A Year of Reading: My Favourite Books of 2016

Author Julian Barnes. (Photo: Graham Jepson)

As many have also said, 2016 has been a terrible year. One of my consolations has been deriving pleasure from reading, and offered here are some of the best books I have read. One criterion for inclusion on this list is whether they stayed with me long after I read them. In some of the following, that quality became more important than literary excellence. – Bob Douglas 

Podcast: Interview with Author Richard Adams (1988)

Richard Adams, author of Watership Down and Plague Dogs, passed away on Dec 24. (Photo: Greenwood/ANL/Rex/Shutterstock )

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 1988, one of those people was novelist Richard Adams.

On December 24, Richard Adams passed away at the age of 96. Though Adams wrote almost twenty books for both adults and children over the course of his writing career, he will likely be best remembered for his very first, Watership Down (1972). At the time of our conversation, Traveller –  his historical novel of the American Civil War – had just been published.

– Kevin Courrier

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

From the Inside Out: Hyper Light Drifter

 Hyper Light Drifter was developed by Heart Machine, and released in 2016.

The floodgates have opened, and independent game developers are enjoying unprecedented access to tools for making and releasing games. Anybody and their dog can make a game nowadays, so for the gamer, it’s just a matter of sifting through the chaff. For every diamond, there’s a lot of rough – it’s a market flooded by cheap imitations, cash-ins, low-effort knockoffs, and the like – and at a glance, it can be tricky to separate the good stuff from the bad. I’ve seen countless pixel art retro-style indie games, and so Hyper Light Drifter by Heart Machine, which looked like a better polished version of this dime-a-dozen archetype, slipped under my radar. It was only after it surfaced on almost every gaming outlet’s end-of-year “Best of 2016” lists that I sat up and paid proper attention, and by god I’m glad I did: Hyper Light Drifter is a beautifully made work of art and a satisfying, memorable action game. Had I played it in time, it would have made my list too.

Harry Callahan and Edward Hopper Walk Into a Bar

Atlanta, 1984, by Harry Callahan.

It’s easy to think that the American artist Harry Callahan was one of the most canonical figures in both fine art and photography as an art form in the 20th century. It’s also logical and natural to think so, since it’s largely true. To be a part of a canon, as Callahan is, or even to initiate one, as his peer Walker Evans did, means, as the critic Harold Bloom has so effectively demonstrated, that you occupy a special place in the cultural stratosphere, a location which requires everyone after you to be placed in a contextual relationship to you and your work. There is a canon in every medium, be it literature, painting, dance or photography. There are also a classical, a romantic and a modernist canon, with, say, Caravaggio, Turner and Hopper, to name only a few, as part of the hierarchy of painting. Just as clearly, photography has its own historical epochs and a similar aesthetic canon: Stieglitz, Evans, Callahan.

As Aldis Browne has astutely and allegorically noticed, “Callahan’s eye was to the camera what the painter Edward Hopper’s was to the canvas."

West Coast Wonder: Goh Ballet’s The Nutcracker in Vancouver

Goh Ballet's The Nutcracker ran at The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts from December 15-20. (Photo: Louis Li)

Vancouver never had a Nutcracker tradition until Goh Ballet gave the city its own version of the holiday classic in 2009, the same year former National Ballet of Canada principal Chan Hon Goh took over the company her dancer parents had founded on the West Coast almost 40 years ago. None of this is apparent, however, from the full houses which greeted the ballet's recent week-long run at the 1,800-seat The Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts.

The shows, which ended on Dec. 20, were mostly sold out, attracting audiences from as far away as the coastal islands and across the border from nearby Washington State. The draw is a charming ballet that many readily identify with Christmas, if not the entire month of December. Gorgeously nostalgic, the sets and costumes invoke a bygone era when the Christmas festivities came shrouded in glamour and mystery. Drosselmeyer (guest dancer Adonis Daukaev) is here an actual magician whose conjuring and disappearing tricks highlight Christmas as a time of enchanting transformations. With its scenes of dancing snowflakes, bears and sweets, The Nutcracker speaks to the child within, never failing to cast a spell.

Telling Stories: No Man’s Land, The Babylon Line & The Encounter

Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in No Man's Land. (Photo by Johan Persson)

Harold Pinter wrote No Man’s Land for John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, who performed it in the West End in 1975. The current revival, with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart, toured in rep with Waiting for Godot for three years before returning to London; I missed it in New York but caught up with it on HD in the NT Live series last week. The play is constructed around a meeting between two old men, a famous writer, Hirst (Stewart), and a minor, down-on-his-luck poet, Spooner (McKellen). Hirst has picked Spooner up at a pub and invited him to his posh Hampstead home for a drink, where Foster (Damien Molony) and Briggs (Owen Teale), his two manservants, who are also his bodyguards and appear to be gangsters (and perhaps also lovers), treat Spooner alternately as an intruder, a prisoner and a house guest. He spends the night locked in the living room; the next morning Hirst, whose memory is failing, claims to recognize him from their Oxford days – and even to have slept with his wife – but calls him by a different name. Spooner goes along with the misapprehension, which suits his purposes. Eventually he attempts to sell himself as a candidate for the post of Hirst’s secretary.

The Upside Down: Musings on a Year Watching Television

Pamela Adlon in FX's Better Things.

Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you’ve never been. Once you’ve visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. And discontent is a good thing: people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different...

– Neil Gaiman, from The View from the Cheap Seats

2016 has been a long year, an awful year… even (to paraphrase Judith Viorst) a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. As I type this, news of the sudden passing of Debbie Reynolds has emerged close on the heels of the woefully premature death of her daughter, Carrie Fisher – adding to the body count of a year that seemed to be almost gleefully stealing our brightest lights. But, eager as I am to finally see the back of this year, taking on the task of reflecting on the past twelve months of television has been genuinely heartening. It has been an eventful – too eventful – year in the real world, but for television it has also been a time of innovation, and further strengthened my belief that TV has never been as good, as smart, as brave, and as human as it is now. It may feel more like a decade ago, but it was only last January that Louis C.K. unceremoniously gifted us the first episode of his stripped-down and ground-breaking Horace and Pete, and only six months ago that Netflix premiered Stranger Things, the Duffer Brothers’ unabashed and brilliant homage to the best of the 80s, from Steven Spielberg to John Carpenter to George Lucas and Stephen King. And then last September, Netflix pulled the curtain back from its small corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and introduced us to Luke Cage – a series that, despite some plot weaknesses late in its first season, jumped with both feet into our difficult times and provided us with some of the year’s most compelling hours of television. In a year when reality threatened to overtake our imagination, both in menace and absurdity, television kept pace – providing escape, insight, and regular and much-needed reminders that the human race has more up its sleeve than the ever-darkening headlines suggest. A small caveat: what follows is not a complete ranked list of what television has offered these past 12 months, but rather a few reflections on where television has taken me in 2016.

Movie Musical as Theory: La La Land

Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in La La Land

Damien Chazelle’s La La Land has won several critics’ prizes and is sure to be an Academy Award contender, which is good news for those of us who love musicals since its success is likely to generate new ones. But I’m afraid I couldn’t get up much enthusiasm for the movie. It’s amiable and well-intentioned, it looks lovely (Linus Sandgren lit it, and the production design is by David Wasco), and God knows you can’t fault the two charming stars, Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling. For this L.A.-set romantic tale of Mia, an aspiring actress who goes to auditions when she’s not working as a barista, and Sebastian, an aspiring jazz musician who wants to open his own club, where he can play the music he loves. Chazelle spins off from what must be his favorite musicals: Jacques Demy’s The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Stanley Donen’s Singin’ in the Rain, Martin Scorsese’s New York, New York and (in one number) Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris. I adore those movies, too, but unlike them La La Land rarely leaves the ground. Chazelle, who is about to turn thirty-two, has made only two previous movies, and La La Land is an immense improvement over his last, the highly acclaimed Whiplash, which I found eminently phony from start to finish. (I didn’t buy either the college-age drummer hero, played by Miles Teller, who is so dedicated to his art that he doesn’t have time to get laid, or his sadistic teacher, played by Oscar-winning J.K. Simmons, who would have been fired years ago for his relentless abuse of his students. And I found the relationship between these two characters incomprehensible.) But La La Land just isn’t the real thing. It feels like someone’s doctoral dissertation on movie musicals.

The Best of CAL 2016

Back in January 2010, when David Churchill, Shlomo Schwartzberg and I came up with the idea of Critics At Large, we envisioned a daily online arts journal that would provide us the freedom to write – a freedom we were beginning to lose in magazines and newspapers. Growing rapidly tired of working in a field where desperate careerism and craven expedience was being rewarded, we wanted to remain true to the pleasures of critical writing. We also wanted to discover who our readers might be. Over the last seven years, many things changed in both our writing and in our audience. For one thing, Critics At Large grew to be less a haven for frustrated writers and more a home for a diverse and hopeful group who saw us as a possibility. We began attracting a motley crew from various backgrounds who helped change the magazine for the better. A number of men and women, young and old, experienced and not, came to shape our identity as a journal rather than take on the identity we originally gave it. Along that path, we attracted veteran arts critics who wanted to continue to address the work that inspired them, but we also drew inexperienced voices trying to find out the true value of having one to speak with. When I read individual pieces each day, I marvel at the sheer range of material and the keen passion each writer brings to their subject. As for our readers, they have not only been rapidly growing, but the diversity of opinion in the magazine has helped us reach out to a much wider readership.What became most important for me, as one of its co-founders, was watching Critics At Large grow beyond my own expectations into a continually morphing organism that embraces the freedom our writers bring to it. For those who believe that criticism is not about everyone having the right opinion, but instead a means by which the writer and reader mutually discover their own personal relationship to a work, I think we are succeeding in getting there. As a way to celebrate that goal, and I suppose to demonstrate it, here is a look back at some of my own favourite pieces from the past year. Rather than commenting on the writer and their work, I've selected specific quotes that I think best reflects their value to me as critics. As I continue on as both writer and reader, I can truly say that I'm proud to call them colleagues.

Kevin Courrier

Editor-in-Chief
Critics At Large

Top 5 Games of 2016: Finales & Friends

A look at FROM Software's Dark Souls III.

Once again, the biggest video game titles of the year have slipped me by. Among many others, I missed out on Final Fantasy XV, Battlefield 1, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Hitman, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Dishonored 2, Titanfall 2, and Gears of War 4. These games dominated industry commentary and global markets alike, much like Hollywood blockbuster sequels elbowing their way into the spotlight every summer – and like those blockbusters, they have grown more and more tedious in my eyes. In a market overstuffed with as much repetition as variety, I have to be ever more careful about where I spend my gaming dollar, and none of the titles I listed intrigued me enough to justify spending almost a hundred dollars (and who knows how many hours of my life) on any one of them. But that’s not to say that I didn’t play anything in 2016. Far from it. In fact – if only in terms of sheer quality – this might have been one of the best years for gaming in recent memory. Without further ado, here are my Top 5 Games I played in 2016 (along with some honourable mentions that didn’t quite make the cut).

The Art of the Song 2016: The Year’s Best Singles

The members of A Tribe Called Red. (Photo: Falling Tree Photography)

Sometimes a single track can go a long way… to inform, entertain and genuinely change the way we think of ourselves. This past year’s political, environmental and social events were certainly magnified by a U.S. Presidential candidate who raced all the way to the bottom and won. But out of all that muck, these songs in particular cleared the haze and showed us some light. They graced us with humour and passion. They spoke truth to power and put the spotlight on the rich subtleties of life. We’re going to need a lot more of them in the years ahead.

Curve Ball: Paul Verhoeven's Elle

Isabelle Huppert and silent witness in Elle

In the opening scene of Paul Verhoeven's Elle, Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) is raped in her home by an assailant in a ski mask while her grey tabby cat quietly looks on. What Michèle feels about the violent assault, and how she will respond to it, are initially as mysterious to us as trying to read the thoughts of the feline who witnessed it. Afterwards, Michèle simply cleans up the mess and proceeds to have a hot bath, where, in the soap bubbles, she gathers the rising blood from her genitals into a miniature sculpture – and soon afterwards shares a contentious dinner with her son where they argue about the woman in his life. For those used to seeing genre films where rape, murder and betrayal get answered and explained in predicable ways, and can (in the worst pictures) even get exploited to heat up our blood lust, Elle goes completely against the grain. Rather than play to the most melodramatic kind of cause and effect – where sociology and dogmatism replace polymorphous sexuality and psychopathology – Verhoeven sets up a maze of possibilities to characterize a woman who doesn't get pinned down and defined by her circumstances. Not only will that approach upset those who have specific, narrow views of what constitutes rape victim response, but Elle doesn't even tell you if Michèle's behaviour grows out of the trauma of the assault. In fact, the more we get to know her, the more we see that any number of disturbing and bizarre moments have shaped her life. Elle builds its strength and its power by throwing curve balls at our expectations so that we have no choice but to take the character – and the movie – on its own terms rather than the terms we wish to impose on it.

One on One: Moonlight

Mahershala Ali (right) and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight.

I’ve never seen a coming-of-age movie quite like Moonlight, written and directed by Barry Jenkins. It’s the story of an African-American kid from a poor neighborhood in Miami told in three parts, each one capturing the boy, Chiron, at a different age: nine, sixteen, twenty-six. (Given the three-act structure, it’s not surprising to find out that the source material is a play, Tarell Alvin McCraney’s In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.) In act one Chiron, known as Little and played by Alex Hibbert, lives with his mother Paula (Naomie Harris), who turns tricks for crack money. Tiny and delicate, Little is bullied by the other boys; the only one of his peers who shows him any kindness is Kevin (Jaden Piner), who tries to teach him how to stand up for himself in a fight. Little is hiding from the other kids in an abandoned house sometimes used by junkies when Juan (Mahershala Ali), a drug dealer, finds him and takes him home to his girl friend Teresa (Janelle Monáe) for a meal. Little is shy – and stubborn – to the point of non-communication; it isn’t until the next day that Juan and Teresa get him to tell them where he lives, and when Juan drives him home Paula isn’t grateful for his generosity, since he’s the man she buys rock from. Still, Little, who has no male role models and has to negotiate his mother’s substance-fueled moods, adopts Juan and Teresa as surrogate parents, and they’re tender and patient with him, riding out his silences and answering the questions he can’t ask anyone else. The other boys make fun of the way he walks and holds himself and call him a faggot; their merciless ragging has the effect of causing him to struggle with his sexuality before he’s old enough to even see himself in sexual terms. When he asks Juan and Teresa what a faggot is, Juan tells him it’s “a word used to make gay people feel bad,” and in the macho street culture of the neighborhood Juan’s instinctive egalitarianism and lack of bias, which come from his openheartedness, feel like a small miracle. He and Teresa are a gift to this brooding, complicated kid, who alternates between avoiding everyone’s gaze and seeking to make direct contact, his huge, demanding eyes fixed on Juan or Teresa or Paula or Kevin. Juan treats Little like a son, counseling him that he has to make up his own mind about who he’s going to be. He never lies to the boy; when Little finds out that he deals dope to his mother and confronts him about it, Juan doesn’t deny it, though for the first time you can see the shame in his face. Clearly he’s not the right paternal figure to get the kid through his troubled childhood, but he’s the only one Little’s got.

Oh What Fun? The Troubling Origins of “Jingle Bells” and the Problem of Christmas Entertainment

Few, if any, Christmas songs are as widely known and capable of eliciting such instantaneous recognition as “Jingle Bells.” The short, simple song conjures up images of an old-fashioned holiday, feeding nostalgia for a Currier & Ives version of the past full of universal and uncomplicated Christmas cheer.

The reality, however, is far different. Dr. Kyna Hamill of Boston University has recently made some surprising discoveries regarding “Jingle Bells” that challenge our cozy assumptions about its nature and origins. Hamill spoke with me as part of a regular podcast series, the Theatre History Podcast, on howlround.com. In our conversation, which you can listen to here, she explains that what began as a matter of local interest eventually turned into a much deeper research project, one with surprising conclusions.

Showboating: Fences

Denzel Washington stars in and directs August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Fences.

When you watch Denzel Washington in the movie version of Fences, you don’t think, “This is a great actor”; you think, “This is an actor who wants to make sure you know how great he is.” In the mammoth role of Troy Maxson, the 1950s Pittsburgh sanitation worker who is the protagonist of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning 1987 play – and under his own direction – Washington yells and declaims, shambles and struts and puffs himself up. His recitations of the long, long speeches Wilson put in this character’s mouth are like tricky vocal exercises, and we have plenty of time to marvel at his mastery of modulation and tone, particularly since we’re not distracted by any emotional involvement in the performance. On human terms I didn’t believe a single word of it, at least until, late in the picture, Troy began to sing to himself while puttering around his yard building the symbolic fence we hear about in every damn scene. (It signifies, depending on the moment, Troy’s penchant for alienating the people closest to him, his refusal to let in the truth about himself, and his struggle, in the Edgar Allan Poe “Masque of the Red Death” sense, to keep death away from his door.) This song about an old dog named Blue feels genuine, as if for once in the movie Washington didn’t feel he had something to prove. Or maybe I was just relieved that the character had stopped talking.

A Spy infiltrates ISIS in Daniel Silva’s The Black Widow

Author Daniel Silva. (Photo by Marco Grob, courtesy of HarperCollins)

The murder of civilians over the last couple of years in France and northern Europe to my knowledge has been portrayed in fiction at least twice, in Todd Babiak’s Son of France, and most recently in Daniel Silva’s The Black Widow (HarperCollins, 2016) – before the events occurred in reality, as both authors indicate. Silva has written sixteen novels in his Gabriel Allon spy series about an Israeli master spy, and on the basis of his current offering – the first that I have read – he is adept at rendering a gripping, page-turning thriller. There are sufficient backstories to inform new readers: Allon began his career as a spy and assassin when he tracked down the Palestinian terrorists who killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; he lost a son to a terrorist car bomb, shattering his wife’s mental faculties and leaving her languishing in a care home. At this point in his career, his fieldwork appears over. Because of Allon's past record of derring-do exploits along with some mishaps, a fabricated story of his death has been circulated. He is actually living in Israel, virtually in hiding, in large part to protect his new family, and on the cusp of becoming security chief for “the Office,” known in real life as Mossad. His cover is that of an internationally recognized art restorer and we initially meet him in The Black Widow working on a Caravaggio at the Israel Museum.

Incidents of Travel in the Fourth Dimension: Phenomenological Drawings by Patricia Salen

All pieces imaged on this page are from an untitled drawing series by Patricia Salen, 2010.

“We must return to the Lebenswelt [life-world], the world in which we meet in the lived-in experience, our immediate experience of the world.” – Maurice Merleau Ponty

It is entirely possible for drawings to explore time. In fact, time may be their primary content. The relationship between the cognitive and perceptual realms may also best be investigated through a conversation between the eye and the hand, mediated by the mind, as evidenced in the drawings of Quebec-born artist Patricia Salen. Following its inception by Edmund Husserl, the notions inherent to the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty are perhaps an ideal vehicle for examining the artmaking impulse. Especially the Salen drawing impulse.

Gaming the System: HBO'S Westworld

Anthony Hopkins as Dr. Robert Ford, in HBO's Westworld.

Note: This review contains spoilers for the first season of HBO’s Westworld.
 
The “Mystery Box” is empty.

That’s a revelation that took almost a decade to seep into my brain. J.J. Abrams, like all great storytellers, is a great liar. But, despite his skill as an emotional filmmaker, his personal storytelling technique of capturing audience interest by building mystique around insignificant things is fraudulent and false. He’s an actual liar. There has never been anything in the box. And getting me to care about it – the way he, and others who imitate him, were able to string me along for years on the promise that one day the box would open, and something fantastic would be inside, was little more than a nasty parlour trick. He did it with LOST; he did it with Star Trek Into Darkness; he did it with Cloverfield and Super 8 and arguably even Star Wars: The Force Awakens. But I’m wise to his game, and by this point most general audiences are, too. We’re sick of being told we must find something interesting just because it’s mysterious. And this impatience on our part changed the way that writers can approach material in this mystery genre, whether on film or in episodic form: they can’t be lazy anymore and assume their audience will stick around to find out what it all means. They know that we know that if the answer ever does come, it’s likely to be unsatisfying anyway. And so the smarter creators – like those behind HBO’s Westworld (including, yes, J.J. himself) – are starting to remember that quality storytelling spends its time engaging with character, theme, and semiotics, rather than hollow plot twists and empty reveals.

A Tragedy in Time: Keith Maitland's Tower

Pregnant freshman Claire James and her boyfriend, Tom Eckman, moments before they're shot in Tower

On August 1st 1966, after first murdering his mother and then his wife, Charles Whitman, a mentally ill 25-year-old engineering student, climbed to the top of the campus tower of the University of Texas and began shooting randomly, hitting 49 people and killing 17. Up until the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007, this horrible tragedy was the deadliest school shooting in American history. Most of the accounts have focused primarily on the shooter, and how his father was a violent and abusive man who regularly beat his wife and son. There were also stories of Charles Whitman's fascination for guns from a very young age until, as an adult, he became a marine and learned how to use them effectively. Some reports even suggested that an undiagnosed brain tumour may have contributed to his deteriorating mental state. His story has been told in many true crime documentaries. He was the subject of James Jameson's drama The Deadly Tower (1975) with Kurt Russell in the role of Whitman. Singer/songwriter Harry Chapin ("Taxi," "Cats in the Cradle") wrote an epic folk tale, "Sniper," in 1972, which was loosely based on the killer. "[T]he earnestness with which Chapin imbued his folksy love songs serves this macabre subject well," wrote critic Sean T. Collins. "Chapin is no more able to hide behind irony or ambiguity here than he is in his more romantic work, forcing the audience to come directly to terms with the horror of the sniper attack, and the tortured character of the sniper himself." As with most mass murders, we remember the perpetrator of the crime, that "tortured character" Collins identifies – a nobody who through an act of horror becomes a somebody – but rarely do we remember the victims, who end up, ironically, as anonymous as the killer himself was before his shocking deed.

The Band’s Visit: What We Share

Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub in The Band's Visit. (Photo: Ahron R. Foster)

Affably modest and utterly joyous, The Band’s Visit is the perfect ninety-minute musical – and the best new musical I’ve seen since 2012’s Dogfight, which was also a small-scale off-Broadway show. Dogfight played its limited run at Second Stage; The Band’s Visit will be at the Atlantic Theater Company in Chelsea only until the end of the first week in January. (It’s been extended twice.) The source material is a film from 2007, written and directed by Eran Kolirin, a sweet morsel from Israel that attracted little notice; no one I’ve mentioned the musical to had heard of the film, let alone seen it. In it, a police band from Alexandria with a date to perform at the Arab Cultural Center in a tiny Israeli city finds itself stranded in another Israeli city, Bet Hatikva, with almost the same name. (They’re one consonant apart.) Dina, the café owner who informs them that they’re in the wrong place – and that no buses are expected until the next morning – feeds them and offers to put some a couple of them up at home and more at her restaurant, volunteering her unemployed pal Itzik to take in the remaining two musicians.