Jury’s Still Out: NBC’s Trial & Error

Nicholas D’Agosto and John Lithgow

NBC’s long-running sitcom The Office left its mark on contemporary television in a number of ways, not least in the sudden emergence of a number of mockumentary-style comedies, most notably NBC’s Parks and Recreation and ABC’s hit Modern Family. However, it’s striking that both of these shows seem to have essentially discarded the sub-genre’s main conceit: the idea that everything we see and hear is being recorded by a camera crew that exists within the world of the show. The Office spent a considerable portion of its final season acknowledging that there had been other characters, long familiar to the denizens of Dunder-Mifflin but completely unknown to us, present throughout the show’s run, and it dealt with some of the logical complications that might ensue from that situation. Parks and Modern Family, on the other hand, became almost Brecht-lite; characters speak directly to the audience, calling our attention to the show’s artificiality, but there’s rarely any pretense that they’re actually talking to a person behind the camera.

It’s hard not to think of the quirks of the mockumentary sub-genre while watching NBC’s new Trial and Error, which premiered on March 14 and airs on Tuesday nights. In large part, that’s because creators Jeff Astrof and Matthew Miller seem to have attempted to reverse-engineer the success of The Office and Parks and Recreation; the latter’s influence is especially evident from their attempts to quickly establish the show’s setting, a fictional South Carolina town called East Peck, as a quirky but lovable backwater, à la the equally fictional Pawnee, Indiana. Here, the conceit that everything that we see is the result of a camera crew following around the characters is frequently acknowledged, oftentimes to satisfying comic effect.

Reset, Reborn, Renewed: Toronto Fashion 2017

Sid Neigum (centre right) and models, on stage at Re\Set Fashion in Toronto, February 6.

If fashion is about reinvention then Toronto is right on trend. Over the past few months several new initiatives – five and counting – have risen from the ashes of Toronto Fashion Week, which died a sudden death when its New York owner, sports and entertainment marketing conglomerate IMG, abruptly pulled the plug last July, citing a loss of local sponsorship necessary for keeping the biennial event alive. One door closes and another one opens.

Enter Re\Set Fashion, an installation-style fashion event which unfolded in the recently renovated Great Hall on Queen Street West in Toronto in early February. A designer-focused alternative to the frenetic runway show, the concept was developed by Dwayne Kennedy, co-founder and fashion director of The Collections among other local fashion events, in collaboration with Toronto Fashion Week founder Robin Kay. Taking place on Feb. 6 and 7, the two-day experiential fashion event took the form of Instagram-friendly static presentations which, besides being a more flexible and intimate model than the traditional catwalk show, is also more cost-effective to produce. Models looking like human mannequins simply walked out onto a dais and posed under strategically placed lights, a refreshing and dynamic alternative to the usual hype and freneticism. Tapping into the see-now-buy-now, Re\Set also offered up a pop-up retail component aimed at encouraging members of the paying public to get up close and personal with the latest in Canadian style. The strategy worked. Re\Set packed them in, leaving everyone feeling they were part of something new. Designer participants ranged from newcomers like Elle AyoubZadeh, creator of fledgling Toronto-based fashion footwear brand, Zvelle, to rising stars like the award-winning Alberta-born womenswear designer Sid Neigum, who soon after showed his monochromatic 3-D silhouettes at London Fashion Week, garnering a rave review in Vogue and a multi-million dollar deal with the international luxury online retailer, Net-a-Porter. Canadian fashion lives!

Terminal Velocity: Train to Busan

Yoo Gong, with Soo-an Kim, in Train to Busan.

I’m so sick of zombie movies. They’re as played out as any genre can be, and I didn’t think that there was anything new to be done or said with them. Imagine my surprise, then, when South Korean zombie thriller Train to Busan was consistently hailed as one of the best films of 2016. I’ve made my love of Korean cinema pretty clear in the past, so it should go without saying that I was intrigued – and now that the film has landed on Netflix here in Canada, I finally got the chance to investigate.

The film, directed by Sang-Ho Yeon, has not changed my opinion on zombie movies. I still think that the dead rising to eat the living – though it’s been a worthy avenue for gory chills and social commentary for decades – has aged into a tired and tedious concept (which only becomes more absurd when the light of slick modern filmmaking and special effects is shone upon it). But I had a great time watching Train to Busan, and it was far less because of the subject matter and much more because it was simply a well-written, well-staged, and well-executed film. In effect, it’s a zombie flick for people who don’t really like zombie flicks – which means it was just what I wanted to see.

Fugitive Glances: The Paintings of David Lasry

Silence I by David Lasry. (Acrylic on canvas, 2015)

“I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of this fact.” – Claude Levi-Strauss

When I look at vibrant paintings of Belgian artist David Lasry, such as his Silence I and Silence II, I can’t help feeling that I’m being shown an X-ray of matter itself and being brought into an intimate conversation between the physical world and the immaterial world. Though clearly not representational in any conventionally realistic manner, they are nonetheless a re-presentation of either thought patterns or a diagram of pure energy. As a result, they are more actual than realist, surpassing a scientific image of the interior of matter by sharing brief glimpses into what feels like an embodied meaning: a portrait of energy, a distilled life of electrons, and a powerful landscape at the sub-atomic level. Endless flux.

I’m not a fortune teller, of course, but as an art critic and curator, there is at least one thing I can safely predict: the further we proceed into the flickering digital lights of the pixilated 21st century, the more important paintings will eventually become in all our lives. Lately I’ve become rather immersed in reconsidering what I like to call the magic of the painted cloth: the alluring textile domain of handmade images on canvas, and the larger context of works of art in the age of digital reproduction. This is alchemy in action, captured in the frozen music of paint, and shared in fugitive glances.

Neglected Gem #99: The World of Henry Orient (1964)

Merrie Spaeth, Peter Sellers, and Tippy Walker in The World of Henry Orient (1964).

In Nora Johnson’s 1958 novel The World of Henry Orient, set in Manhattan, the title character – a celebrity “pop pianist” with a glitzy, undisciplined technique, who plays Carnegie Hall and is a favorite of the gossip columns – barely appears. He is mostly just talked about, wondered over, or spied upon. No matinee idol, he is described as “fat and bushy-haired, with a pouting lower lip . . . unwashed . . . carrot-headed.” Only once, and in the worst possible circumstances, is he seen up close by either Marian or Val, the teenage girls and best friends who for their own reasons have decided to be obsessed with him. “The world” becomes the girls’ code name for the exciting adulthood they are certain awaits them, while Henry Orient, insignificant and even absurd as an individual, assumes enormous importance as the symbol of their aspirations. Val, the more adventuresome of the girls, and herself a gifted pianist, presciently frets that meeting the man himself “might destroy everything,” because he’s less a person than “the voice of my conscience. He’s so awful, and yet he seems to mean everything good.”

Social Problem Plays: The Price and Sweat

Mark Ruffalo and Jessica Hecht in The Price at Broadway's Roundabout Theatre. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Arthur Miller’s plays may have been inspired by Ibsen’s realist dramas, but he rarely seemed able to get at the great unresolvables beneath their well-made social-problem surface. They creak and they clang as the banalities slide into the grooves his dramaturgy has made for them – even when the ideas themselves haven’t always been thought through. (After all these years and God knows how many productions, I’m still not sure exactly what’s being indicted in Death of a Salesman, and, as for The Crucible, however much one might deplore HUAC and the blacklist, it wasn’t much like the Salem witch hunts. For one thing, as Elia Kazan’s wife Molly Day Thacher pointed out in a famous letter to Miller, there actually were Communists in show business.)

The Price, Miller’s last major play, first produced on Broadway in 1968 and currently in revival by the Roundabout Theatre, is particularly clunky. Two brothers meet in the attic of a Manhattan brownstone where Victor, the younger, took care of their father in the twilight years that followed the stock market crash and the death of his wife – two disasters from which, according to Vic, the old man never recovered. A talented scientist, Vic sacrificed his dreams of a research career and joined the police force in order to support him while his brother Walter went to medical school and on to a distinguished and affluent career. Now the building is being torn down and Victor is hoping to secure a good price for the antique furniture from an appraiser whose name he found in the phone book. He’s tried to contact his brother, whom he hasn’t seen in a decade and a half and who hasn’t answered his calls. Just as he’s about to make a deal with the appraiser, Solomon, who’s something of an antique himself, Walter shows up in time for the first-act curtain, and the two brothers – as well as Victor’s wife Esther – learn, as the ten-ton ironies fall about the play’s title, just how high a price we pay for the choices we make in our youth. The second act of the play is mostly a long pitched battle between the estranged brothers, who spell each other with revelations and corresponding accusations. By the time the play is over, it’s long since turned into a very slow tennis match with hammers for rackets.

Life, and Death, with Archie: The CW's Riverdale

Cole Sprouse (as Jughead Jones) and K.J. Apa (as Archie Andrews) in Riverdale on The CW.

 This review contains some spoilers for The CW's Riverdale. 
 
The Archie comics of my childhood were comfort food: safe, unchallenging and so predictably consistent that issues could recycle old stories practically word for word without disappointing. Without any pretence of continuity, in one story Betty and Veronica would be inseparable BFFs and in another "arch" rivals (terrible pun intended). At one point, my sister and I tried to catalogue how many individual Archie comics we had, and they numbered over a thousand. Thumbing through them now (they still sit in several boxes in my parents' basement), every story is somehow both familiar and forgettable at the same time – which, as I recall, was precisely their appeal. In recent years, the comic has taken some decisive steps towards reinventing the 76-year-old franchise, largely under the helm of its new Chief Creative Officer, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. Aguirre-Sacasa was tapped for the role after the critical and popular success of his "for mature readers only" series Afterlife with Archie, which placed Archie and the gang into a post-apocalyptic, zombie-filled Riverdale. These firm steps into the 21st century notwithstanding, for me the world of Archie Andrews remains the one I was brought up on: a timeless, largely consequence-free universe with cheerleaders, chocolate malts and burgers, 50s-era morality, and innocent adolescent love triangles. At least that was the case until Riverdale, The CW's new teen drama.

Riverdale premiered at the end of January, but I confess it took me until this past week to finally check it out, my curiosity finally getting the better of me after I discovered that the broadcast series was streaming on Netflix here in Canada. (Canadians can view the first half of the season there, with new episodes appearing weekly.) Created by Aguirre-Sacasa himself (who, in addition to his work in comics, has also penned episodes of Glee and Big Love, as well as being one of the credited screenwriters for 2013's Carrie remake), the new series takes Riverdale High's familiar characters (Archie, the typical American teen; Jughead, his best pal; Betty, the sweet girl next door; Veronica, the spoiled rich girl) and throws them headlong into a Riverdale that has more in common with Veronica Mars's Neptune, California, than the town I'd grown to love as a kid. If you, like me, have only sugar-coated memories of idyllic, sunny suburban Riverdale, what you'll find on Riverdale will likely shock you – but stick around, because that shock with quickly turn into a unique, multi-textured delight.

Podcast: Interview with John Sayles (1983)

Linda Griffiths (left) and Jane Hallaren in John Sayles' Lianna (1983).

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 1983, one of those guests was American independent filmmaker and screenwriter John Sayles.

When I sat down with Sayles in 1983, Lianna (starring Canadian actor and playwright Linda Griffiths) had just been released. Lianna was the second film Sayles directed, his follow-up to his critically acclaimed debut, Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980). Since 1983, Sayles has directed sixteen features, including Eight Men Out (1988), Lone Star (1996), Sunshine State (2002), and most recently Go for Sisters (2013).

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with John Sayles as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.


 

The Business of a Woman's Life – Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will

 Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond, 1850. (National Portrait Gallery, London)

My story begins, dear reader, with a description of a not-so-distant journey that took me through the sky to the isle of Manhattan, and ultimately inside the workings of a most extraordinary intellect. The destination was that seat of high repute and learning, the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. I entered through its glassy doors off Madison Avenue as the autumnal sky above streaked plum and apricot, the colours dancing rich and vibrant on the shadowy walls. After perusing the rare gilt-edged books and illuminated manuscripts lining what had once been banker J.P. Morgan's private library, I ascended to the second storey aboard a chrome elevator. Turning right, I spied a treasure of a different stripe, a simple cotton and wool dress, patterned over with the petals of pale blue flowers. It guarded the entrance of Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, a unique collaboration between the Morgan and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in England. Commemorating the 200th anniversary of the author's birth in 1816, the intimate exhibition closed in January, but not without creating a lasting impression.

Man vs. Nature – Kong: Skull Island

Tian Jing, Brie Larson, Tom Hiddleston, and Thomas Mann in Kong: Skull Island.

I had one thought going into Kong: Skull Island, and it was a fervent hope that the film wouldn’t cleave to the story we’ve all already seen more times than we can count. I went in ready to condemn the film if any of the following were depicted: the big ape and the titular island become separate entities; the humans want to capture or control him in any way; his murderous rage is soothed by his fascination with a beautiful blonde ingenue. I’m pleased to report that Skull Island contains none of those story beats, and is distinct enough from all the other iterations of the King Kong story to justify its own existence.

But if it isn’t any of those things, then what the hell is Skull Island, exactly? This is a movie about King Kong, isn’t it?

In God’s Country: The Joshua Tree by U2

A couple of weeks ago, I posted images of the inner-vinyl labels of side one and side two of U2’s 1987 release The Joshua Tree (Island). It was my way of marking the 30th anniversary of the release of one of my prized albums. And I don’t mean compact disc either. This was a vinyl pressing, gatefold jacket and lyrics insert edition as it was intended on March 9th, 1987. I was thirty years younger and listening to jazz exclusively, since pop music and rock 'n' roll in general weren’t engaging my ears at the time. But U2 was the exception. I was immediately impressed when they launched in Canada in 1980, thanks to the support of CFNY radio and The New Music television program, long-time sources of new groups in the post-punk age of my generation. By posting the inner-label images on my Facebook page, I wanted to remember the record as a two-sided experience where you centered your focus on the rotation of the long-play album and flipped it to side two. In those days, music was a little more precious in its physical form. Digital files are simply no match for the texture and engagement in a record. To those pundits who fail to see the value in “things” such as vinyl albums, you’re way off the mark and rude to think that “things” are worthless, backdated forms of media.

Off the Shelf: Lunch with Charles (2001)

Theresa Lee and Nicholas Lea in Lunch with Charles.

Lunch with Charles is a relaxed and genial romantic comedy about a number of couples who begin to feel dislocated and dissatisfied with the lives and partners they've chosen. Making his feature film debut, writer-director Michael Parker sets in motion a charmingly low-key Feydeau-style farce that's sprinkled with granola and cured in heady coastal air. Set in British Columbia, a province most easterners wrongly assume to be catatonically relaxed, Lunch with Charles examines with a droll undercurrent a number of partners who fear they've lost the itch for love, but turn out to be anything but sedate. The movie puts these mismatched duos, who are from different cultures as well as different walks of life, on a collision course that leads them to question the choices they've made in their lives.

Return to La Grande Jatte: The Latest Sunday in the Park with George

Jake Gyllenhaal in Sunday in the Park with George. (Photo: Matthew Murphy)

I didn’t expect to be reviewing another production of Sunday in the Park with George so soon after the Huntington Theatre’s season opener last September, but who could resist checking out a Broadway revival starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Annaleigh Ashford? Sarna Lapine – niece of the book writer, James Lapine, who did the original Broadway staging in 1984 – worked it up out of the sold-out one-night-only 2016 concert version, and though it’s fully designed, it retains some of the intimacy it must have had in concert. Sitting in the front of the mezzanine at the newly refurbished Hudson Theatre, which dates from the turn of the twentieth century, I felt very close to the actors, especially in the two-character scenes between Gyllenhaal’s Seurat and Annaleigh Ashford’s Dot. Beowulf Boritt’s set is a raked rhomboid with an upstage curtain hung like a circus tent that holds Tal Yarden and Christopher Ash’s projections. In the 2008 revival, which came to New York by way of the Meunier Chocolate Factory in London, the projections felt like a cut-rate approach to a musical that was so visually vibrant in 1984, especially in the first-act finale, “Sunday,” where Seurat puts together his canvas A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte – which he had painted exactly a century before Lapine and Stephen Sondheim wrote their musical. But in this production of Sunday in the Park, the combination of Boritt’s and Yarden’s designs is elegantly understated and quite beautiful.

Electioneering at the Vatican: Robert Harris’ Conclave

Author Robert Harris. (Photo: Karen Robinson)

"Power brings a man many luxuries, but a clean pair of hands is seldom among them."

– Robert Harris, Imperium

As a former political reporter, Robert Harris has considerable knowledge of the corridors of power and an understanding about the frailties and flaws of those who exercise it. He brings those qualities, along with a passion for detailed accuracy and compelling plots, to his historical and contemporary political thrillers. One only has to think of The Ghost Writer and its film adaptation, Harris’ thinly-veiled, withering portrait of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair; An Officer and a Spy, whose protagonist, Georges Picquart, was the French officer who initially fingered the arrest of Alfred Dreyfus, but whose investigation convinced him that an injustice had occurred, thereby invoking the wrath of his superiors; or The Fear Index, whose protagonist, Alex Hoffman, a mathematics nerd, runs a vastly successful algorithmic hedge fund, and whose vulnerabilities set him up for a financial and emotional crash. Harris's latest foray, Conclave (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016) is an engaging investigation into the political machinations and personal liabilities of those seeking the Keys of St. Peter when the Catholic cardinals assemble to elect a new Pope at Vatican City.

Courage, Compassion, and Hopelessness: The White Helmets

A White Helmets volunteer in Aleppo after an airstrike (Beha el Halebi/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images).

For the last six years, death has rained from the sky onto the people of Syria. Unchallenged by any regional or foreign powers, the air force of Bashar al-Assad, more recently supplemented by the attack jets of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, have purposely slaughtered civilians in a bid to wipe out the Syrian opposition. Amid chemical attacks, crude “barrel bombs” dumped out of helicopters onto playgrounds and schools, and “double-tap” strikes that target rescuers who rush to save the victims of a first wave of bombings, Syria’s people have been systematically slaughtered. The world has largely shrugged in indifference.

While horrifying images of the ruins of Aleppo, Syria’s second-largest city, capped off the grim parade of news that darkened 2016, a more hopeful story has emerged from the recent rise to prominence of the White Helmets, as the members of the Syria Civil Defense organization are known. These unarmed volunteers don their signature headgear and desperately attempt to pull survivors from the rubble of civilian targets flattened by Putin and Assad’s fighter jets and attack helicopters. Amid Syria’s seemingly endless agony, they’re a rare beacon of humanitarian spirit.

Talking Out of Turn #51 (Podcast): Bob Swaim (1983)

A scene from Bob Swaim's La Balance (1982).

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, I 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. 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.

As mainstream movies became more predictable and packaged in the eighties, some filmmakers turned to the fringes. Not all of the work of independent directors, though, was worthy of being enshrined (any more than all of the Hollywood work earned for itself the right to be trashed). There were good and bad films in both camps. What I wanted to illustrate in the chapter Occupying the Margins: Re-Inventing Movies was the more idiosyncratic styles of people working in the business on both sides of the fence. They included screenwriter Robert Towne, the Hollywood mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff, the then-emerging sibling filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, and film directors Agnès Varda, Bill Forsyth, James Toback, Mira Nair, and Bob Swaim.

When I sat down with Bob Swaim in 1983, his French-language film La Balance (starring Nathalie Baye and Philippe Léotard) had just premiered at the Toronto Festival of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival). Set in the Paris that the American-born Swaim had made his home for more than 15 years, the crime drama stood apart from other action films by forgoing the vigilante qualities of Hollywood action flicks of the era.

– Kevin Courrier.

Here is the full interview with Bob Swaim as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1983.

Inheritance: Peter Reich's A Book of Dreams (1973)

(l. to r.) Eva Reich, Jerome Siskind, Peter Reich, Wilhelm Reich, Ilse Ollendorff (Peter's mother) in Maine.

"I am in Lewisburg [Penitentiary]. I am calm, certain in my thoughts, and doing mathematics most of the time. I am kind of 'above things,' fully aware of what is up. Do not worry too much about me, though anything might happen. I know, Pete, that you are strong and decent. At first I thought that you should not visit me here. I do not know. With the world in turmoil I now feel that a boy your age should experience what is coming his way – fully digest it without getting a 'belly ache,' so to speak, nor getting off the right track of truth, fact, honesty, fair play, and being above board – never a sneak ..." 

– Letter from Wilhelm Reich to his son, Peter, aged 13, from prison, March 19, 1957.

When my mother passed away recently from cancer, I fulfilled a promise I made to eulogize her at the memorial. For the first time, however, I decided not to write the tribute as I had for other friends and relatives I'd lost in the past. It might seem to be a strange choice since we choose our friends over time and throughout our life, but we begin in the womb of our mothers. You would think that my eulogy would need the care of consideration and thoughts first consigned to paper. But as I was growing up, I came to know a formidable and peripatetic woman who was as daunting as she was fascinating. For one thing, Sheila Courrier-Vezeau had done many things by the time I was 10. Besides being a striking model in her late teens, she would soon after get her pilot's license. To this day, I still have a distinct memory and knowledge of all the cloud formations she taught me when we took to the sky. If she longed for the stars, she also dove into the depths of the water when she learned to scuba dive. I would often go up to Tobermory, Ontario, in the Great Lakes on summer camping trips, trekking into the woods, while she sought out small shipwrecks.

No More Guns in the Valley: James Mangold’s Logan

Dafne Keen and Hugh Jackman in Logan.

Logan is perhaps the most unusual Marvel film yet made. It more closely resembles director James Mangold’s 2007 remake of 3:10 to Yuma than its own predecessor, 2013’s The Wolverine (also directed by Mangold), not just in looks, but in spirit. Logan has more of the Western in it than the popcorn-fueled superhero norm; it’s absolutely insane to think that it shares DNA with last year’s X-Men: Apocalypse. It doesn’t feel like a superhero movie, or an X-Men movie, at all. It feels like a swan song, haunting and terribly sad. It also feels like the first time that anyone has been able to truly make a meal of the character of Wolverine – so, of course, it has to be the last time.

Immersive: The Neo-Baroque Paintings of James Verbicky

“Sometimes, in order to accurately imitate the original, it is necessary to put something that is not really in the original into its portrait.”  – Lorenzo Bernini

Everything that is happening is happening in our mind. That just might be the skeleton key to the doors of perception. While William Blake wrote about cleansing those doors, and Aldous Huxley characterized those perceptual doors as what lies in between the known and unknown, James Verbicky paints intense and immersive images of the windows of perception. He doesn’t, of course, depict what is seen by looking through them but rather what we experience by looking at them, thus permitting us to be witnesses to the act of accumulating layers of meaning via visual information itself. By doing, so he also engages our imaginations at a visceral level, at the foundational and entrancing level of what has come to be called the optical unconscious. Verbicky’s sumptuous paintings plumb the depths of our media-saturated domain of simultaneous imagery and they are visual verbs, virtually pulsing with dynamic and dreamy data formations.

That optical unconscious, a term first coined by the German critic Walter Benjamin in the 1930's, is the dwelling place of the visual aura in artworks. It resides at the edge of what he called the expressionless: the terminal zone where nothing more can be expressed and at which the truth content of a work of art reveals itself via the aura. The visual aura is not some mystical cloud, but rather an emotional distance which continues to expand regardless of how close you are to the work. James Verbicky’s seductively layered images amount to a veritable archaeology of that visual aura and its portal to the optical unconscious, and this painter is thus an archaeologist of the spectacle of social space itself.

It’s a Gray World: Man from Nebraska

Annette O'Toole and Reed Birney in Second Stage's production of Man from Nebraska. (Photo: Joan Marcus)

Man from Nebraska by Tracy Letts (August: Osage County, Superior Donuts) – currently at New York's Second Stage Theatre – is the latest entry in the life-of-quiet-desperation sweepstakes, following closely on the heels of last season’s Tony Award-winning The Humans. The protagonist, Ken Carpenter (played by Reed Birney, star of The Humans), is a Lincoln insurance salesman approaching sixty – with two grown daughters and a mother (Kathleen Peirce) struggling with end-of-life issues – who gets out of bed in the middle of the night, panicked and weeping, because he’s lost his faith. (He’s a Baptist.) His wife Nancy (Annette O’Toole) is sympathetic but stymied, and his daughter Ashley (Annika Boras), who works with him, has no experience of her own to draw on when he tells her about his existential plight. Nancy asks their pastor (William Ragsdale) to talk to Ken, and though he comes across at first as a pleasant man with a cheerleader personality, he offers a suggestion that turns out to be profound for both his parishioners: he urges Ken to take a vacation alone. He travels to London, where he was stationed when he was in the military and of which he has fond memories, and though his crisis of faith leads him to question everything about himself and his past, he manages to makes friends there: Tamyra (Nana Mensah), the bartender at his Leicester Square hotel, and her flatmate Harry (Max Gordon Moore), a gay sculptor. Meanwhile his absence shakes up his wife, whose world is defined by him as much as his has always been defined by his belief in God.