Effie Gray Fails to Rise above Namesake Dullness

EFFIE GRAY  (2014/15)

Directed by Richard Laxton

Sovereign Films, 108 minutes, PG-13 (brief nudity)

* *

Emma Thompson has many talents, but script writing is not one of them. Effie Gray tells the story of spirited Scots lass Euphemia Gray (1828-1897) and her disastrous marriage to English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), one that took place in 1848 and was annulled in 1854. It is such a fascinating tale that it has been the subject of numerous well-received plays and books though, alas, this (rightly) is not among the highly regarded.

Effie is played quite well by Dakota Fanning, though Ruskin (Thompson's husband, Tom Wise) is miscast. Effie Gray begins like a classic case of cradle robbing, with Fanning looking to be about 16 and Ruskin a gray-templed man in his 40s who weds a girl of whom his parents disapproved. This is the first of numerous liberties taken. In truth, the Ruskins and Grays knew each other well, with the latter residing in a home in which Ruskin's grandfather had committed suicide. John Ruskin had literally known Effie since she was a child, but it wasn't quite as creepy as the film suggests–he was just nine years her senior, not decades, and such an age gap was hardly unusual in Victorian times. But it is true enough that Ruskin, though a brilliant intellect, was a distasteful man and likely impotent as well. Legend holds that when Effie disrobed on their wedding night, Ruskin was disgusted to see that she had pubic hair—unlike the Greek statues he admired—and never consummated a marriage that ended five plus years later with Mrs. Ruskin still intact.

The film gets the vibe of Effie's monastic existence right–the feeling of being a virtual prisoner in a life devoid of work, duty, or meaning. When she accompanies John to Venice and is allowed to explore the city, go dancing, and participate in society, the Italian light serves only to magnify her husband's coldness and Effie realizes her need to do something about her circumstances. (Hey, if you can't be romantic in Venice, carnality is off the menu!) Effie lapses into a neurasthenia made worse by the laudanum-laced  "medicine" with which her evil mother-in-law (Julie Walters) plies her and only starts to come back to life when she returns to Scotland with her husband and his protégé, pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (Tom Sturridge). After her annulment, Effie married Millais and bore him eight children before his death in 1896.

Where to begin with the film's problems? Although the vibe is right, it's exceedingly dull to watch a film in which very little happens. Wise's Ruskin is so buttoned-down that he reacts to nothing; hence there are no big scenes and little drama other than that conveyed by Fanning's sad doe eyes. We get lots of nice scenery—Venice, the Scottish Trossachs, English manor houses–but we could get that from Google Images. Don't expect to learn a lot about art either; there's hardly a word about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and only a smattering of paintings filmed from British museum walls and snipped into the film. One is Millais's famed "Ophelia," and it's implied that Effie was its inspiration—and Ophelia's face does bear resemblance to Fanning's—but the model was actually Elizabeth Siddal, not Gray. Also wasted is a superb cast that includes cameos from heavyweights such as Walters, Claudia Cardinale, James Fox, Derek Jacobi, Emma Thompson, and David Suchet. Given the period setting of this film, one could say this is literally a case of a cast all dressed up with nowhere to go. And that's where this film went as well–after Thompson fended off two lawsuits from playwrights alleging copyright infringement, this $11 million film garnered weak reviews, and made just over $368,000 at the box office. That's a bomb by any measure.

Should you download it? It's up to you. Effie Gray isn't terrible, but that's largely because it takes more energy to create camp.  Rob Weir

Learning to Drive is Formula on Cruise Control

LEARNING TO DRIVE  (2014)

Directed by Isabel Coixet

Lavendar Pictures, 90 minutes, R (brief nudity)

* * *

 

Learning to Drive is a “small” formula picture. It has its charms, but only if you accept the idea that you’re along, so to speak, for a diverting little journey down familiar byways.

Bourgeois New York literary critic Wendy Shields (Patricia Clarkson) is dealt a shock when her husband Ted (Jake Weber) announces his intent to leave. Ted has philandered many times in the past, but Wendy­—now on the wrong side of 50—must face the truth that he really means it this time, that divorce is likely, and a settlement will probably entail selling her comfy Manhattan home. She’s not in a good psychological space for learning to drive, something she needs to do if she wants to spend quality time with her daughter Tasha (Grace Gummer), who is in ensconced in upstate Vermont trying her hand at organic farming.  

Enter Darwan Singh Tur (Ben Kingsley), a New York cabbie who moonlights as a driving instructor. He’s everything Wendy isn’t: calm, centered, patient, spiritual, and responsible. Darwan ekes out a downsized version of the American Dream. He was a professional in India before the post-pogrom of Sikhs following Indira Gandhi’s assassination made him a prisoner/refugee. In Queens, though, he’s just another working-class foreigner.

This is a very predictable film with just two surprises, one of which centers on the relationship between Wendy and Darwan. The other is that this is an American, not a British, movie. There are so many East-meets-West themed films in Britain that the de facto genre needs a name. Conventions reign in such films: moronic nativism, cross-cultural misunderstanding, the wisdom of the East, and the revelation that we’re all alike underneath our surface differences. You’ll find all of these in Learning to Drive, plus a few diverting twists: glimpses of Sikh rituals, a few inferred foodways, and the appearance of Jasleen (Sarita Choudhury) as Darwan’s family-chosen intended. Don’t expect a crash course in anthropology from any of this—you’d learn more by reading National Geographic photo captions.

There is a definite sense that director Isabel Coixet is padding the story to stretch it a respectable 90 minutes. Many of the film’s subthemes—illegal immigrants, female subcultures, the inability of Americans to tell foreigners apart—are little more than snap-ons devoid of developmental depth. Overall, Learning to Drive is a slight effort that owes whatever success it has to the performances of Clarkson and Kingsley, though I doubt either was overly taxed. Clarkson is physically and emotionally convincing as an urbane but world-weary sophisticate who realizes her head-turning beauty is fading, but knows how to present and flaunt what remains. Kingsley, of course, has the man of honor and hidden wisdom act down pat. There is strong chemistry between the two but, again, it’s probably not the kind you anticipate. If anything, though, the most important statement this film makes is something the script did not intend: both actors would be in much better films were it not for film industry ageism, sexism, and racism.

You need not ponder these things to enjoy Learning to Drive. It is what it is: a fluffy social comedy/drama hybrid. Call it an end-of-the-week-my-brain-is-shot diversion that goes down as easily as a glass of cheap, but satisfying, wine. In each case, we know we’re not dealing with vintage goods.  Rob Weir

    

J: A Dystopian Marvel from Howard Jacobson

J  (2014)

Howard Jacobson

Crown, 312 pages

* * * *

Howard Jabobson’s chilling dystopian novel J dares ask three questions: Can there be reconciliation without truth? Can there be history without memory? Can either love or hate exist within the other?

Jacobson—who won the Man Booker Prize for his 2010 novel Finkler—takes us to a future Britain that is failing to recover from a cataclysm so vague that it is always referred to as “WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED.” Britain already has a problem—basic linguistics theory has long held that naming is a necessary precursor to mastery. But before Jacobson probes this, he opens with a parable of a wolf and a spider in which the ravenous lupine falters and the patient arachnid survives. Readers need to be spiders as well, as Jacobson spins a web that emerges slowly before it takes shape. In fact, it’s not immediately clear at first we are in England, as opposed to Germany, Russia, or maybe Wales. And, of course, we're not sure what happened, if it happened. There are rumors of mass killings, but where are the bodies? If it happened, how can the victims have simply disappeared?

Jacobson’s dystopian Britain isn’t one out of Children of Men—it’s more terrifying and more English. After the thing that might not have happened, Britain is dying a death from a thousand paper cuts in a land that doesn’t “ban” things outright; one simply doesn’t do certain things: listen to jazz, travel abroad, read most books, collect fancy furniture, stand out, or think about the past. Especially the latter, which is dissuaded by public campaigns to “let sleeping dogs lie,” think of “memory as useless,” and view the past as an obstacle to thinking “about the future.” Powerful social conventions are (usually) passively enforced by Ofnow, an enforcer branch of government, which occasionally dissuades individuals directly. Mainly, though, society is held in check by an elaborate peer pressure network in which everyone is watching everyone else for any signs of “unusual” behavior, defined mostly as being vaguely unconventional or solitary. It’s as if every citizen is involved in a network that’s like a grassroots mash-up of Stasi and Savak.

Still another oddity: everyone has a Jewish-sounding last name, which we learn was the project of Operation Ishmael after WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED. The book centers on two individuals who must be suspect because they are unusual: Kevern Cohen and Ailinn Solomons. Kevern lives in Port Rueben, where he carves wooden spoons for the tourist trade—often under the tutelage of a mentor Professor Everett Zermansky, who heads the division of Benign Visual Arts. (It just isn’t done to make distressing expressionist or abstract art.) Kevern is a dour, naïve, and exceedingly cautious man more disposed towards being a hermit than part of a group think society. That suits Kevern fine—he was raised to be invisible by a cheerless mother and a disengaged father whose most notable trait was that he made a sport of placing two fingers in front of his lips before pronouncing any word beginning with the letter “J.” Kevern falls in love with the quirky, perky Ailinn, whose favorite book is Moby Dick. Love serves mainly to raise Kevern’s caution flags higher as he knows it’s unlikely for two “aphids”–a word used by those who think they are above the hoi polloi—to expect happiness. Moreover, why is Ailinn’s former roommate, the mysterious Esme, so invested in wanting the two of them to have a child?

How does one discover the truth of anything in a land where Densdell Kroplick, the village barber, is also the official local historian cranking out pamphlets that are piles of folktales and sanitized stories of artisan crafts? How does one recover the past in a place where memory is only two-generations deep? Is there a future in a land in which moroseness and violence are creeping upward? When Kevern and Ailinn travel to the capital city of Necropolis (London), they encounter a glum, dangerous, and shabby place—but mostly it exudes a gray soullessness that dissolves into a metaphorical obscuring mist that’s as foggy as what happened (and it’s clear something did).

What’s Jacobson on about? A clue comes in the fact that many in Necropolis are wearing keffiyahs. Another is the J word never spoken: Jew. And when a character begins to speak in obvious riddles—“What is a culture but ghosts?” “What’s Ahab without his whale?”­—and insist upon an “equipoise of hate,” an “H” word is suggested: Holocaust. Jacobson has been vocal in his denunciations of how Islamophobia is often invoked to excuse modern-day British anti-Semitism. Is Port Rueben a living museum, an incubator for a better future, a shtetl awaiting a new pogrom, or something sinister?

This is, simply, an amazing work of literature. Jabobson often writes is long, sweeping sentences and uses beautiful words—some of which will send you scurrying to your dictionary. I have seldom read such a chilling and gripping work in which tension is sustained in silences rather than actions, and terror looms most ominously in passivity.

Rob Weir

Atwood Jumps the Shark in Last Third of New Novel

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THE HEART GOES LAST (2015)

Margaret Atwood

Doubleday, 38 pages

* *

When it comes to dystopia, Margaret Atwood is a go-to name. Her 1986 novel, The Handmaid's Tale, is surely among the greatest works of that genre, and subsequent offering such as Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam are only a cut or two below. Atwood returns to things-fall-apart themes in The Heart Goes Last, but this time her major distinction is one I doubt she wants: one of the worst examples of a great writer thoroughly losing control of her creation. The first two-thirds of The Heart Goes Last has the makings of an important novel, but the last third spirals out of control in ways that can only be labeled "embarrassing." It's the kind of bad that if had been submitted in a fiction-writing class, the instructor would have handed it back with demands that it be reconceptualized and rewritten. 

[Warning: A few spoilers occur below.]

The best dystopian works build upon what is imaginable. Atwood has a killer premise–a not-so-distant economic collapse occasioned by greedy speculators has divided society into haves and have-nots (!). The have-nots are desperate–vast segments of the population live in Mad Max realms of thievery, rapine, and violence. At the center of this is a young couple, Stan and Charmaine. In better times they were the poster children for success–he a business high-flyer and she a medical social worker. Now they live in a used Honda, trying to scrape by with Charmaine's part-time job at a retirement center and Stan's ability to sense danger and move the car before gangs overtake them. Things are so bad that Stan must approach his brother Conor, a petty crook and fixer for bigger gangsters, for some cash.

Their life takes a turn when Charmaine hears a recruitment ad for a walled community called Consilience, with its promises of homes, clean sheets, showers, jobs, gardens, and community. There is, of course, a catch—as they learn when they attend the recruitment seminar: if you are accepted, you can't leave. Stan smells a rat, but yields to Charmaine's dreams of cleanliness and stability. Consilience is everything it's billed to be. The past is often a retreat when things go wrong, and Consilience is straight out of a gee-whiz view of the Golden Fifties: neat suburban homes with hedges and lawns, practical furniture, safe streets, and clustered neighborhoods. In fact, it's so Fifties that Consilience has banished things that might be viewed as disruptive—its entertainment options center on Doris Day, Bing Crosby, wholesome movies, and religious-values TV. But they quickly learn that Consilience is a literal con game. The Positron Corporation that runs the community has a motto: DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR THE FUTURE. 

Consilience is just half of the community, the other half being Positron, a prison. The whole deal is run by Ed, a combination Svengali and Big Brother. His vision of a well-functioning society is unique: each home is shared by two couples, but in alternating months. For one month Stan and Charmaine are 50s-style homeowners, while their alternates—whom they never meet—do time in Positron. When the calendar month flips, roles reverse. Still, Positron is gender-segregated but humane, more like a college dorm with work requirements. Residents think this is how the company makes its money and Charmaine doesn't question it as she's a 50s kind of gal at heart. But production based on crocheted teddy bears, electric scooters, and soft goods literally doesn't add up. Nor does all that wholesomeness, and when Stan finds a sexy note left by "Jasmine" for her partner "Max," Stan begins to fantasize about their wild sex life in dangerous ways. Charmaine also worries–about Stan's grumpiness, her desires, and her Positron job in "Special Procedures."

Great stuff so far. Atwood could have done a great take-down of faux Fifties values–after all, the historical Fifties were more tin than golden.* Instead, she jumped the shark. Rule one for all writers: avoid jolting tone shifts. After building a bleak future, establishing ominous suspicion, and placing her characters in peril, Atwood shifts to humor of the lowest, sophomoric proportions. I'll say nothing about the narrative, but the book's resolution depends upon all of the following: out-of-control libido, sexbots, Vegas, Elvis and Marilyn Monroe impersonators (some of whom are gay for seemingly gratuitous reasons), a woman sexually fixated on a Teddy bear, a takeoff on the Blue Man Group, and another special procedure that makes the old Clovers' pop song "Love Potion No. 9" seem scientific by comparison. Does this sound promising? Kirkus called the novel "dystopian clichés played as farce," but that's too kind. It's simply bad.

Tell you what—read this novel up to the point where Stan is chosen to expose Positron, then email me: I'll tell you what happens so you don't have to cringe over each page that follows. Call it a public service on my part!  Rob Weir

* Historical footnote: The 1950s is often viewed by neo-cons are the golden past. It was also a time of paranoia, atomic nightmares, communist witch-hunts, brutal racism, patriarchy run amok, and pressures for conformity that led to rebellion. The Fifties, not the Sixties, was the true era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Infidelity, divorce, delinquency, and sales of sex mags skyrocketed. Rock music emerged along with rebels such as Beats and civil rights activists. It was also the era with the greatest number of drug addicts in American history: pill-popping housewives!  (For the record, Millennials also have much higher drug consumption rates than Sixties' Baby Boomers.)

Fair Helen: A Thrill, a History Lesson, and Some New Vocabulary

FAIR HELEN (2014)

Andrew Greig

Quercus Publishing, 384 pages

* * * *

If you want to immerse yourself in some challenging and rewarding reading, download Scottish writer Andrew Greig’s Fair Helen. (You’ll probably wish to download it as only hard cover copies have made their way to our shores.) Beware: Although the novel is written with Greig’s customary elegance, many of the terms that appear are from the Lowland Scots dialect and you’ll need to consult the book’s glossary for many of them. (I did a cut-paste-printout for the ones I was having trouble remembering.)

Is the effort worth it? I think so. Fair Helen is a 17^th century historical drama/romance based upon a tragic ballad as filtered through Sir Walter Scott’s second volume of The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border. Got that? Let me explain. James VI of Scotland has just ascended to the English throne as James I and, in 1603, brought about the union of the two crowns. If you think this brought peace, think again. We’re still 200 years from the birth of modern nation-states, which means that regional identities trumped any sort of nationalism. That is to say, not only did people view themselves as Scots or English– the Crown be damned–they also subdivided.  A Lowland Scot knew he was different from a Highlander or a Glaswegian, just as he knew he wasn’t a Northumbrian or a Cumbrian (English). Since no one agreed on where the borders between any of these places lay exactly, vast tracts of the Borders were known as the Debatable Lands. Moreover, local power on both sides of the questionable divides lay in the hands of powerful families and clans, with lesser folk allying with whomever they thought could offer the best patronage and protection. 

Greig takes us inside a world of treachery, bloodshed, and shifting loyalties through an likely means: he imagines the back-story of Helen of Annandale, an Irvine family beauty about whom history knows next to nothing other than she is the tragic subject of a Scots ballad known as “Helen of Kirkconnel.” If Helen of Troy was the face that launched a thousand ships, Helen of Kirkconnel was the fair lovely face that set hundreds of horsemen and soldiers into bloody glens. The book is narrated by her cousin, Harry Langton, a scholar and writer more comfortable in Edinburgh than among the unwashed, unlearned, sanguinary warriors of the Borders. He’d not be there at all, were it not that he was born in the Debatable Lands and his boyhood friend Adam Fleming is on the cusp of becoming a laird. Adam is also one of the rivals for Fair Helen’s hand, the other being the violent and even more powerful Rob Bell.  In Greig's telling, Helen may have been fair, but chastity was not among her virtues. Within the patriarchal world of the 17^th century, Helen is not at liberty to choose her future husband—acquisition of land, power, and patronage trumps love.

The novel is a complex tale of scheming, double-dealing, spying, politics, and shifting alliances involving Border families such as the Irvings, Bells, Scotts, Armstrongs, and Grahams. Each thought themselves noble and exalted, though history’s judgment is that most were petty tyrants with grandiose ideas. In short, Helen a pawn in a big game played by small men. Call it love, lust, and mayhem in a place where borders are abstractions and rights are asserted by the thrust of a blood-tipped sword. Fair Helen isn’t an easy read for those unfamiliar with Lowland Scots but, then again, neither is Sir Walter Scott. Wade through this—the thrills outweigh the required language lessons.      Rob Weir

Postscript:  Music plays a big role in this novel, as it does in many of Greig’s works. If you’d like some instrumental background accompaniment, secure a superb CD from Kathryn Tickell titled Debatable Lands. (Topic PRKCD50).  Tickell is a talented fiddler and is considered one of the foremost virtuosos of the Northumberland bagpipes, a much buzzy, sweeter, non-blown cousin of the Highland pipes. As this suggests, she hails from the English side of the Debatable Lands though borders remain hazy. When I visited Berwick-upon-Tweed a few years back I wasn’t certain if I was in England or Scotland. The answer? It depends on whom you ask!

Super Tuesday Special Edition

The Truth behind the Bluster

What if truth in advertising laws applied to political campaigns? Let’s imagine what that would look like for the seven remaining contenders and let’s give each a sound bite grounded in reality.

Republicans

Donald Trump: A second-rate mind for a nation with third-rate values.

Trump is the very symbol of American decline, a bloviating snollygoster who appeals to all that is selfish, gauche, and mean-spirited in Americans. The fact that he hasn’t been laughed out of the race is its own statement about American stupidity. His actual business record is as thin as his hair, and his major achievement that he hasn’t yet managed to lose a $200 million inheritance. Look it up—it’s one failure after another with a wave of human wreckage left in Trump's wake. I’m surprised he hasn’t lobbied for the release of Bernie Madoff—that would make a great ticket. The Donald could claim that he wants a man at his side who understands the real workings of American business and one who shares his values. I think this Bernie will be tied up for a bit, so Trump ought to check out the availability of Ronald MacDonald. Theme song: “Send in the Clowns.”

Ted Cruz: I’m so mean my own mama don’t like me.

If this were the 1930s, Cruz would be a Father Coughlin Brown Shirt. Cruz is proof that Canadian niceness isn’t in the DNA. What does it tell you when no one in the Republican Party can stand this SOB? He’s meaner than a snake and more dangerous than a coiled cotton mouth. I don’t use the term “fascist” lightly, but he might well be one. And he’s so damn stupid he doesn’t even realize that the old-style rightwing would have seen him as brown-skinned, not brown-shirted. Perfect running mate: Rand Paul. Theme song: “Must Wanna Get Nasty.”  

Marco Rubio: Don’t I look good in my empty suit?

Rubio looks the most presidential looking of them all, but don’t be fooled: Donald Trump is way more liberal than Rubio. Rubio is Rick Santorum with a human face. He is pro-gun and anti-choice, anti-immigrant, anti-tax, and anti-New Deal/Great Society. His foreign policy is an ill-conceived bundle of nonsense packaged in rhetoric straight out of the Cold War. If you thought Obama was inexperienced and naïve, check out this dude. Running mate: Sarah Palin—she doesn’t understand nuance either. Theme song: “The Asshole Song.”

Ben Carson: Don’t be fooled, I really am crazy.

Ahh, the good doctor—black, affable, amusing, and did I mention that he’s black? A black Republican? Who does he think he is: Clarence Thomas? If you need further proof he’s nuts, ask him about dinosaurs. He’s comic relief for the GOP and the poor man is too far gone to realize it. Running mate: Simon Legree from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Theme song: “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-ha.”

John Kasich: Do you know me?

He smiles, he doesn’t drool, and not many people know a damn thing about him. Perfect! He ought to be the clear-cut front runner, but isn’t--proof that the GOP suffers from a mental malady known as Bencarsonitis. He’s the only Republican whose record is so obscure that he could actually win. Think of it—he’d be competitive in every state in the Union except Ohio, where they actually do know him. Running mate: Caspar the Friendly Ghost—no one sees him either. Theme Song: “Would You Like to be My Neighbor.”

Democrats

Hillary Clinton: I’m (Kinda ) Like Bill: All of the smarm, but without the charm

Some of us in Massachusetts see Hillary as Martha Coakley times 50, but that’s unfair; Coakley was merely an inept candidate, not one with more baggage than Samsonite. Hillary is packaging herself as the “realistic” candidate, a much nicer term than “status quo.” I keep waiting, but it seems that all she has going for her is name recognition, sanity, and an extra X chromosome. Democratic voters need to be very careful, because only one candidate has more negatives than she: Ted Cruz. It’s not true that she’s more electable than Bernie Sanders—she’s the one Democrat who Trump stands a very good chance of defeating, especially if tons of disgusted voters stay home. Clinton has the Democratic Machine working to anoint her if the delegate count is close, but her campaign reeks of a desperation and an antiquarianism analogous to supporters such as Gloria “Jurassic” Steinem. Running mate: Too bad old faithfuls like Humphrey and Mondale are dead. Maybe Joe Biden would give it another whirl. Harry Reid? Theme song: “Yesterday”

Bernie Sanders: What you see is what you get

This election boils down to whether you want a charlatan or a honest person and here are only two candidates who actually say what they mean: Cruz and Sanders. It’s not hard for me to choose Rumpled Bernie over Nasty Ted. I keep hearing about how “unrealistic” it is to think a democratic socialist could get anything done. So what, exactly, is getting done now? If we must have stasis—and for the record, I think Sanders would be a much stronger leader than Obama—let’s at least elect someone with decent values who won’t lie to us. Running Mate: Yvette Clarke would be perfect—a liberal, African American, Republican member of Congress. Theme Song: “All I Have to Do is Dream.”  

Haymarket Squares: February Album of the Month

THE HAYMARKET SQUARES

LIGHT IT UP

http://www.haymarketsquares.com/

* * * * *

If you stuck Tom Lehrer, Bill Bragg, and Phil Ochs in a bluegrass ensemble you might end up with something like The Haymarket Squares, a quintet that labels its music "punkgrass." The insouciance of punk is evident, though the Squares are funnier, more musically accomplished than most punk bands, and paint from a more diverse melodic palette–some blistering rock, a dollop of Spanish guitar, or a flight into klezmer. The artistic core remains bluegrass, but don't expect formula. The closest they come is the breakdown feel of "Horrible Intentions," but it's a song about how the armed guardians of the US border serve masters who profit from the very fears they manufacture.

That alone should tell you that the Haymarket Squares are a political band–a deliciously retro throwback to the days in which folk music was message music from the left of center, not a narcissistic look-at-me confessional. Like the late Utah Phillips, though, the Squares prefer humor to polemics. "Heaven" is a bluegrass gospel take-down of organized religion with lines such as "There ain't no heaven, got make one here." It's hard not to think of pompous fools like Donald Trump when you hear lyrics in "King Me" such as: "I'm a monarchist, and I'm here to say/I can solve the problems that we face today/If you bend the knee, and give all power to me/I will lead this land to glory, like no other king before me/Bringing back the aristocracy." They even make light of the national Security Administration: "Tell me your secrets, tell me you hopes/What you had for breakfast, your off-color jokes/I am a guy who will listen all day/Your new best friend-I'm the NSA." Even the title is funny: "No Such Agency." Remember the old Phil Ochs song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal?" Check out the band's update, "Part of the Problem."

When they wish, the Haymarket Squares can work up a righteous lather, as in "High demand," when they take on the National Incarceration State," or "Working Reward," a call-it-like-is comment on the war on wage earners: "It's a high-wire act/With the safety net in tatters and a target on your back." And there's a really sharp cover of the old Credence Clearwater anthem "Fortunate Son." Mainly, though, the Haymarket Squares force you to chuckle and contemplate. There's plenty that justifies revolt, but the great causes in "Let's Start a Riot" are ennui and boredom. Even the band name is tongue in cheek. Chicago's Haymarket was the site of a famed 1886 anarchist event, but these guys (Mark Alred, Jayson James, John Luther Norris, Marc Oxborrow, Mark Sunman) are based in Phoenix. True to their nature, their "Gritty City" (which sounds like something from The Pogues) is an anti-love letter to the Valley of the Sun. Or is a for-real love letter? The Haymarket Squares delight in keeping us off-kilter. Call this album witty, wicked, and deceptively weighty. –Rob Weir