Dynasty of Dissonance: Noise and 20th Century Art

Marcel Duchamp and John Cage playing chess at the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto in 1968.

In the beginning, there was chess. It was a great year. Vintage. On Tuesday, March 5, 1968, I was standing outside of the Ryerson Theatre in Toronto on the sidewalk listening to an unearthly cacophony pouring from within its walls. Inside, two of the great modernist sages, John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, were playing an exhibition match of chess on an amplified board before an audience of enraptured worshippers. It was both deafening and enlightening. Sound and vision were shaking hands.

I was seventeen years old and could not get a ticket to the sold-out event, indeed I was not alone on the sidewalk in the pouring rain, for many other puzzled onlookers were keeping me company. The only difference between us, I quickly surmised, was that I realized I was observing one of the seminal moments in our contemporary culture: the virtual triumph of dissonance within the arts. Though I was not therefore able to be an eyewitness to this incredible event, appreciative as I was of the consequences of its hidden meanings for our shared global culture, that acceptance allowed me to become something perhaps even more intriguing. I was an earwitness to history’s following announcement: anything goes now, so get used to it. After all, we had certainly had a long enough time to acclimatize ourselves to the remarkable presence of disharmony and radical discontinuity in all aspects of artistic pursuit, and not just in music, but in all avenues of creative expression. Yet the challenge remained, and perhaps still remains to this day. How able were we to adapt to the fact that modernism meant that the classical rules of proportion, harmony, even presumed beauty, were being assailed from every side. And this was not new. The urge to introduce noise into the arts really began, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, ages ago, but it did pick up quite a head of collective steam in the twentieth century.

Phony Feminism: The Girl on the Train

Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train.

Tate Taylor’s movie The Girl on the Train is awful, but it’s pretty much what the material – the 2015 bestseller by the English (South Africa-born) novelist Paula Hawkins – deserves. It’s a fake-feminist thriller, like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, though not quite as loathsome. Flynn’s book is the twisty tale of a vanished wife whose husband is assumed to have murdered her, but for the first half it presents itself, with a hip, up-to-the-minute chic, as the anatomy of a bad marriage. When the material turns around on itself and Amy, the wife, is revealed to be a sociopath who’s manipulated her own disappearance to make the husband look guilty, and thus get revenge on him for cheating on her, Flynn tries to play it both ways – to make Amy the villain the narrative requires while rigging a pitiful portrait of her childhood, when her parents, co-authors of a beloved series of children’s books, used her as the model for their implausibly perfect heroine. Flynn pretends to be commenting on the damage to the psyche of a little girl who’s stuck competing with her own flawless image, just as she pretends to be exposing the gritty reality of a disintegrating modern-American relationship relationship. But Amy’s behavior doesn’t match up convincingly with her backstory, and Flynn has made her such a demon that a backstory is superfluous anyway. It would be like inserting a flashback in Fatal Attraction that showed how her father’s cruelty toward Glenn Close had made her into the psycho who stalks Michael Douglas and boils his little girl’s bunny rabbit. Amy’s monstrousness – like Close’s Alex’s – is so clearly predicated on male terror of aggressive, outsmarting women that the idea of Gone Girl as feminist would be a bad joke if it weren’t so offensive.

Critic's Notes & Frames Vol. XX

Andrew Lincoln in AMC's The Walking Dead.

I've grown to trust fan culture less and less as the years go on. There's a perfectly good reason: decent criticism ends up invalid in the face of it. Dedicated zealots will criticize a popular television show, but only within the confines the series provides – which means viewers will complain if a character they like dies in a manner they don't approve of, or if the arc takes an unpopular turn – but they don't think outside the confines of the show to examine what it is actually doing and why. This is what separates criticism (which asks why this and why now) from consumer reporting (which tells you what's cool to see and what's not). One form invites you to think and the other tells you what to think. And, if you haven't noticed, consumer reporters today find themselves more often employed than actual critics. (That's what makes marketing folks happy and many editors and producers relieved.)

A perfect example of fan culture criticism is AMC's popular zombie apocalypse series, The Walking Dead, which over the last six seasons has grown fascinated with splattering zombie brains each week (therefore trivializing death by endlessly numbing us to its gore). It even has an after-show gabfest, Talking Dead, where fans get to have their own variety show and the zombie is reduced to a lifeless commodity consumed to boost viewership and ratings. If people were fighting for their humanity in something like Night of the Living Dead, today people appear to identify more with the undead, as if true human feeling had already been gobbled up. The post-modern age has done much to chisel the tombstone of a more romantic and passionate response to death and destruction. In its place lies a comforting cool cynicism where folks distrust any form of rebellion against the norm. We're so inured to shock now that it's rare that a work of art even has the ability to cause a riot, or even perhaps stoke passionate debate. Until a couple of weeks ago.

When the latest uber-villain, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and his barbed-wire baseball bat, brutally and vividly bashed in the brains of two of the more popular living characters on the show, The Walking Dead suddenly prompted a number of its fans to walk away. (Talking Dead characteristically celebrated the season opener by screening it - without a whisper of intended irony - in a Los Angeles cemetery where the cast and fans could be wistful together and then jubilantly bring in a new season.) When it comes to the subject of death, The Walking Dead has long developed its own dramatic somnambulism. (Sometimes the corpses seem to be moving – and thinking – faster than the living.) But in the season opener, the creators pulled the cheapest trick of exploitation by prolonging the tension so that the audience would also get bashed over the head. (The most shameful bit of manipulation made the audience wait for an eternity to see if the hero, Rick, played by Andrew Lincoln, would cut off his son's arm with an axe to demonstrate his loyalty to Negan.) Where fan criticism might complain about the necessity of the gruesome violence, or bemoan the death of an adored character, a critic examines the larger issues. For instance, James Hibbert tweeted, "That The Walking Dead censors Negan swearing & won’t show nudity, but airs THAT feels like [a perfect] example of upside down puritanism." The Walking Dead is an ample example of "upside down puritanism."

Psychiatric Help: Leonard Cohen’s You Want It Darker

Leonard Cohen's new album, You Want It Darker, was released on October 21st. (Photo: Luke Macgregor/Reuters)

Since its release a couple of weeks ago, Leonard Cohen’s latest album has been getting a lot of attention. You Want It Darker (Columbia) is Cohen’s 14th studio album. But rather than write an essay with syrupy accolades and explanatory impressions of the record, I’d rather not compete with the beautiful superlatives of Sylvie Simmons in the November issue of MOJO magazine. Nor try to unfurl the historical and spiritual connection of Cohen to Montreal, his birthplace, as Robert Everett-Green did so nicely in The Globe and Mail on October 22.

Similarly, I have no notion of adding anything more to David Remnick’s excellent profile in the October 17 issue of The New Yorker since I didn’t request an interview in the first place. I want to discuss Cohen’s remarkable timing with this record and the context, at least to me, of his profound ability of holding up a mirror to our world. With the clusterf#%& of the Presidential election campaign to the south, the Syrian Refugee crisis and, as recently reported by the WWF, a shrinking wildlife, Cohen’s poetry and songs are like a cold slap in the face to me. A shake-up of my ego and the ridiculous speed at which the world is cruising along without taking notice of the damage humanity is incurring upon itself. Of course we want it darker and we need a poet, perhaps this poet, to point it out. Finger-wagging won’t do; we’ll tune out. But as emotionally instructive opinion surrounded by the company of music, Cohen hits the proverbial spot as only he can, and for that I’m grateful.

Talking Out of Turn #47 (Podcast): Sidney Lumet (1988)

A scene from 12 Angry Men (1957), directed by Sidney Lumet.

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, host and producer of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g., Doris Kearns Goodwin sitting alongside Clive Barker). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I were trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One area of the book concerned the legacy of the sixties. My thinking was (and still is) that it’s difficult taking into consideration the political landscape of the eighties without examining aspects of the sixties. Many ghosts from that period (i.e., Vietnam, the Cold War, civil rights) continued to linger as unresolved arguments that underscored political and cultural actions in the eighties. If cynicism became more the common coin twenty years after the idealism sparked by JFK’s 1960 inaugural address, the voices included in this chapter of Talking Out of Turn set out to uncover what the political lessons of the sixties were. This section included, among others, poet Allen Ginsberg, novelist Ann Beattie (Love Always, Chilly Scenes of Winter), and filmmaker Sidney Lumet.

Director of movies such as 12 Angry Men (1957), The Pawnbroker (1964), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Network (1976), Sidney Lumet would make many political films in his career, but few of them in the eighties did very well. This includes Running on Empty, a movie that dealt with sixties-era fugitives from the law in the 1980s, that had just been released when I sat down with the director in 1988. In our conversation Lumet ruminates on the problems of making political movies – especially ones that confronted the 1960s – during the Reagan era. Sidney Lumet passed away in 2011 at the age of 86.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Sidney Lumet as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1988.

 

The Front Page: Old Pros

John Slattery and Nathan Lane in The Front Page at Broadway's Broadhurst Theater. (Photo by Julieta Cervantes)

In recent years every Broadway season has included a top-flight revival of a classic American play. Last year it was Long Day’s Journey into Night, the year before You Can’t Take It with You and Of Mice and Men the season before that. But they don’t always get the respect they’ve earned. The mediocre notices for Jack O’Brien’s production of the 1928 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur comedy The Front Page with Nathan Lane and John Slattery have been utterly perplexing. I saw the show just before the press opening and walked away in a state of bliss. O’Brien has gathered together a dazzling cast to mount what I’d say is one of the three best comedies ever written by Americans, and watching them parry and thrust, negotiate Hecht and MacArthur’s hilarious banter and glide through the perfect mechanics of the farce plot with acrobatic grace is akin to buying a ticket for a revue in vaudeville’s heyday and discovering that every single act is good enough for the coveted penultimate slot on the bill.

Politics along the Danube: Reflections of a Study Trip River Cruise (Part 2 of 2)

Hungarian Jews waiting in line at the Swiss embassy in Budapest, 1944. (Photo by Agnes Hirschi, Carl Lutz's daughter)

Last August I had the good fortune to be a member of a study trip river cruise along the Danube that sailed from the port town of Vidin (after two days in Sophia, Bulgaria) to Passau in Germany and concluded with a two-day trip to Prague, Czech Republic. It was an exhilarating experience because of the significant ports of call at which we stopped and the stimulating conversations with fellow passengers. But my lasting impressions were more about what was imparted or omitted by the local guest lecturers and tour guides, and their often selective or subjective remarks. This piece is also informed by my exchanges with others about those experiences, as well as my supplemental reading. Part 1 of this piece was published two weeks. The second, and concluding, part is below.
– Bob Douglas

Arriving in Budapest and opting for the Jewish sites tour rather than a general city tour turned out to be one of the best experiences of the trip. The guide was excellent, wonderfully integrating historical, personal and the contemporary at both the places we visited and in the talk she gave at the “Glass House.” At one time a glass factory showroom owned by a displaced Jewish manufacturer, during the war it was the location at which the Swiss diplomat, Carl Lutz, sheltered 3,000 Jews by annexing it to the Swiss legation, thereby extending diplomatic immunity to the place. It is now a museum to honour Lutz.

Living in Hell: J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy and the White Working Class

Author J.D. Vance. (Photo: Naomi McColloch)

It’s hard to say which is the most arresting anecdote in J.D. Vance’s memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. There’s the story about the time his beloved grandmother – “Mamaw” to Vance and his sister – nearly blew off an interloper’s head in backwoods Kentucky during her girlhood. There’s the one that Vance recounts about his opioid-addicted mother nearly swerving off the road while screaming at him, then chasing him and forcing him to take shelter in a neighbor’s house, only to break down the door just before the cops showed up. Then there are the fleeting but haunting images of rural poverty that he witnesses when he returns to “hillbilly” country, such as the eight pairs of eyes, belonging to hungry and neglected children, that he catches staring out at him from a rundown shack.

Vance’s memoir, which recounts his early life as the son of self-described “hillbillies,” isn’t all despair and misery, however. His grandparents, Mamaw and Papaw, seem to have fled their small Kentucky community to settle in Middletown because of a teenage pregnancy scandal. Miscarriages, alcoholism, and domestic violence followed, but eventually the couple achieved an unconventional but workable equilibrium, which allowed them to provide a degree of stability to Vance and his sister Lindsay when their mother’s life went off the rails. There’s a fair degree of warmth in the book, as well as recurring moments when he steps back from the narrative of his life to cite experts who have studied the social decay of the white working-class milieu from which he comes. It’s an admirable attempt to provide some perspective and to contextualize his personal experiences. In some ways, it’s eye-opening: hillbilly culture, according to Vance, is indeed violent, but it’s also not quite the reactionary, Bible-thumping stereotype advanced by those who are unfamiliar with his world.

Let's Get Small: Netflix's Easy

Malin Akerman and Orlando Bloom in Easy.

The Netflix series Easy was created by the independent filmmaker Joe Swanberg (V/H/S), who also directed, produced, and edited it, and is the sole writer credited on each of its eight half-hour episodes. It’s an anthology series set in Chicago, a collection of self-contained stories about the relationship and career problems of a couple of dozen characters, some of whom make fleeting appearances in one episode but may return to play a more prominent role in another. Many of the characters are involved in some kind of creative work, from acting or writing to setting up an illegal – dare one say, “indie” – brewery. And most of them are in their twenties or thirties and either just getting the hang of adult life or struggling with the conflict between reaping the rewards of committing to a long-term relationship or starting a family and settling into a rut and closing off other unexplored possibilities. (There are also a few older characters who are weighed down by regrets and blown chances: Jane Adams as an aging actress and Marc Maron as an autobiographical cartoonist who’s one part Robert Crumb to two parts Marc Maron.)

Critic’s Crypt: Threequel Thursday – The Exorcist III & A Nightmare on Elm Street 3

Ed Flanders and George C. Scott in The Exorcist III (1990).

The Halloween movie season is, for me, as much about discovering new favourites as revisiting old ones. Classics like Suspiria, Poltergeist, Halloween, and Evil Dead 2 are like friends I welcome back each year with open arms and a beaming heart, and I’m ever eager to add new friends to that group. That’s why I make time every October to fill in the gaps in my horror repertoire that represent the sequels, prequels, and other continuations of movies I already know and love. Over time I’d heard many good things about two such cinematic hellspawns, which both happened to be the third entry (a.k.a. “threequel”) in a series that suffered from a sub-par sequel: The Exorcist III (1990) and A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (1987).

Love Me T.O.: In Conversation with Author Piers Hemmingsen

A Beatles' press conference at Maple Leaf Gardens before they took the stage on Aug. 17, 1965. (Photo: John Rowlands)

Canadian Beatles authority Piers Hemmingsen served as guest curator on the multimedia BEATLES 50 T.O. exhibition, and this Saturday he will give a talk at Toronto's Market Gallery, where the show continues until Nov. 12, explaining his role and the role Canada played in making the Fabs famous in North America. The author of the recently self-published book, The Beatles in Canada: The Origins of Beatlemania!, Hemmingsen is a retired computer programmer who spent the last seven years investigating the topic. He knows what he's talking about.

His sizeable tome -- an expansive 468 pages -- grafts little-known fact to revealing interviews with such important early Beatles figures as Paul White, the former Capitol Records Canada singles promoter who in 1963 was the first to release a Beatles' record – "Love Me Do" – in North America. Canadians reacted. More than 100,000 eventually signed on to join the Toronto edition of a Beatles fan club that ended up being the biggest of its kind in the world. The U.S. had nothing comparable. When the Beatles touched down in New York in February 1964 for the first of three Ed Sullivan Show appearances, Toronto sent down two of its teenagers to handle the deluge of fan mail. Beatlemania had erupted on the continent and Canada helped make it happen, ushering in the pop-centred British Invasion which would come to shape the 1960s.

Those sparks flew for the first time over 50 years ago with Toronto, or T.O. as it is familiarly known, emerging as the North American city where the Beatles played the most during their touring years. Their last concert in Canada took place at Maple Leaf Gardens, the city's major hockey arena, in 1966. That transitional year forms the focus of When the Beatles Rocked Toronto -- whose displays of rare Beatles memorabilia, including the infamous "butcher" album cover, Hemmingsen organized, borrowing from public and private archives across the country as well as his own collection.

"The Beatles’ story is a great story. They were never happy to live with what they had already recorded and they always strived to improve with each new release," said Hemmingsen during a conversation which took place earlier this week in Toronto. "There was a start and an end, just like life. Their messages of love and peace are universal messages that will reverberate for a long time to come."

Here's more of that conversation:

Critic’s Crypt: Extreme Home Makeover – The Amityville Horrors, Old and New

James Brolin and Margot Kidder in The Amityville Horror (1979).

I’m going to open with a confession: despite moonlighting as a film and television critic, I have a notoriously bad memory for film and television. Friends and coworkers regularly quote movies and TV shows to me, often ones I’ve seen and loved, and I respond with a blank stare. I used to try to maintain my cultured façade by discreetly Googling the reference in question but I’ve given up on that as I’ve gotten older (… mostly because sometimes I get caught). My abysmally bad memory is how I wound up writing this piece. My colleague Justin suggested I do a Critic’s Crypt piece: maybe I could compare an original with a remake. The horror genre is rife with remakes! So I said, “Sure! I’ll write on The Amityville Horror! I love that movie.”

Upon re-watching “that movie,” I’ve recognized that I don’t actually love it. Rather, I fell into the trap of misremembering a classic – and it cost me five hours of my life. Let this be a lesson.

Minimalists: New Plays by Simon Stephens and Steve Martin, and Camelot in Westport

Denis Arndt and Mary-Louise Parker in Simon Stephens' Heisenberg, at New York's Manhattan Theatre Club. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

In his two-hander Heisenberg, Simon Stephens sets out to provide a dramatic illustration of Heisenberg’s principle that the more precisely you measure an object, the more it eludes your attempts. His guinea pigs are Alex Priest (Denis Arndt), a seventy-five-year-old Irish butcher and lifelong bachelor residing in London, and Georgie Burns (Mary Louise Parker), a transplanted American thirty-three years his junior who approaches him in the street, a complete stranger, and kisses him on the neck – an action that occurs just before the play begins. Georgie explains that from behind Alex looked so much like her recently deceased husband that she couldn’t help herself; she also identifies herself as a waitress at London’s legendary restaurant Ottolenghi. In their second encounter, at his shop, she recants, insisting that everything she’s told him was a lie. Now she says that she works at a receptionist in an elementary school, that her husband left her and their son has emigrated to America, cutting off all contact with her. After Georgie and Alex become lovers, she asks him for money to look for her son in Hackensack, his last known location. Did she decide to try to get money out of Alex after sleeping with him, or was he a mark she targeted from the outset?

New Harlem Renaissance: Marvel's Luke Cage

Mike Colter as Luke Cage, in Marvel's Luke Cage on Netflix.

Five months have passed since the events of the first season of Jessica Jones, and the scene has now shifted uptown from Hell's Kitchen to Harlem, where Luke Cage (Mike Colter, The Good Wife) has been keeping to himself, working two minimum-wage jobs and living anonymously above a Chinese restaurant. He has revealed his abilities to 'Pop' Henry (Frankie Fraison), a paternal figure who runs a barbershop where Cage works, but otherwise is largely content to sweep hair and wash dishes. All that changes when a kid from the shop, also under Pop's wing, gets caught up in some dirty business with local drug dealer and club owner, Cornell "Cottonmouth" Stokes (Mahershala Ali, House of Cards). Cage stops laying in the cut and steps – hoodie, bulletproof skin and all – on to the streets. There is a lot that is great about Luke Cage, even more that is very good, and, unfortunately much that is ultimately disappointing.

Talking Out of Turn #46 (Podcast): Robert Altman (1983)

David Alan Grier, Matthew Modine and Michael Wright in Robert Altman's Streamers (1983).

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, host and producer of On the Arts.

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (e.g., Doris Kearns Goodwin sitting alongside Clive Barker). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One chapter, titled The Ghosts of Vietnam, featured interviews with a variety of authors (Robert Stone, Brian Fawcett) and filmmakers (Oliver Stone, Louis Malle) who dealt in their work with various aspects of the legacy of the Vietnam War and how it was felt in the Eighties. The American obsession with Latin and South America during the Reagan years seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the earlier conflict. One of those interviews was with filmmaker Robert Altman, who I sat down with in 1983 to speak about his new film, Streamers.

The films of Robert Altman's films constantly had the buzz of Vietnam behind them, whatever their explicit subject matter – e.g. MASH (1970), McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971), and Nashville (1975) – but Streamers, a screen adaptation of David Rabe's play of the same name, was Altman's first film to deal directly with the conflict. Though Streamers isn't among Altman's best movies, his thoughts about the project and about the Vietnam conflict were fascinating.

– Kevin Courrier.
 
Here is the full interview with Robert Altman as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983. 

 

Principal Photography: In Conversation with Gregg Delman

Misty Copeland by Gregg Delman was published in the U.S. by Rizzoli at the end of September. (Photo by Gregg Delman)

New York-based photographer Gregg Delman photographed ballerina Misty Copeland over a two-year period, from 2011 to 2014, before she became internationally famous as the first African-American to become a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, one of the world's top classical dance companies. Their collaborative sessions yielded thousands of images, 95 of which have just been published in a gorgeous new cloth-cover book by Rizzoli. Misty Copeland by Gregg Delman, officially released on Sept. 26 with a Manhattan book launch party attended by both artists, is a feast for the eyes that deepens the intimate relationship between dance and the still image.

For fans of Copeland, the book immortalizes the California-born ballerina who today is the most talked about dancer since Mikhail Baryshnikov defected from the Soviet Union in 1970s. Her fame arises from her status as a ballet iconoclast whose pronounced musculature and ample bosom represent a sharp departure from the pale and frail ballerina stereotype that has dominated the popular imagination since the early 19th century. It's a welcome change, and one which Delman appears to have presciently anticipated. His erotically charged images spotlight the dancer's voluptuousness and daring artistry. They celebrate a powerful dancer who is also a strong woman, in control of her destiny. Delman calls it an accurate portrait.

"Dancing is something Misty does but she's much more than a dancer," said Delman during a recent interview in New York, close to his Chelsea studio. "Anyone who meets her can see the energy she has. I always knew she'd be something. She was already something for me from the beginning. She was this incredible muse." Here's more of that conversation:

Critic’s Crypt: J-Horror Genre Slugfest – Kairo & Hausu

The girls arrive at the titular House (Hausu, 1977).

I’m comfortable admitting that I felt a certain amount of trepidation about this particular Critic’s Crypt. Japanese horror films like Ring (1998) and Noroi: The Curse (2005) have always had a way of getting under my skin the way no Western horror movie can (in fact I still maintain that in addition to being far superior to its Hollywood remake, Ring is the scariest movie I’ve ever seen). I’ve been trying to put my finger on it for years, but I think it simply comes down to the difference in cultural sensibilities between Japan and the rest of the world, and how that manifests in terms of horror. What the Japanese find frightening is represented in a much more subtle and insidious way than our Hollywood-bred jump-scare fare, relying far more often on the audience’s imagination and playing on fears and doubts that – to me, as an uncultured gaijin, anyway – are just as scary in their probing truth as they are in their foreign incomprehensibility.

Often it’s about the way j-horror (as it’s affectionately known here) will take ordinary, innocuous things and – by connecting them to the strange, the supernatural, and the psychotic – make them terrifying. Whether it’s an unlabelled VHS tape, a flock of pigeons, a crumpled garbage bag, or a TV screen left on static, this genre excels at forcing you to re-examine the world around you with suspicious, fearful eyes. The potential freak-out factor extends beyond the threshold of the theatre doors, making your walk home in the sunshine as nerve-wracking as a night-time shortcut through a cemetery. In short, I can’t really articulate exactly why, but Japanese horror movies scare me good.

So, in a month that’s so far been pretty light on true horror, I had to steel myself for what I expected would be the most harrowing viewings of Halloween 2016. I chose an old and a new, neither of which I’d seen before: 2001’s Kairo (aka “Pulse”), about ghosts who invade our world through the internet, and 1977’s Hausu (aka “House”), about… well, we’ll get to that. To my immense surprise, neither really represented j-horror the way I had expected – but in their unique twists on the formula, they were exemplars of how broad and varied and surprising the genre can be. Plus, I made it through without mentally scarring myself! So, that’s a win.

Riding the Rails: Billy Bragg and Joe Henry

Billy Bragg and Joe Henry's new album is titled Shine A Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad.

At first glance the musical combination of Billy Bragg, beloved son of the British left, and American songwriter Joe Henry would be unusual. But the fact of the matter is that the two musicians met over thirty years ago in an office waiting room at Warner Brothers. Henry’s wife was a publicist with the label at the time courting Bragg to radio stations and newspaper interviews. Their introduction was “the start of a beautiful friendship” that eventually put Joe Henry in the producer’s chair for Bragg’s album, Tooth & Nail (2013), and finally as a partner on their new album Shine A Light: Field Recordings from the Great American Railroad (Cooking Vinyl). It’s an album of train songs recorded in various train stations from Chicago to Los Angeles. Bragg, Henry and a small crew set out to capture history, by taking a trip through the Midwest United States by rail. The first track released, as a single, was “Midnight Special,” documented on a video by Ray Foley.

Daydream Nation: FX's Atlanta

Donald Glover and Brian Tyree Henry in Atlanta.

Donald Glover, the star and creator of the FX series Atlanta, maintains a rap career under the name Childish Gambino, and anyone who saw Glover as Troy Barnes on Community will think they have an idea of what a childish Gambino is like. Troy, a high school football star tentatively easing into adult life as a community college student, initially came across as kid’s idea of a confident, swaggering jock, but that’s because his aggressive, socially well-adjusted persona was a pose. Once Troy embraced his true character as a lonely nerd in search of a playmate and began spending all his time playing games and obsessing over old TV shows with the master nerd Abed (Danny Pudi), he grew increasingly childlike, to the point of losing his jock’s sexual aura and becoming a human stuffed animal. It was to Glover’s enormous credit that he managed to make this seem less like a regression than like the self-realization of someone who’d been hiding behind a false front and needed some time in the playroom before becoming an adult.

For fans of Community, or even Glover’s often witty and intoxicating nerd-rap, the first surprise of Atlanta is that Glover – lithe, bearded, and heavy-lidded – is very much an adult. As Earn, who’s back home in Atlanta after dropping out of college, he has the presence of a man who’s been kicked around the block a few times and is ready to claim his place in the world and do right by the people he cares about. If anything, he’s more precariously lost than Troy, in the limbo of his community-college safe space, ever was. Earn arrives in town with no money, job, or prospects, just an uncertain relationship with Vanessa (Zazie Beetz), a schoolteacher who’s the mother of his baby daughter. Troy’s face would sometimes freeze in an expression of smiling terror when he was afraid reality was about to catch up with him and present him with something he couldn’t bluff his way out of. Panic seems to be outside Earn’s emotional range, even when, in the wake of a ridiculous shooting incident, he’s arrested and has to spend most of a night and much of the next day idly waiting for bail money to arrive.

The Cherry Orchard at the Roundabout: The Upside and the Downside

Harold Perrineau, Diane Lane and John Glover in the Roundabout Theater's The Cherry Orchard. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Diane Lane gives a warm and luminous performance as Ranevskaya in the newly opened Roundabout Theatre production of The Cherry Orchard. Though she’s done relatively little theatrical work, Lane has the aura of a great stage personality, the kind playwrights built vehicles around in the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth. As Ranevskaya, who, with her brother Gaev (John Glover), embodies the last vestiges of the bankrupt Russian aristocracy, incapable of saving themselves, she gets at both the high-comic and the tragic undercurrents of Chekhov’s masterly final play – and at its magic, too. It’s the most radical of his pieces, giving rise to sudden shifts of mood and tone as well as revealing the contradictions that make his characters both intricate, impressionistic reflections of real human experience and unsolvable mysteries. Ranevskaya is frivolous and generous, foolish and worldly-wise, life-embracing and haunted – and Lane suggests all of these aspects.