Music As History: Freedom Highway by Rhiannon Giddens

Rhiannon Giddens at the 2015 Big Ears Festival Knoxville, Tennessee. (Photo: Amos Perrine)

On the cover of Freedom Highway (Nonesuch), the new album by Rhiannon Giddens, the singer stands alone in a forlorn position, barefoot on a muddy country road. The colours are as subdued as the artist who graces the cover. Frank Zappa once said that album art is often a key to the music inside, yet one would be surprised by the music on Freedom Highway, a wide-ranging sequence of original songs, closing with the "Pops" Staples title track. For Giddens, who prides herself on being a student of African-American history, bowing one’s head in respect to past generations is the first order of the day. After that, a celebration the songs of which Freedom Highway are made.

Wounded Souls at the Edge of a Rain Forest: The Night of the Iguana at ART

Amanda Plummer, Dana Delany and Bill Heck (centre) in The Night of the Iguana at the American Repertory Theatre.
(Photo: Gretjen Helene Photography)

Amanda Plummer gives a wondrous performance as Hannah Jelkes in Michael Wilson’s new production of The Night of the Iguana at American Repertory Theatre. In Tennessee Williams’ 1961 play, set in a hotel at the edge of a Mexican rain forest in 1940, the protagonist, T. Lawrence Shannon – a southerner and one-time Episcopalian minister, now a tour guide for an American company – describes Hannah as a “thin-standing-up-Buddha.” In fact, she’s a Nantucket spinster who travels with her nearly-centenarian grandfather, a poet. He recites and she paints portraits; that’s how they live, traveling from hotel to hotel, though when they appear at the Costa Verde, run by Maxine Faulk, the recent widow of Shannon’s old friend and fishing buddy Fred, they’re distinctly on their uppers. Hannah possesses the sort of philosophical endurance that is indistinguishable from grace, though, she assures Shannon, who has worked himself up to a fine state of hysteria – he’s slept with a teenage girl on this latest tour, of Texan Baptists, and its supervisor, Miss Fellowes, is determined to get him fired – her serenity has come at a steep price. He is trailed by his “spook”; she fought a tense battle with her “blue devil,” defeating him at last because, she explains, she couldn’t afford to lose. Shannon finds an unexpected companion in Hannah, who is almost supernal in her perceptions and utterly non-judgmental of other people. (“Nothing human disgusts me,” she asserts.)

Plummer has been one of my favorite actresses since Lamont Johnson’s lovely, too-little-known 1981 western Cattle Annie and Little Britches, where, at twenty-four, she and sixteen-year-old Diane Lane played a pair of orphans who join Burt Lancaster’s gang of outlaws. Around the same time she took up the role of Jo in a rare New York stage revival of Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey, and in both projects she demonstrated a poetic ferocity and gallantry that weren’t quite like anything I’d seen before. (God knows she came by her talent honestly – she’s the daughter of Christopher Plummer and Tammy Grimes.) Those qualities ought to be a perfect match for Tennessee Williams’ heroines, but the first time I saw her attempt one, Alma in Summer and Smoke at Hartford Stage in 2006 (under Wilson’s direction), oddly enough she couldn’t seem to get her mouth around the poetry – at least not until the epilogue, where Alma, once the eccentric of her small southern town, has become its scandal, picking up salesmen in the square. Plummer had been off track since the opening scene, but in that last five minutes she was exquisite; I couldn’t help thinking it a pity that she couldn’t start her performance all over again. But she did some fantastic work opposite Brad Dourif in Williams’ The Two-Character Play four years ago, and her line readings in this Night of the Iguana are quicksilver and often very funny and always, always unpredictable. And she’s radiant – a kind of earth angel with a sometimes unsettlingly level gaze.

Nineteen Eighty-Four Revisited

One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

– George Orwell, “The Politics of the English Language”

With this go the horrors of emotional nationalism and a tendency to disbelieve in the existence of objective truth...
– George Orwell, in a letter from 1944 (collected in George Orwell: A Life in Letters)

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.

– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

My first impression after rereading George Orwell’s harrowing dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is how much it reminded me of totalitarianism in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. In this bleak, repressive country named Oceania people's lives are constantly on public display through the ubiquitous two-way telescreens. The protagonist, Winston Smith, seeks privacy, itself suspicious, and keeps a diary, a transgressive act deemed by the Party as intolerable because it suggests that a person can think for himself. Add in his decision to develop a sexual relationship and soon agents of the Thought Police are dispatched to hustle him away at night to the Ministry of Love. As a political prisoner, Winston is at the whim not only of the guards, but also of the privileged criminals. He, along with other captives, is disoriented, not knowing whether it is day or night, and is subjected to excruciatingly painful interrogation inflicted with truncheons, electricity, and the victim's greatest fear -- in Winston’s case, rats. No one is ever really free again. Even prisoners who have been released will eventually be re-arrested and “vaporized.” They will become “unpersons," every record of their existence obliterated in the Records Department of the Ministry of Truth, which sends all relevant documents down a “memory hole,” a job that Winston once performed. Substitute the Lubyanka in then-Leningrad for Orwell’s doublespeak euphemism and we have almost identical conditions to those that existed in the Soviet Union. Even the Thought Police are based on the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), which actually used riled-up rats in their interrogations.

A renewed interest in the Soviet Union, of course, cannot explain the surging popularity of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The election of Donald Trump has been an impetus, yet I do not think that anyone can reasonably suggest that Americans are about to descend into the totalitarian conditions limned in the novel. But we are living in a time that does summon up ominous features that derive from the novel and the former Soviet Union. Consider President Trump’s almost daily “fake news” accusations against The New York Times, his counselor Kellyanne Conway’s coinage of “alternative facts,” echoing the linguistic inventions of Orwell's Ministry of Truth and by implication Trump’s blatant contempt for objective truth, and his -- along with his aides’ -- cascade of lies – from false accusations that journalists invented a rift between him and the intelligence community (when he compared the intelligence agencies to Nazis) to debunked claims that millions of unauthorized immigrants robbed him of a popular-vote majority.

Podcast: Interview with Author Angela Carter (1984)

Angela Carter, in 1984. (Photo: Alamy)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show On the Arts, at CJRT-FM (today Jazz 91.1) in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1984, one of those guests was British novelist and journalist Angela Carter.
  When I sat down with Carter in 1984, she had authored over a dozen books, including eight novels and multiple collections of short stories, and her acclaimed novel Nights at the Circus had just been published. Nights at the Circus went on to win that year's James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. (In 2012, the novel would be honoured again when it was selected from among almost a century of winning novels as the Prize's "best of the best.") In 2008, Carter was ranked at #10 in The London Times's list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945." Angela Carter passed away in London, in 1992, at the age of 51.

– Kevin Courrier

Here is the full interview with Angela Carter as it aired on CJRT-FM in 1984.

Neglected Gem #97: Hollow Reed (1996)

Joely Richardson, Sam Bould (centre), and Jason Flemyng in Hollow Reed (1996).

The ostensible subject of the 1996 English drama Hollow Reed is child abuse, but the writer, Paula Milne, the director, Angela Pope, and a superb cast move into deeper themes of isolation and the desperation for love. Martin Donovan plays Martyn, a gay doctor living with his lover (Ian Hart); his wife, Hannah (Joely Richardson), has custody of their son Oliver (the delicately expressively Sam Bould). When Martyn suspects that Hannah’s live-in boy friend Frank (Jason Flemyng) has been beating Ollie, the unresolved tensions close to the surface of these complicated lifestyle decisions – fear of abandonment, competition for affection, bitterness over old losses – burst through. And the boy, who’s become a magnet for these knotted adult impulses he can’t comprehend, retreats farther and farther. Pope’s handling of Ollie’s buried feelings, which he can convey only by indirection, is the most compelling aspect of the movie: it recalls the lacerating scenes with the little girl in Roger Donaldson’s classic New Zealand troubled-marriage picture Smash Palace.

Childhood's End: "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane"

A few months ago, director Ron Howard described his documentary, The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years, as an adventure story and a tale of survival, and he tells it as if caught up in the tidal drift of its momentum. Retracing the familiar tale of the meteoric rise of Beatlemania, Howard wastes no time in showing both the endurance and the astonishing skill of a young group of musicians who became the pleasure principle in an age of social and political change. Beginning with footage from November 20th, 1963, at Manchester's ABC Cinema where the group performs "She Loves You" and "Twist and Shout" to an ecstatic crowd, Eight Days a Week goes on to chronicle their growing international acclaim as live artists – while also contrasting those shows with the astonishing quality of studio album after studio album despite the band's having to swim daily in a sea of madness.

Howard, whose first documentary was 2013's Made in America, about Jay-Z's music festival of the same name, provides a few choice observations, including The Beatles' stand against racial segregation, while deftly revealing how they always stayed ahead of the cultural curve by making everyone else play catch-up. Although most people who didn't live through that era have today experienced their music in its totality, Eight Days a Week brings you closer to the evolution of their sound so that you hear how remarkably canny they were at resisting being derivative and never repeating themselves. By the end of the film, you can't imagine this feat ever being duplicated again. The footage both familiar and new still carries an explosive charge of adolescent exuberance. Yet Eight Days a Week doesn't shy away from displaying how that adoring adulation would soon turn turtle into the kind of violent fan worship that took the band off the road and later claimed the lives of John Lennon and George Harrison. As Devin McKinney pointed out in his Critics at Large review, however, Eight Days a Week doesn't go far enough into the shadow side of The Beatles' utopian spirit. But it does catch the jet stream of their impact with a full-force gale. Since it only deals with the touring years, though, Eight Days a Week doesn't delve into the radical changes that followed their departure from the road.

Night of the Living Dread: Jordan Peele’s Get Out

Daniel Kaluuya in Jordan Peele's Get Out.

 Note: This review contains spoilers for Get Out.
 
Jordan Peele, one half of the sketch comedy duo Key & Peele, has made his directorial debut with a comedy horror film that is not only a box office hit – taking in nearly $35 million on opening weekend on a $4.5 million budget – but an artistic triumph, too, approaching Robert Eggers levels of cinematic near-perfection on his first crack at bat. Comedy and horror are probably the two easiest genres to screw up (where one flat joke or failed scare can bring the whole thing tumbling down), but with Get Out, Peele walks that tightrope effortlessly, delivering a movie that is both terrifying and hilarious. That it’s also brilliantly smart is just icing on the cake.

I’ll come right out with it: I feel awkward talking about this film as a white critic. Get Out is deeply rooted in the so-called “black experience” (a phrase that is itself harpooned in the film), going to extreme lengths to express the fears, anxieties, reservations, and petty cruelties that people of colour live with every day when they interact with a predominantly white culture here in the Western world. It’s perhaps very appropriate that I feel awkward, because the well-intentioned yet tone-deaf approach that the film’s white characters take to interacting with the protagonist, Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), are equally cringeworthy. But with that said – and with you now forewarned to take my view on the film with a grain of pure white salt – it’s undeniable that Get Out has mass appeal, because no matter its politics, it’s just a goddamn great movie.