Category: Arts & Entertainment

Music, Films, Books, Art, Theater: Reviews, previews, commentary, analysis.

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

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

BOOKS: The Famine Plot

Could Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy have been prevented? ◆ by Brandon Cook

In 1996, almost 150 years after it occurred, Tony Blair issued the first apology on behalf of the British authorities for the part they played in Ireland’s Great Famine. “That one million people should have died in what was then part of the richest and most powerful nation in the world is something that still causes pain as we reflect on it today,” the prime minister said.

Nowhere does one feel this pain more acutely then within the pages of Tim Pat Coogan’s most recent history The Famine Plot, which sets forth to describe “honestly, without either malice or cap touching, how [Irish] forbears died.”

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It’s no surprise that the famed Irish historian has at last settled himself upon the Blight as his next subject. His 2001 book Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora contains early seeds of Coogan’s interest—it is probable that the diaspora itself would not exist if the famine had not displaced so many of Ireland’s natives.

But the tragedy, Coogan writes in The Famine Plot, has heretofore been treated with a “strange reluctance” by historians who seem either to subscribe to A.J.P. Taylor’s declaration that “all Ireland was a Belsen,” or else defer from chronicling the grimmer details of the Famine and, in so doing, embrace what the historian Cecil Woodham-Smith called a “colonial cringe” mentality.

Coogan’s book, a pastiche of scintillating research, theory, and vitriol, contains more of the former class than the latter, and yet the author is careful to try and play fair and objective. Like any good historian, he endeavors to let the facts speak for themselves.

For many readers, Ireland’s colorful and in many ways tragic early history will be more or less unknown. To these readers Coogan pays special attention in characterizing the struggles of the 18th century Irish natives, most of which were paupers, as a perennial uphill battle against British imperialism. Like the Americans just 25 years before, the Irish rebelled against their oppressive authorities in 1798, under the flagship of the incomparable Theobald Wolfe Tone. What resulted was not only calamitous for the Irish population (Coogan estimates that 30,000 were “shot down or blown like chaff”) but also for its leadership. Cheating the hangman’s noose, Wolfe Tone committed suicide before he was sentenced to execution. His death would prove to be a haunting precursor to Ireland’s future history of crippled, sovereign heroes (notably, Charles Parnell in 1890 and Michael Collins in 1922).

Great Britain responded to the 1798 Rebellion by extracting all organizational power from the nation that it could, causing a future “leadership deficit” whose harmful implications would be realized during the Famine when it was already much too late. Countrymen, flocking to relief efforts, would find only sporadic benefactors (namely, Quakers) and the clergy, whose circumstances were little better than the countrymen’s. This, combined with a sense of “backyardism,” (England’s belief that it could dictate the goings-on of its neighboring country) would later lead to legislative conflicts, external and internal.

For Ireland’s part, its citizens, particularly its peasantry, reacted to the British ruling with a psychological state known as “learned helplessness.” Cognizant and yet paralytic to their thralldom, their state was characterized by demoralization, a sense of primitivism, and a very real inability to advance their social status. People stayed where they were, inherited their ancestor’s land and their Catholicism, married young, and had children to alleviate their boredom. The effects resultant of “learned helplessness” can still be seen today. Irish citizens, particularly those in the west where the Famine hit hardest, suffer from some of the highest rates of schizophrenia and alcoholism in the world.

It is under this backdrop that Coogan’s “main players” finally enter onto the stage. There are five although only two really matter: the acting prime minister during the first year of the Famine: Sir Robert Peel and the infamous secretary to the Treasury: Sir Charles Trevelyan.

Peel is the only one who earns much sympathy. While his leadership during the Famine did not garner near enough resources to prevent calamity, his main battle was fought against a perverted English ideology of Laissez-faire. A quote from Adam Smith’s masterwork, The Wealth of Nations, provides the basis for these beliefs: “the natural effort of every individual to better his conditions…is so powerful a principle, that it alone…is only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity.”

What Smith’s economic ideology does not include, as indeed no ideology includes, is the human variable, or the means of making the ideology, as Peel fought for, “applicable to the real world.” Even the “natural effort of every individual” will not prove enough when he is harried by foreign despots, a lack of resources and education, and poor mental health. Unfortunately for the prime minster, his cries fell on deaf ears. The policymakers held staunchly to Smith’s ideology and believed erringly that a nation which could launch a rebellion could use those same energies to launch itself out of turmoil. The fact that the policymakers were also from Peel’s rival Whig party probably didn’t help much either.

These factors, coupled with his failing health, the burden of the Famine tragedy, and also the hatred he bore from his own Tory party, caused Peel to resign his post in 1846. Coogan chronicles the prime minister’s final broken years and his minor heroism pointedly.

With Peel’s resignation there was nothing to stop the implementation of Trevelyan’s economic policies, which combined both the misguided interpretations of Adam’s Laissez-faire with a blunt jingoism. Before the policies take root, Coogan presents Trevelyan in a few choice details, quoting Yeats in describing him as “a soul incapable of remorse or rest” and citing details found at the Trevelyan estate, where the civil servant kept a stained-glass window of himself depicted as “St. Michael the Archangel in golden armor” under the inscription by St. Paul: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished my course.”

For Coogan, Trevelyan embodies the extremes of Irish racism and misguided belief, second, only to the idea of Laissez-faire, of which was that “poverty was the fault of the individual.” Yet Trevelyan serves also to embody Coogan’s more extreme dual thesis that “God sent the blight, but the English made the Famine,” and that the English executives used the Famine to propel a Hibernian genocide.

Tim Pat Coogan

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As to the latter, much of Trevelyan’s records substantiate that possibility. His feelings towards an Irish free state were certainly indignant, as is expressed in one of his correspondences: “one of the greatest of the delusions which have been put into the heads of the peasantry is that they are a nation.” While this was technically true (Ireland would remain apart of the Union until 1922), his attendant letter, contained in the book’s excellent, though short, appendices, exemplifies not a small amount of British imperialistic ideologies as well as bigotry directed towards the peasantry and the Catholic clergy. One need see only the disturbing, anthropoid depictions of the Irishman in the early cartoons of Punch magazine to get a sense of this anti-Irish zeitgeist.

His policies for the distribution, or non-distribution, of relief rations, and for the exportation of good crop in Ireland despite the starving masses of over 3 million (it is important to note too that Ireland’s population in the mid 19th century was just over 8 million), also qualify a degree of sadism.

Coogan cites several stories of horror and misery to back this point up. Following through with his mission to render the history as true and objective as possible, he unflinchingly delivers pages of starving children, noisome workhouses, putrid disease, and obtuse government. One story, referenced in his Introduction, gives the account of Nora Connelly: a poor peasant woman who walked miles on foot to a food distributor so that she could feed her dying children. Turned away because her name was not on the list of those to be fed, she walked back to her home where she discovered that four of her children had starved to death. Only later was it realized that she should have been on the list but that a careless official had entered her name incorrectly.

While stories such as these are meant to signify governmental obliviousness and a lack of general human kindness, they do not prevent Coogan from implying that the blame should be placed directly upon Trevelyan. Such a maneuver is repeated in the later chapters on peasant evictions, workhouse conditions, and immigration.

Trevelyan certainly worsened the conditions of the Famine, yet much of this can be chalked up to basic incompetence, which Coogan himself acknowledges when he details the ineffectual Corn Laws, (laws that governed the importation of Indian maize) and posits that the British “literally did not know a great deal about corn,” or rather, enough about the corn to instruct the Irish on how it should be ground and digested, which was done in a series of lengthy and inaccurate articles that resulted in widespread deaths caused by dysentery and scurvy.

Coupled with this were other negligible reports that, flagrantly misleading, would be laughable if their results weren’t so tragic. At the height of the first year of the Famine and during the outbreak of corn-related diseases, Trevelyan was fed information stating that there were “ ‘scarcely any’ gastric complaints” and that “ ‘the general health of the people has wonderfully improved.’ ” How he managed this information with the thousands of gastric disease-related deaths can only be left up to conjecture.

Whether Trevelyan chose to believe any of what he was told doesn’t seem to matter to the author, who focuses more or less only on how the man reacted. And yet it doesn’t appear to be too far a stretch to assert that Trevelyan, already proving himself highly delusional in his self-depiction as archangel Michael, caved again to willful delusion and chose his policies not as a means of genocide but in the interests of self-preservation.

Although this theory might not hold during Trevelyan’s later moments, such as when he learned of the massive farmer deportation: “I am not at all appalled…that seems to me to be a necessary part of the process,” or when he presided over the relief efforts during the Famine’s worst year (“Black ‘47”): “with the smallest amount of abuse [we will] encourage such principles of feeding and action…to improvement of the social system,” it is still a possible avenue the reader wishes the author didn’t leave unexplored.

Though a study of anti-Irish psychology could very well encompass its own book, room could have been made had the author chosen to cut his chapter on immigration, which is a brilliantly treated topic in Wherever Green is Worn but which meanders here.

Even so, the unsparing depiction combined with his laboriously conducted research mark The Famine Plot as fine a work as any in the chronicles of Famine books. Should the reader choose to disagree with the contention that England’s role was one of extermination, he will nevertheless yield to Coogan’s evidence that historians have long undermined the tragedy’s shocking reality. What’s most important is not that we place the blame on all those responsible, but that we honor and remember all those who suffered.

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The Ryder, March 2013

TV: House Of Cards

Kevin Spacey stars as an amoral schemer in the new series produced by Netflix ◆ by Ben Atkinson

Television has blurred the line between pro-and-antagonist for a number of years. Frank Underwood, the central character and foundation for Netflix’s House of Cards, is the latest example of a bad guy we care about. Underwood, the embodiment of villainy, destroys careers and lives, and back-stabs colleagues who trust him, all for the noble goal of personal political advancement. Any thought for the causes he had hoped to champion were forgotten long ago. Denied the cabinet post he feels is his due, he drops all loyalty to friends and political party and uses his position as House Majority Whip to launch a tightly orchestrated campaign to weaken his personal enemies and position himself for an endgame that is revealed gradually throughout the premier season. Along the way he breaks ethics codes, laws, and anyone who stands in his way. And along the way, though we might not root for him, we inevitably start caring about what happens to him.

Kevin Spacey In “House Of Cards”

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David Fincher (The Social Network, Fight Club) brings his Hollywood director sensibilities to the show, blurring the lines between television and film. House of Cards shares its name with the early 90’s BBC miniseries and original novel by Michael Dobbs on which it is based. Netflix has released House of Cards in 13 “chapters” of about 50 minutes each. They function more or less as standard one-hour television episodes, with most episodes paired with its neighbor and sharing the same director. The result is basically 6 two-hour movies, and, like movies, the directors have far more influence than the usual television day-worker director. Netflix released all the chapters at once, knowing that many of its users prefer to immerse themselves in a series. The “Netflix Effect” has even become a euphemism for binge-watching entire seasons of television shows, often leaving viewers a season behind the actual airing of the show. Technology has made it easy to watch many episodes together, which has had a huge impact on the production of shows. Viewing several episodes immediately and sequentially allows for a cohesian not possible when a series is doled out weekly over the course of seven or eight months. With around 11 hours of material, season one of House of Cards achieves epic length akin to the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, while still being broken down into digestible amounts. Look for the release of more shows using this format. The recent doubling of Netflix’s stock price won’t go unnoticed by its industry competitors, and Fincher won’t be the only one marrying film and television.

This is a show that values directors and uses the visual medium to great effect. It does not rely on an uplifting story arc or an idealistic hero who stands up to corporate and political corruption. There are no stirring speeches or fast-paced witty dialogue. A great deal of House of Cards’ power comes from visual cues and subtext. For instance, in one episode Frank returns to his district to deal with a potential lawsuit. Outside of Washington, he shows a completely different face to his friends back “home” in South Carolina. After showcasing so much of their wholesome South Carolina home with its flowerbed, welcoming front porch and homey living room, the exit shot for the episode is the stark sterility of the Underwood’s Washington brownstone.

Instead of dry, long conversations about morbidity, we get to see Frank’s middle-aged wife Claire experience jarring interactions while jogging through a cemetery, having to wait for her coffee while an older barista gets help with the digital cash register by a younger barista, and extended moments standing in front of an open refrigerator. She is more than a Lady Macbeth and heads her own non-profit organization. Frequently, she and Frank use each other’s positions to gain influence for themselves, and in many ways it seems a marriage of convenience, as indicated by the extra-marital affairs both enjoy. But like everything else in this show, it’s just not that simple. There are many moments of genuine love and compassion between them and a mutual respect and admiration, and each honestly hopes the other will succeed. Many couples know there is much more to marriage than dewy-eyed romance, and to find a television series in which a long-term relationship is built on something other than children or nostalgia is refreshing. While Claire plays the good wife often enough, when push comes to shove she looks out for her own interests and knows that partnership does not mean subjugation.

Ultimately, it is acting that carries the show home. There are no “good guys.” There are political characters, like Frank and Claire, who care mostly for personal advancement. But even the characters of pure heart and sweet intention either struggle to overcome personal demons. Surrounded by the overwhelming temptations of power and wealth, the characters in House of Cards succumb to the dark side of Washington politics. This isn’t an idealistic portrayal of government or people. Neither is it a condemnation. The characters are real, and the acting is superb. Corey Stoll plays Peter Russo, a congressman compromised by substance abuse, who wants to do right by his constituents but finds the glitter of power too alluring, and once he becomes Frank’s puppet we get to witness some of the personal consequences to Frank’s Machiavellian schemes. Robin Wright (Claire Underwood) and Kate Mara (reporter Zoe Barnes) portray the difficulties their characters face trying to satisfy their professional ambitions without sacrificing their personal lives.

Kevin Spacey is the keystone. Netflix used the vast data collected from users to know that Spacey is a name that would attract a large and specific audience. Like a successful politician he is all things to all people, and it takes a brilliant acting job to pull it off. We see an amoral schemer, a good ol’ southern boy, and a gregarious colleague, all wrapped up into one. The viewer gets a special glimpse of Underwood during his asides. Breaking the fourth wall is an old stage tradition that allows the audience to share the innermost thoughts of characters. The camera adds another dimension. Underwood, instead of merely achieving distance from the action to address the audience, addresses us directly through the camera. These private moments in the spotlight are when Spacey truly shines. And instead of being fooled like Frank’s family, friends, and colleagues, viewers are in the know, privy to the dark inner secrets of this enigmatic mastermind. Ultimately, House of Cards is the story about the variety of stories Frank tells his targets and co-conspirators as he cons his way through Washington. Frank’s asides to the audience are another story, perhaps the story he is telling us, or perhaps the story he is telling himself.

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The Ryder, March 2013

MUSIC: Bach’s Mass In B Minor

◆ by Jeffrey Huntsman

Unbridled expression is the commonest way great emotional intensity is realized. Ecstatic spiritual rites, dancing to exhaustion, talking in tongues, even a heavy-metal rock concert are highly individualistic manifestations of passion. Nonetheless, as spontaneous as they may seem, they are all best understood through lenses that reveal intentions, structures, and cultural meaning. In time such practices may become formalized into styles, movements, or even genres — think Romanticism in art, literature, and music. In these examples there is a kind of symmetry between the forms of expression and its intended content, so a wildness of expression serves a wildness in meaning.

But there is a contrary impulse as well, which works through a dynamic tension between a passionate intensity and a highly formal structure. The power of Kwakiutl carvings, early Celtic knotwork, and Islamic calligraphy all depends precisely on the spring-wound energy of the internal forms straining against the outer boundaries. Dylan Thomas’ most personal and wrenching poem, “Do not go gentle into that good night,” pushes his anguish about his dying father against the formal strictures of his sestina version, with a single pair of rhyming words throughout. The emotional storm is harnessed — barely — by the straited structure.

Bach

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In Western music, there is no better example of emotional intensity manifested through highly formal structure than Johann Sebastian Bach. His compositions — even the cantatas he turned out at a rate of one or more per week of his later professional life — are each models of precise musical genius. It is possible in many cases to demonstrate with mathematical exactitude the balance of musical motifs, textual meanings, and spiritual revelation — although just as surely Bach himself would never have overtly modeled his work mathematically. Writing one such masterpiece of controlled focus would be a wonder for most of us; the hope of “tossing off” hundreds is virtually unimaginable.

Out of a lifetime compendium of Bach’s treasures it is daunting to choose a single exemplar of supreme excellence, but if pressed to choose one, Bach’s Mass in B minor would be it for many. A product of his late life, the Mass in B minor (1749) is unusual for one composed by a Lutheran, because it sets the whole Latin text of the Roman tradition. Several parts were actually composed earlier: a segment of the Crucifixus dating from a cantata of 1714, the Sanctus from 1724, and the Kyrie and Gloria from 1733. Revisiting, reusing, and revising earlier material is something most musicians do, of course, and Bach’s companions here include among many others Handel, Janáček, and Lauridsen. But there is nothing stale in this reimagined masterpiece. The Mass was Bach’s last major composition, completed after he had gone blind and when he surely was most mindful of his impending mortality.

Although it apparently languished unperformed over two centuries until 1859 — Bach himself does not seem to have heard it in its finished form — it has since become recognized as an epitome of his writing for voice, with a compendious variety of musical styles, a breadth of textures and sonorities, and his characteristic richness of technical complexity and finesse. So towering is its stature that no one since, not even Beethoven (who tried twice to get a copy of the ms.), has written another mass in that key. That player’s number has been permanently retired.

The Chamber Singers, under the baton of Music Director D. Gerald Sousa, is returning to the Mass after a decade and a half of consistent growth in its size and musicality. For this performance, the BCS is partnering with the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra (Artistic Director Barthold Kuijken), a group also with many past and current connections with IU’s Jacobs School of Music. It will be an especially rare treat to hear the Mass played on period-correct instruments, like Bach himself could have used, and the splendid venue at St John the Apostle Catholic Church, on the northwest edge of Bloomington near Ellettsville, is a virtually third acoustic partner.

[The Bloomington Chamber Singers, with the Indianapolis Baroque Orchestra, will perform J. S. Bach’s Mass in B minor on Saturday, April 13 at 8:00 pm and Sunday, April 14 (at 3:00 pm at St. John the Apostle Catholic Church in Bloomington.

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The Ryder, March 2013

FILM: People Will Say We’re In Amour

The Heart-Stopping Cinema of Michael Haneke ◆ by Craig J. Clark

This has been a long time coming, but it appears uncompromising Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke is finally starting to gain some mainstream acceptance in the United States — that is, if the multiple Academy Awards nominations for his last two films are anything to go by. Between them, 2009’s The White Ribbon and last year’s Amour were nominated for seven Oscars, with two nods for Best Foreign Film (which Amour won), Best Cinematography, Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Original Screenplay. That’s not bad for a period piece about the nature of evil and a heavy drama about a couple facing their mortality with grim determination. Hardly what one would consider feel-good films, but Haneke has never been interested in coddling audiences or providing them with easy answers to life’s problems.

That hard-line stance goes all the way to his first feature, The Seventh Continent, which was released in 1989 and is one of his most quietly devastating efforts. It also illustrates his early propensity for formal experimentation, breaking the action down into three distinct parts. The first takes place in 1987 and observes engineer Dieter Berner, optician Birgit Doll and their young daughter Leni Tanzer as they go about their daily routines. Nothing that unusual happens; we just watch them (usually from a distance or framed in such a way that their faces aren’t visible) as they do all the mundane things one has to do to get through the day. Part two, which takes place a year later, is structured the same way, and features repetitions of some of the same shots and actions. There are enough subtle differences, though, that an observant viewer will begin to wonder just what Haneke is getting at. Well, what Haneke is getting at is what happens in the third part, which takes place in 1989.

The first clue that something is amiss doesn’t come until nearly an hour in, when Berner casually mentions to Doll that they “have to cancel the newspaper subscription.” It’s at that moment, when the characters reveal that they have crossed some kind of threshold without telling us, that the dread starts to mount. There’s one mention that they’re immigrating to Australia (the seventh continent of the title), but it soon becomes clear that they have an entirely different destination in mind. What that is I leave the reader to discover for themselves if they so choose.

For his second feature, 1992’s Benny’s Video, Haneke ventured into Atom Egoyan territory with his story of a teenage boy (Arno Frisch) who is obsessed with capturing images on videotape and then playing them back repeatedly. A child of affluent parents, Frisch is also in the habit of renting violent movies and listening to loud rock music while he’s holed up in his room, a practice disapproved of by his father (Ulrich Mühe), but his mother (Angela Winkler) doesn’t find it too troubling. Maybe if she had a look at some of the videos he’s taken and edited together, she would.

“Benny’s Video”

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Provocatively, the film opens with footage of a real pig being killed with a captive bolt pistol (similar to the one favored by Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men). And if that’s not disturbing enough, the video is rewound and played back in slow motion, and then a third time when Frisch shows his set-up to a girl that he meets outside the video store he frequents. Conveniently, his parents are away for the weekend when he brings her home, so when he kills her with the same weapon that was used on the pig, he has time to coolly clean everything up. The only thing he doesn’t do is dispose of the body, as his parents discover to their horror when they get home. From the way they go about dealing with the problem, though, it becomes pretty clear how Frisch became so dispassionate that he could take a human life without batting an eye.

The final part of Haneke’s “glaciation trilogy” was 1994’s 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, which tells the backstory of a young gunman’s rampage at an Austrian bank by breaking it down into bite-sized narrative chunks spread out over the two months leading up to it. Rather than explain how the event comes to pass or why each of his eventual victims was there when it happened, though, Haneke teases out just enough information with each fragment to give the audience the chance to figure out how they all connect (or not, as the case may be). As such, there is no one central character to latch onto (not even the murderer), but we do come back to a few of them enough times to get a feel for how they pass their days in the shadow of looming tragedy.

Meanwhile, Haneke starts each day (there are five depicted in the film) with news reports on unrest and violence in places like Somalia, Haiti, Northern Ireland, Turkey, Lebanon and Bosnia, as well as an in-depth look at the Michael Jackson child abuse scandal that was consuming a lot of media attention at the time. I’m sure Haneke is making some kind of point about how easy it is for people to lose perspective (the Jackson case is given as much weight as all of the other stories, if not more), but the main thing one takes away from the film is that there are no easy answers. And apart from the gunman, whose death by his own hand is revealed in a title card at the top of the film, we never find out the fate of any of the other characters. That may be frustrating to some, but anybody who appreciates not being spoon-fed will have much to chew on after all 71 fragments have been slotted into place.

Next up for Haneke was his adaptation of Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel The Castle, which had previously inspired some aspects of Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka. Made in 1997 for Austrian television, its story concerns a land surveyor (Ulrich Mühe, the father from Benny’s Video) who arrives in a snowbound village, having been summoned by the Castle, only to find that his services are no longer required — nor were they ever, apparently. Mühe attempts to gain entrance to the Castle, but is frustrated at every turn, and it doesn’t help that he’s been assigned a pair of interchangeable assistants (Frank Giering and Felix Eitner) who make quite a nuisance of themselves. He also takes up with barmaid Susanne Lothar when he finds out she’s the mistress of a high-ranking official, but how he expects to get anywhere that way is frankly beyond me.

Things get more complicated from there — much, much more complicated — as Mühe peels away the layers of bureaucracy and obfuscation only to find more where they came from. His relationship with Lothar also becomes a major distraction, and like everything else he tries it gets him no closer to gaining entrance to the Castle, but by the end there are people trying to get to close to him because of his perceived connections there. At least Mühe remains sane enough to appreciate the irony of that.

Haneke’s next theatrical feature, made the same year as The Castle, was Funny Games, which is one of his more notorious films (made even more so by the fact that he remade it shot for shot a decade later). Briefly, it’s about two unfailingly polite young men who show up at the vacation home of a nice, upper middle class family and proceed to terrorize the hell out of them. It’s difficult to say any more about the plot without giving the “game” away, but the whole thing starts with a simple request for eggs and, before it’s over, they’re not the only things that end up getting broken.

It’s instructive to watch Funny Games in tandem with The Castle since Ulrich Mühe plays the hapless father and Susanne Lothar is his wife. Haneke even recasts one of Mühe’s unhelpful assistants (Frank Giering) as one of their tormentors, and the other (Arno Frisch) had played the title character in Benny’s Video, so he was well-versed in the art of inflicting randomly cruel violence on others. Of course, Haneke chooses to only show us its after-effects, scrupulously keeping the actual acts of violence (with one notable exception) offscreen. This is much appreciated considering some of the worst offenses are committed against the couple’s child, making this a film that disturbs as much as it enrages.

For an encore, Haneke puzzled out 2000’s Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys, which is a companion piece of sorts to 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance since it presents a series of interlocking stories about people whose lives intersect in ways both ordinary and unexpected. The main focal point is Juliette Binoche, who plays an actress working on a thriller that we get to see in various stages of rehearsal and shooting, but we also spend time with her photojournalist boyfriend (who seems most at home in the middle of war zones), his younger brother (who yearns to escape from the family farm), a young African (who takes offense to the brother’s treatment of a beggar), his father (who drives a cab to support his family), and a Romanian immigrant (who winds up getting deported since she was in the country illegally). As with 71 Fragments, Haneke leaves it up to the viewer to figure out how their stories fit together.

While Funny Games and Code Unknown were both in competition at Cannes, and Code Unknown received a special Prize of the Ecumenical Jury, Haneke moved one step closer to the coveted Palme d’Or with 2001’s The Piano Teacher, which was awarded the Grand Prix (the second-highest prize at the festival), plus Best Actor and Actress. As anyone who’s seen the film can attest, Isabelle Huppert definitely deserved the latter for diving headfirst into the role of a deranged music professor who enters into a sado-masochistic relationship with a student (Best Actor winner Benoît Magimel) whose aggressive nature both attracts and repels her. Then again, it doesn’t help that she has the worst stage mother this side of Barbara Hershey in Black Swan, which is all the more pathetic when one considers that Huppert is clearly in her 40s and therefore has little chance of being “discovered.” Not only does she still live at home, but her overbearing mother is constantly checking up on her, which probably accounts for why she has so many sexual and emotional hang-ups.

“The Piano Teacher”

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As is frequently the case in Haneke’s films, it takes some time for Huppert to reveal the depths of her psychosis. The camera dispassionately observes her in uncomfortably long takes while she engages in erratic behavior which becomes increasingly dangerous, both to herself and others. Her passive-aggressiveness even compels her to destroy a student’s chances of playing professionally just before an important recital. Little wonder, then, that Magimel tells her, “It’s totally sick what you’re doing here.” That’s as may be, but it doesn’t prevent him from coming back for more.

Huppert returned for 2003’s Time of the Wolf, an apocalyptic tale that shows how the world ends, neither with a bang nor a whimper, but rather with uncertainty, misery, and the high probability of death by exposure and/or starvation. Set during an unnamed calamity that spurs city dwellers Huppert and Daniel Duval to stock up on some essentials and flee to the country with their children, the film immediately puts them at a disadvantage since another family has beaten them to their cabin and the father has a gun. This means the supposed safe haven where they were planning on waiting out the catastrophe instead puts them face to face (for the first of many times) with desperate people who will do whatever is necessary to hold onto what little they’ve got. After Duval is taken out of the picture, Huppert tries her best to provide for herself and her children, finding food and shelter where neither is easy to come by.

Much like the similarly themed Children of Men and The Road, Time of the Wolf is bleak pretty much from the word go, and it only gets bleaker as it goes on. Even so, there are some starkly beautiful images on display, with Haneke going the Stanley Kubrick route by shooting all of the night scenes by firelight. (One such tracking shot features Huppert and her children walking past a row of farm animals that have been killed and set ablaze — an image both poetic and horrifying at the same time.) It may not be a comforting vision, but few people go into a Michael Haneke film expecting to be reassured about their place in the world.

Another winner at Cannes (earning him Best Director and two other awards), 2005’s Caché found Haneke on the threshold of a crossover success that seemed unlikely just a few years earlier. A tense drama about a man unwilling to face up to his past mistakes, it stars Daniel Auteuil as the host of a popular public television program who starts receiving creepy videotapes showing the exterior of the house he shares with book editor Juliette Binoche and their preteen son. The premise is similar to the opening scenes of David Lynch’s Lost Highway, but whereas Lynch quickly branches off into other, stranger avenues, Haneke stays firmly rooted in reality as the tapes (and the gruesome drawings and postcards that begin arriving with them) chip away at Auteuil’s long-dormant conscience. But what does he have to feel guilty about and why does he feel compelled to keep secrets from his wife and son?

“Caché”

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Without giving too much away, Auteuil eventually receives a tape that leads him to the apartment of a mysterious Algerian man (Maurice Bénichou) who’s cagey about the connection between them when a clearly agitated Auteuil shows up at his door. He also has a memorable confrontation with the man’s son (Walid Afkir), but that only comes after an event that I wouldn’t dream in a million years of spoiling. Haneke’s films may be deliberately paced, but that only serves to make the shocks more effective when they do come.

For his first (and, so far, only) English-language film, Haneke followed in the footsteps of The Vanishing‘s George Sluizer and Nightwatch‘s Ole Bornedal by remaking one of his own films. In his case he chose Funny Games, casting Naomi Watts and Tim Roth as the affluent couple whose home is invaded and Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet as the ones doing the invading. Both films are equally effective (it all depends on whether you prefer to read subtitles or not), but Pitt and Corbet make for very ingratiating home invaders and the games they come up with are designed for maximum discomfort, both for the “players” and for the audience.

Before Amour, Haneke’s biggest success, both domestically and internationally, was The White Ribbon, which stands apart from the rest of his filmography thanks to its period setting and Christian Berger’s stark black-and-white cinematography, which perfectly evokes the place and time (a small German village in the months leading up to the outbreak of World War I). The imagery also captures the outlook of the villagers, many of whom see everything as strictly black or white. As Haneke deftly illustrates, that sort of environment is a veritable breeding ground for intolerance and corruption.

“White Ribbon”

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If anyone could be said to be at the center of everything, it would be the village schoolteacher (Christian Friedel), who narrates the film from the vantage point of some unspecified time in the future. His main concern, both in the past and the present, is his tentative courtship with the local baron and baroness’s nanny (Leonie Benesch), a girl of 17 who is unjustly dismissed after an incident that doesn’t even involve a child under her care. The incident is far from the first, or the last, though, and most seem to somehow involve the older children of the local pastor (Burghart Klaussner), whose ideas about punishment always seem to outstrip the misbehavior involved. Then there is the doctor (Rainer Bock), who’s carrying on an affair with the town midwife (Susanne Lothar, returning from The Castle and the original Funny Games), which turns out to be the least of his transgressions. With role models like these, it’s no wonder the children lack a proper moral compass.

Firmly back in the present, Haneke’s second Palme d’Or winner in a row was Amour, which is that rare thing: a tearjerker that conjures up profound emotions without having to ladle on the sappy strings or Nicholas Sparks sunsets. Rather, it uses the most straightforward method of telling the story of a man (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who watches helplessly while his wife (Emmanuelle Riva) incrementally slips away from him. After all, who needs cheap melodramatics when you’ve got two actors with more than a century of film-acting experience between them?

The film opens with the story’s end, as the fire department breaks into Trintignant and Riva’s apartment and finds her dead with flower petals strewn about her room. It then flashes back to the night of another break-in, which the couple missed because they were attending a piano recital given by one of her former students. Apart from that all seems well, but the following morning Riva zones out for a few minutes during breakfast, which raises a red flag for Trintignant. “We can’t pretend nothing happened,” he says, and next thing we know Riva has had an operation, but it apparently did more harm than good because when she comes home she’s in a wheelchair and has lost the use of the right side of her body. It’s quite understandable, then, that she makes him promise never to take her back to the hospital, even if it will cause him great distress to keep it.

For the most part, Trintignant and Riva exist in isolation, save for the occasional visits from helpful neighbors and their daughter (Isabelle Huppert), who fills them in on her problems (a philandering husband, a directionless son) and grows increasingly concerned about Riva’s condition, which deteriorates rapidly. In a matter of weeks she goes from zipping around in her motorized wheelchair (the introduction of which provides a rare moment of levity) to being confined to her bed and barely capable of speech. Given the range of emotion she has to express, I’m not surprised she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, but Trintignant is equally deserving of recognition for his work here. I’m sure it will be a long time before I see another pair of lived-in performances such as these.

[Editor’s note: The Seventh Continent, Benny’s Video, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance, Caché, Code Unknown, The Piano Teacher and The White Ribbon can all be viewed on Netflix.]

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The Ryder, March 2013

FILM: True False Festival

◆ by Peter LoPilato

One of the best documentary film festivals in the world is just a short drive down I-70 in Columbia, Missouri. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating – it’s not that short a drive (six hours) but it is a fantastic festival. Filmmakers and occasionally the subjects of their documentaries present films, take part in Q&As and hobnob with festival-goers in hipster cafes, taverns and ice cream shops.

Think Lotus, only with movies. Film showings take place in multiple screening rooms in downtown Columbia and on the campus of the University of Missouri, all within walking distance of one another. For four days, from mid-morning until past midnight, Columbia is transformed into a film-lover’s playground. You can leapfrog from a film to a panel discussion to a performance by an indie band. And at night there are parties! Real parties — this is not one of those dreary academic affairs, with all due respect to academics. True False 2013 will feature close to forty new films and forty now bands. Most films come freshly discovered from Sundance, Toronto and other festivals; others appear mysteriously before their official premieres elsewhere.

Musicians Perform At The True False Film Festival

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Some of 2012’s best documentaries were showcased last year at True False including The Ambassador, The Imposter, Queen of Versailles and Searching for Sugar Man.

This year’s festival will take place February 28th through March 3rd. As we go to press, the full slate of films has not been announced. It will include however, No, by Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín. No captured the Directors’ Fortnight top prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Actress and fictional filmmaker Sarah Polley (some of you saw Take this Waltz last year at The Ryder) will present her documentary debut with Stories We Tell. By the time you read this, the rest True False program should be posted on the festival’s site.

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The Ryder, February 2013

STAGES: February (& More)

◆ by Ryan Dawes

◗ King Creole’s Bayou Boogie


Saturday, February 16 / Bloomington Convention Center / 6 pm / $60

This Mardi Gras-themed event will feature a performance by Curtis Jackson’s Motown Review, which will serve as soundtrack to the shell-crushing ecstasy of a massive crawfish boil.  Other Cajun, Creole, and Yankee dietary delights will be served compliments of local restaurants.  The event will benefit the Bloomington Independent Restaurant Association and the Monroe County Chapter of the American Red Cross to support their work with victims of disasters, military families, and emergency response and preparedness.  Tickets can be purchased at bctboxoffice.com or at the door.

◗ Soup Bowl Benefit


Sunday, February 17 / Monroe County Convention Center / 5 pm / $25


Benefiting the Hoosier Hills Food Bank, which collects and distributes food for local NPO’s, the Soup Bowl offers ticket holders their choice of hundreds of handmade ceramic bowls made by area artists, along with soup and bread donated by local restaurants and bakeries.  The idea for the Soup Bowl Benefit was first conceived by local artist Carrie Newcomer and music attorney Robert Meitus, who participated in a similar event while on tour.  Since then, the benefit has helped HHFB buy trucks and refrigerators and feed families across Monroe and 6 other counties.  Musical entertainment will be provided by Another Round (formerly Straight No Chaser) and the old-time folk outfit, The Monks.

◗ Pokey LaFarge & The South City Three with Al Scorch


Thursday, February 21 / The Bishop / 9 pm / $10


Lotus World Music Fest alumni Pokey LaFarge and the South City Three conjure spirits of the historic South with a glowing brand of  rag-time, western swing, and country blues. The sweaty, humid feat is achieved with Pokey’s brilliant guitar-picking and crooning voice stacked charmingly atop guitjo, double bass, kazoo, and harmonica. Chicago’s own banjo shredding Al Scorch will pre-heat the Bishop with his old-soul narratives supported by a bluegrassy, gospelish folk that is often penetrated by a youthful post-punk recklessness, lending more emotion to the work. Each act alone would be worth the same door price.

Pokey LaFarge & The South City Three

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◗ The School for Scandal


Friday & Saturday, February 22 & 23; Tuesday, February 26 through Friday, March 1 / Ruth N. Halls Theatre / 7:30 pm / $10-25

Set in London in the 1770’s (when it was also written), this theatrical comedy by Richard Brinsley Sheridan is about the repercussions of the age-old practice of gossip. We see this play out as Lady Sneerwell plots to wreak social havoc by spreading unfounded rumors of a love-affair so that she may pluck what she wants from the wreckage, that being the affection of a married man. After more lies, backstabbing, bribery, and the arrival of a rich uncle in disguise, Sneerwell’s plot unravels in a way that illustrates just how “tale-bearers are as bad as the tale-makers.” Tickets are available at the IU Auditorium box office or at the Lee Norvelle Center box office in-person, which opens one hour before the show.

◗ Dragon Wagon


Friday, March 1 / Max’s Place / 10 pm / Free

With a fiddle player who was trained the tradition of Celtic violin and later toured with a death metal-bluegrass hybrid outfit, DW is a bluegrass folk-rock band, but obviously not without a diverse array of other influences. The band is based in Ann Arbor, MI and has been playing together since 2008.  Legend has it that percussionist Fritz McGirr was once hired by Guinness Brewing Company to rap about beer and play the Bodhrán (double-sided, hand held frame drum with goat skin). DW mandolin player Troy Stanley Radikin confirms this.  Donations for admission will be accepted.

◗ Spamalot


Wednesday, March 6 / Indiana University Auditorium / 8 pm / $38-62

“Bring out your dead!” Created by the writers of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and The Life of Brian, Spamalot is the Broadway version of the former.  After entertaining more than 2 million people and grossing more than $175 million in its first year, Spamalot was awarded a Tony for Best Musical in 2005. So enthused by the first year’s success, that 1,789 Monty Python fans amassed to form the “World’s Largest Coconut Orchestra” in Shubert Alley in Manhattan. Since then, the production has toured through Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and Australia.  If you’re not dead yet, you can find tickets at the IU Auditorium Box Office, located just south of the main entrance.

◗ Unknown Mortal Orchestra with Foxygen, Wampire

Friday, March 8 / The Bluebird / 9 pm / $12


Led by Ruban Nielson formerly of New Zealand, UMO creates a guitar-driven psychedelic pop with strains of funk and garage rock influenced by solitude and liver-punishing life on the road. His high-pitched, emotionally charged vocals combined with fuzzy distortion sound like a mix of Elliott Smith, Jimi Hendrix, and a new 21st Century bleakness that didn’t exist before. Sharing similar threads of psychedelia (not to mention the local labelship of Jagjaguar), Foxygen will precede UMO on stage, sporting surprising song structure that illustrates admirable instrument and genre diversity, amounting to a very entertaining and thoughtful experimental pop.

◗ Silk Road Ensemble with Yo-Yo Ma


Monday, March 18 / Indiana University Auditorium / 8 pm / $38-60

As one of the most recognized cellists in the world, Yo-Yo Ma directs and performs in the Silk Road Ensemble, which is part of a broader educational initiative called the Silk Road Project and includes performers from nearly 20 countries, playing instruments unique to their countries. For example, you can hear a kamancheh (bowed instrument with silk or metal strings) from Iran, a shakuhachi (end-blown flute) from Japan, or an erhu (double stringed fiddle with a python-skinned sound box) from China, just to name a few. Altogether, the Ensemble boasts both an enormous fleet of symphonic sound as well as illuminates individual instruments solo.

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The Ryder, February 2013

OPERA: Philip Glass’s “Akhnaten”

A Modern American Opera With An Ancient, Exotic Feel ◆ by Kristen Strandberg

Philip Glass’s music often conveys a sense of mesmerizing calmness, yet can just as easily–and sometimes simultaneously–provoke a sense of unease. Such is the case with his 1984 opera, Akhnaten, which the IU Opera Theater will perform on February 22 and 23, and March 1 and 2.  While the IU Opera often performs one or two contemporary works each season, this marks their first performance of a Glass opera.  Akhnaten may be slightly more challenging for listeners than this season’s Mozart or Verdi operas, yet Glass’s music is still accessible and somewhat familiar.  Much of the opera’s music contains the unmistakable sounds of Glass’s minimalist style, in which short musical fragments are repeated over long periods of time with slow-changing harmonies.  Yet, Akhnaten’s dissonant sounds set it apart from Glass’s well-known piano music and earlier opera Einstein on the Beach, giving it a foreign, ancient feel.

“Anhkaten” At The IU MAC

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The mesmerizing and reflective quality of Glass’s music has a powerful effect when paired with visual images or a narrative.  He has written music for several films, such as Candyman (1992), The Truman Show (1998), and The Hours (2002), which received nine Academy Award nominations including Best Original Score.  In film, the synergy between Glass’s score and the on-screen images offers depth and insight into the narrative: during Virginia Wolf’s suicide scene in The Hours, the mesmerizing calmness of Glass’s score offers psychological insight into the character, giving the viewer a sense of peace and finality in spite of the urgency and distress of the visual images.  The 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi offers a similar alliance between image and Glass’s music.  The film consists entirely of landscapes and city scenes without dialogue or narrative, and while the landscape scenes are often beautiful, Glass’s repetitive minimalist music can be deeply unsettling, giving the viewer the sense that something is very wrong; later scenes showing the effects of pollution confirm this sense.

Glass’s operatic music similarly complements images on stage.  Written in 1984, Akhnaten is Glass’s third opera, telling the story of an ancient Egyptian king who is overthrown after his attempts to impose religious reform on his kingdom. The music complements the ancient Egyptian setting, altering our sense of time and place because of its unfamiliar and somewhat unsettling nature.

Throughout the opera, the instruments and voices create layers of sounds; the strings, brass, percussion, and voices each repeat their own musical ideas without interacting with each other, producing a sense of organized chaos.  The Act 1 love duet between Akhnaten and Nefertiti demonstrates this effect while also speaking to Akhnaten’s desire to abolish polygamy in his kingdom. The duet features Glass’s signature repetition in the orchestra, while the two voices interject in their own style, perhaps symbolizing the characters’ unity in conflict with the desires of the polygamous kingdom.  Other elements, such as dissonance and a lack of sustained notes and vocal beauty, remind the listener that this is not a nineteenth-century operatic love story, but a much more distant, unfamiliar one.

Akhnaten is performed by twelve solo voices, a chorus, and a narrator, with a mixture of sung and spoken text.  Glass and his collaborators drew upon various sources for the text, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Bible, and several letters and poems.  Each segment is performed in the source’s original language- English, Hebrew, or Egyptian.

The IU Opera Theater will perform Akhnaten at 8 pm on February 22 and 23, and March 1 and 2 at the Musical Arts Center.  Additionally, they will join the Indianapolis opera for two performances on March 8 and 9 at Clowes Memorial Hall on the campus of Butler University.

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The Ryder, February 2013

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