MassMoCA Always a Showcase of New Delights

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In the last post I spotlighted the Clark Institute of Art. If you're headed for Williamstown,  be sure to pop over to the adjacent town of North Adams to visit the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, better known as Mass MoCA. I visit the Clark to see old favorites, but I go to Mass MoCA see things I've never seen before. #massmoca

A word on the campus and the town of North Adams: Mass MoCA is located on the 24-acre site of what was previously Sprague Electric. At one time, Sprague employed more than 4,100 people and its 1985 closure ripped the guts out of a town that was already on the downward slope. In the first four decades of the 20^th century, North Adams was home to about 22,000; today there are fewer than 14,000. Mass MoCA opened its doors in 1999, a gutsy move in a fading blue-collar town where locals much prefer lager to LeWitt. Naysayers predicted that Mass MoCA would be a taxpayer-subsidized flop. They were wrong. Mass MoCA will never replace all those lost Sprague jobs—not with a staff that's more in the order of 50, not thousands. North Adams is still pocked by empty red brick factories and substandard housing, but Mass MoCA does generate around $10 million each year for the local economy. Score one for art.

Here's the deal: You won't like everything you see there, but the stuff that does grab you is likely to be stuff you've seldom before encountered. Contemporary art differs radically from classical art in that it's more speculative. Collectors may spend a lot of money on pieces, but it's as big a gamble as Mass MoCA itself whether the investment will pay off.  Curators, critics, and collectors think they have discriminating tastes, but they are often spectacularly wrong—as evidenced by the kind of art that today hangs in conventional museums, much of which was denounced in its day as rubbish. If you see things at Mass MoCA that strike you as landfill, you might end up being right, but maybe not! 

To show my own cards, I'm not a big fan of visual word art; that is, pieces that are supposed to blow me away with the juxtaposition of words—often too small to read when on the wall—with other media. I find such works too personal to resonate broadly and, frankly, I find a lot of it nonsense dressed in pretentious explanations. I also lose patience with most video installations—mostly because I don't want to waste my time and energy on them. (I also see film as a different form of mental stimulation.) My final admission is that I can't stand the aforementioned (Sol) LeWitt. I think he' was the P.T. Barnum of art. Others love him; thereby proving art is, in the end, subjective.  

When Mass MoCA scores, it scores big. Two exhibits playing this summer fit that bill. The first, Radical Small by Elizabeth King, borrows from Walt Whitman the idea of the eidolon—projecting human likenesses onto inanimate objects. The monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a form of this; ditto Pinocchio. Eidolons show up elsewhere: carnival automatons, androids, the golem of Jewish folktales, homunculi, shape-shifters, the folkloric fetch, wraiths, the White Walkers of Game of Thrones…. King serves them to us visually, through uses of film, poppets, masks, small machines, photographs, and representations of body parts like floating heads that are stripped from the overall human physique. It's at once fascinating, disturbing, visually stunning, and creepy.   

Even more fascinating is an installation by Nick Cave, an African American artist not to be confused with the Australian musician of the same name, though the two share morbid fixations. His Until appears at first a riot of pleasure: thousands of dangling glittering objects that look like a forest of scored CDs with cut-outs. Then you walk among them and revelation dawns. Those beautiful 'sunbursts' aren't at all what you thought; they are the flashes from gun muzzles, which we see in the profiles of weapons and bullets that appear when we 'see' instead of merely 'look.' Cave is also interested in representations of race and what these mean in society. His video installation is one of the few for which I did sit still. (Admittedly, the projected wave pattern upon the floor is so hypnotic and vertigo inducing that I needed to sit!)  This smart, provocative exhibit is biting social satire.

Sadly, the sculptures of Fererico Uribe are now gone, as his Here Comes the Sun was a perfect companion to Cave. Amidst his whimsical assemblages of animals are some that stop you in your tracks: a porcupine made of hypodermic needles, a sheep constructed of sharp scissors, rabbits and fawns fashioned from bullet cartridges….

But that's how it is at Mass MoCA. It's a place where you can wander in old factory corridors and then into a multi-colored tube. There are some permanent displays, such as  Michael Oatman's stunning all utopias fall, but mostly we go there to see what's new, hip, and perhaps a classic sometime in the future. A new building has just opened, nearly doubling the gallery space and featuring works by a few names you might recognize: Laurie Anderson, Louise Bourgeois, and Don Gummer (Mr. Meryl Streep). I can't wait to return to see what's new. 

 Rob Weir

Clark Art Institute: My Favorites

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Among the many joys of living in Western Massachusetts is that the Clark Institute of Art is only an hour from my home. It is, simply, one of the most important repositories in the country—especially for 19^th century art.  #@the_clark

New Yorkers Robert Sterling and Francine Clark were so shaken by the devastation of World War Two and the ensuing Cold War that they placed their considerable collection in a locale unlikely to be ravaged by a nuclear attack: Williamstown, in the far northwestern corner of Massachusetts, where it joins New York and Vermont. The Clark opened its doors in 1955. The next time you go, here's a baker's dozen of my favorites.

My favorite is Smoke of Ambergris from John Singer Sargent. Admittedly, it exoticizes Moroccan culture. The figure is of a woman lifting her veil to take in the scent of ambergris, incense made from whale oil (which is also non-PC). But my goodness, what a picture! Nobody does white on white (or black on black) as well as Sargent. This one transfixes me every time I see it. There are just enough splashes of other colors to make the whites pop out. I marvel at the skill of someone who can get so much depth out of white, nature's most neutral pigment. I had a poster of this for decades, but it's not even close to the experience of seeing it.

A close runner-up is Nymphs and Satyr by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. This is a "Why don't I ever get invited to parties like this?" painting. Three naked lasses dance around a randy satyr and a fourth beckons him into the woods for what we can be pretty sure is not PG-13 fun and games. The funny thing is that, even though no one in the gallery can take their eyes off of this, everybody pretends to be looking elsewhere—as if they're naughty little boys sneaking a look at a Playboy magazine. Go ahead; stare.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was a Dutch-born British academic painter that some people loathe, but I like him, especially his The Women of Amphissa. You've probably never over indulged like these women, who are sleeping off a night of drinking and dancing in honor of Bacchus, the Greek god of wine. It looks like he was well praised! But the real fun of this picture is counting how many times you see the same model represented in slightly different ways. She's Laura, the artist's second wife. Look for the schnoz! 

 

I've seen so much Impressionist art that I occasionally forget why I love it. The Clark reminds me. One of my all time favorites is Monet's Street in Sainte-Adresse. It evokes the memory of the first time I walked down a European village lane such as this. All I have to do is change the clothes and it's all there: the walled path, the stone buildings, the smoke rising from a hearth, the shade trees, and the church dominating the town. Monet is an instant time warp.

Bouguereau isn't really one of my favorite painters, but his Seated Nude is glorious. It perfectly illustrates the difference between naked and nude. Although the young model wears nothing but an enigmatic expression and a lush blue cloth tumbling down her back, the adjective that springs to mind is "innocent."

If you ever need a visual spirit-lifter, Monet and Tulip Fields at Sassenheim will do the trick. The countryside, a rustic cottage, and a riot of pink, yellow, green, lavender, and red that looks like earthbound fireworks. Works for me!

I admit, though, that sometimes I OD on 'pretty' Impressionist works. That's why Camille Pissarro is probably my favorite within that august genre. Despite the shambolic lifestyles of most Impressionists, few were what you'd call working-class heroes. As Port of Rouen, Unloading Wood indicates, Pissarro was different. He actually painted working people, grit, and grime. And he made it look good.

Winslow Homer is a New England favorite, but his endless paintings of churning seas and barren rocks just don't do it for me. My favorite Homer is Sleigh Ride, a rare winter scene. What is more New England than winter? I love the way Homer used light, a reminder that our "dark" season exists more in imagined gloom than how Mother Nature actually illumines.     

Maybe I have a thing for bad-boy artists. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec is nobody's idea of a saint. He hung out in whorehouses, absinthe bars, and sketchy clubs. Yet, this portrait of Carmen intrigues because of its ambiguity. Is Carmen a harlot, or an unfortunate gypsy girl caught up in cycles of robbery, betrayal, and perhaps a dash of the occult? Lautrec's portrait is a face that is, at once, defiant but sallow. Is this Carmen beautiful, or on the downward slide to haggardness?   

I don't know much about Émile Bernard, but I really love the stolidity of Portrait of Madame Lemasson. She's a Breton woman, but she evokes my grandmother, who similarly attended to the tasks at hand with down-turned eyes. She also exuded a silent no-nonsense countenance.

The Clark's 1524 Portrait of a Man by Jan Gossaert is everything a Reformation era painting should be, and not just because it evokes the work of Hans Holbein (the Younger). It's those dark tones, the elaborate frame, the burgher's chain of authority, the handful of rings, the velvet bonete, the whiff of prosperity inherent in the figure's double chinned gaze, and the vibrant blue surrounding him like a secular halo. 

I like Perseus Rescuing Andromeda because this picture from Cavaliere d'Arpino is at once dramatic and silly. In Greek mythology, Andromeda is punished because she's more beautiful than many of the goddesses, so they chain to a rock, where she's menaced by Cetus, a sea monster. Well you would, wouldn't you? Along comes our hero, Perseus, astride his flying horse, Pegasus. He rescues Andromeda so he can go forth and do other hero stuff—like slice off Medusa's head. In this painting, though, our sea monster looks a dog plagued with reptile skin, Andromeda—her lipstick never mussed—looks more bemused than threatened, and Perseus seems to have left an Arctic lair. It's like a Terry Gilliam cartoon with a Wagnerian score.

Finally, I like Pére Fournaise by Renoir because it's jolly. I like the figure's sparkling blue eyes, his easy-going manner, and the glasses of beer on the table. I think there's one calling me right now.

The Beguiled Entertains, But Be wary of the Hyperbole

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THE BEGUILED (2017)

Directed by Sofia Coppola

Focus Features, 94 minutes, R (sexual situations—should be PG-13)

★★★ ½

One reviewer called The Beguiled "a sexually charged feminist psychodrama." That, my friends, is what is known as hyperbole. The Beguiled is actually an easy-on-the-eye film that sports lovely tableaux and mannered performances punctuated by harrowing pivots, but it's only feminist if you define that term as females forced by circumstance to live without the company of men. It's best not to make this film more than it is: a diverting way to spend an hour and a half—nothing less and nothing more.

The Beguiled is based upon A Painted Devil, a 1966 novel by Thomas Culllin an, previously adapted to film in 1971 with Clint Eastwood and Geraldine Page in the lead roles. Sofia Coppola's remake is subtler, perhaps the reason why she recently took away the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival. The year is 1863, and the Civil War rages with unrelenting fury in Virginia, where Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman) struggles to keep open an academy for young women. In those days, a female academy was a glorified finishing school in which boarding students learned French and music alongside needlework, proper posture, religion, and manners. The overall goal was refinement and mastery of domestic skills, not training for wage earning professions. The war has disrupted normal routines, but Miss Farnsworth valiantly maintains high moral standards, even though her six remaining residents must till their own gardens, forage, and get by the best they can. Farnsworth continues to act as headmistress, supervisor of in-house teacher Edwina Morrow (Kirsten Dunst), and role model to an ill-matched group of students: maturing teen Alicia (Elle Fanning), the slightly younger Jane (Angourie Rice), and three youths: 13-year-old Marie (Addison Reicke), round-faced Emily (Emma Howard), and spunky 11-year-old Amy (Ooma Laurence).

Farnsworth succeeds in keep the war outside the academy's iron gates until Amy stumbles upon a badly wounded Union solider, Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell) while collecting mushrooms in the woods. Against her better judgment, Farnsworth allows McBurney to recuperate inside the school. It is here that Coppola shows a more deft hand than either Cullinan or Don Siegel, who directed the 1971 film. Instead of making a fox-in-the-henhouse antebellum horror film, Coppola allows her Beguiled to be more ambiguous.

Is McBurney the fox, or the hunted? It's clear that he encourages the growing affections of the school's three oldest women, but is he a silver-tongued devil or just an impulsive lad with poor impulse control? Kidman is terrific as Farnsworth, whom she plays with outward ice, but with hints of a mushy core. Dunst is also impressive as Edwina, a woman torn between respectability, desire, and the realization that, by 19^th century standards, she's already an Old Maid. Farrell, whose past work has been uneven and occasionally prone to pretty boy preening, does a credible job of portraying McBurney with the right balance of charm, recklessness, and smarm. It's a good thing these three performances are topnotch, or Oona Laurence would have stolen the show; though she's just 11, she's already a force of nature. Oddly, Ms. Fanning—who usually dazzles—is the weak link in the ensemble. She is alluring and flirtatious, but altogether too modern in look, attitude, and even speech. (At one point she actually asks McBurney, "How's it going?")

Strong acting carries the film because, when it's all said and done, this is actually a very slight film. Even at just 94 minutes it feels stretched out. That's because it's an interior film in which personalities and circumstances will either mesh or not, and there are really only a few ways in which matters could be resolved. Coppola engages in a little padding. It is suggested that the war is winding down, though in the summer of 1863 it has nearly two years to go. There are discussions of shortages but, though the academy table lacks meat, there's plenty of food on the fine china, and a nicely apportioned wine cabinet to accompany it. And if you want to know why Virginia looks like it's in the Deep South, it's because it was filmed in Louisiana. Still, I'm glad Coppola avoided the excesses of her Marie Antoinette (2006) or the tedium of Somewhere (2010). The Beguiled is assuredly watchable, though it looks deeper and prettier than it actually is. Best Director? That seems as hyperbolic as calling The Beguiled a feminist film. At its best, a strong ensemble cast takes over; when it lags, it's like having all that Spanish moss hanging from trees in what is supposed to be Virginia—more atmospheric than convincing.

Rob Weir 

#thebeguiled         

Encounter Picasso at the Clark

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PICASSO ENCOUNTERS

Clark Institute of Art

Through August 27, 2017

Think you know Pablo Picasso (1881-1973)? You do and you don't. It's hardly your fault; Picasso began producing works when barely in his teens and continued unabated until his death in 1973. A visit to the Picasso Museum in Paris can be mind-boggling as it holds more than 5,000 works. There are another 4,000 in Barcelona, and you'd still have at least 41,000 left to view if you wanted to exhaust his output.

Dora Maar

If you're dizzy from even contemplating such a brush with Picasso, you can regain your bearings with a visit to the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. There are just 38 Picasso works on display and these have been chosen to make a point, not to provide any sort of Pablo's Greatest Hits retrospective. Artists as prolific as Picasso draw inspiration from everywhere and the Clark's exhibit, "Picasso Encounters," is meant to be doubly evocative—we encounter Picasso through the eyes of some of the encounters that influenced him, among them: the Old Masters, cubists, printmakers, the stage, and women. Especially women. Picasso was, by today's standards, a serial womanizer, but les femmes were more than sexual conquests for Picasso; they were his muses. In fact, he had trouble working unless there was a woman (or two or three) in his life, whether they were kin, friends, wives, or mistresses. If you think that his modernist/cubist/surrealist mash-ups are merely eye-catching and strange, look hard at his 1937 Portrait of Dora Maar, the photographer and artist with whom Picasso had a brief affair. This painting is so lovingly rendered that the only adjective that really fits is 'beautiful.'

Minotauromachia

Picasso had many women in his life, the most important of whom were Maar, Fernande Olivier, Marie-Thérèse Walter, François Gilot, Olga Khokhlova, and Jacqueline Roque. He only wedded the last two, which means his domestic life was often chaotic. We see this in Minotauromachia, outwardly an amalgamation of modernism, a medieval woodcut, and the Greek story of the Minotaur etched onto paper. But it's also an allegory of Picasso's complicated home life, with the partially nude body of his mistress (Walter) lying across a horse fleeing the horned beast, while unfeeling Picasso's wife (Khokhlova) looks down from above and a figure that is probably Pablo hightailing it up a ladder to safety.    

The Italian Woman

We see different kinds of encounters in this exhibit as well, among them: an early self-portrait that owes much to Velasquez; a Cranach-inspired Venus and Cupid; and his 1953 The Italian Woman, which was influenced by the work of a relatively obscure 18^th century painter named Victor Orsel. The last is a graceful front-facing portrait that would be suggestive of Mexican portraits tinged with Georges Rouault were it not for the impish figures etched above the model. For me the most surprising works were Picasso's linoleum cuts, not because they are necessarily his strongest images, but because they highlight the ways in which he kept his vision clearly imagined through several layers—like a chess player strategizing five moves ahead. Portrait of a Young Girl, after Cranach the Younger II looks at first glance like it an offbeat rendering of a red queen from a pack of playing cards until you think of what it took to produce this one print. Among other things, Picasso had to think through how every dot of red and scratch of black (of which there are many) would look like when the final version was inked and pressed. 

This is a thoughtfully curated exhibit that gives weight to the credo less is more. Is there more to say about Picasso? Of course, but the beauty of the Clark exhibit is that we can begin to hear some of those things without the cacophony of all that could be said about him.

Rob Weir     

@the_clark

Beatriz at Dinner is Thin Fare

BEATRIZ AT DINNER (2017)

Directed by Miguel Arteta

Roadside Attractions, 83 minutes, R (language)

★ ½

There's a line from an old Don McLean song that goes: The world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. He was singing about Vincent Van Gogh, but the lyrics could have been written for the titular character of the new Miguel Arteta film Beatriz at Dinner, though I'm glad McLean didn't waste his words on the biggest dud I've experienced over the July Fourth holiday.

Beatriz (Selma Hayek) is a middle-aged woman with an old soul. She works as a holistic healer at a Los Angeles cancer clinic where she's part massage therapist, part yoga instructor, and part New Age practitioner. Because she's, you know, Mexican, she also has gig as freelance masseuse to the rich, pampered, and clueless. How else can she afford to live in San Jose and put kibbles in the dog dishes and greens in the pen of her pet goat?

Aside from a few establishing shots, this film covers a single day in Beatriz's life—one in which she leaves her day job, battles rush hour traffic, and wends her way to the gated hillside estate of a regular client, Kathy (Connie Britton), who simply must have a massage before her husband Grant (David Warshofsky) entertains a few very exclusive business associates: Yuppie hotel builder Alex (Jay Duplass), his pampered wife, Shannon (Chloë Sevigny); and the big fish: Doug Strutt (John Lithgow) and his third wife, Jeana (Amy Landecker). Strutt is one of the world's wealthiest people, a rapacious real estate mogul without a PC bone in his body or a hint of social conscience in his soul. He's accustomed to getting what he wants, which gives him free rein to be a loud-mouthed bigot who seems to have been fashioned out of equal parts Rush Limbaugh, Donald Trump, and Walter Palmer (the moneyed dentist who killed Cecil the lion).  When Beatriz's car won't start and she becomes the unwanted seventh dinner guest, the stage is set for a clash between her humanistic, Gaia-centered values and the cultures of arrogance and greed.

Beatriz at Dinner has been called a Trump-era morality tale. By all rights, I should have loved this film and its messages. The bling-and-brag crowd couldn't be more awful in their money-grubbing inhumanity, materialistic shallowness, and soul-crushing smugness. They represent the puppet masters that make the Make America Great Again lumpenproletariat dance like limp marionettes. And yet, I disliked this film pretty much from its onset.    

It could have been a dark and frank look at social class, ethnocentrism, and avarice. To have been so, though, would have required an ingredient fully missing from the menu: nuance. By tarring Strutt (get it?) and his circle with such a broad brush, director Arteta reduces evil to cartoon-like caricatures. And by continuing to slather layer upon layer of that tar, the Strutts of the planet become unbelievable rather than indefensible.

Perhaps this would have made a searing play. It is clearly a vehicle for Lithgow, who does his best to convey amoral creepiness. His is a superb performance and he should not be blamed for the weaknesses in Mike White's screenplay. Lithgow, alas, is the only one with much to do in this film.

The rest of the ensemble is competent, but underutilized—especially Britton, Sevigny, and Landecker, who spend most of the film either being catty or shrugging their shoulders in "Whatcha gonna do?" apologies for the outlandishly jerk-like behaviors of their respective alpha males.  Though she is the co-star, Hayek doesn't sparkle either. She spends some of the film interrupting conversation, getting unattractively drunk, and committing social faux pas. Call them characteristics out of character for her character, though very few people would behave this aggressively, even before the most deplorable of hosts. The rest of the time, Hayek doesn't speak much at all; she hovers around the film's edges and looks sad. Pan to Hayek's sad face. Move in on her even sadder eyes. Feel the weight on her sad shoulders…. And if you haven't gotten the fact that Beatriz is, like really sad, overlay her disconsolance with hints of homesickness glimpsed via flashbacks of a gauzy youthful idyll.  

I do not wish to defend the lifestyles of the opulent and boorish, but this film fails to take them down. It's far too trite to do that.

Rob Weir

Young Radicals a Portrait of Shattered Socialist Dreams

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YOUNG RADICALS: IN THE WAR FOR AMERICAN IDEALS (2017)

Jeremy McCarter

Random House, 340 pages.

★★★★★

(This review originally posted on http:NEPCA.blogpost.com) 
 

 

I didn’t like this book; I adored it! It is so well written that it reads like novel. Among the unorthodox things Jeremy McCarter has done is pen it in the present tense. Another is to make its major theme the death of idealism. Or perhaps I should say its betrayal.

McCarter, a Chicago-based writer and critic, turns his gaze to the first two centuries of the 20^th century, a time in which American socialism sprouted, blossomed, and was pulled up by the roots—its dreams of a global cooperative community sacrificed upon World War One’s altar of militarism, nationalism, greed. Rather than tell this tale through the usual channels of analyzing historical forces, material conditions, and mounting tensions, McCarter shows how larger dramas played out in the lives of five fascinating characters: Max Eastman (1883-1969), John Reed (1887-1920), Alice Paul (1885-1977), Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), and Randolph Bourne (1886-1918). He chose well, as between them, they moved in circles that represented the numerous strains within American culture.

The book’s title is apt, for the five radicals were indeed young and were, in their own ways, warriors within the “war for American ideals.” If you associate socialism with glum Russian apparatchiks, think again. Max Eastman was the editor of The Masses, a publication that was as much bohemian as socialist. Its pages supported labor unions, social equality, and pacifism, but also sported graphic art, poetry, and fiction that ranged from agit-prop to whimsical. It survived on a hope, serendipitous donations, and Eastman's dogged determination to keep it afloat.

Journalist “Jack” Reed was an energetic swashbuckler crossed with a frat boy.  He seduced and exasperated, pontificated at one moment and betrayed his half-baked views the next, pissed off his friends as he exhaled and charmed them on the inhale. He was the very scarred embodiment of a fast, hard, full, short life.  He needed to be where the action was, which is why he didn’t allow a lost kidney to keep him out of Europe as war clouds gathered and why he was a firsthand witness to the Russian Revolution.

Alice Paul wasn't good at moderation either. Like a reckless campus radical, she put her body on the line for the cause of suffrage and wore out others in the process, including Inez Milholland Boissevain who died from taking part in Paul-orchestrated non-stop agitation. Paul’s was a world of picketing, workhouse internments, force-feedings, and embarrassing President Wilson. One of the book’s many revelations is the depth of mutual contempt between Paul and Carrie Chapman Catt. Catt saw Paul as an impetuous troublemaker who threatened her careful one-state-at-a-time strategy and nearly cost Wilson the White House; Paul saw Catt as a self-aggrandizer willing to tolerate the status quo to be an insider player in the Wilson administration.

The latter charge was also leveled at Lippmann, with some justification. Lippmann, who co-founded the New Republic, was an intellectual who had trouble reconciling idealism and pragmatism. As war loomed, he jettisoned socialism for liberalism and joined Wilson’s team in the vain hope the war would "make the world safe for democracy.” Lippmann actually wrote most of Wilson’s famed 14-Points, but their abandonment led him to leak an internal document that doomed Wilson's nationwide campaign for the League of Nations.

A good tale requires a tragic figure and few were more so than Randolph Bourne. His was one of the most inventive minds of his day. Bourne dreamt of transnational identities, cosmopolitanism, and universal citizenship decades before Greenwich Villagers imagined themselves global villagers. His capacious mind was housed in a sickly hunchbacked body that he felt was doomed to be unloved. He was wrong; the beautiful free spirited actress Esther Cornell seems to have accepted his marriage proposal, only for Bourne to perish in the postwar influenza epidemic.

The postwar fallout took more than Bourne with it. Socialism’s promise also faded—not just because of wartime repression and the postwar Red Scare—but because idealists often battled with each other, and bitterly so over the war. It has been said that World War One was the only war wished into being by the left. Though somewhat hyperbolic, roughly half of U.S. socialists—including Lippmann and John Dewey—supported the conflict. Pro-war socialists were mistaken. History would soon judge the Great War a disaster in nearly every way one can measure such things. Ideals such as transnationalism gave way to cynicism and insularity. Paul would hold fast to her principles, but Eastman and Lippman would embark on several journeys between left, center, and right before settling into contrarianism. 

McCarter’s book is a masterpiece of forgotten and overlooked detail. It is also an examination of how dream worlds and officialdom overlapped and separated. The book is so compellingly written that I shall refrain from quoting so you can make your own discoveries and savor the richness of its prose. Kudos to McCarver for restoring the “story” in history and making tales come alive in real time. One can dispute whether the hopes of McCarter's five young radicals were admirable or misguided, but there is something tragic in the observation that we now live in a world too parochial to conceive of globalism in non-economic terms. #jxmccarter

Rob Weir

The Jerry Cans: June 2017 Album of the Month

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THE JERRY CANS

Inuusiq (Life)

★★★★★

The Jerry Cans hail from Nunavut, Canada's far northeastern territory. It's 2 ½ times larger than Great Britain and France combined, yet it contains only 35,000 people, its capital, the Baffin Island town of Iqaluit has a fifth them, and much of the territory lies above the Arctic Circle. Two-thirds of the population is Aboriginal and more than half speak a first language other than English.  

Why the geography lesson? If you're going to put together a band that, as The Jerry Cans have done, is strong enough to appeal to a small but diverse audience yet gain enough traction to win some Canadian Music awards, you'd better be damned versatile. They are. Imagine a less countrified Ray LaMontague fronting a band with the good time vibe of Great Big Sea and you are on the road to getting the Jerry Cans, but you're still not there. This band can rock, toss of an Irish fiddle lick, tamp it down for some folk music, and still find time for some Inuktitut throat singing. That's impressive given that lead vocalist, the muscular- and raspy-voiced Andrew Morrison, didn't know a word of First Nations languages before he moved to Nunavut and fell for Nancy Mike, an Inuk woman (accordion, vocals).

Were it not for the growling breaths and unfamiliar language, you'd swear you're in a hipster club with dancers thrusting pumped arms in the air and belting out the "whooa oooaaa" chorus of "Ukiuq," which zips along to guitar, Gina Burgess' fiddle, Steve Rigby's drums, and Brendan Doherty's bass. On another song whose name contains—I kid you not—22 letters, the song feels like something Hawaiian mixed with pop rock song. I've no idea what Morrison and Mike are singing, but it sounds very, very cool. Then there's "Nirlit," filled with yips, barks, and an ever-gathering pace that's a prelude to a robust song with tinges of punk rock. Can this be the same band that slows things down for the acoustic "Tusaavit" or the piano-centered "Arnaluka?" Each would be labeled tender if Morrison's voice were smoother. But this band doesn't really do smooth for very long. Check out the reggae central groove of "Maikliqta," albeit one supplemented by everything from an infectious hook, some jaw harp, and a few other sounds I simply can't identify. Fancy something in an electric bluegrass mode?  Try "Paniarjuk" or "Isumagivappinnga." The Jerry Cans bring it home with the joyous "Anaanaga" and a repeat of the first track, which I gather translates "Northern Lights."

This record should erase any doubts you had that you're living in the Global Village. Listen. Dance. Enjoy. Just don't ask me to tell you what any of these songs mean. #Inuusiq

Rob Weir