Interpreting Mordecai

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Back in 2010, the late Canadian author and essayist Mordecai Richler was treated to both a lengthy and exhaustive biographical study by Charles Foran and a film adaptation by Richard J. Lewis of his last novel, Barney's Version. Since Shlomo Schwartzberg has an affinity for Richler, and shares the same home city of Montreal with the irascible writer, it seemed only fitting that he write up both projects, which he did, back to back.

Subject Over Style - Charles Foran's Mordecai: The Life & Times

Nearly ten years after his death, Canadian writer/provocateur Mordecai Richler is still in the news. Two Montréal city councilors are facing flack from Quebec nationalists for daring to suggest that the city name a street after one of its most famous native sons. The film adaptation of Richler’s last novel, Barney’s Version, is opening wide on Christmas Eve. And writer Charles Foran has penned the ultimate Richler bio, Mordecai: The Life & Times (Knopf Canada, 2010), a problematic but fascinating look into the life of one of the most original, free thinking and courageous writers of our age. 

As a Montreal-born Jew, though one who came along almost thirty years later than Mordecai and grew up in the suburban (but mostly Jewish) City of Cote St. Luc, far from his St.Urbain Street haunts, I have always found Richler to an interesting enigma. And not the least because my own community had such ambivalent feelings towards him. As I wrote in my 2001 obituary for him in the Jerusalem Report magazine, the Jewish community went from being uncomfortable with his often scathing, satirical, warts-and-all portraits of his people to viewing him as something of a hero, even someone to be proud of, because of his forthrightness in confronting Quebec’s separatist and/or intolerant French nationalists. Mordecai was particularly scathing in his disdain for the province’s asinine language laws which decreed that English, one of Canada’s two official languages, be deemed second rate or non-existent on street and business signs. You get a vivid sense of how strongly he felt about those oppressive laws in his superb non-fiction book Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem For a Divided Country (1992). 

Destruction Orgy

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Given that today in Critics at Large we are commemorating the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, it seemed fitting to turn our attention to another disaster (albeit fictional) in Luna Sea Notes. Since David Churchill was the progenitor of the Titanic Omnibus, we've gone back in our archives to find his views on film director Roland Emmerich's most recent attempt to end the world.    

Roland Emmerich's Putrid Popcorn: 2012

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/03/roland-emmerichs-putrid-popcorn-2012.html

Roland Emmerich is a sadist and his film 2012 is reprehensible. Strong words for what is ostensibly a 'popcorn movie', but the words are earned. This is the third time now that he has destroyed the world (Independence Day (1996), The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and this), fourth time if you include his earlier film, Moon 44 (1990), where the world is already basically destroyed and maybe fifth if his first picture, The Noah's Ark Principal (1984), is included, and I doubt whether he's done yet. In one other picture, Godzilla (1998), he only leveled New York City. Emmerich seems to take some sort of twisted glee in watching the world laid waste. In the post 9/11 and 2004 Tsunami world, there's something deeply wrong with someone who repeatedly returns to this material, especially the films that were made after these catastrophes. Isn't it enough that we are witnessing it in the real world? Do we need to be 'entertained' by this?

Emmerich is on record saying that he views these films as a warning. He's even been wrong-headedly embraced by the environmentalist movement for this and his previous destructo-pic, The Day After Tomorrow. In 2012, he essentially steals the premise of the far-superior movie The Core (everybody seems to be stealing from this little-seen picture, James Cameron stole the word 'unobtainium' from it). In 2009, a brave, misunderstood scientist (Chiwetel Ejiofor) discovers the earth's core is heating up caused by catastrophic sun flares, and the earth will essentially destroy itself in the very near future (The Core's Aaron Eckhart and 2012's Chiwetel Ejiofor are interchangeable). A plan to save as much of humanity as possible is launched. Ejiofor's prediction is off, however. It turns out that centuries before, the ancient Mayans had predicted that the world would end on December 21, 2012, and of course they are right. The mad scramble is then on to get 'the lucky few' to the 21st century equivalent of Noah's Ark, or in this case Arks.

Spike Jones's Slapstick Dada

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Frank Zappa once asked the pertinent question: Does humour belong in music? Of course it does, that is, unless music for you is another form of cultural hair-shirt. No debate that one of the greatest practitioners of nose-thumbing in the face of pomposity in the mid-20th Century were Spike Jones & His City Slickers who Kevin Courrier wrote about in Critics at Large a couple of years back.  

The Mozart of Mayhem: Spike Jones and His City Slickers

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/04/mozart-of-mayhem-spike-jones-and-his.html

While re-watching The Marx Brothers in Monkey Business (1931) last week on TCM, I was trying to think of who might possibly be their musical equivalent. (Of course, The Marx Brothers had their own fair share of musical absurdity in their comedies.) Ultimately, I didn’t have to look too much farther than Spike Jones and His City Slickers. From the early forties to the mid-fifties, Spike Jones and his group tore into the pomposity of high culture with a savage intent. Jones implemented a storehouse of rude sounds that made composer Erik Satie’s experiments in Parade (1916) seem polite.

Jones turned musical history into a broadly satirical farce. He made a mockery of honoured classics like Rossini’s William Tell Overture, which he recast as a ridiculously hysterical horse race. The unbearably dippy standard “Love in Bloom” was torn to shreds in much the same manner that The Marx Brothers laid waste to Il Travatore in A Night at the Opera(1935). Johann Strauss’ delicate Blue Danube waltz was transformed into a drunken brawl (in contrast to the lame reverence shown by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey). In their assault on Bizet’s Carmen, the group’s “messy-soprano” Eileen Gallagher is heard frightening off three bulls with the mere shriek of her opening aria. Michael “Cub” Coda, of The Brownsville Station (who once sang about "Smoking in the Boy's Room"), remembers his father seeing Spike Jones at the Michigan Theatre in Detroit back in 1945. “They were crazy,” he recalled his dad telling him. “The stage went black and all these sirens and gunshots started going off. Then the stage lit up and it was Spike Jones and His City Slickers…They had a guy playing a toilet seat with strings on it, people onstage wearing wigs and crazy outfits – oh geez, they were nuts.” This nutty group spent their career blowing raspberries at High Art. And they did it with an all-American gusto.

Spike Jones & His City Slickers

Hailing from Long Beach, California, Jones first put together a college dance band that he patterned after Red Nichols’ Five Pennies. But performing standards bored him to pieces. When he met the multi-talented Del Porter, who played xylophone, violin, sax, and clarinet, and had hung out with the great impressionist Mel Blanc, Jones saw the possibility for integrating a little mayhem into the mix. They began as the Feather Merchants, but by the end of the thirties, they became Spike Jones and His City Slickers and their distinct lunacy caught the attention of RCA Records. By this time, the group included violinist Carl Greyson, whose tenor vocal style displayed a twisted grin in songs like “Cocktails For Two”; Red Ingle, who mutilated the sentimental weepie “Chloe,” turning it into a beautiful act of desperate desecration; Winstead “Doodles” Weaver, a former comedian who created the droll voice of the race-track announcer on the William Tell Overture; Freddie Morgan, a goofy-faced, mad banjo player; “Babyface” George David Rock, a trumpet player with the sweet kid voice in “All I Want For Christmas”; and Dr. Horatio Q. Birdbath (a.k.a. Purves Pullen) who contributed mightily to the massacre of “Love in Bloom.” Sir Frederick Gas (a.k.a. Earl Bennett) provided ample demonstrations of his peculiar emissions on songs like “Happy New Year” and “Knock Knock.” The City Slickers dressed like inebriated renegades out of a Preston Sturges comedy, with loud clothes and goofy hats. Their stage presence was a dada explosion from Dogpatch.

Ry Cooder: Renaissance Man

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Ry Cooder has built a substantial career as a roots artist who has brought the foundations of American folk and blues into the world of pop. But he's had an equally substantial career writing film music which David Kidney explored with keen insight in one of his early posts for Critics at Large.

Catching the Spirit: The Film Music of Ry Cooder

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/07/catching-spirit-film-music-of-ry-cooder.html

"What you’re trying to do is catch the spirit of a picture. And that means sometimes you go contrary to what’s on the screen, and sometimes you go with what’s on the screen. It’s a matter of instinct; if your instincts are good, it’s going to work for you.”—David Raksin (Laura, The Bad and The Beautiful).

“I used to think about this music (blues, gospel, etc.)…as being environments…so I’d look for chances to add this music to the environment in the film…I didn’t go to school to learn this…it has more to do with your own personal awareness.”—Ry Cooder.

The first time I heard Ry Cooder’s guitar was in a film score. The blues-soaked bottleneck featured in Donald Cammell's 1970 film Performance (seen in a small New York City theatre) captured my attention even more than Mick Jagger’s acting debut. I rushed to Times Square the next morning to buy the soundtrack, which wasn't yet released. It was months before I was able to find it — and I've been hooked on slide guitar music ever since. The music in Performance was overseen by Jack Nitzsche. Cooder was merely a hired hand. Yet it’s Cooder’s work (on Jagger & Richards' "Memo From Turner" and Randy Newman's performance of "Gone Dead Train") that is memorable.

"Jack Nitzsche was doin’ Candy…in those days they didn’t have rock’n’roll movie scores…played a lot of blues, Howlin’ Wolf…just sound…Mac Rebennack on piano, Earl Palmer on drums…the producer didn’t understand at all, he wondered where the strings were, where was the orchestra…then Jack did Performance which was essentially the same score…I learned…watch the film and play somethin’…”— Ry Cooder.

“Watch the film and play somethin’!” It seems like the simplest advice. But can it really be that easy? 

Piece of My Heart

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

Like David Churchill, Susan Green can draw upon memoir as a means to perfectly call up an era. In this case, she drew a compelling portrait of the late Janis Joplin.

Triggered Times: Remembering "Pearl"

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2010/10/triggered-times-remembering-pearl.html

An October 4 New York Times story revealed that Janis Joplin – gone at that point for exactly 40 years – is on the verge of a comeback. Although she has remained a music icon since overdosing on heroin in the fall of 1970, her family never groomed the singer’s legacy the way relatives of other rock stars have. But now a “professional estate manager,” who already has done wonders for the equally deceased Jim Morrison, Peter Tosh and Gram Parsons, intends to relaunch her image. There’ll be new books, vinyl collector editions of her albums, a line of Janis-like clothing and jewelry called Made for Pearl (her nickname and the title of her posthumous record). Plus, he’s planning a feature-length documentary that will include rarely seen footage shot by her road manager John Byrne Cooke.

Illumination

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

In Camille Paglia's anthology Break Blow Burn, this feminist scholar and cultural critic provides a provocative analysis of forty-three of the world's best poems. She writes in her introduction that "[p]oets have glimpses of other realities, higher or lower, which can't be grasped cognitively. The poem is a methodical working out of fugitive impressions." While taking into consideration the diminished role of poetry in schools and society at large, Mari-Beth Slade also takes into account with precise observation some of those "fugitive impressions" when talking about the work of Mary Oliver.     

Pathetic Fallacy and Amazing Truth: The Poetry of Mary Oliver

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/07/pathetic-fallacy-and-amazing-truth.html

As a society, we don't read poetry like we once did. Although we still study poems in school and acknowledge our poets at prestigious award ceremonies, most of us turn to novels when reading for pleasure and are far more interested in the Giller nominees than the Griffin winner. Reading poetry is so much more labour intensive than reading fiction; it requires a different skill set than the one needed to navigate our fast-paced world. No poet seems to understand this better than Mary Oliver (Swan: Poems and Prose Poems, Beacon Press, 2010).

Back when people did read poetry for pleasure, Alexander Pope proclaimed (in verse!) “True wit is nature to advantage dressed / What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.” Had Pope lived 300 years later, I’m sure he would have appreciated the way Oliver advantageously dresses nature to express human emotion. Oliver is famous for her “affinity with the natural world” (her words) and most of her poems draw on images from nature. But Oliver is much more than a naturalistic poet. The parallels she draws between human existence and the organic world imply that we are deeply interconnected.

To Connect or Not to Connect

For all the current readers of Critics at Large, we've resurrected the Luna Sea Notes website to publish previous C @ L posts. The idea is to introduce readers to pieces they may have missed from earlier in our incarnation. Since we now have a huge body of work to draw from, the goal is to post articles that may also have some relevance to events of the day.

As the new media and technology has given us quicker access to more information and to each other, it doesn't mean it has enhanced the quality of life. As a supporter of technological change, Laura Warner still remains skeptical of how we engage with it as she explains in her perceptive review of Sherry Turkle's book on the subject.

An Inconvenient Conversation: Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together

http://www.criticsatlarge.ca/2011/08/inconvenient-conversation-sherry.html

I’ve always been an advocate for technology. As an information professional, my regard and respect for the tools that help us access, analyse and communicate this currency of our knowledge economy are vital to both our existence and success. Personally and professionally, our social networks matter more than ever to our careers. I do believe it is important to adapt and adopt, or be left behind.

That being said, I also believe that the age-old ability to personally connect with ourselves (and with one another) remains imperative to the human experience. A recent stream of events and observations has had me thinking: do our digital tools and connections distract us from caring for those real and most vital relationships? Every so often, I find myself amongst those who tend to sneak a peek at my phone, or email, when I should otherwise be in the moment. I’ve also observed that this addiction has been inherited by the heir to my legacy. My two-year-old once greeted me at the airport gates yelling “Mommy! Black cell phone!” (Well, at least she said my name first.) With any touch screen in her fingers, she goes to work. Even at her tender young age, she knows what all the apps do. What ever happened to just sitting in a sandbox and digging a hole? There’s probably now an app for that.