Steampunk Quilts? You Betcha!

 

 

  

StitchPunk (through July 13)

Domestic Partners (through June 15)

New England Quilt Museum

18 Shattuck Street

Lowell, MA

 

On a recent trip home from Maine Emily wanted to stop at the New England Quilt Museum (NEQM). I was only mildly interested and planned to walk about and take photos instead. Into every life a little rain must fall and, in my case, threatening weather was a good thing. I went inside the NEQM and adored the two featured exhibits.

 

 

 

StitchPunk is, of course, wordplay on Steampunk, but it was also a marvel of imagination and creativity. First, though, let me say a few words about steampunk. It was all the rage in the late 1990s and into the first decade and a half of the 21^st century. The term is associated with dreamers and science fiction writers who use the trappings of the Victorian world, but replace modern technology with shiny brass gears and steam power rather than our current (pun intended) reliance on electricity and petroleum. Steampunk ardor has cooled a bit, but it still has allure. Its critics associate it with hipsters doing hipster things and those who dislike science fiction for its assumed lack of “science” and its alleged animus toward “progress.”  

 

 

Courtesy of a book by Simon Webb titled The Real World of Victorian Steampunk, I’m prepared to tell such people that they are nuts! Do you remember that Elon Musk design for a vacuum tube rail system? A steam-powered version was successfully demonstrated in 1867. In1903, the Wright Brothers flew the first airplane, right? Nope! Several steam-powered airplanes got off the ground in the 1880s and 1890s and traveled further than the flimsy gas-powered wood and canvas box of the Wrights. Solar power was proved a good idea in 1878, and in the same century steam-powered buses,  ocean-going boats, telephones, and fax machines were operational. So too were electric cars capable of reaching over 150 mph and the prototypes of Skye and computers. The very world of oil and gasoline to which fanatics so zealously cling came to dominate for the same reasons they remain: the discovery of oil led self-interested investors to promote machines using it and demote steam machines, some of which were superior. So there!

 

The show at the NEQM doesn’t seek to rekindle such battles, rather it focuses on stitchers and quilters who wanted to do create unique and unusual fabric art. Like steampunk writers, a lot of what they do upsets traditionalists. Is it a “quilt” if it contains wire, dryer vents, gears, hardware, jewelry, mannequin faces, and glass jars? Why not? As the below pictures show, it’s cool stuff no matter what labels you want to slap on it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would suppose the wooden marionette fashioned by Bruce Rosenbaum, Isaac Singer: The Time Stitcher doesn’t fit rigid definitions either, though many of the pieces you see are decidedly sewing-related. (If you don’t know, this is the Singer associated with a famed line of sewing machines that still bear his name.)

 

 

 

 

 

You only have a few more weeks to catch Domestic Partners, which is more on the calm side–in both design and intent. Fiber artist Dawn Allen pays homage to the farm animals of her youth as well as domesticated companions, and woodland critters. Her show skirts the borders of “Ahh, cute!” but in a good way.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rob Weir

Thinking ‘Bout Sports

Right now every sport except gridiron football is in high gear. I’ll overlook the fact that basketball and hockey should have crowned their champions at least six weeks ago if I get a break from the NFL. Can’t stand the latter! I’d much rather view real football (aka/soccer) than watch steroid-enhanced monsters slap each other on the butt and pretend to play an exciting sport that ends in 6-3 scores. 

 

 

 

In the National Basketball Association I’m rooting for the Boston Celtics, who have the most talented team in the NBA. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Indiana Pacers or the Western Conference champ upsets them. The Celtics can be maddeningly  lethargic and play as if they are disinterestedly mailing it in. This is particularly the case of Jaysson Tatum, who gets by too much on reputation rather than his box scores. I hope he wakes up and wins his kudos. If he doesn’t, it’s not out of the realm of possibility the Celtics might move him rather than give him a max contract. 

 

 I’m rooting for the New York Rangers to win hockey’s Stanley Cup, though my head tells me they won’t get past the Florida Panthers. I’ve nothing against the Panthers, except that they play in Florida. I refuse to root for anything or anybody from that IQ-challenged state. (I don’t even like the weather!) If the Rangers fall, I really hope  the Edmonton Oilers win the Cup. It’s been 31 years since Canada hoisted a Stanley Cup and it will go wild when a Canadian team is finally triumphant. Few in Sunrise, Florida will look up from their pina coladas if the Panthers to win. 

 

 The Major League Baseball Season is nearly one-third finished with its162-game season. Fans still seem to like the pitch clock, but MLB continues to face challenges. One of them is the luxury tax, which was supposed to bring parity. It has not. May is almost over and just 11 (of 30) teams have a winning record. Eight are in large media markets, with only Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Cleveland representing so-called small markets. 

 

 MLB has produced some surprises. I did not expect the Yankees to be in first place or the Red Sox to have a winning record. I love the fact that Tampa Bay and the Houston Astros have sucked. Tampa often plays “dirty” baseball and everyone knows about the “cheating” Astros. I also delight in seeing the Twins and Angels struggle, Minnesota because they are perennial tomato can playoff fodder for real contenders; the Angels for pathetic management that has wasted the career of Mike Trout. 

 

 I’ve been heartened by the success of Cleveland and Kansas City, though both need to start putting butts in the seats or pressure will mount to move them. This is also the case in Cincinnati, Miami, and Pittsburgh. Instead of expansion—heaven forbid still another wave of AAA ball masquerading as the big leagues–MLB needs to either institute a salary floor or move failing teams. Montreal ought to be choice number one; it’s twice as large as Charlotte, another frequent candidate. (BTW, Nashville has a more rabid baseball base than Charlotte.) 

 

 MLB has decided to abandon Oakland for Las Vegas—desert heat, hookers, and gambling, what could go wrong? I’m glad that Oakland is giving MLB the middle finger to the tune of just 6,000 fans per home game; there’s no reason why fans should line the pockets of the greedy. I’d love to see the Dodgers fall flat as they try to buy a World Series. They won’t though; they’re just too good. 

 

Pro sports need new awards categories. The Cleveland Guardians probably won’t win the World Series, but Stephen Vogt should be Manager of the Year for keeping them in the running and for taking over from Terry Francona, surely a future Hall of Fame skipper. 

 

 There should be a Most Outstanding Player for whomever is the best at their craft, and the Most Valuable Player should be reserved for the one who truly means the most to a team. For instance, Mike Trout is as perennial MVP candidate, but is he really all that “valuable?” Each year he won or was considered, the Angels finished near the bottom of their division. Did they need Trout to finish fourth? 

 

 I’ve been thinking about this during the NHL season. If you are voting on the best player in the NHL, you start considering Nikita Kucherov, Nathan MacKinnon, Cale Makar, Auston Matthews, Leon Draisatil, and Connor MacDavid. Only the last two are still playing for the Cup. However, the most valuable is Artemi Panarin of the Rangers. It’s impossible to imagine New York’s success without him. 

 

 By the way, the most valuable player on the Celtics is Derrick White.

 

 Several other general thoughts:

       Can people just give Caitlin Clark a break? She’s played only a handful of games in the Women’s National Basketball League and gets flak for not being dominant. Gee, how can that be? She only went from college ball to competition against the finest female competitors in the world! What she has done is triple attendance everywhere she has played.

·          Shame, shame, shame on black commentators and players pulling the race card on Clark! Is it her fault that others see her a proverbial Great White Hope? Or that endorsements have come her way? Isn’t the real villain the NBA, which provides half of the WNBA budget? Let’s see, Clark is the consensus #1 pick and makes $76,500; the minimum NBA salary is $1.1 million for pine-riders!

·          Think the networks regret shelling out over $7 billion to broadcast NASCAR? Auto racing has devotees who go to the track, but it’s a terrible sport for TV.

·          Golf is even worse on TV. Plus, the PGA/LIV split has really taken a divot out of its viewing audience. 

 

 Rob Weir

Small Towns: Cheshire County New Hampshire

 

In Southern New Hampshire nearly every settlement from Keene in the east to Manchester 69 miles westward is small. Keene is a vibrant college town of roughly 23,000 people, which makes it a metropolis by the standards of Route 101. The next biggest place is Peterborough, which has 6,400 residents. It's famous for a folk music venue that has operated for many years and for the MacDowell residency program where visual artists, writers, architects, and other creative people gather in the woods to collaborate and work on their projects. MacDowell was where Thornton Wilder wrote “Our Town” with Peterborough as his model. However, I would like to concentrate on three smaller towns: Dublin, Harrisville, and Hancock. 

 

 

 

Perhaps you’ve heard of Dublin population 1,500 and can't recall why. If you have ever picked up Yankee Magazine or the Farmer's Almanac, they are published in Dublin. The center of town is a classic New England white village, the exceptions being the fieldstone library and the red Yankee Magazine building. Dublin is in the middle of the Monadnock region, a region in which to enjoy nature and then kick back in a town dotted with small inns and restaurants. There are three large lakes within the town limits, the largest being Dublin Pond. It's also home to the genteel Dublin School, a private college prep institution of just 170 students spread across more than 500 acres–roughly three per student! Dublin has long been an unconventional town for New Hampshire–more crunchy and arty than sawdust- and plaid-covered. It has quite a few devotees of the Baha'i faith, courtesy of a 1912 visit from Abdu’l-Bahá, the Persian-born son of the founder of Baha'i. In the summertime it hosts the Walden Music School.

 

 

 

If you drive up the hill by the parking lot of Yankee Magazine Publishing and travel about 5 miles you will come to Harrisville. It has a special place in my heart, because when I was an undergraduate at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, the very first book I read in a labor history class  (my eventual graduate school specialty) was Factory under the Elms by John Borden Armstrong. It profiled Harrisville and taught me a lot about then-alien concepts: macroeconomics, the immigrant cycle, demographics, and ethnographic history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Harrisville was–and is–a textiles village. It was named for Milan Harris who opened the first woolen mill there. It is a picturesque village of just 984 people and much of it looks as it might have appeared in the 19th century. There are old brick and stone factories, mill ponds, canals, and raceways that provided water power to run the machines. Think Lowell, Massachusetts in miniature. Much of the town has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and Harrisville Designs still produces yarns and cloth for purchase at the factory store. Harrisville is a friendly place, but because it is so small it depends on a few people doing a lot of things. I struck up a conversation with Frederick, who was repairing windows sills and pointing bricks and blocks. He is one of just two people who oversee the historical complex. His partner Cat, a graphics design artist, was gracious enough to put aside her work preparing upper stories of factories for housing and business conversion to show Emily and me around the old mills. “Old,” though, is a bit of an oxymoron. There are historic photos to be viewed and a relatively large weaving and twisting room still using classic textile machinery, but much of the post-industrial space has been beautifully renovated. Bringing retrofitted buildings into the 21st century has required removing walls, installing modern furnishings, and replacing inefficient energy sources with solar power, heat pumps, and up-to-date furnaces. Harrisville is a fascinating place just to walk around and imagine yourself in a different time period. It even has a general store that pretty much takes care of all local needs from crackers to coffee.

 

 

 

Hancock was actually our primary goal for the day because it is home to the Farm at Wolf Pine Hollow. Every May it becomes a riot of color because its 118 acres are planted in more than a half million tulip bulbs. The village proper has 1700 people but they are spread out and the center looks as if there couldn't contain more than a few hundred. Hancock is quiet and operates at a casual pace. There are several cafes, but don't expect fast service. Somewhere it has a bell fashioned by Paul Revere, but that didn't seem exciting enough to seek out. Like most of the towns in Cheshire County it’s located in watersheds of the Ashuelot and Contoocook rivers, hence there are lakes dotting the landscape, including extensive Nabanusit Lake.

 

Cheshire County New Hampshire is a place where you go to operate in slow gear. That is unless you wish to climb the Monadnock ridges or burn energy paddling in the ponds. We opted for taking our time to poke about, stop, and enjoy the views.

 

Rob Weir

Chihuly Collection a Must-See

 

Chihuly Collection

Morean Arts Center

720 Central Avenue

St. Petersburg, Florida

 

There’s scarcely a major art museum in the country that doesn’t have at least one piece of glass from Dale Chihuly. If you’ve been to MFA Boston, there’s a soaring installation of green spikes in the restaurant space and foyer that fronts the American wing. It has been variously described as a giant icicle, a bottle brush, or a thin evergreen tree. Those who live in Western Massachusetts can also see a Chihuly’s composition of entangled tendrils in the lobby of the Mt. Holyoke College library.

 

There is a special thrill in seeing a lot of Chihuly’s work in one place. To do that, you have to go places such as Las Vegas, Oklahoma City, Seattle, or Florida. I recently took in the Chihuly Collection in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is part of the city’s downtown Morean Arts complex. I was enthralled.

 

Chihuly hails from Washington State and, to his legions of fans, is considered the dean of modern blown glass in the United States. After dropping out of college, he returned and obtained his bachelor’s degree from the University of Washington and an M.S. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also established a university glass arts program said to be the first in the country. (Some dispute that.) He also has a New England connection in that he obtained a second masters, a MFA, from the Rhode School of Design. Chihuly holds numerous honorary degrees and has been showered with awards and honors around the globe. He even worked for a time on the Venetian island of Murano, where I’ve been lucky enough to visit.  

 

Before delving into the St. Petersburg collection I should note that Chihuly has his detractors. I’m not sure if it’s still true, but for a time he held the distinction for having the largest blown glass piece in the world. For some critics that was emblematic of Chihuly’s penchant for showmanship over artistic merit. It probably doesn’t help that Chihuly exudes a piratical look with a patch over his left eye that is the result of a 1976 auto accident in London that blinded him in that eye. (It was ironically the result of smashed glass.) More to the point, though, it left him unable to use a blowing tube. In other words, he designs his works and consigns it to others.

 

Personally, I’m not a fan of the work at MFA Boston and am put off by the snaky evocations of the one at Mt. Holyoke, but I’m happy to place Chihuly at the forefront of American glass arts. Most museum glass displays bore me with their rows upon rows of cut crystal, decanters, bottles, vases, and showy centerpieces for rich people trying to impress other rich people. Chihuly’s work is more organic, energetic, and vibrant. Much of it exudes life as well as light. The St. Petersburg collection consists largely of selected works from various series he has worked upon.

 

One of these is of baskets, some of which were inspired by the Navajo or Japanese design. Quite a few are simply products of his imagination. These are the first thing you encounter at the Morean. 

 

    

 

I am very fond of his evocation of the sea. Some of the most impactful pieces are seen from below as you gaze upward at ceiling-mounted displays. It’s as if you are underwater amidst a bed of shapes, foliage, and colors.

 

 

Speaking of colors, Chihuly embodies the ethos of Japanese minimalism in a stunning collection of spheres, orbs, and globes resting in a boat-like receptacle like giant marbles. Some spill out and we see how perfectly they are formed and polished. They refract with such exactitude that the eye sees a spectrum of color. 

 

 

 

 

It’s a personal taste to be sure, but my least favorite are his chandeliers, flowers, and hanging lights. Some of these evoke Persian art; others are faintly Art Deco. Not that I turn down any one of them as a gift!  

 

St. Petersburg is loaded with museums, but I recommend you make the Chihuly Collection a must-see if you find yourself there. (For the record, it’s the only place I could imagine living in the entire state!)

 

Rob Weir

 

Wonder Women of Country, Holly Lerski, Crow & Gazelle, Spencer LaJoye, Evan Boyer

 

 

The term supergroup is so overused that the moment I see it, I grow suspicious. In the case of Wonder Women of Country, I yield to whomever first gave that handle to the trio of Kelly Willis, Melissa Carper, and Brennen Leigh. Willis, of course, is the best known of the three having rocketed to fame in the 1990s in the pop/rock-infused genre that is today’s country music. It was sheer genius to join forces with Carper, a standup bass player who is more Hank Williams and Patsy Cline than modern country, and mandolin/guitar/vocal talent Leigh. Put them together and they are a dynamic combination. Among the gems is the cheeky western swing of “Fly Ya to Hawaii” sparked by a hint of yodeling, Willis going retro on “Won’t Be Worried Now” and singing of love gone missing on “Another Broken Heart” to Leigh’s turn-back-the-clock electric lead, and a bass-heavy calypso reworking John Prine’s “I Have Met MyLove Today.” The eponymo
usly named Wonder Women of Country release returns us to the harmony- and tune-forward country music of yore. Wonder Women of Country are my artists of the month.

 

 

Holly Lerski has been a musical nomad. She’s British and learned to play Led Zep licks in her ‘tweens during the 1970s, played rock in the ‘80s, and was inspired by Jeff Buckley in the ‘90s and first decade of the ‘00s. Then she traveled to the United States and was blown away by the West: the prairies, the mountains, the Pacific, the redwoods…. Sweet Decline is her foray into Americana. With titles such as “Chicago,” “Joshua Tree,” “Carmel,” and “Yosemite,” she leaves little doubt about her lasting impressions. “Sweet Decline” also reflects her immersion in the West, right down to the splashes of pedal steel in the mix and lyrics comparing the mountain ridges to the curvy stickle back of her thoughts and down the middle of the sweet decline. Its wistful edge suggests she’s musing of her journey into middle age. “Tall Trees” is elemental in both metaphorical and literal ways as she hints at a fractured relationship that can be healed with love that endures like centuries-old giant pines. But don’t worry; there’s joy on the album. “Oh Cassy Run” is bouncy in the ways older Joni Mitchell songs used to be (though Cassy is a dog). She also has a fine song titled “Nepenthe,” a word that usually means a mythical Greek drug of forgetfulness, but all indications are that Lerski has her memories intact.

 

 

As Above So Below is the debut recording from the duo/life partners Mike McClure and Chrislyn Lawrence who perform as Crow and Gazelle. That unusual moniker owes its origin to the first two tarot cards drawn during an early date. Each spent a lot of their youth in fundamentalist parts of Oklahoma and Texas, but as the title track reveals, they opted out of harsh tenants for a more universalist faith in which the gap between the human and the divine is narrower. “Still Free to Fly” dispels wisdom in how they dumped the libertine view of freedom in favor of one that replaces drifting in the twilight with one that celebrates not needing to wander. If you have any doubt about what they mean, check out the lyric version of “Blackbird." To don my reviewer hat, though, I found McClure and Lawrence more admirable than musically enticing. For my tastes, the album is too safe and of a piece. 

 

 

 

Spencer LaJoye has released Shadow Puppets, an apt title on several levels. LaJoye grew up in an evangelical household, but uses the pronoun they, identifies as non-binary, and is religious but adamantly non-Christian. This Michigan-based singer songwriter is unafraid to play in churches or to assert their experiences. On the title track LaJoye confesses … all I got is a shadow so big, a shadow so wide/it’s a darkness I fit my whole self inside, and later boldly discusses top surgery in an offering directly titled “Surgery.”  LaJoye has been well received by many communities of faith, in part because of songs like “Plowshare Prayer.” It is, in my estimation, the best song on the album. It is deeply spiritual, appeals to a higher power, and challenges believers to live up their creeds. Listen to the link as the close captioning reveals the depth of those sentiments. LaJoye has a powerful message and an even more powerful voice. The arrangements, though, could use much more diversity.

 

 

 

Evan Boyer is about to drop The Devil in Me. In the namesake song he comes off as the anti-Spencer LaJoye: I’m a bad man doing bad things/I’ve walked the line so many times for all the joy it brings/I’ve got a bad way, pray for me like rain/I should have died so many times and all the souls would have been saved. I couldn’t find a clip of this excellent gritty song, but I suspect that this Dallas-based Americana artist who draws comparisons to Jason Isbell and Tom Petty is more bark than bite. “Burn the Ships,” backed by the excellent Texas band Della Rose, is soulful country that’s more a man searching for a landing place than a bad boy anthem. “Cedar Creek” is positively sweet, the hard edges of his big voice notwithstanding. Ditto “Home to You.” Hey Evan, get some more vids out there so more people can hear what I did.

 

Rob Weir

Witchcraft: More Than Just Salem

 

 

 

Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials (20230

By Marion Gibson

Scribner, 261 pages + back matter.

★★★★

 

Many people think “Salem” the moment the word “witch” is uttered. There is little doubt that the events in 1692 Massachusetts are a stain upon the pages of American history, Yet they are a mere blip on the far bigger, older, and ongoing global scapegoating record. That’s why Marion Gibson, a professor at the University of Exeter in England, devotes just one of her 13 chapters of Witchcraft to Salem.

 

Scholars have long known that the persecution of witches runs deep in the veins of Western history, hence Gibson begins her study with the 1485 trial of Helena Scheuberin in Austria. It’s not even close to being the oldest witch accusation in the West­–the Old Testament sanctions killing witches­–but it was a watershed in leading to mass witch hysteria. Scheuberin was acquitted, but her case fired the zeal of demonologists and led to the publication of guides on how to identify witches (and male wizards), the most infamous being Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, which held sway for centuries.

 

Untold numbers of women suffered in the post-Scheuberin period. An estimated 35-50,000 were executed between 1450-1750. Gibson recounts the toll in North Berwick, Scotland in the 1580s-90s–one tale of which influenced Shakespeare’s MacBeth–and those in Europe’s “colonial edge” of northern Scotland, Scandinavia, and North America. These tragic details are known to scholars, but there is a lesser-discussed synthesis involved in Gibson’s readable account. She reminds us that witchcraft upheavals through the ages take place for many of the same reasons across time–religious disputes, non-scientific speculation, political manipulation, fear of outsiders (Jews, travellers, the Sami people), the Reformation­, offshoots of warfare–but also that the very definition of witchcraft has been malleable.

 

The Bible indeed mentions witches, but how do we explain the rarity of accusations in Europe prior to the 15^th century? Gibson argues that witchcraft has undergone cycles in which it was superstitious to believe or to not believe in it. In the 1620s, Joan Wright became America’s “first” witch. She was a respected healer, herbalist, and midwife in Virginia, but because she wasn’t always successful in her ministrations and the colony was starving, she came under suspicion. As far as we know, Wright survived but the transformation from healer to witch planted the very idea of Satan loose upon North American soil.

 

Gibson detected “echoes” of witchcraft paranoia after Salem and the rise of Enlightenment thinking–during the French Revolution, homophobia outbreaks, attacks on indigenous beliefs, and during sensational murder trials– but the prevailing norm in the West shifted to associating malevolent witchcraft with archaic superstition. In chapters set in Sub-Saharan Africa Gibson reminds us, though, that the Western norm is not universal. Nor does the Western ideal always have salutary effects. In her final chapter on Stormy Daniels Gibson shows how rejection of the power of witches can be manipulated for political advantage. She speculates that Donald Trump’s charge that his detractors and accusers are engaging in a “witch hunt,” is an attempt to tar them with ideological superstition.

 

This is both an enlightening and entertaining book, though it has its flaws. I appreciated Gibson’s attempts to globalize witchcraft fears, but she is open to the charge of having written a Eurocentric book that’s merely a drive-by peek at the rest of the world. This, in my estimation, is fair commentary. There would have been nothing wrong with confining her study to the West and, having heard her speak, she had plenty of material to have expanded Western examples.

 

Gibson sometimes draws distinctions too sharply. In later chapters she presents modern-day witchcraft as a return to the standards before Joan Wright’s trial; that is, that witches are either benign or engage in healing arts. That depends on who you ask! If she’s right, Trump’s evocation of a witch hunt is a political gamble. There are plenty of evangelicals and cultural conservatives who continue to demonize homosexuals, witches, spiritualist mediums, astrologists, those holding non-Christian beliefs, and (paradoxically) scientists. Some ministers and priests would happily append Malleus Maleficarum to the New Testament.

 

I wish to emphasize that I’m one of the scholars who has delved into the topic at hand and thus my eye is more critical than that of the average reader. You need not wade in academic waters to enjoy Gibson’s short volume. You’ll learn a lot if you do.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

 

 

 

 

Still Life: Why Books are Better than TV

 

Still Life: A Three Pines Mystery (2013)

Directed by Peter Moss

Magnolia Pictures, 85 minutes, Not Rated

★★

 

Are you disappointed when a book you loved is made into a TV show and what you see doesn’t match what’s in your head? One can’t really fault the script writer or director for that. After all, there’s no reason why anyone else would carry the same impressions as you. Still Life, though suffers from a major fault. The Peter Moss-directed version of Louise Penny’s first Armand Gamache novel sacrifices the very thing that has made her novels­–# 15 is due this fall–so beloved: strong characterization.  

 

The novel Still Life introduced us to Gamache and Three Pines, Québec; Still Life the TV show tries to cram all of the characters into 85 minutes, gets many of them wrong, and jettisons character depth in favor of solving a mystery. It’s bad choice; the mystery isn’t actually all that complex. I’m not sure if this Penny project went any further than the first book but let’s put it this way; if you tried to read Penny’s 293-page novel in 85 pages, you’d have to read 3.5 pages per minute and you’d miss a lot. (I’ve read books that fast written by some academics whose turgid prose would be masochism to read slowly, but novels are a different story!)

 

Here's a thumbnail of the storyline for those who’ve not read the novel. Seventy-eight-year-old Jane Neal, a retired school teacher, walks in the woods and is murdered. Who would kill such a harmless and well-loved individual? This brings Chief Inspector Gamache (Nathaniel Parker), the head of the homicide division in Québec, to the tranquil, close-knit, and hard-to-find village of Three Pines to investigate. He is accompanied by his right-hand man Jean-Guy Beauvoir (Anthony Lemke), efficient Agent Isabelle Lacoste (Judith Baribeau), and pouty, flippant Inspector Yvette Nicol (Susanna Fourrier). The mystery involves a shocked village, a close-to-the-margins family, three ill-behaving teens, a confession, unrequited love, Jane’s not-very-sad niece, art, and the creepy Hadley mansion.

 

We also meet a few of the Three Pines regulars: painter Clara Morrow (Kate Hewlett), Clara’s artist husband Peter (Gabriel Hogan), and aging poet Ruth Bardo (Deborah Grover). If you wonder about Olivier and Gabri, Myrna Landers, Dr. Harris, and Gamache’s wife Reine-Marie, the term cameo applies. That can partly be explained by the need to elide to fit everything into 85 minutes, so I call no fouls on this. I will, though, assess technical fouls for numerous other transgressions, though Moss got Jean-Guy, Peter Morrow, Isabelle Lacoste and Yvette Nicol right, though Baribeau wasn’t on the screen very long.

 

Now for the misfires:

 

·      Kate Hewlett was too beautiful to play the part of Clara Morrow. At the very least they could have splattered her with paint and mussed her hair!

·      A smiling Ruth Bardo? No, no, no! She’s a tart-tongued, whiskey-mooching misanthrope who was often amusing, but seldom in a nice way. It takes numerous books to gain insight into why.

·      Myrna Landers is mere background in the show, but she’s played by the very attractive and shapely Patricia McKenzie. Penny’s Landers is a cornerstone of the village, runs the bookstore, and is kind, but her beauty is mostly internal, as she’s presented as obese. (I gather she’s even thinner in the new show. Shame!)

·      I’ve liked Nathaniel Parker in BBC productions and movies, but he’s miscast as Armand Gamache. He says some of the right things, but he lacks gravitas. Crinkly eyes alone don’t convey much. Mostly he’s a presence in the film around which the mystery unfolds, but we get little sense of his keen mind or commanding presence. Penny fashioned her fictional Gamache from Atticus Finch, her late husband (Michael Whitehead), and a Québec tailor whose surname she borrowed. For other reasons hard to articulate, I simply didn’t buy Parker as Armand.

 

I hasten to remind that my comments apply to the DVD version of a 2013 production. I’m not an Amazon Prime member, so I’ve not yet seen the latest attempt to bring Gamache to the small screen. I can only hope that the Alfred Molina-anchored series is stronger. If I do watch it, though, I think I’ll wait until Ms. Penny is done writing books.

 

Rob Weir