September 7, 2010
Everyone's a Critic
arborweb's culture blog
Friday, May 28, 2010
DISCOVERIES: Paul Miles and Blue Collar Man, by Eve Silberman
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For those of us who like cities, Ann Arbor can sometimes feel too lofty, too sanitized--we miss the crowds, the bustle, the cigarette butts on the sidewalk that shout "urban."
People like musician Paul Miles, who occasionally performs in the streets here, evoke the tougher texture college towns lack. Miles, an African American with a grizzled chin and broad- brimmed hat, sings and plays a medley of his and others’ songs, and, man, is he good! His song “Blue Collar Man” resonates resignation and yet resilience:“I’m working my fingers to the bone / I’m a blue collar man. . .Let me tell you I’m not about to give in! ”That’s a contrast to a playful piece in which he bellows “Giddyup! Hi ho Silver! / The Lone Ranger, he went into town.”
I bought his CD, Blue Collar Man, but I’m keeping an eye out for him downtown, where his music makes A2 seem bigger than it is.
posted by John Hilton at 12:52 p.m. | 0 comments
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
A non-musician hears the Life Science Orchestra, by Eve Silberman
Many people talented in the sciences also play musical instruments. Hence the creation, nine years ago, of the U-M Life Sciences Orchestra. Its eighty-some members include physicians, med and dental students, engineering alums, and even, somehow, a couple of stray U-M undergrads not connected with the hard sciences. That many of these people at one time during their life may have considered music as a career is suggested in the opening remarks by the remarkable Ora Hirsch Pescovitz, M.D, and million-dollar-a-year CEO of the University of Michigan Health System. Pescovitz had trained as a concert pianist but said that she was nowhere near as good as Life Sciences pianist Cathy Twu, a U-M senior and business major who plans "to pursue a healthcare investment banking job on Wall Street," according to the program. The fierce competition and lack of financial security of concert musicians may explain why Pescovitz and Twu made their career choices, though Twu also "dreams of starting her own children's hospital." May the Market prosper!
The group does two free concerts a year, and I caught the spring one. In some ways, the performance was perfect for classical music novices like myself. One of the group's three pieces was Beethoven's 5th ("Emperor," Mov. 1), and you'd have to be as deaf as the composer when he wrote it not to have previously heard or be moved by this cloudburst of orchestral greatness. The other pieces included "Voyage" by modern composer John Corgliano, and Symphony No. 5 by Tchaikovsky, which went all over the map emotionally. I'm not qualified to offer technical criticism: the orchestra sounded awfully good to me, and conductor Richard Boardman was clearly passionate.
One minor quibble: was it necessary for poet Keith Taylor to read, in both French and English, the Baudelaire poem "L'Invitation au Voyage," that inspired the Corgliano composition? Keith is a wonderful friend to our arts community, but even in an Ann Arbor audience, I'm betting that between ten and twenty percent understand French, and (despite my two years of conjugating French verbs at Ferndale High) I didn't make that cut. Also, I think Keith should have worn a tie in respect to the tuxedoed musicians. But this is petty. Thanks to the mighta-been musicians, this ex-English major who got a D in high school chemistry advanced another step in my classical music education. Thanks, LSO!
posted by John Hilton at 11:26 a.m. | 0 comments
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Two Point Oh at the Detroit Rep, by Eve Silberman
The weirdly named play Two Point Oh at the Detroit Repertory Theatre (until May 29) was a trip in more ways than one. It meant my leaving Ann Arbor's fabled "28 square miles" to drive into the "real world," sad, old Detroit. A small building in a wasteland near the Lodge/Davison intersection, the Rep has a long, proud history as a professional, socially conscious theater, the first in Michigan to do race-blind casting. It's been at its current location since 1963, having survived the '67 riots and the city's economic decline. There's a bar in the lobby, and, the day I went, a church fundraiser that attracted a crowd of smartly dressed older black women (one in a wide pink satiny hat), nibbling cake off paper plates.
The Rep does a lot of black-themed, realistic dramas (the preceding production was A Song for Coretta), so Two Point Oh seemed, at first, a wacky anomaly. The two leads, husband and wife, are black, but race plays no part in the plot: billionaire software mogul Elliot Leeds (Monrico Ward) dies in a plane crash, only to stun his grieving wife Melanie (Satori Shakoor) by reappearing on her computer monitor (a TV screen placed center stage). He cheerily explains that, by recording thousands of hours of information, he has essentially made a cyber copy of himself. Now, they can happily continue their marriage at the gentle pace impossible in his frantic, physical existence, where she never saw enough of him. Now he has time to banter with her and read books aloud. His body may be missing but he's there in spirit...or whatever.
Playwright Jeffrey Jackson has given a high-tech twist to a trope at least as old as Hamlet's ghost: an otherworldly being butting into the lives of mere morals. If it's disconcerting at first to view Two Point Oh's principal actor on screen, the story, with subsequent sub-plots, soon resumes ascendancy. Bemused at first by her "virtual" husband, Melanie starts to like the idea, but things get complicated when Leeds' business partner, Ben Robbins (Mark Barrera), lets Melanie know he's there to fulfill the needs that her husband no longer can.
Playwright Jackson takes gleeful digs at the media through two characters: over-the-top TV commentator Jerry Gold (Mark Halpin), and Leeds's successor at (chuckle alert) Paradigm Software, a corporate queen played by Maggie Patton who frantically works at damage control once word gets out about Leeds' life-in-death (or is it the other way around?)
All the players are talented, but Ward, as Leeds, is a standout; he projects a sinister charisma, grinning away at his wife and ex-partner as though he knows he's got them trapped. And does he? Entertaining as the play is, its real strength may come from the philosophical questions it leaves in its wake. What makes someone "real?" Is technology bringing us closer together or just feeding our fantasies of closeness? How far are we from the dystopian fictions of Brave New World and 1984? And so forth.
As an audience member, I was in a minority: about 80 percent of the audience was African American, and many, if not most, were over 60, which I think says something about the loyalty people who didn't flee Detroit feel about the theater that also stayed. I was a little startled, when some of the usual four-letter words were bantered, to hear some of the older people giggling nervously, as if something impolite was happening. Afterwards, an 83-year-old Detroit friend asked me if all the swear words were "necessary." Now, that's another interesting philosophical question.
p.s. the program explains that "Two Point Oh" is "loosely associated with the term Web 2.0 . . .and refers in broad terms to the exploration of the interactive capabilities of the internet." It's still a crummy title.
posted by John Hilton at 11:42 a.m. | 1 comment
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Dinner with the Coroner of Oz, by Eve Silberman
About fifteen years ago I attended, in Chicago, a meeting of the International Wizard of Oz Club. Similar to Star Trek gatherings, these conferences attract devotees of both the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz and the series of books about the utopian fairyland written by L. Frank Baum.
In the increasingly distant pre-video era, The Wizard of Oz was aired once a year; its broadcast a publicized and much-anticipated event, almost akin to the presidential inauguration. No one I knew would have dreamed of watching anything else that evening; in school, my art teacher gave assignments to "Draw your favorite scene from The Wizard of Oz." Families debated whether their little kids could contend with the terrifying wicked witch and her manic minions, the winged monkeys. (My five-year-old brother ran and hid the first time he saw the witch cackle balefully into the hourglass.) When color television came in, I watched the film at the home of the only kid on our block with whose family had one of the new sets. For the first time, I saw the drama of mundane black-and- white Kansas transform into the variegated beauty of Oz.
At the Oz convention, I mingled with adults and kids dressed in Ozzy costumes--lots of pig-tailed, Judy Garland Dorothy's and wicked witches with tall hats. Then the stunner: at dinner, I found myself next to none other than movie Munchkin Meinhardt Raabe--the coroner who sings that the Wicked Witch is "not only merely dead / She's really most sincerely dead."
I'm sitting next to the coroner of Oz, I kept repeating to myself. Surreal wasn't the half of it.
Dressed in his shiny blue coroner costume, complete to brimmed hat, the 4 feet 7 Raabe was very easy to talk to. He told me Judy Garland had been friendly to "the little people." Years after the film was shot, he recalled, he worked as a substitute teacher in an elementary school. Kids who started to tease him because of his size became respectful when he told them he played the Coroner in The Wizard of Oz. The next day, excited parents called the school, asking if it was true that a Munchkin was teaching their kids.
I asked him how the movie changed his life. He said quietly that he'd felt "a little cheated" about being born different. The fame that followed him after the movie, he said, helped "make up" for the stigma and employment problems he'd experienced as a little person. After dinner, he stood up and sang the song that had won him immortality. "As coroner, I must aver / I thoroughly examined her . . ." The thrilled audience, kids and adults, broke into applause.
So I was sorry to learn last week that Raabe, 94, was himself "most sincerely dead." I cherish the poster he'd signed for me, depicting himself as coroner (though at first, I was a little spooked that he'd written my name in the Wicked Witch's "death certificate"). I'm grateful for the magic he and the others--Garland, Bolger, Lahr, all long gone--provided to kids in a bygone era. And I'm glad he felt a little of that magic himself.
posted by John Hilton at 2:07 p.m. | 0 comments
Friday, March 26, 2010
From Russia with (Tormented) Love, by Eve Silberman
When my book group did the big Chehkov plays last year, I felt disappointed. I'd read somewhere that Chekhov was second only to Shakespeare as a dramatist, but these kvetching bourgeois seemed a far cry from the heartbreaking grandeur of Lear or Hamlet. "Is Chehkhov overrated?" I asked the office Ph.D. He looked scornful, but reminded me I was reading "in translation."
Turns out that what's lost in translation on the page can still come alive in theater. In the current production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at Power Center, the cast--from the Maly Drama Theater of St. Petersburg--spoke Russian; English supertitles flashed above. Nutshell summary: aging, acclaimed Professor Serebryakov and his gorgeous young wife, Elena, show up at the family's country estate looked over by Uncle Vanya and Serebryakov's "plain" daughter from his previous marriage, Sonya. Sonya is in love with the local physician, who falls for Elena, as does Uncle Vanya. Yep, they all whine a lot about their thwarted desires.
I ushered for the play on a "student night," when the tickets are discounted. Almost everyone there was younger than I (excepting my fellow ushers), which may explain the conversation I heard afterward among four bemused looking U-M students in the lobby. "That was strange!" said one kid. Replied another, "Were those people geeky or what?"
Geeky? Nyet! This is one of the few examples of pure ensemble theater I've seen: no one actor stood out and yet they all did (though if you ask me, the actress playing Sonya could not be called "plain"). The actors were so good that even in Russian, their chatter was more absorbing than physical action in lesser plays. Collectively, they turned the characters' carping into something grander: an articulation of the disappointment most adults carry as we realize the disconnect between our dreams and the way our lives have played out. Give those kids thirty years and they'll see the power of Chehkov, too.
Turns out that what's lost in translation on the page can still come alive in theater. In the current production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya at Power Center, the cast--from the Maly Drama Theater of St. Petersburg--spoke Russian; English supertitles flashed above. Nutshell summary: aging, acclaimed Professor Serebryakov and his gorgeous young wife, Elena, show up at the family's country estate looked over by Uncle Vanya and Serebryakov's "plain" daughter from his previous marriage, Sonya. Sonya is in love with the local physician, who falls for Elena, as does Uncle Vanya. Yep, they all whine a lot about their thwarted desires.
I ushered for the play on a "student night," when the tickets are discounted. Almost everyone there was younger than I (excepting my fellow ushers), which may explain the conversation I heard afterward among four bemused looking U-M students in the lobby. "That was strange!" said one kid. Replied another, "Were those people geeky or what?"
Geeky? Nyet! This is one of the few examples of pure ensemble theater I've seen: no one actor stood out and yet they all did (though if you ask me, the actress playing Sonya could not be called "plain"). The actors were so good that even in Russian, their chatter was more absorbing than physical action in lesser plays. Collectively, they turned the characters' carping into something grander: an articulation of the disappointment most adults carry as we realize the disconnect between our dreams and the way our lives have played out. Give those kids thirty years and they'll see the power of Chehkov, too.
posted by John Hilton at 6:37 p.m. | 0 comments
Sunday, February 21, 2010
WJN's journalistic triumph
More than twenty years ago, I met a new neighbor while we mowed our back yards. We were amused to learn that we both were editors (not a common occupation, even in Ann Arbor). I'd recently taken over the Ann Arbor Observer, while Nina Gelman ran the Washtenaw Jewish News.Though Gelman has long since moved on--she married and moved to California--I've read the WJN ever since. And recently they've published two extraordinary stories. The December-January issue features an article by former Ann Arbor News staffer Art Aisner about the anti-Israel protests outside Beth Israel congregation on Washtenaw. Many publications, including the Observer, have written about the handful of people who picket the synagogue's Saturday services, but no one has done it as well as Aisner. Working with WJN editor Suzie Ayer, he's produced a compelling picture of the protesters, their motives, and the Jewish community's response. Smart, thorough, and fair, it's journalism at its best.
Some WJN readers felt Aisner was too fair. In the February issue, retired anthropology prof Steve Pastner riposted with a scholarly expose of the picketers' connections to groups advocating Israel's destruction. (The names of two protesters are misspelled in photo captions, but that's no reflection on Pastner--they're right in the text). The real eye-opener, though, was an op-ed piece by Laurel Federbush. "The few and the just" is a first-hand account of life inside the tiny cadre of protesters, as seen by a former member.
Federbush recalls how she joined the protests; her deepening involvement--"I digested the idea that the Zionists controlled the world, a tight-knit, elite cabal"; and her decision to break with what she now considers "a cult of sorts." But to her credit, this time, she's determined to resist polemics. "The few and the just" scrupulously maps the rugged landscape where emotion and politics meet. Candid and unsparing, it's an illuminating Ann Arbor memoir.
posted by John Hilton at 1:08 p.m. | 0 comments
Thursday, February 18, 2010
Holden in Heaven, by Eve Silberman
In mid-February, forty people were waiting their turn to check out a 60-year-old novel from the Ann Arbor District Library. Of course it's not just any novel--it's the high school classic Catcher in the Rye.
The recent death of reclusive author J.D. Salinger has caused a resurgence of interest in the man and his best-known book. "It's been flying off the shelf," says a Borders clerk, estimating that that since the author's death on January 28, the Liberty Street store has been selling between 30 and 40 copies a week, compared to 1 to 5 copies previously. Adds the clerk, " I read it when I was a senior. Loved it!"
An author's popularity often surges after death. Following the suicide of novelist David Foster Wallace, "People were asking about [his book Infinite Jest] for weeks, " says a staffer at Dawn Treader. But Salinger's death hit especially hard because so many young readers empathized with its angst-ridden teen hero, Holden Caulfield. who wonders around late 1940s Manhattan fulminating at "phonies."
"Compared to a lot of classics we teach, that's one book [teenagers] connect to," says Huron High English teacher Bob Fox. Judith DeWoskin of Community High says her students still find Holden as endearing as ever: "In a class of thirty students, I'll get twenty-six who respond to his voice and four who say he's a whiner and should shut up." Increasingly sophisticated about mental health, today's young readers debte whether Holden was bi-polar (DeWoskin has brought in shrinks to contribute to that discussion).
In this post-Salinger era, anyone treasuring a first edition of Catcher could unload it for up to $15,000, says Jay Platt of West Side Book Shop. Wistfully, he recalls that he sold one about twenty years ago--when the price was just $75.
The recent death of reclusive author J.D. Salinger has caused a resurgence of interest in the man and his best-known book. "It's been flying off the shelf," says a Borders clerk, estimating that that since the author's death on January 28, the Liberty Street store has been selling between 30 and 40 copies a week, compared to 1 to 5 copies previously. Adds the clerk, " I read it when I was a senior. Loved it!"
An author's popularity often surges after death. Following the suicide of novelist David Foster Wallace, "People were asking about [his book Infinite Jest] for weeks, " says a staffer at Dawn Treader. But Salinger's death hit especially hard because so many young readers empathized with its angst-ridden teen hero, Holden Caulfield. who wonders around late 1940s Manhattan fulminating at "phonies."
"Compared to a lot of classics we teach, that's one book [teenagers] connect to," says Huron High English teacher Bob Fox. Judith DeWoskin of Community High says her students still find Holden as endearing as ever: "In a class of thirty students, I'll get twenty-six who respond to his voice and four who say he's a whiner and should shut up." Increasingly sophisticated about mental health, today's young readers debte whether Holden was bi-polar (DeWoskin has brought in shrinks to contribute to that discussion).
In this post-Salinger era, anyone treasuring a first edition of Catcher could unload it for up to $15,000, says Jay Platt of West Side Book Shop. Wistfully, he recalls that he sold one about twenty years ago--when the price was just $75.
posted by John Hilton at 2:57 p.m. | 0 comments
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