Category: Magazine

FILM: Summer’s Here And The Time Is Right…

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…For Watching Films Indoors ◆ by Craig J. Clark

According to Hollywood, the summer movie season has been in full swing since the beginning of May, but by the time July and August roll around, temperatures are sweltering enough that it just doesn’t pay to go outside, even if your destination is an air-conditioned screening room. That’s why, instead of putting yourself at the risk of sunstroke, it’s much better to stay put and watch one (or more) of these summery cinematic treats.

The mid-80s had no shortage of movies about how people chose to spend their summer vacation – or their lack of one as in Carl Reiner’s Summer School. In it, high school gym teacher Mark Harmon’s planned getaway to Hawaii is scuttled when he’s tapped to shepherd a class of misfits through a remedial English class. Helped along by fellow teacher Kirstie Alley (his requisite love interest), Harmon tries his best to engage his inattentive charges, which leads to much high-jinks, including a classroom screening of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Nothing spells “summer” like watching a movie where other people watch a movie.

From "Summer Rental"

“Summer Rental”

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Carl Reiner was also responsible for Summer Rental, in which frazzled air-traffic controller John Candy is given some much-needed time off and uses it to take his family to Florida, where a cascading series of mishaps prevents him from getting much rest and relaxation. His plight does give rise to one of the mainstays of ’80s comedies, though: the montage sequence where everybody pitches in to fix something up. In this case, it’s a boat that Candy needs to get shipshape so he can win a regatta, a plot point that also figures into the Nantucket-set One Crazy Summer. Written and directed by Savage Steve Holland, the auteur behind the ’80s classic Better Off Dead, it’s about a singular season of screwiness during which hapless cartoonist John Cusack and his pals (whose ranks include Bobcat Goldthwait, Curtis Armstrong, and Joel – brother of Bill – Murray) band together to save Demi Moore’s grandfather’s house from being razed by some shady developers. (That’s another trope of ’80s movies that could inspire an article all its own.)

From "One Crazy Summer"

“One Crazy Summer”

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If you don’t mind getting a little arty, boating is also central to Ingmar Bergman’s Summer with Monika, which was his first film to make a splash on these shores, largely because its American distributor capitalized on the title character’s fleeting nudity by releasing it under the lurid title Monika, the Story of Bad Girl. Said bad girl is played by Bergman’s muse, Harriet Andersson, who convinces her boyfriend to steal his father’s boat so they can get away from Stockholm for a few months. Andersson returns in Smiles on a Summer Night, which was made two years later and deals with the romantic entanglements of several couples. A classic of world cinema (one of many Bergman would turn out over the course of his career), Smiles later inspired the Stephen Sondheim musical A Little Night Music and Woody Allen’s pastoral A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, which isn’t quite on the same level, but it’s still plenty funny.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream has been brought to the screen on a number of occasions – most notably in a 1935 adaptation with the once-in-a-lifetime cast of James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland and Mickey Rooney (as Puck) and one from 1999 that features Kevin Kline, Christian Bale, Rupert Everett, Michelle Pfeiffer and Sam Rockwell, among others – but if William Shakespeare seems too daunting, you can always give Tennessee Williams a try. First staged in 1958, Suddenly, Last Summer was adapted by Williams and Gore Vidal the following year for Joseph L. Mankiewicz to direct. In the process they had to skirt around some of the issues that the play addressed more directly, but Elizabeth Taylor remains a force of nature as a patient in a mental hospital whose vindictive aunt (Katharine Hepburn, who was nominated alongside Taylor for Best Actress) wants kindly lobotomist Montgomery Clift to go to work on her. Before he can do so, though, he has to get to the bottom of what happened the previous summer, suddenly.

From "Suddenly, Last Summer"

Elizabeth Taylor In “Suddenly, Last Summer”

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Williams’s flair for the psychosexual reared its head again in 1961’s Summer and Smoke, based on his 1948 play. Directed by Peter Glenville, it’s about a wastrel of a bacteriologist (Laurence Harvey) and a repressed preacher’s daughter (Geraldine Page, earning her first of many Best Actress nominations) who live next door to each other in a small Southern town and are about the most incompatible would-be lovers as you could ever imagine. That doesn’t prevent Harvey from trying his best to drag Page down to his level over the course of a particularly sultry summer.

Those who wish to go abroad without actually leaving home would be advised to look up David Lean’s Summertime, which got the director hooked on location shooting. Set in Venice and filmed in glorious Technicolor, it stars Katharine Hepburn as a spinster fulfilling her lifelong dream of visiting that most photogenic of Italian cities. What she doesn’t anticipate is that she’ll fall in love with a handsome Italian in the process.

From "Early Summer"

“Early Summer”

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If the Far East is more to your liking, you can visit Tokyo in Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer and The End of Summer. In the first, Ozu regular Setsuko Hara plays a young woman who wants a say when her family decides it’s time for her to get married, and in the second, released a decade later, she’s one of the daughters of a widower who takes up with his old mistress. As is Ozu’s practice, both films are punctuated by shots of the Japanese countryside and downtown Tokyo, making them a miniature travelogue.

Doubling back to Europe, why not spend a couple of Summer Hours in the French countryside? In the 2008 film, which comes complete with the Criterion seal of approval, a family that is widely dispersed has to figure out what to do with their estate when matriarch Edith Scob dies. All three of her adult children have their own ideas about what to do with it, but as writer/director Olivier Assayas observes, it is the next generation that will be most keenly affected by their decision.

If beating the heat isn’t high on your agenda, then turn off the air conditioning to get the full effect of the sweltering Summer of Sam. Directed by Spike Lee, whose Do the Right Thing proves that he knows how to evoke a hot summer’s day, the film is set in New York City in the summer of 1977 when the Son of Sam was on the loose and tempers flared across the boards. Of course, if you’d rather not be reminded of real-life horrors, there’s always Red Hook Summer, in which Lee reprised his role from Do the Right Thing. Like Summer of Sam, that one had a hard time finding an audience and divided critics, but perhaps it plays better when people can watch it in the comfort of their own homes.

Oddly enough, Red Hook Summer could have easily been an alternate title for I Know What You Did Last Summer, which is about what happens when a quartet of fresh-scrubbed television stars is stalked by the Gorton’s Fisherman. Photogenic young people are frequently the focus of contemporary horror movies, especially those that take place at summer camps, but it took the makers of I Know What You Did Last Summer and its follow-ups – I Still Know What You Did Last Summer and I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer – to put the word right in their titles. I cannot in good conscience recommend that you watch any of them, though (unless you’re nostalgic for the days when Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze, Jr. were considered bankable stars). Instead, why not cool off with an affectionate send-up of summer-camp movies?

From "Wet Hot American Summer"

“Wet Hot American Summer”

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Set on the last day of summer camp in the Catskills, way back in the mists of time (also known as 1981, making it the spiritual successor of the Bill Murray vehicle Meatballs), Wet Hot American Summer was the debut feature of David Wain, who co-wrote it with fellow State alum Michael Showalter and stacked the cast with troupe members Michael Ian Black, Ken Marino and Joe Lo Truglio, plus such ringers as Janeane Garfalo, David Hyde Pierce, Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler and H. Jon Benjamin. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that if you’ve watched any American comedy film or television series in the past decade, you could have seen (or, in the case of Benjamin, heard) half its cast here first. Few did, though, because Wain’s film received a critical drubbing and at best a token theatrical release in the doldrums of 2001, but in the years since it’s attracted a sizable cult audience. If you’re not yet a part of it, now’s your chance to hop aboard.

The Ryder ◆ July 2013

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113 Days of Art

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IU is hosting dozens of performances and exhibits throughout the summer ◆ by Hannah Waltz

This summer, the Indiana University Art Museum will host dozens of exhibits from artists all over the world as part of Bloomington’s 113 Days of Art. Among the not-to-be-missed events is a Midsummer Night on June 21st, an evening of art and live music to welcome in the official beginning of summer. From 7-9:30 p.m. guests can stroll through the three permanent collection galleries and gawk at night-themed art, including works by Picasso. Inspired by the wonders of the night, guests are encouraged to enjoy a drink on the Sculpture Terrace and listen to live music beneath the stars by The Dynamics, performing r&b, funk, and blues classics by artists such as Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Parliament Funkadelic.

An evening of jazz is scheduled for July 26th, during which the museum will host the Urban Jazz Coalition, which will spotlight Diane Pelrine’s gallery talk about the important relationship between African textiles and American jazz, from 5:30-8:30 p.m. in the Raymond and Laura Wielgus Gallery of the Arts of Africa, the South Pacific, and the Americas.

The Kinsey Institute’s Annual Juried Art Show is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of Bloomington’s 113 Days of Art. The eighth annual show will be held in the Grunwald Gallery and runs through July 13th. The exhibit will show pieces of various mediums that investigate issues like sexuality, the politics of sex and gender, and romantic relationships among many more.

For Betsy Stirratt, the Grunwald Gallery director, the Kinsey Institute’s exhibition is at the top of her recommendation list. “The Kinsey Institute Juried Exhibit is always an interesting show,” Stirratt said. “It allows us to show a lot of great artists from all over the world and quality pieces.”
This show is a thought-provoking break from the societal norm. “It portrays sexuality in a way people don’t normally think about,” Stirratt said. “People tend to think of it as a certain type of show, like an erotic art show, but it really isn’t that. It’s not a typical perspective, and that’s really important.”

On July 19th the Grunwald Gallery will hold the opening reception for the Bloomington Photography Club Juried Exhibition from 6-8 p.m., which can be viewed through the 27th of July. “It’s our community show,” Stirratt said. “It’s an important contribution to the Bloomington community.”

The Lilly Library will also serve as a venue for this year’s 113 Days of Art, as it shows off its exhibition entitled “The Grolier Hundred,” which showcases one hundred of the most famous works of English literature. “It’s some of the most valuable books that we have in our collections,” said Rebecca Baumann, the reference associate at the Lilly. “There are lots of titles and authors that people will recognize as some of the high points of English literature.”

The exhibition was first opened over one hundred years ago in 1903 in New York City as one of the most significant rare book collections of the century. The Lilly Library in Bloomington became home to ninety-nine of the Grolier Hundred works in the mid 1950’s when J.K. Lilly, Jr. began gathering as many pieces from the collection as he could. The writings represent a wide range of literary genres, including history, law, science, fiction, poetry and drama.

One of the most prized pieces of the collection, Shakespeare’s First Folio, also known as Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies, which was published in 1603, will also be on display. “If festival-goers are interested in great literature, this is a must-see,” Baumann said.

The Mathers Museum of World Cultures will host several exhibitions that will stimulate any viewer’s creative juices. Keeping those Indiana roots alive, the exhibit titled “The Day in Its Color: A Hoosier Photographer’s Journey Through Midcentury America” will showcase through June 23rd some of Indiana-native Charles Cushman’s 14,500 photographs. Other anticipated exhibits include “In the Kitchen Around the World,” which will display food-processing objects from different countries, “Time As We Keep It,” which explores the phenomenon that we call time, and “Footsteps of a Stranger: Shoes from cultures around the world,” among others.

Additionally, Folklorist and Director of Traditional Arts Indiana John Kay will give a lecture on “Southern Indiana Gravestones and Their Makers” on June 14th at noon in which Kay will speak about his research and Hoosier gravestones.

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Music

Don’t forget about the audible arts this summer at the Indiana University Musical Arts Center (MAC). Packed with performances by world-renown musicians, this season will offer an abundance of opportunities to bring music to your ears. Although nearly every week in June and July is full of concerts, a few notable performances should be noted. On Monday, July 8th at 7 p.m. William Harvey will deliver a lecture called “Teaching Music in Afghanistan.” Harvey is the Orchestra Director at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM) where he also teaches violin and viola. After attaining degrees from both Julliard and Indiana University, Harvey founded the Afghan Youth Orchestra as well as Cultures in Harmony. The latter is a non-profit that advocates for cultural understanding through music. Harvey will speak in Sweeney Hall.
On Wednesday July 10th, the opening ceremony for the USA International Harp Competition will be held in Auer Hall, beginning at 4 p.m. Founded in 1989, the competition is held every three years in Bloomington. The finals will be held July 20th at 7 p.m. on the MAC Stage.

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Film & Theater

Film and theatrical arts in Bloomington are not hard to come by, especially during summer’s 113 Days of Art. The IU Cinema and the Indiana Festival Theatre will be hosting various films and live performances respectively from different genres and time periods. This year for the first time the Cinema will host the Slapsticon Film Festival from June 27-30th, a national comedy film festival that spotlights silent and early sound films with Chaplin, Keaton, and more. Other summer film showings include the 2013 film The Reluctant Fundamentalist about a Pakistani man and his post-9/11 struggles, screening May 24-26th, and Bayou Blue, a film that explores the “decay of a community” in Louisiana that screens with live music on May 30th at 7 p.m.

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The Ryder

Dido and Aeneas

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by Kristen Strandberg

Shifting between pleasant consonant sounds and stunningly beautiful dissonance, Henry Purcell’s 1689 Dido and Aeneas is still regarded as one of the most significant musical works of the seventeenth century. It is a rare treat to hear such a work performed, and while it is certainly a product of its time, the music is still emotionally striking and relevant over three hundred years later. Indiana University’s Summer Festival Chorus will perform an un-staged version of the work on June 25, under the direction of Dominick DiOrio.

cgpurcelloil2

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While Dido and Aeneas has remained popular within early music circles, little is known about the circumstances of its composition. The first known performance took place at a boarding school for young women in the London suburb of Chelsea in 1689, although some evidence suggests it may have been written for the coronation of King William and Queen Mary earlier that year. Very few operas were written in seventeenth-century England, largely due to a lack of patronage and royal support. Yet, Dido and Aeneas’s composer, Henry Purcell, and librettist, Nahum Tate, both had royal connections- Purcell was an organist at the Chapel Royal, and Tate would soon be named court poet.

Historians have suggested that the text for the opera’s prologue (the music for which has been lost) may allegorically reference the union of William and Mary. Additionally, the earliest surviving musical score includes male vocal parts in low ranges, which could not have been sung by the young female students. Still, no record of a court performance exists, so we can only speculate as to whether Dido and Aeneas was a court-sponsored work, and there is no other documented performance of the work during Purcell’s lifetime.

The opera’s plot is based on the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Dido, the queen of Carthage, is in love with the visiting Aeneas, who will eventually establish Rome. A sorceress intervenes and destroys the budding romance, leaving Dido to die of a broken heart. Just before dying, Dido sings her famous and heart-wrenchingly beautiful lament. Purcell borrowed the concept of a musical lament from earlier Italian operas, and retains the genre’s trademark repeated bass line. While laments traditionally included a repeated bass line of four descending notes, Purcell adds chromatic half steps to create a six-note descending pattern. The lament’s smooth lyricism combined with dissonant harmonies gives it a tragic, yet unique and strikingly beautiful sound.

The opera involves a small orchestra of strings and harpsichord, and eight sung characters, plus a chorus. Purcell’s chorus fulfills various functions throughout the work, acting as groups of background characters to provide commentary on the narrative.
IU’s production will consist of Jacobs School of Music students participating in the annual Summer Festival, including the Summer Festival Chorus, directed by Choral Conducting Professor Dominick DiOrio. The performance will take place on Tuesday, June 25 at 8pm in Auer Hall in the Simon Music Center.

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The Ryder

Teaching Music in Afghanistan

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The Afghan Youth Orchestra’s repertoire includes everything from Afghan patriotic songs to the Four Seasons ◆ by William Harvey

The last time I visited my alma mater, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, was in June 2009, nine months before I moved to Afghanistan. This summer, I will return to Bloomington to teach and perform at the IU String Academy. So what have I been doing for 4 years?

My job title at Afghanistan National Institute of Music (ANIM), founded by Dr. Ahmad Sarmast, barely begins to describe my duties. I am the Violin and Viola Teacher, but I also teach cello and double bass, instruments I do not play, whenever we do not have a teacher for those instruments. I have conducted the Afghan Youth Orchestra in gala concerts in Kabul, on television, over half a dozen times for President Karzai, and at sold-out concerts in Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center. I teach some music academic classes and coordinate concert activities at the school.

It would be impossible to summarize the joys and heartaches of my life in Afghanistan in one brief article, but I am looking forward to returning to Bloomington this summer so that I will have the opportunity to share with a home state audience some of the transformative experience of making music in Afghanistan while nostalgically reconnecting with aspects of my years in Bloomington.

My first performance will be on June 28 alongside Erin Aldridge, Tzeying Wu, and Csaba Onczay in Don Freund’s Summersongs for String Quartet. I studied composition with Freund from 2002 to 2003. Although I was almost as much a composer as a violinist until I moved to Afghanistan, since 2010 I spend more time arranging music than composing. The Afghan Youth Orchestra is the only one in the world combining Afghan and Western instruments. Since Beethoven mysteriously neglected to include ghichak in any of his symphonies, I arrange our repertoire, from Afghan patriotic songs to the Four Seasons, which, with a few Afghan melodies and rhythms sprinkled in, became “The Four Seasons of Afghanistan.” I’m grateful for the composition training I received at IU from both Don Freund and Sven-David Sandstrom, even if these days, I apply it mostly towards the challenges presented by arranging the music of others (such as when to introduce the tanbur in Ravel’s Bolero).

For those who would like to learn about my work in Afghanistan, on July 8 I will deliver a lecture in Sweeney Hall. The next day, July 9, my recital with Cory Smythe in Auer Hall will relate the experience in musical terms. When Mimi Zweig, my beloved former teacher, informed me that many concerts this summer would focus on contemporary music, I wanted to create a recital program that would ask the question: what does contemporary music mean from an Afghan standpoint? Parts of this recital resemble the recitals I gave or attended while at IU, and other parts resemble the concerts I perform in Kabul.

The recital starts with “Bia ke birim ba Mazar,” the most famous Afghan song. I have played it on the street at the command of the Afghan national police, for conservative Pashtun men whose home I entered by mistake, and on national TV when I was a guest judge on “Afghan Star” (the popular television show similar to American Idol).

The song’s elegiac character connects nicely to the first movement of Bach’s C Minor Sonata, the last movement of which features a rhythmic technique similar to tihai, found in Indian and Afghan music. Next, I’ll play the 4 Lauds by Elliott Carter. When Carter passed away in 2012, I keenly felt how far I was from home when I realized that I might be the only person in Afghanistan mourning his passing. The complexity of his music contrasts well with a different kind of complexity at work in a piece using the Indian raga Marwa composed by Ehsan Arfan, the sitar teacher at ANIM.

The second half opens with Remix, a piece by my Juilliard classmate Ryan Francis. If the influence of minimalism is not far from the surface, then it’s also important to recall the influence of Indian classical music on the minimalist composers; that same influence has dominated Afghan classical music for centuries.

Since I do not want my Afghan students to neglect their culture while learning Western music, I have arranged 24 Afghan songs each for violin and viola and am working on an anthology for bass. These anthologies are available at the ANIM website, and Cory and I will play four at my recital.

Closing the recital with Schubert has a special resonance. Erin played it brilliantly when I was in Bloomington in 2009. Each time I play or listen to Schubert in Afghanistan, it soars above the stresses and dust of my life: I feel like someone who, after returning from a long cold journey to a distant planet, returns to a beautiful mountain here on Earth, breathes the clean air, and drinks from a spring of pure water.

During my 2009 visit to Bloomington, Erin Aldridge and I gave the premiere of “Dialogue,” my composition for two violins that deals with the perils and promise of dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims. I based the piece on my experiences leading cultural diplomacy projects in Muslim countries with my non-profit organization, Cultures in Harmony, which I founded in 2005 as a response to the tragedy of September 11, 2001. I am delighted to reprise “Dialogue” with Erin on July 15 of this summer, but were I to compose such a piece now, it would be very different. The ending is optimistic; it might not be so optimistic now.

In spite of the challenges I face there, Afghanistan has given me more than I could possibly give it. So has Bloomington. Every day that I teach violin in Kabul, I use principles and techniques I learned from Mimi Zweig. This summer, through teaching students at the String Academy and performing in the Summer Festival, I will do what I can to give back.

[William Harvey is the Afghan Youth Orchestra Conductor and the Artistic Manager of the Afghanistan National Institute of Music.]

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The Ryder

FILM: Wait ‘Til Your Father Gets Home

Movies to Watch on Father’s Day ◆ by Craig J. Clark

On television, fathers may think they know best, but at the movies they aren’t always so sure-footed. Whether they like to admit it or not, they can’t all be Atticus Finch.  As portrayed by Oscar winner Gregory Peck and brought to the screen by Robert Mulligan,  Atticus is the father to the impressionable young Scout and her brother Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird.  He is the preeminent upright father figure, but few of his peers can ever hope to measure up to him.

 Not that they don’t try their best, of course. In Terrence Malick’s Palme d’Or-winning The Tree of Life, Brad Pitt attempts to instill his values in his three sons, but the eldest (who grows up to be emotionally distant architect Sean Penn) chafes against his authoritarian stance. The same goes for Burl Ives as Big Daddy in Richard Brooks’s adaptation of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Based on the play by Tennessee Williams, which lost some of its subtext in the transition, Cat finds Ives struggling to relate to his grown son Brick (Paul Newman) and mostly failing, but they eventually reach a kind of mutual understanding.

Finding a way to relate to his family is also foremost on the mind of Gene Hackman in Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums. Long absent from the scene, he has his work cut out for him with his adult children (financial wiz Ben Stiller, moody playwright Gwyneth Paltrow, tennis pro Luke Wilson) who all blame him for the ways they’ve faltered in their lives. It’s hard to get more estranged, though, than Jack Lemmon is from his son in Costa-Gavras’s gripping political drama Missing. Another winner at Cannes, taking home the Palme d’Or and Best Actor for Lemmon, it’s a true story set in the aftermath of Chile’s 1973 coup and sees the deeply conservative Lemmon coming to a political awakening as he tries to find his activist son, who has disappeared without a trace.

Albert Brooks has a bit more luck as an animated clownfish in Pixar’s Finding Nemo, which turns a parent’s worst nightmare – a child being snatched away right in front of their eyes – into a thrilling and frequently hilarious adventure. That’s definitely a far cry from the work of writer/director Lodge Kerrigan. In his debut, Clean, Shaven, newly released mental patient Peter Greene attempts to track down his daughter in his own unhinged fashion, and his later film Keane follows a desperate Damian Lewis obsessed with finding his young daughter, who was abducted from New York City’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. The way Kerrigan gets inside his characters’ heads, you feel for them almost as much as you fear for their dwindling sanity (and realize that even if they found their children that might not be the best thing for either of them).

A kidnapping is also central to the plot of Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low, only this time the twist is that instead of the son of industrialist Toshiro Mifune, the perpetrators take his chauffeur’s son instead – and then insist that he still pay the ransom. There’s a great deal of tension in the first half of the film as Mifune debates whether he’s willing to ruin himself financially for the sake of another man’s son, but when his chauffeur pleads with him, one father to another, he knows he can’t refuse.

A father’s desire to protect his offspring is the driving force behind Orson Welles’s Mr. Arkadin as well, but it manifests itself in a completely different way. In addition to writing and directing, Welles also plays the title character, a filthy rich man of the world with a murky past who hires a private detective to dig up whatever dirt can be found on him – largely so his daughter (Paola Mori) will never hear about it. On the other side of the fence, Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone knows all about his father’s dirty dealings in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, but Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) tries to keep him out of the family business anyway (and we all know how that works out).

For some fathers, protecting their children is their way of atoning for past mistakes. In Firestarter, based on the Stephen King novel, David Keith is on the run from a sinister government agency that is really after his pyrokinetic daughter (Drew Barrymore). Of course, she would have been a completely normal little girl if Keith and his wife hadn’t taken part in a government experiment in college that left them with residual (but weak) psychic powers. Little did they know what they would be passing on to the next generation.

A similar situation is found in David Cronenberg’s Scanners, although in that case the mutation was the unexpected side effect of a pregnancy drug developed by scientist Patrick McGoohan, who subsequently withdraws himself from the lives of his two sons. That they grow up to be bitter rivals, battling for control of his legacy, is something he never could have foreseen, but at least McGoohan makes it up to the young brother (protagonist Stephen Lack) in his own way. Elder brother Michael Ironside, on the other hand, is a lot less forgiving.

Continuing the theme, it’s never explicitly stated where pint-sized Danny Torrance gets his telepathic power from in Stephen King’s The Shining, memorably brought to the big screen by Stanley Kubrick, but it’s intimated that his father Jack (a scenery-chewing Jack Nicholson) also has a touch of it. Instead of leading to father-son bonding, though, it merely leaves Nicholson more open to the malevolent influence of the Overlook Hotel, which eventually drives him to try to murder his wife and son, echoing the actions of a previous caretaker.

Jack Torrance may not be a candidate for Father of the Year, but at least he can blame his crack-up on a combination of cabin fever and supernatural forces beyond his control. In contrast, John Meillon, who plays the father in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, has no such excuses, and we never do find out what prompts him to drive to the Australian outback with his two children (a teenaged Jenny Agutter and Roeg’s own son, billed as Lucien John) and try to shoot them before turning the gun on himself. This also causes their car to go up in flames, stranding Agutter and John, so it’s a good thing they’re soon befriended by an Aboriginal youth (David Gulpilil) on walkabout who guides them back to civilization.

A car accident of a different sort is what precipitates the action in Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, in which an outwardly noble surgeon (Pierre Brasseur) kidnaps young women in an effort to restore his daughter’s beauty since he feels responsible for her disfigurement. Shocking in its day for its graphic face-transplant scene, the film also manages to get under the skin with its chillingly poetic imagery thanks to Edith Scob’s performance as the daughter, who glides through most of the film in a featureless mask. Brasseur gets points for his dedication to her, but what he really needed was to find another, less destructive, outlet for it.

Knowing when to let go can be hard, but one of the most important things a father can do in the movies is give his daughter away to another man, as widower Chishu Ryu demonstrates in Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring and An Autumn Afternoon. Made 13 years apart, the films bookend the final stretch of Ozu’s long career and find Ryu playing characters that comes to realize their adult daughter needs to be married off before they’re consigned to the life of an old maid. Don’t think their plots are identical, though. Ozu may have been fond of remaking his own films and reusing certain plot devices, but he always knew how to spin them in such a way that they always felt novel.

Things are a bit more lighthearted in both versions of Father of the Bride, which were made four decades apart. In the first, directed by Vincente Minnelli, Spencer Tracy is the doting dad overwhelmed by the hectic arrangements surrounding the wedding of his darling daughter (Elizabeth Taylor). In the second, directed by Charles Shyer, Steve Martin takes over the role, which means the emphasis is placed more on his physical comedy. At the end of the day, though, all he wants is to make sure his daughter’s big day goes off without a hitch (and doesn’t bankrupt him). You can’t ask for a better wedding present than that.

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The Ryder

3 Days In Bloomington

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THURSDAY, MAY 16TH, 2013

■ EXERCISE SilverSneakers Cardio Circuit; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; 8:30AM

■ EXERCISE Nia; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; 8:30AM

■ EXERCISE SilverSneakers Cardio Circuit; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; 9:30AM

■ YOGA Yoga class; St. Thomas Lutheran Heritage Hall; 10AM

■ ART TAPA: Unwrapping Polynesian Barkcloth; IU Art Museum; 10AM-5PM

■ EXERCISE SilverSneakers Muscle Strength and Range of Movement; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; 10:30AM

■  YOGA Hatha yoga class; Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center cultural building; 4:30PM-6PM

■  BOOK CLUB Secular Alliance book club; Rachael’s Cafe; 5PM-7PM

■ EXERCISE Core Essentials; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; 5:30PM

■ CLASS Put It in Order: Circulation Volunteer Training; Monroe County Public Library; 6PM

■ CLASS Job Search and Resume Help; Monroe County Public Library; 6PM

■ YOGA Yoga Class; Unity of Bloomington; 6:30PM

■ MEDITATION Sitting/walking meditation; Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center; 6:30PM-7:30PM

■ EXERCISE Body Blitz; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; 6:30PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Built for Comfort; Player’s Pub; 6:30PM; $4.oo

■ DOCUMENTARY Room 237; IU Cinema; 7PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Live Music at the Brewpub; Upland Brewing; 7PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Dead Roses; Max’s Place; 9PM

■ COMEDY John Dore; The Comedy Attic

■ LIVE MUSIC Three Story Hill; The Bluebird

■ PLAY Underneath the Lintel; John Waldron Arts Center

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FRIDAY, MAY 17TH, 2013

■ ART TAPA: Unwrapping Polynesian Barkcloth; IU Art Museum; 10AM-5PM

■ RACING USAC sprint cars Larry Rice Classic; Bloomington Speedway; 5:30PM-11PM

■ FOOD & DRINK National Bike to Work Day Block Party; Upland Brewery; 5:30PM

■ ART Kinsey Institute Juried Art Show: Zoom; artist Sophie McMahon; Grunwald Gallery at the Kinsey Institute; 6PM-8PM

■ DOCUMENTARY Room 237; IU Cinema; 7PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Monika Herzig & Oliver Nelson Duo; Cafe Django; 7PM

■ LIVE MUSIC/COMEDY Heywood Banks; Brown County Playhouse; 7:30PM; $25.oo

■ PLAY Spun: A Brother/Sister Rock Musical; Bloomington Playwrights Project; 7:30PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Summertime Band; Player’s Pub; 8PM; $5.oo

■ LIVE MUSIC Instrumental Pop Series; Rachael’s Cafe; 8PM; $5.00

■ LIVE MUSIC Here Come the Mummies; The Bluebird; 9PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Charley; Max’s Place; 9PM

■ COMEDY John Dore; The Comedy Attic

■ LIVE MUSIC Time Travels; John Waldron Arts Center Auditorium

■ PLAY Underneath the Lintel; John Waldron Arts Center

■ LIVE MUSIC River Roots Festival; Bicentennial Park

■ BIKING Bloomington Bikes Month Cycle to Service Weekend; City Hall Showers Building; all day

■ BIKING Bloomington Bikes Month National Bike to Work Day; City Hall Showers Building; all day

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SATURDAY, MAY 18TH, 2013

■ MARKET Bloomington Community Farmers’ Market; City Hall parking lot; 8AM

■ BIKING Bloomington Bikes Month Bike to Market; City Hall Showers Building; 8AM

■ EXERCISE Beginner Boot Camp; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; 8:30AM

■ HEALT Active Living Coalition Health Fair; City Hall Showers Common; 9AM

■ YOGA Hatha yoga class; Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center cultural building; 10AM-12:30PM

■ ART TAPA: Unwrapping Polynesian Barkcloth; IU Art Museum; 10AM-5PM

■ ART International Art Museum Day celebration; IU Art Museum; 10AM-5PM

■ ART Trained Eye Arts Art Sale; Trained Eye Arts; 10AM-3PM

■ EXERCISE Zumba; Twin Lakes Recreation Center; 10:30AM

■ HEALING Ch’i Gung Healing Circle; Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center; 10:30AM-12PM

■ WORKSHOP Emerald Ash Borer Workshop for Homeowners; City Hall Showers Building; 11AM-12PM

■ WORKSHOP Discover the Spirit of Gratitude and Generosity by Rediscovering Macedonia; St. Thomas Lutheran Church; 1PM-4PM

■ MARTIAL ARTS Tae Kwon Do; ages 6-12; Unity of Bloomington; 1:15PM-2:15PM

■ ART Power of Pattern workshop for simple block carving; Mathers Museum of World Cultures; 1:30PM-3PM

■ MARTIAL ARTS Tae Kwon Do; ages 6-12; Unity of Bloomington; 1:15PM-2:15PM

■ PETS Adorable Adoptables; Monroe County Public Library; 2PM

■ MARTIAL ARTS Tae Kwon Do; ages 13 to adult; Unity of Bloomington; 2:15PM-3:45PM

■ FILM The Shining; IU Cinema; 3PM

■ OPEN MIC LGBT Aging & Caring Network Open Mic/Open House; Rachael’s Cafe; 3PM-6PM

■ DOCUMENTARY Room 237; IU Cinema; 7PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Der Vorfuhreffekt; Rachael’s Cafe; 7PM-9PM

■ PLAY Spun: A Brother/Sister Rock Musical; Bloomington Playwrights Project; 7:30PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Hoosier Young; Brown County Playhouse; 7:30PM; $20.oo

■ DANCE Dancing with the Celebrities presented by Arthur Murray Dance Studio; Buskirk Chumley Theater; 8PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Harsch Reality; Player’s Pub; 8PM; $5.oo

■ LIVE MUSIC Istanbul Breeze; Cafe Django; 8PM

■ LIVE MUSIC Lil’ Ed and the Blues Imperials; Max’s Place; 9PM

■ EVENT A Night at the Club with Mr. Gay Southern Cities ’13; Uncle E’s Nightclub; 10PM

■ COMEDY John Dore; The Comedy Attic

■ LIVE MUSIC Smooth Country; Mike’s Dance Barn

■ LIVE MUSIC Dot Dot Dot; The Bluebird

■ RECORDING Creative Aging Month oral history recording; Monroe County History Center

■ PLAY Underneath the Lintel; John Waldron Arts Center

■ LIVE MUSIC River Roots Festival; Bicentennial Park

■ BIKING Bloomington Bikes Month Cycle to Service Weekend; City Hall Showers Building; all day

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The Ryder & Kurt the IT Freelancer bring you the best of Bloomington.

MUSIC: Local Live—Bloomington Magical Musical Mojo

◆ by Ryan Dawes

With a limitless broadcasting format, WFHB (FireHouse Broadcasting, FM 91.3, 98.1, 100.7, 106.3) becomes a busy crossroads for countless bands and musicians representing a daunting array of genres. Besides the thousands of albums mailed to the station from labels across the globe, WFHB also draws bands and musicians in the flesh, ready to perform live for listeners via in-studio or remote broadcasts. A select portion of this artistic traffic has been captured on a series of albums featuring local musicians performing at remote broadcasts at various recording studios in Monroe County. WFHB’s Local Live: Remote Broadcasts, Volume 3, is due out just in time for the station’s Spring Fund Drive.

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WFHB’s downtown studios have hosted thousands of live broadcasts with touring and local bands alike, but this particular series of recordings features exclusively local artists performing at remote broadcasts transmitted from area recording studios including Russian Recording, Midwest Audio Recording, Farm Fresh Studios, and White Arc Studios. Given that each of the recording studios are inarguably of professional caliber, the audio quality is clearer and better mixed than what you would expect of a live recording elsewhere at a venue or club. In addition to each recording studio’s full time engineer, the remote broadcasts are supported by station music director Jim Manion and a seasoned squad of volunteer producers.

“All the studios offer different environments but the sound is consistently great at each one,” says Manion. “The talent pool of audio engineering in this town is insanely good.”
While you could find traditional recordings from most of the artists featured on the Local Live series, many of the tracks include songs unreleased elsewhere. Furthermore, as Manion explains, there are unforgettable qualities in the recordings that could only come from performing live, before an audience.

“The added value is the ineffable magic musical mojo that is present on the live songs we pick from the sets we archive. You could never find all these songs out there in the form they take on our CDs.”

Volume 3 is as diverse as the first two volumes, featuring old-time bluegrass by the Indiana Boys, blues from Gordon Bonham, Motown/garage-rock from The Vallures, psychedelic surf-rock from the Triptides and a more, amounting to 16 tracks in total.

The station gives away copies of the CDs as fund drive incentives to donors, but the intent behind these recordings is culturally much broader. Manion also sees this initiative as a means of historic preservation, marking trends and strengths in the local music scene at this point in time.

“I hope these recordings show that Bloomington has a high-quality and wide-ranging music community full of creative musicians and songwriters,” says Manion.

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The Ryder, March 2013

Dido and Aeneas

A sorceress intervenes and destroys a budding romance.

by Kristen Strandberg

Shifting between pleasant consonant sounds and stunningly beautiful dissonance, Henry Purcell’s 1689 Dido and Aeneas is still regarded as one of the most significant musical works of the seventeenth century. It is a rare treat to hear such a work performed, and while it is certainly a product of its time, the music is still emotionally striking and relevant over three hundred years later. Indiana University’s Summer Festival Chorus will perform an un-staged version of the work on June 25, under the direction of Dominick DiOrio.
While Dido and Aeneas has remained popular within early music circles, little is known about the circumstances of its composition. The first known performance took place at a boarding school for young women in the London suburb of Chelsea in 1689, although some evidence suggests it may have been written for the coronation of King William and Queen Mary earlier that year. Very few operas were written in seventeenth-century England, largely due to a lack of patronage and royal support. Yet, Dido and Aeneas’s composer, Henry Purcell, and librettist, Nahum Tate, both had royal connections- Purcell was an organist at the Chapel Royal, and Tate would soon be named court poet. Historians have suggested that the text for the opera’s prologue (the music for which has been lost) may allegorically reference the union of William and Mary. Additionally, the earliest surviving musical score includes male vocal parts in low ranges, which could not have been sung by the young female students. Still, no record of a court performance exists, so we can only speculate as to whether Dido and Aeneas was a court-sponsored work, and there is no other documented performance of the work during Purcell’s lifetime.
The opera’s plot is based on the fourth book of Virgil’s Aeneid. Dido, the queen of Carthage, is in love with the visiting Aeneas, who will eventually establish Rome. A sorceress intervenes and destroys the budding romance, leaving Dido to die of a broken heart. Just before dying, Dido sings her famous and heart-wrenchingly beautiful lament. Purcell borrowed the concept of a musical lament from earlier Italian operas, and retains the genre’s trademark repeated bass line. While laments traditionally included a repeated bass line of four descending notes, Purcell adds chromatic half steps to create a six-note descending pattern. The lament’s smooth lyricism combined with dissonant harmonies gives it a tragic, yet unique and strikingly beautiful sound.
The opera involves a small orchestra of strings and harpsichord, and eight sung characters, plus a chorus. Purcell’s chorus fulfills various functions throughout the work, acting as groups of background characters to provide commentary on the narrative.
IU’s production will consist of Jacobs School of Music students participating in the annual Summer Festival, including the Summer Festival Chorus, directed by Choral Conducting Professor Dominick DiOrio. The performance will take place on Tuesday, June 25 at 8pm in Auer Hall in the Simon Music Center.

MUSIC: Jazz, Funk, And Cuban Rhythms

The IU Latin Jazz Ensemble ◆ by Kristen Strandberg

Latin jazz’s fusion of Cuban music with American jazz and funk has captivated audiences for decades with its catchy syncopated rhythms, and prominent brass and percussion sections.  Long known for its outstanding jazz program, the IU Jacobs School of Music has recently broadened its scope to include a Latin jazz ensemble, directed by percussion professor Michael Spiro.  On Monday, April 8, the IU Latin Jazz Ensemble will perform in the Musical Arts Center with internationally acclaimed composer and trombonist, Wayne Wallace.

What began five years ago as a small jazz combo has since grown into a group of twenty to thirty performers featuring Jacobs School of Music students on piano, guitar, drum set, trumpet, saxophone, and trombone, along with Latin American percussion instruments including the conga, timbale, batá drum, bongo, chekeré, guiro, and maraca.

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The ensemble specializes in music often described as a blend of Cuban music and American jazz — a genre that emerged in the late 1940s, which, according to the group’s director, Michael Spiro, is “rooted in Cuban rhythms and American harmony.”  The repeated, syncopated Latin dance rhythms worked their way into American jazz in the 1940s and 1950s, as jazz legends such as Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie worked alongside Latin American performers.  Genres such as the mambo, bolero, and cha cha cha eventually became popular choices for big bands playing in American dance halls.  By the 1960s, Latin Jazz musicians were incorporating elements of African-American popular music, leading to boogaloo and eventually salsa, which combines Cuban music with American rock, R&B, and funk.  While the Latin rhythms and unique timbres of Cuban percussion instruments give the music its distinct Latin flavor, the brass section, along with the piano and guitar, are reminiscent of the funk styles of Earth, Wind & Fire, and James Brown.

San Francisco-based Wayne Wallace continues this tradition of combining Cuban and American musical styles.  Spiro particularly points to Wallace’s bass, horn, and drum set patterns, which are strongly influenced by funk.  Wallace is a five-time Grammy nominee who has performed with a wide variety of well-known musicians including The Count Basie Orchestra, Gladys Knight, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, and Tito Puente, among dozens of others.  Additionally, Wallace and Spiro have collaborated in many previous performances and recordings, including the CD ¡BIEN BIEN!, which was nominated for a Grammy in 2011.

The IU Latin Jazz Ensemble concert, featuring Wayne Wallace, will take place on Monday, April 8 at 8pm at the Musical Arts Center.  A smaller jazz combo will perform in the lobby beginning at 7:15.  The event is free.

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The Ryder, March 2013

Gumshoes In The Heartland

Fictional detectives have found a place in the Midwest ◆ by Ray Zdonek

Philip Marlowe hung out amid the glitz and grunge of LA, Mike Hammer around the mugs and dames of the Big Apple, and Sam Spade in a fog-shrouded San Francisco. It was the name of the game — glamorous places full of mystery, sex, greed, and frequent violence — the action was on the “coasts”, left and right. The Big Time, you know? Maybe it’s the Cyber Age democratizing the landscape or maybe it’s a sort of literary tourism, where a simple paperback takes you on adventures in places you hadn’t imagined you would go. But the mighty Midwest is finally making its mark on the private eye archetype, setting the action and characters into heartland communities, great and small.

The road, however, has been a bumpy one. Jonathan Valin, whose private detective Harry Stoner visited the dark back alleys of Cincinnati in books like The Lime Pit, a world populated by bikers and sprinkled with meth labs, was an early casualty. Though it was great stuff, Valin finally gave up writing altogether and is currently immersed in a high-fidelity sound equipment business in the Southwest. Harry was a tenacious investigator with a soft spot for lost causes, an essential aspect of the private eye brand, and the proximity of Covington across the Ohio River carried over the Southern grit of Cincinnati’s Kentucky neighbor, in a relationship like New Orleans and Algiers, or Los Angeles and Long Beach. But as fate would have it, even a TV movie couldn’t save the Harry Stoner series.

Another Midwestern series that has gone out with more of a whimper than a bang is Michael Z. Lewin’s notable mystery novels featuring Indianapolis detective Albert Sampson, whose business is so threadbare that he has to operate out of a spare room behind his mother’s business. Quirky and erratic in quality, the Sampson series of books is petering out slowly, and no one should miss them much. Lewin became an expatriate and has lived in England for some years, and it appears his once-vibrant character is withering now that the author has left his Indy roots, seemingly for good.

Of course, the elephant in the room has to be the ultra-successful V.I. Warshawski bestsellers by Chicago writer Sara Paretsky. The tables began to turn when her female detective made the scene. Rivaled only by the likes of Robert B. Parker and Jonathan Kellerman, Paretsky struck a well-timed blow for feminism in a genre that much needed to think outside the box. Vic is feisty to the extreme, and will toss caution easily to the wind if an issue of bigotry or a failure of justice looms. Caring and loyal, Paretsky’s prime character is relentless in the hunt, and surrounded by a cast of returning characters like Mr. Contreras and Dr. Lotty Herschel, who add richness and color to the novels, and make you look forward to the next installment. In books like Burn Marks, Total Recall, and Hardball, Paretsky over the years has not been afraid to deal with the hard edge of life in the Windy City, from homelessness, to Holocaust survivors, to the blacklists of the 1950’s, to the not-yet-won battle against racism against African-Americans in Chi-town. V.I. is beautiful and hard-nosed — a perfect combination.

Sometimes, though, a strength can morph into a weakness, and while the matters at hand are new each time, the character development is practically at a standstill. Vic’s young cousin Petra has been added to the mix, but not much else. Oh, Vic’s had a classical musician boyfriend for a few books now — he lives in her building—big deal. I have to think of the Sharon McCone mysteries by San Francisco author Marcia Muller. Shar has lived through more than twice the number of novels as her Chicago counterpart, as well as finding out she’s a full-blooded Native American who’s been adopted by her white parents, being shot in the head and virtually paralyzed for a book or two, and getting married to an ex-mercenary security specialist and pilot to boot. Still, mystery lovers swell with pride when V.I. Warshawski steps into the literary room every time.

We lucky folks in Bloomington, of course, have our own resident private eye novelist, at least for part of the year. That would be Michael Koryta, the youngish ex-crime writer for the Herald-Times, who broke through with the intriguing debut novel Tonight I Said Goodbye, and the worthwhile follow-up mysteries Sorrow’s Anthem and A Welcome Grave, introducing readers to the Cleveland-based PI Lincoln Perry. Tonight I Said Goodbye won the Best First Novel award from the Private Eye Writers of America, and was nominated for an Edgar in 2004, the year Koryta turned twenty-one. A Welcome Grave was nominated for a Shamus award as best PI novel in 2007 by the Private Eye Writers group.

Michael Koryta’s Latest

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Going somewhat in the direction taken by Dennis Lehane, Robert Crais, and others, Koryta has turned to standalone novels mainly in recent years. Whether he wants salability to Hollywood or bestseller status for his books, his standalones have received generally good reviews from critics. The Lincoln Perry series stands currently at four entries, and its future remains in question. In some ways, Lincoln Perry is a throwback to earlier fictional private eyes, and something about him seems strangely out-of-date. He doesn’t embody the technical savvy and modern stance of V.I. Warshawski, and his personality lacks real depth. Particularly, his relationship with his journalist girlfriend comes across as wooden and unconvincing. I found the most recent Lincoln Perry novel, The Silent Hour, the weakest of the series. Let’s hope Mr. Koryta injects some vitality and relevance into his private eye and returns with a Lincoln Perry novel that really grabs us by the throat. A feel for suspense and an ability to generate tension are Koryta’s strong points; characterization, not so much, at least not yet.

Last, but certainly not least, is the case of mystery writer Steve Hamilton, a novelist originally from Michigan, now living in New York. Reluctant part-time private eye Alex McKnight is Hamilton’s Upper Peninsula Michigan creation, a Detroit ex-cop with a bullet lodged near his heart who has “retired” to rural northwestern Michigan, where he owns and manages a bunch of vacation cabins his handy-with-tools father left him. Atmospheric and moody, the McKnight novels have engaging supporting characters and dazzling action. What’s scary is: he’s getting better. His last novel in the series, Misery Bay, was nothing less than riveting, certainly one of his best. When he’s on his game, he captures some of the passion and drama of James Lee Burke, which is a considerable achievement in the world of mystery and crime novels today. The heart-wrenching death of Alex’s Mountie fiancé Natalie Reynaud at the end of Ice Run gets lodged in the reader’s memory in much the same way as Dave Robichaux’s wife Annie’s graphic killing in Heaven’s Prisoners. Hamilton’s current release, Die a Stranger, is not quite as powerful as Misery Bay, but still provides page-turning action and further fleshes out the McKnight character, as well as his Ojibwa best friend.

Michael Koryta’s latest standalone novel, The Prophet, finds our Bloomington author painting the sad and dark landscape of Chambers, Ohio, a Rust Belt community where the only going enterprises are prisons, bail bonding, and the local high school football team. And a serial killer is trolling for victims there. Think Stephen King meets Elmore Leonard. The main characters are brothers, Adam and Kent Austin—one a bail bondsman, whiskey-laced and tortured by guilt over the decades-before murder of his sister by a killer who has since died in prison; the other a God-fearing football coach who has successfully buried the loss along with his failed previous gridiron seasons. It is indeed a sad thing that pop culture has been dominated by a serial killer fixation since Anthony Hopkins first brought Hannibal Lector to the big screen in Silence of the Lambs, as sequels, imitations, and outright rip-offs have seemed endless in subsequent years. More than that, spinoff genres populated by FBI profilers and police CSI technicians have provided pulp fiction writers and TV hacks with a steady income, making it largely impossible to write a crime blockbuster without plenty of forensic trivia and thank-you’s to their technical consultants. Fortunately, Koryta does not fall for these DNA diversions, and instead gives us an in-depth look into the hearts of the brothers Austin. The football analogies are carried to the extreme, but then all the time the author spent with the Bloomington High School North football squad couldn’t have been for naught, now could it?

While The Prophet is testosterone-soaked and sometimes dreary, especially in the beginning, the action picks up in plenty of time. More importantly, we care about the characters, which is a vital element in any kind of suspense novel in which danger confronts the protagonists. Adam’s girlfriend Chelsea Salinas, to Koryta’s credit, comes across as a fully-realized human female, which is an accomplishment, considering some of his previous attempts, and this bodes well for his future writing career, since American women purchase a vastly higher percentage of fiction novels than do men. Witness the extraordinary popularity of Stieg Larsson and his cyberpunk detective, Lisbeth Salander. There are plenty of twists and turns in The Prophet; some can be anticipated by the reader, but others come unannounced. All in all, Koryta shows a maturity in this standalone novel that I have not seen before, so maybe the standalone field does bring him a freedom that the private eye novel never did. Real people in extraordinary situations—that formula can certainly stir fear into the mix when it’s done well, as it is here. Maybe I’ll go back and pick up another of Koryta’s standalones, which I have bypassed until this one. Stephen King, James Patterson, Michael Connelly, and Dean Koontz have all gushed about his work. Guys like that can’t be wrong, can they? Still, I wonder about no females being on that list.

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The Ryder, March 2013

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