Category Archives: The Morgue

Powerful Theater

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Antony & Cleopatra, Shakespeare, McCarter, Esau Pritchett

Nicole Ari Parker and Esau Pritchett in Antony & Cleopatra (photo: nj.com)

Last week we saw McCarter Theatre’s production of Antony & Cleopatra, directed by Emily Mann. It stars Esau Pritchett (who gave such a moving performance last year in August Wilson’s Fences), Nicole Ari Parker (Showtime’s Soul Food), and a strong supporting cast. Their performances, combined with a single stripped-down set for fast scene changes, gorgeous Cleopatra-wear, and an unexpected percussion accompaniment perfect in every beat add up to a whole greater than the parts.

This is the play about which some say, if all Shakespeare’s plays but one were lost, save this one, because it has passionate love (and a Romeo and Juliet-style ending), war, betrayal, tragedy, and Romans. Even some humor. It’s hard to judge the play itself, as its four-hour run-time was substantially cut, as so often happens, but the resulting production is fast-paced and emotionally rich. And this play is not often produced, so here’s your chance! Through October 5.

Wittenberg, David Davalos, Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, Jordan Coughtry, Anthony Marble, Erin Partin

Erin Partin, Anthony Marble, and Jordan Coughtry in Wittenberg (photo: STNJ)

There’s only one more week to catch The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey’s production of Wittenberg by David Davalos. Directed by Joseph Discher, this highly entertaining play set in 1517 at the eponymous university and town stars Jordan Coughtry as Prince Hamlet, a student, Mark Dold and Anthony Marble as Hamlet’s professors, the ideologically opposed Martin Luther and John Faustus, and wonderful Erin Partin as whatever lady is needed onstage at the moment.

Witty and fast-moving—great body language from Marble (Faustus), who is a would-be 16th c. rock star—it has modern touches that aren’t intrusive and numerous Hamlet references and puns. Faust’s office—Room 2B. If you’ve never seen a tennis match on stage, this is how it’s done, a nice metaphor for the lobbing back and forth of Hamlet’s budding worldview by Luther (God’s will) and Faustus (a man decides his own fate). Again, perfect set and costumes. We admired Erin Partin’s recent performance as Ariel in The Tempest, and a local review correctly noted about this performance that she plays each of her characters “with such veracity” that it seems multiple women are in the cast.

The Blacklist: Under Covers

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TV, NBC, Blacklist, James Spader, magazine cover

(photo: AP/NBC)

Since the ads on network television drive me crazy, it’s ironic that ads have persuaded me to watch the second-season premiere of The Blacklist, Monday, September 22 on NBC. If you’ve watched the show, you know it’s an American crime drama starring James Spader, Megan Boone, Ryan Eggold, and Harry Lennix. The premise is that Spader, a high-profile fugitive—Raymond “Red” Reddington—emerges from the shadows to make a deal with the FBI. He’ll help them capture a series of hard-to-nab global criminals, but only if they let him use a young profiler (Megan Boone) “fresh out of Quantico” to help.

The show last season received pretty strong positive reviews from the critics, and in a recent Chicago Tribune interview about the upcoming twists, Spader said, “once you start taking all those backroads, the backroads become much more interesting than the destination.” Spader pursues those intriguing backroads with his characteristic intensity—which led Rolling Stone to call him “the strangest man on TV.”

But what about those ads? The first one I noticed was the inside back cover of this month’s Wired, which showed Spader in a typical neon-drenched Wired explosion, with mock-cover headlines like “Get with the Program: Red’s Shocking Next Move” and “On the List, Off the Grid: Tracking the Criminals Still at Large.” Clever. Then I spotted a fake cover in the 9/8 issue of The New Yorker, drawn by popular cover artist Mark Ulriksen (who drew the recent Derek Jeter cover), and you may have seen similar cover spoofs in GQ, Rolling Stone, Time and six other magazines. Spader’s undercover under covers. Ok, I’ll watch once, anyway. (Did. Not an immediate fan.)

Reading is Sooo Good for You!

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reading, book

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

GalleyCat recently recycled a nifty infographic from Canada’s National Reading Campaign and CDC books showing what you probably already know—reading is good for you! Not only does it increase physical, mental, and emotional health, it’s a better stress reducer than drinking a cup of tea, going for a walk, or playing a video game (six times better than that last activity). Although some of the data are from Canada, most of the findings apply equally well everywhere.

This website has talked about how reading (good stuff) contributes to better writing. But research has shown many cognitive benefits of reading, as well, including its ability to provide mental stimulation, improve memory, and strengthen analytic thinking, focus, and concentration skills. Lana Winter-Hébert cites these and other benefits as reasons people should read every day.

Not to understate the case, the folks at WhytoRead begin with the premise that “reading books will save your life.” Their top 10 reasons repeat many of those above, adding “it makes you interesting and attractive.” OK. You can stop there. Sold!

Flammen & Citronen

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Flame and Citron, Mads Mikkelsen, Thure Lindhardt

(photo: upload.wikimedia.org)

Wandering the Internet, I found reference to this 2008 Danish drama (trailer) about Danish resistance fighters during the Nazi occupation. Flame and Citron being their noms de guerre, one for the man’s flaming red hair and the other for his having bombed the Citroën auto factory. Directed by Ole Christian Madsen.

The film is loosely based on two real-life and much-decorated fighters, Bent Faurschou-Hviid, played by Thure Lindhardt, and Jørgen Haagen Schmith, played by Mads Mikkelsen—looking, as always, like he just ate a bad oyster. They start their train of murders with Danish collaborators, in order to minimize German reprisals, but when they branch out, it gets complicated. Where are their orders coming from? Are they killing collaborators or innocent Danes? The ambiguity and hesitation they feel seems much more real to me than the Killing Machine assassins of so many films.

The fractures in human relationships and trust that occur in such pressure-cooker situations are not a surprise, and the denouement is over-long, but the movie is compelling and well acted. It was nominated for numerous awards, winning several. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 87%; viewers 82%. “To its credit, the film gives full weight to the confusion and ambivalence of war; the struggle for liberation from tyranny rarely looks so dubious,” said Colin Covert in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

The Dictionary in 2014

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Alice in Wonderland, words, Humpty DumptyIn his September column for Visual Thesaurus Orrin Hargraves comments that in pre-Internet days, as if we could remember back that far, dictionaries carried “a certain authority.” They not only satisfied writers that they were spelling and using words correctly, but they also resolved tricky dinner-table arguments. But today, dictionaries may be as likely to start those arguments as to settle them.

Because the Internet enables a much wider discussion and debate of word meanings, people have available to them a wider range of information on which to base word choice, giving dictionaries a run for their money. When using foreign words, I rely on the Internet site WordReference.com for straight meanings and its wide selection of idioms, but I also use its discussion threads in which native speakers debate usage and suggest how they would express an idea. Very helpful, especially with slang, which changes more rapidly than more formal speech.

Hargraves says the dictionary “is no longer regarded as an anchor of certainty on the reference shelf,” thanks to the usurpation of its role as arbiter by the lightning speed and facile opinions of the Internet. He cites this example: a recent BuzzFeed article took Merriam-Webster to task for defining “pit bull” as “a type of dog that is known for its strength and its ability to fight.” In its irrelevant objection to this characterization, BuzzFeed posted numerous cuddly pit bull photos. Dog-lovers rallied. And BuzzFeed concluded Merriam-Webster had some cleaning up to do.

These fans should have read the British dictionary definition and encyclopedia entries regarding pit bulls provided by dictionary.com! The inconvenient fact that the “ability to fight” was developed through decades of deliberate breeding was ignored; the definition was treated as a value judgment.

Hargraves’s second example came from Quora, where a user asked, “Which is more correct: ‘have a bar mitzvah’ or ‘get bar mitzvah’? Hargraves notes that the most popular answer endorses neither of these usages, in favor of “to become (a) bar/bat mitzvah.” While the original meaning of the term did refer to the child, in current usage, it most often refers to the ceremony. “Usage, that old tyrant, has nearly eclipsed the original meaning of bar/bat mitzvah in the majority speech community,” he says, “and usage is in fact what determines what words mean.”

Despite such debates, dictionaries will continue to base their definitions on actual usage, so people who don’t like the definition of pit bull and those defending the original meaning of bar mitzvah have a lot of usage-changing to do. But don’t blame Messrs. Merriam and Webster: “Dictionaries merely document the evidence.”

Google Algorithms at Work

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Google

(photo: c1.staticflickr.com)

Everyone has noticed—and is from mildly to serious annoyed—that after we visit a website looking for garden tools, say, Google generates an avalanche of related ads. Last year I bought a scarf online and, for the next few months, my social media were draped in it. What gives? I already bought the darn thing! You’d think the system could distinguish between “Purchase completed” and “Still interested. Maybe? Nice, right? You like?”

Two RISD graduates—Jason Huff and Mimi Cabell—decided to test the limits of networked marketing by emailing to each other, page by page, Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 scorcher, American Psycho. You’ll recall the book is about Manhattan businessman and serial killer Patrick Bateman, and is notorious for its graphic sex and violence. What ads would Google’s hard-working algorithms find relevant to these emails? Huff and Cabell wanted to know. The interesting results revealed what the author’s say was “GMail’s unpredictable insensitivity to violence, racism, and sex.”

A page that included the murder of a man and a dog by a knife-wielding attacker did generate ads for knives and, in a grisly touch, knife sharpeners. And a page with a racial slur carried no ads at all. But the most common ad across 408 pages of mayhem? Crest Whitestrips. Maybe a “just keep smiling and all this will go away” message there.

You can get a pdf of the book they compiled from their results, which includes all 800+ ads as footnotes (minus the contribution by Bret Easton Ellis). Something he wrote that appeared on page 27 stimulated an ad for “folding chair parts.” I can’t imagine. And, on the very last page, a way to avoid “3 Awful Guitar Mistakes.” Probably not one of Bateman’s top-of-mind worries.

Movies on the Brain

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Natalie Portman, Black SwanGreg Miller’s recent Wired article about how movies trick your brain into empathizing with characters begins by describing the scene from 2010’s psychological thriller Black Swan. In this intense scene, Natalie Portman, playing a ballerina vying for the role of Odette/Odile in Swan Lake, begins to believe black feathers are sprouting from her skin. “When people watch this scene,” Miller says, “their brain activity bears some resemblance to a pattern that’s been observed in people with schizophrenia,” according to neuroscientist Talma Hendler.

At a recent Hollywood event, Black Swan’s director, Darren Aronofsky, said he’d “be thrilled” if he gave audiences “a temporary taste of psychosis.” It may work that way through the activity in two brain regions shown by functional MRIs to be connected with empathy: one, she calls “mental empathy,” the classic, putting yourself in another person’s shoes feeling; the second, “embodied empathy,” is more visceral, the kind of weak-in-the-knees feeling I get when I see someone else’s cut or injury.

Having studied people’s reactions to emotional movie scenes, Hendler believes both types of empathy are important in shaping what they experience. Schizophrenics, however, tend to rely more on mental empathy. “It’s as if they’re having to think through the emotional impact of situations that other people grasp more intuitively and automatically,” she suggested. And in that scene from Black Swan, Aronofsky believes viewers’ minds mimic that, by being engaged in trying to figure out whether the feathers are real or Portman’s hallucination.

Aronofsky, known for his surreal and sometimes disturbing work, uses a filmmaker’s entire toolbox to shape the audience’s emotional reactions. He cited his film Requiem for a Dream, in which addictions cause the main characters’ lives to spin out of control (Ellen Burstyn received an Academy Award nomination). He began that movie with wide shots, graduating to tighter and tighter ones, “to convey an increasingly subjective sense of what the characters were experiencing. There’s always a theory of where the camera is and why it’s there.”

Dear Class

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Dear ClassDelighted to announce my friend Jane Stein’s children’s book, Dear Class: Traveling Around the World with Mrs. J., with charming illustrations by Pamela Duckworth, has been published and is available for ordering online.

The book is about a teacher who visits more than a dozen countries in an amazing six-month trip. It’s based on the travel log of the real Mrs. J, who took this trip in 1963. Readers learn about her adventures through the letters she writes her students, reproduced in the book.

Sidebars include historical information, updates, fun facts, websites, and activities. Written for children ages 8 to 12, Jane says, the book is the story of living out a dream—in this case, to travel around the world–and having the adventurous spirit to do it alone.

During the course of her adventures, Mrs. J studies at the Sorbonne, visits a school in Istanbul, lives on a houseboat in India, and more. She sets out to learn about people, places, food, art, and the culture in countries around the world. While she does that, she also learns a lot about herself.

Here’s an excerpt from the first chapter. Order for your kids, grandkids, kids of friends, and reward this imaginative, fun project! Good work, Jane!!

Days of Rage and Pain

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White House

(photo: pixabay.com)

Three days in Washington this week afforded the opportunity to read one of the country’s great newspapers (and about its new Jeff Bezos-appointed publisher) over my croissant and coffee and smear myself with printer’s ink. Not the same experience as online.

I read the discouraging Washington Post coverage of the state of affairs in Ukraine, and it offered a special section on Obama and Putin, which I brought home to read on a day when my blood pressure might be dropping. I’d just read David Remnick’s long piece in The New Yorker about the travails of former Russian ambassador Michael McFaul and wasn’t ready for more from Vlad the Unveiler (think bare-chested photos).

I read about the disastrous state of the Ebola outbreak and thought about how last year Neil’s 3-hour stay in the outpatient surgery unit of a new hospital in our area produced a bill well in excess of $20,000. That was for use of the room (no doctor fees—those were extra—no lab tests, no x-rays) and a carton of cranberry juice. What the struggling and filthy hospitals in West Africa could do with one day’s take from that facility! Or any U.S. hospital.

The second beheading of an American journalist, looking bravely forward while his assassins covered their faces, as well they might.

The continued intransigence of all sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, rushing deeper and deeper into a labyrinth that would appear to have no way out.

The Justice Department and Ferguson. Police forces in U.S. cities I’ve never heard of armed better than some countries.

Inevitably, the Post covered stories about people considering a 2016 Presidential run. I could only guess they’re not reading the same newspaper I did!

Le Weekend

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Lindsay Duncan, Jim Broadbent, Le Weekend

Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent in Le Weekend

Saw the previews for this movie (trailer) several times last spring, and it didn’t look promising. In it, two past-middle-aged Brits have a madcap weekend in Paris, fumbling around in their relationship, the wife mercurial—laughing one minute, enraged the next—the husband hoping for sex. They’re living high but low on cash, and full of petty irritations. For once, the previews were right. Plus they showed all the best barbs. How this ended up in our Netflix queue, I don’t know.

Still, the acting was flawless, with Jim Broadbent as the husband and Lindsay Duncan as his wife. A wonderful smarmy performance by Jeff Goldblum as a sycophantic fellow-academic who outs the fact that the couple’s lives are falling apart. Olly Alexander has a juicy part as Goldblum’s bored son. Another dinner party disaster, uncomfortable to watch, yet unbelievable.

Critics liked it. The Rotten Tomatoes reviewers’ rating: 89 percent, but audiences seemed more in my camp: 55.