Category: TV

Tidy Tidbits: Culture Notes

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MORE BESTS

As I indicated last week, the newspaper world is full of bests.  Even our local paper, Herald Tribune, offered up a selection of the best books of the year.  And the New York Times  seems to have gone overboard with each of its distinctive sections having its own, “The Best of 2018” edition.  On Sunday, “Arts & Leisure” had numerous articles including best classical music, best pop music, best television programs, best streamed television, best movies, best art exhibits and so on.  This week the Wednesday “Food” section had its own best of the year features:  best restaurants, “The Top Cheap Eats, Dish by Dish,” a listing of twelve remarkable wines, and the recipes that were the favorites of readers.  I liked the Salted Chocolate Chunk Shortbread Cookies and the Beef and Broccoli stir fry.  Something here for every taste and palate! 

FABULOUS THEATER!

Asolo Repertory Theater always delivers and they did it again this week with energy and style. Their production of The Music Man was a tap dance lovers’ bonanza with frenetic footwork, lively music, and some lovely singing, particularly by Britney Coleman as Marian the Librarian.  Noah Racey who plays Professor Harold Hill is a choreographer as well as actor and it showed; his professor was perhaps less brash than Robert Preston’s in the original movie, but still winning.  And Marion came across as a more rounded character, less innocent sweet maiden and more complex woman with dreams and determination.  

I would have said that The Music Man was lower down on my list of favorite musicals, but I enjoyed every minute of this production.  There are still more performances between now and Dec. 29.

SMALL SCREEN

Silk (Amazon Prime)

Thanks to my friend Patricia for this recommendation.  Martha Costello is one of a group of lawyers in a British firm plugging away defending clients in court cases and vying to become “Silk” or QC, that is Queen’s Counsel. Single and singleminded, she is hard driving, while her colleague Clive Reader, from a posh background, appears less dedicated and always with an eye for the female solicitors.  Lording it over all of the office is Billy Lamb, the senior clerk, who makes case assignments and minds the books, or perhaps cooks them. I’m now into Season 2 of this BBC production and enjoying it immensely as it keeps me going on the treadmill! 

Homecoming (Amazon Prime)

This original series from Amazon has gotten a lot of praise from the press and at least one award nomination for its star, Julia Roberts.  The setting is a facility that runs a residential program for returning vets who have been diagnosed with PTSD or other issues.   Roberts plays Heidi Bergman, a counselor there.  Each episode is only thirty minutes long, and I can see why.  Much of each episode focuses on her sessions with one or more of the residents, with occasional leaps forward to the present day when we see Heidi working as a waitress at a cheap joint.  

What happened to make her leave the Geist program and why did one of her clients leave at the same time?   We have now watched five episodes and while it’s well done, it’s also somewhat weird.  

MOVIE TIME

Puzzle

We missed Puzzle when it was in theaters and so decided to pay the nominal rental fee of $4.99 to watch it here at home.  Starring Kelly Macdonald, it’s a measured, deliberate film about Agnes, a married mother of two grown sons, who has little self esteem and no satisfying function in life other than serving at the beck and call of husband Louie and those sons.  They show little appreciation for her efforts on their behalf and can’t understand why she might want more in her life.  Until she receives a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle for her birthday and discovers she’s good at it!  

Thus begins Agnes’, aka Martha’s, tentative steps toward independence, as she gains a male puzzle partner (Irrfan Khan) and ventures regularly beyond the confines of her own home and town.  I liked this film a lot, although some might find the pacing slow.

Maine Time: Of Spies and Ghosts

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In my view, summer is a time for excess.  Lots of lobster.  Indulging in more carbs and sweets, bingeing on television series, and reading beach books as well as serious literature.  This past week, the Chief Penguin and I devoted morning and evening hours to The Americans and Crownies while I also included an atmospheric historical novel (The Tea Planter’s Wife) midst my reading of Lincoln in the Bardo.

VIEWING

Legal Fix—Crownies (Acorn)

If like me, you became addicted to the Janet King series and you are a big fan of Marta Dusseldorp, then I can recommend the predecessor series, Crownies.

The Aussies like their slang (witness a recent article in the WSJ about the heated debated over “parma” versus “parmy” for chicken parmiagiana), and “crownies” are young lawyers working for the Department of Public Prosecutions in Sydney.  Janet King is a character here and there are other familiar faces, Richard, Erin, Lina, and Andy, plus Tony and Tracey, to name just a few.  Janet is more senior in rank and the others are getting their feet wet in preparing briefs and going up before the judges.

Filmed beginning in 2011, it’s looser and has a lot more sex than Janet King, but the cases it presents are serious and complex, making for intelligent and absorbing viewing.  Interestingly enough, some reviewers loved this series and found Janet King somewhat boring and tame.  Others felt just the reverse. I think, on balance, I prefer the greater seriousness of JK.  Crownies, with characters like Tatum who is always dressed more for partying at a nightclub than for work and acts it too, can be tediously sophomoric at times.

Sunken Garden in Wiscasset

Spies in DC—The Americans  (Spoiler alert)

While overall, I think there are more excellent British and Australian series than American ones, this series, The Americans, is simply brilliant! We just binge watched season 6, the final series and it’s so well done.

We get the unraveling of Elizabeth and Philip’s lives as spies, Stan’s curiosity and puzzlement changing to downright suspicion, Paige’s tutoring by her mother and Claudia coupled with her idealistic view of what they are working to accomplish—all set against a changing world.  The end of the Cold War is at hand, Gorbachev is coming to the U.S. for the summit and in 1987, the spy game is changing.

Philip is out of the business, mostly, trying to succeed as a businessman at their travel agency, his and Elizabeth’s relationship is strained and broken, Paige is allied with her mother, and Philip is the parent who pays attention to Henry away at school.  How it all ends, how Stan caves, how the Jenningses get away, and who stays behind as the family is fractured is compelling drama.

RECENT READING

#16  The Tea Planter’s Wife by Dinah Jefferies

A historical novel set on a tea plantation in Ceylon, Jefferies’ novel is lush and atmospheric and filled with mystery, love and lust.  It’s perfect for whiling away a rainy afternoon.  At just nineteen, Gwen goes out from London to Ceylon to join her new husband, thirty-seven year old Laurance Hooper, a widower she married after a whirlwind romance.  Attracted to the beauty and scents of this new world, Gwen has questions about her husband’s late first wife Caroline, is confused and uncomfortable with the shabby treatment of the native workers, and unhappy over the continuing presence of Laurance’s sister Verity in their home.

When she gives birth to twins, she faces a difficult decision and the resulting secret plus secrets from the past will haunt them all:  Gwen, Verity, Laurance, and her servant and almost friend Naveena.  (~JWFarrington)

#17 Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

In my limited reading experience with several Man Booker Prize winners, I have found them to be some of the most offbeat and unusual novels and the most challenging to read. Saunders won the Man Booker Prize for this, his first novel, and it’s hard to find appropriately punchy adjectives to describe it, but I’ll start with weird, inventive, bizarre, strange, and haunting.  To gain the most from this work, it’s helpful to have a working definition of bardo. One can infer from the novel that it’s a state of being that is sort of between life as we know it and complete death. Or to quote from a recent article by Pema Rinpoche:

In bereavement, we come to appreciate at the deepest, most felt level exactly what it means to die while we are still alive. The Tibetan term bardo, or “intermediate state,” is not just a reference to the afterlife. It also refers more generally to these moments when gaps appear, interrupting the continuity that we otherwise project onto our lives. In American culture, we sometimes refer to this as having the rug pulled out from under us, or feeling ungrounded. These interruptions in our normal sense of certainty are what is being referred to by the term bardo. But to be precise, bardo refers to that state in which we have lost our old reality and it is no longer available to us.

Abraham Lincoln’s son Willie died at the age of eleven in 1862 and Lincoln visited the cemetery late at night.  In Saunders’ novel, the graveyard is populated by ghosts who interact with one another and who observe Willie’s burial and the visit by the president. These ghosts appear not to have gone fully over into death or at least they don’t fully realize that they are in fact dead.

The novel is structured like a Greek chorus with a series of voices in a continuous stream each spouting his or her lines and each speaker identified by name.  Interspersed with the fictional ghosts are snippets quoted from real historical works.  These excerpts add color, context and factual detail.  The ghosts run the gamut in their speech being coarse and ribald, argumentative, reflective, or even philosophical.  Together the lead threesome of Hans Vollman, Roger Bevins iii, and the Reverend Everly Thomas, collaborate to try to bring Lincoln together with his son one last time to provide him solace and to ease Willie’s transition to the next world.

This description makes the novel sound all very matter of fact, when it’s anything but that. Rather it’s a somewhat mesmerizing experience that caught this reader up in its momentum, so that while I found it initially off putting and weird, I also found it awesome and compelling.  It truly is a novel unlike any other I’ve ever read.  (~JWFarrington)

Note:  All photos ©JWFarrington (some rights reserved)

Maine Time: Politics & Fiction

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POLITICS—BRITISH STYLE

If you’re fed up with the American political scene, here are two video offerings for an English change of pace.

Margaret  (Amazon Prime)

This 2-hour production traces the wheeling and dealing and backroom haggling that transpired in November 1990 and resulted in Margaret Thatcher’s ouster as British prime minister. Think lots of older white men all angling for their continued place in the sun (i.e. the Cabinet) or for more, the prime ministership itself.  Lindsay Duncan is strident, determined and even occasionally screechy as the indomitable Margaret while Roger Ashton-Griiffiths is appropriately deferential and caring as her long-suffering spouse Denis.  Very entertaining, although some might find Duncan’s portrayal of Thatcher caricaturish.  Released in 2009.

A Very British Scandal  (Netflix)

In three parts, this mini-series chronicles the calamitous career of MP Jeremy Thorpe beginning in 1961 with his affair with a young lower class man named Norman Scott.  This was when homosexual relations were still illegal in the U.K.  Thorpe set Scott up in a flat and wrote him affectionate letters.  Scott later made the letters public and talked freely to any and all about their relationship.  How Thorpe dealt with this threat to his rising career and the lengths to which he went to try and silence Scott are so extreme and farfetched as to seem unbelievable.  But all true.  This slice of British politics stars the usually impeccable Hugh Grant as Thorpe with Ben Whishaw as the charming, flaky, and appealing Scott.

 

SUMMER READING

#10  Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

I found Ng’s first novel, Everything I Never Told You, masterful and poignant.  This one is even better, excellent, in fact.  Ng gently skewers life in the perfect suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio, during the Clinton era.  And she “gets’ and skillfully portrays the foibles, frenzies, and frustrations of teenage life.  The Richardson children, Lexie, Trip, Moody, and Izzy are well intentioned (except for Izzy) and appropriately self-centered.  Outsiders Pearl Warren and her mother, Mia, a rootless, talented artist, who rent an apartment from the Richardsons, are different, and each child is attracted to one or both of them.

They become catalysts for upheaval when Mia champions a Chinese woman whose baby is slated for adoption by the wealthy, white McCulloughs, close friends of Elena Richardson and her husband.  Newspaper reporter and busybody Elena runs a well-ordered household and lives a mostly rule-following life.  Lacking in self-awareness, she uses her reporting skills to investigate Mia and reaps much more than she bargained for.

With a punchy opening sentence:  “Everyone in Shaker Heights was talking about it that summer:  how Isabelle, the last of the Richardson children, had finally gone around the bend and burned the house down,“ this novel about motherhood, art, and how we live in society will linger in your memory long after you’ve finished it.  For more about Ng and her upbringing, here is a link to a 2017 interview.  (~JWFarrington)

 

#11  Love and Ruin by Paula McLain  

Paula McLain writes historical novels about intriguing women, women who are notable in part because they are the wives or amours of famous men.  In essence, she writes love stories.  I first read The Paris Wife about Ernest Hemingway’s time in Paris and his marriage to Hadley Richardson, wife #1.  It was good, particularly for its depiction of the literary scene and all the famous writers who congregated there in the 1920’s, but not great.  I did not read Circling the Sun about Beryl Markham, but was attracted to this latest novel by the very positive press it’s been getting.  And it didn’t disappoint.

Martha Gellhorn was an accomplished and noted war correspondent who covered all the major 20th century conflicts from the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War to Vietnam and even Panama in her early 80’s.  She was the first journalist and the only woman to be on the beach in Normandy.  She was also Ernest Hemingway’s third wife and reputed to be the only woman who stood up to him.

Effectively told primarily in Gellhorn’s voice with two wars as backdrop, it’s a gripping and graphic account of the turmoil of battle and the tempestuous relationship between two intense individuals.  Gellhorn’s desire to accede to the demands of marriage fights with her strong determination to forge ahead in her own career as a writer and journalist.  As a reader, I also gained a better understanding of the Spanish Civil War through this novel.   (JWFarrington)

 

#12 From the Corner of the Oval by Beck Dorey-Stein

Probably most of us didn’t realize until recently that there are stenographers assigned to the president to transcribe his every public word.  I certainly didn’t until I read about this memoir by Ms. Dorey-Stein. She worked for President Obama for five years and stood in the shadows recording and then transcribing.

She has a fresh voice and an enduring sense of wonder at being where she is:  witnessing history, traveling on Air Force One to U.S. cities and countries around the world, and living in a very special bubble.  For the twenty-somethings who support POTUS, it’s a life fueled by alcohol and constrained by the demands of being available 24/7, but ripe with opportunities for affairs and hook-ups.

Reading Dorey-Stein is a bit like being on a careening roller coaster as she shares her doubts and insecurities and details her relationships with boyfriends and work colleagues all the while demonstrating her ability to write.  She matures and becomes more confident over these years, and I appreciated the up close view she provides of living and working in such a rarefied atmosphere.  A quick read that will either entrance you or drive you nuts with all the boyfriend angst!  I was entranced and always rooting for her to have good sense. (~JWFarrington)

Note:  Header photo ©JWFarrington.  Book jackets from the web.

Tidy Tidbits: On Stage, Screen & Page

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ON STAGE—Always…Patsy Cline

Florida Studio Theatre’s production of Always…Patsy Cline was a wonderful immersion in Cline’s most famous hits.  This is a play, rather than a cabaret performance, although Patsy is mostly just singing.  The context and glue are provided by the connection and friendship that developed between Houston fan Louise Seger and Cline.   I expected the role of Louise to be a minor one; instead Susan Greenhill as Louise is superb—funny, mouthy, caustic, and oh, so spirited!

Jones & Greenhill from broadwayworld.com

 

Meredith Jones, as Patsy, appears in almost as many different dresses and outfits, all perfect for the early 1960’s, as there are songs, and captures the aching quality of Cline’s voice.  One of my favorite songs being “Crazy.”  The show was so popular with local audiences it frequently sold out and was then extended by a week.

 

 

ON TV—Janet King (Acorn)

Cast from dailytelegraph.com.au

If you liked Marta Dusseldorp in A Place to Call Home, chances are you’ll find her equally fascinating and complex as the star of Janet King.  Based in Sydney, Janet King is a crown prosecutor and later head of a royal commission investigating gun violence.  She is smart, controlled and controlling and stubborn.  Her home life has its own set of potential challenges with a lesbian partner and two small children.  Her office colleagues are well developed characters complete with their own issues, both political and personal.  This legal drama is full of surprises and twists, some violence, and is occasionally dark, but always compelling.  There are three seasons.

 

ON PAPER—Asymmetry

Halliday by Sophia Evans for the Observer

#6  Asymmetry by Lisa Halliday is one of the more unusual novels I’ve read recently, but also one of the most delightful.  The first section, “Folly” is about the love affair between 25-year old editor Alice and the decades older successful novelist, Ezra Blazer (modeled after the author’s real affair with Philip Roth, say the critics).  There is tenderness, humor, and discussions of literature and aging as he molds and manages her.  His phone calls always arrive, CALLER ID BLOCKED.

In the second section, “Madness,” also aptly titled, is the story of newly minted PhD Amar from Los Angeles who is trying to get to Iraq to visit his brother.  He is detained at Heathrow Airport and denied entry to the UK; while there he reviews his own life and his extended family’s checkered history and reflects on both American and international politics, all the while annoyed at this delay, but not overtly angry.  Lastly, the extended interview with Ezra Blazer fills in more of his life and loves as well as his thoughts on the role of art and literature.  All three sections take place in different years.  Blazer’s coda links back to “Folly,” but Amar’s section is more discrete.  (~JWFarrington)