Staying Close to Shore: Pixar’s Finding Dory

Finding Dory, the latest offering from animation studio Pixar, is set primarily in and around an aquarium/wildlife rehabilitation center, the Marine Life Institute, with the action rarely moving too far from the confines of that locale. In many ways, the setting mirrors the film's ambitions: it’s frequently delightful, but much more circumscribed in terms in scope than Pixar’s best movies, including its predecessor, 2003’s Finding Nemo.

A Counterhistory of a Counterculture: Jim Downs' Stand By Me

Gay “Be-In,” Central Park, New York, June 28, 1970. (Photo: Diana Davies, New York Public Library)

Established in the Bay Area in 1970, Gay Sunshine, later Gay Sunshine Journal, was part of the flowering of post-Stonewall gay newspapers that also included Detroit’s Gay Liberator, Philadelphia’s Gay Alternative, Boston’s Fag Rag, and New York’s Come Out! The cover of the paper’s August ’71 issue, drawn in black ink by Bruce Reifel in the lineage of Aubrey Beardsley, depicts a naked man and woman running with raised fists and broken manacles in front of a five-pointed star that we can trust to be red in spirit. The man has a Clark Gable mustache; the woman the long, center-parted hair of Joan Baez or Shulamith Firestone. The caption, GAY BROTHERS & SISTERS UNITE! FREE OURSEVES · SMASH SEXISM, redoubles the Marxist heritage while urging on an already tenuous gay-and-lesbian alliance that in coming years would be further tested by divergent interests and male chauvinism. Although the cover typifies the countercultural naturalism that sought to separate nakedness from titillation, it’s also a reminder of how closely linked political and sexual freedom were in the early years of gay liberation.

Needless to say, the seventies, even before the powerful conservative revanchism that ignited in the decade’s later years, were not years of unchecked liberty for LGBT communities. Governmental repression, public bigotry, internalized oppression, and the constant threat of violence hardly vanished overnight – in many areas change was felt not at all. But in certain neighborhoods in some cities, there were, along with hopes for radical societal transformation, new opportunities for dramatically freer sexual expression. For some, sex itself was revolutionary, a source of unifying pleasure that could militate against shame and repression while challenging fundamental institutions and values: the family, the church, monogamy, patriarchy. It was often impossible to imagine political equality growing without the continued expansion of sexual freedom. “A humane socialism,” Charley Shively wrote in ’74, “must move beyond trade-union economism; it must lose its prudery, and find sexuality.” Or as Edmund White put it in his 2009 memoir, City Boy, “We thought that sexual freedom was the same thing as freedom. We were willing to contemplate the possibility of ‘gay politics’ or ‘gay culture,’ but only if we’d first secured total gay sexual liberty.”

Toothless: The Shallows

Blake Lively stars in The Shallows, currently in theatres.

The first thing I thought when I saw the trailer for The Shallows was “Great, another Jaws ripoff.” The second thing I thought was “Wow, it looks gorgeous, though.” My thoughts now that I’ve seen the film are, perhaps unsurprisingly, totally unchanged. I’m not an expert on the work of director Jaume Collet-Serra, but I knew enough to expect a trashy piece of summer entertainment that had a distinct visual polish, and that’s exactly what I got with The Shallows.

Collet-Serra directed the 2005 remake of House of Wax, and the late-era Liam Neeson thriller Non-Stop, making him the perfect candidate for this “Blake Lively fends off a shark for 90 minutes” vehicle, which trades in striking cinematography, a beautifully vapid leading lady, and surprisingly coherent characterization. Not that that sort of thing matters in a film like The Shallows, of course – it’s exactly the same kind of summer schlock as the stuff on the other side of the marquee (like Independence Day: Resurgence, which I’m looking forward to), but on the opposite end of the spectrum. You go over there for your massive explosions and your romantic subplots and your moustache-twirling villains; you sit down for The Shallows for the shark-on-Blake action. Either way, you check your brain at the door.

Old Bottle, New Wine: William Bell’s This Is Where I Live

William Bell's new album, This Is Where I Live, was released by Stax Records on June 3. (Photo courtesy of Shorefire Media)

When the great soul singer Otis Redding died in 1967 one of his logical successors at the time was vocalist William Bell. Born in Memphis, Bell first arrived on the music scene in 1960 and was signed to the Stax label in 1961, the same label Redding signed to four years later. Bell released his first single “You Don't Miss Your Water” (Stax 116), but it barely charted on the Billboard Top 100. Redding recorded his inspired version of Bell’s first single in 1965, which made people look up and take notice. Ironically, even though William Bell had been around for several years, his sound was often compared to Redding, but he wasn’t as dynamic a performer in concert.

Bell sang ballads that were considered torch songs for the R&B crowd and whether they knew it or not, both he and Redding competed for the same audience. The only advantage Bell had on Redding was that he was also a pretty good songwriter. One of his biggest songs, which he co-wrote with Booker T. Jones, was “Born Under a Bad Sign,” a huge hit for Albert King.

This Spirit Soars: Giselle at the National Ballet of Canada

Artists of the National Ballet of Canada in Giselle. (Photo: Aleksandar Antonijevic)

Giselle is a work of fantasy, as compelling as anything seen today on Game of Thrones or Outlander, or any other contemporary pop culture enterprise probing the paranormal. No matter that the story of a Rhineland peasant girl who returns to earth as a ghost after dying of a broken heart is now 175 years old. It remains a powerful tale of love and vengeance – ballet as powerful theatre. Certainly, this iconic Romantic work has enabled the National Ballet of Canada to conclude the bumpy 2015/2016 season with a bang. The company’s performance of Giselle at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Arts two Fridays ago was especially sharp, with everyone from ensemble dancers to solo artists turning on the charm to make the ballet come alive for today’s audience. Sir Peter Wright’s 1970 remake is both logical and lively, despite dwelling 50 percent of the time in the land of dead. It is also sumptuously gorgeous. Adolphe Adam’s original 1841 score is a hauntingly beautiful – and readily recognizable – piece of music which the National Ballet Orchestra, under the baton of David Briskin, made poignantly dramatic. You can’t help but be moved just listening to it. But the ballet is really a feast and on this point Desmond Heeley’s eye-grabbing sets and costumes, bathed in tones of emerald green, burnished gold and lapis lazuli blue, more than deliver. The celebrated designer, a fixture of Canada’s Stratford Festival, died five days before Giselle opened on June 10; the National Ballet used the occasion to pay tribute to Mr. Heeley, dedicating the opening night June 15 performance to his memory.

Musical Revivals in London's West End

Emmanuel Kojo (centre) and members of the cast of Show Boat at London's New London Theatre. (Photo: Johan Persson)

There are three major American musicals in which the main male characters are gamblers, and by chance all three have been revived in London’s West End this season. So audiences who check out Show Boat at the New London and see Gaylord Ravenal (Chris Peluso) toss his winnings in the air as he shares his good luck with his wife Magnolia (Gina Beck) may feel a weird déjà vu sensation if they’ve already seen Nick Arnstein (Darius Campbell) perform the same action with Fanny Brice (Natasha J. Barnes) in Funny Girl, which moved to the Savoy from its original venue, the Meunier Chocolate Factory. No such scene appears in Guys and Dolls at the Phoenix, but nonetheless it is the quintessential gambling musical.

The Night Manager: From Page to Small Screen

Tom Hiddleston as Jonathan Pine, in AMC's adaptation of' John le Carré's The Night Manager.

“[Pure Intelligence] meant turning a blind eye to some of the biggest crooks in the hemisphere for the sake of nebulous advantages elsewhere.”

– John le Carré, The Night Manager 

“Guns go where the power is…Armed power’s what keeps the peace. Unarmed power does not last five minutes. First rule of stability.”

– Richard Roper, in John le Carré's The Night Manager 

 
Note: This review contains spoilers.

Part of what made John le Carré’s version of the Cold War so fascinating was the way it avoided a Manichean view of the universe. Shading, ambiguity, and doubt were qualities absent in earlier examples of the thriller from Le Queux, Buchan or Fleming but not in a le Carré Cold War novel. Only the most obtuse reader would fail to recognize how alike Smiley and Karla were, secret sharers on either side of the Iron Curtain. Smiley represented the better side – decent, compassionate and endowed with a healthy skepticism – and he believed that Karla’s fanaticism would be his undoing. However, Karla defected for the love of his lost daughter. Smiley regarded himself as an archetypal liberal – reasonable with measured responses – but he could sustain a murderous hatred for someone who betrayed him, an antipathy that could cloud his judgment. This does not mean that Smiley became Karla: the Soviet spymaster ordered the murder of agents while Smiley did not. Smiley believed in the power of Western democracy but feared that if his side succumbed to Karla’s methods, the decencies he professed will become illusions and feared that he could lose his own humanity. While he agonized over these moral conundrums, Smiley and the intelligence services were civil servants who pursued their opposite numbers. Communist agents were often ruthless murderers but, unless they were moles inside British intelligence, Smiley (or le Carré) did not regard them as evil villains. Then the Cold War ended and le Carré became an angry man.

That anger radiates throughout le Carré’s first post-Cold War novel The Night Manager (1993). It is as if the author is questioning whether the principles that inspired the West to fight the Cold War were nothing but hollow rhetoric. If its purpose was designed to protect freedom and capitalism, how is Richard Roper – a wealthy and powerful illegal arms and drugs smuggler operating out of the Bahamas to peddle weapons to anyone who will provide him with a profit and admirer of the odious Idi Amin – possible? Masquerading as a respectable business magnate, he is frequently described as “the worst man in the world” – and le Carré is not intending any sense of irony – because Roper’s greed and callousness without any redeeming features, render him a villain rarely depicted in the Cold War novels.

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 Siebert’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 Siebert talks about the hundreds of dancers he memorializes in this marvelous book – as men and women who make sublime music with their feet.