Juliet, Naked: The Title Must Refer to the Script

Juliet, Naked (2018)

Directed by Jesse Peretz

Lionsgate, 105 minutes, R (For F-bombs?)

★★

Nick Hornsby is an interesting writer. Ethan Hawke is a wonderful actor. But this doesn't mean that every book or film associated with the two is a winner. Juliet, Naked is a case in point. This is one of those films you stream on a night in which your brain is fried and you want pure escapism.

The film takes its name from the album title of a one-hit-wonder rock musician. We zero in on a fading beach town southeast of London, where Annie Platt (Rose Bryne) runs the local history museum and shares an airy apartment with her longtime boyfriend Duncan Thompson (Chris O'Dowd). Duncan is a college professor obsessed with Tucker Crowe, a rock star who disappeared during a concert interval 25 years earlier. Annie is fed up hearing about Crowe and her annoyance grows deeper when someone sends Duncan an acoustic demo of Crowe's only album, Juliet, Naked. Duncan is analogous to diehard Deadheads who insist that everything the band did was transcendent. Annie's listening–and she couldn't avoid it if she tried–is that the demos are rubbish. But Duncan is into his fantasy way more than he is into Annie.

Her response to Duncan's video blog touting the demo's virtues is to post a comment to the site calling Crowe's music lame. Duncan is infuriated and a sharper wedge is driven into his failing relationship with Annie. The big surprise, though, is that Annie gets an email from Crowe himself (Ethan Hawke) in which he agrees with every word she wrote. Tucker has no idea that Duncan is Annie's partner and wonders who the obsessed idiot who has been writing about him for years might be. The two begin a regular email conversation and connections between to deepen. When Tucker tells her that he will be flying to London to see his pregnant daughter, Lizzie (Ayoola Smart), plans are laid to meet.

Serve some false start leftovers, drizzle with complications, and toss in some toasted clichés and you could have written the script; especially if you've seen Sleepless in Seattle and Searching for Sugar Man. Tucker's life has been such a mess that he sees his attempt to be a good dad to 6-year-old Jackson as perhaps his last shot at redemption. This, of course, is never true in a rom-com, but tossing in sentimental fatherhood and, in Annie's case, empty womb essentialism are common elements for novelists and script writers aiming for lowest common denominator mass appeal.

The overall thinness of the story is revealed in subplots that go nowhere, such as the love life of Annie's lesbian sister Ros and Duncan's attraction to a new colleague. There are several scenes that are as broad as a Victorian drawing room play from a second-tier writer, such as a particularly silly (and unlikely) hospital scene and a forced impromptu performance from Tucker. (He sings a Kinks song.) Even the central revelation about the identity of Juliet and the back-story of the record feels like a let down.

There are two reasons to give the film a look: Hawke and Bryne. Hawke plays Tucker as if he's a mix of Jeff "The Dude" Lebowski and Cat Stevens. He's such a fine actor that he can drift through a film and still look good, which is pretty much what he does in Juliet, Naked. Rose Bryne is radiant as Annie. She physically embodies (undeveloped) themes of fading glory (the seaside town, central relationships, Crowe's reputation). At age 39, the Australian-born actress is still gorgeous, but she plays Annie with just enough exasperation and weariness to appear haggard around her luminous edges. Like Hawke, she needs a life refresh button before it's too late. I wish I could say that O'Dowd was equally subtle, as the script is set up to be a Duncan-Rose-Tucker triad. Alas, O'Dowd is all annoyance and no charm, which taints his performance with histrionic excess. 

In the end, Juliet, Naked isn't a horrible film, but neither is it a good one. The prevailing emotion one gets watching it is that it's all right, but should have been much better. Like I said upfront, call this one a film for a no-heavy-thinking evening.

Rob Weir

Good Old Boys, Ari and Mia, Music Maker Relief Artists

Traditional Music for March 2019

The music business has a category called  "traditional." The label was originally used during the 20^th century authenticity wars when a person singing a song had to have learnt it at his grand pappy's knee to be considered a real folk artist. No one has held that standard for quite some time and the information age has reduced the number of truly isolated communities to close to nil. These days it's hard to know exactly what traditional means in musical terms. You're sharper than I if you can come up with hard boundaries between labels such as traditional, old-time, bluegrass, acoustic country, and folk. 

A better point is to embrace the fact that ours is a mashable world. In this column I'd like to feature some recent releases and reissues that both step in tradition and sing the present.

Good Old Boys-Live, Drink Up and Go Home

Who's authentic and who isn't? By the 1970s it was already a stupid question. Need an example? How about the Good Old Boys? The band's traditional artist-for-sure was mandolin wizard Frank Wakefield (b. 1934), whose fingers blaze like a lightening strike in dry chaparral. He was born in Tennessee and comes from musical stock. There was also fiddler Brantley Kearns and bass fiddle player Pat Campbell, both of whom had been playing old-time music. The guitarist, though, was David Nelson, best known for his country rock/folk band New Riders of the Purple Sage. The banjo player on the cover looks familiar: Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead. He sounds familiar too; on the band's double-album release of two 1975 Santa Cruz, CA concerts, Garcia is also the lead vocalist on the title track and "All the Good Times."

Garcia always insisted that bluegrass and old-time music were his favorites. In 1975, the Dead was on hiatus, but Garcia had long forged partnerships with down-home musicians. Could he play banjo? Listen to "Fireball Mail" and you've got you answer. Garcia, though, is probably not what you'll remember most. Perhaps you'll recall the tight twangy vocal harmonies. This was an affectation on the part of several band members, done so because twang was considered an "authentic" backwoods voice. Sounds pretty good, though, as you can hear on "Pistol Packin' Mama," "Teardrops in My Eyes," and "Lonesome Road Blues." Yeah, this project is filled with songs and tunes that often carry a label of their own: standard. But what you're most likely to recall is Wakefield's mandolin. He was and remains one of the standards by which expertise is measured. On "White House Blues" Wakefield lays down notes that are played somewhere around warp 5. And there's what is arguably his most famed composition, "New Camptown Races." There's a clean recording on this on the album, but it's worth watching to see how back in 2008, when Wakefield was 74, he could still play the daylights out of this tune.  ★★★★

Ari and Mia, Sew the City

Sisters Ari (cello/vocals) and Mia (fiddle/banjo/voice) Friedman take a Child ballad like "Unquiet Grave" or a sacred harp offering like "Sweet Morning" and make you think you're hearing the heirs to Jean Ritchie. Except that doesn't quite work as these Massachusetts musicians honed their music at the New England Conservatory of Music, not the hollers of the Southern Appalachians. They do, however, possess an uncanny knack for taking you on a musical journey that feels so rooted in tradition that only the clarity of the sound reminds you that this isn't some lost field recording from the age of song catchers. "Come on Home" is an original, but its banjo-driven melody and sweet lyrics such as There are stars, there is music but where are you? I am calling you home tonight/I can see through the fog to what I have to do/I’ll light the fire so it’s burning bright enhance our out-of-the-present experience. It's not until we get to the offbeat "Till I Die" that we experience the Friedmans as children of this age. It's a spare song like all their material, but it has quirky elements that evoke everything from the stage to The Beatles. The title track is also contemporary in content, though once again the instrumentation spills out from an ancient stream. You'll also wish to check out their string/drone cover of Joni Mitchell's "The Fiddle and the Drum." Ari and Mia make it sound like a minor key growling from beneath the earth's crust. I'm told that Mia teaches music in Springfield and at the Hartsbrook School in Hadley. Lucky students. ★★★★

Music Maker Relief Foundation, Blue Muse

For the past quarter century the nonprofit Music Maker Relief Foundation (MMRF) has helped musicians having trouble meeting living and health expenses. That's way more artists than you think. It's easy to look at MMRF contributors such as Eric Clapton and Taj Mahal and forget that for every celebrity such as they, there are dozens of blues, folk, and acoustic country musicians barely scraping by. On this compilation CD you can hear Clapton scorch the strings on "Mississippi Blues" and Taj Mahal gives us a "John Henry" variant "Spike Driver Blues." Don Flemons (Carolina Chocolate Drops) is another name you might know. He gives us the delightfully retro "Polly Put the Kettle On," complete with old-time fiddle, mouth harp, and kitchen table sing along harmonies. But the delight of collections like Blue Muse comes from listening to artists whose names you probably don't know. You'll hear the hillbilly vibe of Sam Frazier, Jr. ("Cabbage Man"), the boogie-woogie groove of Alabama Slim ("I Got the Blues"), the mountain sounds of Martha Spencer and Kelley Breiding ("Sweet Valentine"), the wailing blues of Algia Mae Hinton ("Snap Your Fingers"), and a tickle-the-ivories jazzy cover of "Route 66" from Eddie Tigner, and you've still just scratched the surface of this gem of an album. Let me give a special call out to the artistCaptain Luke, whose work song "Old Black Buck" might rankle delicate sensibilities but I'll guarantee you won't forget his deep, glorious voice. He passed away in 2015 and his is decidedly a talent that went underappreciated. ★★★★

Miseducation of Cameron Post is Good (ish)

The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2018)

Directed by Desiree Akhavan

Film Rise, 90 minutes, Not-rated (brief nudity, language)           

★★★

The Miseducation of Cameron Post seeks to shed light on religious intolerance.  Its lead actress, Chloë Grace Moretz, is a champion of LGBT rights and the film’s director, Desiree Akhavan, is a Smith College graduate. These factors conspire to endear this movie to me, but they don't necessarily guarantee a quality product. So is The Miseducation of Cameron Post a good flick? The answer is “ish.”

The setup is simple and, in some ways, reflective of the film’s overall tendency to skim surfaces. It’s 1993 and Cameron Post (Moretz) is in love, but not with her boyfriend. She has been having hot and heavy make-out sessions with Coley (Quinn Shephard) that have moved from the experimental stage to reckless passion. The flash point comes on prom night when Cameron’s boyfriend discovers the two girls flagrante delicto in the back of a car. Cameron’s aunt Ruth­–Cameron’s parents died in a car crash–loves her niece, but Ruth is also a serious Christian who sees lesbianism as a sin and yearns for Cameron’s social and spiritual salvation. For her “own good,” Cameron is trundled off to God’s Promise, a Christian boarding school/conversion therapy center to be “cured” of her SSA (same-sex attraction).

God would need to work a miracle to get past some of the center’s basic contradictions, starting with the fact that sending someone with SSA to a facility filled with other gay people is akin to housing a sugar addict in a candy store. Plus, it would take a staff far more competent than Rev. Rick (John Gallagher, Jr.) and his psychologist sister Dr. Lydia March (Jennifer Ehle) to keep the lid on teen hormones. Their half boot camp, half evangelism approach doesn’t really get to the core of nature and identity, and the two consistently confuse compliance and games-playing with genuine conversion. Can you say inmates in charge of the asylum?

God’s Promise is at least an interesting collection of inmates. There is, for instance, a mixed race, prosthesis-wearing, attitude-oozing girl named–and I’m not making this up­–Jane Fonda (Sasha Lane), as well as Cameron’s blissed-out but not quite buttoned–down roommate Erin (Emily Skeggs). On the male side, there is Adam Red Eagle (Forrest Goodluck), a Lakota two-spirit (third gender), and his roommate Mark (Owen Campbell), who is outwardly the school’s star convert. Cameron, like most of the kids at God’s Promise, is mainly conflicted. She knows how she feels but worries that her aunt Ruth may be right about God and what she should want. Another intriguing character in this vein is stout Helen (Melanie Ehrlich), who would be mercilessly taunted in a regular high school. She possesses a great singing voice, though, and thinks maybe she can use it as an evangelical tool and clarify all of her identity issues. You can bet the farm that things will not go entirely as planned for anyone, even for those who yearn to become heterosexual.

This movie is in the spirit of films such as Saved! (2004), Jesus Camp (2006), and Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), though it’s not as good as any of them. Its strongest feature lies with strong performances from Moretz, Goodluck, and Lane. Each is in his or her early 20s, but easily look and act the part of high school adolescents. Moretz in particular appears poised to become the next bright young thing. She is the princess of cool detachment, even when she’s seething with anger, sadness, or resignation. Lane and Goodluck are more sly and enigmatic, but all three keep us just enough off balance to make us wonder what they will conspire to do. Ehle is also superb in her portrayal of an ice queen wearing an evangelical cloak.

This film won a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, but in my estimation that was overly charitable. Too many of the peripheral characters are unconvincing cardboard cutouts. Gallagher’s Rick is a rah-rah, guitar-strumming come-to-Jesus minister, but he’s also so clueless that we wonder how he ended up in charge of anything, much less a band of vulnerable young folks. He also seems more goofy than charismatic. Skeggs’ out of nowhere break in character is exactly that: out of nowhere. Several other characters appear in cameos that are personality 'types,' but they lack the development to make them seem real. 

Akhavan’s direction, depending on your point of view, is either improvisational or overly passive. There is something to be said for giving actors wide latitude and, at times, her film-the-riffs approach captures the inner turmoil of the adolescent mind. It is, however, also a director’s job to impose a certain degree of coherence for viewers. It is perhaps an odd remark to make, but this would have been a far better film had it been nastier. Akhavan wants us to grapple with assumed/imposed versus inherent sexual identity, but the message that comes across most vividly is that God’s Promise personnel were incompetent.

Akhavan exposes the sanctimonious veneer of gay conversion therapy and, by extension, sanctimony and puffed-up piety. Still, what we see is a scratch on the surface. Her Christian heavies are more bumbling and comically inept than menacing or small-minded. This has the effect of pulling punches rather than delivering any sort of body blow to the essential arrogance of those who believe that God’s will has been delivered unto them in a small gift-wrapped box.

Rob Weir

A Dangerous Collaboration is a Page-Turner Mystery

A Dangerous Collaboration (March 2019)

By Deanna Raybourn

Berkley/Penguin, 336 pages.

★★★★

When 19^th century activists and writers began to discuss the "New Woman," I doubt that Deanna Raybourn's Veronica Speedwell was quite what they had in mind. Lucky for us. Raybourn's creation is a wonderful combination of fierce determination, pigheadedness, insight, and pluckiness. The New Woman was known for her independence and willingness to defy convention, but I don't know of any who secreted throwing knives in their corsets, were unabashedly carnal, were the "semi-legitimate" offspring of the notoriously randy Duke of Wales, or combined careers in lepidoptery (butterfly studies) and amateur sleuthing.

Everything about Veronica Speedwell is cheeky. Her name is also that of a spiky purple flower that looks a bit like loosestrife, and her partner in adventure is Revelstoke Templeton-Vane, who goes by the handle of "Stoker." One of the first literary figures to write the New Woman into his novels was Bram Stoker. Veronica and Stoker are not exactly lovers–he's recovering from a disastrous marriage–but Speedwell isn't a virgin and she wouldn't exactly kick Stoker out of her bed, or his brother either. In fact, controlling her animal instincts is an ongoing struggle as there's only so much Victorian society will countenance, even from its outliers.

The fourth installment of Raybourn's Veronica Speedwell series is set in 1888, when Jack the Ripper is loose in London. But Veronica's attentions are directed elsewhere–off the coast of Cornwall to be precise. Stoker's brother, Lord Tiberius Templeton-Vane, puts forth an offer Veronica can't refuse: come with him on a short outing to St. Maddern's island, where a rare butterfly exists. There are odd extenuating circumstances. Ostensibly Tiberius is going to cheer up an old friend, Malcolm Romilly, whose lordship of an ancient castle has suffered because of his grief. Because the Romilly family is Catholic, Tiberius and Veronica must pose as affianced. The chance of seeing a butterfly thought to be extinct is lure enough for Veronica, though Stoker suspects it's just a ruse on his brother's part to seduce her. She reminds him in no uncertain terms–and our Ms. Speedwell isn't one to mince words–that she's 26, has no desire to be anyone's doormat or wife, and can take care of herself. Stoker, though, despises his brother, whom he sees as a scheming and amoral aristocrat. A sample of their mutual vitriol–Tiberius: "Peace, brother mine. I can feel you cursing me." Stoker: "And yet you still breathe…. I must be doing something wrong."

Stoker will also journey to St. Maddern's and there, things are odder still. Malcolm desires help is solving a mystery that has reduced him to melancholic torpor. It is the third anniversary of the disappearance of Rosamund, who vanished on the day she and Malcolm were to be wed. What happened? Did she flee? Was she kidnapped? Murdered? No one comes or goes from St. Maddern's in secret, so where is Rosamund? As another detective was fond of saying, the game is afoot. 

Without revealing anything, let's just say that truth will follow a very crooked path. The castle cast also includes Malcolm's reclusive sister Mertensia, who is happy only when tending the castle's extensive grounds, including a poison garden; Malcolm's widowed sister-in-law Helen, who is a medium who proposes to contact Rosamund in the spirit world; her 19-year-old spoiled brat of a son, Caspian; and a full household staff commanded by Mrs. Trengrouse, who has been at the castle since Malcolm was a lad. There is also a village full of eccentrics and fishermen, not to mention the bickering brothers, and various motives that are seldom what they purport to be. 

You might want to get the digital version of this book so you have one-finger access to the built-in dictionary. Ms. Raybourn has an exceptionally large vocabulary that is replete with now-archaic Victorian terms. She also has a puckish wit, such a description of a large castle fireplace "the sort for roasting half an ox or an annoying child." Raybourn engages in subtle gender inversion, such as making Veronica more rational, decisive, and sexually aroused than the men. I suppose some might complain that Veronica is too thoroughly modern at times, but it is a novel after all, not a work of history. If there is a weakness, it is that once the mystery is unveiled, what occurs next is telegraphed and predictable. I didn't care. I ripped through this book in two sittings and felt refreshed to indulge in the wit and passions of Veronica Speedwell, a Victorian for our times.

Rob Weir

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Capernaum a Trip to Hades You Should Take

Capernaum (2018)

Directed by Nadine Labaki

Sony Pictures Classics, 123 minutes, R (kids in peril)

In Arabic and Amharic (with subtitles)

★★★★★

In the Bible, although Jesus spent much of his ministry in or near Capernaum, he cursed the town and said it would be cast into hell for its lack of faith. Today’s Capernaum is in Israel and the namesake film is set in Lebanon, but Beirut is surely a candidate for a damned city. Once hailed as the “Paris of the Middle East,” Beirut has been a basket case since the 1975 civil war, a cesspool of warring factions.

Capernaum the film isn’t directly about Lebanon’s woes, yet it is. Director Nadine Labaki offers several wide aerial shots of Beirut and what we see is a bleak canvas of concrete, dilapidated apartments, rat maze streets, and roofs secured by cast off tires. When we zoom in to street level, we observe residents fashioning lives marked by improvisation, resignation, desperation, and detached misanthropy. It’s not the sort of place that’s kind to poor families or children. Zain’s family is doubly cursed. His father Selim has the enervated look of a man on the verge of giving up, though he can martial the energy to beat his children and impregnate his wife, Souad. There’s nothing like too many kids, grinding poverty, and domestic violence to make squalor seem even worse. The family survives mainly because their shopkeeper landlord cuts them a break, and that’s only because he wishes to marry their 11-year-old daughter, Sahar.

Capernaum is really Zain’s story. We first meet him in a courtroom, as he has been sentenced to five years in jail for stabbing a man and because Zain is suing his parents. Labaki tells Zain’s story in a non-linear fashion. We learn that Zain’s life was on the streets, where he hawked goods (including Tramadol), shoplifted, and did whatever he needed to survive. Zain (Zain Alrafeea) is probably around 12–he has no birth certificate–but he swears, smokes, and cavorts with the swagger of one twice his age. Zain’s fate is tied to his decision to disappear for a time, a journey that led him to an amusement park where he engaged in defiant acts of mischief, but also met Rahil (Yordanos Shiferaw), an undocumented Ethiopian refugee trying to make ends meet and keep secret from her boss that she has a toddler son, Jonas. Zain soon moves in with Rahil and becomes a surrogate caregiver to Jonas. It is hard not to choke up as we see Zain pulling Jonas around in a cooking pot mounted to a stolen skateboard, or tying Jonas’ ankle to rope so that he won’t venture into danger as Zain hustles his wares du jour.

Some reviewers have compared Zain to Huck Finn. I get the analogy insofar as Zain, like Huck, is adept at fending for himself. But let’s not pull punches. Capernaum is a tough and affecting film, but there’s little of Twain’s humor in the telling. Zain will also meet a young Syrian girl who hopes to immigrate to Sweden. Let that sink in. How bad are things in Ethiopia and Syria if illegal immigrants come from such places to Beirut? If you’ve no stomach for children in peril, steer clear of Capernaum. Ms. Labaki does not try to bathe her film in gauzy sentimentality; hers is more of a fictionalized documentary style that uses blinding Mediterranean light to bring social problems into sharp, unvarnished focus. We get a glimmer of hope in the film’s final moments in which Labaki pays homage to Francois Truffault’s 1959 classic 400 Blows, but we get little sense–as we might in a Hollywood fairy tale–that everyone will live happily ever after. Lebanon is still a world of child brides, children abducted and sold, women with little control over their bodies, and chaos reigning supreme.

Zain Alrafeea is riveting and was quite a find; literally so as in real life he is a Syrian refugee who was illiterate when cast in the film. Alrafeea is now in Norway, but his future remains uncertain. Like I said, Labaki doesn’t trade in fairy tales. Capernaum has won numerous awards, including several at Cannes. It is a deeply moving film that, in most years, would be an odds-on favorite to win an Oscar as best foreign film. In 2018, though, it is at best the fourth best foreign film in a stunning field that includes Cold War, Roma, and Shoplifters. It is nonetheless a stunning journey into Sheol. Don’t look away because you don’t want to know about what Zain endures; watch because you should know.

Rob Weir

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Unsheltered Burdened by Preachy Tone

Unsheltered (2018)

By Barbara Kingsolver

Harper, 480 pages.

★★★

Barbara Kingsolver is always worth reading, but she’s not written a truly great novel since Poisonwood Bible (1998). Alas, Unsheltered is not her long-awaited return to literary glory. It’s a good book, but not a great one. Years ago the New Republic slammed her as the mistress of “calamity writing.” That’s harsh, but it’s beyond dispute that Kingsolver seeks to make proverbial Big Statements in Unsheltered.  

On the surface, it’s a simple setup: one badly constructed house, two families separated 140 years in time, and one locale: Vineland, New Jersey. The setting was carefully chosen. Vineland was the brainchild of utopian developer Charles K. Landis (1833-1900). In 1862, Landis began building an alcohol-free town based on progressive educational and political principles. As the name suggests, agriculture was to be the economic driver of the town, especially grape production*. Landis appears in the 1875 part of Kingsolver’s novel, a time by which some residents–including journalist Uri Carruth­–had come to believe Landis’s middle initial stood for “King.”

Landis and Carruth are historical figures, as is Mary Treat (1830-1923), a brilliant entomologist, botanist, and faithful correspondent of Charles Darwin. Most Vineland residents viewed her as eccentric, as women simply weren’t supposed to pursue such things in Gilded Age America. Kingsolver’s main focus, though, is on Treat’s next-door neighbors, the (fictional) Greenwoods. They live in a house that, like the Gilded Age, looks respectable on the outside but is structurally unsound. Thatcher is the poorly paid new science teacher who struggles to keep afloat a household that includes his materialistic wife Rose, her spirited tomboy sister Polly, and their snobbish widowed mother Aurelia. To make matters worse, Thatcher teaches pure science in ways that outrage his Biblical literalist colleague Cutler. Thatcher’s only solace is Mary, who introduces him to the Pine Barrens as a plein air laboratory.

Kingsolver’s chapters alternate between 1875 and 2014 and she’s good at parallelism. Our contemporary center of attention is the Tavoularis clan. Like Thatcher Greenwood, Iano Tavoularis is a struggling academic. He lives in Vineland because the college at which he was tenured went under, and Vineland is a cheaper base from which to commute to Philadelphia for an adjunct’s starvation wages. By the mid-20^th century, post-industrial Vineland was no utopia, and it certainly was not one in the wake of Hurricane Sandy (2012). Iano and his wife Willa are ageing former hippies with two adult children: Zeke, who wants to be an investor, and “Tig” (Antigone), a diminutive fireball eco activist who thinks it’s probably too late to save the planet. There is also Nick, Iano’s dying rightwing father, and Zeke’s baby, “Dusty,” whose mother is deceased.

There are other examples of parallelism. The Greenwoods have two dogs, Scylla and Charybdis. I’ll spare you the detour into Greek mythology, but they are the origins of the phrase “between a rock and a hard place.” Antigone’s name is also plucked from myth. The irreconcilable worldviews of Zeke and Tig are analogous to disputes between blind faith versus rational science explored in Thatcher’s Scopes Trial-like tribunal, the sensational trial of Charles Landis, Nick’s talk radio parroting, Willa’s quixotic quest to save her house, Zeke’s belief in money, and Tig’s apocalyptic warnings.

Kingsolver’s novel is well plotted, rich in detail, has well developed characters, and is an imaginative blend of fiction and history, but it's pretty damn obvious in its use of metaphors. The problematic house threatens to unshelter its inhabitants, but will it allow them to “stand in the clear light of day…?” In Kingsolver’s telling, we have the choice to follow convention or truth, unreason or fact, vanity or nature, and those who tell us what we want to hear or scientists. Landis is a metaphor for Donald Trump and in case you don’t get that Mary Treat remarks, “When men fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore all order.” Still uncertain? A Vineland mob harasses a defender of Darwin with chants of, “Lock him up.”

I am part of the choir to whom Kingsolver is preaching, but will she convince non-believers? Too much of Unsheltered is as subtle as a Facebook rant. Her message that humankind’s house is falling down is advanced through long sections whose didactic tone is similar to that found in Edward Bellamy’s famed Looking Backward (1888). Big chunks of the novel are informative, but the prose is limp.

Kingsolver also presents either/or binaries. Perhaps she's right that the time for nuance is past but then again, maybe she’s ambiguity-challenged. I admire her passion, but she could trust her readers more instead of becoming the scientific scold to Cutler’s evangelicalism or Willa’s idealism. I certainly wouldn’t dispute the view that Planet Earth, like Vineland, has become Paradise Lost. But Kingsolver doesn’t give us much space to dream that we might, in Joni Mitchell’s words, get back to the garden.

Rob Weir  

* Vineland was, for a time, the major supplier for Welch’s Grape Juice.

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Mackenzie Shivers: February 2019 Artist/Albums of the Month

Mackenzie Shivers is New York bred and based. She refers to her music as "piano-driven indie folk with a Celtic soul," and counts Tori Amos, Elton John, Joni Mitchell, and Aoife O'Donovan among her influences. I'd recommend you ignore labels or comparisons and just listen. I have just sampled two previously released EPs and material from her new record The Unkindness and my first thought is, "Who is responsible for keeping this woman a secret from me?"

The title track from Living in My Head (2016/18) is a fragile little song that is sweet and affecting. Shivers can sing high and reedy, but she's far from being a delicate songbird. She really works the band on "Disco's Dead," and her arrangement of it drifts toward a Cowboy Junkies-like foray into acid rock. When she goes staccato to sing of putting on "my shitty black dress and my shitty black shoes," we know she meant what she emoted in the previous line: "I won't cry for the departed, I won't cry for the afraid/But I'll cry for New York City, babe, cause they say she's turnin' gray." "Lily-Rose" also rocks around the edges and it features a common trait on this release: open quiet, build, get quiet again in the middle, and then let 'er rip. "Tell Me to Run," another ghosts of NYC song, showcases how Shivers constructs a song from spray-like tinklings of the ivories. When she shapes the melody to where she wants it, she breaks out the ornamentation.

Shivers wears her Celtic cap of the EP Ravens, right down to doing an amazing cover of the old Irish chestnut "Parting Glass." She uses repeated notes in a pulse-like fashion and keeps the composition spare until she's halfway through. But not even the strings toward the end disrupt the contemplative mood. On the titletrack she breaks out a harmonium for a voice atop drone effect that makes this original song sound as if it's ancient. On "Winter," her keys are as dark as a late November evening sky. But the standout track is "Forgiveness." On this one the plinky high notes get a workout and she lets them resonate. It's waltz time and the melody is so beautiful it brings tears.

From what I've heard of The Unkindness, Ms. Shivers has another winner on her hands. On the titular offering she sings, "Far across the darkness/I see a face like mine/Frightened by the shadows/That leave us far behind." It's very atmospheric and I get the Tori Amis comparisons on this one, but the ever so subtle and tasteful touch of strings on the outro reminds us that Mackenzie Shivers rides nobody's coattails.

Rob Weir

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