Mairead Nesbitt and April Verch: Two for St. Patrick's Day

Celtic Commotion for St. Patrick's Day

Well we must have some Celtic music for St. Paddy's Day, to be sure, to be sure. Here are two new releases.

"Hallowed Fire" unfolds to woodwinds, pulsing strings, harp notes, swooping instrumentation, and the polished conducting of a symphony orchestra. Then come the lead strings of Máiréad Nesbitt—mournful, precise, and controlled, as she makes her way through a slow Irish-themed tune. This is the flavor of Hibernia (Cosmic Trigger). If Nesbitt's name doesn't immediately resonate, think of Michael Flatley's "Lord of the Dance" or "Feet of Flames" dance extravaganzas, or of Celtic Woman, whose videotaped performances are a staple of PBS fundraisers. Nesbitt is the slit-gowned blonde who likes to kick off her high-heels and flash a lot of leg in ways simultaneously suggestive and innocent.

            I generally hate the kind of stuff Scotland's Dick Gaughan calls "tarted up tourist kitsch," but I really liked this album—probably because the act of listening transported me beyond the faux glamour. At least Ms. Nesbitt's light classical approach is honest; she studied under none less than the late Emanuel Hurwitz (1919-2006), so call this album Celtic music in its formal clothes. As befits her training, Nesbitt immerses herself within circumscribed compositions and eschews instant variations and spur-of-the-moment grace notes. Fast-paced numbers such as "Becoming" are fiery, yet disciplined; "TheButterfly" flits, but as in a netted conservatory. "The First Sheaf" is pastoral—in both rural and idealized form, just as the well-known "Merrily Kiss the Quaker," a West Kerry slide, is lively, but decorous. The latter suggests why Nesbitt's formalism works. The notion of kissing an 18^th century Quaker was, depending on the context, either a rebellious act, a violation, or an insider's joke–the Quaker being a symbol of reserve and outward piety. Ms Nesbitt's arrangement captures these contradictions. Okay, so tunes such as "The Dusk" or "Captain H" sound more like something one would hear at a formal ball than on the village green, but there's no quarreling with Ms. Nesbitt's talent. I still prefer the spontaneity and wildness of unconstrained Celtic, but it's fun to dress up now and then.

★★★★

It seems like just yesterday when April Verch was a 14-year-old fiddle prodigy who ventured out of her native Ottawa Valley and showed up at a few folk festivals. She's 38 now and has ten CDs under her step dance shoes. Her eleventh is titled The April Verch Anthology (Slab Town Records), an eighteen-track culling of releases from 1998 to 2015. Although it excludes material from her two earliest recordings, Anthology does kick off with "Trip to Windsor," when Verch was still a fresh-faced country girl sawing away at a tune with precocious skill, youthful energy, and rough-around-the-edges tones. It's also a textbook case of how Celtic music in Canada is different—simultaneously more rustic in feel, but also played in ways that predate Victorian era embellishment.           

            As a Canadian dancer and fiddler, Verch immediately drew comparisons to Natalie MacMaster, but when she started singing in sweet, high tones, those comparisons shifted to Alison Krauss. Neither is apt. If you must make an analogy, a lot of her repertoire and approach is that of barn dance albums in country music's pre-slick days. Some of it feels as if it were a 1930s anticipation of A Prairie Home Companion—wholesome, spare, and rootsy. Verch's are, however, deep and long roots that stretch from Celtic lands to the Ottawa Valley and into the Southern U.S. Appalachians. "He's Holding On To Me" is bluegrass gospel, while "Jump Cricket Jump" sounds like one of those old John Hartford raw fiddle tune/songs that evoke the subject without being onomatopoetic. There are tear-jerker country songs such as "It Makes No Difference to Me," old-timey selections such as "That's How We Run," and vulnerable folk offerings the likes of "Long Way Home." We also hear Verch's growth as a performer. Contrast the opening track with "The Newpart" (2015). In the latter, Verch heads her own band, with flat-picked guitar laying down a framework for fiddle that swells to a repeated and memorable theme worthy of Jay Ungar. When she sings, it's with the slightly nasal and true-to-her-wellspring country tones that deliberately avoid the smooth polish of Alison Krauss. About that wellspring—its waters are the coming together of French-Canadian, Métis, and Celtic. Call Ms. Verch the real/reel deal.

★★★★

In a Dark, Dark Wood a Page-Turning Thriller

IN A DARK, DARK WOOD (2015/16)

Ruth Ware

Simon & Schuster, 310 pp.

★★★★

English writer Ruth Ware's debut novel, In a Dark, Dark Wood, draws comparisons to Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl) and Paula Hawkins (The Girl of the Train). Both are apt, if by those analogies, we mean the creepy undertones of Flynn and the inner psychological torment of Hawkins. Ware's novel is a thrilling and skin-crawling read–one I tore through in just two nights.

This surprised me, as the book's set-up is one that would have normally sent me running the other way. Its central character is twenty-six-year-old Leonora Shaw ("Nora"), a London writer with few friends and a loner lifestyle that suits her just fine. Out of the blue she gets an email inviting her to take part in a "hen" party–the British term for a bachelorette gathering–for Clare Cavendish. Clare had been a close friend from childhood, but Nora's literally not had contact with her for ten years. Her first impulse is to delete the email, but her only really close friend Nina, a lanky Brazilian doctor, got a similar email. Neither wishes to go, but the email's sender and event organizer, Flo, insists that Clare would be devastated if they didn't accept. So Nora and Nina decide to give it a shot.

What ensues is like something out of Agatha Christie, except the creepy house in this case is a sterile glass-sided modernist mistake plopped down in a rural section of Northumberland at the end of a rutted lane and so hemmed in by trees that's there's no Internet or cell phone coverage. Nora and Nina are among a select few guests, the others being Tom, a gay actor/director; Melanie, a neurotic new mother; and Flo, the hen party organizer equivalent of a Bridezilla. Flo declares herself Clare's best friend, but she's also obviously a few bubbles off plumb and so fragile that each aspect of the party must go off exactly as she envisions it, lest sturm und drang wash away the house and all in it. For her part, Clare seems as haughty and privileged as Nora and Nina remembered.

So what do you do? Nora and Nina are freaked out–the house has no curtains, for heaven's sake–but is this just the paranoia that city slickers often feel when they go into the country? No one else is very comfortable either, but wouldn't you just tell yourself, "Hey, it's just 48 hours," and suck it up? Bad idea!

Ware serves up a taut mystery that involves many twists, including a deft use of a dramatic trope known as Chekhov's gun. There's also suspicion run wild, old wounds reopened, obsession, accidents, amnesia, and maybe some pigeons (clay and human) set up for a fall. Much like the character Rachel in The Girl in the Train, poor Nora is pushed into such a state that she can't access or trust her own memories. And she's not the only one. In a Dark, Dark Wood is a clichéd title, but it's also a satisfying page-turner. I'll say no more, except to offer this advice: If you find yourself in a creepy setting, it's a terrible idea to mess with a Ouija board.

Rob Weir

Gunmetal Gray Too Much of a Stretch Even for a Spy Novel

GUNMETAL GRAY (GRAY MAN # 6) (2016)

By Mark Greaney

Berkley/Penguin, 505 pages

★★

Freelance assassin Court Gentry is up to his old tricks, this time in Asia. Whether or not that's a good thing is up to the public to decide, but this reviewer is ready to have Gentry retire to a sunny island.

If author Mark Greaney's name doesn't ring immediate bells, think of Tom Clancy, who died in 2013. Greaney co-authored seven of Clancy's novels, two of which when Clancy was mortally ill and five that appeared (or will) posthumously. Greaney also worked on his own Gray Man series, the first installment of which was published in 2009. Gentry is the Gray Man, so known for his ability to do his deadly work in the shadows and, usually, off shore and off anyone's official books. He is such an efficient killer and spy that he's a legend that few can place by face. For those who've not read Greaney, his work is firmly in the spy/thriller category and Court Gentry is Jack Ryan on steroids. Several familiar characters appear for series fans—including Matt Hanley and Donald Fitzroy–but the novel is a stand-alone, not a sequel.

Gunmetal gray is fast-paced action. The basic set up is that twenty-six-year-old computer whiz Fan Jiang has defected from China and everyone wants him. The Chinese simply want him dead, as his codes could reveal plenty of Chinese intelligence, including all those China has hacked and how to return the favor. The British, Vietnamese, Thais, Russians, and Americans would like him alive so he can help them crack Chinese spy networks. This is a novel that validates Josef Stalin's remark, "I trust no one, not even myself." To that end, the CIA dispatches Court Gentry to Shenzhen, China in search of Fan Jiang–even though Gentry doesn't work for the CIA and the agency once tried to kill him. To what degree can the CIA trust a contracted lone wolf with a penchant for making his own rules? How much can the CIA not tell him before he figures things out and goes rogue? How can it trust that the groups he's playing aren't his real employers?

If you like action that makes James Bond seem like an old fart feeding pigeons in the park, this novel is for you–but enjoying it requires that you turn off anything resembling logic faculties. Before this one is done, you will land in China, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, Bangkok, and Singapore. There will be explosions, shootouts, arson, paratrooper clashes, rice paddy wading, jungle treks, perilous cliff climbs, high-tech spy gadgetry, and clandestine ship boarding. There will be more double crosses than you'd see at an Eastern Orthodox keychain shop and more hair's breath escapes than a Harry Houdini highlight reel. Along the way, Gentry will best or confound the Chinese military, sections of MI6, a Russian elite unit, the CIA, Vietnamese and Thai organized crime syndicates, and the Italian Mafia! The bad guys in this novel are essentially humanized orcs in that it only takes one Gentry to wipe out scores of them. There is even a scene in Hong Kong in which a cornered Gentry manages to best around fifty people trying to kill him. He also manages to find some time to do a single noble deed and a bit of romancing. I mean, c'mon! Nobody's that good. And if he is, the book's ending makes no sense.

No matter—not much of this book does. It's Rambo-like in its absurdities and its flowing testosterone, and an answered prayer for those who think all we need to do is look out for #1–trust, morality, help, and conscience be damned. I won't deny that this is a thriller in the truest sense, but it's kitchen sink slop as literature. First I was intrigued. Then my heart raced. But the moment my brain engaged, "Ooo. Ahh." gave way to "You've got to be kidding!"

Rob Weir

The Underworld Explores Working-ClassLife and Death

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THE UNDERWORLD (2017)

By Kevin Canty

W. W. Norton, 256 pages

★★★★

One of the autopsy findings from the election of 2016 is that Democrats largely ignored the white working class. That's rather amazing when we have so many fine novelists in America who write of that life. Even a cursory reading of Richard Russo might have reminded party leaders there was a part of America they needed to investigate more thoroughly. So too would readings of recent titles such as Mark Slouka's Brewster or Phillip Meyer's American Rust. So now that your attention has been refocused, check out Kevin Canty's The Underworld, a novel whose tone is reminiscent of Slouka and Meyer.

The title, in my view, isn't wisely chosen. First, Don DeLillo used the same title—sans the article—in his sprawling 2003 novel. Second, most people associate the term with organized crime. Canty, however, means it literally: the underworld as the realm of miners working more than a half-mile beneath the surface. His is a fictional reimaging of Idaho's 1972 Sunshine Mine fire in which 91 miners lost their lives. His setting of Silverton is a thinly veiled pastiche of Kellogg and Wallace, located in the heart of the silver mining Coeur d'Alene region. Ninety-one people also perish in Canty's novel. So why write a novel at all? Wouldn't a collection of news clippings accomplish the same task?

Nope! That's because, in many ways, the major character of the book is Silverton, located in the thin thumb of Idaho that pokes up between Montana and Washington. It's a hard place to love, yet locals talk more about getting out of town than actually doing so. And when they do leave, they seldom venture much further than Missoula to the east or Spokane to the west. I instantly related to Canty's book, though I'm an Easterner—my own postindustrial Pennsylvania hometown has the same ensnaring qualities. I did not fall prey to them and left in the 1970s, the same period under Canty's microscope. To leave or to stay is the dilemma facing David, the book's central character.

Canty also uses Underworld metaphorically–those mental, often non-verbalized, excavations of people trapped by circumstance, depression, and indecision. David's one of the latter. He's a student at the University of Montana Missoula, which is just 120 miles from Silverton as the crow flies—though its network of culture, restaurants, upscale bars, intellectual life, and veneer of bourgeois respectability are light years away. He also knows–and his landlord reminds him–that Silverton can't objectively compare. It's a town of dangers: toxic air, seedy bars where a misinterpreted glance can mean being smashed with a cue stick, rampant alcoholism, and unhealthy diets. Silverton is where weathered whores have no trouble staying busy; it has dozens of bars, but just two TV channels that most view in glorious black and white. Above all it's a place where death in the mines can come without warning and the work wears a man down fast even if he isn't killed outright. David knows of mining: his father and his beloved brother Ray are miners.

Why on earth wouldn't David flee and not look back? If you have to ask that question, you need to learn more about blue-collar life. David goes to Missoula, but he is not of that world. His is the classic college first generation dilemma: David feels like an outsider—a poseur, not a scholar. He's right; the university crowd doesn't have a clue about what he thinks, what his life has been like, or how he feels. As bad as it is, Silverton is where people understand him–though they don't exactly. Man! I know that feeling! You become the walking definition of liminality—trapped between the working and middle classes and uncertain whether to step backward or move forward. So when someone tells you there's a job opening up that pays over $10 an hour (about $57 in today's coin), do you pursue a life of materialism and danger, or stay on the middle class track? Ray has stayed in Silverton. Maybe David should too: get a new truck; keep up with a longtime affair with his former piano teacher he thinks is a big secret, but isn't; and eventually get married a have a few kids like Ray and his wife Jordan.

Then the mine blows up while David is at school. Ray was in there. Did he make it out? What about Malloy, another guy from town? He and Ray are a lot alike–tough, funny, hard drinking, bombastic, and easier to love in the abstract than in person. What about Terry and Lyle and all the others David has known since childhood? What about the women who will be widowed if their husbands come out under a sheet? Jordan? Ann Malloy? Let's just say that, in 1972, feminism hadn't yet had a big impact in this part of the world.

The sections of Canty's book chronicling the fate of two men trapped in an air seam 3,500 feet underground are gripping and harrowing. It would behoove all middle class readers to contemplate what manual labor means. Do not dismiss this event as a museum piece. Think upon West Virginia's Upper Big Branch disaster that killed 29 miners in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 that same year, or the 14 who died at a Waco, Texas fertilizer plant in 2013.

Yeah—maybe it's time to think about this kind of stuff. Canty–the author of five previous novels and an English professor at the University of Montana–has written a novel filled with action, pathos, despair, and glimmers of hope. His writing is direct, vivid, and so crisply paced that The Underworld feels like a short book. Is it ultimately a work of literature, or sociological commentary? Yes.

Rob Weir

Judy Collins Covers Sondheim

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A LOVE LETTER TO STEPHEN SONDHEIM

Judy Collins

MVDvisual 9662D

There are some things that come around only once or so in a lifetime–a horse like Secretariat, a painter like Picasso, a dancer as graceful as Nureyev, or a voice with the beauty and crystalline purity of Judy Collins.

Ms. Collins has taken her lumps from grumps who decry her lack of creativity. It's true that she's written very few songs in a career that's now in its 58^th year. I'd argue that offerings such as "My Father," "Since You Asked," and "Blizzard" address with quality whatever her pen lacks in quantity, but let us concede that she has always shined brightest as an interpreter of songs written by others: Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Lennon and McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Ian Tyson…. She made her mark as a "folk" singer, but because Collins has always been drawn first and foremost to melody, it was pretty much inevitable that folk music wouldn't contain her. Along the way she also began to pick up songs she liked from composers such as Jacques Brel, Aaron Copland, Marvin Hamlisch, and Rogers and Hart. Almost without trying, she morphed from a folk singer to an interpreter of what for lack of a better term could be called "art songs." If there was a tipping point, it came in 1975, when Collins recorded what is now viewed as the definitive version of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns." I do not exaggerate with the adjective "definitive." Consider that Sondheim has won 8 Tony Awards, a Pulitzer, an Oscar, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, a Laurence Olivier Award, and 8 Grammys, but only one of those Grammys is for Song of the Year: Collins' cover of "Send in the Clowns." 

Call that the genesis of Love Letter to Stephen Sondheim. Collins and Sondheim became friends and, in May of 2016, Collins began rehearsing a full slate of his songs with the Greeley, Colorado Symphony Orchestra. She then launched a tour that took her to places exalted, including the Metropolitan Opera. Some of you have perhaps seen the PBS special of her Denver concert. If you've not, I'm sure it will be rebroadcast during numerous future pledge drive, though you'll have to put up with viewing it with numerous interrupting prattle of PBS barkers asking for money. A much better way to enjoy this glorious treat is to mail your check to your local PBS affiliate, then go online and purchase the DVD.

The concert has a few diversions–"Chelsea Morning" and a John Denver medley–but the rest is a select sampling from Sondheim shows. Each track is polished and superb, so it really boils down to which Sondheim show floats your boat to the high water mark. Personal favorites include: "I Remember Sky" from Primrose; "Sunday" from Sunday in the Park with George, "The Road You Didn't Take," from Follies, "Beyond the Sky" from A Little Night Music, and of course, "Send in the Clowns," one of my all time favorites (also from a Little Night Music). But let me return to my opening remark. One can like or not like the repertoire or performance style of Judy Collins, but you simply can't watch what she's doing and fail to marvel over what a force of nature she is. The woman before you is 77-years-old and her voice remains supple, strong, clear, and gorgeous. She has, of course, fallen a bit from her 1975 peak, but she has also learned a lot abut how to sing–when to drop half an octave to avoid cracking, how to nail a note to the instrumentation and let it drift on the wind, when to soar, and when to swoop. In my lifetime, I have witnessed ruthless Time diminish many of my musical heroes, but Time may have met his match in Judy Collins. The only way he's silencing this voice is to sneak up on Collins when she's not on stage.

Clips from the trailer: Collins at age 77!

Rob Weir

Paterson: Jarmusch's Personified Metaphor for a New Jersey City

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PATERSON (2016)

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

Amazon Films, 118 minutes, R (language)

* * *

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He lies on his right side, head near the thunder of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep, his dreams walk about the city where he persists incognito.

So begins the book-length poem Paterson from the New Jersey city's most famous native son: William Carlos Williams. It helps to know that before viewing the film Paterson. Jim Jarmusch, one of the nation's quirkiest and droll directors, directs this film and people tend either to adore or deplore his work. Like previous Jarmusch films such as Down by Law and Mystery Train, the pace of Paterson is pre-global warming glacial.

This time, though, Jarmusch's slow pacing makes sense. The film follows a week in the life of a Paterson bus driver who is named Paterson (Adam Driver) and is, in fact, the city personified. His is a life of mundane routine. Five days a week , Paterson awakes shortly after six, has coffee and Cheerios, and walks down the hill through the former Silk City's post-industrial ruins to the bus shed. There he boards the #23 and scribbles in his notebook until his colleague Danny (Rizwan Manji) regales him with his personal woes. Then Paterson begins his rounds, his monotony relieved by the prose poems he composes and edits in his head. On his break, he transfers his thoughts to his notebook as he eats lunch in a shabby concrete park at the foot of Passaic Falls. At the end of the day, he walks home, straightens his mailbox, has dinner with his wife Laura, walks their English bulldog, has a pint and perfunctory chat at the neighborhood tavern, and returns home. Reset to Tuesday… Wednesday… Thursday… Friday….

This is Jarmusch, so you know the characters will be oddballs–none more so than Laura (Golshifteh Farahani), who is cute as a button and crazy as a loon. She has an obsession with halftone design, and spends her days remaking everything in black and white: dresses, furniture, curtains, even cupcakes. Becoming a cupcake mogul is one of her big dreams, or maybe instead she’ll buy an Esteban guitar, learn to play, and become a country singer. Paterson adores her and the two are almost wordlessly in love—wordless on his part, anyhow.

Paterson is laconic and economical with words everywhere except in his mind. How does man (or a city) trapped in time move forward? William Carlos Williams wrote:

Immortal he neither moves nor rouses and is seldom seen, though he breathes and the subtleties of his machinations drawing their substance from the noise of the pouring river animate a thousand automatons. Who because they neither know their sources nor the sills of their disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly for the most part, locked and forgot in their desires —unroused.

Williams knew about living an external life that clashed with his psyche—he was a physician, but it was merely the trade that supported his poetry habit. Paterson the driver/city is on auto pilot–the man surviving on snippets of eavesdropped bus conversations, Laura’s wackiness, and chance encounters with other poets, including a ten-year-old girl sitting by a factory and a Japanese man (Masatoshi Nigase) who came to New Jersey to rub metaphorical elbows with Williams. His own poetry is filled with mundane observations that flirt with things that might be profound. Or not. He's like the city–locked and unroused. In both cases, it’s hard to know if dreams can be animated, or if it's sleepwalking entombed in self-deception.

The film is filled with deadpan humor, irresistible weirdness, and sublime small moments—such as the revelation about Paterson’s crooked mailbox. I especially admired the fact that whites and people of color interact as people and nothing more. There are no coded or overt mentions of race. Doc (Barry Shabaka Henley) is just a bartender, not a black bartender; the people Paterson encounters on the street, including gang members, are just neighbors who know each other. How refreshing! 

On the less refreshing side, this is not Jarmusch’s strongest film. Paterson is enigmatic, but the viewer spends a lot of time inside his head without getting much of a sense of what he thinks or feels. Laura is deliciously weird, but Ms. Farahani’s acting skills fail to dazzle. What are we to make of Paterson’s encounter with the Japanese poet? It feels like a diversionary tack-on, not the inspiration it was supposed to suggest. Is the scene here just because Nigase was also in Mystery Train?  

And, of course, there is the slow pace. Jarmusch makes us feel the weight of Paterson’s routines, but the day-by-day structure is clichéd and unnecessary. A really good montage could have shaved thirty minutes from the film without sacrificing content—of which there isn’t much—and without exhausting the viewer. We want to appreciate the tedium of Paterson’s life, but must we experience it vicariously? If you are a fan of Jim Jarmusch (and I am), you’ll enjoy this one. If, however, his films are too slow for your taste, stay on the Garden State Parkway and don’t take the Paterson exit.

Rob Weir

Japanese Impressions at the Clark a Delight Even for the Uninitiated

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JAPANESE IMPRESSIONS

Clark Art Institute

Williamstown, MA

Through April 2, 2017

I just saw a show of Japanese art at the Clark and I really liked it. I did not expect that. Lots of Westerners are fascinated by Japan, but I’ve never been among them. Who can explain it? It’s not ideological or racial–more like a complete disinterest. When I saw the film Lost in Translation I thought I’d rather eat dog sashimi than visit Tokyo, which appeared to me to be Las Vegas on neon steroids.  I did not watch Shogun. My knowledge of Japanese culture is pretty much exhausted once we get past the words sushi, sayonara, and sake. That’s weird, because I know a fair amount about Chinese history and culture and much of Japanese culture began life as Chinese culture–sort of like Christianity began life as modified Judaism. This prelude is to say that if you were expecting some sort of “expert” review of the current show at the Clark, you’d get better commentary from a drunken samurai. Like that will stop me! 

One reason I liked the show so much is that it’s a medium I adore: wood cuts. Its subtitle is: Color Woodblock Prints from the Rodbell Family Collection. I don’t know squat about the Rodbells either, except that in 2010 they gave the Clark a whole bunch of art they collected in the 1960s and 1970s. In this show, it’s woodblock prints from the 1830s into the 1970s. The earliest come from a style known as ukiyo-e, which translates “scenes from the floating world.” That’s a pretty cool way of expressing the idea that the things of this life and world are transitory, which is why the images are sumptuous yet dream-like, and nature is a dominant theme. The two most famous printmakers from this period were Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. You know Hokusai even if you don’t realize it. Have you ever seen the print of a large curling, cresting blue and white wave? Of course you have; it’s on a poster in every college dorm room and pseudo head shop in America!

The earliest print makers did it all—design, cutting the blocks (often several for each image), inking, printing, and publishing. In the 20^th century, these tasks were often separated; hence the style is called shin-hanga (“new print”). It’s also more blatantly commercial–a tip they got from the late Impressionists, who discovered the link between marketing and solvency. Many of these evoked village life, exoticized Japanese life, and catered to Western buyers—much in the spirit of Native American trade goods. Japanese prints from the 1930s on are more expressionist, personal, and psychological in nature. I suppose one might even call them modernist, though I’m not sure if Japanese art experts would agree with that label.

This is about all I can honestly tell you, so here are a few images I photographed, along with a line or two about why I liked the woodcut. And I know I shouldn't make so many West/East comparisons, but I ascribe to the educational theory that you start with what you know and let it take to places unknown.

If you’re in the Williamstown area before April 2, take a look for yourself.

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1.  I always enjoy scenes of ordinary life. I like how the gloominess of a rainy day is captured, especially the contrast between the foreboding sky and the yellow raincoat and the red umbrella. It gives a sort of gloom meets hope for renewal vibe.

2. I've always admired the angst-riddled works of Edvard Munch and Edward Hopper. This one struck me as a Japanese mash of the two. Hey, I told you it would be an impressionistic review! 

3.This one is trippy enough to be a rock concert poster from the Fillmore. It's a waterfall and the Japanese love to represent them. In fact, only images of Mt. Fuji are more numerous. I didn't put any Fuji images into this piece because everybody has seen scads of them. 

4. Loved this one! The framing is off on my image because I was looking for an angle that didn't reflect the gallery lights off the glass. I like this because it's what Renoir's nudes should have been! I've never cared very much for Renoir's fleshy bodies--mostly because they are too sentimentalized for my tastes. This one is sensual, which is what I think nudes should be. I will also confess to being a fan of the nude in my bed--err, I mean art. (Monty Python reference!) Note once again the use of just a splash of bright color. The subject is an actress applying her make-up.

5. This one surprised me. Could be a Picasso, yes? See what I mean about the modernist flair? 

6. Another angst vibe, but this one feels ominous with the the small dark figure about to burst into a square of light. It made me think of Orson Welles movie shots from films such as "Touch of Evil."  

7. Take out the junks under the bridge, add some fog, add a few smokestacks poking through the murk,  and render the tones more somber and you'd have something from Monet's Waterloo Bridge series.

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