Lisa Jackson's Older Novel Skewers Celebrity Culture

 

 

 

EXPECTING TO DIE (2017)

By Lisa Jackson

473 pages

★★★★

 

To paraphrase John Kerry, who among us does not love Big Foot? In Grizzly Falls, Montana, that would be detectives Regan Pescoli and Selena Alvarez. The rest of the town is either scared out of their wits, believers, or boosters who hear the tourism cash register ringing when Big Foot emerges as the prime suspect in a series of crimes. Pescoli and her now-husband Santana think Big Foot is superstitious nonsense. Regan (literally) lacks the time to take Big Foot seriously. She is closing in on 40 and her ballooning belly is lampooned by town busybodies who think her advanced age for motherhood is embarrassing. No wonder Pescoli wears her raging hormones on her badged sleeve. Selena is a rationalist who doesn’t welcome upheaval because she’s next in charge when her boss goes on maternity leave, though Reagan is determined to restore order before checking into the birthing room.

 

It’s personal, as Regan’s teenaged daughter Bianca from her previous marriage was allegedly chased by Big Foot. It’s bad enough that Destiny, one of Bianca’s classmates, is missing but Bianca and a bunch of her high school classmates returned to the forbidden area where Destiny was last seen to “hang out” (read drinking, smoking pot, making out, and scaring each other).  As Bianca is navigating her way out of the woods, she hears movement and senses she’s being stalked. A rattlesnake? A grizzly bear? A cougar? All could be found in the mountains of West Montana. Imagine Bianca’s terror when she glimpses a hairy creature over seven feet tall that smells like a garbage dump. My guess is that you, like Bianca, wouldn’t stick around to get a closer look. She tears off through the forest, stumbles, gets up, runs, and keeps going until she mangles her ankle, tumbles into a small creek, and onto Destiny’s putrefying body. Despite the pain, Bianca screams and speeds back to a parking lot filled with cop cars and reports her find, despite the plea of some of her peers to keep quiet. Not happening; her mom is a cop after all, even if she is embarrassed by her mom.

 

Regan retains her doubts about Big Foot, but somebody or something has killed Destiny. Now imagine being a teen again. Not much happens in Grizzly Falls, but Bianca’s peer group is pretty much like those elsewhere, a volatile mix of recent grads who didn’t go to college, good kids, dare devils, preening beauty queens, scholars, idiots, and entitled jerks and jocks with parents who are even worse. You’d think, though, that young folks would finally avoid venturing out of town, but you’d be wrong. Some of the boys want to act like they’re not scared, and adrenaline, peer pressure, and a taste of freedom are powerful lures. It’s just a matter of time until another kid goes missing and another attack takes place. The local Big Foot Believers club is ready to lock, load, and go hunting. In other words, Grizzly Falls is facing mass hysteria. Can it get any worse?

 

Yep, all that’s needed is hucksterism, an aggressive journalist, and Pescoli’s slacker ex-husband Luke and his much younger second wife. Luke is happy to exploit his biological daughter (Bianca) in pursuit of easy money and a brush with fame. Welcome to the age of greed and “reality” TV. Barclay Spinx is the “host” of a show that “exposes” mysteries. He wants to restage Bianca’s flight for Big Foot Territory! Montana and his TV crew descend on Grizzly Falls like a plague of locusts. Soon, everybody is town including the mayor is anxious to be interviewed, be on TV, or explain why their daughter would be more telegenic than Bianca. The fact that that Regan and Santana want nothing to do with such a sleazy project serves only to encourage erstwhile usurpers to crawl out the woodwork. Meanwhile, Pescoli and Alvarez have several additional murders and missing persons investigations to solve.

 

Is Big Foot discovered? You’ll have to discover that for yourself, just as you’ll have to judge the plausibility of author Lisa Jackson’s mystery. IMHO, Jackson absolutely nails the cult of celebrity, the tawdry aspects of smalltown life, hormone-poisoned teenage boys, jealousy-inflamed girls and young women, and how “reality” can be warped. Think Mark Twain’s “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg” for the age of television. Expecting to Die is an incisive indictment of American culture.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

Sliding Doors a Look at the Butterfly Effect

 

 

 

SLIDING DOORS (1998)

Directed by Peter Howitt

Miramax, 99 minutes, PG-13 (adult situations)

★★★

 

Movie themes often run in cycles. In 1981, Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski made Blind Chance, a film about the famed butterfly theory. It holds that changing the smallest thing from the past, even the flapping of a butterfly’s wings, could alter the future significantly. My favorite butterfly effect movie is Run, Lola, Run (1998). It was part of a mini-trend of similarly themed films: Me, Myself, I (1999), Happenstance (2000), Donnie Darko (2001), Mr. Nobody (2009) …. Some, like Donnie Darko, confused audiences; others ranged from intriguing to middling.

 

Place Sliding Doors in that last category, which is better than its official designation as a Rom-Com. It’s only a romantic comedy in one of its two timelines; one would be better labeled a tragedy. Its focal point is Helen Quilley (Gwyneth Paltrow), who has been fired by her public relations firm in London. On the elevator she drops an earring, which is picked up and returned by a stranger. She heads for the Tube, and misses her train by a split second. These things alone qualify as a bad day on its own, but she returns to her London apartment to find her slacker boyfriend Gerry Flannigan (John Lynch) climaxing with Lydia (Jeanne Triplehorn), his ex-American girlfriend. Helen walks out.

 

In a rewind, Helen makes the train and finds herself in conversation with James Hammersmith (John Hannah), the stranger who picked up her earring on the elevator. Helen finds James funny, daft, and kind. On her trip home she is mugged, allowing Gerry to dodge discovery by minutes, though he leaves clues requiring awkward movements to conceal. By then, we already hate Gerry as a lazy sponge who is being kept by Helen while he’s not writing the book that is supposed to assure their financial futures.

 

In each scenario, Helen ends up seeing through Gerry’s shallow veneer and staying with her best friend Anna (Zara Turner) as she tries to sort out her life. To help keep the timelines straight, script writer/director Peter Hewitt has one Helen coifed in long, straight hair and looking classically “cute.” In the alt-timeline Anna convinces Helen to move on from Gerry. Helen marks the shift by getting her hair cut short in a stylish manner and assumes an air of glamor, despite being exhaustive from working several jobs. In each timeline, Helen comes to prefer James, while Gerry pours out his tribulations to his mate Russell (Douglas McFerren). As opposed to Anna’s sympathy for Helen, Russell laughs hysterically at Gerry and tells him what an idiot he is. In each timeline, Helen discovers she’s pregnant, but in one Gerry’s the father and the other it’s James. (Even Lydia gets into the act!)

 

Things happen that disrupt rom-com formulae. Neither Helen will deliver a baby. In one she falls down stairs and miscarries; in another she is struck by a van. Whatever her fate, though–even one in which she thinks James has been playing her for a fool–it is James who is steadfast in a good way, not the obsequious Gerry.

 

As in most butterfly effect tales, viewers need to be alert; hairstyles alone won’t tip off essential details less obvious than Helen never should have been in a relationship with Gerry in the first place. The title Sliding Doors is clever in its dual meaning–the subway door opening or failure to do so is our metaphorical “butterfly”–but it also references the way the film cuts between the two Helens and, less obviously, the way James’ mind slides between light-hearted and serious. Although Sliding Doors is not likely to be thought of as a significant film, Gwyneth Paltrow is pretty good in it. Because of her career in fashion and her parentage (actress Blythe Danner and director/producer Bruce Paltrow) we expect her to do sophistication well, but she was also convincing as a more earthy and naïve young professional. In addition, her English accent is very convincing. John Hanna is amusing, but would have been more endearing with his manic side tempered a bit. John Lynch is supposed to disgust us and does, though he too could have dialed it back to help us understand why Helen was so blind to his quintessential jerkiness. For me Zara Turner struck the right balance between comedy and seriousness.

 

Sliding Doors is no Run, Lola, Run, but it’s diverting.

 

Rob Weir

 

Ann Lee an Ahistorical Dud!

 

 

 

THE TESTAMENT OF ANN LEE (2025)

Directed by Mona Fastvold

Searchlight Pictures, 137 minutes, R (brief nudity, violence, adult subject matter)

★

 

I won’t beat around the bush; I hated this movie. I give some credit to Amanda Seyfried for taking a gutsy role and for her vocal dexterity and to William Rexer for his excellent cinematography, but The Testament of Ann Lee should have never been made. It does an injustice to Seyfried, history, tolerable music, biography, and 18^th century faith.

The film is putatively about the Shakers, an 18^th century religious group that began in England and migrated to America under the leadership of Ann Lee. It is often categorized as a cult, a term that carries negative assumptions untrue of the Shakers. Officially they were the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, which is something most Christians believe will occur. The “Shaker” handle comes from opponents who labelled them “Shaking Quakers,” an attempt to link them with an older Pietist group. They bear some resemblance to Quakers in that both broke with the Church of England and emphasized direct connections to God via the Holy Spirit unmediated by ministers or congregations. Their form of “ecstatic” faith was, however, closer to Pentecostalism in their gyrations, emotionalism, speaking in tongues, and prophecies.

Christians have historically been unclear about questions like the end of the world and the final judgment. Shakers were among numerous millenarian groups that believed they were to restore the world, suffer a period of persecution, and await the Second Coming of Jesus. A 1,000-year reign of peace would ensue before a final battle between angels and demons, the sealing of Hell, and the end of the world*. Among the things that made the Shakers controversial was their practices of celibacy, asceticism, pacifism, communal living, and the equality of women. The latter came from the belief that God was both male and female, with “Mother” Ann Lee the female analogue to Jesus. In their view, this meant they were on the cusp of the 1,000-year countdown.

The movie follows Lee from her pious childhood in England to demise at age 48 at Niskayuna (Colonie), New York in 1784. Seyfried plays the adult Lee and highlights her various tribulations–traumatization from seeing her parents having intercourse, the loss of four children before their first birthday, her inability to convince her husband Abraham (Christopher Abbott) of the virtues of sexual abstinence, parting with followers who also rejected celibacy, the burning of a Shaker community in Petersham, Massachusetts, and her brother William’s (Lewis Pullman) fatal beating. She too died from a beating and humiliation shortly after her brother’s death. If the Shakers strike you as too odd to survive, know that they attracted numerous converts, took in orphaned children, and formed 19 communities in the United States. According to estimates, there were 2-4,000 members at their apex. (Today, there remain two elderly women at the Sabbathday Lake community in Maine.)

Director Mona Fastvold gets many of the chronology semi-right, but at the cost of weird decision-making and histrionic depictions of Shaker practices. It is true enough that they danced and sang fervently, but we don’t know exactly how they behaved in those roles. Perhaps they were odd, but is it any stranger than making a musical about the Shakers? Seyfried has a lovely voice, but the music is atonal and the lyrics repetitive and unpoetic. When Fastvold shows the Shakers in the throes of ecstatic bliss, it looks more like outtakes from Moulin Rouge mixed with a clothed orgy than a sacred practice. Mona Fastvold is no Baz Luhrman.

Movies need not be 100% faithful to the past, but when they depart too far from the accepted norm, they fall apart under their own weight. Ann was illiterate and left behind no records or instruction manuals. Fastvole uses the unknown as license for theatrical speculation. To venture another analogy, Ann Lee is like La La Land in Shaker drag. 

 

Ann Lee?

 

Not Ann Lee

 

Memo: Ecstatic dancing is not choreographed. In the period before photography and among people who eschewed vanity and self-adulation, we also lack a reliable idea about Lee’s appearance. She was said to be plain, which Seyfried is decidedly not! Many of the exteriors and interiors were shot at Hancock Shaker Village near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. This includes the round barn, which wasn’t built until 1826, more than 40 years after Lee’s death.

Rob Weir

 

*  There are at least four variants of how earth’s end will occur!

 

Photos Into Kiddie Books at the Eric Caryle Museum

 

 

 

PHOTOS TO PICTURES (and random stuff)

Eric Caryle Museum

Amherst MA

It’s been a long time since I was a kid. Back then, children’s book choices were much more limited. I’m sure there were others, but I only recall Mother Goose rhymes, expurgated Grimm’s fairytales, Little Golden Storry Books, and Dr. Seuss. Today’s kids have many things that tickle their imaginations, a gamut that runs from the magical stories of Jane Yolen and Mo Willems to Beverly Cleary and Roald Dahl. In my working-class family we didn’t even have A. A. Milne, C. S. Lewis, or Beatrix Potter; they were too “limey” (English) for my 1950s-early 1960s family. The closest we got to a Harry Potter-like stories were greatly fictionalized Knights of the Round-table stories. Nor did we have anything from the pen of Eric Caryle.

I only learned about any of these when my nieces were small and former students started having kids. By then, I was a bit long in the tooth to put myself on an extended reading diet of present-day kids’ writers., though a former colleague specialized in children’s books and tried to tell me it was serious literature that was miles beyond Little Golden Story Books, My deeper education came from exploring Western Massachusetts and learning more about Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) who was from Springfield. Then, in 2002, the Eric Caryle Museum of Picture Book Art opened in Amherst. Caryle lived much of his life across the Connecticut River in my town of Northampton. Even I had heard of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, but it was the word “art” that grabbed me.

I loved comic books once I got out of toddlerdom, but until the Teenage Ninja Turtle creators opened a now-closed (sigh!) museum in Northampton, I never thought of storybooks or comics as real “art.” But when Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird dumped the “comics” label for the Ninjas and called them “sequential art,” a lightbulb went on in my head. I went there often and to other museums spotlighting the art involved in my favorite childhood Loony Tunes and Hanna Barbera cartoons. I still haven’t read many recent children’s books, but I absolutely love the art work. If I’m honest, I have to admit that I’m ready to be four-years-old again!

Trips to the Eric Caryle Museum doesn’t make me physically younger, but it does allow me to set free my inner four-year-old. I knew from an artist friend that he and his colleagues often work from photographs and a current exhibition at the Caryle Museum highlights how pictures and set ups are (and have been) the basis for the illustrations in children’s lit.

I don’t know the books associated with the following, but I’m fascinated by how photographs and playing with fruit made their way into books. 

 

The above two are from Peter Buckley's Cesare of Italy (1954). They bespeak the poverty but vivid thoughts of Cesare's mind. 

The above two are from Nina Crews setup shots of a young Black child. the top is, of course, "Jack and the "Candle Stick," the bottom is the poem that begins "to market to market..." 
 

Saxton Freyman 

 

This and the header shot are from Children of the Tsaatan Reindeer Herders, a book for kids in Inner Mongolia. Tsaatan means "he who has reindeer." 

 

 

 

The Caryle also has original illustrations that now hang on the wall and are often as detailed as much of the so-called “fine art” that adorns major metropolitan art museums.

 

Robert Lawson, "Little Prince Toofat" 

 

Trina Hyman 

 

 

 

And here are a few others that I simply found endearing and brought a smile to my face.

 

Edward Gorey

 

Eric Caryle

 

 

Rob Weir

 

Peter Robinson Keeps Readers on Their Toes

 

 

 

CARELESS LOVE (2019)

By Peter Robinson

★★★★

 

I’m always on the lookout for mystery writers who are new to me. Every time I go to the transfer station, I check the shelves of free books left behind by folks who donate them rather than throw them away and grab titles that intrigue me. I had heard of Peter Robinson but had never read him, but after sampling Careless Love, I grabbed another one last week.

I think I may have seen an episode or two of DCI Banks on ITV when visiting Scotland, though it hasn’t been aired since 2016. DCI stands for Detective Chief Inspector, the top investigation officer among British police units who is outranked only by a Detective Superintendent. (They are mostly administrators.) When we meet the debonair Alan Banks in Yorkshire, he is driving a police car and bemoaning the fact that his beloved Porsche is in the garage to investigate a report of an abandoned car in Belderfell Pass with a young woman’s body in it. She is dressed to the nines as if she were on the way to a party. That’s odd because the same car had a crash at the same location the previous week and its owners had called for help. Banks interviews them, but they haven’t the slightest idea who she is or how she ended up behind the wheel of their undrivable Ford Focus covered with POLICE AWARE yellow tape. Banks takes an instant dislike to owner Trevor Vernon, who makes a racist remark about a black investigator with Banks, but it’s pretty clear that neither Vernon nor his wife are likely suspects. They do discover after putting her picture on the news that the dead woman is Adrienne Munro, a 19-year-old student at Eastvale College.

Nothing adds up for Banks. Everyone he interviews–family, friends, professors– says the same thing: Adrienne was a serious and stellar student who worked hard, seldom went out, and though quite beautiful, had no serious boyfriend and kept a low social profile. One female friend tells Banks that she had been stressed the previous year over money, but that she had just won a big award that had alleviated that woe. No one considered her a suicide risk. So how did she end up inside a crashed car in a remote area that’s not walkable to anywhere?

 

To add to the confusion, DI Annie Cabbot from an adjacent jurisdiction has a conundrum of her own. She’s trying to identify a mysterious corpse of a man found in a vale in the moors. He is in his 60s, well-dressed, and wearing expensive shoes that would be unsuitable for hiking in the moors. His injuries are consistent with having fallen off the path and down an embankment. Yet, there are no tire marks or explanation of how he would have gotten to such an off-the-road location. When he is identified as Laurence Hadfield, an answer seems even more elusive. He was a rich, widower businessman with a foul-mouthed, wild-but-privileged daughter named Poppy. Banks suspects that Hadfield might have been having an affair with Adrienne, but Poppy has never heard of Adrienne and a student named Colin, who admitted being in (unrequited) love with Adrienne, has never heard of Hadfield. It’s only after a third victim, Sally, is found that Banks and Cabbott even know which direction to turn!

When things seem too good or bad to be true in Careless Love, they usually aren’t. Poppy is a slutty mess whom Banks ends up babysitting as a potential witness, but to what? The only clue is a single name, Mia, who might have known the victims, but who is she? Things will get murkier and darker before they get better. This is my favorite kind of mystery, one that doesn’t scream its resolution from the top of the hill. The victims aren’t quite the angels they appeared to be, nor is Banks an omniscient Holmes-like investigator. Follow the money is usually good advice, but even that isn’t what you might suspect. In other words, Robinson blends the mystery and thriller genres and tosses in misdirection. It may seem odd to call a novel with murder and unseemly circumstances at its core satisfying, but Careless Love keeps secrets even after the murderer has been fingered.

Rob Weir

 

Sandy Denny Home Recordings

 

 

Sandy Denny

Early Home Recordings

First Vinyl, 2024

 

Every now and then something special comes my way. Readers may know that my favorite female vocalist of all time is Sandy Denny. I recently got my hands on a double CD of Sandy’s Home Recordings that I did not know existed. It comes with a hardcover storybook-sized booklet with essays by Patrick Humphries and Pat Thomas. The latter produced a project of 27 tracks. Many of them are versions of songs she later made famous. If you wonder how a superfan such as I did not know about these, it’s because Denny was never as famous in the States as she was in Britain, an injustice I explain as brain rot for listening to Top 40 radio.

 

I won’t say that Denny’s earliest works were masterpieces. You get it exactly what is promised, things that Sandy recorded at home before she made her mark in the folk world. She was born in 1947 and, like millions of teenagers, was  enamored of Bob Dylan. Humphries quotes Denny as saying “…he was the closest I’ve ever come to worshiping anyone.” It’s hardly surprising that we find  a cover of “It Ain’t Me Babe” among  Denny’s home recordings. Nonetheless, what drew her in to a musical career (rather than one in nursing) was the British folk revival. In the mid-60s Dylan vied with folk songs, many of uncertain origin. Sandy tried her hand on such time-tested gems as “Geordie,” “Let No Man Steal Your Thyme,” and “East Virginia.” At the very end of the disc however, Denny set up her tape recorder and recorded what would become her signature song, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”

 

It was her entrée into a career that began in folk clubs and gigs with various bands. She would soon be poached by The Strawbs, and it didn’t take long for the word to get out. She began to write more of her own material as well as covering traditional songs. The Strawbs repertoire became too inconsistent for Denny. She felt increasingly confident about her compositions but not yet about herself. In her words,” I always write [a] song… and make it into something which everyone can actually identify with… I did try to be a bit more down-to-earth about things, but I do find it … difficult because I’m a bit shy of people knowing me.” That would change in a big way. Several of the songs on Disc Two became beloved concert selections. This includes “She Moves Through the Fair,” “Carnival,” “Fotheringay,” “They Don’t Seem to Know You,” and of course, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?”

 

It's remarkable to hear how much different her 1968 version of “Who Knows” is from the one from the year before. Her first recording effort seems rushed, as if she’s trying to get the words out before she withered. As she gained confidence, she slowed her treatment and it began to approach what the song finally became. In 1968, Sandy went to a tryout for a band that became a legend: Fairport Convention. She was only with Fairport for about 18 months, but she made three amazing records with them, including 1969’s Liege and Leaf. Alongside teen guitar phenomenon Richard Thompson (!), Fairport was among the bands credited with pushing folk-rock to new levels. 

 

The Thomas essay takes us beyond the timeframe of the two discs. In summary, Sandy formed her own short-lived band, Fotheringay with her musician husband Trevor Lucas, birthed a daughter, briefly rejoined Fairport Convention, and tried a solo career that included an attempt to break into the North American market. Neither of the latter two worked out as well as she had hoped. By 1976, Denny was spiraling out of control. Her marriage fell apart, her behavior was erratic, and she abused alcohol and drugs. When visiting her parents Denny fell and hit her head on concrete. Denny complained of headaches, but passed away on April 21, 1978. She was just 31.

 

Most Americans don’t know of Sandy Denny, though almost every music fan has heard her voice. She is the only guest vocalist Led Zeppelin ever used. She sang a duet with Robert Plant on Zep’s IV album. Listen to “The Battle of Evermore,” then by all means purchase Fairport’s Liege and Leaf. You’ll thank me.

 

Rob Weir

 

Note: Rather than provide links to various songs as I usually do, I thought it would be fitting to offer three versions of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes?” They are in order, the 1967 Who Knows....., 1968 Who Knows, and definitive 1969 version from Fairport Convention.

Class, Gender, and Race in the Roaring Twenties at the Rockwell Museum

John Held Jr. "They Went to the Silver Slipper"

JAZZ AGE ILLUSTRATIONS

NORMAN ROCKWELL MUSEUM

STOCKBRIDGE, MA

THROUGH APRIL 5, 2026

 

The “Jazz Age” is synonymous with the “Roaring Twenties.” In the popular mind it was a time of cultural rebellion: short skirts, baggy trousers, raccoon coats, bathtub gin, sexual exploration, votes for women, exuberant dancing, and wild parties. Coming on the heels of World War I, the Jazz Age is often viewed as the death of Victorianism. It even had its own soundtrack: hot jazz.

 

Like many historical labels, the Jazz Age is an oversimplification. Was Victorianism dead? It depends on where you lived. Rural Americans and older ones saw the Jazz Age as a time of immorality, promiscuity, bad music, obscene dancing, and law-breaking. Alcohol had been banned under the18th Amendment (1919), but bootleg and homemade liquor was rampant and enforcement was lax. Some rural Americans embraced the assault on Victorian mores, but on a whole it was rural America that pushed for Prohibition, cheered the persecution of Tennessee teacher John Scopes (1925) for teaching blasphemous theories of human evolution. Unlike today in which just 20 percent of Americans live in rural areas, during the height of the Jazz Age (1920s/30s) 56 percent of Americans lived in places with fewer than 2,500 people. Black Americans invented jazz, but eight of ten African Americans lived the Jim Crow South. Even those living in the urbanized North faced discrimination. Moreover, White Women were only partially liberated. A flapper who got “caught” (pregnant) in the Jazz Age faced shame and a legal system inclined to judge her as immoral rather than demand that fathers support their offspring.

 All of this is to say that Jazz Age flapperdom was largely a Northern, urban phenomenon whose existence was invented, named, and exaggerated by a small number of elites, newspapers, magazines, and advertisers. In over 100 images, Jazz Age Illustrations at the Norman Rockwell Museum explores the period from 1912-42 in all of its excitement, ballyhoo, and excess.

 

Held, "Vacation Time in the Berkshires"

 

Held, "Tattooed Man Goes Collegiate"

 

Gibson, "Have You a Book Innocent Enough for Grandpa and Grandma to Read?" 

 

Among the Jazz Age illustrators, two names often come to the fore: John Held Jr. and Charles Dana Gibson. Held was prolific and, if anything, he is under-represented in the Rockwell exhibition. Gibson made his name a bit earlier. If you’ve heard the phrase “Gibson girl,” he’s the illustrator who depicted working women in high-collared shirtwaists and elegant long flowing skirts. Before the Jazz Age launched, a number of young women entered the workforce. Gibson emphasized their independence and wholesome beauty. His was a subtle form of propaganda as his women were generally of the upper class and actual shop girls worked long hours for little pay. Nonetheless, he wasn’t wrong to notice that it took a degree of wealth to live a bohemian life. Dana is a bit more fun in that he often drew eccentric images–especially of collegiate life– and had an eye for satire.  

 

 

Preston, Miss America pageant 1921, dressing room 

 

Preston, "Without Thinking, Without Caring, He Walked Two Steps Out on the Floor" 

Patterson, "Ballyhoo"

Hosiery Ad

Duer, "Danger Calling"

 

Leyendecker
 

 

Several other illustrators focused on social class, including May Wilson Watkins Preston and Douglas Duer. The latter captured the very essence of a vamp, slinky and salacious in an open-necked green dress that accentuated her bosom. Jazz Age advertisers knew that sex sells. Russell Patterson did a soap add with an obviously naked woman demurely tucked behind an umbrella. Phillips Hosiery advertised its “hole proof” nylons, though most eyes were likely on the thin model in her sheer petticoat looking down at her long legs. Patterson combined suggestive nudity and hosiery for the cover of Ballyhoo of a strike by cabaret women. Joseph Leyendecker illustrated for menswear clothier Kuppenheimer, though ironically, some of his well-clad men blur the line between fashion and conman.    

Jackson

Harlem: Even it was segregated! 

 

African Americans also jumped onto the Jazz Age ballyhoo train.  Jay Jackson at least dressed singer Etta Moten (Porgy and Bess)  in a thin top, though her sexuality is spotlighted more than her considerable acting and singing chops. A map of Harlem nightclub venues makes it seem exciting, though it should be noted that one of them is the famed Cotton Club in which the only Blacks in evidence were the musicians. Only White patrons were admitted to Cotton Club shows.  

 

Lois Jones

I suspect Loïs Mailou Jones was making a backdoor critique when she drew “A Lawyer” as an arrogant-looking child.

 Don’t misinterpret this review as a complaint that I didn’t care for the exhibit. Quite the opposite, though I do mean the suggest that there are different ways of seeing art. The Roaring Twenties are so… well.. ballyhooed that it doesn’t need more from me. But we do learn new things when we change the lenses through which it is viewed.

 

 

Rob Weir