Therese Honey: Harp Tunes for Cold Nights

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THERESE HONEY

Summer’s End

Waterbug 108

Some instrumental albums force you to dance; Therese Honey’s solo harp release makes you want to hunker down with a fleece and a steaming mug of cocoa. She’s titled it Summer’s End, but the mood is midwinter. The ambience is enhanced by the glassy tone of Honey’s harp, the skill with which she plays high scales, her tendency to let her strings ring rather than stopping them, and her downy touch on those strings. It begs a positive spin on the adjective ‘icy,’ as in crispness and stark contrasts. Honey’s repertoire of original, traditional, and covers is mostly drawn from or inspired by Celtic composers, lands, and legends. There are the obligatory Turlough O’Carolan pieces, tunes drawn from the O’Neill and Bunting collections, and a few learned from Grainne Hambly. As this suggests, Honey’s playing tends toward the formal side of the ledger, even when she’s plucking out a jig or reel. You’ll find old favorites such as “Hewlett,” “Moving Clouds,” and “Queen of Yarrow,” and accomplished originals such as the title track and “Connealy Rose.” There’s also a surprisingly lilting rendition of “Bonaparte Crossing the Rockies,” a reworked variant of the popular hornpipe “Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine.” What makes Honey’s rendition unusual is that the variant is a bluegrass standard generally cranked out with deliberate homespun raggedness. No rough stuff from Ms. Honey; she’s as inviting as that cup of cocoa with my name on it.

Rob Weir

August: Osage County--Overactors of Hollywood Unite!

 August: Osage County (2013)

Directed by John Wells

Weinstein Group, 121 minutes, R (language)

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Wrestling for the coveted "Greatest Overacting Award."

What we’ve learned from the moves lately is that living in flat places like Montana, Nebraska, and Oklahoma can make you nuts. Apparently Oklahoma also produces horrendous acting, if August: Osage County is any indication. Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write: Julia Roberts out-acts Meryl Streep. Here’s another: That’s because Streep’s latest performance is her career worst. She’s not alone, though. A “412” is actors’ slang for overacting and if there were 412 Oscars, the cast of Osage County would clean out the trophy case.

The film is ostensibly a twist on the adage: “The sins of the father are visited upon the son.” This time it’s the sins of the mother. Violet Weston (Streep) is a pill-popping bitter woman suffering from mouth cancer, and from benign neglect from her brilliant world-weary poet-husband Beverly (Sam Shepard in a cameo) . He’s had it with her Wicked Witch of the West act and has hired Johanna Monevata, a local Cheyenne woman (Misty Upham), to be a housekeeper and wedge between him and Violet. When Bev dies (accident or suicide?), the extended Weston family descends upon the homestead to bury Bev and pick up the pieces.

Hank Williams once sang, “A house without love is not a home,” and this is certainly true of the Westons. There’s not an ounce of kindness between Violet and her three daughters: Barbara (Roberts), Ivy (Julianne Nicholson), and Karen (Juliette Lewis). Violet is equal parts abusive and manipulative toward her younger sister Mattie Fae (Margo Martindale) and her huband, Charlie (Chris Cooper). She is sharp-minded, sharp-tongued, and occasionally funny, but Violet is as Machiavellian and mean-spirited as her own mother had been. Of course, she is powerfully resented by her daughters, all of whom are convinced they are nothing like her when, in truth, they’re chips off the old blockhead.

Barbara is a control freak in the midst of a disintegrating marriage to Bill Fordham (Ewan McGregor), and estranged from her 14-year-old daughter, Jean (Abigail Breslin). Ivy is the stay-behind daughter who is dutiful on the outside, but is so filled with resentment and fury that she’s about to explode; Karen is a trashy floozie dating the older Porsche-drving huckster Steve (Dermot Mulroney), who is literally and metaphorically taking her for a ride. Also in the mix is “Little” Charles (Benedict Cumberbatch), Mattie Fae’s son, whom she abuses and demeans at every opportunity.

Tracy Letts wrote the screenplay, which was based on her Broadway play. There’s  plenty here for a skilled director to shape but, alas, Wells isn’t that director. He’s best known for his work on television and he simply isn’t up to the task of laying down the law to all the star power and egos involved in this film. Streep plays Violet like Michael Bolton sings–she starts at 110 decibels and stays there. Her performance isn’t dramatic, it’s histrionic. Roberts is far superior because at least her anger smoulders before it ignites, but playing off of Streep’s overwrought tantrums, even cool Julia bursts into lighter-fluid-fanned flames. The less said about Juliette Lewis, the better; her performance is inept and embarrassing. Benedict Cumberbatch doesn’t have much to do, but he does it badly in a performance that runs the gamut from moping to really moping. Even the usually delightful Abigail Breslin slips; she plays a 14-year-old living dangerously as if she’s reduxing an old Christina Ricci role.

There are a few highlights. Julianne Nicholson is quite good because she plays her cards close to the vest instead of waving them in front of our faces. McGregor also does a nice job of repeatedly retightening the lid on the lamp, lest the genie (destructive outbursts) escape. Misty Upham is quielty present but forceful whilst being a leaf upon a raging stream, though we do wonder why she doesn’t leave all these Pugnacious Pale Faces to drown in their own bile. Best of all is Chris Cooper, a mostly silent man who’d be content just to be a good person, except for all the bullshit he’s forced to shovel and dodge. His perfomance has something most of the others lack; I believe they call it sublety.

This film is up for quite a few Oscars, but don’t be fooled–it’s what you’d get if you took the humor out of Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch and mashed it with a high school production of A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and shocking revelations á la Chinatown. It’s my least favorite type of movie: 412s masquerading as weighty high art. Rob Weir

Intent to Deceive: Can You Spot the Fake?

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Intent to Deceive: Fakes and Forgeries in the Art World

D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts (Springfield, MA)

Through April 27, 2014

Take a look at this luscious painting by Van Gogh. All his mastery is on display–the psychedelic colors, the thickly applied oils, and bucolic tranquility that looks as if it’s about to be devoured by the swirling sun burning across the horizon. The work is so vivid that we can imagine the mad, paint-splattered Vincent attacking his canvass with brushes and palette knife. Except that what you’re seeing is actually by John Myatt.

And what a treat to drive the 20 miles to Springfield and gaze upon Vermeer’s classic Girl with the Pearl Earring. The last time I saw it, I had to board a plane to Amsterdam and board a train for The Hague. Now that the Mauritshuis is closed for renovation, the Vermeers are free to travel. All is good, except that the image before me isn’t Vermeer; it’s Myatt again.

Intent to Deceive features five talented individuals: Myatt (1945-), Elmyr de Hory (1906-76), Han Van Meegeren (1899-1947), Eric Hebborn (1934-), and Mark Landis (1955-). You have to be talented to do what they did: make the art world think your knock-off is the Real McCoy. A newly opened exhibit at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts explores the world of art forgers. Its purpose is didactic, not laudatory. One should not equate art forgers with romantic double agents–their mischief has sidetracked careers, tarnished museum reputations, and triggered untold millions of dollars in financial losses. There are an estimated 1,000 works hanging on museum walls posing as master works that are actually by de Hory. The next time you see a museum label identifying a work as “attributed to,” chances are you’re gazing at a fraud. That may not be entirely bad. Stay with me on this seemingly outrageous remark.

The first question on everyone’s mind is: “How did the forgers get away with it?” This brings us back to the fact that one must be a superior artist even to attempt such a thing. This, in turn, begs the question of how value is assigned to art. A friend of mine judges so-called masterpieces by framing them in a question rather than gilt: “If you saw this painting at a yard sale, how much would you pay for it?” A real Van Gogh would sell for over a hundred million dollars; a faux Van Gogh for several hundred. Is the genuine article really 50,000 times better than Myatt’s work? Before you take the high ground, consider that tens of thousands of satisfied visitors annually leave a Las Vegas museum that admits its walls are adorned with simulacra.

This begs the question of whether the ultra-rich and self-anointed arbiters of public taste are complicit in the forgery trade. It’s a bit like the issue of why some athletes cheat by using steroids–because the potential monetary gain seems to justify the risk. The deceivers showcased in the exhibit made very good money off collectors, art houses, and museums more focused on value than artistry. None of the painters have made that much money with their own canvases, yet each was good enough to pass as a master.    

One can both deplore theft and raise questions about the culture of ridiculous accumulation. Take de Hory, for instance. A 1969 biography detailed de Hory’s shady career. It was penned by none other than Clifford Irving, who two years later published (and was eventually jailed for) a falsified autobiography of Howard Hughes. Did these men commit fraud for a lark, or was it for the lolly? A shadowy character named John Drewe sold several Myatt works as masters before the artist knew about it. Why did Myatt eventually go along? Follow the money.

If you’re looking for ‘good’ guys, check out the details on panel boards that explain how forgers are exposed. It’s real CSI stuff involving connoisseurship, meticulous tracking of a work’s provenance, and technical analysis (much of it using technology not available when some of the works were produced). One fascinating revelation is how an eagle-eyed art detective noticed that two prints allegedly from different time periods used the same paper. That’s a real connoisseur at work, but basic homework would have averted a lot of fraud. Myatt and Landis, for instance, legally sold acknowledged copies on the open market. 

Intent to Deceive is about mischief-makers, con men, and rubes. Its final section has small works and forgeries side by side. We are invited to identify which is fake and which is real. Can you do it? Here’s a painting. It’s a de Hory, not a Modigliani. If nothing else, Intent to Deceive made me look more closely than I normally do. It’s the only way to appreciate a true Modigliani.--Rob Weir  

Random Thoughts on American Society

Hobby Lobby, a chain owned by Christian mullahs, obtained a temporary stay on the portion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) that requires coverage for contraceptive services. It claims such provisions violate the religious conscience of the chain’s owners. Conservatives have cheered this, but they should not. Let’s be clear about this: Hobby Lobby is not a religious institution; it’s a retail chain. If the Supreme Court doesn’t  vacate this stay, you can forget the worms analogy–the Court will open a can of venomous snakes. You might recall that the same Supreme Court ruled that the ACA was a “tax.” If non-religious institutions can opt out of taxes on the grounds of conscience, then every peace group in America should sue to opt out of taxes that go to war and military spending. How is the principle different?

I was thinking about the military this morning as I car-slalomed past potholes the size of Estonia. The reason they’re not fixed is the same reason we have a shortage of just about everything relating to civil society these days: lack of money. People can rail about welfare bums and entitlements all they want, but there are really just two choices:  live in a society whose civic life rivals that of Nigeria, or invest money in rebuilding. There’s really only one way to do that–slash military spending. And I mean severely, as in a reordering of national priorities. We’re probably talking on the order of 30-40% cuts.

Ignore politicians that equate military spending with jobs. That’s an old dodge rooted in propaganda. Yes, some jobs would be lost temporarily if, say, Groton, Connecticut closed its submarine base. But check out data from the Centre for Research on Globalization. It tels you what has been known for decades: military-industrial complex spending is the path to a boom/bust economy. Towns and regions that (think they) depend on it are among the least stable communities in the nation. Military towns are far from being “recession-proof” (like college towns). Portsmouth, New Hampshire is among the cities that came back stronger once its military base closed.

Do we really care any more about baseball’s steroids scandal? I surely don’t. Alex Rodriguez is banned for a year. Ho hum! Everything about Major League Baseball’s efforts to catch “cheaters” has been a fraud. As much as I think Rodriguez an egoistic boor, MLB promised it would not release names of people in the Mitchell Report. Had it been true to its word, A-Rod would be considered a first-time user, not a repeat offender. Moreover, there are things most folks are ignoring. MLB isn’t the worst sport insofar as drug use goes­–pro football is much worse, even if the public doesn’t give a crap about an interior lineman who gets caught. Second, sports has always had “cheaters”–spitballs, corked bats, horses shot full with pain killers, golfers moving balls for a better shot…. Fair? Nope, but consider this: “cheating” can give players an edge, but it doesn’t make them Superman. If Barry Bonds only did well because of drugs, why didn’t everyone hit 762 homeruns? And why didn’t every hurler win 354 games like Roger Clemens? Don’t tell me these guys don’t belong in the Hall of Fame. 

It’s hard for me to decide who looks most like a walking corpse, Keith Richards or John Kerry.

Remember the battle to ensure that Ebonics would never be considered acceptable grammar? Explain to me why non-standard grammar is okay if it comes from those wired and white. Where’s the outrage over things such as misuse of prepositions, apostrophes, split infinitives, and violations of subject/pronoun agreement rules? Don't’ get me started on texting shortcuts. I’d much rather someone “axe” me a question than receive an “R U there?” text.

New debates have arisen over raising the minimum wage. Predictably, business groups and conservatives predict economic collapse if wages go up–as they have every single time it has ever been raised and the sky, at last glance, is still standing. John “Putz” Boehner asserts that America didn’t always have a minimum wage law and that it was strong economically back in those days. Apparently he’s never studied the Gilded Age or read The Jungle. And don’t buy his strain-on- small businesses line of crap either. Two-thirds of all minimum wage workers are employed by large corporations; moreover, the Fair Labor Standards Act does not apply to businesses that take in less than $500,000 if they are not engaged in interstate commerce.

Another John Bonehead misconception–seven states have no minimum wage law: Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Wyoming. Gosh! What economic powerhouses they are! I can’t wait for Massachusetts to become a dynamo like these perennial contenders for poorest state in the Union. Leaving that aside, this is simply Boehner’s attempt at political distraction. All it means is that these states do not have any minimum wage laws on their state books, which would make it harder for them to surpass the federal minimum wage, as 19 states plus the District of Columbia have done. They must comply with federal law, whether or not they have state minimum wage laws except in the cases noted above. 

Watching Chris Christie trying to squirm away from his vendetta-induced scandal reminds me that the only political sin worse than being arrogant is being too arrogant to admit that you’ve been an arrogant ass.

Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas Triumphant Again

 
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ALASDAIR FRASER and NATALIE HAAS

Abundance

Culburnie 124D

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Classic Scots fiddlers like Niel Gow saw little contradiction between playing for a fashionable drawing room audience by day and sawing out tunes for village peasants in the evening. After all, bowed instruments (including viola and cello) were more about the dance than the musician. If it set Scottish toes a tapping, it scarcely mattered if they were shod in silk or leather. That spirit of court and pub pervades the latest release from Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas. Superlatives fail for these two, but does it surprise anyone to hear this is a stunning release? It differs from previous projects in several ways. First, the feel is more courtly than plebian. There are some wonderful raucous  traditional tunes here, including one of the better versions of the 3/2 dance tune “Keys to the Cellar” (known by many as “Cam Ye Ower Frae France”) ever recorded, but there’s even more stately material such as the strathspey “Niel Gow’s Wife;” Fraser’s birthday tune for a friend, “Howard Booster’s Style;” and “Glenfinnan,” a slow wedding march composed by Fraser. Another departure involves the integration of a style unavailable to the old masters: jazz. Fraser’s cleverly titled “Hot Club d’Écosse” hops to Django Reinhart small-combo jazz beats. Perhaps most surprising, Fraser and Haas even integrate some trombone and euphonium into “The Kelburn Brewer.” But style scarcely matters with masters such as these. Think I exaggerate? Who else could make a playful song about a kitten on the back of a gull (“On the Wings of a Skorrie’) sound so soul-wrenchingly beautiful? 

Rob Weir

 Here's a You Tube video of very good quality from the amazing concert I saw last September.

Major Pettigrew's Last Stand is Quite Grand

 

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand (2011)

By Helen Simonson

Random House 978-0812981223

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Gay love isn’t the only kind that dare not speak its name. Not if you’re a proper English gent living in the tradition-bound village of Edgecombe St. Mary and you find yourself falling for a Pakistani widow. Britain is, after all, a land in which Pakistanis are called “wogs” and Muslims are called “towel heads” (a term, alas, learned from boorish Yanks). But 68-year-old Major Ernest Pettigrew, himself a widower for six years, has spent his life being disciplined, orderly, and proper and is starting to think maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Although village tongues wag, Major Pettigrew shares a love of tea and Kipling with Jasmina Ali and, the more they talk, the more they seem to have in common, even though he’s proper bourgeois and she operates a convenience store that sells goods many locals find exotic, if not dangerous.

The Major certainly has more in common with Mrs. Ali than with his money-grubbing sister-in-law, who wants him to sell a valuable pair of Churchill guns and give her half of the money rather than reuniting the set as the Pettigrew paterfamilias intended when he entrusted each son with one of them. The Major’s son Roger also wants him to sell them so he can get his hands on the money for some of the high-flying London banking schemes in which he’s involved, including Lord Dagenham’s plan to sell off part of the manor to an American developer who would remake the village as a sort of retirement theme park for elderly aristocrats and gentry. The Major finds Dagenham irresponsible, his neighbors annoying, and his son and his American girlfriend insufferable. When you read of the pageant staged by the villagers, you will come to share his disgust. You need not be a devotee of political correctness to conclude they don’t have a multicultural bone in their collective body.

Jasmina, for her part, is growing equally impatient with the Muslim bigotry of her own extended family, including her way-too-serious nephew Abdul Wahid, who doesn’t like women to be in public (though he harbors a few not-so-orthodox secrets). To compound the irony, the Major was an army brat born in Lahore and Jasmina in Cambridge. The novel builds to an inevitable culture clash crescendo.

This is Simonson’s debut novel and an impressive one. Her village characters have enough bigotry and foibles to be something out of Fawlty Towers and this keeps the book amusing rather than annoying. She also makes her characters walk the line between wackiness and obsequiousness, which makes them semi-endearing even in moments in which we’d like to rip out their lungs and feed them to the White Tower ravens. There are the usual pitfalls that come from a Yank (even one who has lived in the UK) interpreting British culture and trying to integrate Brit Speak into the dialogue. I suppose also we might protest that the storyline is ultimately implausible. Whatever. When the Major makes his eponymous last stand, it feels very satisfying. Label this one just a plain old good read.

Rob Weir

Enon is a Beautifuly Written but Dull Book

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ENON (2013)

By Paul Harding

Random House 978-9400069439

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Normally it’s very bad form to give away the plot of a book, but Enon isn’t a plot-driven book, so here it is: Charlie Crosby, his wife, and his daughter are living a humble but happy life along the shores of Lake Enon. One day a car strikes his bike-riding daughter, Kate, she dies, and Crosby’s dreams pop like soap bubbles. He loses his wife and his grasp on reality. At some point he gets a little bit better. That’s it.

In the hands of a lesser writer, Enon (none spelled backwards) would be the sort of book you’d toss aside after you slogged through 50 pages and concluded that the plot wasn’t going anywhere. Paul Harding is not just any writer, though; one of the best ways to describe Enon is to call it a beautifully written bad book. Because the plot is far too thin to sustain a 212-page novel, Harding plumbs the depths of Charlie’s memories, impressions, depression, and fantasies. But it’s not even accurate to call this an interior novel; Harding’s poetic descriptions of Enon, the marsh, the cemetery, the lake, and other such externals are, if anything, even more brightly illumined than Charlie’s despair. (Enon is patterned on Massachusetts North Shore towns such as Georgetown, where Harding resides.)

Those who’ve read Harding’s 2010 Pulitzer-winning debut novel Tinkers will recognize Charlie as the grandson of that book’s narrator, George Washington Crosby. You will also see him as a chip of the block one generation removed: a man with such heightened senses and powers of observation that he can’t focus well enough to be much more than minimally competent in all things mundane (like school, work, home repairs, or being a husband). He was, however, spectacularly good at being a father.

Harding is a terrific writer. Alas, this does not make him a great storyteller. I don’t wish to sound unsympathetic to the set-up. I can’t imagine what could be more horrifying for a parent to lose a 13-year-old like Kate–on the cusp of adolescence, whip smart, funny, coltishly cute, and kind. Harding does a masterful job of showing Charlie’s deep slide. Since Charlie is only tangentially connected to routine in the first place, Kate’s death jump-starts a quick getaway from reality. Or is it an excuse? Is it simply easier to exist as an addled bum and only live in memories and fantasies of Kate? I’m sure it would be hard for anyone to pick up the pieces, but after a while it’s hard to sustain empathy for Charlie. He, in effect, becomes a plebeian Howard Hughes, but without the romance and myth associated with the latter's slobbery.

Charlie is totally fixated on Kate and her death, but the constant reminder of this eventually wears on readers the same way that a constant whiner begins to grate. Harding employs an episodic structure rather than a conventional narrative, but it’s not clear what Harding wants us to do other than feel bad for Charlie’s loss. We get the fact that Charlie’s paralyzed by grief–pretty early on, in fact. This leaves us with an endless array of episodes that are repetitive and substantively indistinct, even when surface specifics differ. We marvel over Harding’s prose, but it’s simply not enough. Perhaps this would have made a better novella; by page 100 I found myself skimming for lyricism rather than resolution. When the later comes, it feels implausibly abrupt and contrived. Is this the classic sophomore slump? That may be too harsh, but one hopes that Harding spends more time plotting his next novel; his elegant word baubles deserve to hang from tall redwoods, not spindly scrub pines.

Rob Weir