
<#FROWN:C01\>
Earplay's Peterson premiere
'Diptych' shows composer's wide experience
By Allan Ulrich
EXAMINER MUSIC CRITIC
A PREMIERE by the Bay Area's Wayne Peterson, this year's Pulitzer Prize winner for composition, proved both the most absorbing and most instructive work featured on this season's first Earplay concert of contemporary music Monday evening at Fort Mason's Cowell Theater.
'Diptych,' a 21-minute opus, co-commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation and the Earplay ensemble, makes no radical statement and realigns no aesthetic priorities. But Peterson, the senior contributor to Monday's concert, revealed a quality only intermittently evident in his colleagues' offerings - the gift of wide experience, and the ability to learn from intense listening. They are not surprising virtues from someone you encounter at almost every new music concert in town.
(Peterson's next local premiere will be a string quartet for the Alexander Quartet. Composers, Inc. will present it Nov. 10 in the Veterans Building Green Room.)
Much of the accompanying fare in Earplay's eighth season curtain-raiser was honorably wrought, even arresting at moments. Yet, except for James Dashow's 'Mnemonics' (1990) for violin and tape, distinctive personalities failed to emerge.
The program also included Gustavo Moretto's 'Silenciosamente' (1990), David Vayo's 'Poem' (1990) and Scott Wheeler's 'Night Owl Variations' (1987). The hard-working performers were Joseph Edelberg, violin; George Thomson, violin/viola; Sarah Freiberg, cello; Peter Josheff, clarinet/saxophone; Janet Kutulas, flutes; Andrew Lewis, percussion, and Karen Rosenak, piano. J. Karla Lemon conducted the Peterson, Vayo and Wheeler works.
Peterson's wasn't the only piece on Monday's concert to reconsider the past; he favors the dotted rhythms found in baroque dance forms. Yet, it was the composer's gift for striking instrumental sonorities and the constant direction of the two-movement work that won the evening.
Scored for flute, clarinet, piano, viola, cello and an impressive array of percussion, 'Diptych' consistently surprises in the clarity of its counterpoint and in its deployment of instrumental timbres for both sensuous and dramatic possibilities. Tensions grow organically from the material without seeming imposed upon it.
The first section, 'Aubade,' is a morning song in which Peterson deftly conjures an emotionally charged landscape. Burbling sounds from a vibraphone, soft drumrolls and descending chords glory in pictorialism, yet there's an arch effect here that derives from the subtle manipulation of textures.
Peterson arranged 'Odyssey,' the second part, in rondo form, but a rich vein of lyricism and widely contrasting textures sustain the interest even when a breakdown seems imminent. And one discerns a sophisticated wit. The strings, in one extended passage, are assigned a syrupy theme that suggests Franck or Faure. A coda highlighting piano and gentle percussion leaves the listener wanting a bit more.
Less, however, would have been preferable for 'Mnemonics.' Chicago-born Dashow has worked extensively in both acoustic and electronic music. Here the solo violinist (Thomson) finds his sonority matched by the sound on type; that, in part, has been determined by the harmonic structure of the string sound.
The explanation in the program stresses the complexity of the method. What one hears is elegantly assembled, but about halfway through, the attention wanders. The aesthetic relationship of live musician and electronic sound seems under-defined.
'Silenciosamente' offered eight minutes of provocative and inconclusive sounds for clarinet, violin and piano. Less is more for Argentine-born Moretto, who favors dynamic extremes and isolated notes, from which the violin line rises to occasional lyrical statements.
Vayo's 'Poem' (for flute, piano, clarinet, violin and cello) often hints at a warm, almost Brahmsian sonority, from which jocularity is not excluded. Wheeler's 'Night Owl Variations' separates its four instruments (flute, clarinet, cello and marimba) in agreeable, almost improvisatory fashion. Twelve minutes of the work, however, left an impression of grayness.
Family struggles in 'God's Hands'
Theatre Works musical just misses its calling
By Robert Hurwitt
EXAMINER THEATER CRITIC
PALO ALTO - A crisis of faith has always been good grist for a dramatist's mill, whether it's a religious leader's loss of faith in his God (as in Ingmar Bergman's 'The Silence') or an artist's in his craft (Ibsen's 'Master Builder,' John Osborne's 'The Entertainer,' et al.). But when the artist is a kid just discovering that others are as talented as he, or when the crisis is an adolescent's belated discovery that his father isn't omnipotent ... well, let's just say that not all crises are created equal.
That's one of the main problems with 'God's Hands,' a semiautobiographical new musical by Douglas J. Cohen that opened Theatre-Works' Stage II season at Palo Alto's Cubberley Theatre Saturday. You want to like these people. You want to believe that their story has significance beyond its particulars. You certainly sympathize with them at times. But the whole thing feels like an exercise in self-indulgence.
The story starts in medias res, when Rabbi Daniel Levy (Stephen Gill) heads for New York to search for his 18-year-old son, Benjamin (Mark Phillips), who's been missing from Juilliard for several days. We're not worried though. We already know what the rabbi won't discover for another 2 hours and 20 minutes: Ben's dropped out and taken a job at a supermarket.
Meanwhile, we flash back through the story of Ben's life, from his birth - with Dad dreaming of his son, the first Jewish president - through his prolonged adolescence. Ben has a mother, of course, the quiet homemaker Ellie (Diana Torres Koss), and an older sister Ruth (Rebecca Fink), eclipsed by her brother from the moment he's born. But except for a brief look at Ruth's struggle for her own identity, and a superfluous, obligatory nod to woman's lot in the song 'Bloomin' Time,' they have little to do with the story.
THE CENTRAL relationship is between Ben, his father and his father's mother, Rhea (Miriam Babin), a concert pianist determined to turn her grandson into the keyboard prodigy her son refused to become. The close tie between Ben and Rhea not only fosters Ben's musical talents but also precipitates his first crisis of faith, when his father, who "wears God's hands" (the hands of the rabbi raised in benediction), admits he can't pray Rhea back to health after a stroke.
Though played as background to Ben's story, his father's crisis is more fertile dramatic ground. A reform rabbi whose progressive views lose him congregations in Walnut Creek and Illinois, he's a grown man still struggling for his mother's approval. The show's most interesting moment, too soon over, is a flashback to their mother-son, God vs. piano confrontation and her complete rejection of a deity who couldn't protect her family against Hitler.
Cohen doesn't follow up on this theme, however, nor on the rabbi's failure to recognize that his daughter has taken on the social conscience side of his calling. Instead, what we get mostly is a study in generic middle-class adolescent angst, packaged as a swiftly flowing musical that rarely comes to rest on a dramatic moment or a distinct melody.
Few of the songs - not even a mildly sardonic hymn to Manischewitz - have anything like a definable personality. Most of Cohen's tunes fall into that gray netherland between recitative and actual melody, easily adaptable to whatever mood the composer wishes to indicate: a heavier hand on the keys for emotional turmoil; a slide into falsetto for added poignancy. The music is professional, painless and forgettable, capably performed by Dan Casper on keyboards and Bryan Lanser on percussion.
Director Barbara Valente gives the show a sharp-looking production on a wondrously versatile set (by Joe Ragey) of cylindrical blocks and slide projections, all framed between Torah-like scrolls. Led by an engaging Phillips, who pushes the cute side of Ben just a bit, the cast works hard, but often isn't up to the demands of the store.
NEITHER Gill nor Babin, though they handle their acting chores well enough, quite manages to bring off their major confrontation in 'What Good Is Prayer?' The chorus fails sadly in 'It's a Dirty Job,' Ben's vision of the congregation as a Damon Runyonesque gang (Ben's Broadway-style fantasy life is another theme that falls by the way-side). Fink, bursting with teen attitude, and Koss, in the underwritten role of Ellie, shine in their musical moments together.
But at this point, 'God's Hands' isn't exactly a mitzvah.
'Mad Dog' Ellroy sounds off
By Cynthia Robins
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF
JAMES ELLROY'S latest book, 'White Jazz' (Knopf, $22, 349 pages), makes previous detective fiction, including his own, read like Dr. Seuss. Pared down to the verbal equivalent of Gillespie-Kenton rebop, Ellroy's prose scans nervous, jittery, polyphonic and blood-soaked. A fugue for tinhorns, hookers, extortionists, dopers, window peepers, porno kings, crooked cops, vicious Feds, millionaires, mobsters, murderers and molesters.
For a man whose fiction treads a very thin line between violence and art, James Ellroy is deceptively charming - used to performing, spinning out catchy quotes and off-handedly telling his life story. But if life and art forge some kind of fidgety truce on his pages, you can bet that somewhere under the engaging, clownish exterior, Ellroy's more profligate, dangerous instincts lie in wait.
Right now, it's time to feed the beast - the author who answers not only to James Ellroy (not Jim, not Jimmy, certainly not Mr. Ellroy) but also 'Dog,' short for 'Mad Dog.' If you're especially nice, he'll even bark for you.
Enjoying his fame
Mr. Mad Dog's day started at an indecently early hour - 5:30 a.m. - in Houston. As he folds his long legs into a booth at Postrio, he peruses the menu, ordering up a charcuterie plate. "You share it with me," he says. "You eat the stuff with liver. I hate liver."Ellroy is enjoying every bit of new fame and burgeoning bank account, ordering two entrees at this very expensive restaurant and then flourishing a $20 tip on top of the gratuity left by his book escort. He talks fast, eats with his fingers, slurps mineral water out of his interviewer's glass and complains about his thinning salt-and-pepper hair.
A rangy, lanky guy given to teensy round glasses ("they match my beady little eyes," he jokes), Ellroy bears a passing resemblance to Adolf Hitler and nurtures a passion for cashmere sweaters. He says that when he first started writing, long "before I started marrying women," when he had $22,000 in the bank and a $600-a-month flop, he treated himself to a $1,300, zillion-ply cashmere. The navy one he's got tied around his neck over a faded red and white Hawaiian shirt is as soft as a kitten.
Twelve years ago, when Ellroy, a self-confessed druggie, alcoholic, thief, went on the wagon and wrote his first book - 'Brown's Requiem,' an elegiac stroll into Los Angeles' seedy underbelly of itinerant golf caddies, crooked cops, Mexican whores and white powder traffickers - all the elements of his well-hewn prose style were there: the offbeat hero not afraid to soil his hands or use his gun; a rogue's gallery of characters who, morally corrupt or not, are always riveting; a plot that zigs when you expect it to zag.
But Ellroy was wordier then. His sentence structure parsed. He didn't believe in italics or words in all caps. In the last five years, since he began what he calls his 'Los Angeles Quartet,' four books about the crime-garnished margins of L.A. circa 1958, he's dropped verbiage and parts of speech like a clumsy waiter with a tray full of dirty dishes.
That's not to say that Ellroy's next step is a comic book interspersed with Batman-style sound effects, but 'White Jazz,' for all its lean-mean-rat-a-tat-machine cadences, was tough to finish. It took 21 months.
"The story was all there when I started," he says. He began with a complicated 164-page outline that led to five separate rewrites. Beginning the book in a more traditional first person, Ellroy says it "felt a little flaccid to me, so I went back and cut, cut, cut, subtracting words, adding words, taking out again." Basically, he laughs, "it is bebop - it's this racist cop getting into black jazz."
Only it's an invented syntax, as artful and riveting as the dialogue in a David Mamet play, that reads just like the title - jazz.
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Romance of War in Old Asia
THE GREAT GAME
The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia
By Peter Hopkirk
Kodansha; $30; 565 pages
REVIEWED BY ANDREW LEONARD
The events in Peter Hopkirk's new history, 'The Great Game,' sound like front-page headlines from the past decade:
Angry mobs fueled by religious passion take over a foreign embassy in a Middle Eastern nation bordering the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, a Western army bogs down in the mountain fastnesses of Afghanistan, and thousands of young soldiers die. To the north, wily Muslim leaders, heirs to the tradition of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, play one superpower against another.
But Hopkirk, a onetime foreign correspondent for the London Times, has turned the clock back 100 years, to a time when the insatiably expanding empires of Russia and England were gobbling up Central Asia, seeking strategic advantages in their global struggle for commercial and military domination.
The British feared that Russia would not stop until it invaded India, the jewel of the British Empire. The Russians were obsessed with protecting their borders, psychologically scarred, suggests Hopkirk, by a disastrous Mongol invasion centuries earlier. The meeting ground, where Russian military outposts came closest to British India, was Afghanistan.
'The Great Game' is old-fashioned history written with engrossing flair. Hopkirk tells the story of this massive confrontation between the 19th century superpowers through the personal stories of the various British and Russian explorers, spies and diplomats who mapped out the uncharted mountains and deserts of Central Asia. The British wanted information on the passes where Russian troops could come storming across the mountains. The Russians sought to convince the khans of the kingdoms to their south - Bokhara, Khiva and Khokand - that it was in their best interest to accede to Russian demands. On rare occasions, the two sides met, with sometimes gallant results.
"'We will shoot at each other in the morning,' one Russian told [British explorer Captain Frederick] Burnaby, handing him a glass of vodka, 'and drink together when there is a truce.'"
The place names are exotic - Bokhara, Samarkand, Tashkent and Kashgar. Russian and British-er alike engage in thrilling feats of derring-do, dressed as Buddhist pilgrims infiltrating cities never before seen by Western eyes, or riding 700 miles over the most inhospitable terrain on Earth to relay news on the latest Russian or English advance, or simply dying alone, the victims of unspeakable treachery in remote mountain valleys.
Hopkirk tells the story well, playing up the romance and glamour while never losing sight of the overarching historical picture. Of particular relevance to current-day events is the role of Afghanistan and the history of the Central Asian Muslim khanates.
Afghanistan, with its fabled Bolan and Khyber passes, notes Hopkirk, was the traditional staging ground for the many successful invasions of India during the past 3,000 years. But when the British tried to place their own puppet on the throne, they ended up losing a 16,000-man army almost to the last soul. The fierce Afghan tribesmen were practically unbeatable, something the Soviet Union also learned after its own foray into Afghan politics.
And Central Asia? A look back at the 19th century proves that the domination of this vast area by Russia had nothing to do with Marxist ideology. The overriding imperative, demonstrates Hopkirk, was a strategic concern for the protection of the heartland. Communism may have collapsed today, but Russian interests remain the same.
England may no longer be a player in the "Great Game," argues Hopkirk, but in these post-Cold War days, America and Russia will be certain to seek their advantage, through diplomacy, intrigue and perhaps even military force, in the new republics of Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Nadzhikistan and many others.
"If this narrative tells us nothing else," writes Hopkirk, "it is that little has changed in the last hundred years." It is a point well taken.
A Vietnam War Nurse Tells Her Story
AMERICAN DAUGHTER GONE TO WAR
On the Front Lines With an Army Nurse in Vietnam
By Winnie Smith
William Morrow; 352 pages; $22
BY ALIX MADRIGAL
When nurse Winnie Smith joined the Army in 1963, she had never heard of Vietnam.
"I was 19," the San Francisco writer said on a recent visit to The Chronicle. "I grew up with very romantic notions about war, and I wanted to travel. My hope was to go to Korea so I could wear fatigues and run around in a jeep." Smith was so naive that, although a nurse, she didn't know what a condom was.
By 1966 she was in the thick of it - Long Binh, Vietnam, where "time passes quickly but the day drags on forever," as she writes in 'American Daughter Gone to War.' Hard work, exhaustion and tragedy were "facts of life," and soldiers were "put aside to die because of lack of space or staff even to try and save them."
A heart-wrenching account of Smith's wartime experiences, the book tells of her odyssey from being an idealistic young nurse who feared the war would end before she got there to becoming a battle-hardened veteran.
An important book, it is also a painful one, with its graphic scenes of young bodies torn apart: Removing a dirty bandage from the head of a wounded soldier, Smith lifted his wounded eye right out of its socket; another soldier wrapped his intestines around his neck before throwing himself off a building.
Harder still is the psychic mutilation Smith describes. Early on, she had visions of helping the "most innocent victims of war, the children." Later, she prayed the Vietnamese children would leave her alone. Although she dimly realized that bombing Vietnamese villages and shooting their children was a peculiar way to "save" them, she was so outraged at the suffering of American soldiers that she came to hate the "gooks." Once, unable to stand the sight of them, she refused to let a Vietnamese couple visit their dying 4-year old son.
Though sickened by the My Lai massacre, Smith feels that she understood it. "Inside, I scream at those who condemn the lieutenant in charge at My Lai," she writes. "I'd like them to get off their self-righteous asses and learn about war first hand ... .To watch a couple of buddies get blown to pieces and then see how long they can hang on to their high and mighty ideals."
'American Daughter Gone to War' is also the harrowing story of what happened to Smith when she got back to the "world" - cigarets and alcohol, emotional isolation, lethargy and depression, all from memories she didn't know she was suppressing.
It was difficult for Smith to talk about her war experiences, "especially because I moved to San Francisco, where there was a lot of anti-war sentiment." But she couldn't talk to her patriotic family, either. "They only wanted to hear the funny stories," Smith remembers. Her mother's chatty, chirpy letters form an ironic counterpoint to Smith's story: "Well, Winnie," she wrote, "with the way things are going I really think it would be a pleasure to stay in Vietnam for a while to get away from the world's problems ..."
The book began as therapy for Smith, a way to exorcise the grim and bloody visions she later learned to identify as flash-backs, a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. "I discover writing helps me regain control of my mind," she writes. "The reels won't stop, but I can slow them enough to record portions, and once they're put to paper, they fade back into the past, change from experience to memory."
Until the flashbacks and tears began in 1983, 16 years after her return from Vietnam, Smith says, she was so out of touch with her feelings, she didn't realize the war had left a scar.
She remembers working in the recovery room at San Francisco General Hospital when she saw an article in The Chronicle on groups for women veterans. "When I read it I almost cried," she says. "But I pushed the feelings down and just put the whole thing out of my mind."
Soon after Smith procured a vial of potassium chloride with which she intended to end her life, a cousin sent her a copy of Lynda Van Devanter's account of her time as an Army nurse in Vietnam, 'Home Before Morning.'
"The first page does not impress me," she writes. "Twelve years later she's blaming Vietnam for not being able to sleep at night. What nonsense, I think." But the book brought it all back; soon the flash-backs started, and the tears, and Smith remembered the article about women veterans, with the number of the Concord Veterans Assistance Center. The call marked the beginning of Smith's recovery.
"I'm hoping that when vets and their families read this," she says, "they'll see the value of getting out of the pattern of suppressing the pain and find a way to heal. Whatever it takes."
Caribbean Family Saga
TREE OF LIFE
By Maryse Cond, translated by Victoria ReiterBallantine; 371 pages; $18
REVIEWED BY TERESA MOORE
'Tree of Life,' a newly translated novel by West Indian author Maryse Cond, is a rococo pageant that stretches from Guadeloupe to Panama to San Francisco to Paris to London to New York to Jamaica to Haiti and back. A family saga that moves from the early days of this century to the 1970s, 'Tree of Life' follows the fortunes and misfortunes of the descendants of a dreamy peasant who vaults from the cane field into the bourgeoisie.
Cond, author of the acclaimed family sagas 'Segu' and 'The Children of Segu' is a native of Guadeloupe and has taught Caribbean literature at several American colleges, including the University of California at Berkeley.
Reading this book is like stuffing oneself on a delicious, well-cooked meal and feeling oddly ill-nourished and hungry again before the plates are cleared. So much happens so fast to so many in 'Tree of Life' that at times the book is hard to follow. Matters are further complicated by a rich, almost poetic writing style that seems at odds with such a busy narrative.
Everything that happens in 'Tree of Life' seems bigger, brighter and faster than anything that has ever happened before. This is the novel as Broadway extravaganza - lots of flashy effects and whirling about in gothic/exotic locales, strong choruses and a huge cast of head-strong lovers, wild men and wicked women, wise crones and hapless buffoons.
Albert Louis, the patriarch of the far-flung clan, loses just about everyone he has ever loved to early death. During different fits of mourning, Albert is an ascetic, a drunk or a hermit. Nicknamed "Soubarou" or "Wild Man," Albert spends so much time in the throes of grief that one is relieved when the self-absorbed old man finally dies his own death.
One might think the deaths of several characters would simplify the novel, but in 'Tree of Life,' death is simply another country, like France or America. Many of the dead, more vindictive and vigilant than ever they were in life, return to meddle in the lives of the living.
Cond employs the style of legend and fairy tale to limn these figures: "Jacob was born far away from the Boyer-de-l'Etang plantation, in a forest in Massachusetts, three years after Albert's head had slipped down between Thodora's tortured thighs while she prayed to God: 'Let it be a boy! A boy!'" The result is like a highly imaginative and detailed woodcut - within the tilt of a head or the design on a skirt, one might get an outline of a people, but such one-dimensional forms give few clues to an individual soul. Cond uses punctuation to heighten her linguistic arabesques: If all the exclamation points in 'Tree of Life' were deleted, the novel would probably be a full two pages shorter.
The novel's narrator further contributes to the book's maddening opacity. The story is told by young Claude Ela<*_>i-circ<*/>se Louis, the illegitimate daughter of Thcla, a spoiled, dissolute beauty who flees the comfort of the family compound in Guadeloupe for a series of lovers in Paris, London, Manhattan and Jamaica.
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POP REVIEW
MTV Show: Where's the Bite?
By CHRIS WILLMAN
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Even in the realm of pop-culture vulgarity, as the MTV Video Music Awards demonstrates, this is the era of down-sized expectations.
Remember that special MTV moment just a few years back when, in the middle of 'Vogue,' an unidentified male dancer heartily squeezed Madonna's corseted bust on cue for all the cable-equipped world to see?
The closest thing to that 'high-light' in Wednesday's telecast came when Howard Stern, costumed in his bare-derriered 'Fartman' persona, pointed to his saggy behind and ordered Luke Perry to "touch it for power." This prompted the TV hunk to gamely give the radio personality a good bun-rubbing.
In this recessionary age, even bad taste isn't what it used to be.
Not that everything about the 1992 MTV Video Music Awards didn't shout bigger. The telecast lasted more than three ear-boggling hours, and was broadcast live from UCLA's Pauley Pavilion, which offers twice the seating capacity of the show's previous home, the Universal Amphitheatre. Thirteen major pop acts performed, all but two of them on the premises, all but one live.
Despite this exponential growth, this year's show may be the first in MTV history without a single genuinely, memorably provocative moment - the best (or worst) attempts of Stern and a few other shock therapists notwithstanding.
And from a live audience point of view, the move from Universal to Pauley proved a big - emphasis on big - mistake, with the arena's massive size decidedly dampening rather than heightening the intended excitement. Unlike previous MTV blowouts, TV really was the place to watch this one.
Musically, the telecast was rich with star talent, albeit only one female act - En Vogue - showing that Wednesday, at least, the M in MTV stood for 'men.'
At the climax of a diverting, if not adventurous show, Elton John showed up to share adjoining pianos with Axl Rose on Guns N' Roses' 'November Rain,' after having earlier performed his own 'The One.' Also on hand for this big finale was a 40-piece orchestra, although making out its contributions over the roar of GNR proved an impossibility for anyone at Pauley.
Bringing along their own posse of onstage partyers, the Red Hot Chili Peppers directly followed Pearl Jam in what was announced as a "battle of the bands," both of the groups agreeably turning up the musical tension level for one of the few palpable times in the proceedings.
And in a show historically dominated by high-energy barn-burner production numbers, Eric Clapton's quiet, tender 'Tears in Heaven,' written as a response to the death of his young son, was a clear favorite. In the midst of so much failed tastelessness, his inherent touch of class and his ballad's bittersweet emotion carried perhaps even more import than they might have in less frivolous company.
But as frivolity goes, another highlight was host Dana Carvey - as Garth of 'Wayne's World' - sitting in on drums with U2, via satellite, performing 'Even Better Than the Real Thing' from Detroit. Garth also joined in some rock 'n' roll repartee with Bono. "I don't mean to bug ya!" said the young Auroran, mocking one of Bono's better-known recorded quips.
Carvey's overall reception as master of ceremonies was mixed. In moments, his impressions and characters from 'Saturday Night Live' - Bush, Perot, Church Lady, et al. - brought down the house; at other times, he was dying and seemed to know it. But erratic as Carvey was, nearly everyone on hand seemed to agree he was a far preferable choice to prior host Arsenio Hall, whose benign cheer-leading had always seemed out of character for the show's intended rock 'n' roll attitude.
Not surprisingly, Nirvana went furthest in providing the show a sense of tension, some of it off-stage. Originally the band was scheduled to open the telecast with 'Smells Like Teen Spirit,' but, reportedly, when they began doing a new song called 'Rape Me' at rehearsals instead, nervous producers bumped their segment to the middle of the show.
Nirvana ended up performing the less incendiary 'Lithium,' complete with the by-now entirely predictable set-smashing finale. Having tossed himself into the drum set, singer Kurt Cobain proceeded to drool, perhaps showing off a new trick borrowed from his infant daughter.
(Other rockers felt compelled to mock Cobain's antics, on and off stage, most notably Elton John, who capped his ballad by picking up his piano cushion and dropping it to the floor.)
With Nirvana bumped from the opening slot, first-song honors unfortunately instead went to the Black Crowes, with a standard run-through of 'Remedy' that provided anything but the kind of provocation MTV usually depends on to kick off its annual showcase.
Even less impressive was the second live act, Bobby Brown, whose usually supple singing voice was inexplicably a hoarse rapper's shout during most of 'Humpin' Around,' and whose dancers looked like a mini-version of the Hammer aerobics troupe. Endearing himself to few, Brown superfluously concluded his appearance by winning the annual race to be the first star to smugly brandish the F-word on the live telecast.
(Sammy Hagar came in second in that contest, prompting Carvey to announce: "For those of you at home, he just said clucking - 'We clucking appreciate it.'")
Brown's elder statesman and rival, Michael Jackson, didn't fare much better. Whereas once a Jackson appearance of any sort would have produced some sort of anticipation, a taped performance of 'Black or White' in London seemed almost like an after-thought.
Jackson's presence was felt elsewhere, as well, albeit in less flattering ways: Axl Rose took a minor stab at him in accepting the so-called Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award on behalf of Guns N' Roses. And in the weirdest proxy acceptance speech since Marlon Brando sent an American Indian to the podium to turn down an Oscar, Nirvana sent a Jackson impersonator up to accept the first of the band's two awards, with the impostor announcing that he was changing his self-anointed title from King of Pop to "King of Grunge-Rock."
When the band later did deign to personally accept another award, Cobain - apparently alluding to stories of drug use by he and his wife - looked straight into the camera and warned against "believing everything you read."
All this mayhem might have seemed more entertaining to the 12,000 attendees, and the performances more galvanizing, had the show not been plopped down in uncomfortable Pauley Pavilion, a venue only a Bruin could love. The sole measurable benefit of the big hall: a safe distance from Howard Stern's flatulence, verbal and otherwise.
BOOK REVIEW
Terrorist Women: Muddled Thought of Maternal Ideals
By CONSTANCE CASEY
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
We women don't make up more than 10% of the world's judges and law enforcement officers but, by God, close to half of the terrorists are women. It's hard to imagine which feminist group would point with pride to this female representation among the grenade-throwers, hijackers, car-bombers and knee-cappers of the world.
The first book to deal exclusively with women terrorists, 'Shoot the Women First' may not precisely praise this group, but its author, British journalist Eileen MacDonald, at least seeks to understand it.
MacDonald wanted to find out what these 20-some violently political women had in common and to answer the question, Are women more dangerous than men? ("Shoot the women first" is reputedly an order given to Germany's anti-terrorist squad.)
MacDonald is all over the map - Palestine, Northern Ireland, Spain, Italy, Germany - diligent in tracking down women to interview. She gives us complicated women and tells the violent things they've done - blowing up planes, assassinating bank presidents, setting off bombs in shopping malls, ambushing bus loads of soldiers - but doesn't supply a unifying thread or convincing conclusions.
The author's own story might have worked as an organizing principle. She put herself in danger by talking to these women, some of whom suspected she was a police agent. We wonder what set her on the trail.
"I had always been interested in how women succeeded in what were considered to be male-dominated environments," she explains, and the reader gets a little nervous about what the author believes constitutes success.
It's odd that MacDonald's book lacks tension. Part of the blame rests with the fact that many of the people she interviewed were, so to speak, retired. Those currently active are in the Palestine Intifada, the Irish Republican Army and the Basque movement. These women stand out in the story because they are fighting, as they see it, a civil war to erase long-standing injustice.
Kim Hyon Hui, a North Korean woman who was responsible for 115 deaths when she set a bomb on a South Korean airliner, couldn't be any sort of feminist heroine. This beautiful and delicate woman, raised singing "Hack to Death the Capitalist Dogs," was just following orders. Aiming to please her North Korean bosses, she got off when Korean Air Lines flight 858 made stop, having planted a ticking bomb inside a radio in the overhead compartment.
The West German and Italian women seem to MacDonald to have muddled motives, primarily anger at authority. She finds the most interesting group closest to home. The women of the Irish Republican Army don't much like what they're doing, but can't imagine not doing it. "No one hates this war more than us," says one. "It is our country, and we hate the bloody war."
MacDonald's theory that the women terrorists hold maternal feelings for the cause is pretty hard to swallow. Khaled, who now works in a refugee camp near Damascus, remembers watching a little girl playing in the airport lounge before they boarded: the girl with her toys, Khaled with her grenades and gun. It worried her that the girl might die. "Then," she says, "I remembered all the countless thousands of Palestinian children in the refugee camps. They were depending on me to tell the world about them."
It's a big stretch from that to MacDonald's conclusion: "One can begin to see why a woman fighter should be more feared than a man: she views her cause as a surrogate child ... ." MacDonald turns out to be guilty of the same anti-feminist thinking she criticizes: the stereotype that a woman doesn't get angry on behalf of a cause; she has to be the mother bear protecting her cub.
In fact, MacDonald's interviews show that women can find ecstasy in being immersed in a cause. Their attachments to fellow cadre members are intense, and the drama of their lives is heightened by the possibility of being captured, tortured or even killed.
In her conclusion, MacDonald makes a rushed, halfhearted attempt to link the women to a common past. A few lost one parent when they were young, she finds, but the majority were "disturbingly normal." She quotes the head of Germany's anti-terrorist squad, who states with weird pride, "German women are more liberated and more self-aware than Italian and French women ... ."
Then she writes, equally bizarrely, "German women have thrown off the shackles of the traditional woman in society and have realized that there is no reason why they should not be violent." Are we supposed to get up and cheer, "Go, fight, win, German terrorist women"?
Instead of drawing her own conclusions, MacDonald keeps going back to one German anti-terrorist who definitely believes that the female of the species is deadlier than the male. Really? With a grenade in your hand, a package with a bomb under your arm, and a gun tucked in your belt, does it really matter whether you are female or male?
MOVIE REVIEW
'Bridge': Buddy Story With a Drug Twist
By MICHAEL WILMINGTON
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Semi-autobiographical coming-of-age movies have some built-in traps and Mike Binder's 'Crossing the Bridge' (city-wide) tumbles right into them. In this rock 'n' roll '70s reverie about a trio of high school buddies bumbling a drug-smuggling adventure, Binder mines his own memories, sometimes movingly or humorously, sometimes opportunistically. But, just as in his script for 1990's 'Coup de Ville,' he tends to pump them up, restage his past in action movie or teen-sex comedy terms.
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Kim Hunter tackles Dickinson
Belle of Amherst at Theatre Club of Palm Beaches
By CHRISTINE DOLEN
Herald Theater Critic
Julie Harris, among the greatest American actresses to grace a stage, played an integral part in developing what came to be one of the strongest of the one-person shows: William Luce's The Belle of Amherst. Her incandescent portrayal of 19th Century poet Emily Dickinson won Harris the 1977 Tony Award as best actress, and on long tours she shared her vibrant vision of the famously reclusive, innovative, romantic literary figure.
Though created for and identified with Harris, The Belle of Amherst offers actresses of a certain age - Dickinson is 53 at the time of the play - the all-too-rare opportunity to entertain and enlighten an audience, and solo yet. So it is easy to understand the ongoing appeal of the piece, both to performers and audiences.
Another strong actress, Kim Hunter, has put The Belle of Amherst into her repertoire, and she's tackling it again at the Theatre Club of the Palm Beaches. Hunter, who was on the receiving end of Marlon Brando's bellowed "Stella!" in A Streetcar Named Desire (and who won an Oscar for that performance), moves adeptly through the taxing two-hour show. But is it a perfect hand-in-glove, actress-in-role fit, as it was for Harris? Not really.
The playwright, drawing on Dickinson's poems and letters and the writings about her, presents an engaging woman who was almost self-consciously "eccentric" - a woman who, as a teenager, speculated that she might soon become the belle of her hometown of Amherst, Mass., though fate and choice turned her into a "half-cracked" spinster who habitually dressed in virginal white.
Talking with her "visitors," as she calls the audience, she confides the facts and emotional content of her life, discussing the "austere" father who never kissed her good night, the brother she adored, the married Presbyterian minister who made her lonely heart soar, the Atlantic Monthly editor who was both mentor and crushing critic to her.
Interwoven, of course, are passages of Dickinson's glorious poetry, touching on her recurrent themes of death, nature, unrequited love and immortality.
"I dream about father every night, always a different dream," she says after speaking of Squire Dickinson's death. "His heart was pure and terrible."
Or, absorbing her mentor's refusal to publish her poems, she asserts, "My business is to sing. What difference does it make if no one listens?"
And, naturally, "Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul."
Hunter, moving comfortably over Allen D. Cornell's evocative set with its carefully arranged antiques, takes us on Dickinson's journey from hopeful youth to underappreciated artist. Her long fingers comb through the gossamer light as she emphasizes a point or exudes excitement.
The performance is solid, professional. What it lacks, though, is a kind of inhabiting passion, a deep communication of the contradictory soul that was Emily Dickinson. One of the poet's comments about a friend and fellow writer could just as well describe Hunter's work in The Belle of Amherst: "She has the facts, but not the phosphorescence."
Weight-loss obsessions explored in often-sad Famine Within
By RENE RODRIGUEZ
Herald Staff Writer
Diets. Open the newspaper or turn on the TV, and you're bound to come across a story or ad dealing with yet another fast way to lose weight. According to The Famine Within, an often-fascinating documentary by Canadian-based filmmaker Katherine Gilday, one out of every two American women is on a diet at any given time.
Through interviews with psychologists, models and their agents, writers, doctors and normal everyday women, Gilday has taken a look at a part of American culture that has grown into a billion-dollar industry. What she has produced is an enlightening, often-sad film about why some women spend their entire lives battling their own bodies.
The documentary is divided into three segments: The first focuses on the fashion-model industry and its "ideal" woman - 5 feet, 11 inches, 115 pounds, measurements 35-25-35 (even agents admit that this ideal is very hard to find). Since the 1960s, the film tells us, the gap between the "average" American woman and this "ideal" has ballooned. What's worse, Gilday notes, today's fashion models have become role models for younger women, and even little girls, who will do their best to reach that unrealistic ideal.
Next comes a look at anorexia nervosa, the eating disorder that causes mostly young women to starve themselves. "I'd rather be dead than fat," one anorexic woman says nervously into the camera. The final section deals with bulimia, another eating disorder in which the sufferer gorges and then forces herself to vomit. The interviews here are among the film's most painful.
At its best, The Famine Within explores the American female psyche and why women often go to extreme lengths to achieve the popular image of beauty. In modern society, Gilday states, obesity is a moral, not physical, trait; being fat is often associated with being lazy, dirty or stupid, a connection of which we're often only subconsciously aware.
The film covers a lot of ground and is full of revealing, sometimes startling bits of information: One California study, for example, found that 80 percent of fourth-grade girls have already been on their first diet.
But Gilday tends to overuse the 'talking head' shots, and the material she uses to connect her interviews - shots of models on a runway, women on a beach - aren't always very interesting. And toward the film's end, some of the subjects repeat what has already been said.
Still, The Famine Within is a stimulating look at a widespread American phenomenon. After seeing it, you'll never think of miracle diets or lose-weight-quick schemes in the same way.
RECORD REVIEWS
King King brings the real blues to life
The Red Devils, King King, Def American
MICHAEL CORCORAN
Dallas Morning News
With shovels of dirt thrown down by creative laziness, horn charts, yuppies and something called the Fabulous Thunderbirds, the blues are dead. Or so I thought until greeted with this scintillating debut. Not since Muddy Waters' mid-'70s band (featuring Jerry Portnoy, Guitar Jr., Pinetop Perkins and others) has a blues group had such a good sense about what is so thrilling about real blues. That these five guys are young, white Los Angelenos doesn't detract from their powerful performance. The Red Devils do for the blues what Dwight Yoakam did for country six years ago.
The franchise here is singer-harmonica player Lester Butler. Besides blowing a cool, dusty harp, he's a singer who reaches down, deep down, to pull out beads of emotion. Though most of the songs are covers of artists such as Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter, Junior Wells and Muddy Waters, Butler is no mere imitator. He sounds like he's earned the right to play the blues.
Chalk up another big victory for producer Rick Rubin in his quest to return grit, sweat and street to modern music. Even though this record starts to drag a little halfway until the ending - which almost becomes a relief because of too much compulsory riffing - for several glorious minutes, the Red Devils revive the blues.
English Chamber Orchestra, World Anthems, RCA-Victor
TOM MAURSTAD
Dallas Morning News
I know what you're thinking: What would anyone want with an album of 30 national anthems? It IS true that the scenario in which one would want to cue up, say, Norway's national anthem (Ja, vi elsker dette lander) is an elusive one. Which makes it tempting to view this timely collection as one of the more absurd examples of the marketing bonanza that has overtaken the Olympic experience, now more a selling spree than a sporting event.
Then again, an album gathering national anthems is at least an interesting product. After enduring that procession of crassness, the songs-videos making up Barcelona Gold (the official collection of Olympic-inspired songs by contemporary pop artists), the Lithuanian anthem sounds pretty good. In fact, listening to 30 national anthems strung together makes for instructive listening.
Because I recognized only a handful of these anthems, I was able to play the game in which I tried to name that country. Consequently, I discovered how discrete the relationship between a country and its anthem can be (with so many featuring a regally blaring brace of horns, I kept guessing Austria). Another quickly evident pattern is how so many anthems are military processionals, calls-to-arms marches (such as Egypt's Hail, Gallant Troops). It makes you think about how seemingly intractable is the rooting of national identity in war-making. Or maybe I've just been watching too much CNN lately.
It remains unclear why this collection was limited to these countries. Maybe this is something like a greatest-hits package - the world's Top 30 anthems. Not to sound an unpatriotic note, but in that context, The Star-Spangled Banner doesn't fare very well. I prefer the more forthright self-celebration of Hungary's anthem, God Bless the Hungarians, or Ethiopia's 30-second trumpet exercise with the post-modern title, Instrumental. I can't wait for the extended dance mix.
Al Jarreau, Heaven and Earth, Reprise
JONATHAN EIG
Dallas Morning News
Al Jarreau has been moving steadily away from jazz since the Moonlighting theme, and with this album his journey is nearly complete. The man with the mellow voice pulls out all the stops in search of the broadest possible audience, but he ends up trying too hard. Instead of a plush, soulful album that showcases his silky voice, Jarreau goes pop crazy. The 10 songs take on the atmosphere of a musical circus - albeit a mellow one - as clammy synthesizers, electric drum machines and sappy background vocals compete for attention. Each song seems produced by committee and performed by a small army. Jarreau's greatest strenghth, his improvisational doodlings, suddenly sound rehearsed.
Blue Angel begins with a sharp, funky groove that quickly becomes mired in a bog of heavy-handed instrumentation. Even on the straightforward ballad Heaven and Earth, synthesizers mimic the singer's every syllable, mocking the album's only asset. Instead of inducing romance, this sugary goop leaves the listener feeling sticky. Superfine Love is not content to open with a pretty horn solo or a simple whistle, so it uses both. Still, it's the best song on the album because it maintains a relatively gentle swing for Jarreau to work out on.
If there is a nod to jazz here, it's Jarreau's stringy arrangement of Miles Davis' Blue in Green. But the pop singer can't leave it alone. After a few choruses of pleasant if uninspiring swing, he flicks the echo switch on his microphone, cues the electric bass and punches up an even less inspiring hyperactive rhythm.
If record buyers reward this effort, expect Jarreau to drop even the pretense of jazz on future efforts.
ANN WHITE THEATER PRESENTS WALLS DON'T TALK
By GEORGE CAPEWELL
Special to The Herald
Jody Hart's The Walls Don't Talk to Me Anymore - winner of the eighth annual Ann White Theatre New Playwright Competition - aspires to be a morality play for the '90s, and it partly succeeds. But much of its message is diffused through old-fashioned overextension.
Selected from among more than 500 manuscripts submitted, the play is about a small group of teenagers who ingratiate themselves with an 84-year-old man, then go about methodically stealing his most prized possessions.
Everett (Charles Mace) and Harry (Gust Miller), two very different men, have shared the same park bench for the last five years. Harry spends his time feeding pigeons and expounding his own special brand of cynicism; Everett, a former English teacher, has lived a rather protected life, occupied for the most part by intellectual pursuits. (Sounds an awful lot like Herb Gardner's I'm Not Rappaport.) One day, two gruff teenage girls, Gina (Carol Ann Ready) and Patsy (Lori Sherman), engage the older men in conversation. Everett befriends the girls and after a second meeting, invites them to his condominium. Everett's nephew, Martin (Jeff Stevenson), wants him to sell the condo, and although Martin's intentions are not totally amoral, Everett is well aware that his only living relative covets his small estate.
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MAGAZINES/BY DEIRDRE DONAHUE
Revamped 'Bazaar' a picture of elegance
We all have our blind spots. And, indeed, some of us cherish them as though they were distinctive leopard spots revealing character. Quite simply, this reader doesn't entirely understand the purpose of fashion magazines and their ceaseless chronicling of changing hemlines, color schemes and fresh new faces and forms. Frankly, it always seems a bit sad that by the time most women have the money to devote to fashion, they no longer possess the waistlines nor the firm young flesh so necessary for haute couture. Sometimes those Women's Wear Daily society page icons end up resembling E.T. in their designer frocks.
These caveats aside, the newly redesigned, much-anticipated, thoroughly gossiped about Harper's Bazaar displays in its September issue a calm, elegant new design and absolutely lush photos by Patrick Demarchelier. His work displays a posed perfection that seems to celebrate the pre-'60s, less hysterical world of fashion photography. Indeed, his work is so spectacular, it makes the other photo spreads in this issue look a touch drab by contrast. Compared to the sometimes frantic Vogue, the new Harper's Bazaar unveils a distinct simplicity, although the typeface is so tiny as to strain the eyeballs.
The articles explore topics ranging from the fate of ritzy department stores to Detroit-born designer Anna Sui to issues of women's health and multiculturalism in the schools.
But hey, the Hearst organization hired editor Liz Tilberis to go designer heel to heel with the stylish Anna Wintour at Vogue and those lesser lights at Elle and Mirabella, over the nebulous direction of style. You know, all that elan, fluffy stuff women are so conflicted about: i.e., can a female neurosurgeon look at a series of pages devoted to how designers treat the neck, the wrist, the waist this season and not have her IQ drop several points? Or is this just reverse sexist snobbery on the part of the blusher-shunning feminists? After all, no one claims that Car&Driver requires serious mental lifting on the part of all those male readers who happily inhale the Lamborghini dream. They never fear that wives and girlfriends will consider them rivetheads on the basis of their heavy-metal manuals.
And in the end, both fashion and car magazines are both in the fantasy business of youth, beauty, adornment and the magical dream of never saying die.
BOOK REVIEW
Leonard's agreeable but diluted 'Rum Punch'
Rum Punch
By Elmore Leonard
Delacorte Press
297 pp., $21.
By Peter S. Prichard
USA TODAY
Rum Punch is not Elmore Leonard's best work.
Oh, the sharp dialogue is there. Leonard's ear for the cadence of street talk is as keen as ever. And the lowlifes are their usual despicable selves. The Principal Villain, gun-runner and killer Ordell Robbie, thinks he's as slick and untouchable as John Gotti thought he was.
But Rum Punch is, well, not dull, but maybe thin is the best word. Not quite the novel you would expect from the man critics call "America's finest crime fiction writer."
I would argue with that. I think James Lee Burke, with his New Orleans detective, Dave Robicheaux, is better. I think Tony Hillerman, whose Navajo mysteries evoke the spirit of the Southwest, constructs more compelling protagonists. Carl Hiaasen, who does south Florida at its most outrageous, is funnier. Charles Willeford, the Miami Herald reviewer who wrote several good crime novels before he died, did bad guys as well or better than Leonard.
Even so, Rum Punch keeps you turning the pages. Ordell Robbie steals guns, rips off guns from nutso neo-Nazis and sells them to crazed Colombian drug dealers. Then he blows away anyone who might snitch on him.
Max Cherry sells bail bonds. He gets mixed up with Ordell and Jackie Burke, the pretty airline attendant who smuggles Ordell's money into the USA from his stash in the Bahamas. Then they get all mixed up together, each trying to rip the other off, <*_>a-grave<*/> la The Grifters. The big question is whether Max Cherry will stay straight or go on the grift. "You plan to rip me off," Ordell tells Max. "(But) lost your nerve. Gonna have to stay a bail bondsman, deal with the scum while you try to act respectable, huh? The rest of your life."
Trying to figure out whether Max will beat the lowlifes or join them makes for decent entertainment in this mildly satisfying summer book.
BOOK REVIEW
Edwardian letters, intimate literature
The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell, Volume I: The Private Years. 1884-1914
Edited by Nicholas Griffin
Houghton Mifflin
553 pp., $35
Vita and Harold: The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson
Edited by Nigel Nicolson
Putnam, 452 pp., $29.95
By Diane Cole
Special for USA TODAY
Read together, The Selected Letters of Bertrand Russell and Vita and Harold provide the spiciest picture of Edwardian England imaginable. Here are the ups and downs of marriages among patrician Britons whose extramarital flings and romantic flights would put even bohemians today to shame. Yet even as their private foibles unfold, Russell in his letters and Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West in theirs also display the wit, intellect and qualities of mind that not only made them attractive to their contemporaries, but captivate us today.
Famous as a philosopher, mathematician and political idealist, Russell eventually won the Nobel Prize for literature, and these letters demonstrate his abundant gifts not only as a thinker, but as a stylist.
Nicholas Griffin has edited this first of two projected volumes of selected letters (Russell's total correspondence numbers 40,000 to 50,000, Griffin estimates) with an emphasis on Russell's more private dilemmas. In doing so, he has crafted an informative, entertaining and often moving novelistic chronicle of Russel's passage from the earnestness of young adulthood through the muddles of early middle age.
Born in 1872 to one of England's most famous political families, Russell suffered the deaths of both his parents by the time he was 4 and was brought up in relative seclusion by his grandmother. She struggled to hold on to her favorite grandson, even in adulthood, by setting up extraordinary emotional obstacles to his marriage to Alys Pearsall Smith. But as his letters show, not only was Russell equally tenacious - he and Alys wed in 1894 - he seemed to thrive on emotional turmoil. As soon as the scene seemed set for a comfortable married life, Russell slowly but surely became disenchanted with Alys and devoted himself for some years almost exclusively to his work. The result was some of the most brilliant philosophical writing of the century, but inwardly Russell felt he had become "a logic machine."
Then, in 1911, he met Lady Ottoline Morrell, the famous society hostess who became the love of his life - an emotionally tumultuous courtship that spawned Russell's most passionate, despairing, charming and agitated letters, sometimes all at once.
Like Russell, the novelist Sackville-West and her diplomat-writer husband Nicolson also seemed to compose a letter for every mood. But how different their moods - and their loves - were. Russell, famous logician though he was, is all romantic intensity in his courtship of Alys and his wooing of Lady Ottoline. By contrast, Nicolson and Sackville-West display a sense of perspective (and, under the circumstances, a singularly strong commitment to their on-going marriage) even when their independent love affairs are at their most intimate.
Vita and Harold married in 1913 and had two sons, the youngest of whom, Nigel, wrote the well-known memoir of his parents' unusual union, Portrait of a Marriage, to which this collection of letters is an apt companion. Both books dramatize the mutual devotion these partners shared throughout 50 years of marriage; both books also make the reader wonder at how they managed to balance that allegiance with the many homosexual and lesbian love affairs each had and sometimes discussed with each other.
To judge from these letters, part of the answer lies in simple logistics. Nicolson preferred the city, where he kept a pied-<*_>a-grave<*/>-terre, while Sackville-West kept primarily to their country estate, where she wrote her books and cultivated what became world-famous gardens. Nicolson's diplomatic duties also took him abroad frequently, usually alone.
With so much physical separation, each may have felt freer to develop emotional ties outside their time together. Moreover, writing these letters seemed to serve as a way of re-assuring each other of the deeper ties of friendship, loyalty and - yes - love that bound them.
Thus their correspondence, like Russell's, provides sympathetic insight into otherwise mystifying arrangements. Both collections also make us privy to the storms and calms that only international telephone operators could possibly know if these most literate of letter writers lived today.
TV PREVIEW/MATT ROUSH
Shining knights may not save 'Cross'
NEW SERIES
Covington Cross
ABC, tonight, 10 ET/PT
<*_>star<*/><*_>star<*/> (out of four)
There's plenty of iron, but not near enough irony, in the squishy swashbuckling of ABC's inexplicable Covington Cross, the first and far from the best (or worst) new show of the traditional fall TV season.
ABC couldn't seem to wait to inflict this cheerful anachronism on us, as if all too aware how tough a sell this knaves-and-waifs-in-shining-armor saga would be. Tonight's pilot repeats a week from Friday night, with new episodes not expected until Sept. 19, when it moves to low-impact Saturday.
Having already exhausted the teen Western in The Young Riders, ABC now leapfrogs several centuries backward for this lavishly produced but creaky Excalibur Jr.
More like a medieval High Chaparral, the biggest charge in this pilot - which I caught this weekend during previews at a movie theater - comes after a rambunctious opening of swordplay and havoc, interrupted when grumpy dad Sir Thomas Gray (Nigel Terry) yells at his errant-knight sons: "How many times have I told you: Not in the castle!"
Cute. Cute. But something short of a hoot.
As the convoluted plot gets under way, the tone shifts from this sort of deadpan Full Castle sitcom spoofery (raunchy table manners, rebel kids, what's a widower dad to do) to deadly earnest melodrama with obviously villainous scheming neighbors. They wear black.
Is this a joke? Is it for (un)real? A bit of both, and not enough of either.
Two of Sir Thomas' boys are so interchangeable one will be sent to the Crusades by the time episode 2 rolls around, replaced by yet another brother. That leaves us with youngest bro Cedric, a reluctant clerical student who wants to be knight. He's played by punkish Glenn Quinn, best known as Roseanne's oldest daughter's squeeze and who's not entirely at ease in a jerkin.
Similarly out of place is Ione Skye (... Say Anything) as proto-feminist daughter Eleanor. She prefers archery to harp lessons, and says her lines with flat zoned-out inflections that make her seem as if she'd beamed in from some suburban mall Renaissance fair.
Maybe this is what's meant by an "international" cast.
With a grating score that sounds like John Williams at his most redundant, and plotting so familiar it ends in a duel fought in slo-mo, Covington is just the first Cross ABC will have to bear this fall.
But, no doubt, not for long.
INSIDE TV
Andrew gives momentum to The Weather Channel
Long the lightning rod of material for stand-up comics, The Weather Channel has been at the center of the Hurricane Andrew story.
"We've tweaked the programming to really feature the hurricane," says Stu Ostro, the channel's senior meterologistmeteorologist. "We've sent a crew to the Miami area to file reports not only for us but for a number of local stations."
Local outlets that are affiliates of the news co-op Conus have had live Weather Channel updates, which can only bolster the channel's identity. "This is the political convention, the World Series and the Super Bowl all rolled up into one," Ostro says. "As early as (Sunday) morning, when the other TV media were giving the storm little attention, we were already at the update desk saying how dangerous it was. That lets people know we are not a joke."
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Jackie Gleason's Dark Side Revealed in New Bio
The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason.
By William Henry III. Doubleday, $21.95.
Kay Gardella
He had everything: talent, fame, money and power. Jackie Gleason's public adored him. His 'Honeymooners' is spoken of as one of the great classics of television's half--century.
Yet, with it all, 'The Great One', as he called himself, had a dark side. He was deeply sensitive, introspective, and suffered fits of depression, loneliness and anger. If you were a Gleason fan, then let Time magazine's culture critic William Henry III take you along on a journey through the deepest recesses of this great comic's life and times in his excellent biography, 'The Life and Legend of Jackie Gleason.'
This is not your typical celebrity book, but a real journalist's-eye-view of Gleason, warts and all, a tome that captures the man's flamboyance, generosity and showmanship, as well as his many faults, insecurities and contradictions.
It's the end result of 150 interviews with those who worked closely with Gleason - including Art Carney, Joyce Randolph, Sheila McRae, Audrey Meadows, his writers, friends and enemies. Although Henry, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, conceded in an interview that he found "very few who disliked him."
That even includes the great comic's head writer, Coleman Jacoby, who, as Henry said, "had epic battles over credit where serious money was involved. Still, he considered Gleason the most talented and interesting man he ever worked for."
The thoroughly researched, exquisitely written biography covers Gleason's life from his poor boyhood in Brooklyn, where at an early age his father deserted him and his mother, through his early struggling years as an entertainer and his ultimate success on television (he spent 18 years on CBS), films and on Broadway ('Take Me Along'). Along the way there were three marriages. The book is about a man who, despite his outgoing personality, remained an enigma to many.
"Who was Jackie Gleason?" writes Henry. "To Art Carney, he was 'the greatest talent I ever worked with,' but far more boss than friend, so distant that he would be out of touch for years, until the next deal came along. To Joyce Randolph, the original Trixie on 'The Honeymooners', Gleason was an unknowable man, hidden behind psychic walls, touchy and temperamental, whom she didn't even dream of inviting to her wedding. But to Audrey Meadows (who played Alice Kramden), Gleason was a man of boundless warmth and great restraint, a genius on stage and almost a saint off it."
What intrigued him about Gleason, the 42-year-old Henry said, was that "the bigger and more extreme Gleason got, the more real he became," when usually, "most actors, to convey reality, pull everything in until they're almost catatonic.
"Borrowing George Abbott's old phrase, he was louder, faster and funnier. He consumed more, did more, sinned more, repented more, and simply plunged into life when most of us dip our toes into it."
If as the book suggests, Gleason was a moody and angry man at times, he was also loyal and given to bursts of generosity.
As Henry, quoting sources, said: "If you were his secretary, you'd be it as long as you could get yourself into the chair and answer the phone. And if you were his driver, you'd be it until your license was revoked."
For those who miss Gleason, and appreciated his talent, Henry's book will be a revelation. The author, who writes that he felt like the reporter in 'Citizen Kane', after all the searching and digging, and exposing of his subject's darker side, said he still admires the man. "There were aspects of him that were very brave, and even noble, but I wouldn't have wanted to work for him."
Cuba: A Journey. By Jacobo Timerman.
Translated by Toby Talbot, Vintage paperback, $9
Charles Solomon.
Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman casts an unflinching eye on the self-proclaimed 'workers' paradise' of Castro's Cuba in this vivid journal.
Instead of a Marxist Elysium, he finds a depressingly typical dictatorship, whose ruler, 'El Commandante', insists on being referred to by a string of titles as long as any Holy Roman Emperor's.
A former prisoner of conscience, Timerman has firsthand knowledge of the ruses despots employ, and he immediatly notes the glaring discrepancy between Castro's image as the caring, all-knowing savior of his country and his alleged ignorance of the mismanagement and corruption that have reduced the inhabitants of this once-prosperous island to poverty.
Kai Bird Introduces Readers to 'The Chairman'
THE CHAIRMAN: JOHN J. MCCLOY, THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT. By Kai Bird. Simon&Schuster, $30.
Bill Barnhart
Writer Kai Bird has produced a long, intensely researched account of the man who was called the chairman of America's establishment, yet who is unknown to most Americans.
Despite humble beginnings in Philadelphia, lawyer John J. McCloy became the essence of the behind-the-scenes operative, advising and obeying presidents and tycoons from the 1930s until his death in 1989.
Walking in McCloy's footsteps, we tread an astounding amount of American history and witness the development of an establishment mind-set that brought us Iran-Contra on the one hand and a diminished nuclear threat on the other. Along the way, we see McCloy reshape one of America's leading banks, Chase Manhattan, as well as the World Bank. He helped set the tone for relations between the country's private-sector elite and its federal government.
McCloy, from his base in the Wall Street legal fraternity, was a ubiquitous participant in world history, who shunned publicity and never stood for electoral review by the American public. As Bird tells it, he was not motivated by money but by a keen instinct for problem-solving and a sense of duty. He never displayed power or wealth ostentatiously and worked well into his 80s to support his ailing wife.
The peculiarities of McCloy's beliefs worked themselves into the core of American policy, especially foreign policy, under the last six presidents. Deeply involved in investigations of German espionage during World War I, McCloy came to espouse a strong - some would say radical - ends-justifies-the-means approach to national security.
The roots of Central Intelligence Agency excesses, and even the Watergate burglary, can be traced to the McCloy mind set. He aquiesced in the internment of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent during World War II and facilitated the release of Nazi war criminals to improve U.S. relations with postwar Germany.
On the other hand, he worked to integrate the U.S. Army. He was a strong advocate of nuclear disarmament negotiations and pushed a liberal view toward the sovereignty of such pivotal countries as Egypt.
Excellent historical writing draws on personal dilemmas to illuminate events. In this regard, Bird has produced a monumental achievement. At the risk of overstating McCloy's role, Bird presents history through the decisions McCloy made in his career.
Excellent biography, on the other hand, requires more. And if 'The Chairman' can be faulted, it would be for not probing deeper into McCloy. The beginning and end of the book explore McCloy's personality and character. In between, we learn a lot of McCloy but not enough about him. There is little discussion of his relationship with his wife of 56 years, Ellen, or their children. We don't hear enough about McCloy from those who knew him best professionally and socially.
Just as the monarchy seems to be unraveling in tabloid headlines in Great Britain, America's gentlemanly East Coast establishment - our approximation of royalty - has lost much of its credibility and utility in an age of no-holds-barred public debate and opened-collared billionaires like Microsoft's Bill Gates.
The idea of an American elite imbued with a beneficent sense of America's place in the world and able to "rise above private interests" and "discern public good," as Bird puts it, is looking a bit threadbare and even dangerous. It's important to walk in John McCloy's footsteps, but there don't seem to be many Wall Street lawyers willing or able to fill his shoes.
THE NEW ROADSIDE AMERICA.
By Mike Wilkins, Ken Smith and Doug Kirby.
Fireside paperback, $13.
Charles Solomon
Thomas Carlyle wrote that it was America's mission to vulgarize the world, but this tongue-in-cheek guide to roadside tourist attractions (with pictures!) suggests that vulgarity, like charity, begins at home.
The authors highlight such tacky landmarks as the largest tree stump, in Kokomo, Ind. (57 feet in circumference); the 4 1/2-story muskellunge (the world's largest fiberglass structure) at the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame in Hayward, Wis.; the Creation Evidences Museum in Glen Rose, Texas; Riverside, Iowa, which bills itself as 'The Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk,' and the $15 million, 45,000-square-foot 'World of Coca-Cola' pavilion in Atlanta.
Enterprising readers might copy particularly awful listings and send them to the kids of people they dislike just before they depart for a cross-country vacation.
Larry Powell
Works on Crime And Punishment
Crime and Punishment: The king of the crime writers, Elmore Leonard, is back with 'Rum Punch' (Delacorte, $21), a novel about a bail bondsman, a stewardess and a gun dealer.
The stewardess and the bail bondsman concoct a scheme to fleece the gun dealer, which is a dangerous way to get rich. Like most of the earlier Leonard novels (he's written 31, with a high degree of excellence), the twists in the story grow out of his characters' nature. It's also a funny story, with some of the best dialogue being written today.
Jerry Oster, the author of 'Fixin' To Die' (Bantam, 20$), also has a knack for writing dialogue. That's one of the attractions of his crime tale in which a thief named Elvis Polk escapes from police custody and is pursued by New York detective Joe Cullen. The detective appeared in earlier Oster novels. 'Fixin' To Die' is also about police politics and the private devils that betray police officers. Oster, former New York newspaper-man, has the city's sights and sounds down pat.
As Elmore Leonard knows Florida and Detroit, as Jerry Oster knows New York City, so Edna Buchanan knows Miami. Buchanan is a crime reporter who has been covering Miami violence and vice for 20 years. Her book, 'Never Let Them See You Cry: More From Miami, America's Hottest Beat' (Random House, 20$) is a second collection of her crime pieces. She claims to have written about 3,000 murder cases in her career and is famous for her hard-boiled, jived-up leads. If you're just discovering Buchanan, you should also pick up her first true crime collection, 'The Corpse Had a Familiar Face.'
Buchanan also published a novel, 'Nobody Lives Forever,' and has a second work of fiction coming from Hyperion in the fall. 'Contents Under Pressure' is the title.
"Fiction is so much fun," Buchanan recently said. "It's so liberating. As writers, we like everything to be tidy. We like to wrap up the loose ends. There are murders that go unsolved forever, missing people who are never found and bodies that are never identified - no matter how hard you try."
Buchanan came to Miami on vacation from New Jersey in 1961 and fell in love with the city. She has been married twice, to a reporter and to a policeman, and she likes cats.
Paragon House is publishing a remarkable series of reference books about crime. Their author is Jay Robert Nash, who won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America for his six-volume Encyclopedia of World Crime. He has written many books about crime, including the famous volumes on American desperadoes and lawmen called 'Bloodletters and Badmen.'
The first reference work in the Paragon series was 'World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime.' The second, recently published, is 'World Encyclopedia of 20th Century Murder.' Scheduled in September is 'Encyclopedia of Western Lawmen and Outlaws.' The hefty volumes, more than 600 pages long and containing 300 illustrations as well as an extensive bibliography, cost $49.95 each.
Nash's guide to organized crime contains profiles of individual gangsters, histories of crime families, and accounts of events such as the St. Valentine's Day massacre.
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Belated Tribute to a Visionary
By AUSTIN CLARKSON
STEFAN WOLPE'S MUSIC has long been admired for its uncompromising strength, vitality and adventurousness by professional composers and performers, but like many other migrs, Wolpe was never fully at home or accepted in his adoptive countries. Still, he lived and taught in New York from 1938 until his death in 1972, so it is with a firm sense of timing that Parnassus, a New York ensemble led by Anthony Korf, is marking the 90th anniversary of Wolpe's birth, which occurred last Tuesday, with the release of an album of his music.
Although musicians in Germany, England and elsewhere are now discovering Wolpe's music, the musicians in New York remain the principal custodians of his legacy, and the Parnassus CD (Koch International 7141) is a document that splendidly affirms and carries forward that tradition. There is no better introduction in the current CD catalogue to Wolpe's visionary contribution to 20th-century music.
The eight pieces are well chosen. They range from 1929 to the year before Wolpe's death in 1972, and show various sides of his output yet emphasize masterworks of his last decade. Several of them have been recorded before, but only two have thus far been heard on CD.
The earliest item was for a Berlin production of 'Hamlet' in 1929. The five-minute movement for flute, clarinet and cello probably accompanied the dumb show in the play-within-a-play. A remarkable vignette, it gives evidence of a richly polyphonic imagination, fastidious workmanship and an early mastery of free 12-tone Expressionism.
Wolpe's active service from 1929 to 1933 in the army of antifascist artists alongside Hanns Eisler, Wladimir Vogel, Ernst Hermann Meyer and others is recalled by the Three Songs of Bertolt Brecht, composed for a Brecht tribute at the Hecksher Theater in Manhattan in 1943. The melodies reflect the agitprop 'Kampflieder' (fighting songs) of the 30's - hard-driven, modal, acrid, rejecting the allure of Tin Pan Alley - but the richly textured and harmonized piano parts raise the songs to the level of recital pieces. One hears in them the ethos that marks so much of Wolpe's music: a revolutionary utopianism that reconciles a deeply felt populism with profound faith in the value of the individual imagination.
After Wolpe fled Berlin in 1933, he settled in Palestine from 1934 to 1938, teaching at the Palestine Conservatory in Jerusalem. He wrote many solo songs and choral settings of biblical texts and contemporary Hebrew poems. 'To the Dancemaster' by Chaim Nachmann Bialik is typical of the poetry of revolt, whether by biblical prophets or modern-day authors, that moved Wolpe to musical action: "The wrath of our soul -/ our burning heart/ will now be poured out/ in our raging dance./ And the dance will rise/ with thunder and lightning/ to terrify the earth/ and stir up the heavens."
Wolpe was fascinated by the sounds of the Semitic languages, Yemenite folk songs and classical Arabic oud players, but was opposed to the practice of creating "a national Jewish style along the lines of a chemical formula." For his settings of Hebrew texts he created a ruggedly modernistic yet tonal idiom richly infused with elements of Middle Eastern melos. Joyce Castle, mezzo-soprano, and Edmund Niemann, pianist, are superb partners in the Brecht and Bialik songs. And Alan Kay's brilliant clarinet adds a wild klezmer quality to the Bialik. The songs are recorded for the first time here, and Ms. Castle, with her trenchant voice and lively, accurate enunciation, sets an enviable standard for Wolpe lieder, in both German and Hebrew.
The Quartet for Trumpet, Tenor Saxophone, Percussion and Piano, composed in 1950 and revised in 1952, lies at the juncture of the first and second phases of Wolpe's career in the United States. During the 40's Wolpe worked out systems of atonal harmony and spatial proportions that served as the bases for a series of works he composed in the 50's, of which the first was the quartet.
His music of this period has often been likened to the Abstract Expressionism of his friends Guston, Kline, de Kooning and Rothko. The forms are nonhierarchical, yet they maintain a charged flow. The quartet contains music of expansive actions and intense affects. Wolpe revealed that the work's first movement is a lament for the suffering of the Chinese people during the Long March, and the second is a street celebration of Mao Tse-tung's victory. After the powerful drum patterns, mysterious piano sonorities and keening of the trumpet and saxophone in the first movement, the second opens with a boppy unison theme that reminds many listeners of jazz.
But as with Middle Eastern music, Wolpe here is exploiting the affinity between his own language and that of jazz rather than incorporating jazz structures as such. The jazz element is one among a number of levels of language that Wolpe works with in this piece to develop what he called "its craziness and openness."
Conveying the movement's craziness and openness in performance poses a mighty challenge. Of the four recorded performances to date, the one that comes closest to Wolpe's tempo indication and to the sense of delirious joy he sought to express is Arthur Weisberg's 1974 version (Nonesuch 79222-2; CD). Mr. Korf's tempo makes possible crystalline definition of the colors and instrumental planes but fails to generate the requisite feelings and gestures.
During his last decade Wolpe was preoccupied with paring the complexities of his earlier music to essentials. He focused attention on creating sequences of intensely contrasted shapes and gestures that achieved a balance between spontaneously intuited images and logically ordered processes. In these late works, Wolpe mixes various levels of language, from unique formulations to echoes of tonal tunes, from jazzy riffs to rubbings of Beethoven and Scriabin.
Each of the four late works of the Parnassus CD (Piece in Two Parts for Six Players, Piece for Two Instrumental Units, Solo Piece for Trumpet, and Piece for Trumpet and Seven Instruments) needs to be heard as a play of intense contrasts - gathering and scattering actions, stable and mobile shapes and masses, symmetrical and asymmetrical proportions, mixed and pure colors, wit and grimness, grace and roughness.
It is from the remarkably rapid interplay of so many strongly opposing factors that Wolpe's music of the period acquires its electrifying power and haunting beauty. In these late pieces the alternation of gathering and scattering actions gains in intensity until the final scattering seems almost to throw the piece off its rails. It is often a moment of stark danger and disorder, which the final gathering close just manages to contain.
Wolpe's music pushes performers to the limits of their ability and listeners to the utmost bounds of comprehension. The juxtaposition of apparently irreconcilable elements challenges the listener to rivet absolute attention until some unforeseeable illumination appears as a kind of grace.
Mr. Korf and his Parnassians perform Wolpe's late music with a technical mastery of its labyrinthine intricacies and a lively understanding of its lightning shifts of structure, mood and image that bespeak many years of familiarity with it. They are worthy heirs to a 30-year tradition of Wolpe performance in New York.
Gorecki: A Trendy Symphony and Beyond
By JOHN ROCKWELL
IT'S EASY TO BE CYNICAL ABOUT the recent flurry of mainstream enthusiasm for the music of the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. The interest centers on a few pieces - the Symphony No. 3, in particular - that are consonant and songful, far from any hint of off-putting modernist abrasiveness. It is fueled by trendy artists like the Kronos Quartet and a trendy record company, Elektra Nonesuch. Mr. Gorecki's music is being promoted to the same young audience that laps up Arvo Part, Sofia Gubaidulina and, horror of horrors, the American Minimalists.
But cynicism slights the quality of Mr. Gorecki's achievement. Born in 1933, he studied in Paris with Olivier Messiaen and briefly became the darling of the Polish avant-garde around 1960, with huge, clashing exercises in orchestral sonority like 'Scontri' ('Collisions').
By the early 60's he began to find his true voice, which lost him two important sources of patronage. His individualism put him at odds with the Communist regime in Poland. And his increasing absorption in folk music and religion lost him the sympathy of the modernist establishment. He lives now in the polluted southern Polish industrial city of Katowice, but spends much of his time in the Tatra mountains on the Czechoslovak border, a home of particularly wild and bracing forms of folk music.
The Third Symphony (1976) dominates the Gorecki discography primarily because of a recent Nonesuch CD (79282-2) that holds a place on the classical top-10 sales chart. But of the six current CD's that include music by the composer, three contain this symphony.
Subtitled 'Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,' it is a mournful three-movement work lasting about 52 minutes. The movements are almost uniformly slow: Lento, Lento e Largo and Lento. The texts, sung by a soprano, were drawn from various sources suggesting broken bonds between mother and child, from Mary and Christ to an imploring Polish teen-ager who scratched a prayer to the Virgin Mother on the wall of a Gestapo prison in 1944.
The singing, though crucial, is set into long stretches of purely instrumental texture. The first-movement lament is flanked by the two halves of a huge canon for strings, building from near inaudibility to surging, shining triumph, and then receding. Elsewhere the music recalls not only the mystical Minimalists but also Shostakovich's late, world-weary song-symphonies, Wagner's 'Parsifal' and even the radiant simplicity of Copland's 'Appalachian Spring.'
The Nonesuch recording, with David Zinman conducting the London Sinfonietta, is a fine one. The soprano, Dawn Upshaw, sounds pure and steady yet manages to dig soulfully into this primally Slavic music. But buyers should also explore one of the competing versions.
The 1987 account on the Polish Olympia label (OCD 313; CD) offers an even better orchestral performance, by Jerzy Katlewicz and the Polish Radio National Symphony of Katowice. And Stefania Woytowicz, the soprano most closely identified with this score, makes up in experience and idiomatic fervor what she lacks in tonal steadiness.
Mr. Katlewicz plays the long opening movement a shade faster than Mr. Zinman does, and his more natural, flowing, organic account makes the score pulse with an emotional intensity that is never sentimentally exaggerated. Unlike Nonesuch, Olympia offers enticing bonuses: the 'Three Pieces in Olden Style' (1963) for string orchestra, which will be welcomed by anyone who responds to the symphony, and a short, sweet 'Amen' (1975) for unaccompanied boys' choir.
The final competitor in the Third Symphony (Koch Schwann Musica Mundi 311 041; CD) places a poor third. Wlodzimierz Kamirski's account of the work with the Berlin Radio Symphony and an even less steady Miss Woytowicz sounds prosaic, and the final movement is much quicker than in the other performances (12-plus minutes versus 17-plus).
What is missing in the current Gorecki discography is documentation of his more overtly modernist style of the late 50's and early 60's. But ultimately, his gentler works will undoubtedly come to seem part of a unified sensibility. He has always been a composer of wild extremes. He has long shown a fascination, as in the Third Symphony, for a formal elegance that doesn't preclude intense emotion, and some of his recent music is far from calm and meditative.
There are two recordings of the 40-minute 'Lerchenmusik' ('Lark Music'; 1984) for clarinet, cello and piano. The title, which suggests Messiaen's aviary enthusiasms, also derives from Lerchenborg Castle in Denmark, where the score was first performed. It and the String Quartet No. 1 ('Already It Is Dusk'; 1988) alternate furious eruptions with mystic quiescence in the best Messiaen manner.
The two pieces are paired on another Nonesuch CD (79257-2), with Kronos playing the quartet and members of the London Sinfonietta 'Lerchenmusik.' This release is clearly preferable to the other 'Lerchenmusik,' performed by unnamed members of the Camerata Vistula (Olympia OCD 343; CD). The London musicians, especially the clarinetist Michael Collins, are full of personality and passion; the Polish players sound sober and bland.
<#FROWN:C08\>
Vignettes pay homage to the icons of Santeria
ART REVIEW
'Las Siete Potencias: Mestizaje and the Aesthetics of Santeria'
Chastain Gallery, 135 West Wieuca Road N.W.
Through Sept. 2. 1-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.
257-1747 or 257-1804.
By Jerry Cullum
Arturo Lindsay calls these shrines to the seven African powers "secular art with a spiritual intent." Each shrine is filled with objects associated with the New World religion of Santeria (based on Yoruba worship from West Africa), but nothing has been actually used in religious ceremonies.
However, most viewers will find these pieces charged with aesthetic and religious energy. Each installation consists of a painting and wall sculpture, a "throne" (more resembling an elegantly modern chair), statuary, candles and votive offerings appropriate to the spirit, or orisha, being honored. (The throne and offerings sit in a low boxlike enclosure in front of the painting.) Mr. Lindsay's paintings are starkly abstracted renditions suggesting the West African version of the orisha, while the surrounding imagery often is appropriated from Catholicism.
For example, Eshu-Elugg<*_>u-acute<*/>a is shown in the paintings in his capacity as guardian of the cross-roads. The religious statue in front of the throne is that of St. Anthony of Padua, whose imagery reminded Santeria worshipers of Eshu-Elegg<*_>u-acute<*/>a's.
Mr. Lindsay uses the traditional colors of the orishas to superb effect - pure white for Obatala, vivid red for Eshu-Elegg<*_>u-acute<*/>a and Shango, yellow for Osh<*_>u-acute<*/>n, green for Orula and Ogun, and blue for Yemaya. The theme is carried out spectacularly in the Obatala shrine, in which the whiteness is carried through from the white background of the line-drawn painting to the cotton lining of the enclosure and bowl of popcorn used as the offering. The various shades of blue in Yemaya's water-associated imagery are equally striking.
It should be pointed out again that these aren't traditional shrines but artistic homages. Mr. Lindsay's paintings and thrones are crisply modern (and extremely beautiful examples of a semi-geometric style). The seashells and fragrant dried flowers spread around Osh<*_>u-acute<*/>n's shrine, the iron implements of Ogun or the moss at the feet of Orula are thoroughly traditional. But the traditional materials are part of an imaginative homage, not a traditional worship ceremony. Some traditional symbols, such as Shango's double ax, appear in a non-traditional form.
This imaginative reinvention of Santeria symbolism has been a significant part of recent Latino art in the United States. A symposium on Santeria aesthetics in contemporary Latino art, featuring an array of scholars, artist and intellectuals, will be held Aug. 6 at Spelman College. Because of limited seating, reservations are essential; call 223-7515.
'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' has Valley Girl bite
FILM REVIEW
'Buffy the Vampire Slayer'
A comedy. Starring Kristy Swanson and Luke Perry. Directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui. Rated PG-13 for language and violence.
At metro theaters.
By Eleanor Ringel
FILM EDITOR
"I can't believe I'm in a graveyard looking for vampires on a school night!" complains the stake-wielding heroine of the nimble new comedy 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer.'
There are vampires on the loose in Southern California and, according to a grizzled stranger (Donald Sutherland goofing on his Deep Throat role in 'JFK'), the only one who can stop them is the chosen Vampire Slayer - Buffy (Kristy Swanson), an airhead cheer-leader.
Buffy is not exactly what you'd call vampire-slaying material. Her favorite pastime is mall-crawling. And all she wants to do with her life is graduate from high school, go to Europe and marry Christian Slater. Her transformation into the scourge of the living dead is as unlikely as it is hilarious.
Lighthearted and light on its feet, 'Buffy' is basically a one-joke affair - Dracula's age-old nemesis, Dr. Van Helsing, reimagined as a vacuous Valley Girl. But it's handled with airy aplomb by everyone involved.
Rutger Hauer plays the suave head of the undead. Paul Reubens (the former Pee-wee Herman) is Mr. Hauer's right-hand bloodsucker. Teen idol Luke Perry is a rebel-drifter allied with Buffy in her battle against the forces of evil.
Ms. Swanson ('Deadly Friend,' 'Mannequin Two') makes a killer fearless vampire killer. She (and her doubles) can do back flips to rival Catwoman's; she's even better at handling gymnastic exchanges with her Heather Squad friends ("Puuhleese, that's so five-minutes-ago" is a typical put-down).
Maybe Buffy could guest-star on 'Wayne's World.' She's just their type.
Just call it her 'Death' by vanity
FILM REVIEW
'Death Becomes Her'
A comedy. Starring Meryl Streep, Goldie Hawn and Bruce Willis. Directed by Robert Zemeckis. Rated PG-13 for possibly scary special effects.
At metro theaters
By Eleanor Ringel
FILM EDITOR
The special-effects era in movies hasn't been especially nice to actresses. After all, no one's paired Sissy Spacek and Whoopi Goldberg in a blow-'em-up buddy flick or suggested Jessica Lange as the new RoboCop.
But that wrong has been riotously righted by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn in 'Death Becomes Her,' a wicked sick-joke comedy that blends the black wit of Billy Wilder with some of the best effects money can buy. This movie takes our nation's Eternal Youth obsession with anti-aging creams and cosmetic surgery to surreal extremes.
Madeline Ashton (Ms. Streep), a vain actress, and Helen Sharp (Ms. Hawn), a vengeful author, are deadly rivals in the style of the old '40s movies when men were men and women were Bette Davis and Joan Crawford.
In the film's hilarious late-'70s prologue, Madeline is starring on Broadway in 'Songbird!' a musical version of 'Sweet Bird of Youth.' Helen, her mousy childhood friend, brings her fiance, superstar plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis), backstage. With the merest flutter of a false eyelash, Madeline gets the good doctor in her thrall.
Madeline and Ernest go to the altar. Helen goes to the fridge, blows up to Roseanne-times-two size and lands in the loony bin.
Cut to the present. The erst-while lovebirds are locked in a mutually loathing marriage. She worries about her face ("Wrinkle, wrinkle, little star"); he's so permanently pickled that the only cosmetic job he can hold down is at a funeral home. Helen, meanwhile, has been tranformedtransformed into a ravishing redhead with long Rita Hayworth tresses, a hard body to kill for and a best seller called "Forever Young."
Her secret? Well, it has something to do with a mysterious beauty (Isabella Rosselini, slinking around like a '20s vamp) who dispenses a certain magic elixir. An elixir that Madeline is about to try out herself.
Director Bob Zemeckis, who took us "Back to the Future," turns his back on the future, with its sagging breasts and spreading middles. Instead, he concentrates on our lust for a cosmetically perfect here and now, with nipped tummies and tucked buttocks. He takes a story at least as old as 'The Portrait of Dorian Gray' and jazzes it up with some astounding state-of-the-art effects ("The Morphing of Dorian Gray?").
More importantly, Mr. Zemeckis realizes that the best effects are best served by the best actors available. The cartoon craziness of his 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' was anchored by Bob Hoskins's expertise; Ms. Streep and Ms. Hawn do the same for this film. Both are terrific comedians - whether suffering eye-popping physical mutations that would flummox Alice in Wonderland or spitting out their spite-laced dialogue (at one point, Ms. Streep sounds eerily like Elizabeth Taylor in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?').
'Death Becomes Her' loses some steam in its last half-hour, with Mr. Willis on the loose in Ms. Rosselini's Gothic castle, running into such supposedly pretty-but-dead celebs as James Dean and Jim Morrison. But it pulls itself together for one of the sickest slapstick finales in memory.
This is one strange movie. See it with one of your stranger friends. Say, someone who loves to hear Joan Rivers dish about her latest facelift.
Wonder will thrive among extinct species at Fernbank
PREVIEW
Fernbank Museum of Natural History
Opens at noon Oct. 5. Regular hours: 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Monday-Saturday; noon-6 p.m. Sunday. $5; $4 senior citizens and ages 2-12; free under 2. 767 Clifton Road N.E. 378-0127.
By Catherine Fox
VISUAL ART CRITIC
Atlanta is experiencing an unprecedented decade of cultural expansion. Art and science museums, performing arts facilities and libraries in the metro area have blossomed like azaleas, and there are more to come. The Center for Atlanta History, the Auburn Avenue Library for Research on African-American Culture and History, and an expanded Michael C. Carlos Museum are being readied for 1993 debuts.
But there's a big unveiling to celebrate this fall: the Fernbank Museum of Natural History. When the $43 million facility opens Oct. 5, Atlanta will have the largest science museum south of the Smithsonian. Fernbank will fill a vacuum in science education, to be sure. But it will play a larger role in Atlanta's psyche as well.
Fernbank is certainly a plus in the civic pride department. After all, can a city be world-class without a dinosaur or two? The museum gives us our dinosaurs - including a cast of a stegosaurus and the skeleton of a giant sloth, an 18-foot-tall Georgia native recently dredged up from the Frederica River west of St. Simons Island.
But this museum is not merely following in the paw prints of its predecessors.
"Lots of museums are built to house collections," director Kay Davis says. "We focus on the public first. Atlanta doesn't have a place where basic research can be translated for the public. This is a learning facility."
To that end, Fernbank will be the first museum of its kind, she says, "to tell a story."
The story is both specific and epic. The 12 galleries devoted to 'A Walk Through Time in Georgia' present the history of the Earth's evolution and its flora and fauna from the big bang to the future. Walk-through dioramas and interactive exhibits pair the big picture with Georgia's varied natural history.
Fernbank will be "the first truly interactive science museum," says Edwin Schlossberg, the New York exhibit designer.
The emphasis is on hands-on experience. Children learn through play in two discovery rooms geared to different age groups. Adults can research their own finds in a well-equipped lab set up for that purpose. And watching a movie on the 50-by-72-foot IMAX Theatre screen is, as anyone who has experienced one can tell you, the next best thing to being there.
Fernbank takes the integrated approach to learning a step further in establishing connections to other disciplines. The museum commissioned Atlanta composer James Oliverio to write a choral work for chorus and chamber orchestra for its opening. It will link art and science in upcoming exhibitions including 'Winterland,' a show of Norwegian paintings that will kick off Atlanta's Cultural Olympiad. (The art show will be complemented by a related science exhibit and programs.) The museum co-sponsored 'Mountain Gorilla,' its IMAX theater debut film, and plans to sponsor others.
In addition, the museum has recognized its civic responsibilities as a city builder: Like other cultural institutions here, its building offers a high level of design. Whether or not one cottons to Boston architect Graham Gund's postmodern vocabulary, at least the architecture and plan befit its purpose, unlike, for example, so many of our new governmental buildings, which look like average office buildings. Both the approach from Clifton Road and the interior offer a sequence of spatial experiences and an elevated tone.
Fernbank is undoubtedly an important new 'attraction.' An item to check off on the list of big-city amenities. Something that encourages conventioneers to bring their spouses and spend more money in Atlanta. Somewhere to take one's kids on a rainy day.
But Fernbank offers more than diversion. If it does its job, it will be a resource that helps us understand who we are and why we are. Like all of our cultural institutions, it helps us come to terms with a mystifyingly complex world.
Taking on the topical or the tried-and-true
Diverse exhibits blur boundaries of culture, mediums
By Catherine Fox
VISUAL ARTS CRITIC
In the art world, blurring boundaries is a mission, and it is a theme or subtext for some of the more intriguing exhibitions planned for Atlanta museums and galleries in the coming year.
<#FROWN:C09\>
Beans of wrath - the rise, fall of Brazil's cacao trade
THE GOLDEN HARVEST
By Jorge Amado; translated by Clifford E. Landers (Avon, $12.50)
By C.W. Smith
That chunk of chocolate you love so much will never taste the same after you've read The Golden Harvest, Mr. Jorge Amado's novel about the Brazilian cacao industry.
Though the novel, written in 1944, has only now been published in English (translated by Clifford E. Landers), the story of the cacao bean boom and bust during the 1930s in the Bahia region of Brazil seems vibrantly fresh. It will also be familiar to any who have seen oil, cotton, silver and real estate follow a similar rise and fall in recent decades with attendant human misery.
Because it was written in 1944, the novel is not afflicted by the current fashion in fiction to explore the surface of a narrow subject. The Golden Harvest is refreshingly maximalist; it follows the intersecting paths of many lively characters over the course of several years. They are peasants, drovers, poets, lawyers, prostitutes, landowners or exporters; their fates and fortunes are tied to the production and exportation of the cacao bean, and the novel charts their ongoing lives in a manner that recalls the scope and thematic intent of Dresier, Tolstoy, Norris or Steinbeck.
Working solidly in that older tradition of realism, Mr. Amado sets the book among a conspiracy of exporters in Ilheus, Brazil, who want to manipulate the price of cacao so that the growers on nearby plantations will fall into their debt and have to sell their lands to them. Because the Bahia region produced most of the world's cacao beans, from which chocolate is made, the exporters will then have almost complete control over the global market.
As might be expected of a Latin American novelist, Mr. Amado seems to use the fictionalized events to indict capitalism and a vicious free-market economy. He dramatizes the plight of plantation workers and their ceaseless, unrewarding toil in scenes reminiscent of portraits of slaves and tenant farmers in the American cotton fields. The exporters' conspiracy results in widespread hunger among the peasants, and near the end of the book, the novel's communist Joaquim, says "one day the land will belong to everyone."
But given the time and place of the novel's composition the didacticism is remarkably low-keyed when compared, say, to The Grapes of Wrath, and it's hard to tell whether Mr. Amado's implied critique of capitalism is merely obligatory or was restrained for aesthetic reasons. In any case, he doesn't allow the need to take such a stand interfere with his ability to make the characters sympathetic and fully human, no matter which side they're on.
Even the plot's mastermind, the exporter Carlos Zude, fails in the end to achieve what he has always wanted more than money: the love and fidelity of his young and beautiful wife, Julietta, who carries on an affair throughout the book with a proletarian poet, Sergio Moura.
The story focuses as much on passion as on politics, which should not surprise readers familiar with Mr. Amado's best-known translated work, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. It's here, in his interest in the characters' emotional lives, that Mr. Amado changes The Golden Harvest from tract to tragi-comedy.
Despite the large cast, dozens of characters are etched clearly because their individual quirks are described so vividly:
Raimunda was ... querulous and angry, a woman of few words who hated the parties and dances, with their harmonica and guitar music, held now and again in the houses of workers and small growers ... When she did go, she refused to dance, remaining off in a corner and complaining that her shoes hurt her feet; she would end up taking them off right there ..."
But "Whether it was picking and splitting open the cacao pods, dancing over them in the drying frames on sunny days, removing the visgo or mucilaginous pulp from the trough, she could do it all like the best worker on the plantations. And there she felt happy, among the cacao trees, waking at dawn, going to bed at dusk for the deep sleep of weariness."
Bacchic Inferno
A macabre tale of six college students, horror and murder
SECRET HISTORY
By Donna Tartt (Knopf, $23)
By Annemarie Marek
In Greek mythology, two gods of opposing character war within the human psyche - Apollo, the god of reason, and Dionysus, or Bacchus, the god of the irrational, who embodies the power and fertility of raw, unrelenting nature and its primordial forces. In The Secret History, first-time novelist Donna Tartt weaves a tale of horror and psychodrama with her macabre story of six New England college students who, under the tutelage of their professor of classics, explore the deepest, darkest realms of Greek culture.
The tale unfolds through the eyes of 28-year-old Richard Papen, whose middle-class upbringing in the small suburb of Plano, Calif., smacks of tract homes, fast food drive-throughs and supermarket specials and contrasts sharply with that of his wealthy class-mates. Richard happens upon Hampden College at age 19 almost by accident and largely from financial need.
It is here, at this rather elitist liberal arts college in the remote village of Hampden, Vt., that Richard meets Julian Morrow, the classics professor, and the five students who prove to be fatally drawn together under the auspices of pursuing the higher realms of thought and culture of the ancients - Henry Winter, tall stoic multilinguist; Francis Abernathy, elegant, dapper, gay heir to a Boston family fortune; Charles Macaulay, the alcoholic, and Camilla Macaulay, twin sister to Charles, both orphans from Virginia; and imposing, blond-haired, blue-eyed Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, son of a football star turned banker.
Naively, Richard abandons his first-year curriculum when he learns about Julian Morrow's small, select classical studies group, for Richard lives a two-faced life, hiding the details of his plain and embarrassingly uneventful middle-class childhood with fictitious stories about his past in an effort to be accepted within this inner sanctum of peers. What Richard has no way of knowing is that this inner circle, with which he has nothing in common except his knowledge of the Greek language, will pull him into a dark and vicious vortex of deceit, lies, drugs and the eventual murder of one of his own classmates, Bunny Corcoran.
The story is divided into two distinct books, the first leading up to the account of Bunny's death; the second, the murder and aftermath. Much of Richard's relationship with his classmates is superficial in nature. Initially, Richard knows little about the Dionysian experiments - using various paraphernalia to send them into uncontrollable frenzies - of Camilla, Charles, Francis and Henry until Henry's probing. In fact, it is not until the second half of the novel that Richard himself begins to understand his naivete and the horror of the incidents that have occurred.
Julian Morrow portrays the revered classics scholar whose insights about the Greek and Roman cultures lead to the teen-agers' clandestine Bacchic rites in the Vermont woods and the death of an innocent Vermont farmer. But it is Henry Winter who orchestrates the actual Dionysian rites and is the central figure who plots the subsequent murder of Bunny.
So methodical is Henry's plotting of Bunny's death and his subsequent efforts to cover up any evidence from the police and FBI that Henry assumes more and more the role of the psychopath, the true killer who has lost any sense of what is real or right.
One of the more fascinating aspects of The Secret History is the series of Dante-like dreams scattered throughout the second half of the novel. They plague Richard who, like the rest of his classmates with the exception of Henry, is haunted by Bunny's death and his hand in it, long after the funeral.
Still, if it were not for secondary characters like Judy Poovey, the frosted-haired arty animal and cocaine addict from Los Angeles who drives a red Corvette with personalized tags, and Bunny's best friend, Cloke Rayburn, one of the biggest drug dealers on campus, who believes he might have been responsible for Bunny's death, this story might be too oppressive to tell.
The Secret History is a large book, more than 500 pages and heavily laden with Homeric references. Structurally, the novel experiences rough transitions between important scenes and moves somewhat awkwardly to its climax. The biggest disappointment is Donna Tartt's failure to achieve the appropriate denouement that this story-telling deserves.
Nonetheless, The Secret History is bound to be a best-seller and, most likely, will head for the silver screen, too.
The midwifery of abortion rights
A QUESTION OF CHOICE
By Sarah Weddington (Gosset/Putnam)
By Ann Vliet
When Sarah Weddington argued Roe vs. Wade and won by a margin of 7-to-2, she was 27 years old, it was 1973 and all over the country forces for women's rights were on the rise. This June, after a series of Supreme Court decisions allowing states more and more regulation of abortion, Roe survived a complete reversal by only one vote.
In the meantime, an entire generation of women, whether or not they sanction abortion, have reaped the indirect benefits of Roe, taking for granted what their mothers could not: to be able to finish their educations, to be hired instead of being passed over for a man who "wouldn't get pregnant," to work while pregnant, to establish their own credit, to make their own plans as to careers, family and lifestyles.
A Question of Choice, Ms. Weddington's history of Roe from its beginnings at an Austin garage sale through its 19-year erosion, is a well-argued brief for pro-choice voters to get back to the ballot booths and make their wishes known.
The issue was and still is, as Ms. Weddington puts it, a question of choice. As women in the '70s discovered that "they could not truly determine their own destinies ... until they could control the number and spacing of their children," the abortion issue became symbolic of "whether women would have decision-making power over the issues that most affected their lives."
Roe vs. Wade never asked the Court to advocate abortion, but only to rule that "whether or not a particular woman will continue to carry or will terminate a pregnancy is a decision that should be made by that individual, that she has that constitutional right." The 1973 court concurred that, with a few rights reserved to the state, she did.
No matter which side of the issue you come down on, Ms. Weddington's explanation of how she came to argue Roe is an interesting and informative memoir. We learn in detail how Texas women joined forces with Austin activists and evolved from lobbyists to legal defenders; how previous Supreme Court decisions paved the way for Roe; how the trimester formula (never mentioned in the hearings) got into the Supreme Court decision as dictum; how Presidents Reagan and Bush have shifted the balance of the court by anti-abortion appointments.
We also learn how Sarah Weddington herself evolved from a "prim and proper" small-town preacher's daughter to a champion of women's rights in the Supreme Court, the Texas Legislature and the Carter White House.
Although most of Ms. Weddington's arguments are remarkably free of emotional language, her dander does rise over the smugness of the vociferous minority imposing their values on the rights of others.
She makes a clear distinction between true pro-life, with its commitment to quality child care, and merely pro-birth. She also resents having to re-fight in the legislature and executive branches decisions guaranteed by the Constitution. But she warns that the only place to re-win disappearing rights is at the polls, and outlines a plan of action.
It goes without saying that A Question of Choice should have a wide audience. For those over 40, it will be a reminder of the dangers of a return to pre-1973, where most decisions about women were made by men. For those who don't remember women's previous entrapment by states with both contraception and abortion laws, or the suffering or death many of them faced attempting illegal abortions, it will demonstrate that, in practice anyway, not all rights are inalienable.
<#FROWN:C10\>
A Singer's Penchant For Enigma
By PETER WATROUS
David Byrne started his show at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan on Wednesday night with a good idea. The stage, cleverly lit by just one or two lights that gave a slightly industrial look, offered up Mr. Byrne alone. Playing his acoustic guitar and accompanying himself with occasional rhythms from a drum machine, he performed a set of tunes that were beautifully spare. Taken from all over, the songs - 'Cowboy Mambo (Hey Look at Me Now),' 'Nothing but Flowers,' 'Road From Nowhere,' 'Girls on My Mind,' among others - worked perfectly, with just Mr. Byrne's voice to scratch out the melodies. His singing vocabulary, full of strangled cries, shouts, a yodel or two and all sorts of textures, seemed stronger than ever, ideal for the often enigmatic songs.
As soon as his band appeared, however, Mr. Byrne's material sank under the weight of bad arrangements and an overloud sound system. And a lack of dynamic change - usually a sign that the music's genesis is the recording studio and not the stage - rendered the songs similar.
This was a shame, because over the last decade Mr. Byrne, as a member of the group the Talking Heads and on his own, has produced some of the oddest music to have influenced pop culture, and it deserved to be heard well. Though it's obviously rock, the music is also full of ideas that seem completely antithetical to rock. Where rock assumes the artist on-stage means what he's saying, Mr. Byrne is clearly writing from the point of view of another character or imbuing the material with so much irony as to render it slippery. He treats rock, a deeply adolescent musical form, as a vehicle for art world topics. And where grace, through rhythm and virtuosity, is often popular music's province, Mr. Byrne has opted instead to be clumsy, and to develop his own vocabulary of gestures, musical and vocal and physical, that never tie into rock's myth of power and ability.
His personality clearly retains some appeal, at least in New York, where this concert sold out. But, understandably, it hasn't been doing well across the country. The logical college-age audience for Mr. Byrne's music now has its own favorites, from the slew of Seattle bands to hiphoppers, all more blunt than he is in their intent and their politics. Mr. Byrne is now an oldies act, defined by his ethos and his audience. In concert that audience, mostly older than at an average rock show, seemed transfixed by Mr. Byrne, who dresses like a mixture of an Elvis impersonator - including long sideburns and slicked-back hair - and a SoHoite. On Wednesday, any movement, from his St. Vitus dancing to the occasional rock posturing, brought on huge uproars and a few standing ovations.
On his new records, Mr. Byrne has found a balance between Latin influences and his rock leanings. When heard live the songs, enormously loud, lost their definition, leaving a large blur instead of detail. Where his newer songs are loaded with strange, idiosyncratic melodies and abrupt structural movements, in concert the absence of articulation robbed the pieces of their individuality. Mr. Byrne's weakness in the past has been his coldness, and his lack of evident commitment to anything besides artistic production. His inability to do anything more than hide behind the personality has always limited the work and made it cute at worst. A new piece like 'Something Ain't Right,' an angry denunciation of God as a fraud, was lost in the blare. All that was left was Mr. Byrne's character, which didn't do the song, or the singer, justice.
Woody Allen as Political Metaphor
Middle America faces off with the bicoastals.
By WALTER GOODMAN
For the uncertain television voter in this season of the family, the political choice was sharpened this week. The election came down to a contest between the score or more Bushes and the dozen or so Farrow-Previn-Allens who populated the tube during the days of public embraces in Houston and domestic disruption in New York City. Ms. Farrow's family was reportedly valued at $7 million. The value of Mr. Bush's was the White House.
At the sight of that screen of Bushes at the Astrodome on Wednesday night, hard-nosed political commentators went gooey. David Gergen, who usually maintains a sober mien on the 'MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour,' could scarcely contain himself. It was a very important moment, he kept saying, incredibly important. Professional skepticism gave way to open-mouthed awe as the grandmother of all First Ladies presided over the mother of all photo opportunities. It was repeated Thursday with the Quayle family and balloons.
Meanwhile, television news and quasi-news shows were scrambling to get an exclusive shot of the house in which Mia Farrow was sequestered and rerunning clips of the famously reclusive Woody Allen making a declaration of love in front of other people's cameras. Marilyn Quayle countered with a prime-time confession in Houston about how rewarding it has been to live with Dan Quayle all these years.
So for the television fan, the lines are drawn. It is the soap opera of the bicoastals versus the soap opera of middle America, the late-night jazz club (clarinet and saxophone) versus Sunday morning in church, the separate dwellings versus the double bed.
Television has helped make the campaign issues manageable: Has Mrs. Quayle sacrificed more than Ms. Farrow? Has Maureen O'Sullivan contributed as much as Barbara Bush? Was Hillary Clinton spotted in line for 'Annie Hall' when she should have been watching 'Mary Poppins' with Chelsea? The race may come down to a montage of the multi-culturally with-it Farrow mnage opposed to a Bush family Thanksgiving Day card inspired by Norman Rockwell.
This is a contest made for Republicans. When Mr. Quayle picked on Murphy Brown, her admirers pointed out that she was mere fiction, as though that mattered. But Mr. Allen and Ms. Farrow are said to be real, although given the treatment of celebrities on television and in the tabloids, one can never be sure. Either way, for admirers of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan, television personalities both, who thundered forth the us-against-them organ peals that dominated the week in Houston, the Manhattan story is a morality tale on the paths of godlessness.
Has anybody ever seen Woody Allen in church or at a Fourth of July parade or any of the other places where Mrs. Bush revealed she spent her time during the best years of her life as a young wife and mother in Texas? For Mr. Allen the very word Texas is a punch line. (If Mr. Bush and Mr. Quayle plan to attempt more campaign jokes like those in their acceptance speeches, they might study his timing.)
In the religious war conjured up by Mr. Buchanan, Woody Allen is a general on the wrong side. Show business being what it is, can anyone doubt that he consorts with homosexuals? And he has never been a closet atheist. In more than one of his movies he has taken delight in kicking around men of the cloth and milking the amusement in scenes of real church-going Americans, whom he plainly finds ridiculous, being confronted with a neurotic Jew from New York. This man has been known to kid God, that Underachiever.
When Republican sermonizers in Houston kept reminding their audience that the Democrats had met in Madison Square Garden, which happens to be in New York City, they may have thought they were only connecting the opposition with crime, homelessness and dirt; add now intimations of hanky-panky among those whom Dan Quayle likes to call the elite, known for their liberal inclinations and contributions to the other party.
Here is the quintessential made-for-television debate. The candidates may drone on about growth packages whose details few will ever understand, but who can fail to understand the wholesome images that were packaged on that stage in Houston? A big audience without much patience for differences between this health plan and that one can be counted on to pay attention to the minutiae of any story involving romance or worse among actors.
For the Democrats, the conjunction could hardly have been more unfortunate. Their only hope now is that despite the predictable recycling in Republican commercials, this week's images will be shaken off by others as the campaign bounces along. For the time being, Bill Clinton will probably avoid being photographed in the company of stars, and Hillary and Chelsea may be seen whipping up a batch of their mother-daughter cookies with Regis and Kathie Lee.
Psychodrama With a Desperate Grin
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Sylvia DeSayles, Kay Stevens, Fay McKay, Carol Jarvis, Dorothy Squires and Libby Morris are hardly names that, when dropped, produce a universal nod of recognition. But in the performance artist John Epperson's newest show, 'Lypsinka! Now it can be Lip-Synched,' these nearly-forgotten singers are placed in a vocal pantheon side by side with Ethel Merman, Connie Francis and June Christy.
'Lypsinka! Now it can be Lip-Synched,' which plays at the Ballroom through Sept. 6, is the newest one-man show starring Mr. Epperson as his drag alter-ego, Lypsinka. The hourlong performance offers further proof, as if any were needed, that yesterday's pop culture never really dies. And if it happens to involve a sequined pop diva with a taste for loud costumes and brassy music, it will probably sooner or later find its way into Mr. Epperson's museum of pop trash.
For those not already acquainted with the performer, his increasingly famous character is a willowy red-headed showgirl with popping clown eyes, penciled brows raised in continual astonishment and a ferociously cheery smile. A composite of Delores Gray, Carol Channing, Shirley Bassey and dozens of other famous and forgotten divas of stage, screen, television and nightclubs, the character never speaks.
Instead Lypsinka mouths the words to these women's usually obscure recordings from the 1940's, 50's and 60's while dramatizing the lyrics in a meticulously choreographed body language of shimmying arms and legs, swiveling hips and clawing fingers. His physical vocabulary is as brilliantly precise a distillation of traditional female stage mannerisms as the movements of a Japanese Kabuki performer.
Interwoven with the songs are snatches of movie dialogue that offer the spoken equivalent of the music. As a ringing telephone punctuates each bit, Lypsinka changes character every few seconds, eventually becoming a hysterical, multi-phrenic personality. The new show's more familiar excerpts include a fragment of a Gloria Swanson monologue from 'Sunset Boulevard' and a scene from 'Valley of the Dolls.'
Mr. Epperson's lip-synching is not the only thing that sets him apart from more conventional drag performers. 'Now It Can Be Lip-Synched,' like his previous shows, holds together as a high-tension comic psychodrama that offers a scathingly funny critique of modern show business iconography and the role of women.
Behind Lypsinka's desperate grin is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Periodically the lights around her suddenly flicker and turn greenish, and she clutches at her face in a parody of Joan Crawford in her 1960's ax-murder epic, 'Berserk.' All the show's emotions, whether sung or acted, have a grotesque larger-than-life quality. That's partly because of Mr. Epperson's shrewd selection of material that emphasizes extremes of self-pity (June Christy's 'Lonely Woman' and cheery, look-at-me grandiosity ('I'm the Greatest Star,' sung by Mimi Hines, 'I've Gotta Be Me,'by Miss Squires and 'I've Got Everything I Want' by Karen Morrow).
If 'Now It Can Be Lip-Synched' celebrates a glitzy kind of stardom as an ultimate form of American glory, it portrays its attainment as an empty desperate 'Valley of the Dolls' sort of existence in which women, to succeed, have to be a little monstrous.
Mr. Epperson serves up his vision as pure unfettered comedy executed with dazzling juxtapositions of songs and dialogue and virtuosic high-drag clowning. The new show's funniest moment is Lypsinka's increasingly slurred performance of 'The 12 Days of Christmas' (sung by Fay McKay), in which the true-love's gifts have been changed from turtle-doves and French hens into various alcoholic beverages.
<#FROWN:C11\>
Which One Is Today's Woman?
By Suzy Menkes
International Herald Tribune
MILAN - It was a fashion face-off between heavenly bodies and earthly souls. On one side Gianni Versace's supermodels - heads and bosoms high, necklines and hems swooping low - striding out in dresses that slithered across the curves. In the other, Giorgio Armani's women - eyes down, discreet steps forward - enveloped in jackets over cumuli of fabric from neck to ankles.
Who was the winner in this clash of wills, styles and philosophy as Armani and Versace closed the Milan spring/summer shows?
Round one - for presentation - went to Versace for dramatic lighting, superb staging with a kaleidoscopic backcloth of slides, and a beautifully paced show - even if the content was just a dazzling re-mix of few ideas.
Round two - for imagination - to Armani, whose shadow play of fabrics textured like dried grass, dark Indian prints, pale subtle colors and quirky East-meets-West styles expressed a fashion poetry.
Both designers had distinct and delicious color palettes: Versace's bright but not brash, with pure white, lilac or primrose, and Proven<*_>c-cedille<*/>al-style prints that were a fresh departure from his familiar style. Armani opened the show with shades of his signature beige as subtly differentiated as beach pebbles. His prints had gone native but with great subtlety, mixing dark Indian paisleys with the palest Mogul patterns in blossom pink and almond green.
The two shows were so strong, yet so different, that the result has to be declared a tie. You take the water or the wine; the veil or the Wonder-Bra; or maybe both.
"It's for the same woman in different moods - and between Versace and Armani, Milan has ended on a high note," said Ellin Saltzman, fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman.
"They are very different designers," said Kalman Ruttenstein of Bloomingdale's. "The Armani woman is subtle, quiet, understated. The Versace woman likes to be noted and is fun in spirit."
The two shows ran back to back with Versace first, causing Liz Tilberis, editor-in-chief of Harper's Bazaar, to change in her limo from a studded black leather suit into a white Armani pantsuit. Other off-runway entertainments included Versace's seven-year-old niece Allegra demanding a front-row seat, and at the Armani show, the film stars Claudia Cardinale and Ornella Muti sitting bust to bust.
Versace's show was spectacular - even though it was based on just two silhouettes: bell-bottom pants updated from the 1970s by making them cling in stretch fabric to the hips and swing out at the calf; and simple mid-calf dresses with uplifting bodices, so that bosoms balanced like two scoops of ice-cream. Variations on the themes included frilled layers of pattern and silk shirts knotted to reveal the ubiquitous bared midriff.
IF you believe that life's a beach, Versace had great clothes, from the opening white dresses - shown with long, loose, crimped hair and bare feet - to the exuberant mixed-print layers of gypsy skirts. The show had little you could wear for work - barely a serious jacket or simple pantsuit - but it was a fine statement. The show was a mite pretentious, as music switched from rock to Panis Angelicus (from the Catholic Mass) and the slides showed historic paintings, regional costumes, details of fabrics or scenes of Versace's beloved Miami Beach.
"Fashion is for joy and for fun. And I know how to play with rock and with grand opera," announced an ebullient Versace, receiving backstage accolades.
Armani took his ovation in navy sweater and blue jeans in front of models sitting in Tahitian dresses against a Gauguin backcloth. Inspirations from far-flung places was the theme of the show, which was quirkily beautiful, even spiritual, in its use of fabrics, motifs and silhouettes from other cultures.
The day clothes had not really changed: pantsuits in putty, stone and beige; straight mannish jackets still with a square - too square - shoulder line; the colors quiet as a whisper. The novelty was in the layering of skirt or tunic over pajama or even harem pants, which seemed too identifiably ethnic, especially when heads too were covered.
Armani has never really been at home with skirts and insisted too much on these, yet the designer seemed to be suggesting something profound: that women can be graceful and feminine, even when completely covered up. It made a nice change from the silicone implants bouncing through the Milan week.
Armani's gentle message came over best in the beautiful evening clothes - slim, straight dresses, maybe in lace, perhaps pleated, or under a beaded vest, or in Balinese prints, or with crusts of embroidery topping souffl-light fabrics. It was a show with a soul.
"Why not mix Eastern and Western dress - the world is small, and we need to find a new femininity that is modern," said Armani.
Neither Versace's jet-stream escapism nor Armani's submissive femininity seem the whole answer for modern women. But it was an exhilarating end to a dull Milan fashion week that saved its sweetest plums for the bitter end.
"If Paris is first next time, Armani and Versace had better follow on its heels, because we buyers aren't going to sit around for a week in Milan waiting for the big guns to go off," said Ruttenstein, referring to the changing calendar of international fashion for next season. Those dates will be announced on Oct.19.
The fashion stories out of Milan were the fluid mid-calf dress, a strong revival for knits, and a continuing focus on Beatles and hippie inspirations, as well as on corsetry and transparency. Often simple, luxurious clothes that are Italy's strength were concealed under swags of love beads.
"When we get to the showroom, most of the nonsense has disappeared - the runway is entertainment," said Joan Kaner, fashion director of Neiman-Marcus. Andrea Jung, the store's executive vice president, said they had done "terrific business" with Missoni, Dolce&Gabbana, Krizia and Ferr.
The fashion crowd now moves on to weekend showings in London, which has to decide how to hold its place on the calendar.
THE London fashion week, which opened Friday, contains 15 runway shows, backed up by an exhibition, the London Designer Show, at the Duke of York's barracks in the King's Road Chelsea.
England remains a seedbed of ideas, many of which are only absorbed into mainstream fashion after several seasons. For example, the back-to-the-Beatles looks dominating the Milan shows were first seen on London's streets and run-ways five years ago, although few of the small London designers have been able to make them into commercial money-spinners.
The London season will close Monday with the British Fashion Awards.
Derek Walcott: History's Nostalgia
By James Atlas
New York Times Service
NEW YORK - In a time when poetry has reveled in its freedom, deploying unmetered, unrhymed lines across the page, the formal properties of Derek Walcott's work are instantly visible to the eye.
To open his 'Collected Poems' is to find oneself in the presence of a writer for whom English poetry is no oppressive burden, to be cast off like the colonial past of Walcott's native St. Lucia, but a vibrant tradition, to be plundered and recast in his own contemporary idiom.
Couplets and quatrains unfurl with a stately regularity, suffused with echoes of Shakespeare and Keats, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden.
"Art is History's nostalgia," Walcott writes in 'Omeros,' an epic-length modern 'Odyssey' composed in terza rima.
In his work, the voice of his English precursors resonates, animated by his own people's voice, a rich Creole patois mimed in 'The Schooner Flight': "I go draw and knot every line as tight/ as ropes in this rigging, in simple speech..."
The son of a schoolteacher who died when Walcott was a year old, the poet was raised in a bookish atmosphere. "Our house had a wire-meshed library of great books," he recalled in a memoir of his youth, "principally a uniform edition of Dickens and Walter Scott and Sabatini."
His teachers recited Swinburne by heart, inculcating in him the notion that poetry was "living speech." A quatrain spoken by one of his characters could serve as an ironic autobiography:
I'm just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
And either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation
Clearly, Walcott is the latter - a nation polyglot in the extreme. "With equal right," as Joseph Brodsky, his friend and fellow Nobel laureate, has noted, "Walcott could have said that he has in him Greek, Latin, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, French: because of Homer, Lucretius, Ovid, Dante, Rilke, Machado, Lorca, Neruda, Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Pasternak, Baudelaire, Valry, Apollinaire."
In part, his genius is his versatility - his recourse to what Brodsky calls "a genetic Babel." Yet however international Walcott's style, his language is quintessentially English.
More than any poet of his generation, he has absorbed our poetic canon - absorbed and internalized it. Walcott, says the Irish poet Seamus Heany, "possesses English more deeply and sonorously than most of the English themselves."
At times, he can sound derivative. "We swore to make drink/ and art our finishing school," he writes in the cadence of Yeats; "A white church spire whistles into space/ like a swordfish" borrows shamelessly from Robert Lowell.
In his earlier work, especially, Walcott's apprenticeship to his English masters has a slavish feel to it; the elaborate, knotted rhetoric is too high-pitched, inflated for rhetoric effect, as in these willed and ponderous lines from 'The Fortunate Traveler':
The heart of darkness is not Africa
The heart of darkness is the core of fire
In the white center of the holocaust.
But at his best - and there is little dross in Walcott's oeuvre - he achieves a sustained eloquence, an exhilarating amplitude; he's "a man immersed in words," the poet James Dickey has written, "not afraid of them, but excited and confirmed by what he can cause them to do."
IN awarding Derek Walcott the Nobel Prize, the Swedish academy singled out his "historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment." Multicultural in the demographic and political sense: Walcott is black, his homeland a Caribbean island remote from the dominant 'white' culture, he is a poet for whom exile - both geographic and personal - has been the informing fact of his life.
But his work vindicates T.S. Eliot's account of the way in which a poetic tradition evolves through the modification of works of art "by the new (the really new) work of art among them."
In Derek Walcott, we can discern the history of what is most enduring in our tradition, invigorated, as it has always been, by the voice of our most recent immigrants. Invigorated and made new.
Popular Culture
A Festival With Some Strings Attached
GLENN COLLINS
WHEN 17 PUPPET companies take over the Joseph Papp Public Theater starting Sept. 7, it could mark a giant step toward increasing American awareness of puppetry as adult theater. Despite its long tradition and popularity in much of the rest of the world, this ancient art form has never been taken quite seriously enough in the United States.
Both Jim Henson and Joseph Papp had dreamed together of providing a show-case for sophisticated puppetry. And though Mr. Papp died last year, and Mr. Henson the year before, the idea survives in the International Festival of Puppet Theater that will feature eight foreign and nine American companies. This dizzyingly comprehensive two-week gathering, through Sept. 20, is the first public festival of adult puppet theater ever produced in New York.
Mr. Henson's hope, said his daughter Cheryl Henson, executive producer of the festival, was that the event "would build new audiences for puppetry." It is being presented by the Jim Henson Foundation, with the New York Shakespeare Festival acting as host.
"My life was changed forever by the first Bread and Puppet show I saw many years ago - I think it was in the basement of the Washington Square Church," said JoAnne Akalaitis, the Shakespeare Festival's executive director. "My life was similarly changed when I first saw Jim Henson's Muppets."
Puppetry's roots can be traced to religious ceremonies in the ninth century B.C.
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The Persecution of Milken
BY L. GORDON CROVITZ
In the mid-1980s, a group from Drexel Burnham Lambert met with the editorial-page staff of The Wall Street Journal. They urged us to stop using the term junk bonds and instead to use the less colorful formulation "high-yield bonds." In either guise, these bonds brought capital to smaller firms and fueled sometimes needed shake-ups of corporate suites by funding takeovers, but the Drexel folks feared a political backlash.
Ridiculous, some of us thought. How could a financial instrument be moral or immoral, good or evil? A bond by any other name would still be judged by its performance in the market. Ironically, Michael Milken, who was busy in his Beverly Hills office that day, would within a few years be undone by just such naivete.
Milken was prosecuted and sentenced as the symbol of a decade, so it's not surprising that a cultural study yields the clearest picture of him to date. Jesse Kornbluth's 'Highly Confident: The Crime and Punishment of Michael Milken' (William Morrow, 384 pages, $23) captures how an over-zealous prosecution helped transform the go-go, greedy '80s into the no-go, vengeful '90s.
The title refers to the letters Drexel once sent to investors saying it was highly confident that a transaction would succeed. Funds flowed to the start-up Turner Broadcastings and MCIs, which created more than 18 million new jobs in a decade when the Fortune 500 lost workers.
Mr. Kornbluth, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair, recalls how "The Bonfire of the Vanities" era on Wall Street "was deeply offensive to those who regarded themselves as cultural arbiters." It never mattered to them that Milken actually lived a simple, if workaholic, life. "To stop Milken is to stop takeovers fueled by junk bonds," Mr. Kornbluth writes, and "to put most of what is politely called New York's 'Nouvelle Society' in jail. It is to make real the fondest dream of the American Establishment - Congressman John Dingell, the Fortune 500, the Business Roundtable, and some of Drexel's battered rivals. It is to roll back the 1980s."
Mr. Kornbluth describes how inside trader Ivan Boesky conned prosecutors into giving him a light punishment by claiming serious crimes by Milken. "In all that time, with all their subpoena power and RICO threats, they never got beyond Ivan Boesky - and Boesky never pointed out pre-announcement trades that netted Milken a quick $20 million, or foreign bank accounts, or bags of cash, or code names in diaries," Mr. Kornbluth writes. Milken was no inside trader, and junk bonds are no daisy chain.
It didn't matter. Federal prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani, Mr. Kornbluth jabs, was "more ambitious than Madonna" and "hit the ground talking." He twisted the RICO statute into a rubber hose and held Milken's brother hostage to a plea.
Mr. Kornbluth spent 400 hours interviewing Milken. He did not find a card-board cutout of greed, but a financial genius who had to admit to his probation officer that "I had a hard time not taking care of people." Even when it was irrelevant to his business, even when it tumbled him into a gray area of securities law.
In a jail-house interview, Milken told Mr. Kornbluth that the media were partly to blame. "All those years," he said, "I thought the marketplace or the customer was the final judge. I was wrong. In the short run, it's the media. And in the media, nothing means anything unless it's negative." Mr. Kornbluth found one-sided coverage based on leaks from prosecutors and cites bond journalist James Grant's claim that the Journal was "the useful idiot" of the prosecution. Paul Steiger, managing editor of the Journal, responds that "Journal policy precludes any discussion of sourcing, but that statement is sheer nonsense."
Milken didn't make things any easier for himself. As Mr. Kornbluth also found, the private Milken "never wanted to meet the press." When charges were published, they were made against a void. Indeed, Milken only recently began speaking to journalists on the record.
Still, things have changed since Milken's plea. In January, the Securities and Exchange Commission simply fined 98 brokerage firms and banks for their Milkenlike technical reporting violations.
Boesky testified in just one case, against arbitrager John Mulheren. The federal appeals court in New York reversed the conviction by saying that "no rational trier of fact" could have bought Boesky's story. Trader Boyd Jeffries, who testified against James Sherwin of GAF Corp., had his Boesky-inspired conviction reversed by this appeals court, which also overturned Giuliani /RICO convictions against securities firm Princeton /Newport and Edwin Meese's friend Robert Wallach.
Everyone, it seems, got his day in court - except those like Milken, whose plea bargain meant his case never got to an appeals court. At least Judge Kimba Wood recently reduced Milken's longer-than-Boesky prison stay.
For all of Mr. Kornbluth's cultural observations, the book is not yet written that closely tracks Milken's persecution with the credit crunch and recession. As for Milken's legacy, last year funds made up of junk bonds earned 40%, and in the first half of this year were ahead 12%. It's too late, but with those kind of returns, let's call them high-yield bonds.
Intellectuals Under Pressure
BY LEE LESCAZE
China's intellectuals have suffered, agonized and worried through more than 40 years of communism. Each time they have gathered their courage and raised their heads, Beijing has lopped them off. Given their cruel history, it isn't surprising that China's intellectuals are a cautious, mostly unheroic group. Perry Link lived among them during one of their years of living optimistically (comparatively) - the year preceding the Beijing protests and killings of May and June 1989. His engrossing 'Evening Chats in Beijing' (Norton, 448 pages, $24.95) is his snapshot of that time.
Like many things Chinese, Mr. Link's book presents a paradox. It highlights the futility of intellectuals' efforts to promote the improvement of China, but also provides abundant evidence of the bottled-up potential that will lift China from its doldrums once the old system is smashed or withers away.
Most of all, 'Evening Chats in Beijing' makes a reader hope that the day comes soon when the Chinese enjoy individual freedom and this book therefore seems an absurd and unreal relic, a report from a vanished Kafka kingdom.
Albert Camus described an intellectual as "someone whose mind watches itself." In totalitarian China, the state apparatus joins in the watching, putting intellectuals under enormous pressure. As Mr. Link, who teaches Chinese literature at Princeton University, shows, this prressure is partly self-induced, thanks to Chinese intellectuals' inbred caution and their historical sympathy for the state.
They have been too willing for their own good to be what Stalin called "screws" in the state structure. What's more, they too often share the regime's fear of chaos. They may hate the Communist Party, but they are scared of the void that might open if it were to disappear.
National pride helps blind them. Intellectuals are proud of being Chinese and cannot imagine China as anything but a nation of special importance in the world - despite their treatment at Chinese government hands.
Mr. Link admires these hollow men more than most readers will. One of the bravest, Liu Binyan, who now lives in exile, once described the typical intellectual as the human equivalent of a town hit by a neutron bomb. "In the end he looks normal, can still see and analyze, and can pronounce regular sentences. He can fit in, and function, but is devastated inside."
The pressure on intellectuals is so intense that it seems to affect their health. According to one Chinese survey reported by Mr. Link, they die at an average age of 58.5, some 10 years before the population at large.
Mr. Link's great affection for the intellectuals doesn't prevent him from seeing their limitations. Few have the courage of physicist Fang Lizhi, who is a friend of Mr. Link, or of journalist Dai Qing. Most are remarkably willing to let someone else take the risks of challenging the state on even small matters. While many feel that their struggle needs martyrs, they think someone else should volunteer for the role.
This might be labeled despicable, but not by Mr. Link. He keeps his criticisms gentle, and self-deprecatingly includes himself among those spectators at the China drama who sometimes fail to perceive the moral ambiguities in their role. He does, however, seem moved close to anger by the Chinese student, wearing an Adidas jogging outfit and Walkman, whom he met on the campus of the University of Virginia. The student felt personally let down that Mr. Fang had sought to save himself by taking refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing at the time of the 1989 killings. He should have sought martyrdom, the student said. "When he went into the embassy, he was not the Fang Lizhi I was rooting for."
With fans like that, Mr. Fang hardly needs enemies.
The major problem with Mr. Link's book, as with most journalism from China, is the author's need to protect the identity of his sources. It is hard to bring people to life on the page when their real names cannot be used and their life stories are necessarily somewhat veiled. The result, of course, is too many phrases like "many say" and "others think."
Still, the depth and breadth of Mr. Link's contacts and reading in Chinese enable him to keep his pages livelier than most accounts from Beijing.
And, he tells an important story. The Chinese state increasingly resembles the swordsman in the old joke. "Missed!" he declares. "Just try shaking your head," his rival responds.
In the south and on the coast, an economic boom is under way and the central government's authority grows weaker daily. Cities that have missed out so far are desperate to latch onto the bandwagon. In Beijing, the gerontocracy hangs on. The Communist leadership re-prints Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai dash-board ornaments in an attempt to draw strength from the party's glory days.
Mr. Link takes his title from Deng Tuo, a brave man who dared to criticize Mao's policies in a similarly titled book. As always with China's intellectuals, bravery has dubious consequences. Mr. Deng was hounded to commit suicide in 1966 and his criticism is now seen as one of the wounds that inspired Mao to launch his mad Cultural Revolution - a disaster for intellectuals and a nightmare for all China.
Film: He's Afraid to Take the Plunge
BY JULIE SALAMON
'Honeymoon in Vegas' is being pitched as a "straightforward" Andrew Bergman movie. That must refer to the fact that it has an obvious beginning and end. But the middle is delightfully Bergmanesque - which in the case of Andrew, not Ingmar, means odd and very funny.
Mr. Bergman, a writer and director, may be best known for "The Freshman," the Mafia spoof in which Marlon Brando does a wicked imitation of himself as Don Corleone. This time the pop culture icon providing the running gag is Elvis. Maybe it's too obvious, using Elvis and his music as the tacky, sentimental emblem of a romantic comedy set in Las Vegas. But Mr. Bergman approaches Elvis the way he approaches everything: like no one else.
This shaggy dog story begins with a nasty mother (Anne Bancroft) on a hospital bed, extracting from her son (Nicolas Cage) a deathbed promise that he'll never marry. She departs this earth with a gleeful grin, leaving behind a man who can't say yes. But he's been dating Betsy (Sarah Jessica Parker), an adorable schoolteacher, for years. He decides the only way he can marry her is to take her to Las Vegas and get it over with fast.
One thing leads to another, and it will all make you laugh a lot: There's the hotshot gambler (James Caan) still mourning his wife, who suntanned herself to an early grave. He sees her face in Betsy's. There's a Hawaiian odyssey that includes the hilarious sight of Peter Boyle playing an island chief who loves Broadway musicals, especially 'South Pacific.'
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Ozzy Osbourne graces fans with buckets of water, hits
By Brenda Herrmann
Come and worship at the temple of the mighty Ozzy.
That could have been the theme of Ozzy Osbourne's Sunday night show at The World Music Theatre because that's what everyone did.
In many ways Ozzy's outdoor act was similar to the one he brought to the Aragon Ballroom last November, basically a greatest-hits package enthusiastically dished out by Oz, guitarist Zakk Wylde, bassist Mike Inez and drummer Randy Castillo.
Opening with 'Paranoid,' Ozzy was looking and sounding good and, as usual, had drenched himself - and much of the crowd - with bucket after bucket of water before the first four songs were finished.
From 'Paranoid,' it was into the new, a quintessential metal anthem called 'I Don't Want to Change the World,' then back to the old: 'Mr. Crowley,' 'I Don't Know' and again, the new, 'Road to Nowhere,' creating a constant shuffle of old favorites and the strongest material from last year's 'No More Tears' album.
Those close to the stage didn't need the video screens Ozzy had packed - watching Ozzy, with his wide, robotic eyes and tiny steps, was mesmerizing enough.
When he left the stage, however, any momentum died quickly. Wylde's dull, self-indulgent solos were barely tolerable and, the band just didn't seem to get it together, leaving only Oz to carry the act.
And he did, right out into the audience, urging the crowd to stampede forward for 'Good-bye to Romance.' In the end, security gave up trying to stop the fans - two guys even managed to get onstage with Oz - and, here, with everyone packed in about five to a seat, was when the show peaked, with everyone singing the ballad and swaying along.
Special guests Faster Pussycat were better than expected, taking the crowd over almost from the beginning. They were beautiful to look at - all five with matching jet-black hair and glammy costumes - but it was the way they campaigned for the audience's attention that won everyone over. If singer Taime Down was on the left, guitarists Brent Muscat and Greg Steele were manning the right, always keeping the stage alive.
Opening act Ugly Kid Joe wasn't so likeable. The cocky novelty band seemed to expect worship but did nothing to deserve it.
Grant Park season ends on a Latin American note
By Ted Shen
With a few exceptions, serious music by Latin American composers is relegated to the fringe of the mainstream repertoire both here and in Europe. Yet, as the Grant Park Festival season closer last Saturday night proved, it's high time to redress the neglect.
All five works on the survey program, conducted by Mexican-born Enrique Diemecke, are noteworthy, if only for their varying success in reconciling indigenous folk strains with European styles. The Grand Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1915), by the self-taught Brazilian nationalist Villa-Lobos, is surprisingly steeped in the swooning gestures of late 19th Century romanticism. Loosely knit, roughhewn, and strongly Schumannesque, this concerto proffers a number of flashy passages for the soloist. Celloist Carter Brey, energetically backed up by the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra, handled them with assurance and verve.
'Barren Land,' a 1949 tone poem by Mexican modernist Jose Pablo Moncayo, is baldly Ravelian in its long-breathed plangent lyricism except for an interlude of sashaying Mexican dance. The orchestra's performance had a voluptuous feel. In contrast, Ginestera's Dances from his 1943 Ballet, 'Estancia,' are outgoing and ebullient - sort of 'Rodeo' on the pampas. The orchestra played them with an immodest amount of gusto.
Silvestre Revueltas' 'Redes' (Nets), a concert suite of his 1935 score for an agitprop movie about the travails of Mexican fishermen, is decidedly 20th Century in its outlook. At times atonal, this folksy and picturesque music is also boldly dramatic. As performed by the Grant Parkers, its poignant moments did not have quite the same intensity as the festive ones.
The evening's most original work belonged to Carlos Chavez, the dean of Mexican music. His one-movement 'Sinfonia India', commissioned by CBS in 1936, deftly incorporates Mexican Indian tribal melodies. Piquant rhythms, exotic modalities and a battalion of unusual percussion instruments contribute to the highly distinctive character of this music.
Woodstock festival offers gems of a teenage Mozart
By Ted Shen
The Woodstock Mozart Festival, given every August in the town's landmark opera house, is capable of surprises. Organized by the Juilliard- and European-trained maestro Charles Zachary Bornstein, it can put on a terrific show especially when it delves into the Mozartean arcana.
Featured in last weekend's season finale were a pair of choral works from the composer's teen years. Seldom-performed and known mostly to cognoscenti, both show a budding genius gleefully at work, experimenting with musical layout and injecting earthly drama into liturgical materials. The 'Orphanage' Mass, in fact, qualifies as a minor masterpiece.
Mozart was barely 13 when he finished this commission (K. 139) in 1768 for an orphanage church in Vienna. Already a sophisticated craftsman and gifted melodist, he turned the cantata-mass into a daring showcase of imaginative, sometimes floridly operatic touches. Unusual for the time was the inclusion of doleful trombones and hammering trumpets that imitate the sound of nails being driven into Christ on the cross. Loosely guided by the dictates of the nascent classical style - though not forsaking Baroque polyphony altogether - this grand-scaled work traverses through moods that alternate between the somber and the ecstatic.
The performance by the festival's resident orchestra and the James Chorale Friday night - in collaboration for the first time - was sensitive yet bracing and exciting. It conveyed the music's essential warmth and devoutness. The intimate setting and the small orchestral and choral forces also added a feel of authenticity. Bornstein, an intense-looking conductor with a Stokowskian hauteur, coaxed graceful playing from the strings. The quartet of soloists - all chorale veterans - sang cleanly and at times rapturously. They were, in order of impressiveness, tenor John Concepcion, soprano Joan Strom, alto Krista Depenthal, bass Matthew Greenberg. The chorus, prepared by James Rogner, paid careful attention to phrasing.
The other piece was the 'Litaniae Lauretanae,' written when Mozart was 17 and feeling stifled in provincial Salzburg. No doubt churned out quickly for a church service, this litany nonetheless is high-quality music, eloquent and lively. The performance was shapely and even affecting, highlighted by ardent soprano and tenor singing.
Formula overdose
2 Fox sitcoms faithfully follow the recipes
By Rick Kogan
TV critic
Two new shows, formulaic in extremis, hit Fox's Thursday night lineup with barely a chance - though one is pretty good - of denting the ratings. First up is 'Martin' (7:30 p.m., Fox-Ch. 32), a showcase for the talents of Martin Lawrence, a highly energetic comic whom some may recall from his work in the 'House Party' films or from HBO's 'Def Comedy Jam' series.
If you remember his work in the latter venture, you might not be able to imagine him toning down his scatological sensibilities to a level acceptable to the censors in prime time.
But he has and, in so doing, has been robbed of some of what makes him an original and aggressively contemporary comic. But he's still winning, as the host of a talk radio show at the fictional WZUP in Detroit. (Amazingly, another comedy based at another fictional Detroit radio station, NBC's 'Rhythm & Blues,' will go head to head with 'Martin' later this season.)
He's a bully - insulting, misogynistic - behind the mike but rather more demure in the presence of his marketing executive girlfriend Gina (Tisha Campbell), who has the ability to turn him into a pussycat.
The show - for all of its topical references to such matters as Sister Souljah - owes much to the sensitivities of 'Seinfeld' but also to such gruff-guy-with-a-heart-of-mush pioneers as 'The Honeymooners.'
The two stars make a lively pair of romantic sparring partners, and many of the supporting cast members are snappy in look and dialogue. Most of them - and this might be forgiven in a premiere - are shrill with their lines, as if performing in a club rather than in front of cameras.
But perhaps the oddest thing about this sitcom is that Lawrence, in one of the most unusual bits of casting in television history, also plays the parts of his own mother and of his rambunctious next-door neighbor.
On the surface, this might seem a novel twist, but in the premiere it's merely weird in a show that otherwise has entertaining possibilities.
'The Heights' (8 p.m., WFLD-Ch. 32) is the sort of neighborhood that seems to exist only in movies and on television: a lower-class area spruced up with loud graffiti and filled with young people who look as if they've just stepped out of a Gap ad.
It is there that a group of these young people gather nightly in some sort of loft space to play rock 'n' roll. They called their band, in a dangerously accurate example of their creativity, the Heights.
Naturally, this series is from the youth-drenched pens of producer Aaron Spelling's factory. And, the characters are a handsome, lithe and pearly-toothed bunch.
There's J.T. (Shawn Thompson), the band's long-maned lead singer, who chases any skirt in his vicinity and works days as a mechanic. There's Stan (Alex Desert), the dreadlocked bassist who works days in his father's pool hall; Hope (Charlotte Ross), a guitarist from more monied circumstances than the others (I think she goes to law school); Dizzy (Ken Garito), the drummer who works days as a plumber; Rita (Cheryl Pollak), a saxophonist who works days as a truck dispatcher; Lenny (Zachary Throne), the drummer who is obsessed, ridiculously, with taping street sounds to mix with the music.
A new person joins this band in the premiere. Alex (James Walter) is something of a renaissance man; one of the busiest young manmen on the tube, working, as best as I could figure, about 37 hours a day as a waiter in a coffee house and as a grocery clerk; and the shyest guy in prime time.
He writes a poem to Rita and later not only sets it to song but also grabs a guitar and proves himself a talented singer-songwriter.
The budding relationship between Alex and Rita is contrasted to the longstanding one between Dizzy and Jodie (Tasia Valenza), a nurse and the daughter of Dizzy's plumbing contractor boss. And she's pregnant!
Both storylines are told in simple (and simple-minded) form.
Rita and Alex exchange longing looks; Dizzy and Jodie squabble because he's afraid to commit to marriage.
Social issues, too, are reduced to comic-book levels: a schoolyard pal asks Stan why he's hanging with white people, to which Stan angrily replies, "It's not a color thing. It's a human being thing."
And this show is meant to be a music thing. That's its highly touted novelty hook - an original song each week given a music video treatment. The problem with this is that in asking musicians to act and actors to be musicians, one is likely to get a bunch of mediocrities.
I know it's tough to judge a band on one song, but the show's initial original tune is a tired track called 'How Do You Talk to an Angel?' It's not likely to make anyone forget 'Last Train to Clarksville,' another original song from a similar and vastly more entertaining TV show called 'The Monkees.'
2 mystery novels: 1 suspenseful, 1 insipid
The Principal Cause of Death
By Mark Richard Zubro
St. Martin's, 182 pages, $17.95
Death Benefits
By Michael Kahn
Button, 308 pages, $19
Reviewed By Bill Mahin
A writer and critic
'The Principal Cause of Death' is the fourth volume in Mark Zubro's series of 'Tom and Scott' mysteries. Here, Tom, a high school teacher, is the chief suspect in the murder of the school's principal.
Bypassing the plodding police, he and his friend Scott begin investigating Tom's fellow faculty members - and a nasty bunch of incompetents, thieves, student-seducers and drunks they turn out to be.
In one scene - almost as unlikely as one in which they beat and torture one of Tom's vilest students - the two uncover a cache of drugs in the home of the delinquent's parents and then summon the police, who, without benefit of a warrant, charge onto the premises, make arrests and seize the drugs.
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Recreating a forgotten showbiz past
Alma
By Gordon Burn
Houghton Mifflin, 210 pages, $19.95
Reviewed by Bill Maxwell
A critic who writes for the Irish Times
In 'Alma,' first-novelist Gordon Burn proves himself to be among the best of the current re-inventors of the past. Recreating a whole era in show business, one that has been almost forgotten because it was wedged in between the end of World War II and the arrival of the Beatles, Burn gives us a rich and hilarious narrative and a sharp satire on the fatuity of fame, the amorality of much of the modern imagemaker's glitz and the devastation that celebrity can wreak on the private lives of individuals.
'Alma' is the fictional autobiography of Alma Cogan, a British pop singer of the '50s. In her time she was Queen of the London Paladium and much of the music circuit and could hold her own against American 'invaders,' as they called people like Doris Day, Lena Horne, Johnny Ray and Nat King Cole.
In those days, television was still such a newfangled idea that when the newsreader came on, mothers would warn their sprawling daughters to pull down their skirts as he might be looking at them. Nowadays, muses Alma, looking back on her life, when you cease to appear on television, you are dead.
Living alone with her pet dog, in a country cottage surrounded by woods and silence, Alma finds it odd that she ever had to invent strategies to ward off the clinging fans. Sitting on the London Underground, she sees her 54-year-old face staring back at her from the depth of a dirt-dappled window, looking a touch reptilian and leathery perhaps, but still with "nothing uplifted, tucked up, sliced off or surgically repositioned."
Much of the thrill of the big time, Alma feels, came from anticipation. Few evenings lived up to the taxi ride through the London dusk that began them. The contrast between the blank, dim gently vibrating interior and the lights and stark specificity outside (plus a few drinks), never failed to produce the perfect balance between excitement and boredom.
Alma's appetite for the social whirl even surprised herself. When she wasn't preparing for drinks, a first night, a private view, a record launch, a supper, she was picking herself up from the night before. The formula was sleep, ice cream and plenty of thick brown tea.
She loved chewing the fat with the hacks and stars of the day: "Although I had been there and back myself and was aware of the shallowness, the fatuity the whatever you want to call it, the truth was that I got a kick out of the mingling with faces from the shiny sheets and fresh out of the evening paper."
But for all her pseudo-sophistication, Alma remained a sexual innocent. As for drugs, when she came across some musicians soaking gauze from inhalers for the hit of benezedrine it gave them and they told her it was a new kind of tea, she believed them.
Much of her success was due to the tenacity of her Rumanian Jewish immigrant parents, who conceived of her as an all-singing, all-dancing showtime spectacular, the natural successor to Shirley Temple. By the time she was 2 years of age, she was being coached in voice and tap. Back home, after every lesson she had to stand and give a demonstration while her father urged her on: "Don't stop 'til I tell you. I want my shillings worth."
By the time she was 10 she could walk into a cinema and tell which studio made the movie by just looking at the print - MGM's lion, Paramount's snowcapped mountain, RKO's radio beacon and Columbia's diaphanous Miss Liberty.
Their modest home in London became a kind of Lincoln Tunnel, as one American called it, where one met all the passing show traffic. Everybody who was anybody in the world of entertainment and more was there. And when they were all settled and sozzled, Alma's mother would take out her banjo and give them her rendition of 'When It Is Night Time in Italy, It Is Wednesday Over Here' or 'If I Had My Life To Live Over Again, I'd Live Over a Delicatessen.'
Never invest in material goods, she told her daughter. The only thing worth hoarding was jewelry, which, when everything else gets taken away from you, you still have something left to sell. Little wonder that Burn has Noel Coward noting in his diary: "Was hectored in the usual scarifying fashion by that stout little woman who is always at Alma Cogan's by and large charming parties in Kensington, claiming to be her mother."
But when the time came, as it must for all celebrities, and Alma was no longer the star she had been, she had plenty of favors to call in. Indeed she owed to a friend of a friend the house she now occupied for most of the time.
Perhaps the saddest episode in this story is when Alma goes off to the Tate Gallery in search of a famous portrait done of her when she was in her prime. Whatever else time may have wrought, she feels, this will remain the same. Unknown to the attendants, who have long forgotten even her name, she finds that her picture is no longer on show and has been confined to the vaults. And when she checks her name in the reference index, the card reads, "Cogan-Alma. See H - has beens, whatever happened to. . ."
In a final twist of invention, which I leave to the reader to discover, Burn links the name of Alma with the notorious Moors child murderer Myra Hindley and her accomplice Ian Brady. Burn doesn't spare us the incongruity and obscenity of the comparison. To the modern publicity-conscious world they too were icons of their time. After all they made the news, didn't they? And while they may not have been persons, they certainly were personalities.
Civic Liberalism's debut
Mickey Kaus calls for an end to welfare and a fair deal for all who work
The End of Equality
By Mickey Kaus
New Republic/Basic Books, 293 pages, $25
Reviewed by George Scialabba
Recipient of a citation for excellence in reviewing from the National Book Critic's Circle
William F. Buckley once remarked in exasperation that he would not read another book about liberalism until his grandmother wrote one. I don't know whether she has, but if not, Buckley really ought to make an exception for 'The End of Equality' by Mickey Kaus. Many details of Kaus' argument will arouse opposition or skepticism from liberals, conservatives, or both. But in its overall vision and thrust, it is an original, powerful book, capable of permanently altering the terms of American political debate.
It is obvious that economic inequality has increased in the United States in the last 10 or 15 years. Most disputes about the subject concern either how much or why. 'The End of Equality' asks a different question: Why does it matter? It does matter, of course, to Kaus as much as anyone; but not, either to him or (he claims) most of the rest of us for the reasons often assumed.
The equality most Americans value, says Kaus, is not equality of income but civic equality: equal dignity and respect for all who do their part - that is, work. People who accept their obligation to society, who work, are entitled to self-esteem and material security, at any rate in a prosperous democracy like ours. Equal dignity and respect mean such people's right to at least adequate medical care, legal help, education for their children and the other necessities of a good life, and even to some of its amenities: safe and pleasant public spaces, public transportation, clean air.
These things need not be distributed exactly equally, or even distributed at all. But if some people can afford the best of all these goods, while many others who are working or have worked hard or are willing to work can barely afford a decent minimum of them or cannot afford them at all - this violates most Americans' sense of fairness.
As Kaus points out, that sentiment does not amount to an ideological opposition to capitalism nor even to a populist antipathy toward the rich. If through luck, talent or exceptionally hard work, someone strikes it rich and wants to buy a yacht, take exotic vacations, retire at 40, most of us will gladly (or grudgingly) tip our hat. But that well-off Americans should live on safe streets while less affluent but equally hardworking Americans are afraid to go out after dark; should be able to afford crowns for their teeth or nursing care for their parents or stimulating schools for their kids while a lot of equally hardworking people can't: this doesn't sit right.
In short, a democracy can allow rich and poor, but not first-class citizens and second-class citizens. Such at least, Kaus claims, is most contemporary Americans' understanding of democracy. (He bases his argument on polling data as well as on a persuasive reading of American political history.)
I think Kaus is right. And he's right, too, to perceive not merely the negative side of this, the widespread popular disapproval of unfair hardship, but the positive side as well, the civic and psychological healthiness of mixing the classes, of having institutions where rich and poor stand in line together, go to meetings together, sit and root together in the bleachers or the grandstands. This is what endures, and deserves to endure, from the culture of smalltown America.
The vision of civic equality as earned dignity ought to guide liberal strategy. Instead, according to Kaus, liberals have in recent decades usually settled for straightforward income redistribution: taxes and transfers. A variety of other redistributive policies are currently on offer from Democrats: worker re-training; 'flexible,' or technologically de-centralized, production; protectionism; profit-sharing; the promotion of unionization. Kaus takes on each of these schemes, arguing that none of them can really do much to halt the recent sharp increase in income inequality, which is rooted in the transformation of the American economy away from mass production and toward symbol-manipulation, away from unionized blue- and white-collar workers and toward a meritocratic managerial-professional elite.
Instead of a futile and unpopular 'Money Liberalism,' Kaus advocates what he calls "Civic Liberalism," which would "use the public sphere to incubate and spread an egalitarian culture" of common interests, sentiments and experiences.
There are half a dozen innovations or reforms, some of them familiar, that could widen the sphere of social equality. For one: a return to conscription, combined with a year of national service for all who are not drafted. For another: campaign reform, public financing and free radio and television time for candidates.
An American scholar's insider report on China
Evening Chats in Beijing:
Probing China's Predicament
By Perry Link
Norton, 448 pages, $24.95
Reviewed by Harrison Salisbury
A specialist in Soviet and Chinese affairs whose most recent book is 'The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng'
No one who experienced the tragedy of Tiananmen emerged unscathed, certainly not Perry Link, an American scholar who was in the forefront of it all. Although he insists that 'Evening Chats in Beijing' is "not a Tiananmen book" it is, in fact, the quintessential Tiananmen book, and that is why it is important.
A soft-spoken American specialist in Chinese literature, Link portrays himself as an accidental player in the Tiananmen events. If this is so, he was precisely the right man in the right place at the right time. Link knew the language, had spent time in China previously and for months had practically lived with the intellectuals who were to take part in the affair, interviewing them in depth about their attitudes toward the regime and its problems.
Long before Tiananmen, Link was in possession of clues that suggested to him that a basic confrontation was at hand. And he himself became a participant in Tiananmen through his friendship with Fang Lizhi, the physicist and dissident who became something of a folk hero during the tumultuous affair.
<#FROWN:C15\>
Bella Vista: Fashion Statement from Food to Decor
By Pat Bruno
Restaurant Critic
Bella Vista had to be a labor of love for Dan and Linda Bacin. The Bacins, who own the Bacino's Pizzeria chain, broke out of their pizza-only concept a few years ago when they opened Bacino's Pizzeria/Trattoria, a many-seats Italian restaurant in Naperville.
The instant success of that restaurant, which featured a broad range of upscale Italian dishes, seems to have been the springboard for the newly opened Bella Vista on West Belmont.
Bella Vista is really something. The restaurant is housed in a building that began as a bank in 1929, and got wracked, ravaged and nearly ruined after the bank moved out. Some sharp-eyed developers talked Bacin into opening a restaurant in the building. Then it began: What started out as a labor of love became a love for labor. It seems that with one thing or another, the process of turning this old bank space into a restaurant went on and on. A number of restaurants around town opened and closed in the time it took Bella Vista to open.
Restaurant as art
The end result is spectacular. If you take a right turn just inside the revolving door, you'll end up in the bar area, which is separated from a small dining area by a wall of wines. In one corner are two rustic, strikingly beautiful, copper-clad, wood-burning ovens that are used for pizza and certain pasta dishes.
The main dining room, with its decorative beaux-arts motif, is composed of a series of levels - five, it seems - that starts with an inlaid marble floor and ends way up there, 30 feet or more, with open balcony seating and small dining rooms that feature hand-painted, fresco-like artworks with a Sistine Chapel feel. In fact, the whole restaurant is one big piece of art; everywhere you look there's some type of on-the-wall original art. It must have cost a small fortune to decorate this restaurant.
Is it all too much? In its intrinsic beauty, Bella Vista becomes somewhat of an anomaly on this part of Belmont Avenue, where, to put it politely, businesses that are a dime a dozen are bought and sold for a nickel - over and over again. Then there is the competitive situation. In the two square blocks around Bella Vista, there are a lot of restaurants, and a lot of them are Italian, and a lot of them - an awful lot - serve pizza.
So Bella Vista, which means 'beautiful view' (the name has to have come from what is seen inside the restaurant, because there isn't much of a vista outside) has its work cut out. But Bacin is known as a 'slugger' in the restaurant business; he's not afraid to mix it up with the competition to get his share of the pasta and pizza pie.
Contemporary Italian
Bella Vista serves, as the front of the menu points out, "contemporary Italian cuisine." This is food that doesn't tweak the old Italian mustache; it completely shaves it off. Calamari gets grilled and served with beans, garlic and tomatoes. A salad of endive, watercress, peppered pecans and Gorgonzola makes quite a fashion statement, one that would make iceberg lettuce freeze with envy.
Pasta dishes are built with sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, wild mushrooms, arugula, grilled vegetables and other ingredients that create tiers of flavor. The lasagna was served in an unabashedly urbane, multicolored, multilayered arrangement that bore little resemblance to lasagna as we know it, other than possibly the shape. And the only red sauce I could find on the menu was called a "spicy sun-dried tomato sauce."
Pizzas swivel down the runway of fashion and carry the 'gourmet' label. They come topped with grilled or roasted vegetables, smoked chicken and white beans, peppered shrimp and goat cheese, roasted onions and smoked mozzarella.
A similar pattern
Entrees follow a similar pattern, boasting names that if they weren't in Italian would defy provenance. Maiale allo spiedo, for example, becomes spit-roasted loin of pork served with garlic whipped potatoes, mixed peppers and buttered escarole. Tonno con capellini is grilled tuna with roasted onions, marinated tomatoes and angel-hair pasta. Every part of that dish would be at home on the menu of a nouvelle cuisine restaurant or a French restaurant.
But how does the food stack up against the dazzling decor and the tight but well-balanced menu (roughly six choices listed under each course)? Sometimes it stacks neatly, and sometimes it tumbles. An appetizer of grilled wild mushrooms redolent with rosemary and lavished with shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese was delicious.
But each of the three gourmet pizzas sampled left me only partially satisfied. The toppings were great, but the crusts weren't. Pizza baked in a woodburning oven should look and taste like it came out of a woodburning oven; these didn't. The crust was too thin, and it had no character, no marks from the wood fire, no good chew. But some of the toppings could not have been better. They included crisp and thin grilled asparagus, roasted onions and marinated tomatoes; pesto, tomatoes, pine nuts and fresh mozzarella-vegetables, and goat cheese. The combinations were right on the flavor button and thoroughly enjoyable.
A pasta dish of corkscrew-shaped pasta (cavatappi) in a Parmesan-rich Alfredo sauce with swirls of fresh spinach and pounded thin slices of breast of chicken was a delicious piece of pasta work in every respect. But a spit-roasted herb chicken dish was woefully short on flavor. The chicken was really bland, and the promised herbs were too little and too tame. I could have made a meal, however, on the delicious creamy wild mushroom polenta that was buried under the chicken.
At lunch, a grilled tuna sandwich was a delicious arrangement in which the fillet of fresh tuna, perfectly cooked to a tasty medium-rare, was laid between thin slices of grilled Italian bread and flanked by slices of fresh tomato, thick rings of roasted red onion and a powerfully good roasted red pepper mayonnaise. It was a sandwich not only of substance but also good taste.
Then there was the lasagna. This was a case where I would have enjoyed an un-lasagna, in which a few layers of the pasta were replaced by more of the delicious grilled vegetables. All this lasagna needed to be outstanding was some rearranging.
Desserts, et al.
Desserts were the most consistent of all. A warm apple tart with caramel and macadamia nuts was most pleasing. Another delicious arrangement was the warm chocolate cake, a round, soft, gooey-good cake ringed by small scoops of milk chocolate and white chocolate gelato and raspberry sorbet.
I hate to admit that tiramisu, which means "lift me up" but has been letting me down, is boring me, but it is. I think it's time someone started tinkering with the basic ingredients (ladyfingers and mascarpone cheese being the most important) and came up with something a little different (Bella Vista works a creme Anglaise into the picture).
The wine list, which features Italian and California wines, is extensive and runs from cheap to expensive. Wines by the glass are just plain expensive. And while I'm at it, I'd like to note that $2.75 is too much money for espresso. Most of the fine dining places in town charge less than that. And charging that much makes it less likely that people will order it, so nobody wins.
Mitchell Our Best Writer?
Up in the Old Hotel
And other stories.
By Joseph Mitchell.
Pantheon. $25.
By Stephen Becker
Back in the 1940s and 1950s young writers used to swap stories about established writers and sooner or later someone would say, "Of course, Joe Mitchell is the best writer in America," always the casual "Joe Mitchell," as if one had seen him recently in New York or was in desultory correspondence with him. None of us aspirants actually knew Mitchell, but we delivered the verdict with awful authority. He was (and remains) a legendary figure, publishing rarely. We kids may very well have been right: He may indeed have been (and still be) the best writer in America.
Up in the Old Hotel is Mitchell's collected work, and it comprises his four published volumes, McSorley's Wonderful Saloon (a classic that should stand in every American home), Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret, plus several stories that have never been reprinted. "Stories," yes, but they live on the border; they are true stories and high art - reportage made so vivid, so real, that it comes out like fiction of the highest order ("a reporter only in the sense that Defoe was a reporter," wrote one critic).
His titles alone are a kind of literature. One story is called "Hit on the Head with a Cow." Another is "The Mohawks in High Steel," borrowed by Edmund Wilson to lead off his own Apologies to the Iroquois, and "The Same as Monkey Glands," and "The Downfall of Fascism in Black Ankle County," and "I Blame it All on Mamma." He can take a group of men or women ('The Gypsy Women') and bring them to life like an old Dutch painter; he can take a place, or a murky region ('The Bottom of the Harbor,' 'Obituary of a Gin Mill,' or the Fulton Street Fish Market), and ease us into it until we feel we have known it all our lives.
And how does he work his magic, this "obsessed reader of Finnegans Wake"? In a prose so simple, so honest, so monolithic that not a word is wasted or affected or vain. Mitchell is to "current American writing" what fine whiskey aged in contented oaken barrels is to soda pop. His accounts share essential qualities with the Authorized Version of the Bible: the prose is direct and solid and dignified, and as a result stately, whatever his subject.
Consider the cats at McSorley's: "He owned as many as 18 at once and they had the run of the saloon. He fed them on bull livers put through a sausage grinder and they became enormous. When it came time to feed them, he would leave the bar, no matter how brisk business was, and bang on the bottom of a tin pan; the fat cats would come loping up, like leopards, from all corners of the saloon." Ever wonder what makes good writing? "Bang Bottom Fat Cats Loping Like Leopards" - that's rhythm, that's music, and Mitchell does it all the time. He may not even know that he does it. He is so gifted a natural writer (and so shaped, we must think, by the Authorized Version) that he cannot write badly. He may be the only writer in America of whom that can be said.
Mitchell is in his early 80s now, and has lived the century's history. He is a Carolina man, and while observing the Klan's solemn foofaraw decades ago he "spent so many nights hiding in the weed patch that I failed my final examinations in algebra, the history of North Carolina, English composition, and French, and was not promoted, which I did not mind, as I had already spent two years in the ninth grade and felt at home there."
Any gap in his formal education is irrelevant and obsolete. He is perfectly at home whether telling Block Island stories or quoting Joe Gould quoting William Blake. He will tell you what sea urchins are and how to dress and eat them, not to mention diamondback terrapins. Or true old-fashioned traditional New York steak dinners, before they were corrupted by Manhattan cocktails and modern manners. (His zest for food is contagious; after a couple of these pieces we feel famished. He may have gone hungry as a boy.) But he will also be brilliant about Calypso music or a gifted child or the deaf club.
Indeed, if you read these stories at random, one or two a night, you soon realize that you are assembling a mosaic of American life.
<#FROWN:C16\>
A Matter of Survival
October, Eight O'Clock
by Norman Manea,
translated by Cornelia Golna, Anselm Hollo, Mara Soceanu Vamos, Max Bleyleben, and Marguerite Dorian and Elliott B. Urdang.
Grove Weidenfeld, 216 pp., $18.95
Louis Begley
Late one Friday: a little boy waits by the window in an unnamed, desolate place. A phantom, "a shadow, withered and gloomy," appears out of the "smoky steppes." It is the boy's mother walking hurriedly, stumbling, bent under a sack heavy with potatoes, beans, prunes, and other scraps of food she earns knitting in houses of peasants whose language she does not understand. The father's work - we are not told what it is - pays only a quarter of a loaf of bread a day. If it weren't for the mother - believing "that we would survive if we held fast to anything that might save us" - they would have "faded very rapidly, right at the beginning." Only this time, in addition to the food which she lays out as always on the floor in six piles, one for each day of the week to come, she has brought in her sack something miraculous. It is a sweater of many colors, like Joseph's coat, knitted of yarn ends scavenged in those alien huts. The sweater is bulky. Avidly, the boy imagines its warmth. The colors sparkle,
as if the magician who would save us wanted to demonstrate to us what he could do. The night enveloped us in smoke, cold, and darkness; we heard nothing but explosions, screams, the barks of the guards, crows, and frogs. We had long ago forgotten such glitter.
Who can this object be for? The mother, to keep her from freezing as she trudges across the steppes? The boy? No, he thinks it must be for the father, "he deserved it more than anybody else, since he had lost all hope long ago." But in fact the sweater is for Mara, the only occupant of the hut the boy names. That is because "she had ended up among us by mistake.... The little girl had nothing to do with the curse on us; she was innocent.... Caught up in the catastrophe, mixed up with us and taken away, she had been brought as far as this." So they "loved her excessively," thinking that "she must return alive at all costs."
So begins 'The Sweater,' the first in the important and beautiful collection of stories by Norman Manea entitled October, Eight O'Clock. From the known facts of Mr. Manea's life, one may infer that the nameless place is a concentration camp, somewhere in Transnistria, a land across the border which then divided Romania from Ukraine; the time is World War II; and the little boy, his family, and the other prisoners in the camp (other than "innocent" Mara, soon to die of typhus) are Romanian Jews deported by the Nazis. But none of these words - Romania, Nazi, German, Jew, the War, typhus - are used, except that once some other boys call the narrator a "kike."
Years pass. One does not know how many. A later story is called 'The Partition.' The boy narrator - who had been one of those children covered with scabies, "with oversized skulls... compressed, stunted, as if an instrument of torture had shrunk them all" - has survived. He is now a middle-aged man, perhaps a trifle paunchy, reclusive, perpetually attired in shabby jeans and turtleneck sweaters which, to his janitor, looks imported. He lives in "an adolescent's mess in an old man's room." The building is also old, well built, with large apartments for rich people. But "they" - we take them to be the Communist authorities - have divided it with "partitions thin as cigarette paper, reallocated living space, redid everything." The janitor watches his tenants' every move:
thick-set, punctual, hygienic. Hairy, swarthy. The eyes of a makeshift expert. A conversationalist by profession.... Always attentive, he notes, makes out, identifies your shopping bag, packages, voice, clothes, who you're with. The rhythm of your steps, any hesitation, the least trace of bad humor, everything is recorded. Such an important building, such different people, in short the community demands its own laws: to know everyone, ward off conflict, to inform correctly, make judicious decisions, have one's eye on everything.
The nameless narrator watches and listens too. His neighbors
wake up, hurry, leave, rush around like greyhounds; flee from the rat race; their eyes empty, they scatter in the streets toward shops, trams, the bus. Lines for cheese, medication, flashlights, buttons, TV sets. A line here, another there: books, light bulbs, pad-locks, shoes, eyeglasses, and so on until nightfall. Twilight eases their exhaustion. Up the staircase of standardized buildings, concrete boxes, the leftover hours pass lazily: armchair, TV, gas heater, ironing, the nightly sarcophagus.
He leaves the city for a resort - an August beach crowded with the recumbent bodies of the vacationing elite of the regime, the paraphernalia of third world chic scattered around them, the sea bringing in "offal, grease, pitchballs, foul-smelling wrack, fruit rinds, rags, empty cans." As yet, he doesn't know how to swim. One step too far into the surf, and he comes close to drowning.
An attenuated affair with a woman who has accompanied him comes to an end. This is in a story called 'The Turning Point.' In a later story, 'Seascape with Birds,' he returns to the same shore in a different season. It seems to him that
The staggering, exhausted bodies should have been brought here, to the deserted edge of the sea, and stretched out on the cold moist autumn sand....
If only the trains carrying them reached here, the few survivors could have descended the high, dusty cliff to the jagged shore. It would have been better had they been forced to watch, for hours on end, the fluid violet horizon, the silky tremor of spring. Transfixed for days, weeks, an entire year, before the same scenery. Had they experienced this feeling of pointlessness, endlessness, they might not have chased after time so greedily....
The boy, the boy at least would have deserved the cold, moist winds, the blaze of mirrors, summer. He should have been brought here long ago, thought the man overcome by indolence and sleep. For years on end, I would have known only the light and the happy sobs of the water, I could have understood why nature means nothing to me...
Thrice and four times blessed were they who perished under the walls of Troy. Between these dreadful parentheses - the sweater and the beach - Mr. Manea evokes with powerful and yet delicate brush strokes, as though in water colors, the nightmare of survival. In 'We Might Have Been Four,' one senses that the war has possibly ended, but not the hunger. The family is still in a "hostile village." They steal a chicken, kill it, pluck its feathers, boil and fry it, gorge "under the spell of the meat's fragrance almost to the point of oblivion." It is just before dawn when they return through the forest: the mother and father, the boy, and Finlanda, the boy's young cousin. The girl wears a dress in which "she seemed to float, to be beyond anyone's reach." She has made it of material the father had offered to the mother and the mother refused: she had grown too thin with the war, it would not have looked good on her. Now the boy sees that
the order in which we had come had broken down. Finlanda had moved far off, ever more absent. Not too far behind her, he [the father] too was moving off, as if caught in the leaves and in the russet light of her flowing hair.
I watched them leave everything behind. I wanted to shout after them, I wanted to hate them, but I liked them, they always joked with me...
Whereas the mother, to whom they owe their survival, now "had no patience, she was always sour, anxious." The theme of betrayal - or is it the stirring of a scandalous spring, an obscene reawakening of senses - returns in the story called 'Proust's Tea.' The boy and the mother are in a railroad waiting room monstrously packed with old people and children. The repatriation trains have been segregated, so that men and young women were dispatched somewhere separately. Although nurses in white uniforms pass through the crowd, distributing tea and biscuits, the rescued cannot understand that they have in fact been saved. The mother
couldn't stop thinking about what might be happening on the train that never arrived. She couldn't have been allowed on board, she knew all too well that she looked like an old woman, no one would have believed that she was not yet thirty. But then she would have had no reason to want to be on the train for men and young women. Surely she too had seen how they had clung to each other without shame - my father and my cousin - the moment they left the lineup.
Eventually, such things are passed over. "Normal times" return. Families survive, "go everywhere they were invited, as if to make up for lost time and to reassure themselves that they had come back alive, that they could start over again with renewed strength." Once again, they live in middle-class apartments. They have maids; like in the old days, the maid sleeps in the basement kitchen. At night, she may receive visits of one soldier or another; one night this family's maid receives instead the now adolescent narrator:
Here are my feverish hands, the curls, the uncovered wetness, open to all promises, summer green darkened in the curled hair, phosphorescent with bacteria. I bite into the heart of her shoulder.
Young boys learn to answer questions such as "Did they beat you?" Driven by their parents and relatives, or by their own anguish, all at once they write poems, pass examinations, excel in mathematics; they are awarded prizes at schools they had never before attended. The narrator is such a boy. He "had made up the lost classes; devoured textbooks, even those others found dull; he swallowed everything; always hungry, concentrated, impelled by his own thirst."
But, at a certain moment, even that may not be enough. The boy's identity must be defined - for grownups, the issue may not arise, their identities had been formed and, however tattered, can be reassumed. Such a moment is examined in 'The Instructor.' The father and the mother arrange for the boy to be taught Hebrew in preparation for his bar mitzvah. Mr. Manea does not name either the language or the ceremony; the teacher - an old man dressed humbly in black like a petty functionary or a shopkeeper - says to the boy:
You're about to turn thirteen, to become a man. That's why I've been called. The ceremony is not complicated. The language is old, beautiful. The greatest book of all was written in it. That is why the language has survived to this day.
It is as though the parents tried to attach the limb that has been severed:
suddenly he was seeing them from a great distance. They seemed childish, ridiculous. They did not even believe in the ceremony for which they were preparing him. It was just the need for yet another sign that all was normal. Nothing else but the rush to accumulate proof, to have relatives and neighbors and former friends confirm that, yes, everything was in order that life had reaccepted them, that it was just like before, that they were the same as before.
The narrator does not rebel for long. His parents hold a trump card, the ability to control his movements. In addition to the Torah, he is poring over the Communist Manifesto. What he reads there, he believes and wants to believe. That is his road to an identity and a "normal" new life. A selection is about to be made for a great honor: attendance at a summer camp for Soviet Pioneer Scouts, the elect among secular believers.
<#FROWN:C17\>
Santa Maria and Spaceships
Philip Glass's Columbus opera sails into the Met
KATRINE AMES
During an early rehearsal of Philip Glass's 'The Voyage' at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, one orchestra member asked conductor Bruce Ferden how long the first act would run. "Forty-five minutes," the meastro replied. "Oh," said the musician. "So if we played it without repeats it would last five?"
Commissioned for the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus's journey to the New World, 'The Voyage' sailed into the Met right on schedule last week, exactly 500 years after the famous landing. Unfortunately, it was also about a decade too late: minimalism crested years ago. Though much of 'The Voyage' is lovely, especially its lush orchestral passages, and though Glass is using a wider harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary now, he's riding the same old wave. Still, 'The Voyage' is a hit. All six performances are sold out, in part because Glass has a legion of downtown followers. And there is the faint but real possibility, particularly after the success last season of John Corigliano's 'The Ghosts of Versailles,' that some Met subscribers are willing to give new operas a chance.
Conservative operagoers will not suffer. 'The Voyage' is scored for acoustic instruments- no computer clicks or electronic beeps here. But there's too little that surprises: Glass's famous arpeggios abound, and the chromaticism is pretty but predictable. (Someone has already renamed the piece "Recycled Glass.") It makes considerable demands on the performers, and too few on the audience. The concept was the composer's: not to tell the story of Columbus, who gets very little stage time, but to explore the notion of exploration, of space, of time, of the mind. It's an intriguing idea and a neat way to sidestep much of the Columbus controversy. But, hampered by a muddled libretto by playwright David Henry Hwang ('M. Butterfly'), an overblown production and his own failure to shape character, Glass doesn't pull it off.
The opera begins with a touching prologue, as a scientist (modeled on Stephen Hawking) hovers above the stage in a wheelchair, ruminating: "The voyage lies where/The vision lies." He summons up a planet-filled sky, and flies away. After that, the vision falters: the action moves from the late ice age, when four intergalactic travelers crash to earth in their spaceship, to 1492, as a hallucinating Columbus nears land. The last act, set in 2092, takes an abrupt tonal shift. Frantic and hilarious, it features twin archeologists (imagine Hans and Franz as Margaret Mead) who have unearthed crystals left behind by the ice-age astronauts. Finally, in an epilogue, the dead Queen Isabella tries to seduce the dying Columbus. Amid the mess are some fine performances, particularly Patricia Schuman as the spaceship Commander and Timothy Noble as Columbus. There are some great moments, as when the Commander tangos with earthlings who wear bird headdresses- like 'West Side Story' with feathers. But too often, my mind took a little voyage of its own.
The Rise From Rice to Riches
A 10-hour TV series tracks Asia's economic miracle
JOSHUA HAMMER
Five years in the making, 'The Pacific Century,' a 10-part documentary now appearing on the public television net-work PBS, is a history lesson that goes down easy. Produced by Alex Gibney, a filmmaker whose critically acclaimed 'Battle for Eastern Airlines' on PBS chronicled the rancorous 1989 machinists' strike, this series covers a vastly larger chunk of time. Over 10 hours, it traces East Asia's transition from dependence on America to political and economic vibrancy, concentrating on Japan but also touching on China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Inevitably, the series, which will appear in a number of Asian and European countries in the coming months, is flawed by tedious passages, omissions and eat-your-spinach commentary from those inescapable talking heads. But for every dull spot, it comes alive with newsreels and pop-culture artifacts - from the appalling American 1910 film "comedy," 'That Chink at Golden Gulch,' which shows cowboys gleefully murdering a pigtailed coolie, to early Sony promotional films.
'The Pacific Century' is most riveting when it weaves Asia's past with its present. One of the best episodes, 'The Two Coasts of China,' places the xenophobia of today's Communists in the context of China's ancient hostility toward the outside world. Gibney's camera crew traveled to Mongolia and got scenes of native filmmakers re-creating Genghis Khan's invasion of China, complete with hundreds of soldier-extras riding horseback across the steppes. To capture the era of the Opium War (when the British navy overwhelmed the Chinese to protect its contraband trade), he serves up details about "Miami Vice"-style smuggling trips, Indian opium factories and entrepreneurs such as Warren Delano, Franklin D. Roosevelt's grandfather. Framing the old conflicts are modern images of capitalist Hong Kong - as threatening to today's Communist regime as the British "barbarians" were to the Manchus.
Gibney does a terrific job exploring Japan's history, showing how it grafted Western-style colonialism, culture and democracy to its own society. Beginning with the rise of the Emperor Meiji, he devotes four episodes to the country's 130-year evolution from a nation of samurai to soldiers to salarymen. It's jolting to realize that the Mitsubishi Corp. once ran Battleship Island, a 19th-century Alcatraz where coal miners lived packed into wretched "octopus dens" and faced execution if they tried to escape. Particularly touching are scenes from the occupation, in which Japan aped all things American: a patronizing American newsreel shows "a Jap jazz band for Joe and Mrs. Joe" and a Japanese Elvis attempts to sing "(You Ain't Nothin' But a) Hound Dog." But footage of strikes and anti-American riots in 1960 explodes the common misconception that Japan's transformation to economic superpower was smooth. In one moment from 1960 captured on videotape, a right-wing assassin rushes across a stage and thrusts a samurai sword into a socialist leader. It's a chilling image of the violent, medieval forces still seething in the Japanese psyche.
Striking themes: Once it gets past Japan, however, 'The Pacific Century' loses focus. (Gibney's original plan was to make a documentary just on Japan, but the Annenberg/CPB Project, which chipped in $2.5 million of the $4.5 million budget, wanted him to tackle the whole Pacific Rim.) South Korea's rapid modernization and pro-democracy uprisings are vividly portrayed, but his treatment of the Chinese Revolution is cursory and disorganized, and much of the material on Taiwan and Singapore is just plain dull. And while Peter Coyote's fine, understated narration lends resonance, your eyes may glaze over when the documentary falls back on a battery of droning academics.
A documentary this sprawling is also bound to be flawed by omissions. It doesn't touch Thailand's boom or Cambodia's tragedy, skirts the Vietnam War and neglects Deng Xiaoping. A segment on the Philippines begs for more scenes from Cory Aquino's 1986 revolution that toppled Ferdinand Marcos; an episode about Indonesian leader Sukarno (described by a comrade as "a combination of George Washington and Clark Gable") inexplicably says nothing about the thousands of leftists murdered in the 1965 military coup - one of the darkest chapters of Asian history. And it could use more about the underside of the Japanese miracle - the stock-market scandals, the bursting of the real-estate bubble. But what's striking are themes and, above all, images: a shabby crowd at a Tokyo fashion show in 1960, poised between memories of abject poverty and dreams of prosperity. And in a tacky video from the People's Republic, a young woman sings: "Hurry up 1997/ Then I can go to Hong Kong/ Come soon 1997/ I want to have a wild time." Moments like that one poignantly capture the yearnings of a region still new to affluence and democracy.
Playing with Paradox
Director of the moment: Canada's Robert Lepage
SCOTT SULLIVAN in Paris
A plain white sheet: behind it, the spectral outline of the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis rolls up its sleeve and ties off a vein in its forearm. Looming stage left, a giant hypodermic syringe aims itself at the inside of the jazzman-junkie's elbow, strikes - and ejaculates a jet of liquid across the sheet. Blackout.
Few stage directors would dare mount such a scene. Fewer still could bring it off. But for Robert Lepage, a 35-year-old French Canadian who is captivating audiences across Europe, the Miles Davis sketch is all in an evening's work. All his productions abound in wit, surprises and unlikely combinations. When he stages Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet,' he has the Capulets speak English, the Montagues Canadian French. When he presents a murder mystery situated in Quebec, the action takes place before the Berlin wall. In Lepage's 'Coriolanus,' the playing area consists of a 6-by-16-foot window; when the hero rises to address his countrymen, his head vanishes from view. In several productions, the hero flies overhead on wires.
A few critics tax Lepage with superficiality. But the vast majority see him as the brightest new star in the Western theatrical firmament. Not since the early 1970s - when the American renegade Bob Wilson first mesmerized European theatergoers with his slow-motion stage magic - has a director made more waves. Already this season Lepage has presented five plays at the prestigious Autumn Festival in Paris. This week he is directing 'Needles and Opium' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. Last summer he created a dazzling 'Midsummer Night's Dream' at London's National Theatre. He works in Frankfurt and Munich this winter, then returns to his Th<*_>a-circ<*/>tre Rep<*_>e-grave<*/>re in Quebec. Already, European critics are classing Lepage with the great theatrical innovators of the late 20th century: Wilson, Peter Brook, Peter Stein and Patrice Chreau.
He is a somewhat unlikely candidate for such adulation. A painstaking minimalist who uses small casts and deliberately limited stage spaces, Lepage implicitly rejects the lavishness of most postmodernist productions. More than that, he sees himself as an intensely local phenomenon. He is a Qubcois patriot, wedded to the archaic (sometimes even incomprehensible) French of the province. But Lepage has turned his apparent limitations into real-life assets. He crowds his tiny stages with psychological and physical action. And he studs his texts with brash cultural allusions - from Leonardo da Vinci to Jean-Paul Sartre to the East German secret police - which he treats with the infective enthusiasm of a provincial who has just come up to town.
"Modern theater people never stop talking about communication," says Lepage. "They've forgotten that the main point is communion." To knit his audiences into theatrical congregations, he uses every trick in the book - from cinematic subtitles to flashbacks to full frontal nudity - plus some he has invented himself. "Audiences today have learned everything from television," Lepage points out. "Because of the TV and even the VCR, I can permit myself all kinds of gimmicks that were off-limits ten years ago." There is a certain slightly unfinished quality about some of Lepage's work. But he defends even that quality on interesting theoretical grounds. "If the images are too perfect," he argues, "you forget you are at the theater. You might as well be sitting at the movies with your girlfriend."
Nobody who attends a Lepage performance will confuse it with a movie. "Polygraph," one of the plays he presented in Paris this fall, follows (and pokes fun at) the conventions of the B-movie thriller: the sinister detective in a snap-brim hat, the unconventional femme fatale, the tense meetings on subway platforms. But Lepage transforms this familiar material, chops it up into quick, punchy episodes, sows his trail with false clues, blends the central plot with themes from Shakespeare ('Hamlet,' mostly). In the end, the raw material is transmuted into a challenging puzzle about human guilt, responsibility and punishment. The murderer is never identified.
Lepage is a searcher, a ransacker of European culture, which, he points out, his native Canada so acutely lacks. Two of his plays - 'Vinci' and 'Needles and Opium' - are renderings of his own experiences as a provincial on the Old Continent. He searches out the hotel room where Jean-Paul Sartre once lived and wrote.