Books and Literature

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      At Under the Radar, Theater That Jumps Right Off the Page

      by

      Literary influences suffuse this year’s festival of avant-garde performance. Artists from six shows share the stories that inspired them.“A story,” the director Yngvild Aspeli said, “is something that makes us connect to each other, something that manages to go beyond time or cultural difference.”Theater, even in its more experimental corners, has long been in the business of telling stories. At this year’s Under the Radar festival, the Public Theater’s annual survey of avant-garde theater and performance in New York, some of these stories may seem familiar. Half a dozen of the main works are deliberately in dialogue with literary classics and ephemera, from sources as diverse as Mark Twain’s satirical monologues, James Joyce’s erotic letters, the Epic of Gilgamesh and “Antigone.”“I’m interested in the contemporary as the ancient comes through it,” Mark Russell, who founded and programs the festival, said. “And I was very moved by these primal theater impulses and primal texts.”Running through Jan. 22 at the Public and five partner venues, this is the first iteration of Under the Radar since 2020. The 2022 festival was canceled just weeks before opening because of an upsurge in Covid-19 cases. Though somewhat less international than in years past (an acknowledgment of the difficulty and expense of obtaining visas for artists), it still represents a substantial array of narrative, style and tone. Aspeli’s piece, for example, an adaptation of “Moby-Dick,” is performed by 50 puppets and an underwater orchestra.Annie Saunders and Jesse Saler in “Our Country.”Gema GalianaNot all of these projects were conceived during the pandemic, but even those dreamed up before it seem intent on finding language — textual and visual — to apply to this uncertain cultural moment. Much of that language happens to be literary, and it centers on themes of isolation and community. While several of the programmed works survey grief and loss, others offer alternatives, such as friendship and pleasure. Some do both.“Perhaps in a moment where we’re in crisis, we can use this past poetics to bring us joy and relief and connection,” said Rachel Mars, the creator of the performance piece “Your Sexts.” (The show has a longer title, but it is, like many sexts, unprintable.)The New York Times spoke to artists associated with six of this year’s shows about the literary works that inspired them and how the pages of the past speak to the present. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.‘Our Country’Inspiration: Sophocles’ “Antigone”Annie Saunders, co-creator and performer: As a person who struggles with self-belief, I’m interested in “Antigone,” in the idea of believing in yourself that much. The other thing that really interests me is the brother-sister dynamic, having a brother who you feel you have to save. My brother has a criminal history. He’s actually great now. But for many, many years, that was the dynamic. I spent a few days with my brother in the summer of 2016 and made about 10 hours of tape of us talking to each other about “Antigone,” our childhood, criminality, the law. That became a major part of the show.“Antigone” is an anchor. I always come back to that core story dealing with fundamental human themes about right and wrong, self-belief, familial obligation. These are core human experiences.‘Otto Frank’Inspiration: “The Diary of Anne Frank”Roger Guenveur Smith, creator and performer: I was invited to a theater festival in Amsterdam. I went to the Anne Frank House. I was very inspired and very moved. I’m always trying to bring the past into the present moment. The idea that Otto Frank should come to know his daughter through that diary, especially having lost her the way that he lost her, must have been an extraordinarily daunting exercise. I thought that would be something worth pursuing, because of this ongoing crisis that we’re still engaged in.The fundamental challenge is: How does a man reverse the natural order of things and create a memorial for his daughter? To simultaneously serve the living and the dead is the great challenge for Otto Frank and for many of us, who are in the current moment, dealing with loss.‘Your Sexts’Inspiration: The erotic letters of James Joyce, Frida Kahlo, Georgia O’Keeffe, etc.Rachel Mars, creator and performer: I was on a residency. Brexit had just happened. It took the wind out of my sails creatively. Then Scott Sheppard [the writer and performer] was like, “I have something to cheer you up.” He read me this James Joyce 1909 letter. I was bowled over by the explicitness, the poetics, the imagery, how much it was all about butts. It was super life-affirming.I began this search for who else was writing these letters. I worked with two sexologists. It was obviously more difficult to find the women and the queer women, because history, but it was easier than I thought. There’s an illicitness to it, definitely. It does feel like opening a crack into people’s private lives. But there’s this sanctity to it, a kind of respect.‘KLII’Inspiration: Mark Twain’s “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” Patrice Lumumba’s independence speechKaneza Schaal, creator, co-director and performer: My practice is about remembering. Today, we look at a figure like Leopold [the Belgian king who presided over atrocities in his administration of the Congo Free State] with mock horror, his atrocities stun and outrage. But there are new Leopolds every day. For me, this was a way of exorcising this evil. I’m interested in looking inward and looking outward, exorcising these catastrophic figures and catastrophic events.Christopher Myers, co-director and designer: Mark Twain was interested in the Congo, and he understood the relationship between the oppression of Africans there and the oppression of Africans at home. This text of Mark Twain was in line with the internationalism and cross-cultural, cross-pollination that has inspired so many anticolonial causes. It’s about seeing not only the histories of these specific texts, but also how these texts bump up against each other. One of the things that theater does really well is allow you to rub a text against other texts.‘Moby Dick’Inspiration: Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick”Yngvild Aspeli, director and puppet maker: This story, even though it’s an old story, it touches on these things that go beyond time. Out on the sea hunting a whale with a harpoon, or lost in our cyber world, human beings are still tackling the same issues. We use this older story as a mirror, a prism.Our inner struggles are somehow always the same, the questions are the same: the complexity of being human, how we struggle with our inner demons, how we try to figure out our place in society, existential questions of life and death and everything that lies in between. The mysteries of life.‘King Gilgamesh & the Man of the Wild’Inspiration: the Epic of GilgameshAhmed Moneka, creator and performer: I’m from Iraq, born in Baghdad. I grew up with this myth. I was exiled. I ended up in Toronto. Jesse became my first friend in the theater scene. The parallel to that is the relationship between Gilgamesh and his best friend Enkidu.Jesse LaVercombe, creator and performer: We’re toggling between this contemporary story and this totally ancient, sometimes cartoonish, sometimes tragic epic.Seth Bockley, creator and director: I didn’t want to just riff on the themes. I wanted that story retold. There’s something sacred about that. We need each other to get through the world. That’s the Gilgamesh and Enkidu story. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Good Fantasy Writing Is Pure Magic

      by

      All too often clunky dialogue breaks the spell of CGI-heavy TV epics. To be reminded what language can do by itself, try E.R. Eddison’s novel “The Worm Ouroboros.As I watched last fall’s showdown of TV’s big-money epic fantasy franchises, I was wincingly reminded that language is the most underrated special effect. Unforced errors of word choice — loose talk of “focus” and “stress” in HBO’s “House of the Dragon,” for example — kept pulling me down from my fantasy high and into the diction of emails from human resources. Case in point: “I have pursued this foe since before the first sunrise bloodied the sky,” says the elf warrior-princess Galadriel in Amazon’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.” “It would take longer than your lifetime even to speak the names of those they have taken from me.” She’s adrift on a life raft with a mysterious stranger after a sea-monster attack, and certain dark intimations suggest that eldritch evil draws nigh. So far, so OK, but then her speech reaches its climax: “So letting it lie is not an option.”Clangalang! Descending from a tagline fashioned by writers of the movie “Apollo 13” from something a NASA flight director said, “X is not an option” has become a staple of business-speak and coach-talk. The writers of Galadriel’s speech couldn’t have killed the buzz any deader if they’d followed up with, “I’m all about laserlike focus 24-7 on getting some closure on this whole Sauron thing.” It galls me that Hollywood spends zillions on C.G.I. dragons and cities and hosts on the march, but then from sheer tin-eared laziness or a misplaced desire for “relatability,” allows their wondrous spell to be undone by script screw-ups that any half-competent swords-and-sorcery writer — or reader — could fix overnight for a hundred bucks and a six-pack.With the limitless budget afforded by Eddison’s language, I can outspend even the most obscenely expensive production a thousandfold in my head.To be reminded what language all by itself can do, try E.R. Eddison’s novel “The Worm Ouroboros,” first published in 1922. At some point in the 1970s, I bought a plump Ballantine paperback edition for a dime or two in a used bookstore on the South Side of Chicago. I read it in a fugue state of mounting joy on my way home from school on the Jeffery 6 bus, as I walked from the bus stop to my house, and straight on into the night. Visions filled my head — King Gorice conjuring amid his alembics and grammaries in the Iron Tower of Carcë; wet sands gleaming with the lights of the besieged seaside castle of Owlswick — as I gorged on Eddison’s sentences. The words themselves, even more than the scenes they described, pulsed with possibility and invitation.“The Worm” ranks among the greatest epic fantasies of all time, keeping company with pound-for-pounders like the “Iliad” and the King James Bible, mostly on the strength of its diction, which resembles 16th-century English. So put aside for the moment the story it tells of a great war between the righteous Demons and the nefarious but far more interesting Witches, and put aside as well its characters, world-thinking, action set pieces and the like. They’re all gorgeous, though some readers claim to have trouble with trivial quirks like the merely gestured-at setting on Mercury; the framing device of a traveler from Earth who disappears after a few pages; or the naming of various peoples as Demons, Witches and Goblins. None of that matters anywhere near as much as the language Eddison concocted to take you somewhere extraordinary and keep you gloriously, deliriously there.The novel features the requisite euphonious place names (Zajë Zaculo, the Straits of Melikaphkhaz, Thremnir’s Heugh), swordplay (“Nor had they greater satisfaction that went against Lord Juss, who mowed at them with great swashing blows, beheading some and hewing some asunder in the midst, till they were fain to keep clear of his reaping”) and sorcery (“ ‘Abase thee and serve me, worm of the pit’”). But the book is at its best when characters just go about their daily business. They eat: “When the Lord Corund knew of a surety that he held them of Demonland shut up in Eshgrar Ogo, he let dight supper in his tent, and made a surfeit of venison pasties and heath-cocks and lobsters from the lakes.” They gossip: “ ‘Truly this foreign madam with her loose and wanton ways doth scandal the whole land for us.’” They look up at the sky: “A great wind moaning out of the hueless west tore the clouds as a ragged garment, revealing the lonely moon that fled naked betwixt them.”Hollywood keeps promising that further advances in computer-generated imagery will produce ever-braver new worlds of immersive experience. But our most enduringly potent fantasies consist of words, and part of their potency lies in inviting your imagination to do the work. The more work it does, the more capable it gets. If you had a choice between taking either J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” books or their movie adaptations to the proverbial desert island, which would you choose? Would you take the Old Testament or the Charlton Heston version of it? The films would rapidly become spectacles you’d seen too many times, but you could keep coming back to the books and finding further dimensions, fresh visions, novel experiences in their language-generated imagery.I’m not eager to see a movie version of “The Worm.” With the limitless budget afforded by Eddison’s language, I can outspend even the most obscenely expensive production a thousandfold in my head. His prose can exalt anything into the stuff of epic fantasy, even the contents of a chamber pot: “A bucketful took Corund in the mouth, befouling all his great beard, so that he gave back spitting. And he and his, standing close beneath the wall, and little expecting so sudden and ill an answer, fared shamefully, being all well soused and bemerded with filth and lye.” I wouldn’t trade “bemerded” for all the special-effects magic in this world or any other.Carlo Rotella is a professor of English at Boston College and the author of “The World Is Always Coming to an End: Pulling Together and Apart in a Chicago Neighborhood” (University of Chicago Press, 2019). More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Robert Caro Relaxes by Listening to People Drum in Central Park

      by

      The biographer and subject of the documentary “Turn Every Page” talks about his loyalty to the Giants and the Knicks, Zooming with classmates and falling under the spell of Captain Hornblower.When the filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb approached Robert Caro about a documentary on the relationship between him and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, Caro didn’t want to do it. He nonetheless found it insulting when Robert, Lizzie’s father, didn’t want to do it either.That’s just the nature of their relationship.But she persisted. And eventually Caro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and her father opened their inner sanctum for “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb,” about the dynamic, contentious half-century collaboration behind “The Power Broker,” the Zoom-bookshelf must-have about the urban planner Robert Moses, and “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” whose fifth volume Caro has been working on for about a decade.“Why was I reluctant?” Caro, 87, asked in a video call from his orderly West 69th Street office.“We’ve worked out a way of working together,” he said. “It’s two people who are, I suppose, both determined that they stand behind their ideals so firmly that they didn’t want the public to see what that was like.”What indeed. There was the “terrible situation” when Gottlieb, now 91, insisted that 350,000 words be excised from “The Power Broker,” including the chapter that Caro still thinks is about the best he’s written. The quarrels about semicolons that Gottlieb wanted removed and Caro felt should stay, that made Caro wonder, “Why am I doing this?” The editorial comments, so offensive to Caro, that in another age would have warranted a duel.“At the same time, I know that he’s going to support things that maybe nobody else would support,” Caro said, like allowing a three-book series to expand to five and finding him financing through the lean years. “To say that’s invaluable is to slight how wonderful it is to have someone like that behind you.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.From their initial meeting through their arguments, there was always this: “At the end, we’re both talking about the writing on the same level,” Caro said of the editor he now considers a friend. “That’s the reason I picked him in the first place.”Caro, in writing, expanded on his 10 cultural necessities, which include Trollope, typewriter ribbons and the Knicks. And the Giants. These are edited excerpts.1. The Photograph of the Very Moment My Wife and I Met For reasons too complicated to explain here, a photographer was following me around taking pictures of me at a dance at Princeton in 1956. Ina, whom I had never met, came dancing by with her date. “Let’s take a picture of me with her,” I told the photographer, and cut in on her. The photograph was taken, and it sits on a bookshelf in our apartment to this day. It is a bit cracked and fragile, but it is so precious to me that I am afraid to take it out of its frame so it can be restored.2. My Typewriters I write my books not on a computer but on a Smith Corona Electra 210. They stopped manufacturing them about 30 years ago, but I have accumulated some. You need spares because when a part breaks on the one you’re using, you have to cannibalize the part from another one. When I have a book coming out, and newspaper profiles mention that I use them, people send me their old ones that were stored away years ago. Thanks to this generosity, I had 14 of them three years ago. I’m down to 11 already.3. My Typewriter Ribbons Harder and harder to get. And I like cotton ribbons, not the customary nylon, very heavily inked. That way, the words you’re typing are bolder and blacker. When you’ve typed the same page over many times, the words stop having an impact, and having them bold and black helps.4. My Shack In the woods behind my house on Long Island — maybe 70 yards in — is a 15 by 20 foot garden shed with a high pointed roof. It sits on a foundation of cinder blocks. That is where I write in the summer. The walls and ceiling are bare unpainted wood, and there is nothing in the shed but my desk, a filing cabinet, two little bookshelves, an air-conditioner, and, of course, nailed to one wall, a corkboard. I bought it 23 years ago. When we arrive at the house at the beginning of each summer, I run over to the shack to see if there has been a leak in the roof during the winter, and there never has. Unless there is a special reason, I don’t bring my cellphone there. I pin the pages of my outline to the corkboard, and I’m ready to go. It is my favorite place on earth.5. The New York Giants Despite everything.6. The New York Knicks Despite everything.7. Zoom Sessions With Horace Mann Classmates For some years we did it in person, in a restaurant, but now one of us has moved to another city, so we Zoom. We do it every four or five weeks. We’ve known each other since we were 11 or 12. We’re older now.8. My First Edition of Trollope My publisher, Sonny Mehta, gave this to me as a gift to celebrate the occasion of my having been awarded a Pulitzer Prize. It’s a set of Trollope’s novels called the “Chronicles of Barsetshire.” I love Trollope and particularly those novels, as Sonny knew, and this set is the first collected edition of those works, published in 1887.9. My Bound Volumes of the Captain Hornblower Series When I was a boy, I was in the spell of those seven books. I would take them out of the public library branch at Broadway and 99th Street and sit down on the steps outside and start reading; I couldn’t wait until I got home. One year, Ina got me the perfect present. She had them bound in a naval blue binding with anchors and naval devices in gold on the spines. Every time I glance at my bookshelf and see them, I start remembering favorite scenes, sometimes finding to my surprise that I am reciting the scene, without having opened the book.10. Sundays in Central Park In the afternoons, after work, Ina and I walk in at the 69th Street entrance. Pedaling or jogging along the drive are human beings of every race and color. To the right is the Sheep Meadow, a vast space, really: 15 acres. And on summer Sundays, it seems like every square foot of those acres contains people — families, touch footballers, picnickers, etc., etc. To the left are people in immaculate white outfits. English lawn bowlers. Keep going: roller skaters gyrating gracefully or wildly to disco music. Keep going: seated on a bench, a line of drummers, generally 10 or 11 of them. Their drumming almost hypnotizes me; I can sit there for an hour listening to them. Somehow it drums the tension from writing right out of me. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Getting Close to Sondheim: New Books Try to Capture His Essence

      by

      Memoirs by his collaborators are among the works available now, and several others are on the horizon.Roughly a decade before Stephen Sondheim died in November 2021, he added a surprising new occupation to his multi-hyphenate career: autobiographer. His two memoirs-through-lyrics, “Finishing the Hat” and “Look, I Made a Hat,” offered beguiling insights into the life of a man who had long cultivated a reputation for sphinx-like reticence. The year since his death has seen bookshelves sag with an array of books offering further glimpses; D.T. Max’s “Finale: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim” is the most recent, with several more on the horizon. Here is a look at some of those titles.Available nowMany of the current crop of works can be classified as either “I worked with Steve” books or “I had an ongoing professional and intermittently contentious correspondence with Steve” books. (There’s also an “I was sort of married to Steve for a year” book. More on that soon.)Accounts from two of Sondheim’s longtime collaborators, the musical director Paul Gemignani and the pianist Paul Ford, were both in the works well before 2021. Gemignani had put off writing his memoirs for years, and it wasn’t until the Covid pandemic shut down live theater that he had the time to work on “Gemignani: Life and Lessons From Broadway and Beyond.” The book’s extensive quotes from Sondheim include one that Gemignani’s co-author, Margaret Hall, agreed not to use until after his death. In it, Sondheim described their decades-long working relationship: “It can’t be expressed. It’s like trying to explain why you’re in love with somebody. There’s no explanation; it just is.”His involvement with Ford’s “Lord Knows, at Least I Was There: Working With Stephen Sondheim” was less harmonious. Ford, who played piano on the original productions of four different Sondheim shows and what he described as “about 50,000 birthday celebrations,” had plugged away on his memoirs for years and gotten permission to use Sondheim’s name in the title — until Sondheim took a look at the manuscript in 2017.“An advance copy was sent to Steve in the morning,” Ford recalled, “and by the afternoon a scathing series of emails came back saying, ‘I skimmed through it, but it’s just a memoir. Take my name off this book.’ So that was it for a while.” Until this March, to be precise.Such exchanges were not unknown to Paul Salsini, who includes many of them in “Sondheim & Me: Revealing a Musical Genius,” which came out in October. As the longtime editor of the Sondheim Review magazine (for which I worked for several years), Salsini heard from Sondheim often. “He was so protective about making sure everything was accurate,” Salsini said.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91.Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows.Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview.His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers.‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing?‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.A low point in the relationship came after a 1996 review in the publication of the London premiere of “Passion.” The review compared it unfavorably to the original Broadway production, and called it “just a little too blatant,” which triggered a barrage of irate responses both by telephone and through the mail.“It was a good, balanced review, and I have no idea why he was so upset,” said Salsini, who believes the written note could have opened Sondheim up for libel if it had run in the magazine, as Sondheim had intended. And then the protests stopped. “And to this day,” he said, “I don’t know why.”D.T. Max’s involvement with Sondheim was not quite as heated or as lengthy: “Finale: Late Conversations With Stephen Sondheim” is based on five interactions between 2016 and 2019. Initially the intent was to produce a profile for The New Yorker to coincide with a new musical, a pair of one-acts adapted from two Luis Buñuel films, that was left unfinished at the time of Sondheim’s death. They discussed everything from “Vertigo” to the poetry of William Carlos Williams to the Beatles. (Sondheim only liked two of those three things.)“I was not so arrogant as to think I would get to the mystery of Stephen Sondheim’s creative genius,” Max said, “but I did hope to get close to it.”A question about whether he had learned anything from Andrew Lloyd Webber fell on clearly unsympathetic ears, however, and as the new work fizzled away, so did the profile. (“Sondheim broke up with me over that question,” as Max put it, alluding to an email after that interview in which Sondheim begged off participating for the profile.) “Finale” is essentially the paper trail of this long, ultimately fruitless (or was it?) pas de deux between interviewer and interviewee.“Sondheim was a complicated guy to sit with,” said Max, who tagged along with Sondheim and Meryl Streep at a gala for one of the five interviews. “There was a sense of intimacy that wasn’t entirely real and wasn’t entirely fake.”And then there’s that trial marriage. “Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers,” which the Broadway composer Rodgers (“Once Upon a Mattress”) co-wrote with the New York Times chief theater critic, Jesse Green, covers a lot of ground in a career that included far more than her interactions with Sondheim. But those interactions came to a head in 1960, when Sondheim and the recently divorced Rodgers “would get into the same bed, side by side, frozen with fear,” for roughly a year on and off. It didn’t last.Coming soonThe seemingly eternal question mark involves David Benedict’s authorized Sondheim biography, which was announced in 2014 complete with a first draft to be submitted in 2017. But while we wait for that, two new titles are (presumably) more imminent.A revival of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical “Merrily We Roll Along,” currently at the New York Theater Workshop, is heading to Broadway next fall. It stars, from left: Jonathan Groff, Lindsay Mendez and Daniel Radcliffe.Sara KrulwichMarch will see the release of “Careful the Spell You Cast: How Stephen Sondheim Extended the Range of the American Musical.” In it, Ben Francis takes aim at the prevalent view of Sondheim as the eternal cynic. Instead, he suggests, Sondheim’s reminder that “dreams take time” (to quote from “Merrily We Roll Along,” a revival of which is heading to Broadway next fall) positions him as a successor to his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II, as an unlikely romantic.And in “Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy,” slated for release next October, Stephen M. Silverman supplements interviews with what the promotional copy describes as Sondheim’s “collaborators, mentors and fans,” along with illustrated transcripts, letters and more.On the horizonSondheim was a gifted puzzle maker and creator of cryptic scavenger hunts. (Rian Johnson, the screenwriter and director of “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” has credited the 1973 mystery film “The Last of Sheila,” co-written by Sondheim, as an inspiration.) Barry Joseph decided to plumb this relatively under-discussed aspect of his life in “Matching Minds With Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Master Lyricist.”“This is seeing his mind and brilliance in a whole new way,” said Joseph, who hopes to release the book in 2024. “When you’re trying to solve someone’s puzzle, you’re getting into their head.”The following year should see the publication of Dan Okrent’s own biography as part of the Yale Jewish Lives series, or what he calls “little books about big Jews.”Although Sondheim didn’t set foot in a synagogue until he was 19, Okrent said, he spent much of his career on Broadway and grew up with a father in the garment business, two industries in which Jews were strongly represented at the time. Okrent’s book will look at Sondheim and his work through this lens.“My goal is not to uncover things that people didn’t know,” he said. “It is to put what people do know into context.” More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Super 8 Years’ Review: Annie Ernaux’s Celluloid Memories

      by

      In this wistful movie, the French writer and Nobel laureate revisits her life with help from her son, who’s also the director.The film’s images have faded, but the memories they’ve stirred up are vivid and full of feeling. In one shot, a tiny boy pushes a big wheelbarrow. In another, an old man and woman pose with the awkwardness of an earlier generation that never learned how to look at ease before any camera. And then there is the vision of the young woman at a desk, a pen resting in one hand, who gazes at the camera with a tight, unwelcoming smile. I like to think that she’s impatient to get back to the papers on the desk, to get back to her writing and to herself.The woman — the French writer Annie Ernaux, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October — doesn’t smile much in “The Super 8 Years,” a wistful memory movie that she made with her son David Ernaux-Briot. On Dec. 7, in her Nobel Prize lecture, Ernaux spoke about her roots in provincial France, her love of books and desire to write, a yearning that was thwarted by her position as a woman. “Married with two children,” she said, “a teaching position and full responsibility for household affairs, each day I moved further and further away from writing and my promise to avenge my people.”You see that woman now and again in “The Super 8 Years,” which was made before she became a Nobel laureate — what timing! Directed by Ernaux-Briot, and written and narrated by Ernaux, it consists of somewhat degraded-looking home movies from the early 1970s to the early ’80s. In the winter of 1972, as Ernaux explains in voice-over, she and her husband, Philippe Ernaux, bought a Bell & Howell Super 8 camera and projector. Years later, she and Ernaux-Briot revisited these fragile mementos and, with some deft editing, sound effects and music (the original material is silent), created this short, potent, quietly elegiac feature.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.For Ernaux and her husband, the Super 8 camera was “the ultimate desired object,” more coveted than a dishwasher or even a color television. “Film truly captured life and people,” Ernaux explains, though how it captured life and people was complicated. That’s evident the first time you see the younger Ernaux in “The Super 8 Years” entering a house while carrying two cardboard boxes. She’s wearing a dark, hooded coat and an awkward, inscrutable smile, as if she were ill at ease about being (caught) on camera. Or maybe she’s embarrassed by (or for) Philippe, who, as Ernaux explains, shot most of the home movies.Ernaux writes about this image and its complicated smile in her exquisite 2008 memoir “The Years,” which works as a companion piece to “The Super 8 Years.” In her book, Ernaux asserts that there is “something ascetic and sad, or disenchanted” about her younger self’s expression in this scene, adding that her smile lacks spontaneity. I instead see shyness or just self-consciousness, especially in how she looks at the camera only to cast her eyes downward. But this isn’t my memory, and as Ernaux writes in “The Years,” one of the greatest ways to foster self-knowledge is “a person’s ability to discern how they view the past.”For a time, Super 8 was a way for many to view a present that would soon be the past. Introduced by Kodak in 1965, the film format was a significant player in the moving-image revolution that swept the 20th century, turning amateurs (who could afford it) into moviemakers and everyday life into a global celluloid archive. This archival impulse dovetails with Ernaux’s approach in “The Years,” which is partly organized around photos of her from different eras that prompt cascades of words about her life, her family, its town, the region, the country and beyond. A similar impulse shapes “The Super 8 Years,” in which Ernaux insistently tethers images of her former domestic life, with its gentle and agonized ebb and flow, to larger world affairs, to questions of feminism and other liberation struggles.Instructively for a memoir, Ernaux almost entirely avoids using “I” in “The Years,” preferring “we” and often referring to herself as “she.” In “The Super 8 Years,” the “we” usually seems to mean her family, and she switches pronouns freely as if to suggest the mutability of identity. In one section about a vacation in Morocco, Ernaux says, “I thought of the finished manuscript in my desk drawer.” Soon, though, over images from Germany, she refers to her younger self like a friend. “She is 33 and doesn’t yet know,” Ernaux says, that the manuscript she’s submitted “will be published as ‘Cleaned Out,’” referring to her 1974 debut novel.At one point in “The Super 8 Years,” Ernaux ponders what story is being told in this “parade of images” as the movie cuts from a child to her and then to exploding fireworks. Words were needed, she continues, to give meaning to these “snippets of family life invisibly recorded inside the history of the era.” This reminds me of her observation in “The Years” that memory never stops. “It pairs the dead with the living, real with imaginary beings, dreams with history.” Memory is also, I think, one reason we watch movies like this, which with its lapidary narration and melancholic images — with its laughing children, its difficult smiles and its ghosts — movingly pairs you with Ernaux and with the world that she has so brilliantly made.The Super 8 YearsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Book Review: ‘The McCartney Legacy’ by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair

      by

      “The McCartney Legacy” follows the superstar from the last gasp of the Beatles to “Band on the Run.” It’s 700 pages — and only the first volume planned.The MCCARTNEY LEGACY: Volume 1: 1969-73, by Allan Kozinn and Adrian SinclairAre the world’s libraries adequately stuffed yet with literature about the Beatles, still the best-selling band of all time, and their diaspora?Nah.Volume 1 of “The McCartney Legacy,” by Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair, arrives like a well-planned encore a year after the publication of “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” by Paul McCartney, edited by the poet Paul Muldoon. The latter volumes were packaged in Kermit green, presumably a nod to the two Pauls’ Irish heritage. The new book is a saucy red, as if inviting customers to stack it atop “The Lyrics,” stick on a bow and cue up the bouncy seasonal synth of “Wonderful Christmastime.”Peter Jackson’s documentary, “Get Back,” also released at the end of 2021, changed the way many people thought about McCartney: always popular but wrongly blamed for the Beatles’ breakup, and often critically drubbed as a middle-of-the-roader given to sappiness or, worse, insincerity. There has always been blatant ageism and sexism in the dismissal of certain McCartney tunes as “granny music” — and this is a problem why? — likewise the idea that his ease with children and nursery-rhyme dabblings made him less of a rocker.Watching McCartney in “Get Back,” his boyish face solemnized by a beard, show up consistently (and at least once tear up), urging “a serious program of work” as his bandmates sulked or even stalked off, rebranded him as a devoted boss who brought his whole self to the office. Seeing him pull the film’s title song out of the air, soaring on bass and guitar before sinking into pillowy ballads at the piano, reminded viewers that, oh yeah, that guy who could be kind of corny and hammy in MTV videos is a musical genius (“about the only one that I am in awe of,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone); while his confidence in a sweater vest made even lesbians of my acquaintance swoon. At 80, McCartney continues to fill stadiums with screaming, lighter-hoisting fans.Kozinn, a former reporter and critic for The New York Times, and Sinclair, an English documentarian, were influenced by the methods of Mark Lewisohn, the exacting Beatles historian currently at work on the second volume of a trilogy about the group (the first was 900 pages, and that was an abridgment). In a way “The McCartney Legacy” out-Lewisohns Lewisohn, taking almost 700 pages to cover only five years, from the dying embers of “The End” (1969) to the Duracell bolt of “Band on the Run” (1973), by the star’s new group, Wings.McCartney with his wife, Linda, in 1971. Despite limited experience, she joined him as a keyboardist in Wings.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDescribed in minute detail are McCartney’s legal troubles with the Beatles manager he didn’t want, Allen Klein, and his retreat to rural Scotland with his new wife, Linda. Also the bumpy formation of Wings, which integrated the game but inexperienced Linda on keyboards and backing vocals — and his decision to go high (and get high, high, high) when his longtime writing partner, John Lennon, went low.But the text, dotted with tour ephemera and recording session recaps, reads less like a pop-rock “Power Broker” than a set of extended liner notes, a devoted document dump, assembled from diaries, court papers and reporting fresh and reconstituted. Seemingly finished with biographies since he authorized his friend Barry Miles to write “Many Years From Now,” published in 1997, the man himself was not interviewed for this project (though Kozinn has sat with him on other occasions) but gave the thumbs-up to other sources.The result is aptly patchwork, considering that McCartney — even as he became a billionaire — is constitutionally a saver and joiner of disparate parts, in life and art (listen to “Junk” for a meditation on waste in capitalist society). But it’s deft patchwork, the seams between old and new tucked away in the neat drawer of its index.Inevitably, too, “The McCartney Legacy” is a graveyard of the once-robust music print press: Melody Maker, Disc, NME — “Enemy!” McCartney once exclaimed. His jousts with journalists give the book some of its best points of tension. Displeased with a negative profile, he and Linda once wrapped up a turd made by their baby daughter Stella (now a major fashion designer), according to Wings’ former drummer Denny Seiwell, and sent it to the reporter responsible. “Hold your hand out you silly girl,” McCartney telegrammed one music critic, Penny Valentine, quoting the Beatles’ “Martha My Dear,” after she called his first solo album “a bitter disappointment.” She was just wrong, he told her. “It is simple it is good and even at this moment it is growing on you.”And you gotta love the aghast reaction of Clive James to the McCartneys’ somewhat cringey (though intermittently adorable) foray into television variety: a “monstro-horrendo, superschlock-diabolical special,” James wrote, that “burgeoned before the terror-stricken eye like a punctured storage tank of semolina.”Trivia, the coin of the realm in pop culture writing, is spilled here in abundance. Lots of it feels relevant or at least redolent, like that Seiwell once played at Mount Airy Lodge, the place in the Poconos known for heart-shaped tubs, and also at Judy Garland’s last performance. Other facts, like the exact dimensions and cost of the luxury liner that took the McCartneys from Le Havre to New York, might be superfluous.Most notably in a book that is all notes — both musical and literary — is how much its subject, in between eponymous albums, is forever trying to escape being Paul McCartney. The “man of a thousand voices,” as Valentine called him, is also a man of a thousand faces: writing songs for others under the fusty nom de plume “Bernard Webb”; checking into hotels under the alias “Billy Martin”; pretending to be a socialite named “Percy ‘Thrills’ Thrillington”; producing as “Apollo C. Vermouth”; signing his own sleeve copy as “Clint Harrigan”; even titling a song and album — his greatest, in my opinion — after a preferred pseudonymous surname, “Ramon.”There will be thousands more pages written about Paul McCartney, and yet, he seems to be taunting, we will never catch him.THE MCCARTNEY LEGACY: Volume 1: 1969-73 | By Allan Kozinn and Adrian Sinclair | 720 pp. | Illustrated | Dey Street Books | $35 More