Visual Music: The Work of Jasper Johns

Sometimes when mounting an exhibition, its best for the gallery to leave it in the hands of people who are truly passionate about the artist's work. This is what Amanda Shubert discovered when she visited the Jasper Johns exhibit last summer at the Harvard Art University and wrote about it in Critics at Large.  

Ghost in the Machine: Jasper Johns at the Harvard Art Museums

Cicada (1979)

Jasper Johns/In Press: The Crosshatch Works and the Logic of Print at Harvard’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum this summer is a testament to the kind of close looking that small exhibitions make possible. With only twenty-one objects spread out in two galleries, the exhibition focuses in on the way Jasper Johns turns a technique from the printmaker’s arsenal – crosshatching – into a motif in his prints, and the resonant meanings that motif opens up. It’s a view of Johns’ oeuvre that you can drink in endlessly. The exhibition came out of an undergraduate seminar at Harvard in the History of Art and Architecture department, and it’s no surprise – the galleries crackle with the excitement of fresh discoveries.

Jasper Johns fills his paintings and prints with familiar symbols like numbers, letters and flags to strip them of their familiar significance and discover within them both a new range of meanings and a new way of making meaning, not by denotation but through allusions that take you into a rich and imaginative landscape. The crosshatch prints, from the 1960s and 1970s, work no differently. The crosshatch is a set of intersecting parallel lines used in engravings as early as the Renaissance to create the illusion of three dimensions through the modeling of shadow and light. By extracting and enlarging the crosshatch and turning it into a figure, rather than one of the miniscule forms out of which a figure is composed, Johns explores the culture of reproduction and mass production. The exhibition also includes works by Johns that relate to the crosshatch prints by engaging “the logic of print” in other ways, such as text, newsprint collage and letterpress.

an example of the crosshatch technique in engraving

Johns’ crosshatch works are love letters to printmaking: the riddle of process, with its precise calculations, and the sensuous variations and synthetic possibilities you can get out of different media. Scent (1976) uses a crosshatch scheme in purple, green and orange, but the sheet is divided into three sections, and in each Johns uses a different media – lithograph, linocut and woodcut – each with its distinct process and effects, modulating the continuous pattern. Cicada (1979), a screenprint, includes strips of newspaper in its crosshatch pattern, and the design is worked out to look as though it were applied by a cylindrical seal, rolled on so that the pattern could continue beyond the frame of the print. Here, Johns’ screenprint, a contemporary technique, evokes a long history of printmaking, from Mesopotamian seals (the pattern) to engraving (the crosshatch motif) to printing presses (the newsprint collage).

Survival

While there have been many films depicting the Holocaust, one of the little known pictures is last year's In Darkness. Susan Green brought it to light in her review for Critics at Large.

In Darkness: A Harrowing Tale of Enlightenment 

Milla Bankowicz and Robert Wieckiewicz in In Darkness

My mother and her closest kin came to America from Poland, a nation that was invaded a dozen years later by the Nazis. In 1942 virtually all Jewish residents in the shtetl of her little hometown, Goniadz, were killed outright or sent to the gas ovens of the Treblinka death camp. Their homes were ransacked by Catholic anti-Semites, who rejoiced with the local priest as they helped the Gestapo wipe out an entire community.

She’s not around any more but I wonder what her opinion would have been of In Darkness, about a sort of proletarian Polish version of Oskar Schindler named Leopold Socha. With his help, ten people survive for 14 months (beginning in May 1943) in the filthy, rat-infested sewers under Nazi-occupied Lvov, where fellow Jews are systematically obliterated by the Gestapo. This sort of topic was always raw for a woman who could never concede that there might conceivably be such a thing as a good Pole.

Small Pleasures

Many moviegoers celebrate the pleasures of independent cinema, but even some independent directors get lost in the mix. Shlomo Schwartzberg brings attention to one of them in this Critics at Large post.

Win Win: Thomas McCarthy’s Moving and Memorable American Tale

Win Win, the latest film from writer-director Thomas McCarthy continues in the same pleasing vein of his two previous movies, The Station Agent (2003) and The Visitors (2008). It, too, is concerned with the lives of ordinary people who sometimes do extraordinary things, much like the recluse (Peter Dinklage) in The Station Agent who affects a motley group of people when he moves to their neighbourhood; to the lonely college professor (Richard Jenkins) in The Visitors who changes lives, not least his own, when he befriends a pair of illegal immigrants in New York. Win Win revolves around Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), a lawyer/wrestling coach in New Jersey, who reluctantly takes in Kyle (Alex Shaffer), a young man who has left his Ohio home to be with his grandfather Leo (Burt Young). The only problem is that said relative, suffering from early-onset dementia, is now in a nursing home, which leaves Kyle with few options but to move in with Flaherty and his family. What McCarthy does with this seemingly thin tale is nothing short of miraculous.

The strength and appeal of McCarthy’s movies has always been the believability of his characters, and Win Win is no exception. His protagonists are always human scaled, never demonstrating heroics that stretch credibility. They’re also flawed people who can do the wrong thing, not least Mike, who commits an unethical act early in the film that is shocking in its casualness. It's a courageous move because that sets the audience against the movie’s main character, the titular ‘hero’ of the story. It turns out that Mike has his reasons for doing what he does, tied in as it is to his failing law practice and the economic constraints he feels every day of his life. Win Win doesn’t justify his actions – far from it – but makes them understandable. That understanding is even extended to Kyle’s damaged mother, Cindy (Melanie Lynskey), whose history of addiction has rendered her as something of an operator. She‘s only out for herself, but just maybe has her own reasons for being how she is. It is all tied in to her fractious past with her father. She’s unlikeable, but she’s not an easy villain. Win Win never even explains whether Leo, in fact, did mistreat his daughter or whether he just couldn’t cope with her acting out; a refreshing withholding of information that allows the viewer to make up his or her own mind about Cindy and her motives. Win Win is full of such omissions and also a slow parceling out of information, occasionally just in quick asides, a cinematic approach which brings each of its characters to life in slow, subtle ways.

Paul Giamatti and Alex Shaffer in Win Win

Admittedly, that’s not always satisfying. We’d like to know more about Flaherty’s coaching partner, the bitter Stephen “Vig” Vigman (Jeffery Tambor); his contentious relationship with his stepson; and whether Flaherty’s angry best friend, Terry Delfino (Bobby Cannavale), was really wronged by a cheating ex-wife – but McCarthy doesn’t reveal all his secrets. (The stepson and ex-wife remain off-screen characters only.) That’s because he’s more interested in focusing on Flaherty and Kyle’s families, but it’s also a deft juggling of many balls, utilizing the supporting cast to flesh out and enrich the film’s main story: how Mike rescues Kyle from a possibly dead-end existence through re-discovering Kyle’s prowess as a high school wrestler, and learns something valuable about himself in the process. That sounds trite but, unlike so many Hollywood movies, it rings true.

The Song is Over

With a judge's decision to finally remove Toronto's Mayor Ford from office due to conflict of interest, it seemed fitting today to post Kevin Courrier's post-Election piece on Ford from 2010 in Critics at Large.

Songs We Refuse to Sing

Toronto Mayor-elect Rob Ford

While walking home from dinner with a friend last evening, I had the Toronto Civic Election on my mind. This year's Mayoralty race had been a bitterly fought battle between Rob Ford, a right-wing demagogue from the suburbs, and George Smitherman, a provincial Liberal Party politician, who entered the race to bring fiscal responsibility and social awareness to a metropolis where its suburban citizens were angry with our current Mayor David Miller. They weren't alone. Many were enraged over high taxes, political entitlement, waste and an ill-functioning transit system. During his campaign, where he vowed to "stop the gravy train," Ford marshalled that fury into a frightening populist froth. He resembled the late comic Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, acting out his character role of the suburban Ralph Kramden; a big lug always in a state of continuous fulmination.

Midnight Rider

'Tis been the season for pop memoirs by Neil Young, Pete Townshend and Rod Stewart. But one that has attracted little attention is Gregg Allman's searing story addressed in Critics at Large by David Kidney. 

Bearing Witness: Gregg Allman’s My Cross To Bear

I was never much of an Allman Brothers fan. There were so many bands playing blues-based rock’n’roll that you had to draw the line somewhere. Oh, sure, I had a copy of the double live album At Fillmore East, like most of my friends. It was a mark of ‘cool.’ Duane Allman was the next guitar hero, and when he joined with Eric Clapton on the Derek & the Dominos' classic Layla album, I showed a bit more interest. There were just so many bands! And the Southern US had more than their share. Charlie Daniels, Marshall Tucker, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Wet Willie, to name a few. They each had a hit or two, many had twin lead guitars and a soulful singer, and they knew how to mix country with blues and come up with something new. But the Allman Brothers Band? No, I just filed their LPs away with the rest.

Gregg Allman is a survivor. His brother Duane was killed at age 24 in a motorcycle accident over 40 years ago. Bassist Berry Oakley drove his motorcycle into oncoming traffic about a year later. Drug use took its toll on the band, and its crew, including singer and organist Gregg Allman, Duane’s younger brother. In his new autobiography, Gregg drops one word from one of the ABB’s songs for his title. The song was called “Not My Cross To Bear,” but reality has hit Allman hard, and when it comes to his life he now realizes it is My Cross To Bear (William Morrow, 2012).

Ancient Voices

The Chieftans now have a history that is starting to challenge the longevity of the songs they continue to sing and play. According to John Corcelli in Critics at Large, their last CD, Voice of Ages, lived up to the legacy they've created.

A Seamless Tapestry: The Chieftans' Voice of Ages

It's hard to believe that 50 years ago, The Chieftains released their first album. Their tenacious passion to bring ancient Irish folk music to a wider audience was especially brave considering the approaching debut then of a new band from Liverpool, a group that was about to change the sound of the planet. I'm happy to report that Voice of Ages (Hear Music, 2012), The Chieftains new record, is about to do the same in the 21st Century. Produced by T-Bone Burnett, Voice of Agesis a glorious record that captures the unassuming and unpretentious sounds of a band still able to cut through the noise of pop and offer up a genuine, original, non-synthetic sound.

Voice of Ages also features collaborations of the finest order. Unlike the high-strung, record exec match-ups these days, such as Duets II with Tony Bennett, this record brings together musicians whose Celtic sensibility is matched by their respect for the band and its history. Imelda May, the bright new pop singer from Dublin, opens the set with a straight-ahead version of “Carolina Rua,” a traditional Irish folk song. Her buoyant performance of a tune she probably learned at an early age, sets the tone. Right from the start we know this is going to be a serious recording and not simply a frivolous commercial release.

Big Train Keep On a Rollin'

Not all big commercial blockbusters are bust, as Shlomo Schwartzberg points out in this review of the late Tony Scott's last feature in Critics at Large.

Getting it Right #1: Unstoppable

Unstoppable stars Denzel Washington

As Hollywood movies become more expensive to make and promote – with many films, shockingly, costing upwards of $100 million – Tinseltown continues to retreat into ‘safe’ projects, either sequels or remakes, such as Little Fockers or True Grit, or large event movies like Inception that garner buzz because of the massive hype attached to them. That doesn’t leave much room for so-called B movies, films with lesser known actors or directors or unusual subject matter, which simply aren’t being made much anymore and thus often fly under the media's radar when they're finally released. The Tony Scott thriller Unstoppable isn’t exactly a B movie (neither Scott (Top Gun, The Taking of Pelham 123) nor the film’s star, Denzel Washington (Malcolm X, American Gangster) are unknowns), but by any other measure, the film is a comparatively low budget, modest enterprise that stands out by virtue of what it isn’t: overblown, loud and empty headed. It’s also the rare Hollywood movie that does what it sets out to do very well, indeed.

Grimm Tales

Fairy tales have been finding a new life on television and Mark Clamen illustrates in this Critics at Large post how they are now all over prime time.

Once Upon A Time and Grimm: Fairy Tales Go Prime Time

Jennifer Morrison (far right) and the cast of ABC's Once Upon A TIme

Fairy tales are the new vampires: this is what a friend of mine told me a couple of months ago after she saw the new fall TV schedule. And indeed, fairy tales do seem to be enjoying a real renaissance of late. Three years into our apparently unending economic downturn, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that popular culture is turning to more and more fantastic and otherworldly settings to tell their stories. And if fairy tales seems destined to displace teen vampires in our cultural zeitgeist, Snow White herself seems fated to be their poster child. Next year alone, Hollywood will be releasing two live-actions retellings of her familiar story: Tarsem Sitongh’s as-yet-untitled project with Julia Roberts as the Evil Queen coming out in March, and Rupert Sanders' Snow White and the Huntsman with the Twilight saga’s Kristen Stewart playing a Snow White meets Joan of Arc incarnation of the character. And in 2013, never to be outdone, Disney will be releasing Order of the Seven, another live-action adventure which tells the story from the perspective of the dwarves and re-sets the action to 19th-century China.

Songs Anew

You can find plenty of singers doing jazz and pop standards these days. But David Churchill, in this Critics at Large piece, finds something new and refreshing in these songs when they're sung by Emilie-Claire Barlow.

Righteous Reconfiguration: Emilie-Claire Barlow's The Beat Goes On

In December 2008, my wife and I saw Canadian jazz singer, Emilie-Claire Barlow, perform a Christmas-centric concert at Markham Theatre north of Toronto. Markham Theatre is a wonderful place to see concerts because the acoustics are great and the space is relatively intimate. Barlow on that night was in a fine fettle. She sang wonderfully (in English and French) and had a great deal of off-the-cuff fun with the audience. As befits a concert in Markham, afterwards Barlow spent another hour in the lobby signing CDs for audience members. When we got to the front of the line my wife, who is trilingual (English, French and Spanish), asked Barlow if she spoke French. Barlow admitted she did not and that she always sang the songs phonetically.

Talking afterwards, my wife and I were astonished how near perfect her phrasing was, not just in her English-language songs, but her French ones too. This near-perfect phrasing is evident all over her new CD, The Beat Goes On. The CD is Barlow's jazz tribute to the pop songs of the 1960s. She's not the first jazz singer to do this, but this might be the best. Ranging from Burt Bacharach to Buffy Sainte-Marie to Sonny Bono to Bob Dylan, Barlow's choices are frequently inspired. She has taken many very recognizable tunes and, with skilful rearrangements, crafted songs I may have liked at one time, but since have grown tired of (Bacharach's “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”), or songs I never liked to begin with (Neil Sedaka's “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do”) and given them a spin that makes them fresh and rejuvenated.

Much Ado About Love

For those who contemplate the sources of romantic comedy, the road, according to Amanda Shubert in her Critics at Large piece, often leads to Shakespeare.

Undressing: Shakespeare and Romantic Comedy

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2012/09/undressing-shakespeare-and-romantic.html

Emma Thompson & Kenneth Branagh in Much Ado About Nothing

When Kenneth Branagh adapted Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing for the screen in 1993, he had the good sense to shape it like a romantic comedy. Romantic comedy may be a modern genre, but Much Ado has all the same elements – most importantly, two lovers who begin as antagonists and find their way through the friction to a romance that is deepened by the challenges they pose to one another. It also has some of the funniest romantic banter in the history of theater and Emma Thompson, as the unstoppably witty Beatrice, blazes through those lines with the exuberant physicality of an English screwball heroine.

Destiny

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #31: Robertson Davies (1985)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, the executive producer of On the Arts

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

In the chapter on memoir in the Eighties, Mythologizing the Self, which includes interviews with Wallace Shawn describing the highly personal film My Dinner with Andre, D.M.Thomas exploring Freud and the Holocaust in his novel, The White Hotel and William Diehl discussing how he used pulp fiction to work out his violent impulses, the idea was to illustrate how the decade brought forth a few biographical artists who attempted to link themselves to the collective memory of the audience with the purpose of creating a shared mythology out of their experiences. Perhaps no writer could have done more to enhance that goal than the renowned playwright, scholar and novelist Robertson Davies. Besides bringing his personal fascination with Jungian psychology into his 1970 book Fifth Business (which would form the basis of The Deptford Trilogy including the 1972 The Manticore and, in 1975, World of Wonders), Davies continued to provide psychological inquiry as a means to examining academic life in The Rebel Angels (1981), the conclusion of which became the starting point for Davies's next work, What's Bred in the Bone (1985). This book which would then become part of The Cornish Trilogy, an examination of the life of Francis Cornish, an art restorer with a mercurial past, whose demons become part of a larger mythology. Since myth plays such a huge role in the dramas of Robertson Davies, we began the interview with the question of just how big a part destiny plays in shaping a character.

Pop Obsessions

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #30: Douglas Adams (1987)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, the executive producer of On the Arts

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

When I interviewed author Douglas Adams in 1987, who knew that, besides his vastly eclectic interests, he would also be something of a pioneer in technological innovation with his fascination for Apple Macintosh computers. He saw the decade as a launching pad for a number of technological feats which would bear fruit in the years to come. Adams, who died suddenly of a heart attack in 2001, had an equally diverse career as an English writer, dramatist (which included being a script editor of Doctor Who) and a humourist. Most people know him as the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a best selling 'trilogy' of five books (selling over 15 million copies), which began as a BBC Radio comedy in 1978. (His contributions to British radio are commemorated in The Radio Academy's Hall of Fame.)

author Douglas Adams

The day he came in to talk, he had just written Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency which he described as a "thumping good detective-ghost-horror-who-dunnit-time travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic." In Adams' hands, Gently is not your typical private detective. He's more interested in quantum mechanics, conjuring tricks and consuming pizza than fiddling with fingerprint powder; a "Holistic Detective" who believes in the "fundamental interconnectedness of all things." (The book was followed by a sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul in 1988. He began working on another novel, The Salmon of Doubt, but he died before completing it.) Naturally with someone whose interests are so vast, we began our interview discussing obsessions.

Anti-Hero

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #28: Oliver Stone (1986)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, the host of On the Arts at CJRT-FM

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

film director and screenwriter Oliver Stone

One chapter, titled The Ghosts of Vietnam, features interviews with a variety of authors (Robert Stone, Brian Fawcett) and filmmakers (Louis Malle, Robert Altman) who dealt in their work with various aspects of the legacy of the Vietnam War and how it was felt in the Eighties. The American obsession with Latin and South America during the Reagan years seemed to be an ill-advised attempt to exorcise the ghosts of the earlier conflict. One filmmaker who has continually dealt with the legacy of Vietnam and the Sixties in general is Oliver Stone. Although Stone began a profitable career as a screenwriter (Midnight Express,Scarface, The Year of the Dragon) when we met he had just written and directed a low-budget drama called Salvador, with James Woods as print correspondent Richard Boyle. In fact, by the time Salvadorfinally found release, Stone had already completed his Vietnam War drama Platoon which dealt with his own personal experiences in the Vietnam War.

Radiant Language

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #27: Christopher Dewdney (1984/87/88)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the Eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton, the host of On the Arts at CJRT-FM

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

One section of the book dealt with Occupying the Margins, a chapter that examined the role of marginal art on eighties culture. By the Eighties, contemporary composers like Philip Glass, R. Murray Schafer andJohn Cage had already made a significant impact in pop circles with the help of David Bowie, Brian Eno and The Talking Heads. There were also sound poets like Bob Cobbing and bill bissett who expanded the notion of what was considered verse. While Canadian writer Christopher Dewdney is not a sound poet, he does look at language the way a geologist might examine layers of rock. Being the son of the renowned archaeologist, Selwyn Dewdney, none of this should perhaps come as a surprise. But throughout the Eighties, Christopher Dewdney shifted between works of non-fiction (The Immaculate Perception, 1986) , fiction and poetry (Radiant Inventory, 1988). Since we talked frequently during the decade and covered most of those books, I've fused together three excerpts from those talks into one post.

Heroes

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #26: Ralph L.Thomas (1984)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of CJRT-FM's On the Arts

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

The concept of heroes and villains was greatly simplified in the eighties so I wanted a chapter in the book (Heroes and Villains) that featured artists who examined that idea with a little more complexity. One such individual, film director Ralph Thomas (Ticket to Heaven), had just tackled a Canadian icon: Terry Fox. It had been just three years since Fox, a young athlete who had lost a leg to cancer, decided in 1980 to run cross-Canada to raise money and awareness for cancer research. Tragically, the cancer soon spread and he had to abandon the run after 143 days where he had done 5,373 kilometres (or 3,339 miles). Within a year, he was dead, leading to the annual Terry Fox Run which is now held in over 60 countries each year as the world's largest fund-raiser for the disease.

In his movie, The Terry Fox Story (1983), where amputee actor Eric Fryer played Fox and Robert Duvall portrayed his trainer, Bill Vigars, Thomas certainly set out to capture what made Fox such a distinctly heroic figure, rather than building a momument to him. While the film, in retrospect, would have likely done better on television (as it resembled a TV movie in many ways and was released in the U.S. on Home Box Office), it was given a theatrical run in Canada and people simply didn't run to see it. Nevertheless, The Terry Fox Story went on to win six awards at the 1984 Genie Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Academy Awards) including Best Picture.

We did the interview shortly before the awards ceremony.where Thomas was still searching for clues in understanding why his picture didn't strike the same popular chord that Fox himself had a few years earlier.

Ethnics

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #25: Neil Bissoondath (1988)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of CJRT-FM's On the Arts

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large.

In 1984, Paul Mazursky made Moscow on the Hudson, a poignant comedy about exile and homesickness, which starred Robin Williams as a Russian musician touring with the Moscow circus who spontaneously defects in New York City. The movie ostensibly deals with the complex set of emotions set loose when he finds his freedom. His actions trigger a mixture of homesickness, sadness, and the longings for a sense of place that come when (for political and ethical reasons) you are forced to leave home. With those themes in mind, I devised a chapter called Exiles and Existence where a number of artists (including Jerzy Kosinski and Josef Škvorecký) examined what it means to find yourself in a new land while looking back at the home you abandoned.

Neil Bissoondath

Author Neil Bissoondath, the nephew of authors V.S. Naipaul andShiva Naipaul, is from Arima, Trinidad and Tobago. Although he came from a Hindu tradition, he was schooled in a Catholic high school. During the seventies, political upheaval brought him to Canada where he initially settled in Ontario and studied at York University achieving a Bachelor of Arts in French in 1977. But Bissoondath went on to teach English and soon became an award-winning author. When I spoke to him in 1988, his first book of short stories, Digging Up the Mountains, was just being published. In the book, he examines (as Mazursky did in Moscow on the Hudson) the pain endured when people are uprooted from their homeland.

Curiously, in 1994, he would stir up a significant amount of controversy with his book, Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada, which called into question the validity of Canada's 1971 Multiculturalism Act. There are noticeable hints leading to his views towards defining ethnicity in our opening remarks. 

Mogul

For the next month, we present excerpts from a soon to be published e-book, Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the 80s, an interview anthology by Kevin Courrier about the 1980s from artists who lived and worked in that decade.

Talking Out of Turn #24: Samuel Z. Arkoff (1986)

From 1981 to 1989, I was assistant producer and co-host of the radio show, On the Arts, at CJRT-FM in Toronto. With the late Tom Fulton, who was the show's prime host and producer, we did a half-hour interview program where we talked to artists from all fields. In 1994, after I had gone to CBC, I had an idea to collate an interview anthology from some of the more interesting discussions I'd had with guests from that period. Since they all took place during the eighties, I thought I could edit the collection into an oral history of the decade from some of its most outspoken participants. The book was assembled from interview transcripts and organized thematically. I titled it Talking Out of Turn: Revisiting the '80s. With financial help from the Canada Council, I shaped the individual pieces into a number of pertinent themes relevant to the decade. By the time I began to contact publishers, though, the industry was starting to change. At one time, editorial controlled marketing. Now the reverse was taking place. Acquisition editors, who once responded to an interesting idea for a book, were soon following marketing divisions concerned with whether the person doing it was hot enough to sell it.

Tom Fulton of CJRT-FM's On the Arts

For a few years, I flogged the proposal to various publishers but many were worried that there were too many people from different backgrounds (i.e. Margaret Atwood sitting alongside Oliver Stone). Another publisher curiously chose to reject it because, to them, it appeared to be a book about me promoting my interviews (as if I was trying to be a low-rent Larry King) rather than seeing it as a commentary on the decade through the eyes of the guests. All told, the book soon faded away and I turned to other projects. However, when recently uncovering the original proposal and sample interviews, I felt that maybe some of them could find a new life on Critics at Large. 

Samuel Z. Arkoff

As mainstream movies became more predictable and packaged in the eighties, some filmmakers turned to the fringes. Not all of the work of independent directors though was worthy of being enshrined (any more than all of the Hollywood work earned for itself the right to be trashed). There were good and bad films in both camps. What I wanted to illustrate in the chapter Occupying the Margins: Re-Inventing Movies was the more idiosyncratic styles of people working in the business on both sides of the fence. They included screenwriter Robert Towne, film directors Bill Forsyth, Bob Swaim, James Toback, Mira Nair, Agnes Varda, and the Hollywood mogul Samuel Z. Arkoff. This B-movie cigar-chomper who in the late fifties and early sixties virtually invented the drive-in theatre through the product of his low budget American International Pictures. The wildly diverse repertoire he created for those venues at dusk were pictures like I Was a Teenage Werewolf, Hot Rod Girls, The Wild Angels and Beach Blanket Bingo. The directors in his employ were equally motley: Roger Corman, Jonathan Demme, Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Peter Bogdanovich and Dennis Hopper. Since we are approaching Halloween, this interview seemed a timely post.