Overlooked Doc on Amish Resurfaces

DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND (2002)

Directed by Lucy Walker

77 mins. PG-13, Documentary

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Quick. Who throws the wildest parties in Indiana? If you answered “the Amish,” you were either: (a) being glib and got lucky, or (b) among the very few Americans who know about the doctrine known as rumspiga, which is fascinatingly documented in Devil’s Playground. I don’t know how I missed this ten-year-old documentary first time around, but thanks to Netflix I finally got around to seeing it. It remains relevant; in a tradition-bound society such as the Amish that freezes time in the pre-electrical days of the late 17^th century, things don’t change very much.

The entire notion of “Amish Gone Wild” would strike most Americans as an oxymoron, but it’s actually quite consistent with Amish theology. The Amish are part of a Reformation tradition known as Anabaptism.  The ana (against) part of that is adult baptism; that is, Anabaptists believe that only informed adults can have conversion experiences—the decision to join (or not join) the church must be a free will decision. There is, strictly speaking, no such thing as being “born” Amish.  At the age of 16, each individual raised in an Amish family is cast adrift and is free to live among the “English” (all non-Amish, no matter their actual ethnic background).  This is the rumspiga, the period of decision-making. There is no set time limit as to when one must decide whether to join Amish society or remain among the English (though most do so within three to five years) and during this period one can do as one wishes. Many Amish-raised adolescents do it all: drugs, booze, premarital sex, smoking, surfing the Internet for porn, wild parties… as if they were first-year college students! An Amish party socks in outsiders from miles around—the music booms (from high-end electronics no less!) and only the hormones flow faster than the booze.

The Devil’s Playground follows several Indiana teens through rumspiga, each keenly aware that a decision to join Amish society means that they must leave behind their current path forever. The film is a piece of documentary anthropology, but it plays like a taut drama. You will find yourself rooting for some of the kids to leave the Amish and others—such as a young man busted for drug-dealing and gang behavior—to save themselves and return to the fold. Most youth do return. One of my critiques of the film is that Walker could have explained better why that decision is made. (We can infer that the ways of the English lose their allure.) Another is that Walker doesn’t explain in much detail how kids with only eight years of education and no visible means of support manage to live among the English at all. But, then again, maybe she couldn’t or shouldn’t. (Once one is in the church, being filmed or even seeing a movie is generally off limits.) Give Walker, as an outsider, props for gaining any sort of access into closed Amish society, and kudos to her film for shedding tiny rays of light on the practice of rumspiga.

If you label yourself as a person who doesn’t like documentaries, do yourself a favor and check this out before you close the book on them. I think you’ll agree that there’s more drama and true emotion in this little gem of a doc than in 99% of the big-budget, no-heart pap emanating from that other closed society in our midst: Hollywood.

New Book Links the Dozens and Rap

This review was originally published in NEPCA Journal and is republished by author permission.

The Dozens: A History of Rap’s Mama. By Elijah Wald. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0-19-989450-3

What do you think of this/What do you think of that/Saw your mama’s picture in the dictionary/Beside the word “fat.”

That little snippet of doggerel is all I recall from childhood battles in which the choice was put up your fists or shoot off your mouth. The rule was that if someone bested you verbally, you weren’t allowed to beat them up. That was good news for a scrawny brat such as I, who was better at quick wit than a fast left hook. When I got to college and read folklorist Roger Abrahams, I learned I had been playing a sanitized white version of the Dozens, an African-American insult duel. I probably picked it up from the black kids at my elementary school.

As Elijah Wald, a Los Angeles-based musician and writer, shows, the Dozens are in lots of places you might not expect. Modified versions show up in the poems of Langston Hughes, the novels of Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, and in the black comedy routines of Red Foxx and the white ones of George Carlin. You find the Dozens in the blues repertoires of artists ranging from Jelly Roll Morton and Big Bill Broonzy to Lonnie Johnson and Rudy Ray Moore. And, as Wald’s subtitle suggests, it’s alive and well in contemporary rap and hip-hop.

Lesson one: Don’t assume that surfaces are depth. Remember when Tipper Gore crusaded against obscene music lyrics? She wasn’t the only one. Gangsta rap, in particular, has come under fire for its lascivious language and messages of violence. Gore was right to think that a lot of street prose is painted blue, but she (and other critics) badly misunderstood how rap lyrics function. The surface messages are aggressive, provocative, and salacious, but remember: If you bust a rhyme that can’t be answered and you resort to physical retaliation, you lose. Rappers often defame each other in verse, but these slams seldom result in actual violence.

Wald draws upon the works of anthropologists, folklorists, and music scholars, but he also mines his own extensive knowledge and collection of blues recordings. Adding the latter might well make his book the new standard for studying the Dozens. If it fails on that level, it’s because Wald doubts that one can definitively trace the origins of the Dozens. He suspects it’s a holdover from African traditions, but he’s also aware that his sources have been bowdlerized by both collectors and by community members uncomfortable the content of the Dozens. Wald is on stronger turf when documenting the myriad ways verbal jousting has expressed itself in the African-American community.  Second lesson: Don’t leave this book lying around where young prying eyes can peruse it. The Dozens Wald documents are ribald and raw. One can readily see why the Family Values crowd turns crimson—the imagery is sexually graphic, demeaning, and veers over the edge of a misogynist precipice. But remember lesson one: It’s not meant to be taken literally. The Dozens, whether a schoolyard boast or a rap bust, might be assertions of hyper-masculinity or the cultural coping mechanisms of repressed social groups, but quite often they’re nothing more than a particularly naughty game.

Lesson three: Comedy isn’t pretty. Do the Dozens or rap lyrics make you uncomfortable? Does the answer to that question even matter? Personal views don’t alter the reality of a cultural tradition that’s been around for centuries, whether in the PG-13 versions of childhood bouts such as mine, or in the NC-17 raps of 2 Live Crew. Jay-Z astutely observed that rap shouldn’t be compared to other genres of music because “it’s really most like a sport. Boxing to be exact. The stamina, the one-man army, the combat aspect of it, the ring, the stage…” (185).

Wald’s study has blind spots. He’s open to the charge of being so enamored of the “dirty” Dozens that he sacrifices clever wordplay in favor of the graphic stuff. Folklorists might also take umbrage with eliding the Dozens—which are usually rhymed—with other insult games (snaps, retorts, one-liners). It’s not clear, for example, that “Yo Mama” jokes are truncated versions of the Dozens. (Indeed, I used to steal Groucho Marx zingers if I needed a quick one-and-done snap. Verbal jousts were longer, more complex, and involved more audience engagement.) One also longs for Wald to offer conclusions more substantive than an admission that he isn’t sure why the Dozens have endured. In like fashion, Wald’s downplay of surface content seems overly apologetic in the face of feminist assertions that rap is misogynist. It’s simply hard to ignore that the Dozens often target females and female bodies.

But credit Wald with connecting the dotted notes when it comes to music. If you want to do more than lament the content of hip-hop and rap, you need to learn how to play the Dozens.

Rob Weir 

Jason Myles Goss A Name to Watch For

JASON MYLES GOSS

Radio Dial

Jeswaldo Sounds

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Years ago I heard Jason Myles Goss singing on the streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and thought he was the proverbial real deal. Hey, when I’m right, I’m right!  Radio Dial, his fourth album, is the sort you’ll spin once and keep on spinning. Folksingers hit the road a lot, and Goss has apparently seen sides of America where hope and despair are flat mates. There are several semiautobiographical songs about dreamers in down-at-the-heels factory towns. That same bittersweet edges appear elsewhere. “Hospital Shirt” is a song abut coming to terms with cancer, one in which plastic tubes drip medicine, prayers, and reality; “New York City,” captures all that is wonderful, tragic, magical, and terrifying about the Big Apple. A real standout is “Bright Lights,” a boxer’s one shot at either glory or obscurity. This superb record is folk that rocks, courtesy of a crisp backing cast on percussion and electric instruments. Goss still has room to grow as a writer—too many repeated words and fillers—but he is a keen observer who isn’t afraid to plumb life’s barbed depths.--Rob Weir

Sample this superb album at: http://jasonmylesgoss.bandcamp.com/

Andrew Wyeth Weathers Well

Wyeth--"Northern Point"

Remember those halcyon days of youth when one discovery quickly gave way to another? Do you recall the heady rush of experiencing things for the first time? The days when you were such a novice that you thought the bubbles in Lambrusco made it a complex wine? Or that music simply didn’t get any more sophisticated than The Who’s Tommy album? Such things remind us that it’s not always a good idea to revisit our formative experiences. Then again, sometimes we take trips down Memory Lane in which we observe things to the side of the path that we failed to notice on the first stroll.

I confess that I tend to err on the side of nostalgia-avoidance, an experience born from gagging while re-watching too many films I once loved and now see as landfill material. Still, when the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford opened the exhibit Andrew Wyeth: Looking Beyond, I knew I had to see it before it closed on July 12. Wyeth was my first love in the world of art. You grow up working-class poor, and art is frivolous nonsense for snobs and social climbers. Or so my boyhood self thought. But there was something about the millions of little dry-brush paint slashes on Wyeth’s canvasses that reeled me in. No doubt the soft browns, beige-tinged yellows, and steely grays of his pastoral scenes reminded me of spending time on my grandparents’ farm, in Pennsylvania no less, just a few hours down the road from where Wyeth encamped in Chadds Ford (when he wasn’t summering in Maine). Psychology 101 students could probably make a case that I saw “Christina’s World” about the time I was fixated on devloping a values system that included empathy. So I went to Hartford. Is Andrew Wyeth still my favorite artist? Not by a long shot, but I was delighted to find that I still found pleasure in pictures I hadn’t viewed in decades. So delighted, in fact, that Emily and I hightailed it to Rockland, Maine, this past summer to see more.

Of the two experiences, the Hartford show was more rewarding artistically and Rockland for ambience. The Hartford show had several of Wyeth’s signature works. One of my favorites was “April Wind,” his portrait of James Loper, a black friend, sitting on a log with his coat collar dissolving into his hunched shoulders. Yeah, that’s what early April is like—exactly! There was also the ironically but appropriately titled “Chambered Nautilus,” a shell of a different sort—Wyeth’s  gaunt, hollow-eyed mother-in-law sitting upright on her death bed, her world reduced to faint images lying beyond a tattered gauzy window curtain. There was also “Northern Point,” which was one of the first paintings that taught me that emotion can be communicated through small bits of information. (See above) It’s simply a roofline adorned by a lightening rod with empty coastline looming beyond the bird’s eye view. It’s also everything you need to know about how loneliness feels. But the image that sent us toward Maine was “Christina Olson,” the crippled woman who was the subject of his most famous painting. Here’s she neither young nor posed among sylvan splendor, rather a middle-aged, chisel-faced recluse sitting in a doorway half obscured by shadow. (left)  A metaphor for what we see and what we don’t? For our passages through life? Of dreams deferred? Sure; why not?

One of the larger collections of Wyeth outside of Chadds Ford resides at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. There’s even a Wyeth Center there, though last summer’s exhibit was mainly of spectacular muscular images from Rockwell Kent and not-so-inspiring ones from Andrew’s son Jamie. (Confession: I’ve never cared much for Jamie Wyeth’s art. What’s good about it is what he ripped off from the old man and what’s bad about it is what he tried to do that wasn’t ripped off from the old man!) Frankly, many of last summer’s pictures on display at the Farnsworth were underwhelming. Some, in fact, give ammunition to Wyeth critics who say he was a superb draftsman, a decent illustrator, and a mediocre painting. The highlight for me was “Turkey Pond,” which shows a crusty Maine neighbor forcefully striding across an open field. And even it, I must confess, seemed heavy—the left arm unnaturally hinged at the shoulder and almost Popeye-like in deportment. But here’s the highlight--the Farnsworth also owns and operates the Olson home in nearby Cushing, the very one from “Christina’s World,” and the place where the Wyeths often summered.

If you get up that way, do not miss the experience of visiting one of the most ambience-soaked almost-empty homes you’ll ever see. If you’ve ever wondered what inspired Andrew Wyeth’s tiny brush strokes, walk among the fields by the property. Stand at the spot where Christina gazed up the hill at her house. Look at the color and texture of the walls, and it’s like standing inside one of Wyeth’s paintings. Even Christina’s geraniums are there, as is the wavy glass through which Wyeth viewed the outside the world, the weathered boards of the tool shed he so often painted, and the multiple pastel hues of doors found in his work. Go there and let your imagination roam.

So do I think Andrew Wyeth really was an artistic genius? Compared to whom? Bah. Let others do the comparisons. Wyeth painted with a somber palette, but seeing him anew made me happy to recapture some of that revelatory light from the past.—Rob Weir

Video Review: Farrelly Brothers Make Worst Film of the Decade

No knuckleheads harmed, but two made this train wreck.

THE THREE STOOGES (2012)

Directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly

Fox Searchlight, 92 mins. PG (for Pretty God-awful)

No Stars

When you review things one is often approached by others to opine on the best this, or the worst that. I often dissemble in such situations. I recall the wisdom of the Dalai Lama. When asked what the best religion is he replied, “It’s like asking, ‘What is the best medicine?’ I say to you, that depends on what is wrong with you!”

Having just dissembled, I am now prepared to say three things. First, this is probably the only time you will ever hear the Dalai Lama invoked in any context involving the Farrelly brothers. Second, viewing this piece of detritus is my own damn fault. I usually avoid the Farrellys the way a teenager avoids a chastity sermon, but I was told that The Three Stooges was different and that I would be surprised. Third, I was surprised. I am prepared to say that the Farrelly brothers’ take on The Three Stooges wins an award. It is the single most inane, inept, and pathetic effort at movie-making of the decade. The only—and I mean only—thing that’s the slightest bit intriguing about this film is that the three principals—Chris Diamantopoulous, Will Saso, and Sean Hayes—look a lot like Moe, Curly, and Larry. As for the rest, what it lacks is everything. That starts with the script.

Bobby Farrell and Mike Cerrone gave the lads a biographical creation story–orphans tossed onto the steps of a Catholic orphanage. The pratfall and violence-prone trio are, of course, completely unadoptable and come of age (and beyond) under the tutelage of nuns, half of whom love the lads and half of whom consider alternative vocations every time they’re in their presence. For the record, the actual Three Stooges grew up in lower middle-class New York City Jewish families, not a Catholic orphanage. If this were the only thing wrong with the script, it would only be a small scrap, not the complete landfill that it is. I will concede that the material of the original act wasn’t exactly written by Talmudic scholars, but Farrell and Cerrone have plumbed new depths of stupidity in a story arc that involves, among things, a nun played an actor in drag (Larry David), an effort to save the orphanage, nuns in thongs, and close encounters of the worst kind with the cast of Jersey Shore. Stop, you guys are killing me!

The actors look the part, but they lack the timing of the original Stooges, the special effects are more ham-handed than those of the 1930s and 40s, and the saccharine sentimentality of the story robs the Stooges of one of the things that made them “funny” (for those who thought they were): their meanness. Let’s face it, true comedy is mean; there is always a butt of every joke and the Three Stooges often cast themselves as both punch lines and punching bags.  When the Stooges took on outsiders, it was generally those in positions of authority (like nuns, for instance). In most episodes, the boys (sort of) bonded, but each was a walking id—no filters, no grand plans, and “soitantly” no sentimentality.

Leave it to the Farrelly brothers to be even more base and stupid than Moe, Curly, and Larry. Compared to Bobby and Peter, the Three Stooges have the wisdom and intellectual heft of, well, the Dalai Lama.

Roadside Coffees to Avoid

Dumping on Starbucks has become such a snob sport that there’s mounting pressure to make it a medal-awarding event at the 2016 Summer Olympics. Although I understand the concern of those who worry about the homogenization of the planet, you’ll get no snarky anti-Starbucks remarks from me. As capitalists go, Starbucks has more social conscience than most but, more to the point, it brews a reliably decent (though not transcendent) cup of Joe—especially if you ask for dark roast. I draw the line at Yuppie pretentiousness and refuse to order a “Grande,” a “Venti,” or any other term other than small, medium, or large, but when I’m on the road, I seek out Starbucks because at least I can drink a cup without reaching for a carsickness bag. Starbucks is like Subway—good of kind.

I’ve been on the road quite a bit lately and can offer a public service guide of what not to drink under any circumstance. Below are “for external use only” toxins whose ingestion could result in the need for a liver-stomach transplant. I mention only coffee, defined as a beverage in which water is brewed with roasted and ground coffee beans. There is no such thing as “blueberry” or “French vanilla” coffee. Ditto any liquid into which flavored Coffee-Mate or other such oxymoronic substance is added. If you dump syrup, whipped cream, or additional flavor of any kind to a cup of Joe, stop kidding yourself; go to the cupboard, and eat several tablespoonfuls of sugar and be done with it! But never partake of any of these–

                  1. Seattle’s Best: Hands-down the worst brew in North America and a lie from the outset since Starbucks is also Seattle-based. It’s a toss-up which is worst, the thinness of the brew or the utter vileness of it. The only resemblance between this and coffee is that Seattle’s Best is (sort of) brown.

                  2. New England Coffee: This one is all over my region and damned if I know why. It’s disgusting and seems to have been roasted with some sort of artificial sweetener that destroys whatever coffee taste might have been embedded in the original beans.

                 

                  3. Dunkin’ Donuts: “America runs on Dunkin’?” How? It is utterly tasteless. Total crap—like the donuts, which are calories without a cause.

                  4. Most diner coffees: See those little pots on the warmer? These are death to coffee, whose oils break down under heat in a matter of minutes. If you see an oil slick on the top of the pot, don’t go there! Coffee not drunk immediately should be poured into an insulated carafe. Most diner coffee will give you a tummy ache faster than you can say, “Check please.”

                  5. Green Mountain Coffee: Okay, I love Vermont and I admire its branding efforts but let’s face it, you’ve never seen Juan Valdez harvesting beans from Vermont’s shady hillsides. Many GMC offerings taste burnt and others cry out for assistance. It’s the kind of coffee that tempts one to add sugar and lots of milk. Once you’re at that point, why not drink a cup of Maxwell House?

                  6.  Autocrat Coffee:  I can’t believe there’s actually a company with the moxie (sorry to mix drinks!) to call itself this. It’s even harder to believe that it’s been around for more than a century. It comes from Rhode Island. My theory is that the mob runs it and tells people, “Drink this, or you’ll drink with the fishes.”

                  7. Carpe Diem Coffee: That’s Latin for “seize the day.” Seize your bowels is more like it.

                  8. K-Cups and its ilk: Expecting decent coffee to be brewed by pushing a button that injects hot water through a tiny plastic cups is like believing that Santa Claus really can squeeze through a chimney. These “coffee systems” are simply rest area vending machines sans the smelly adjoining rest rooms. But they’re just as crappy as the latter. Any restaurant using these should prompt you to order bottled water instead.

Is it any wonder there’s a Starbucks on every street corner? I’m there. I’m anywhere that doesn’t sell Seattle’s Best or the next seven in the Coffee Hall of Shame! 

Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Works Brilliantly on Stage

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

Adapted and directed by Simon Stephens

National Theatre Live

* * * *

 When I heard that the National Theatre of London had done a stage adaptation of Mark Haddon’s acclaimed novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, my first thought was “How?” Luckily my second instinct was to check it out. Glad I did—it’s a small masterpiece the likes of which will make North American audiences jealous of the creativity that can be accomplished when government subsidizes the arts.  (Imagine such a thing!) Anyone living within driving distance of a movie theater that broadcasts NT productions should make a beeline for this one.

If you’ve read the novel, you will certainly share my kneejerk skepticism over turning it into a play. Its central character is Christopher, a 15-year-old high functioning autistic student. He’s imaginative, a math savant, capable of intense concentration, and is (literally) incapable of falsehood. He’s also terrified of being touched or having his routines altered, has few social graces, is unable to master most mundane tasks, and is so withdrawn that he makes Mr. Spock seem like Mr. Rogers. We first meet Christopher—played with utter brilliance by Luke Treadway–bending over the body of a pitchforked dog, which he is falsely accused of having killed. And we witness his first emotional meltdown when he assaults the policeman who lays hands on him. That trauma out of the way, we proceed to learn about Christopher, his well-meaning but ineffectual father (Paul Ritter), his missing mother (Nicola Walker), and his special needs teacher, Siobhan (Niamh Cusack). I’ll say no more except to say that when Christopher becomes obsessed with solving the dog’s murder, it takes him and the audience on a journey fraught with peril, revelation, drama, and reconciliation.

Haddon’s novel was told almost entirely from Christopher’s (skewed) point of view, so the first stage hurdle is how to represent a mind whose logic runs on a completely different course than most. How, indeed, does one physically show something as abstract as human thought? Stephens and producer Marianne Elliott accomplish this with a set that’s where minimalism meets high tech. The play takes place in a theater in the round upon a bare stage that’s something akin to a mash between a chalkboard, an electrical grid, and an iPad. It can be drawn upon or projected onto, and subsurface lights and diodes are activated by computers to build what can be described as light-based semiotic signs. Need to show a subway train? Activate two vertical lines and set them in motion.  A neighborhood street? A series of squares connected by lighted corridors along which actors dash will do the trick. When Christopher’s mind overloads, lights flash, and holographic letters tumble randomly from the ceiling like snowy gibberish.

Clever staging will take one only so far, though, and it’s the acting that makes those lights sparkle. Treadway is astonishing, both physically and in his range of emotions. He can go from withdrawn to a semi-psychotic tiger and back with the brush of fingertips. He also strikes the perfect balance between being lovable and exasperating. Kudos also to Ritter, who convincingly portrays a working-class bloke with simple tastes who wants to do well for a son who is equal parts genius and volcano, but hasn’t a clue on how to manage his own emotions, let alone Christopher’s.  Niamh Cusack—the younger sister of Sinéad—is also superb as Siobhan, a teacher with the patience of a saint, but the cleverness to plant ideas in Christopher’s mind in non-threatening ways. All I’ll say is this: stay until the very end, after the credits.

Loved the book and loved they play even more. It reminds us that theater done well, with superb actors and visionary directors, casts magical spells that TV and movies often fail to convey. The tendency of the latter would be to convert Christopher’s story to biography, which isn’t the best frame for a boy who lives in his imagination. Simon Stephens invites us inside Christopher’s chaotic mind and we are richer for the experience. —Rob Weir