Classic Film: Atlantic City

 

 

ATLANTIC CITY (1980)

Directed by Louis Malle

Paramount, 104 minutes, R (partial nudity, 1970s clothing)

★★★★

 

 

 

 

In Atlantic City, petty wiseguy Lou Pascal (Burt Lancaster) looks over his shoulder at the slate gray sea and reminisces about his heyday: “The Atlantic Ocean was something then. You should have seen the Atlantic Ocean in those days.”

 

 My parents met and married in Atlantic City after World War II. They ended up moving to Pennsylvania, near where my mother was raised. Dad, a Worcester, Massachusetts native, frequently disparaged Pennsylvania and yearned for Atlantic City. I first visited as a child in the early 1960s. Steel Pier, the famed diving horse, and Boardwalk sedan chairs were still there, but the place was a dump. The film Atlantic City is set a decade and a half later, around the second time I visited. Remarkably, it was even worse. Visitors were advised not to venture into the city and with good reason: it was squalor, boarded storefronts, crime, and angry urbanites at their scariest. Change, though, was on the horizon. Old hotels were coming down and glitzy casinos were rising. We know how that turned out; small-fry hoods like Lou were pushed aside for big-time crooks and crime syndicates. (FYI: Donald Trump didn’t start fleecing Garden Staters until 1984.)

 

Burt Lancaster is our guide from romanticized past to squalid present and a future of misplaced hope. The story opens in Philadelphia, where another chiseler, David Matthews (Robert Joy), observes a drug drop in a phone booth (remember those?), steals the package, and heads to Atlantic City to sell it, with his pregnant girlfriend Chrissie (Hollis McLaren) in tow. He’s actually married to Chrissie’s sister, Sally (Susan Sarandon), who left her loser husband, moved to Atlantic City, and dreams of leaving her dead-end oyster bar job and becoming a blackjack dealer at a soon-to-be-opened casino. She’s taking card-dealing lessons from Joseph (Michel Piccoli), a haughty Frenchman and is trying to learn French in the bargain. Sally also has an interesting evening ritual. She stands in front the window by her kitchen sink, squeezes fresh lemons, and proceeds to rub the juice on her neck, shoulders, and breasts. She is unaware that her neighbor, Lou, watches her.

 

David and the hippie-meets-New Age Chrissie show up and Sally wants them gone, but relents and allows them to crash at her apartment for a few days. She knows nothing about David’s theft of drugs00. Not much good can come from a peeping Tom neighbor, a drug-dealing estranged husband who ripped off drugs from a Philly crime syndicate, an about-to-pop sister, a condemned apartment, and a pipedream. The appearance of some truly dangerous gangsters won’t help matters either. All of this opens the door for an unusual relationship with an unlikely protector, Lou. He too lives in a fantasy world–one that he has repeated so often it passes for truth, though all he’s done for many years is run low-level numbers rackets for a bigger hood, and walk the dog and rub the feet of faded celebrity Grace Pinza (Kate Reid).

 

Atlantic City takes us to unexpected places. It got five Oscar nominations at the 1982 ceremonies but didn’t win any, as On Golden Pond gobbled up a lot of awards. In retrospect, that film seems so much like a Hallmark weepie that one could say that Lancaster and Sarandon got jobbed. There is a reason why Lancaster was a Hollywood legend. His was a performance in which braggadocio, pathos, bathos, and kindness intermingled. That’s a tough balance to maintain, but he did so effortlessly. Sarandon also threaded a small needle, hers between conflicting traits such as determination, naiveté, wholesomeness, and a bit of double-dealing.

 

Atlantic City was mostly praised in its time and the performances of the four principals–add Reid to the mix–remain impressive. Some other things don’t stand up as well. Joy went on to do some TV work, much of it in Canada, but he’s pretty stiff in the film and McLaren is downright embarrassing. The late-70s fashions are also pretty hard on the eyes and the pursuing thugs are cardboard cutouts. The film probably also suffered at Oscar time from being a joint Canadian-French venture. (Hollywood always prefers to honor itself.) It also suffered from a romance/comedy/drama blend that doesn’t quite gel.

 

Another reason to check it out now (or revisit it) is for its implied warning about casino promises. Aside from a few Native-American reservations, casinos are like the blackjack table: the house wins and both punters and bandwagon-jumping politicians get fleeced. (Hello Bangor, Camden, Detroit, Springfield!) Atlantic City and its ocean might or might not have been something back then, but if given a choice of criminals like Lou or the gambling syndicates, I’d rather bet on the former.

 

Rob Weir

World Music:Nordic Fiddlers Bloc, Moving Sound, Coreyah, Madou Toure, Afrika Mamas, Chinese Folk Music

 

 

April sometimes holds surprises–like a snow shower when daffodils are in bloom–so it’s an apt time to review the new album Bonfrost–a Shetland Islands term for a hard frost–by Nordic Fiddlers Bloc (NFB). If NFB’s music is unfamiliar, the trio is Kevin Henderson from the Shetlands (Scotland), Olav Luksengård Mjelva from Norway, and Anders Hall from Sweden. Mjelva plays a hardanger fiddle. It has nine (or eight) strings, though you have to look closely to see them. Four are played as one would any fiddle tune, but their vibrations cause the underlying strings to vibrate harmonically and with an eerie quality.  Hall plays viola and an octave fiddle, the latter of which is strung to sound lower. Several of the tunes are polskas, which is often translated as “polka.” Though both are often in ¾ time, a polska is a Scandinavian dance that’s generally more formal than what most think of as a polka. These are reminders that the feel of NFB instrumentals is often that of a folk/classical hybrid. The new NFB album is a dozen gems that includes three solo pieces, one from each musician. It opens with “Schottische Kerlou,” a lively dance tune penned by piper Calum Stewart who now lives in Brittany and has a suitable Scottish/Breton feel. Two of my favorite pieces are “Frygg,” a tribute to Frigg, a superb Finnish band; and the gorgeous title track. Available videos are currently scare, so trust me when I say the latter captures the quiet locked-down feel of winter. Plucked strings and bell-like tones make for a magical blend that’s at once forlorn, yet hopeful. You can, however, see the lads on “Adam’s Nightmare” and observe the balance between Henderson’s jauntiness and the moodiness provided by Mjelva and Hall. The hardanger gets a workout on “Bas-Pelles Eriks Brudpolska” and will quickly hear why it’s also a favored wedding march. For pure fun, try “Myrstacken,” which starts slowly but doesn’t stay in said tempo for very long. The word is Swedish for “anthill” and NFB make a mountain of it. Savor this release for musicianship of the highest order.

 

 

A Moving Soud is a Taiwanese band, though their newest record Songs Beyond Words sometimes sounds Indian. They are often where modern and meditative meet and mix. Its centerpiece is Mia Hsieh, a willowy singer and dancer who sometimes drifts into the music to offer bird-like vocalizations and at others is front and center directing the action. “Silk Road” and “Ganesh” are decidedly on the meditative side of things. You will hear Hsieh but also instruments such as the two-stringed bowed erhu and the lute-like zhongruan, which sounds like an up-sized pipa. Check out the concert footage of “Fire Dance,” which is supplemented by the performance of an actual fire dancer, and a very supple one at that. Hsieh and the band have a lot of fun on “The Market Song” in which they recreate the sounds, bargaining, and controlled chaos of a Taiwanese agora. “Interplanetary Heart” also intrigues, with hand percussion evincing the thump of the universe. 

 

 

Coreyah is from South Korea, though much of its music is redolent of Indonesian gamelan in that it is trance-like and superlunary. This sextet from Seoul sometimes gets tagged as a psychedelic band. I get that in the sense that their sunny dispositions and deliberately paced music conjures swaying dancers lost in a musical groove. But let’s not imagine the Grateful Dead. Rather than a guitar-driven band, Coreyah’s main melody instruments–played within a mix of minimal guitar and various percussion–are bird-like wooden flutes in the hands of Kim Dong Kun and the zither-like geomungo, which is played seated on the floor and plucked with a bamboo stick. The heart, though, is singer Ham Boyoung and she has a glorious voice that can be as delicate as a “Yellow Flower,” one of the songs from their new album Clap and Applause, but also catchy and filled with verve, as we also hear in said song. Listen carefully to her on “Good Dreams” and you will also notice that hers is a voice of many colors and ornaments. Watch Coreyah’s NPR Tiny Desk concert and I suspect that you too will be mesmerized by their infectious charm. 

 

 

Mamadou “Modou” Touré is the son of famed Senegalese musician Ousman Touré.

The son also rises, though his album Touki occasionally suffers lapses linked to uncertain focus for his band. Touré has a smooth and powerful voice and his songs explore his Senegalese roots, family, and identity. A few songs, like “Moon,” are in English but the bulk are in Wolof, Soninke, or French.  Touré plays an acoustic guitar and, depending upon your perspective, you might wonder if he sees himself as a folk singer, a folk rocker, an Afropop artist, or a jazz fusionist. The title track has elements of the latter, whereas "Mélokane" is laden with pop hooks, and “Noone” has an electric guitar interlude that feels forced. But there is no doubting the allure of his sunny vocals. 

 

 

Let’s hear it for the ladies. Afrika Mamas is six single mothers from South Africa shaped by the dream of group leader Ntombifuthi Lushaba to take their music to the world. That tale is told in “Iphupo.”  They will immediately put you in mind of Ladysmith Black Mambazo and that’s no accident. On Ilanga, the ensemble’s fourth record, Afrika Mamas sing of the challenges of everyday life such as being female singers in a male-dominated society, street vending, and the travails of miners. Songs such as “Isilingo” showcase their robust a cappella Township style and don’t assume the deep bass is a male vocalist! Many songs such as “Tshelamina” spotlight call-and-response singing, but there is diversity within them. Compare the former to “Sithwele Kanzima” in which the chorus sometimes switches roles with the leader. They also offer a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine” that’s a bit like Durban meets Motown.

 

 

 

Only in the West is “folk” music identified with singer/songwriters. In most places it means music of the folk–ordinary people. The Folk Music of China, Vol. 10 highlights indigenous peoples from Yunnan Province in the southwest of China, a region bordering Vietnam, Laos, Myanmar, and Tibet. Various singers from the Pumi, Lisu, and Nakhi peoples sing about things around which their lives revolve, including: vegetable searching, dragon worship, blooming Kapok flowers, shepherding, hunting, and weddings. These are untrained voices meant to accompany tasks or commemorate events and bear such straightforward titles as “Song of Transplanting Seedlings.” They are sparse–mostly a cappella or with minimal instrumentation–and demand patience. There are 28 tracks, but most are just over a minute in length. They may not be your cup of tea–they grow a lot of it in Yunnan–but they are folk music stripped to its basics.

 

Rob Weir

 

The Glass Key: Will It Snap?

 

THE GLASS KEY (1942)

Directed by Stuart Heisler

Paramount, 85 minutes, NR (pre-ratings)

★★★

 

 

In most film noir movies, it’s best not to trust anyone unless you are very sure of their character–very sure. The Glass Key is considered a noir classic and it’s one that plays off the theme of moral ambiguity. “Classic” might be too strong, but it is based upon a Dashiell Hammett story, and Hammett knew a few things about the elusive distinctions between right and wrong.

 

On the surface it seems straight forward. Reform candidate Ralph Henry (Moroni Olsen) is running for governor of a state that could use a good corruption cleansing. He entrusts his campaign to political fixer Paul Madvig (Brian Donlevy), a man who operates in the ethical gray zone, but nonetheless earns Ralph’s trust and is engaged to his daughter Janet (Veronica Lake). Soon, Madvig is so deeply ingratiated into Henry’s good graces that he brags to his associate Ned Beaumont (Alan Ladd) that he practically has the key to the Ralph’s house. Beaumont warns Paul to make sure it’s not a glass key– a term meaning one that it might snap and a metaphor for an act that can’t be undone. 

 

What can be done and undone is a theme of the film. Henry’s son Taylor (Richard Denny) is the classic family black sheep who everyone but daddy knows is worthless. Another noir standard is that it’s never a good idea to be on the outs with a gangster and Taylor has racked up some significant debt to  local thug Nick Varna (Joseph Calleia), who is just fine with the state’s crooked politics and worries that Madvig might get Ralph Henry elected. Janet’s not exactly a peach either. She wears Paul’s engagement ring, but he’s challenged in the couth department and Janet prefers Ned, though he’s too loyal to Paul to tread on his turf.

 

When Taylor becomes his best self–a corpse–the question arises as to who offed him. Varna has an alibi and all signs point to Paul, who vigorously denies it. The allegations though, are enough to steer Ed away and Varna tries to recruit him. Janet is another enticement and we can’t help but wonder whose side she’s on. The Glass Key becomes one of those tales in which any of a number of people might wish Taylor dead–including family members and friends–and not even District Attorney Farr (Donald McBride) trusts that evidence and suspects match. Like Farr, you might not expect the ultimate resolution.

 

The performances of Ladd and Lake stand out in the film. Ladd never quite cracked the A-List in his day, but managed to get steady work in Hollywood in roles such as he played in The Glass Key: a brooding, but steady guy whose inner qualities rather than conventional good looks made him attractive. He was only 5’5” –not exactly Cary Grant territory– but was often paired with Lake, who was just 4’11.” Lake is probably best remembered for her luxurious peek-a-boo blonde mane, but she also exuded qualities associated with a femme fatale: snark, slinkiness, cleavage, and an ever-present air of danger. In The Glass Key, Ladd and Lake smolder rather than sizzle, because that’s what their respective parts demanded. Donleavy is also quite good. He’s oily, but he keeps us guessing whether he’s just an effective political operative or as crooked as an elbow filled with fish hooks.

 

The Glass Key is a solid noir film, though not it’s a bit like Ladd in that it’s not quite top-tier. As a film, it can be confusing if you’re not paying close attention. Jonathan Latimer’s script is problematic, though it might not have been his fault. Hammett’s novel was a heralded work, but one that was rougher and had fuzzier lines between right and wrong. The Hollywood Code of the day had strict standards about how crime was presented. Beaumont gets a small makeover for the film, but it’s just enough to soften him. Ditto Janet, who is more duplicitous in the novel. But assuming that Hammett isn’t at the top of your reading list, the film version of The Glass Key will do you. I doubt it will destroy your faith in politics; more likely, it will confirm what you’ve long suspected.

 

Rob Weir   

Experience the Magic of Glasstastic

 

 

GLASSTASTIC

Brattleboro Museum and Art Center

Through June 15, 2021

 

For the past ten years, the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center has housed one of the most innovative education-meets-art projects imaginable. Kids from across the country in grades K-6 draw imaginary creatures and write about them. In turn, a committee chooses a few dozen or so, and glass artists render them in 3-D. This year's exhibit spotlights 27 of these wonderfully whimsical and inventive critters. It's a toss of the coin which is more magical, the work of the professional artists or the imaginations of the kids. The works range from the silly to the scary and the touching to what might be called burgeoning political awareness.

 

Here's a small sample:

 

Rachel Cousino’s “Biwwy” is a doughnut crossed with candy corn. Biwwy has a small brain but a big heart, the latter of which is used to help people like the homeless. 

 

 

 

“Snoogle” by Sarah Balint-Wohl enjoys the company of others and likes to live in a field of flowers for he can hide from predators.

 

 

 

One of my favorites stories is the “Flower Cat “by Aliana Miller. Allow me to quote her: “One day there was a little girl whose mother was sick. She went outside to get some flowers for her mom. But then out popped a flower cat! The girl picked flowers for her mom, and the cat asked why. ‘Because,’ the girl said ‘I want my mom to feel better.’ The cat said, ‘you can give the flowers to her but I have healing powers. So I can use my healing powers to heal your mom so she's not sick anymore.’ The flower cat and the girl became best friends forever.”

 

 

Gertrude, a monster designed by Timmy, has spikes and gripping feet so he can climb. Raspberries are Gertrude’s favorite food is raspberries and he can run 63 mph. We don't know why Gertrude is a he, but who cares?

 

 

 

One of my favorites is “The Flying Lunchbox” from Marleigh Vose. Anyone who has ever left lunch on the counter needs one of these. All you have to do is say, “On lunch!” and it uses its wing, invisible feet, and six eyes to find you. Plus, it will make food for you.

 

 

 

One of the more elaborate creatures, “Swirly,” was designed by Ava. It lives in Swirly Town on Planet Swirly and likes to sit in the grass and watch the sunset, eat fruit and be happy. 

 

 

 

August Davis drew what looks to be a narwal named “August Junior.” that for some reason likes to play basketball.

 

 

 

John Max Malcovsky drew a creature called “Tigon,” which could have come from a medieval bestiary. It has wings like a dragon but the rest of him looks like a tiger. He hunts, but he also likes to explore caves. 

 

 

 

 

Olivia Sawyer drew a creature called “Drake.” According to Olivia, “Drake is creative, happy, funny, and loves to sleep all day. When not sleeping he likes to bake cookies, draw, and give hugs.” Olivia tells us, he “always likes to eat a lot of cookie dough, doesn't everybody?” And because he likes to look good, he wears a top hat.

 

 

 

Kudos to the glass artist whose craft is everywhere on display. Not all artists deign to enter the realms and minds of children, so glass hats off to: Mariel Bass, Josh Bernbaum, Marta Bernbaum, Jocelyn Brown, Robert Burch, Dominique Caissie, David Colton, Dan Coyle, Robert Dane, Allie Dercoli, Robert Du Grenier, Sandy Dukeshire, Alissa Faber, Nic Flavin, Westley Fleming, Zak Grace, Chris Hubbard, Claire Kelly, Jordana Korsen, Lynn Latimer, Sally Prasch, Bryan Randa, Chris Sherwin, Randi Solin Jen Violette, and Andrew Weill.

 

As an added bonus, another BMAC gallery has a selection of photos from past exhibits.

 

 

Mike Bond's Semi-fictional Look at the Fifties and Sixties

 

 

America, Volume I  (2021)

By Mike Bond

Big City Press, 383 pages.

★★★

 

 

 

Is innocence a good thing? I suppose it depends on how you measure what we choose to ignore. America, Volume I is as advertised, a fictional waltz through the decades after World War II through the late 1960s. Mike Bond’s twist is to focus his tale on two boys and two girls as they come of age in a nation quite different from that of their childhood. (It is the first of a planned multi-volume saga.)

 

A simplistic–and wildly inaccurate­–take is that the United States went from victory culture and world leadership in the ‘50s to a nation divided in the ‘60s by radicals, hippies, and protesters. In said view, the 1950s were a values-centered golden age, and the 1960s one in which permissiveness, disrespect, and chaos ruined the country. An alternative view is it the ‘60s tackled real problems previously swept under the rug: racism, sexism, poverty, cultural sterility, and eco-degradation – not to mention an inane Cold War.

 

The first part of Bond’s novel, though set in New Jersey, riffs off of Huckleberry Finn. y. Troy, whose father died in the war against Japan, hates the Catholic orphanage where he is housed. The priests are sadistic, the place is like a prison, and he's a frequent runaway. In one of his leave-taking sojourns, he meets Mick, a Tom Sawyer-like risk-taker. He and Troy hit it off, but Troy is caught and returned to the orphanage. In another attempt, he and Mick meet again and decide to run away to Florida. They have many harrowing adventures and it would have been worse had they not met two African-American tramps, Joe and Molly, who shared their food and showed them how to hop trains. Eventually though, they abandon their quixotic quest and Mick's father brings them back to New Jersey. He and his wife decide that Troy can live with them, and he becomes the brother Mick never had, though he has a sister named Tara. As part of the extended O'Brien clan, Troy is as focused and goal-driven as Mick is carefree and careless. The O'Briens live on a farm and are both down-to-earth and earthy. Dad is self-reliant and distrusts authority, Mom is kind, and various relatives pop in and out to flesh out a 1950s panorama. Despite their suspicions, the O'Briens believe in the American Dream and are deeply patriotic.

 

Filmmaker Michael Apted (from Aristotle) once said, “Give me a child until he is seven and I will you the man.” He didn't say girl and woman, but he should have. Troy, Mick, Tara, and Mick’s girl crush Daisy fall into Apted’s category. Readers may find the first part of Bond’s novel the least realistic. The O'Briens and Troy talk as if they are indeed from Twain’s Missouri; their speech is certainly not like any New Jersey dialect I’ve ever heard. I don't agree with Bond’s linguistic strategy, but he is setting us up for loss of innocence. At one point, Dad remarks, “religion causes wars." Call it folk wisdom or a political screed, but religion takes it on the chin in the book. And so does the cherished myth that hard work pays off. I don't wish to disclose too much, but I will say if there's a reason you don't hear much about small farmers in New Jersey anymore.

 

To return to the idea that personalities are formed early, Mick, who hates school, nonetheless does well without studying much. He remains addicted to danger, just like the kid who jumped from railroad trestles, got close to venomous copperheads, and drove fast cars. Troy, who romanticizes his dead father, wishes to enlist in the military. Tara, a rebel at early age, will go to UCal Berkeley, and if you know history, you will recognize it is a place where conformity was on the outs. Daisy will also wend her way through trials and transformations.

 

Bond salts the novel with the events of the day. The assassination of President Kennedy was, for many, a turning point. Mick observes, “Like a walking cadaver, America carried on in a stunned, hollow and bereaved world …. Sorrow remained but fury grew." We read of other traumas: civil rights unrest, the murder of icons, Mississippi Freedom Summer, drugs, etc. If the first part of the book is about innocence, the last part is the death thereof.

 

The novel is equal parts fascinating and uneven. It's a bit like Mick in that it's philosophical yet opinionated. Bond has given himself an ambitious task and there is a decided tonal change from the folksy quasi-Twain opening chapters and the historical whirlwind of the last part of the novel. It's an open question as to whether this shift is too mechanistic. I suspect, though, the crux lies in Bond’s choice quote from Nietzsche: “To the extent an ideal has been falsely worshiped, reality has been robbed of his value, its meaning and its truth."

 

Rob Weir

The Midnight Library too much of a Hopscotch Novel

 

THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY (2020)

By Matt Haig

Penguin/HarperCollins, 304 pages.

★★★

 

 

 The Midnight Library is a fantasy novel, but not of the usual sort. Not many fantasy books stray into philosophy, gestalt psychology, or quantum physics. Nor do they open with an epigraph from Sylvia Plath: “Between life and death there is a library. And within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived.”

 

Plath’s library is the central hook of Haig’s tale. His protagonist is 35-year-old Londoner Nora Seed, the very embodiment of ennui. Nora has a flat affect, which works to anesthetize her from life’s disappointments. She cannot commit, hence her life is a series of flights. She, her brother Joe, and several friends had a band on the verge of a record contract until she, the lead singer, got cold feet. Now she works in a used record shop and is about to be fired. She was engaged to Dan, and called it off on the eve of the wedding. Now she's an introvert living alone with her cat, Voltaire. She gives a youngster piano lessons, but can't connect with him or show up on time and stands to lose that gig as well. She was once a champion swimmer with potential to go to the Olympics, but gave it up. Detect a pattern? Nora’s life is one big “what if?” trail of flops.

 

When Voltaire is run over, Nora sees no point anymore and decides to kill herself.

Imagine her surprise to find herself in a very different kind of Purgatory–an immense library staffed by Mrs. Elm, a school librarian who once believed in her and helped her discover things that once interested her. Mrs. Elm explains to Nora that her personal Book of Regrets gives her access to try other lives that she passed up. There is probably a finite set of chances, but Nora can pull any life from the shelf and pursue it.

 

Some might recognize in this the multiverse theory at work. Nora tests numerous paths; among them: rockstar, an Olympian and motivational speaker, Cambridge professor, and glaciologist. She takes lovers, including a schlock actor upon whom she once had a fan crush and Hugo Lèfevre, a “slider” like she going between alt-lives. In other tryouts she’s married, to Dan, who owns a rural tavern; to a cute-but-flaky dog lover; to a rich doctor; and even to a handsome Latin vintner. The sticking point is the butterfly effect; that is, her changes impact others. In some scenarios Voltaire is still alive; in others, he’s dead as is her beloved brother. In each, she is unknown to most of those she knew when she was “alive.” The butterfly effect also means she has no knowledge of people, events, or backstories prior to her arrival at a particular moment in time. Nora must try to piece together things to avoid seeming to be demented.

 

Another stipulation is that if she returns to the library, she cannot take out the same book again. This is not ideal for someone who can't commit. How long can she continue sliding? Hugo has been going back-and-forth between different lives for a long time, but Mrs. Elm reminds Nora it's different for everyone. If library collapses before she makes a final decision, she will get her first wish: death.

 

The Midnight Library is a high-concepts novel. Notice my use of the plural. Haig has so many irons in them the fire that he is ultimately like Nora Seed in that he can't quite make up his mind where to take his novel. This results in narrative and conceptual hopscotch in which there are intriguing surfaces, but not much depth. It's as if he stitched together a bit of Sylvia Plath with the movie Groundhog Day, and made detours into speculative physics and philosophy's greatest hits. For instance, Voltaire's resurrections and deaths are ham-handed winks to the Schrodinger's cat conundrum. An NPR review hit the nail on the head by calling The Midnight Library a tale told in a straight line with no twists that ends pretty much where you’d predict it to go. To me, Haig’s internal moralizing feels like he’s coopting Fredrik Backman’s sweetness without his folksy wisdom or his explorations into humanity’s flawed nature.

 

The saving grace is that this is a goes-down-easy novel with occasional insights that tempt us to see it as weightier than it is. It's a quick read with the potential to spark personal reflections. Those will be the truly profound things to come out of your reading.

 

Rob Weir  

April 2021 Album of the Month: The Sound of the True North

 

 

 Various Artists

The Sound of the True North

True North Records/NoiseTrade 

 

 

 

Ever feel like you’re in the 18^th century–1752 to be precise–when the calendar changed from the Julian to the Gregorian and 11 days disappeared? In our case, though, an entire year slipped away. My 2021 album of the month was actually released in 2019, but it’s worth turning back the clock for this glorious lost-in-Covid release.

 

I’m not usually a fan of compilations, but the Mississauga, Ontario-based True North Records consistently puts out fine music and there are no dogs yelping on this fine sampler. Talk about opening big. Buffy Ste. Marie is 80-years-old, but you’d never know it from listening to “You’ve Got to Run,” which also features Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq. This is First Nations music at its defiant finest and I challenge you to sit or be apolitical still while listening to it. Ste. Marie’s voice has lost some of its vibrato, but that’s actually a good thing, as that form of high warbling is out of style.

 

Where to go from there? How about the well-known but woefully underappreciated Bruce Cockburn, who shows anyone who doesn’t already know that he’s no slouch when it comes to serious acoustic blues. “Blind Willie” is a classic that sounds amazing from his Cockburn’s hands. Juno Award winner Craig Cardiff offers “To Be Safe, Loved & Home,” a hopeful, uplifting, and timely song. Leeroy Stagger’s “Hey Hey! (Song for Gord)” is an earworm in the very best way. It’s about the Gordon Downie from The Tragically Hip and honors the departed rocker in a joyous, infectious fashion does so in a folk/rock song. Like a lot of Canadian rock, The Mahones have the sense to know that rock is meant to move you, not just impress. The Mahones are a bit like Great Big Sea is that they roll folk, rock, and Celtic into one big party.

 

If you know anything about Canadian music, you know that the surname Rankin is synonymous with great musicianship. Jimmie Rankin checks in with the country-laced “Loving You Never Gets Old.” That old mandolin sizzle and Rankin is so spirited that you’ll be picking grass out of your mane. For pure fun, it’s hard to beat Old Man Luedecke’s tongue-in-cheek bluegrass “Easy Money.” Listen beyond the opening and I’ll bet you’ll find yourself walking about singing its chorus: I dream about easy/I dream about easy money…. Yeah, said no banjo picker not named Steve Martin, ever. Need your soul to shake down to its roots?

 

Crystal Shawanda sounds like Aretha Franklin reincarnated on “When It Comes to Love.” You’d never guess from the way she sings about the American South, Motown, and Boston that she’s from a First Nations island of just 3,200 souls in southern Ontario.

“Rise Again.” Matt Andersen’s soulful and gospel-influenced “Quarter on the Ground” and Jeremy Benjamin’s piano-driven, sensitive “Something Broke” round out an amazing collection of songs. This stuff is good enough to resurrect the sullied reputation of mix tapes. 

 

Rob Weir