The Winners: A Novel for the Stanley Cup!

 

THE WINNERS: BEARTOWN #3 (2022)

By Fredrik Backman

Atria Books, 688 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

I nearly skipped The Winners because I felt that three books about ice hockey in two Swedish towns was one too many. Send me to the penalty box for tripping. I should have known that Fredrik Backman would deke when I thought he was grinding. The Winners is a must read during the Stanley Cup playoffs, but you don’t need to know a Zamboni from tagliatelle to appreciate all three Beartown novels.

 

The Winners returns us to an isolated forested section of Sweden where the residents of Beartown and Hed simply hate each other. Though their economic survivals are inextricably linked, there’s little they won’t do to express their mutual disgust–rumbles between rival gangs, workplace antagonism, political machination–but the hockey rink is where the rivalry becomes the Crusades on skates.   

 

Backman picks up the narrative two years from where he left off in Book # 2, Us Against You. That book involved an assault that ripped apart Beartown, but it also paved the way for its reversal of fortune. Hed had always been the more prosperous town and usually prevailed on ice, but the pendulum has swung to Beartown, with its new businesses, expensive new homes, a star player (Amat), and a newly refurbished rink, whereas the roof of Hed’s rink has collapsed, a symbol of its overall decline.

 

Backman readers have previously met the Andersson family, former NHL player-turned-Beartown-general manager Peter, his lawyer wife Kira, and offspring Maya and Leo. Maya is now studying music in Stockholm, Peter is at sea after giving up the GM job, and Leo is AWOL in video game stocked room. Other Beartown fixtures have their own concerns. Amat is overweight from an injury, drink, and ennui; Benji left town to escape the homophobes; former golden boy Kevin has departed to parts unknown; Tails is engaged in all manner of dodgy schemes; Ramona is running out of steam; Ekisabeth Zackell remains a brilliant hockey coach with the personality of particle board; and Ana, Maya’s BFF, is mired in sadness and anger. Oddly, Peter and local thug Teemu have grown friendly, but the only happy campers in Beartown are Bobo, now an assistant coach; former coach Sune; and young Alicia, who might be the future face of Beartown hockey.

 

Backman introduces new characters, including junkyard mogul Lev, who is either a gangster or just a terrible agent. Backman parallels the Anderrssons with a Hed family—firefighter Johnny, his midwife spouse Hannah, and their four children (Tess, Toby, Ted, and Ture). Ted, though still in juniors, could be Hed’s equivalent of Amat. There is also a new editor in Hed who is being fed information by her furtive father that threatens Beartown hockey; Theo, a local politician even sleazier than Tails; a silent goalie plucked from Hed nicknamed Mumble; Aleksandr, a Bears recruit of unspecified ethnicity; a dog named Bang!; and Matteo, a poor kid from Beartown who grew up in a fundamentalist family and missing his sister Ruth, whose fate provides the novel’s crisis point.

 

You might think that a devastating windstorm would bring Beartown and Hed together, but hatred is so intense that even junior hockey is pretext for violence, and neither can desist from all manner of underhanded plots. Mostly, both towns adhere to the same standard they hold for killing wolves: “Shoot. Dig. Silence.” The novel’s’ most profound moments come when fate does bring them together. One involves social class realities. In Beartown it’s the impoverished Hollow versus the new-money Heights; in Hed, it’s the schemers versus the working-class.

 

My initial thought was that The Winners took too long to get serious. I still think that, but the last third of the book is deeply moving. Backman takes us into living rooms, bars, workplaces, campgrounds, and frozen sheets where unbridled play prevails. It’s also where a lot of Backman’s foreshadowing comes into the light, including the famed Chekov’s gun literary device. Backman’s technique reminds me of the late John Prine’s musical repertoire: he makes us laugh one moment, shake our heads at absurdity the next, but moves us to tears when we least expect it.

 

The wrap-up coda went by too fast and was (often) too neat. Yet when Backman writes, “Maya’s story could easily have ended the same ways as Ruth’s story,” we know what he means. If you can avoid a lump in your throat upon discovery, you’re made of sterner stuff than I. Would it have been a stronger 400-page book? Probably, but it’s a bloody good one at 688.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

60 Years of Collecting at UMass

 

University Museum of Contemporary Art

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Through May 14, 2023

[Click on Image for full size] 

 

The Morrill Act of 1862 is one of the lesser known pieces of legislation to bear President Abraham Lincoln’s signature. It–and a second Morrill Act in 1890–set up “land grant” colleges. They were supposed to offer “practical” degrees in four fields: science, military science, engineering, and agriculture. The first three bear little resemblance to the fields of study those terms conjure today and the fourth, agriculture, was the true centerpiece for most land grant colleges. In 1862, farming was still the largest occupation in the United States and so it remained until the 1920s.

 

Amherst, Massachusetts received a land grant college, one affectionately nicknamed “Mass Aggie.” As late as 1941, what was then called Massachusetts College had just over 1,000 students–a far cry from the more than today’s 31,000 students. UMass Amherst did not become a university until 1947.

 

What this means insofar as this post is concerned is that UMass and most other land grant schools haven’t been around long enough to accumulate the huge endowments and gifts of Ivy League schools or elite private colleges. Nor did they have the resources of museums such as the Metropolitan in New York or the MFA in Boston. Want to buy a Van Gogh? It could cost over $80 million and not even a school whose current budget is $3.4 billion can afford to allocate that much of its operating costs for one work of art. So how does a relatively new university acquire collections befitting what they have become? Collect contemporary art, especially that of yet-unknown, up-and-coming, or generous visiting artists.

 

Collecting contemporary art is a crap shoot though. How valuable is it? In many cases no one knows until years later. After all, who was Andy Warhol when he was just another kid from Pittsburgh who moved to New York to try to establish himself as an artist? You know, like untold hundreds of others! What the UMass Museum of Contemporary Art did was simply collect–photographs, prints, graphics, lesser known paintings, architectural mockups–and hope for the best. The last of those is particularly risky, as many interesting designs never get built.

 

UMass is now at a place where it can mount an exhibit of what it has acquired since the early 1960s when it grew like topsy. Photographs dominate Sixty Years of Collecting but you will recognize the shutterbugs and perhaps a few artists from other mediums. When you do, it means the staff chose well and that’s true as well of names that perhaps don’t ring a bell. 

 

Below is a sampling from the exhibit. Hurry to see it though, as it closes about the time of 2023’s commencement. 

 

 

Andy Warhol

   

Eliott Erwitt

 

Robert Mapplethorpe                                                                       

 

 

            

                                                                   

                             

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                 

                                        Ralph Meatyard

 

 Imo Nse Imel     

                                                            Roy Lichtenstein

Sheron Rupp

        

                                                                    Stephen Petegorsky

Tauba Auerbach

We Are the Light a Dud

 

WE ARE THE LIGHT (2022)

By Matthew Quick

Avid reader Press, 246 pages.

★

 

 

 Sometimes minimalism is efficient and appropriate. Sometimes it’s just minimal. We Are the Light falls into the second category. Perhaps I should have known better. Matthew Quick also wrote Silver Lining Playbook, which was made into a movie that I found schmaltzy. Like it, Lucas Goodgame, the central character of We Are the Light, is a damaged man.

 

Goodgame is part of a survivors’ group from a mass shooting at the Majestic Theater in Somewhere or Other, Pennsylvania, that left his wife Darcy and 16 others dead. Lucas isn’t too sad, though, because he believes that Darcy is an angel who visits him regularly. He even collects feathers that he says are from her wings and claims to have seen the souls of all the dead rise.

 

But when he writes to Karl, his Jungian therapist, and asks to see him to talk about all of this, Karl ghosts him. He writes letter after letter–often dropping them off at his door–until a restraining order makes him stop. Is Lucas so delusional that he has scared off his therapist? Lucas also angers Sandra Coyle from the group when he rebuffs her effort to enlist him in a gun control movement because he says he needs to focus on his grief before getting involved in politics.

 

The entire story is told through letters to Karl, which are loaded with Lucas’ take on Jungian theory in which he tries to apprise him of how he’s trying to heal himself. He tells of how his African-American friends Isiah and Bess are praying for him, of how Jill from the Cup of Spoons Diner has been cooking for him, and  how he has allowed young Eli Hansen to camp out in his backyard. That’s surprising because Eli has become the town pariah as it was his older brother Jacob who was responsible for the mass murder.

 

An old adage holds that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing and this holds true for Lucas’ various “insights” into Jungian psychology. Even if you have only passing familiarity with such concepts, you can tell that Lucas understands some of its form, but not much about its function.

 

The plot takes other odd twists. Jill, who was Darcy’s best friend, seems to have moved in with Lucas almost immediately after Jacob shot up the town. Is she a grief maven or a grifter? That’s not nearly as weird as a subplot involving a way to help Eli to graduate from high school via a credited post-drop out project. The grand idea is to make a monster movie starring Eli and other locals that will debut at (gulp!) the Majestic Theater. This, somehow, is supposed to help the community heal. This really angers Sandra, who is convinced that Eli is as psychotic as his sanguinary brother. Lucas tells of his battles with Sandra, how the movie is proceeding, and his sadness that Eli has grown closer to two others and has moved out. All of this is detailed in, yep, letters to Karl–17 in all, one for each victim. Karl remains silent.

 

The last part of the book takes place nearly four years later and updates us on Lucas, his new Jungian therapist, his relationship with Jill, how Eli has fared, and Karl’s fate. If you sense you’ve been setup for a cheap plot ploy, who am I to dissuade you? You might like the resolution and manipulative sentimentality better than I did, but everything is pretty much what I expected from a novel that’s a classic one-trick pony.

 

About the best I can say for We Are the Light is that it didn’t turn into an evangelical Christian novel filled with miracles. Still, if this book is optioned, you’d do well to read reviews from respected film critics before viewing it. By all means avoid  trade magazine hacks and anyone who calls it “timely” because of it deals with the national plague of mass shootings. Let me be clear; those people insult Aurora, Buffalo, El Paso, Nashville, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Virginia Beach, and all the other places where real people suffering from real anguish continue to grieve.

 

Rob Weir

Alice Howe: Artist of the Month

 

April’s Artist of the Month is a no-brainer. On Circumstance, Alice Howe shows how to make a folk/soul/country album that sounds like something special. “No histrionics” is a tag often applied to Howe and it’s apt. Unlike the oh-too-young singers who land in LA, Nashville, and Austin and think that drama is produced by volume alone, Howe understands that the key is to sing a song from the inside out. Her articulation is superb, a small detail that allows the deeper edges of her voice to shine and burnish her compositions.

 

On Circumstance, two other things stand out. First of all, she recorded it at the FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and makes no bones about chasing the ghosts of Aretha Franklin and Etta James around the sound stage. Second, she collaborated with Freebo, the professional handle of David Friedberg, who has recorded and toured with a veritable who’s who of the music world: Ringo Starr, Bonnie Raitt, the McGarrigles, John Mayall, Crosby, Stills, and Nash… the list goes on. How many musicians do you know who drag out a tuba to go with their bass and guitar?

 

These days Los Angeles tries to claim Howe, but she’s from Newton, Massachusetts, grew up summering in Vermont, and graduated from Smith College so sorry, California, she’s a New Englander! You might know Howe from her 2017 EP You’ve Been Away So Long, the title track of which she reworks on Circumstance. (She also recorded two previous LPs.)  Check out how she mixes the lyrics-forward style of folk music with a bluesy country feel. Then watch her turn an NPR studio into a socks-on-the-sofa blues joint in “Travelin’ Soul.” Observe how she turns it up a notch higher still when she steps inside Muscle Shoals to take advantage of a studio band on “Somebody’s New Lover Now.” Somehow, she doesn’t sound totally devastated by her change of fortune! To circle back to the no-histrionics comment, notice how she airs it out without resorting to the vocal equivalent of playing air guitar. It’s a formula she repeats to great effect on “Love Has No Rules.”

 

If you prefer a more acoustic touch, “Let Go” will answer. As you watch this clip, ask yourself how many people sound this strong and clear when singing outside on a breezy day. “Things I’m Not Saying” is another keep-things-simple gem. Alice Howe wears a metaphorical Real Deal full body tattoo.

 

If you want to explore even more, you’ll find some clips of Howe performing amazing Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan covers. My only regret is that I had to be out of town when she played at the Parlor Room in Northampton last weekend.

 

Rob Weir

Black Girl: A Pathbreaking Film

 

 

BLACK GIRL (1966; restored 2016)

Directed by Ousmane Sembène

New Yorker Video, 55 minutes, Not-rated

In French with subtitles

★★★★★

 

 

 

Black Girl is considered a pioneering work in African cinema. This film by Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène probes the impact of colonialism in just 55 minutes, yet still manages to show how it damaged Africans and Europeans alike.

 

The film’s namesake is idealistic Diouana (Mbissine Thérèse Diop), who meets a French husband and wife on temporary assignment in rural Senegal. She is hired by the couple, known only as Monsieur (Robert Fontaine) and Madam (Anne-Marie Jelinek). When the couple return to their home on the Côte d’Azur, they offer to pay for Diouana to come to France and continue her employment. It seems a dream come true for Diouana and she arrives with visions of acquiring sophistication and cultural enrichment. She is so excited that she buys a carved mask at the marketplace in her village that she gifts to the couple.

 

Euphoria gives way to a metaphorical slap in the face. The friendliness she experienced in Senegal gives way to haughtiness and a master-servant arrangement. Diouana has no grasp on European racial dynamics. In Senegal she was treated with respect but in France she is viewed as little more than a trained and caged curiosity. Madame is especially barbed in her commands. Diouana is expected to clean, cook, and take care of the couple’s children and she’s so unprepared for her situation that she wears heels and a tribal dress as she toils around the clock.

 

In one horrifying moment, Diouana is supposed to cook an unspecified African dish for a dinner party at which a male guest embraces her because he wants to know what it’s like to “kiss a black girl.” Diouana is a prisoner in all but name inside the couple’s home, though she does manage to acquire a black boyfriend whose motives are unclear. To say that things do not get better understates how bad things are. At one point Diouana goes on a one-woman strike, though Madam insists that if Diouana refuses to work, she will not be fed. Queue two unfortunate endings, one tragic and the other dangerous and ironic.

 

Despite its age, Black Girl is such a fine film that Sembène is often considered the first African director to attract international acclaim. It should also be noted that it was a timely production. In 1966, Senegal had only been independent for six years, after three and a half centuries of colonial rule, mostly by France, which used it as a center for its foray into the slave trade. It has been a slow and difficult transition. Even today 70 percent of the population lives in poverty, life expectancy is 68 years, and 44 percent of the population is illiterate. It was much worse in 1960, when life expectancy was under 38 and the illiteracy rate was 66 percent.

 

In the 21^st century, Senegal’s legacy of colonialism has fostered resentment toward former masters. We can see the seeds of this in Black Girl. Again, though, part of the brilliance of Sembène’s film is that he shows how erstwhile masters inflicted damage upon themselves as well. We get a palpable sense of how the racist past entrapped Monsieur and Madam, so much so that we draw the conclusion that they left their better selves in Africa. The film’s coda-like second ending powerfully drives home the blindness of Western perspectives.

 

This is a must-see for film buffs. Even if you’re not one, watch Black Girl. It will make you understand what is meant when someone speaks of the cancerous effects of colonialism. Never assume that the past quietly retires to the south of France and simply fades away.

 

Rob Weir  

 

 

School for Scoundrels Dated and Not PC, but Holds Lessons

 

 

SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS  (1960)

Directed by Robert Hamer and Hal E. Chester

Warner-Pathé, 97 minutes, Unrated (sexism)

★★★

 

 

 

If you need a break from political correctness battles, try the 1960 version of School for Scoundrels. It was made before anyone imagined such a term. It’s of middling quality, but it is certainly miles better than the 2006 Todd Phillips box office turkey that posed as an adaptation.

 

Social norms have changed a lot in the past 60 plus years, but most people can still relate to the plight of its main character, Henry Palfrey (Ian Carmichael). His family owns the London business he heads, but Henry is a dorky milquetoast who gets little respect from the staff or anyone else. That includes Raymond Delauney (Terry-Thomas). Call it the toothy (Palfrey) versus the gap-toothed (Delauney). Henry doesn’t like Raymond very much, but the latter delights in hanging around with Henry because he's better at just about everything than his sad-sack acquaintance: tennis, smart dress, choice of cars, conversation, love…. When Henry manages to get a dinner date with the attractive April Smith (Janette Scott), Raymond steals his date from under his plate.  

 

Such failings are why Henry travels to Yeovil in Somerset to attend the School of Lifemanship. It’s really the film’s namesake, which theater fans might recognize as a riff on a famous comedy of manners penned by Sheridan in the 18^th century. The title is also commentary on a 1947 tongue-in-cheek book by Stephen Potter titled The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, which is why the film’s School of Lifemanship is headed by Dr. Potter (Alastair Sim). The gist is that students are schooled in the art of getting over on others via sleazy but not illegal ways. Tactics include making your opponent overthink situations, diverting his attention span, and suckering him into making intentional mistakes. In other words, be annoying but always one step ahead.

 

Henry learns his lessons well, perhaps too well. That is, under the guise of being outwardly a nice guy, Henry becomes a cad. Watch as Henry is first tricked into buying a belching, temperamental jalopy that only Rube Goldberg could love but uses Potter’s training to parlay it into advantage Palfrey. He becomes so supremely self-confident that he’s able to wreck Raymond’s tennis game, outwit Potter, and win April. In the film’s least PC moment, though one in keeping with the era’s paternalism, he deliberately spills a drink down April’s dress to get her out of her clothing and into his dressing gown. In film logic, his affected thoughtfulness causes April to fall for Henry.

 

I’ve probably made this sound more salacious than it is. School for Scandal is a 1960 British movie and back then, inuendo was okay but graphic depictions were still dicey. (In 1960, by the way, it wasn’t yet the norm for all Brits to own an automobile.) The situations in School for Scoundrels fall into the category of broad comedy, some of which is corny by today’s standards and others evocative of outmoded values. Its gentle ending, though, is an indication that fouls aside, no harm is done and goodness prevails. As noted, the parts that continue to resonate are age-old struggles to build confidence and the way that nice people are prey for the unscrupulous. Terry-Thomas was born to play scoundrels and is at the top of his obnoxious game in this movie.

 

Those familiar with the British Ealing comedies that proliferated between 1947-57 will recognize the similarities between its projects and School for Scoundrels. The latter was not made at Ealing Studios and isn’t as sharp script wise. That could be because its first director, Robert Hamer, was fired during production because of his heavy drinking and the reins were handed over to Hal E. Chester and Cyril Frankel. Frankel didn’t even get a credit, so one assumes he wasn’t entirely happy with the final product.

 

Even it’s not up to Ealing’s format in films such as King Hearts and Coronets or The Ladykillers, School for Scandal has its moments. You should watch it if, for no other reason, you’ll recognize gamesmanship tricks that persist despite social “progress.” Forewarned is forearmed.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

Emily the Criminal Unjustly Overlooked

 

 

EMILY THE CRIMINAL (2022)

Directed by John Patton Ford

Roadside Attractions, 93 minutes, R (language, drugs, some violence)

★★★★

 

 

Audience scores for Emily the Criminal were so tepid that it barely recouped its $2 million budget. (If you don’t know, a budget that low is like buying gasoline for 30 cents a gallon.) I have to think that it simply wasn’t marketed very well, because it has a recognizable lead (Aubrey Plaza) and critics liked it. More to the point, it’s a really good film. Maybe the problem is that it was packaged a crime thriller. I can see that, but it’s really more of social commentary than a thriller.

 

Emily Benetto (Plaza) is a young woman failing to make a go of her life in the Los Angeles gig economy. She’s smart and smart alecky, but she’s burdened by crippling student debt and once got into a spot of trouble. Life on the margins + dead-end jobs + a criminal record = unemployable insofar as securing a decent-paying job goes. As her frustration grows, so too does her snarkiness and pessimism. It doesn’t help that her job with a catering service–Gina Gershon plays her boss–doesn’t exactly expose her to La-La Land’s most-polite citizens. And it really doesn’t help when someone she knows pulls strings to get Emily an interview with a magazine, which turns out to be a long unpaid internship that might turn into a paid position if she excels against other interns. She finds that insulting, says so in no uncertain terms, and storms out. (Anyone out there share her view and mine that unpaid internships are a violation of unfair labor practices laws?)

 

The crime part of the movie comes when she finds her way to Youcef Haddad (Theo Rossi) on a tip that he’s looking for someone to be a “dummy shopper.” If you’re thinking she’s helping others, think again. Emily’s obvious intelligence grabs Youcef’s attention in a roomful of other recruits, many of whom are probably undocumented immigrants. The operation is really a credit card scam. “Shoppers” are issued cards Youcef and his cousin Kahlil (Jonathan Agridori) make themselves and bear names and numbers gathered via identity theft. The job is to use the cards to buy high-ticket items and bring them to a predetermined location where they are loaded onto a truck that will take them to be fenced. Illegal? Of course, but $200 a day sounds good to Emily. If the system is going to treat her like garbage, why not get back at the metaphorical haulers?

 

Dangerous? Shoppers are told never to visit the same place over a period of time. It also helps to be issued a taser and receive directions on how to use it. She will have to do exactly that when she’s jumped while dog sitting for her friend Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke). Youcef plays both a love interest (of sorts) and the good guy role that’s juxtaposed against Kahlil’s surly cold-heartedness.

 

I won’t pretend that Emily the Criminal is the most original film you’ll ever see. Based on the above, you might be able to sketch out most of the directions the script takes. For the record, it also channels the Lawrence Kasdan-directed Body Heat (1981) at one point and this film is certainly not in the same quality category at that one. Nonetheless, Plaza is letter-perfect as a young woman pushed to the edge. She enhances the role by also playing the part physically. She’s clearly an attractive young woman but Plaza plays Emily as rough around the edges, the sort who embodies the phrase “she cleans up well.” In other words, she strikes a balance between downtrodden grit and affected poise, and walks the line between anger and hope.

 

Emily the Criminal did well at the Sundance Festival, so think of this one as one of those so-called “small” independent films whose lack of traction was due more to falling through the cracks rather than its merits. It also helps to muse upon its ironic title. If the proverbial “system” gives no breaks, who is the criminal in the title? Give it a try and decide for yourself.

 

Rob Weir