Chris Bourque: Big Dreams, Small Body

Take a good look at Chris Bourque in his Bruins sweater. Unless some team gets very, very desperate, it’s the last time you’ll see the diminutive left-winger in an NHL jersey. Chris Bourque is a symbol of all that is hopeful and deceptive about our modern culture of celebrity. He’s a small (by NHL standards) man encouraged to hold dreams that were too big.

He is, by most accounts, a very nice young man–just what one would expect as the son of NHL Hall of Famer Ray Bourque. The paterfamilias was one of the classiest guys to ever lace on skates–the sort you rooted for even if you weren’t a Bruins fan (which I did, though I’m not!). Ray, who played in the NHL from 1979 to 2011, was an overachiever who used his brain to compensate for a relative lack of physical brawn. In his playing days he was 5’11” and weighed 220 pounds–a bit too much weight that frame. If one of the league’s monsters–a Jagr or a Lemieux, for instance–trapped Ray Bourque in the corner, they could outmuscle him; if one of the speedsters caught him in open ice, they could beat him to the net. The thing was, though, Bourque was so smart that he was almost never caught in the wrong place.

When you grow up in La Belle Province (Québec) with an old man like Ray, you’ve got skates on your feet before you can walk. Two of Ray’s sons, Chris and Ryan, have followed NHL dreams, and that path is where the stardust got in their eyes. Not that they shouldn’t try–everybody should give their dreams a test drive, but they should also know when to it’s time to either shift into high gear, or full over to the curb. They should also have an alternative route planned.

As it turns out, I’ve seen Chris Bourque play for quite a long time. He’s just 27, but he left Boston University–where I saw him play–after a single season to turn pro. He should have gotten a degree. I have also seen Chris Bourque in parts of seven American Hockey League seasons. He was a very popular player for the Hershey Bears, the farm club of the Washington Capitals. Fans loved him for the same reason they loved him at BU–he can absolutely fly down an open sheet of ice. But, when push meets shove, Bourque has never been able to shove back. That’s because nature cheated him.

When the Bruins plucked Bourque from the Capitals in time for this year’s abbreviated season, the Boston media went into hyperbolic overdrive–odd for a guy who, on February 2, scored just his second NHL goal. Bruins fans, of course, wanted Chris to succeed. What could be cooler than having the son of one of the best players in franchise history? And therein lies two problems. The first is the burden of a famous name–one that led a kid to pursue a path whose odds were long instead of having a good backup plan. The odds were long for the second major reason: Chris Bourque is too small to excel in pro hockey. The Boston Globe listed Bourque as 6’ and I want that reporter to be the one pouring the whiskey next time I’m at the bar! Bourque is a generous 5’8” and looks to be less than his stated 180 pounds. What I saw in the AHL was a guy with speed who got pummeled all over the ice. Give CB some space, and he could bury the puck, but professional defensemen (like his old man) are trained not to allow a lot of space on the ice. Today’s NHL is much bigger than it was even in Ray’s time; goal scoring is more a matter of muscle-and-grind than 40-foot slap shots. When I watched Bourque at Hershey, I was baffled by the fan love. He was frequently outmuscled that, were I the coach, he’d have been a fourth liner, if he played at all. If you play on the wing, you have two major jobs: keep opposing wingers from going past you–which he had trouble doing–and scoring. Bourque’s best AHL season was last year, at Hershey, where he scored 27 goals against players mostly less experienced than he. Put another way, he’s no Martin St. Louis, who is the same size, but with the upper body strength to routinely score 30+ goals per season in the NHL, not the minor leagues. What the Bruins saw in Chris Bourque confounds all logic.

On March 1, the boom lowered, and Chris Bourque was placed on waivers. He went unclaimed and is now toiling for still another AHL team: the Providence Bruins. It’s hard to imagine that he’ll get another shot at the NHL. So, at age 27, what does one do? Bourque might be an AHL roster filler for another year or two, or maybe he can catch on with a Swiss or Russian team for a time, but then what? The Bruins foolishly gave him a two-year $1.1 million contract, but only part of that is guaranteed if he doesn’t make it back to the NHL. I hope Bourque invests well–like in completing his education. His hockey career has been stardust, not stardom. And I hope his 5’9” younger brother Ryan has been paying attention.

Lichtenstein Book on Walmart Alarms

This blog seldom runs academic reviews, but given Sylvia Burwell's nomination for OMB, this is timely. 

The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business. By Nelson Lichtenstein. New York: Picador, 2010. 978-0-312-42968-3

Walmart is a company Americans either love or hate. Nelson Lichtenstein’s updated exposé gives considerably more rationale for loathing. His is such a damning portrayal that it ventures onto terrain generally reserved for conspiracy theorists. There’s an important difference, though–Lichtenstein’s evisceration is based on reams of evidence, not preference.

The story of Sam Walton’s enterprise is steeped in folksy creation myths as spurious as that of Abner Doubleday’s invention of baseball. Walmart has been, from the start, a blend of innovation and reactionary politics. Walton was, indeed, a small-town Arkansas boy, but one more akin to the 1920s moralists that precipitated the Scopes Trial. He was an evangelical Christian who loathed urbanites and was stirred by an autocratic desire to Bentonville the planet. Lichtenstein gives grudging admiration for Walton’s business acumen and credits him for revolutionizing retail logistics, but he insists that we also see Walton as a right-winger obsessed with routing demons he felt imperiled his world: unions, liberals, grassroots democracy, cities, and regulatory government.

When Walmart left its Ozarks birthplace in Bentonville, Arkansas, it spread to towns of under 10,000 before tackling urban areas with restorative and proselytizing zeal. Even though it has integrated its operations with China’s manufacturing sector, Walmart’s unchanged goal is to make the world like Bentonville, not promote global understanding. As Lichtenstein notes, the company’s team-building rituals and customer loyalty programs retain an evangelical flair that smacks of cultism.

Lichtenstein raises bigger questions. If Walmart is the modern-day equivalent of Frank Norris’s Octopus, how did it get that way, and how did it build such a loyal following?  Walton’s fixation on low costs is a standard feature of capitalism; in that regard, Bentonville is little different from past Yankee traders, southern plantation owners, or cut-rate retailers such as Butler Brothers, Mammoth Mart, or K-Mart. It took the stagflation of the 1970s and the anti-worker policies of the 1980s for Walton to put bigger plans in motion. Give Walton credit; he was “in love with logistics” (47) and understood how the humble bar code could restructure business. As one executive put it, Walmart became more of “distribution business” than a retailer. (48) It eliminated wholesalers and replaced them with a supply chain that directly tied manufacturers to distribution centers–not supply and demand, rather “supply and command.” (69) The rising empire was sustained through a “corporate culture” built upon “family, faith, and small-town sentimentality that coexists… with a world of transnational commerce, employment insecurity and poverty-level wages.” (70) It also has “more sticks than carrots,” (102) perfect for rooting out deviation or disloyalty.  

Lichtenstein echoes critics such as Robert Greenwald and Charles Fishman, who also reveal that Walmart’s retail model rests upon the necessity of bending vendors to its will, even if vendors go bankrupt in the process. It is equally imperative that wages be kept low. There are few tricks Walmart hasn’t used, or labor laws it hasn’t violated. It also uses propaganda to convince employees of company benevolence, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It touts endless “opportunities” for “associates,” though almost none attain them. Turnover is both expected and preferred. And heaven help the manager deemed too generous with his–almost always “his”–associates. External enemies help, and Walmart slanders labor unions in ways that make mockery of the Wagner Act. The firm spends little on employees, but it spends a fortune to keep unions at bay.

Does Walmart create jobs? Yes and no. In many states, Walmart’s low wages take more out economies–in uninsured health costs and public services–than it adds in wages or taxes. It gets way with this because it uses “its size and sophistication to leverage its political influence” (268). Walmart is fond of far-right officials, but it has also had the Clintons in its hip pocket. Mostly it uses its octopus-like might to decimate competition, from mom-and-pop stores to grocery chains. It manipulates sales taxes, gets sweetheart property tax deals, uses “self-interested philanthropy” (277), and drives its trucks through every regulatory loophole opened since the 1980s.

Any cause for optimism? Refreshingly, Lichtenstein does not attack consumerism. As he puts it, there’s nothing inherently wrong with stuffing one’s house with a “a bunch of inexpensive stuff.” (338) Instead, Lichtenstein thinks Walmart is on the cusp of imperial overreach. It hasn’t done well in Europe–and pulled out of Germany altogether–and has faced stiff opposition in North America. It wins far more battles than it loses, but the campaigns take a toll. Ironically, it also faces competition from others that followed suit and likewise “churn their workforce, whipsaw their vendors, and have turned retirement pay and health provisions into a financial lottery for millions of workers.” (339) Those very millions make the Walmart model unsustainable in the long run. One employer notes that paying higher wages isn’t “altruism. It is good business.” (336) It doesn’t matter how low your prices are if nobody has the money to buy your products.

The wildcard, Lichtenstein notes, is not labor unions–the United Food and Commercial Workers has pretty much surrendered–but politics. He’s open to the charge of being naive in trusting modern Democrats to smack down Walmart*, but he’s probably right that structural adjustment and new ground rules are inevitable. In essence, the retail revolutionaries must pay the hidden costs they have incurred, or the lights will go out–even in Bentonville.

*Lichtenstein wrote this book long before the emergence of Sylvia Burwell as OMB nominee. One suspects he'd dial back some of this optimism. 

Robert E. Weir

University of Massachusetts Amherst   

Walmart's Hand on the US Budget: Thanks (for nothing) Barack!

 

No wonder liberals are so easy to lampoon. Can you imagine the donning of sackcloth and ashes that would have occurred if George W. Bush had announced that his new budget director was a Walmart executive? Hands would be wringing from Beverly Hills to Cambridge, MA. But I guess it’s okay when Barack Obama does it, because I’ve heard nary a peep over his nomination of Sylvia Mathews Burwell to succeed Jacob Lew as head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), the agency that develops the president’s budget and evaluates the effectiveness of executive branch programs.

To be fair, Burwell has only headed the Walmart Foundation since 2010. Prior to then, she the president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Development Program. She was briefly the chief operating officer for the Gates Foundation, but she bolted to Walmart when she was passed over for the CEO’s position. She also has some OMB experience; she worked with the agency under–you guessed it–Bill “Bentonville” Clinton. It’s hard not to see the Clintons’ fingerprints all over Obama’s choice to let her head the OMB.

Let’s cut through some major backpedaling. Surely Burwell’s nomination is fine because she headed Walmart’s charitable arm, not its retail wing. No, it’s not. The Walmart Foundation appears to be the nation’s largest corporate charity–until you parse it. By total giving, maybe, but remember that Walmart is the world’s largest retailer and, worldwide, its revenue stream is second only to Dutch Royal Shell. One would expect someone with more revenue to give more in absolute terms, but if we adjust for size, Walmart is as cheap and shoddy as the goods it sells. It gives a parsimonious .5% of pretax profits to charity, about half of what its retail competitors give, and cheapskate stuff by the standards of small fry such as Ben and Jerry’s, the Body Shop, and Patagonia, which give 10% upfront. The corporate average is around 5.0%. Walmart’s largess works out to about $25,000 per store–hardly Santa Claus numbers.

Who gets the dough is also less than meets the eye. Walmart occasionally does the right thing. It outshined the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina. But let’s not get carried away; that was an anomaly–and it happened before Burwell came aboard. All charitable donations must be approved by Walmart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and its list of approved donors breaks down into benign groups such as the Red Cross, and those that list rightward: the Salvation Army, evangelical churches, youth ministries, abstinence programs, and rightwing think tanks and non-profits such the Cato Institute, the Evergreen Freedom Institution, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Right to Work Defense Foundation. Walmart also spends much more freely on non-deductible efforts such as Republican PACs, antiunion campaigns, and the tawdry Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that sandbagged John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid. All of this is to say that Walmart is about as charitable as an executioner granting a last cigarette to the man he’s about to shoot. Stay tuned for Wednesday’s column to see why Walmart takes more out the economy than it ever puts back.

Walmart is what’s wrong with the American economy, not part of the fix. Liberals need to take the stars from their eyes and realize that Obama is not on their side; he’s as big a fake as Bill Clinton (who ought to play the Wizard of Oz in the new movie). Liberals–and those of us who’ve moved beyond them–should stop pretending that Barack Obama is the next coming of Martin Luther King, and vigorously oppose Sylvia Burwell’s appointment to the OMB. Force Obama to appoint someone to the OMB post that will write a budget that puts workers first–a task that can’t be accomplished by putting a sheen of respectability on a corporation that exploits them.  

Note to John Kerry: Just Walk Away from Syria

Note to John Kerry: Any US role in the Syrian conflict will end badly.

A quote and two questions… The quote comes from Salim Idris, the self-styled chief of staff for Syrian opposition groups seeking to topple President Bashar Assad: “We don’t want food and drink, and we don’t want bandages. When we’re wounded, it’s time to die. The only thing we want is weapons.” He openly mocked President Obama, who has offered $60 million in non-lethal aid to the Syrian rebels. Now the questions: How many secretaries of state does it take to make up a collective train wreck? Will John Kerry be the next engineer to hurtle toward derailment? Let’s hope not. Step one in avoiding this is for President Obama to put the money back in the treasury. Step two is for Secretary of State Kerry to smile before the TV cameras after that is done and say things such as, “Syrians need to work out their destiny independently of Western interference.”

Alas, odds are long that either of these things will happen. It’s hard to resist several myths that persist despite all evidence to the contrary. The first of these is the adage “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Assad is a bad man—make no mistake about that—but it is absolute conceit to think that his enemies are friends of the United States. It’s always very tempting to think we can make friends of enemies. It runs counter to two powerful national myths—the belief that the world lusts to become just like the United States, and the belief that America only wants to help the rest of the world.

America gets into trouble when it acts like the world wants what it has—including democracy. We want to believe, which is why the public is still bottle-fed fantasies of “Arab spring,” as if a thousand ballots are about to spring in the dessert and usher forth republicanism, equality, and human rights. Here’s the reality of the Middle East: it’s a quagmire becoming a nightmare. Democracy? Where? Egypt? Yemen? Libya? (How’d that Benghazi situation work out?) Yet American policymakers continue to act as if “progress” is being made toward “liberating” the peoples of the Middle East. It leads to absolute stupidity on occasion. Such as pretending that Saudi sheiks have a better human rights record than Bashar Assad; such as intelligent people tricked into thinking there may be moderates within Hezbollah with whom they can negotiate. (Reality: Hezbollah is a more dangerous terrorist group than Al-Qaida.) And don’t get me started on those who think that an independent Palestine would actually be a viable nation-state. (If Israel ever did close the borders the way it is accused of doing, Palestine would starve to death.)  The Middle East is where Sunnis kill Shiites, everyone hates the Kurds, non-Muslims are unwelcome, and anarchy prevails with such tenacity that some group you’ve never heard of this week is likely to control vast swaths of an erstwhile nation-state next week. A dispassionate observer might conclude that anti-Semitism is the only shared value in the region.

But forget Middle Eastern history; let’s examine our own. If we’ve learned little else in the last five decades we should see that the Marshall Plan—aid plus covert activity to weaken rebellions--may have worked in postwar Europe, but it sure doesn’t work in the Middle East. The United States hasn’t been very successful in nation-building for a very long time. It has, alas, been very successful at making bad situations worse. Think back to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The U.S. covertly aided a group of “freedom fighters” there called the Mujahedeen. They got rid of the Soviets alright, and then morphed into the Taliban. One of its leaders was a Saudi exile named Osama bin Laden who, of course, headed Al-Qaida. And didn’t Reagan, Clinton, and the two Bushes do a great job by playing Iran and Iraq off against each other. We gave Saddam Hussein weapons to help him against Iran—a sworn enemy since 1979, but a place in which the US has meddled since the Eisenhower years. Somehow, Reagan was actually stupid enough to think that if we sold weapons to Iran to help it fight the very Saddam to whom we had previously armed, Iran would be grateful enough to help secure the release of U.S. hostages held in Lebanon. Note to all future presidents: If a nation’s leaders refer to your nation as the “Great Satan,” gratitude is unlikely. Assistance is even less so.

It’s equally unlikely that anything happening in Syria these days will yield good results. Consider the comments of Mouaz al-Khatid, the man who desperately wants to take Assad’s place as Syria’s leader. He complains that the West worries more about “the length of the fighters’ beards” than of Assad’s massacres. And well it should. The very idea that supporting the lesser of two monsters somehow yields a purring kitten when the fighting stops, is foolish. The more probable result is that Syria’s new government will contain a radical Islamic majority contemptuous of the United States. Syria is on the path to theocracy, not democracy, and is better positioned to devolve to the 12^th century than vault into the 21^st. The only question is whether it becomes antagonistic to the U.S. with or without U.S. cash and weaponry. Syrians won’t love us; they’ll just be better armed. Note to John Kerry: Don’t be a chump like your predecessors. Just walk away, with your hand over your wallet.

Arcadia a Trippy Novel of the 60s and Beyond

Arcadia (2012)

Lauren Groff

Voice 978-1401341909

* * * *

Few groups have been as maligned, romanticized, or misunderstood as 1960s-era hippies. Were they the embodiment of narcissistic individualism, a collective nightmare, or the nation’s last shot at redemption? Did their demise mark the dawning of sanity, or was it a society-wide surrender to the logic of self interest, greed, and dehumanization? Do we call a world without collective dreams “realistic,” or “tragic?” In her second novel, Lauren Groff grapples with such questions in before and after snapshots. The first part of the book is set in an undisclosed section of New York, where idealistic young people are determined to make the world anew in a commune known as Arcadia. (Internal clues suggest she’s located Arcadia someplace near Ithaca, which would make sense, as Groff grew up in Cooperstown and the Finger Lakes region was a hotbed for communalism.) We witness the life and death of a community as it emerges from a small band of rugged idealists living for years in buses, impromptu shelters, and sheds to a large community that restores and dwells in a rambling mansion, has become self sufficient, and stands as a beacon for other dreamers: in both good ways and bad.

Arcadia is, depending on one’s point of view, either a countercultural Woodstock-like utopia where drugs, music, casual sex, veganism, and personhood flourish, or a Brueghel-like hell of poverty, immorality, and foolishness. Among the many questions: Is it the sort of place where kids should grow up? The commune’s unofficial leader is Handy, a somewhat older gadabout, rock musician, poet, and homespun philosopher who may be a tribal elder, or might be a passive-aggressive egomaniac and charlatan that parasitically sucks sustenance and esteem from others. But the book really centers on “Bit,” the diminutive son of ponytailed carpenter Abe and his bourgeois-turned-earth mother partner Hannah. Bit—as in a “just a little bit of a hippie”—grows up wild and free on the commune. It’s the only life he knows, and things such as meat or encountering an old woman living in the woods throw him for a loop. As he begins to grow older, he’s really thrown for a loop by Helle, the daughter of Handy and one of his two wives, Astrid.  Like many things in the book, it’s not always clear if Bit is enjoying a golden childhood free of the hang-ups that damage a lot of kids, or is being set up for failure on a grand scale. And that’s really the question that looms over the entire commune.

Neil Young recently pondered whether 60s ideals were just “a dream/Only a dream/And it’s fading now/Fading away…Just a memory without anywhere to stay.” Groff begins her story sometime in the late 1960s and propels it forward to the year 2018. That’s plenty of time for utopian dreams to unfold, to sour, to morph, and for people to die or move on. It’s time for Bit to develop an independent self, go to college, have relationships, and build a life as a photographer and professor off the commune. And which self will be happier, the one traipsing through the trippy world of Arcadia, or the one bumped and bruised by life in the mainstream? What is this thing we call “reality,” and should we desire it? In essence, Arcadia asks the eternal question of whether we should live in the moment, wallow in regret for paths not taken, show disdain for the present, hope for the future, or seek a return to some sort of metaphorical womb.

There is great speculation as what Groff—who was born in 1978, long after the heyday of communal life--used as Arcadia’s role model. Several critics cite California’s Hog Farm (which remains extant), but to me Arcadia seems a mash between the daily survival struggles of Montague Farms in western Massachusetts and the agitprop politics of the Bread and Puppet community in Glover, Vermont. Another open question is whether Groff’s relative youth betrays her. Arcadia is an odd book stylistically.  She has clearly done some research on communes, but the sections on Arcadia occasionally sound mildly condescending—as if she was familiar with the ideals behind communes, but can’t quite grasp the fervor with which some believed in them. Give Groff credit, though, for vivid descriptions of the land, living conditions, daily routines, and the stark contrasts she draws between communing with nature and being collectively slapped by the same forces.

Still, the book’s tone changes dramatically during the post-commune years. Groff not only understands this period better, she writes about it with an elegance that is sometimes lacking in the first half of the book. This is unexpected, as one might expect the odors of home-baked bread to come off better on the page than descriptions of grab-and-go shopping for prepackaged goods at a convenience mart. Or maybe we should expect this. Neil Young also famously snapped back at a concert critic who complained that his music was redundant with the terse, “It’s all the same song.”  Maybe Groff’s point is that who we are is who we’ve been. Toward the end of the book Bit returns to what’s left of Arcadia and learns unanticipated lessons. Is it the dream finally finding someplace to stay? If you’re Lauren Groff, the smartest thing you can do is leave the question open-ended.—Rob Weir    

Gravity Light Uses Dirt to Illumine the Darkness

 

Problem: How does one bring light into the darkness? I don’t mean metaphorically (as in religion or philosophy); I mean literally.

We Westerners are spoiled. Who thinks about the miracle that occurs every time a switch is flipped and a room is bathed in light? We take electricity so much for granted that it generally escapes notice that satellite photos from space reveal that much of the world lives in darkness akin to that known by the human race when it was in its infancy. It’s not that hard to generate electricity if–and it’s a big if–you have two things: an adequate fuel supply and a network to deliver the electro-juice you squeeze from that fuel. Wood fires (or dried dung in much of the world) are romantic for Westerners sitting around campfires and den fireplaces, but walk six feet away from these and see the darkness. Or fill lanterns with kerosene like our ancestors did. Breathe in the toxicity.

So how does one deliver low-cost electricity to parts of the world in which fossil fuels and wood are scarce and expensive? How does one light up a room if the switch isn’t attached to wires connected to a grid that’s linked to a generator? How does one make light affordable for those with few resources? So few, in fact, that batteries are prohibitively expensive? (There are also environmental disposal hazards.) Is dirt-cheap cheap enough? Martin Riddiford thinks so.

He’s a cofounder of London-based GravityLight and his firm has come up with a product that’s where high tech meets low tech. Think of an old-style grandfather’s clock, the sort that works when chained weights are drawn up to the side of the clock and then left to ascend on their own weight. As the weights fall, they turn gears and the clock keeps time. The problem, of course, is figuring out how to make a light that’s significantly smaller than the average grandfather’s clock! Here’s where high tech comes in. We can now machine-grind very small gears and we can miniaturize dynamos. GravityLight’s very bright idea is to gear a small light and attach it to a rip-proof poly bag. One fills the bag with about 20 pounds of dirt, winches it clock-style to the bottom of the light, and lets gravity do its thing. One light plus one dirt bag provides 30 minutes of light before the bag has to be hoisted anew. The cost? Under $10 for the unit and free ever after.  

I’ll happily donate money for these to be sent around the world. If this isn’t a how-cool-is-this moment, what is?

Dreams of a Life Fizzles Out on all Levels

DREAMS OF A LIFE  (2011)

Directed and Written by Carol Morley

Dogwoof Productions, 95 minutes, not-rated

*

When is a mystery not a mystery, a documentary not a documentary, and a feature-length film not worthy of being one? I can think of quite a few cases for each scenario, but few combine all three drawbacks with the prosaic dullness of Dreams of a Life.

The film’s hook intrigues. In 2006, British authorities broke into the North London apartment of Joyce Carol Vincent to evict her. Vincent, a vivacious and gorgeous young woman of West Indian descent, was discovered sitting on her sofa with the TV playing, and surrounded by a pile of Christmas presents. Or, more accurately, her putrefying bodily fluids were found puddled on the rug beneath her skeleton. Forensics revealed she had died in 2003. Writer/director Carol Morley sought to unravel how a popular and intelligent young woman in her twenties who seemingly had many friends and had held down responsible jobs could die alone in her flat without anyone noticing or making inquiries. Joyce had even made a few records, so somebody should have noticed, right? Quite a mystery, yes? No.

We learn in the first ten minutes that there is no mystery; Joyce was a serial groupie who latched onto people for short periods, vanished, and moved onto a new group (or lover). After 15 minutes we discover that Joyce was not quite what she claimed to be–not nearly so well educated, posh, or well connected as she let on. Had Morley stopped there, she might have had a tight little short film that could have created a minor stir in independent film festivals. Instead, she drags out the non-drama for another 80 minutes. Former partners, coworkers, club acquaintances, and musical collaborators go before the camera to tell us what I’ve already related. Rule one of a documentary is that it must record and document something. But Morley’s subjects have so little to say that she engages in two hard-to-overlook sins: she allows those behind the camera to repeat the same non-revealing items ad infinitum, and she supplements their lack of revelation with partially imagined re-creations using professional actors. (Zawe Ashton stands in for Joyce, Cornell John for her father, and so on.) Is this even a documentary once the corpse is collected? The threads of Joyce’s life are so few and the story so thin that Morley had to do something to get an hour and a half of usable footage, but the film feels like a two-page undergrad paper padded to five.

I don’t mean to sound callous, but Joyce Vincent left behind very little except an inflated view of her own musical talent and a penchant for conning people. Her egoism was probably a mask for deep insecurity, but the key word is “probably.” We don’t know and we don’t find out. Her life was short and tragic–sad, but hardly distinct from other short and tragic lives. This film wants us to grapple with the question of what we really know about another person. That’s a worthy query, but if the answer in any individual case is “not much,” there’s nothing left to say. So call it a wrap.--Rob Weir