignore, Newman constructed Land of Dreams, a new body about the America he himself was part of. Only this time, his real face began to peer through the veil of ambiguity he'd created for songs like "Sail Away" and "It's Money That I Love." For most of Randy Newman's career, we were used to hearing songs about a variety of American archetypal figures, but we rarely heard songs about him. The initial shock of Land of Dreams was that we were no longer hearing outrageous tales about slave traders, stalkers, Southern racists or demagogues. The album caught us up in Newman's own story by looking back to his birth in Los Angeles, the years later in New Orleans with his mother waiting for his father to return from the Second World War, and his problems at school. On the album, Newman draws on his own early life to address the prevailing themes of contemporary American culture – including racism, disenfranchisement and assimilation. What also changed was his voice, now less masked by his standard drawl. Newman sang in a cadence that was direct while simultaneously making the humour in some of the songs more cutting. There was less distance between the singer and his material. But Newman wasn't baring his soul in the way many pop singer-songwriters do, revealing their innermost traumas and longings. Land of Dreams instead implies a connection between the personal dreams of the artist, the dreams of the characters in his songs and the dreams of his country. The title didn't just refer to the American Dream, but more specifically to New Orleans, where Newman had spent his early childhood. Even the album cover, featuring a photo of Newman as a young child in his full Roy Rogers cowboy regalia, with two toy six-shooters in his hands, seems to be posing a challenge to that other cowboy in the White House who was taking the country through Death Valley Days.

Podcast: Interview with Novelist Alice Hoffman (1985)

Author Alice Hoffman in 2008. (Photo: Deborah Feingold)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields.

In 1985, one of those interviews was with novelist Alice Hoffman, who had just published her fifth book, Fortune's Daughter. In addition to her novels, she also had written the screenplay for Robert Mandel's 1983 film Independence Day (starring Kathleen Quinlan). Her 1995 novel Practical Magic would be adapted for the screen in 1998. The author of The Dovekeepers (2011), Hoffman's most recent novel is The Marriage of Opposites, published last year by Simon & Schuster.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Alice Hoffman as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1985.

Through the Mirror Darkly: The Gothic Dimension of the 2016 Presidential Election (Part II)

Louisiana politician Huey Long, during a radio broadcast, January 1930.

The following is Part II of Through the Mirror Darkly: The Gothic Dimension of the 2016 Presidential Election. Part I was published here yesterday. The piece is an edited adaptation of an address I presented at the Mensa Society International Conference in Toronto on June 11.  – bd

The bigoted nativism that Trump stokes is not unique in the American historical experience. In 1780, papist immigrants were targeted allegedly for their fecundity; in 1850, the scapegoat was the Chinese who allegedly could not assimilate; in 1920, Jews were feared because they threatened the economy. The cartoon does not take into account the no-nothing movement that became the American Party in 1854 which called for the end of Catholic immigrants from Germany and Ireland. But these historical episodes were generally relegated to the political fringes and no major Presidential candidate took them seriously as a major plank in their election campaign.

Through the Mirror Darkly: The Gothic Dimension of the 2016 Presidential Election (Part I)

“The Gothic thrives in a world where those in authority – the supposed exemplars of the good – are under suspicion.”

– Mark Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street, 1997.

The Gothic is a “demonic history text … in which its common thread is the singularity and monstrosity of the Other.”

Louis Gross, Redefining the American Gothic, 1989

The following is an edited adaptation of an address I presented at the Mensa Society International Conference in Toronto on June 11.  – bd

If I were to deliver a political overview about the current Presidential election campaign, I would be substituting Hilary Clinton for Barack Obama. Given that I'm more interested here in delving into Gothic undercurrents, I think it is more apt to explore the values that represent vastly divergent visions of America, and they are best personified by the President and the Republican Party’s standard bearer, Donald Trump. Obama embodies a multicultural, inclusive perspective, a worldview that exemplifies the best of twenty-first century America. At the same time, he champions a cornerstone of traditional American culture, that of civic nationalism – a citizenship that depends upon shared values. Donald Trump represents a more atavistic view of America, a throwback to an earlier era when racist and misogynous beliefs had legitimacy for large numbers of Americans. His incendiary rhetoric also suggests a belief that citizenship should be based on ethnicity or race, an ideology that almost destroyed Europe in the 1940s and is once again acquiring populist currency in parts of Europe, a form of ethnic nationalism that flouts the rule of law, celebrates the strong man, and fosters a contempt for and persecution of minorities and immigrants. Trump, like the Presidents of Russia and Turkey, exploits terrorism and cultivates chauvinism by fuelling a backlash against immigrants and minorities.

American Gothic, by Gordon Parks (1942).

I'm not offering as an example of an earlier era the historical painting, Grant Wood’s 1930 American Gothic, the most iconic in America (even for its countless parodies). Gordon Parks' 1942 photograph of the same name is more significant given that an African-American woman with her broom and mop is staring out at us with an out of focus American flag behind her. She is more emblematic of someone in a state of quasi servitude. This photograph also suggests that some Americans harbour a more ambiguous relationship with America because their value as citizens is not as esteemed as others. Over a half a century later, Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize winner for literature, expands upon this idea by exploring how European-American authors have marginalized and ignored African-Americans, or used them as a screen to project Caucasian savagery (even deprived them of their humanity by demonizing them). Although her slim 2008 monograph, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, largely draws upon literary texts from the American canon to develop these ideas, I suggest that her insights can also be applied to the larger culture.

Legacy from a Great Musician: Allen Toussaint’s American Tunes

Allen Toussaint (1938-2015) performing in Vienna, June 2015. (Photo: Jean-François Lixon)

On a hot summer night in 2006 in Montreal, a free, outdoor concert was held that was billed as a Tribute to Paul Simon. Among the performers was Allen Toussaint: musician, producer, composer and one of New Orleans’ favourite sons. Toussaint performed two songs that evening: “Take Me to The Mardi Gras” and “American Tune” (featuring Elvis Costello). Ironically, on the night in question, Toussaint could have easily been the honoree, having penned hits for the Pointer Sisters, Lee Dorsey and Aaron Neville among others. He produced, arranged and played keyboards on Labelle’s hit record “Lady Marmalade” in 1974, one of the biggest hits that year. Glen Campbell had a mainstream country hit with “Southern Nights” written by Toussaint that went to Number 1 on the Pop Charts in 1977.

But I suspect most people in the audience had no idea that they were hearing from an artist with as rich and diverse contribution to American music as Allen Toussaint. He rarely performed in public and worked “behind the scenes” – in fact he preferred it. During the fifties and sixties when he was writing songs he even used his mother’s name Naomi Neville or Al Tousan as the composer. The solitude of the studio away from the public eye was Toussaint’s refuge of creativity in a resilient career away from the spotlight.

Electricity: Macbeth at the Stratford Festival

Brigit Wilson, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings, and Lanise Antoine Shelley in Macbeth at the Stratford Festival. (Photo: David Hou)

For me, the first measure of a Macbeth is the witches. The “weird sisters,” as they call themselves, are can’t-miss characters: They are central to Macbeth’s story, their lines are full of memorable poetry – people who have never seen the Scottish play know “Double, double toil and trouble” – chanting and prophesying. Actresses must love playing these parts. (I’ve occasionally seen them played by men, but it’s not common; and “weird siblings” doesn’t have the same ring to it.)

The witches in the Stratford Festival’s Macbeth – Brigit Wilson, Deidre Gillard-Rowlings and Lanise Antoine Shelley – are excellent, gruesome and dark and scary, and their reading of Shakespeare’s macabre verses is outstanding. The witch-scene staging, by the festival’s Artistic Director, Antoni Cimolino, is first-rate. The cauldron scene, in particular, is easily the best I’ve seen, and the witches’ disappearance at the end of it is an actual coup de théâtre. Macbeth’s “Where are they? Gone?” has never been so apropos.

The Tappin’ Life: What the Eye Hears, Shuffle Along, Tappin’ Thru Life

Donald O'Connor and Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain (1952).

Brian Seibert’s hefty (612-page), comprehensive book on tap dance, published last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, carries the poetic title What the Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing. The author lays out his premise in the introduction:

Most dance arises from an interaction between music and movement. But because tap can be both dancing to music and dancing as music, it’s especially concerned with the combination. As the tap dancer Paul Draper once explained, “What the eye sees is sharpened by what the ear hears, and the ear hears more clearly that which sight enhances.” A dancer jumps up at tilt with bent knees, shaping his legs into a bell; when, still in the air, he brings his heels together, that bell rings. 

And he slams that premise home in every conceivable way, some of them incidental and quirky, like his evaluation of tap on vinyl (a paragraph on Fred Astaire’s tapping on mid-1920s recordings of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “Crazy Feet” offers an evocative example) and his parenthetical claim that “the right hand of the bop pianist Bud Powell produced, to my ear, some of the [1940’s] era’s greatest tapping.” The Illustrated London News, reviewing a performance by the great mid-nineteenth-century black dancer Juba, or Master Juba, proclaimed him “a musician as well as a dancer,” and that’s how Seibert talks about the hundreds of dancers he memorializes in this marvelous book – as men and women who make sublime music with their feet.

If History Has Taught Us Anything....Excerpt from the Introduction to Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors

Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II.

Back in 1994, when I was just beginning a free-lance career, I had an idea for a book about American movies. That year, I'd seen Ivan Reitman's sentimental comedy Dave, starring Kevin Kline as a conservative President who falls into a coma and is replaced by a look-a-like (also played by Kline) so as not to send the public into a panic. Of course, the "new" President is more liberal and ultimately alters the policies of the true President. To my mind, it was as if we were watching George H. Bush morph into Bill Clinton in one movie. From that comedy, came the idea for Reflections in the Hall of Mirrors: American Movies and the Politics of Idealism.

I wanted Reflections to examine how key American movies from the Kennedy era onward had soaked up the political and cultural ideals of the time they were made. By delving into the American experience (from Kennedy to Clinton), I thought the book could capture, through a number of films, how the dashed hopes of the Sixties were reflected back in the resurgence of liberal idealism in the Clinton Nineties. After drawing up an outline, I sent the proposal off to publishers who all sent it back saying that it would never sell. One Canadian publisher almost squeaked it through, but their marketing division headed them off at the pass. From there, I went on to co-write a book (with Critics at Large colleague and friend Susan Green) on the TV show, Law & Order, plus later do my own books about Frank Zappa, Randy Newman, the album Trout Mask Replica and The Beatles. All the while, I kept updating Reflections, seeing my idea change in the wake of Monica Lewinsky, Clinton's impeachment, the 2000 election of Bush, 9/11, and finally the rise of Barack Obama. For the past number of years, Reflections has also been a hugely successful lecture series. Here is an excerpt from the book's introduction.

- Kevin Courrier.

American films in the last fifty-odd years have come to soak up the political and cultural ideals of the time in which they were made and they often reflected a turbulent quest to define a nation. From the dashed optimism of the Kennedy era through to the renewed idealism that led Barack Obama to the White House, American movies, good and bad, were tissue samples of their age. Many of these pictures – from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to The Butler (2013) – helped create a hall of mirrors that resembled the climatic shootout in Orson Welles's The Lady From Shanghai (1947) where you had to shatter a lot of glass to see what was going on. The construction of a hall of mirrors, however, isn't usually a conscious act although sometimes there is intent. You can see a deliberate version of one in Live Free or Die Hard (2007), the fourth installment of the Die Hard action franchise starring Bruce Willis as the terrorist fighting New York cop, John McClane, when he goes up against a group of cyber-insurgents who have hacked into the government's computers. To announce their desire to start a "fire sale," they launch an attack designed to target the nation's reliance on computer controls. To convey this, they edited together a video montage made up of segments of Presidential speeches from Roosevelt to Bush to put their message across. In creating a hall of mirrors effect, where various Presidents end up unwittingly uttering threats to the nation rather than the assurances their original speeches intended, the terrorists simply pull off a clever gag. ("I tried to find more Nixon," says one key hacker with an air of disappointment.) Their distortion of history turns into an obvious stunt, and one that we can see right through. It doesn't make a rent in our consciousness. We are still assured, despite the terrorists' initial control over American cyberspace, that John McClane will come to the rescue to get control back. But there are other hall of mirrors moments that aren't assuring, or designed as stunts, and instead seem embroidered into the fabric of a narrative that creeps out of its corners to spook us.

The Demonic and the Vulnerable in Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs

Author Edna O'Brien. (Photo: Bryan O’Brien)

“I wanted to take a dreadful situation, and the havoc and harm that it yields, and show how it spirals into the world at large.”

– Edna O’Brien on The Little Red Chairs

When Edna O’Brien published her debut novel The Country Girls in 1960, a coming-of-age novel, it was banned and reviled in Ireland because of its frank portrayal of female sexuality and a woman’s struggle for self-determination in the face of social legal constrictions. Since that time O’Brien has written novels, plays, short stories and a memoir that have expanded and deepened these themes. In 1994 she added a political dimension in House of Splendid Isolation, wherein she explored the mindset of an escaped IRA self-confessed murderer and plumbed his humanity beneath the crimes he had committed. Most recently, the grande dame of Irish literature at the age of eighty five has just published her twenty-fourth book and most ambitious, The Little Red Chairs (Little, Brown and Company, 2015) and found little humanity in a mass murderer, responsible for genocide and ethnic cleansing. (Even before the text begins, O'Brien informs us that the title refers to the 11,541 empty red chairs set out in Sarajevo to commemorate victims of the siege by Bosnian Serb forces in the early 1990s. Six hundred and forty-three of the smaller chairs in the sombre tableau were dedicated to children killed at the time.) Even though her settings are in rural Ireland and London with a brief, hair-raising foray into The Hague, Red Chairs has a global reach as countless numbers from the streams of refugees – the unending diaspora fueled by war, fundamentalism and hatred – make appearances not through impersonal media coverage but as fully fleshed human beings who are given distinct individual voices through the artistry and sensitivity of O’Brien. As a result, she has written a reimagined exploration of alternative history and a harrowing, extraordinary novel.

Crash Landing: Le Petit Prince at the National Ballet of Canada

Dylan Tedaldi in National Ballet of Canada's Le Petit Prince. (Photo by Karolina Kuras)

Le Petit Prince, Guillaume Côtè's ambitious retelling of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's classic children's story of a planet-hopping boy on a quest for truth, takes a wrong turn by over-complicating what in essence is a poetic tale simply told. The two-hour long ballet, whose highly anticipated world premiere took place at Toronto's Four Seasons for the Performance Arts last Saturday night, is fussily over-choreographed in places, resulting in a blurred focus. What does Côtê want to say about Le Petit Prince? After two hours of watching the ballet unfold against Michael Levine's cosmic set design and Kevin Lau's lushly descriptive original score, this remains the million dollar question. Correction. The two-million-dollar question.

Issues: Flaked Meets Lady Dynamite

Maria Bamford stars in Lady Dynamite, current streaming on Netflix.

“You've got a serious platitude problem.” – Dennis to Chip, Flaked.

"I saw her on Netflix. She works really hard to destigmatize mental illness. Really brave." – an unnamed South Sudanese warlord, reflecting on Maria Bamford's career, Lady Dynamite.

There are two shows currently streaming exclusively on Netflix which, while having a surprising number of features in common, in the end could not be more distinct. Both involve the outsized talent of writer/producer Mitch Hurwitz (Arrested Development), and each features a comic actor in a very personal role, portraying a character struggling with decidedly unfunny issues. Flaked stars Will Arnett (also Arrested Development) as a 40-something recovering alcoholic and AA leader, and Lady Dynamite stars comedian Maria Bamford in a loosely autobiographical story of her struggles with celebrity and mental illness.

Netflix premiered Flaked in March and Lady Dynamite showed up three weeks ago, and both are the first fruit of the multiyear deal Hurwitz signed with Netflix in 2014 after he joined with the streaming channel the previous year to bring back his Arrested Development for a belated fourth season. He's on board with Flaked as executive producer, and he co-created Lady Dynamite with Pam Brady (co-writer of South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut and Hamlet 2). Perhaps proof that more Hurwitz is better Hurwitz, in practically every way, Lady Dynamite is the better show: it is more original and ambitious, riskier and more personal, more alienating and more engaging, and (perhaps the only thing that truly matters) consistently entertaining. Lady Dynamite also succeeds in being many things at once: a satire of celebrity, an insider comedy about L.A., a pointed and surreal entry into living with mental illness. Flaked, on the other hand, barely succeeds at being one thing at all.

Podcast: Interview with Ian McEwen (1987)

Novelist Ian McEwen (shown in 2013) sat down with Kevin Courrier in 1987. (Photo: Andy Paradise)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields.

In 1987, one of those interviews was with novelist Ian McEwen, who had just published his third novel The Child in Time (which would go on to win the Whitbread Book Award.) McEwen has since written almost a dozen novels, including Atonement (2001) and The Children Act (2014). His newest novel, Nutshell, will be published by Jonathan Cape in September.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with  Ian McEwen as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1987.

Genre Domination: Blizzard’s Overwatch

When, as an outside observer, you hear that many gaming review sites have taken to adopting an “in progress” format for some of their reviews, you could be forgiven for thinking that sounds like pretty lazy journalism. It can feel like an admission on their part that they couldn’t get around to writing something conclusive by the time the game came out (and, unfortunately, in some cases that’s quite true). While I would tend to agree that it’s certainly an inelegant solution, I think the constantly-shifting landscape of gaming has made it necessary for us to re-examine how we examine these works – especially when it comes to games like Blizzard’s Overwatch.

Now, the Blizzard detractors out there – which are legion, despite willfully placing themselves in opposition to the developer’s massive fanbase – are already raising their hands to point out that there’s nothing revolutionary about Overwatch; that, like many of Blizzard’s successful properties, it’s a retread of an already-established title by a different developer (Valve’s Team Fortress 2, in this case), and perfectly reflects Blizzard’s evil modus operandi of giving an older game a fresh coat of paint and calling it new. I’m not about to argue this point. TF2 did come first, yes, and nothing Blizzard has done with their own take on the team-based first-person shooter genre stands out as something that demands a re-evaluation of how to write game reviews. But I believe Overwatch’s core gameplay formula contains so much nested variety, and so many possibilities for endless combinations of characters and situations, that the meta-narrative surrounding the game deserves more insight than a simple review can offer. In that light, the whole “this review is still ongoing” thing starts to make a bit more sense, doesn’t it?

The Great American Tragedy: The Latest Long Day’s Journey into Night

John Gallagher Jr. and Jessica Lange in Long Day's Journey into Night at Roundabout Theatre Co.’s American Airlines Theatre. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night is the greatest of all American plays, and every time someone mounts a fine new production of it, the effect on those of us who adore it is two-fold. On the one hand, we’re sucked back into the play’s riptide – its crosscurrents of conflicting realities as each of the four Tyrones fights against the others for his or her version of family history, the shifting alliances, the repeatedly dredged-up memories, the intricate interplay of guilt and recrimination. Like the great tragedies of the Greeks and of Shakespeare, this is a play that keeps biting you, digging at you; when it’s performed well there’s no safe space for an audience. And on the other hand, a worthy new mounting always reimagines the characters – especially Mary, the morphine-addicted matriarch whose husband James and grown-up sons Jamie and Edmund discover, on this August day in 1912 at their Connecticut home, that after a period of hopeful sobriety she’s relapsed. In Sidney Lumet’s 1962 film version, Katharine Hepburn brings her entire thirty-year career into her performance: the regal star presence and oddball mannerisms and air of authority apparent from her earliest screen appearances, the peerless technique for high comedy showcased in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, the gift for transforming masochism into emotional devastation from Summertime and The Rainmaker, the ability to shift from one age to another with delicate precision that had been a hallmark of her work since her portrayal of Jo in Little Women. I think it’s the greatest performance by an American film actress since the advent of sound. Colleen Dewhurst, in a version performed at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in 1988, seemed to grow slighter and less substantial as the evening wore on, so that by the turbulent last act, when she appeared with her wedding gown in her arms, she was like a ghost carrying a smaller ghost. When Vanessa Redgrave played Mary on Broadway in Robert Falls’ superb 2005 revival, she injected an element of savagery; she seemed to strip down the character and rebuild it physically, drawing on her Amazonian frame to elevate her. It was a creation of dissonant grandeur. Now Jessica Lange is playing the role in a magnificent new production at Roundabout Theatre Company’s American Airlines Theatre staged by the English director Jonathan Kent. What she brings to the role are an edgy lyricism, a bitter humor and an earthy quality that’s utterly unlike anything I’ve seen in other Marys. Anyone who has loved Lange in movies like Tootsie, Frances, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Crimes of the Heart, Music Box and Blue Sky will recognize her here in a performance that certainly marks the zenith of her acting career.