A BLOODY TOUR D'FORCE: "FRONTIER"

Momoa as Declan Harp

“Frontier” is sort of halfway between “Longmire” and “Game of Thrones” in terms of style and casting.  Zahn McClarnon is only in the first episode of the new series and Tantoo Cardinal is in the last, but Jason Momoa is all the way through, the fulcrum and justification for the production.  An imposing figure, he is partly Native Hawaiian but doesn’t play that.  If he did, I would remind the uninformed that among the other fur trappers were Samoans and Iroquois.  They came from everywhere for beaver gold. 

Another character I found notable was Jessica Matten.  She’s tall, tough and beautiful with a fabulous hair treatment. http://www.jessicamatten.com  Her film name, Sakanon kept disconcertingly echoing “Outlander’s” Sasenack. which I can’t spell.  But I gather that Matten is fully capable of walking in Cardinal’s moccasin path.  She’s not limited to historical dramas.  There’s a lot of indigenous talent in this film, and all are quite conscious  of the impact.

Since Bob Scriver was a fur-buyer, a trade he learned in Edmonton, and he continued it alongside the taxidermy business in Browning, the smells of raw fur, the mild acid of the tanning vat (which was in the basement of the shop — I don’t know whether it’s still there — it was an old wine fermenting wooden tank), and sometimes the lingering scent of the living animal were kindled while I watched.  

The matrix at top, knapped off shards fanned out

This is the first time I’ve seen flint-knapping -- the creation of an edged hand-ax or spear head -- actually done in front of the camera.  Most people only know it in terms of diamond cutting.  The idea is to find the subtle fracture-potentials in a stone and hit it in a way that will remove a “flake” to create the edge.  There was a hobby flint-knapper in my Saskatoon UU congregation who said you could always tell someone who did this by the many small wounds on their forearms, where the flying cleaved-off bits hit the cleaving person.  Here’s a link if you want to learn how to do it.

https://www.berrycrofthub.com/store/p45/Flintknapping_Workshop_-_10th_December_2017_or_8th_April_2018.html

Before exploiting the mineral resources of the west and north parts of the continent, and even before the timber extraction, the engine of profit was fur-trapping.  It followed the usual arc of discovery, accumulation, transportation across the profit boundary between acquisition and commerce, and humans striving to exploit national powers while ignoring tribal entitlements.  This sort of thing does not support very good behavior and often gets entangled in the military and the sex trade.  Bottom line: it creates a whole new culture, the Métis.  Its impact is global, into the faraway lives of Britain.

All this when the western half of Canada still more-or-less belonged to the Hudson’s Bay Company, resource entrepreneurs who finally settled for being department stores.  In 1975 the Hudson’s Bay archives were opened for public research and added to the “Memory of the World”  http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/memory-of-the-world/register/full-list-of-registered-heritage/registered-heritage-page-4/hudsons-bay-company-archival-records/  They’re kept in Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Access to them prompted a lot of new writing and I’m sure the writers of this series made good use of them.

The surprisingly symphonic score is by Andrew Lockington, who seems to do scores for sci-fi and monster movies.  He was also nominated for Best Original Score for a Fantasy/Science Fiction Film, for City of Ember.  The sweep of the music echoes the sweep of the land.

The credited lead writers are brothers.  Peter Blackie was born and raised in Gander, Newfoundland. He is a registered architect with The Newfoundland Association of Architects, and is a graduate of the Master of Architecture Program at the Technical University of Nova Scotia (TUNS) (1996), the Bachelor of Environmental Design Studies program, also TUNS (1994), and of the Bachelor of Arts Program (Philosophy) at Dalhousie University(1992). Peter has lived and worked as an Architect in New York, Berlin, the Dutch West Indies and finally Halifax before returning to Canada in 2010 to focus on writing and producing television in St John’s.  His brother Rob Blackie is an award winning filmmaker who holds a Masters in Fine Arts (Film) from Columbia University (2007) along with a Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Laws from Dalhousie University (1999).  

These are unconventional and impressive backgrounds for film makers, but certainly explains their success in controlling dramatic and shocking material against a background of detailed and controversial history.  The addition of gays to the mix is a modern touch — no need to exclude what is bound to be a major part of the audience.  The costumes, by John Ground (who as far as I can tell is not related to the Blackfeet John Ground) are one of the great pleasures of this series, and, in fact, is the cause of one of the best stories, the casting of Greg Byrk as Cobb Ponds.

Cobb Ponds

“Rob called me, and I remember being in a parking lot in the Distillery District [of Toronto]. ‘Greg, hear me out on this. We have a character. So far we haven’t written a line for him yet. We have no idea what he could become or will become. He’s a cross between this real-life assassin-gunfighter that exists—historically from Boston—and Oscar Wilde.’ I’m like, ‘Done. Let’s have an adventure.’”

“We literally created this character from scratch and when I first walked in and I saw the fox hat. When [costume designer] Michael [Ground] handed me the hat I had everything I needed to know about this character. There is such a playful malevolence about him and the idea of sexuality and femininity and being placed in that historical context but to be this completely complicated and contemporary man, in a lot of ways, was a fascinating adventure. We found moments throughout Season 1—some dark, horrific moments and moments of real longing and being lost—and that arc/descent accelerates during Season 2. Cobbs goes to some places that I was so thrilled to get to be able to take him and really explore what love means to this character, what loyalty means, what ambition means, what greed means, what savage revenge means … all the while spinning in the most beautiful clothes one could ever hope to dress themselves in.”

Read more at http://www.tv-eh.com/2017/10/17/frontiers-greg-bryk-on-cobb-ponds-season-2-journey-and-how-paul-gross-saved-his-life/#1Yx4eOj42ofCm2gY.99

Everything was shot on location where there was snow on the ground and people wore coats, often mentioned in the dialogue.  You can buy some of Declan Harp’s coats here:  http://costumediyguide.com/declan-harp-frontier-cosplay  But not that fabulous sheepskin long coat that is reversible, looking like a polar bear pelt on one side and sueded golden leather on the other.

This is a purely Canadian production with characteristic cultural mix of languages (there are subtitles) that is organic. But the land, both the bleached treeless moonscape of the Inuit and the tangle of woodlands quite different from the West Coast timber, transcends the human story.  No more "good gray" fantasy about Canadian righteousness.

"AMERICAN ODYSSEY" A Series Review

Anna Friel

“American Odyssey” is totally misnamed from my point of view because once again the “managers” (investors) interfered to try to force something sympathetic to their condescending view of audiences.  The creating team was working with the idea of simply Odyssey and even that seems to me a kind of high school idea.  It’s not wrong, but this is far from a wily guy trying to go home after a grueling war.  This is about a female soldier who thought she was going on a few weeks’ raid but has gotten into a Star Wars world where she is a “raghead” (that’s a pejorative) version of Princess Leia with a boy who is no droid.  She is nothing like the Debra Winger character in “The Sheltering Sky,” except that she is as appealing.

Sahara

Part of the appeal of the film is the sublime sahara where the landscape rolls in human curves and the towns cluster along crowded cubic alleys where ragged wooden doors open into cushioned homes where small stoves prepare local foods.  In this film there are no Star Wars bars or Game of Thrones bordellos.  Well, except for the music venue where the uncle who presents as a woman is a media star with a general for a lover.

This series, which I see as a long movie, an episodic “book” like “The Jewel in the Crown”, consciously sets out to break up assumptions.  If it had been on cable instead of network, it would not have been cancelled, but maybe it is a lot for us to digest as it stands.  So many people — you have to leave the media to know this — have no knowledge of these worlds, no way to interpret the morality, and no skill with the highly technological stuff that drives the plot.  

If you took away everything in the last decade — those little glass wafer phones chiming in all pockets, the desktops that so easily hack into secret info, flaming predator drones watched from satellites, tracer transmitters the size of cough drops, and even the government’s corrupt addiction to outsourced evil — the show would vanish.

This series is really about the globalizing of the planet and the predatory nature of international corporations who act as nations with no borders.  It’s not pleasant, but it’s true.  It’s happening.

Grégory Fitoussi

Once you accept that, the binaries begin to show up.  “Luc Girard” (played by Grégory Fitoussi whom I knew from “Mr. Selfridge” from the BBC and “Spiral” from France) is presumably a fox who has escaped the French Foreign Legion.
  

Adewale  Akinnuoye-Agbaje

He is balanced by Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje who plays “Frank Majors”, a massive invincible hired soldier.  It’s intriguing that England has formed a cadre of intelligent, educated, impressive Anglo-African actors.  They speak multiple languages and get their start as models.  That seems worthy a movie plot of its own.

Yousef "Joe" Sweid

Yousef “Joe” Sweid as “Shakir Khan” was the most sympathetic mainstream gender-crossover since Peter Capaldi’s performance as “Vera” on an episode of “Prime Suspect.”  

Casting was done by six people, who seem to be two anchor people, two less-used people with long lists of credits, a woman named Gemma Sykes, who must be English, and a specialty man named Saad Fedhari.  According to IMDB, he has a LONG string of credits in the film industry in many countries.  If things go on as they are, he is likely to be working for a long time, since so much happens in North Africa.

I despise these plot beats that depend on women being obtuse and demanding to know things they are not able to understand.  “Decker’s” wife and daughter are plot devices, I know, but there are too many of them in real life.  Odille's daughter is the counterbalance, a sort of Pippi Longstocking.

Sadie Sink

It would not surprise people who know me that I found Peter Facinelli (“Peter Decker”) unsympathetic.  It’s just me, but I thought he was too stupid to be believed.  Not his acting — his part in the script.  Of course, I also disliked Treat Williams and always have, even when he was supposed to be a good guy.  These men have an air of entitlement that’s useful for the plot, but they are “suits”.  The important women all seem to have lost their combs.  Otherwise, their suits are nice.

Nate Mooney

The balance for these fat-cat bullies is the character of “Bob Offer,” played by Nate Mooney, a relative unknown who did a masterful job of unfolding from a nut case who needed a tinfoil hat to a deeply sympathetic but slightly askew nearly-Asperger victim who was capable of loving, not always within the social lines. 

Daniella Pineda

His balance is the cold assassin “Ruby Simms” (Daniella Pineda) who is derailed by love.  They strike me as coastal types: Bob on the Atlantic and Ruby on the Pacific.  You could interpret this series as a collision between the world-view of New York versus the world view of California, or maybe they're merging.

Anna and Omar

In the end the value of the series for me rested mostly on two characters, which is suspect is true for most viewers.  The two are “Odelle" (Anna Friel) and “Aslam” (Omar Ghazaoui)  Between them, they pull the story much closer to the VERY American “road trip” story of Huckleberry Finn and Jim going down the Mississippi on a raft.  So far this is Ghazaoui’s only screen credit.  His value will be apparent if some smart cable channel picks up the series, because he will age and change, creating a gap.  I think he is irreplaceable.

As a concept, this real voyage towards home, never reaching it, is a time trip discovering a future while trying to return to the past.  Simply trying to get hold of the new reality is hard enough, but finding some kind of universal moral dimension is impossible.  The people in control prey on the rest of us, but the worlds of the ordinary people are too small.  We are all moving along alleys where doors, splintered or solidly embellished, open into our paths.  Doubling back is not an option.  The uniforms own the dragons.  That's not a movie.

A NEW GENRE: POETIC HISTORY. (A REVIEW)

From Sid's blog

The Gustafson family is very well-known here, not least because Rib -- the patriarch -- has been a veterinarian and force for good over decades.  Two of his sons are vets and one of the vets (Sid Gustafson, a race horse vet) is a writer.  You can find this story at http://magazine.scintillapress.com.  It’s called simply “Smallpox.”  This time Sid has done nothing less than invent a new genre:  poetic history.

The facts on which this story is based are well-known to me, since I was married to the taxidermist -- not the one in the story, but the one that Sid knew who suggested "Stuf."  This year would have been Bob Scriver’s hundredth birthday.  The historical society baked a cake and put up a temporary exhibit.  

I know this place, Browning, MT, I know the massacre tale (several versions), and I know small lost boys -- I write short stories about them myself.  This one is plainly Sid, but also an idealized version, a mystical imaginary figure, and yet a possibility.  Both Sid and Bob were boys who longed to be Blackfeet somehow, maybe only through soul-affinity.  The writing here is like a lot of sci-fi/fantasy poetry, ennobling “plain” history and plot line with grand sweeps of poetry as strong as Browning wind.

Let’s be clear.  Malcolm Clark’s death was not alleged but actual and his daughters were nothing like the ones in this story, though I love the idea of one of them having a walrus tusk for a pegleg.  There are real families named “Bird” and “Butterfly,” but it’s risky to use real names, even Sherburne.  Still, I’d have liked to see Sid use Frank Sherburne in his story, since that was the son who sort of “went native.”  Most of this history seems to be based on oral tales rather than library research, but that’s okay so long as the two aren’t confused.  Probably he knows the people whose names he’s borrowed, so they will only laugh.

This is a universal classic plot line: a found strange boy who turns out to be the savior everyone has longed for.  (Yah, maybe Xian -- so?)  People with this story in their hearts turn up on every reservation by the dozens, meaning well, escaping from crushing civilization whether military, academic, medical or family.  They come, sit on the "barren porch" and wait to be recognized.  (I love that Sid put in a dog.  I always try to put a dog in every story about Indians.  Sid and I know that Bob often kept a badger for a pet and treated it like a dog.)  

Most of the time no one notices, so the would-be hero sighs and goes on.  Once in a while someone fits in, with deep commitment, and becomes a member of the community.  (Sid and I are peripheral, but we pay attention.)  The girls often get distracted by the romance of it all and end up leaving, pregnant and crying.  Some of the others get high on drugs or politics.  But that’s not what this story is about.  It’s about potential -- what might happen, a beginning.

Strong Blackfeet Women

This story addresses another pattern which is older women, opinionated and forceful, who take hold of situations and try to resolve them.  (Not me.  I just sit here and think.)  But most recently this has been especially strong in the actual dynamics of the rez, even expressing itself in the new organization called Issksiniip which is a group of emergency responders that come to families in crisis of some kind.  http://www.nativewellness.com/nwi-leadership.html   Betty Cooper and Theda New Breast, mother and daughter, are part of this turnaround, this rebound, this renewal.  Here’s the link to a video called “Why the Women in my Family Don’t Drink Whiskey”  that Theda made:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwYHdLbRbNE  Just google to find a mountain of material.

Sid’s short story, “Smallpox” is a different approach to the same idea.  He’s a major fan of “Jimmie” Schultz, otherwise known as James Willard Schultz, who wrote those beguiling adventure tales (“Why Gone Those Times?”) and lived on the rez with a Blackfeet wife and her mother, whom he loved also.  His grave is above the Gustafson ranch, on a ridge overlooking the river, and Sid goes up now and then to clear away weeds and whatever debris has collected.  This story, like Schultz’s imaginings, is romantic and unrealistic, but also at a different level, quite true -- MORE than true.

Part of the magic is relating to the compass points, which are why Blackfeet stories and songs and so on are based on FOUR rather than THREE, and the star patterns, which are given their European constellation names by Stuf.  The 19^th century details also help, but it is the beginning of the 20th that is his designated time (“manifest” as in “manifest destiny”).  “Stuf stared starward.  Maybe it was too early in the night.  The medicine man Many White Horses had told him to watch the sky; that a comet approached.  There, a wisp off Cassiopeia’s chair.  He looked harder, wishing for new spectacles.  The faraway galaxy Andromeda twinkled in the wetness of his eyes.  Andromeda and not a comet.  The woman sighed.”

Sid has a difficulty to overcome when he invokes the mounted animals in Stuf’s shop.  The practice of re-animating dead animals by gluing hides onto paper maché sculptured shells and adding glass eyes was once admired (still is in some circles).  But my dentist was just ordered to remove all his mounted heads from his office because they were “creepy” and maybe contagious in some way.  Sid and his dad often came to the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and Sid as a child responded to the magic illusion innocently.  They tell me that taxidermy is coming back, but as a sort of Victorian sentimental joke -- small animals in human clothes doing human things.  I consider that disrespectful and demeaning of the animals.  In fact, Bob felt that bronze sculptures were MORE realistic than the taxidermy.

The Blackfeet Bundles (in fact, all the prairie tribe Bundles) were based on tobacco-smoking pipes, but beyond that they contained a sort of “hymnal” of animal skins, not recreations of the animals but mnemonic devices for the qualities and powers of the creatures themselves.  Each, wrapped like a baby in calico, is called with a dance and song.  In the old-time people this would open memories of encounters with the real animals.

Iniskum

This is a story of reconciliation after great tragedy.  Small devices like the personal “handgame” with the Medicine Man that ends up with “Buffalo Heart” disclosing one hand holding a black and a white buffalo together is inspired.  But it’s clear that Sid hasn’t seen a Beaver Bundle: they are massive, so much so that one needs a horse to carry them.  Such a Bundle couldn’t have been transported easily in the Dog Days before the horses came.  For Buffalo Heart to die after his vision is a bit over-the-top, a distraction.

Towards the end of the story Sid introduces a little song:

“What will become of a boy as light as he?

As light as me,

A boy as white and alone as me

Arrived here from the land of the Cree.”

I hope someone gives it a tune and appends it as an mp3 to this multidimensional story so that it is multi-media.  Sid’s brother is “Fingers” Ray, a musician.

Times of change are lethal for boys.  A friend of mine tries to pull boys from the streets back to life.  His short story would be called “AIDS.”   Anyway, he makes videos as Theda does but far more phantasmagorical and transgressive and it is the boys who write the poems.

I would like to see this story as a stand-alone book that a boy could carry and study, whether or not he was indigenous.  Sid has his fingers on a pulse and hears the hearts of boys as well as those of horses.

Sid Gustafson feels the pulse in the throat of a horse.

"OUT OF PEEL TREE" by Laura Long: A Review

From the outside, the Appalachians look quaint or deprived or trapped or something else sociological and graphable.  But to themselves they must be like the stories in "Out of Peel Tree", just going along in their lives -- in and out of old houses, friendships, love affairs, jobs, prison, college, and -- wait now!  Here’s an assassin!  Are there assassins in West Virginia?  (Aren’t there assassins everywhere?)  

This is story shading into poems, acutely intricate, some short glimpses, some a little longer, until a town forms from the relationships and a meaning forms from the knitted metaphors.  There’s a kitten unraveling an afghan but it might be Penelope’s shroud or it might be Indra’s net.  No one will force you to see more than you want to.  It’s just that things go along through time and sometimes they’re a big surprise -- like the old lady who traps an intruder who tries to rob her.  Sometimes the story has a sharp niggling hook, like that assassin -- who can’t quite forget a twitch in the corner of his victim’s mouth, like an insect trying to get out.  Or maybe the last humanity of a person trying to be a blank.

If you’ve seen the documentary “Following Sean” you’ll remember how people sort of wandered along, searching for their thalwag on their way to the sea.  And that was in San Francisco, which is not like the Appalachians at ALL.  Isn’t that right?  The smoking, the fantasies, the little projects like gardens or knitting.  Events go along, developing inevitability like roots seeking water, or reaching towards something indescribable like branches spreading towards sunlight.  First thing you know you’ve got a tree.  Another metaphor.

There are a lot of blurbs in the front of this book -- after all, it’s a slender book and you’ll want to make sure you get your money’s worth.  Not to worry.  But Sara Pritchard nails it when she says that for her the recurrent word was “tenderness.”  I see that the blurbs are mostly by other writers, which is a phenomenon we’re all used to, but I begin to see something behind it besides sharing and sympathy, etc.  When a person is reaching into the deep aquifers of memory and distilling it for writing, there’s a kind of trance that forms, a dome over a virtual world, a sensibility the reader can enter and that becomes realer than real.  You could say “immersive,” but in this case it’s not just suspense or the slam of extremes that pulls you in.  Nor is it as banal as having tea on a shaded porch with a nice new friend.  It’s more like feeling a pulse: warm, intimate, and steady.

People pass in and out of houses, grad school programs, marriages, childhood, jobs, prison and affairs.  They discover so many surprises and you’d think some of them would change everything, but not so much after all.  The material culture is what we know: grandma’s teapot, a kitchen linoleum pattern, bedding.  Some people will get a sheet of paper and map out the relationships, make a time-line, but I’m learning not to do that -- just to let the stories unfold like a flower blooming so as to pay attention to the scent.  Not that it’s all pretty and nice, neatened up, tied with a bow.

How does a person learn to write like this?  Laura Long sent me a chapbook of poems along with the stories.  “The Eye of Caroline Herschel: a Life in Poems” is based on a real person, a female astronomer who discovered comets and planets. One of the “rules” about writing is supposed to be that one must “show -- not tell.”  What Herschel “did” was mostly sit in the cold dark and peer through a telescope at the galaxies far far away.  But Long knows how to inhabit such a woman, so what we realize is that there is a sociological web of rules trying to prevent her from doing this quiet, private thing, but that she manages to slip through them in various ways, and the small blips of light have huge implications, even for the mad King George III who takes a kind of hallucinatory sci-fi approach with his entourage of near-alien females.

Here’s a poem for Herschel’s nephew, whom -- like the telescope -- she borrowed from her brother.

BRINK

Rocking you, I invent new words

to old lullabies while five in the morning

turns to six.  Any minute now the world

will pause, pushed to a brink by your eyes,

where every face becomes a field

of possibilities, a guiltless geometry.

A thrush sings the day into light

as a thrush sang a thousand years ago.

The day rubs the dark off its hands.

Rocking a baby and singing is a “showing” more than a telling, but what is pushing a world to the brink by your eyes?  A thrush sings, but does the day have hands, much less rub dark off them?  Of course.  Long inhabits several worlds at once and gives us access.

This poetic ability is what she brings to the narrative in “Out of Peel Tree.”  The book begins with a dream about a returning lover (there are several in these stories) who brings a burlap sack:  a sack of winds?  Pandora’s box made fabric?  “The trace of longing that remains after hope disappears.”  The lover in the dream says, “I don’t want you here.”  I had to read that six times to make sure I read it right.

Here’s the whole plot of the sum of the short stories:  “She was crazy for a man who could repair broken-down objects.  She had grown up in the middle of West Virginia with close to nothing after her dad died, when she was eight.  She had a sweet kid brother, but she grew up with a soused, screwball mom whose second marriage brought twin sisters that she, Corina, took care of.”

Each chapter notes which character is the center of that particular story just then, but at the end of the book Corina is still taking care, this time returning from the funeral of her grandmother Essie, one of the best episodes.  As a writer myself, I always pay a lot of attention to the last paragraph of a book.  Here’s this one:

“Now a midnight wind cry-pries through a crack in the window and snarls my hair.  A ghost-memory of Essie brushes my cheek.  I want to drink coffee with Ruben in the morning and feel the spinning edge of being awake when I’m exhausted, the deep crash of kissing him when I feel cut through by a strange road.  I burn through the dark over an earth my grandma’s shell lies beneath.  My blood sings me forward, caught between the quick spin of a continent, slow burst of a star.”

This is the new religion of ordinary folks: neither pie nor Big Guy in the sky, but only the stars.  What makes it qualify as salvation, redemption, forgiveness of sins, is participation.  They were there together.  They were paying attention.  They are woven into it along Indra’s net, each a pearl, each a dewdrop.

Be awful keerful whut u dream.

SHAKESPEARE GETS PANNED February 2, 1960

REVIEWER CALLS “COMEDY OF ERRORS” LOUSY  by Valerie Weeks

February 2, 1960

The program notes for University theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” express surprise that it is not played more often.  After seeing it, one knows why.

In fact, one wonders why University theatre purposefully selected what is notorious for being Shakespeare’s worst comedy, if not the worst of all his plays.

It was probably selected because it was felt the comic and slapstick elements in the play could make a successful light production, if not a memorable one.  But, without a cast of dyed-in-the-wool, hardened professional comics this is impossible no matter who is producing the play.

In other words, “Comedy of Errors” is a lousy play.  It was badly written and poorly constructed and followed through.  The comic scenes are repetitious and dull.  One is never quite sure, of all the twins, who is on the stage, and one is worn out watching the play without having derived any merriment from it.

Shakespeare listed the play from Plautus’ “Menechini,” where he should have left it.  It is one of Shakepeare’s earliest comedies, and it has all the signs, a complicated plot; stiff, unnatural dialogue; and a peculiar, undeveloped mixing of tragic and comic elements.

So, given these preliminary problems, there is little a cast of university players can do but bear with the play and try to get around it by using what little they know and rarely get to practice about low, slapstick comedy.

There is little desire on the reviewer’s part to continue.  The play is a bad one.  the players and director did their best but what resulted was not an entertaining production.  The only production of the “Comedy of Errors” that ever had any potential was Rogers and Hart “The Boys from Syracuse,” a 1930’s musical saved by the music.

To the credit of the play, it was well-paced and never dragged, a decided possibility in the tedious unraveling of the plot in the second act.  The action was good and the players told their story without belaboring it.

In addition, the play looked good.  That is, the groupings and movement on stage was quite effectively done by means of different levels and a variety of entrances off and onto the stage.  There was a studied effort to place the characters where they would look the best in relation to other characters and to the plot.

Set against a most effective background, built to represent a street in early 19^th century Europe, the stage pictures were very pleasing.  However, the contortions the actors went through to set up these stage pictures not only wore out the actors but also the audience.  At once point, the abbess walks across the stage, up some stairs, and turns immediately around and comes back down, while reciting a speech.

On the debit side, there is the acting out of the play.  It was dull and rarely humorous.

If there was an outstanding performance, it was certainly that of Paula Ragusa [later Paula Prentiss], as Adriana the shrewish wife to one of the twin brothers.  She was the perfect shrew with the loud voice and the flaying arms.  [sic]

Paul Hardy, as the twin Antipholus of Syracuse, did a competent job.  He gave his lines what life he could, but did his best work in pantomime and silent reaction to situations.  Several of the comic bits he and Larry Smith, as his servant Dromio, were the most effective in the play.

Smith, who played both twins Dromio, was most enjoyed by the audience.  He resorted to low comedy routines, as he should have, rolling on the stage, falling, doing double takes, and acting generally unaware of much that was going on.

If there was any fault in his performance, it was that he over-played his part without working with anyone else on stage, except Hardy.

Bill Pogue, as Antipholus of Ephesus, and Sharon Risk, as Luciana, Adriana’s sister, read their poorly written lines without inspiration, in contrast to Hardy and Ragusa.

And Robin Deck, as the courtesan, looked and acted the part brassily enough but never stopped moving the entire time she was on the stage, although attention was rarely centered on her.

The costumes were the poorest this season.  Although there is no particular objection to doing the comedy in Empire dress, the colors are badly matched (particularly that of Antipholus) and the women’s costumes appeared to have been hastily thrown together, one swatch of material over another.

It is too bad that University theatre had to select a comedy like this one to display its talents.  At least “Endgame” was a conscientious effort to experiment and “Caesar and Cleopatra” was an entertaining extravaganza.

This play was last produced at Northwestern in 1939.  Perhaps it would not be asking too much to wait 40 instead of 20 years before the next production.

[Notes:  Weeks never does name the director, but -- judging from the cast -- I suspect it was Krause.  Perhaps it was also Krause who directed in 1939, maybe to better reviews.  But this is speculation.]

Here's a pre-performance publicity clip from the Daily Northwestern.  There was no story.  Thirkield's name is misspelled. Paula Ragusa is unnamed.  

"LIVVAGTERNE"-- "THE PROTECTORS"

There are a great number of movies and series with the title “protector” in them, so let us recall that this TV series is Danish and called “Livvagterne” in its native language.   http://www.mariannedepierres.com/mdp-on-tv-the-protectors-danish/  is an accurate review, IMHO.   The series is considered “Danish Noir” as opposed to English, Scots, Welsh, French and so on -- each with it’s own cultural twist.  Americans have their own unique style, of course, and there is a particular world view coming out of Vancouver, BC, that I would not quite label “Canadian.”  It often includes the aboriginal population.  I normally follow English styles, but they can be viciously S/M, more explicit and more interested in perversion.  Consider “Prime Suspect,” “Wire in the Blood,” “Cracker,” and the like.  Of course, the English also do “cozies” and what might be called “Oxford.”   Great preoccupation with class. The French series I tried seemed still Existentialist and cramped, bitter and authoritarian but sexy.  The Welsh central detective actor has died and I can’t remember his name.  The Scots series (“Rebus”) is called “Tartan Noir.” I’m increasingly aware of “sub-categories” of the BBC, with special attention to the industry on the Tyne.  “Detective Montalban,” an Italian series, is not available on Netflix yet.

Generic “protector” shows vary according to who is being protected and whether the emphasis is on the object of protection or the psychological toll on the protectors themselves, which was the shift that distinguished “Homicide” in the beginning.  Others have followed that pattern, even when the protectors and the vulnerable become very mixed, as in “Oz” where the chaplains and warden try to protect prisoners and each other, and some of the vulnerable must make terrifying compromises to protect themselves, like becoming the slaves of more powerful men. “The Protectors,” the Danish version, has its own focus on relationships, family, love and loyalty with a tolerant attitude toward sex, but less interest in violence, not that it’s entirely gone.

I’ve only seen two years of the series and didn’t know there was a third until just now when I checked imdb.com. These shows can be streamed from Netflix, one episode after the other, like reading chapters in a book, which takes a while to finish but this one has a strong through-line that holds the focus.  Quite apart from the quality of production, which is excellent, and the wonderful aerial shots of various locations (especially the city at night), the professional but unfamiliar actors quickly become transparent.  This story follows an arc from the first episode when a young Egyptian woman with cheekbones that would make a Sioux groan with envy is able to hold her own and even shine during recruitment training for these elite guardians of famous people and national leaders.  

Her cohort includes two others; they become a close threesome.  Jasmina, Islamic, bonds with the Catholic one as a friend and the other, a Jew, as a little more than that, and the three are soon tight, living in an old church with a stained glass window depicting Abraham, the father of the three Middle Eastern religions represented by the three “protectors”.  The series does not shrink away from religious issues, which are causing so much conflict among the three global descendants of Abraham.  In the window Abraham holds a knife to the throat of his son.  

The series plots take a winding labyrinth through tales that go from near-farce when a stalker takes on the persona of an actress to an on-the-scene African exploit retrieving diamonds finally found in shit -- in a body.  There were ten episodes per year, paired to follow five stories. "Leon," who is the director and nearly invisible in the beginning -- only looks up from his desk to receive, unperturbed, more news of disaster and apocalypse.  “The world is ending!” announces someone.  “Yup,” says Leon.  “I’ll deal with it.”  His lover, an Ingmar-Bergman-worthy Liv Ullman with red hair, is his safety and sanity.  They swim on the beach near their home, warm-up together nude in a sleeping bag on the sand, and are married on a sailboat.  Leon guides his people through one crisis after another, in spite of interference by a politically appointed overseer, until gradually we understand from small clues what goes on in his head and how he learned it.

By the end of the second year the limits are reached.  The honorable and sensitive man has accidentally shot a child and cannot recover.  Jasmina has watched someone very much like herself die horribly as a result of an act of terrorism.  Jonas, the cold-blooded one, has lost the woman he loved the most, but refuses to admit she is dead because he believes in the afterlife.  Yet he goes back to his wife.  Leon resigns, fed up with the incompetence of those who have exposed him -- along with all the others -- to terrible suffering, loss and death, all for political power-mongering.

The issue of protection is a major one for me, but I won’t go into psych reflections here except to say that I’m sure that it’s behind my devotion to Westerns in the Fifties.  I was not alone.  The main premise of “Gunsmoke,” “Paladin,” and even “Rawhide” (where it was supposed to be the cows who were being protected) or “Wagon Train,” was Alpha Men giving tough and skillful protection.  By the time we get to more modern protectors like the NYPD cluster and the later, even more sophisticated, “Baltimore cluster”, motives and skills become the chief suspects.

A new element in the more recent crime stories is the possibility of CCTV surveillance, constant communicating, GPI locating, data crunching, tiny nano-bugs, and so on.  Most of the plots depend upon smart phones or pulling something out of a database.  The constant under-theme is how much law enforcement is justified in invading and controlling our lives.  In addition, the internet erases boundaries, esp. for crime, so law enforcement agencies -- previously local or national -- must work together in ways not always supported by communication.  Another issue is that things like metal keys have been replaced by thumbprint locks and card IDs, which can be diverted in inventive ways.

Sifting through the Google posts about “The Protectors,” I find that there is a predecessor series by the same writers called “The Eagle: A Crime Odyssey, ” which is streamable on Netflix.  The episodes begin with an eagle’s view of the country, then pick up some ecological detail: mountains, rugged shore, small household on a bluff with clothes flapping on the line, the face of a reflective man, flashback to a child.  Right away the sense of events overwhelming people and demanding intervention comes in the dramatic form of a huge airliner takeoff aborted in order to get the protagonist off the flight to supervise a terrorist take-down, even though he was going to see his dying mother.  Those are the key terms of being this kind of protector:  choose the greater good or choose the personal desire.  Americans go for desire.   Personally.

Here’s another interesting blog about the work of the writers,  Mai Brostrom and Peter Thorsboe.  http://eurodrama.wordpress.com/tag/peter-thorsboe/    There are other predecessor series.  I appreciate the terse, oblique, can-you-get-it style. Good for subtitles.  I’m sure they have been influencing American writers for a while.  Maybe American watchers are finally ready for them.  Maybe it’s the surprising return of the ’60’s and ’70’s Ingmar Bergman factor: serious, intense, thoughtful.  

I see the villain of “The Eagle” (“Ornen”) now -- he’s Leon, the hero of “The Protectors!”  Well, that actor.  Thomas W. Gabriellson.  Makes Clint Eastwood look like a scenery chewer.

"GROWING UP IN GLACIER PARK" Review

“Growing Up in Glacier Park” by Floyd W. “Bud” Lutz is mostly about the first half of the twentieth century in the little railroad town that is one of three Blackfeet reservation resort towns (the other two are Babb & St. Mary) or one of three Glacier Park towns (the other two are West Glacier & Apgar), depending on how you look at it.  In the distant past the town has been a sort of headquarters anchored by both the Park ranger administration and the primary Louis Hill huge log resort hotel of an east slope Glacier Park complex.  As events unfolded, like the completion of the Logan Pass “Going to the Sun” Highway that diverted summer traffic away from town and the contracting out of the hotel management, the town shrank until some might say it was a little too small for the egos in residence.

Certainly the egos were legendary and historical.  The children of Malcolm Clarke, whose murder triggered the Baker Massacre, established a ranch uphill behind where the Big Hotel is now.  Nothing was there then but a choice spot.  No one was surprised since Helen Clarke, the daughter, was in charge of divvying out the Blackfeet tribal property into individual homesteads.  She did manage to delay it for a long time, but in the end she, Horace, and Malcolm Jr. came to stay.  Malcolm Jr.’s son, John Clarke, was a deaf-and-mute woodcarver of considerable renown.  His daughter, Joyce Clarke Turvey, has run a gallery on the location of his studio until this summer, when a bad fall has put opening in doubt.

The town expands each summer to accommodate tourists, then shutters and hibernates to survive the winters.  Attempts to develop winter resorts have failed, in part because of the severe weather, not just sub-zero temps but also hurricane force winds.  But in winter you needn’t worry about bears climbing on the roofs to lick smoky grease off the chimneys.  This book is domestic, family-centered, and mostly about boy-stuff:  fun, food and romance in about that order.  There’s an exciting robbery at the end.

Very little in this book is about Blackfeet.  There is a “glass wall” between Park people and Rez people, even now, but more so then.  Even the white kids in Browning are invisible.  Bob and Harold Scriver went to the same school about the same time as Bud and Buzz Lutz, and relations between the two families were cordial but entirely unmentioned here.  In fact, there’s not much about Park rangers.  The only Blackfeet are the tribal elders who made a living over the summer by wearing buckskin and eagle feather parade outfits to meet the train, putting on “rain dances” in the evening, and living in tipis on the lawn.  They made very little impression on Bud Lutz.  He did admire cowboys.

The category of white-run small businesses is not explored much in most books about this area.  This may be due to so many of them having their roots in boot-legging -- not the scurrilous rum-running that undermined the Indians, but the Prohibition moonshine supply for insatiable tourists.  Glacier Park was an out-of-the-way spot with confused jurisdictions and locals poor enough to wink. That soon developed into quiet connections to people like Al Capone.  The boys ran a brisk business in recycled bottles.

A big part of the story is the horses and dogs, their names, life-histories and exploits.  Horace Clarke loaned the boys a horse and finally gave it to them.  Much of what boys were good for in those days was finding and bringing in livestock, so they valued good animal helpers.  Because of their gender and their participation in the castration of calves, they took a lively interest in prairie oysters and their unknowing consumption by greenhorns.

Much of the family history revolves around the three incarnations of Mike’s Place, a huge barn of a building on Highway 2 that burned down twice.  At first the venue for dances and skating rinks, by the Sixties it was divvied up into shops and the versions of restaurant that Buzz ran: a short-order counter, a hot dish cafeteria, and an upscale restaurant, all sort of connected and interacting, but only in the summer.  These were hard-working and thoughtful people who chose their mates carefully and put their children to work early.  Even in the later years the summer work in East Glacier moved in winter over to the west side where ski resorts were thriving.  Maureen Little Dog, Buzz’s daughter, became a world-class patissiere (pastry chef) but that was later than this book.

For persons interested in the development and establishment of a rising middle class in an interstitial environment, part entrepreneurs and part opportunists, this book belongs on the shelf with Ray Djuff’s insider accounts of the Glacier-Waterton International complex, the constantly useful books of Jack Holterman (hard to come by as they are), and other accounts like John Fraley’s “A Woman’s Way West: In and Around Glacier National Park from 1925 to 1990.”   Murton McCluskeys’ book “The McCluskey Boys: Adventures in an Indian Boarding School” (reviewed here 5-28-12) is much like the lives of the Lutz boys.  Many layers and aspects remain: the engineering of Going to the Sun Highway, which is now failing; the grizzly stories (Do not read “Night of the Grizzlies” at bedtime!); adventurous women in the Park like Mary Roberts Rinehart or the “lady artists” attracted by the Reiss brothers; the many artists that were subsidized by the railroad to create advertising art (Sharp, Fery.  Not Russell who had a cabin on the west side where he was mostly a private citizen).  

Most published material is to make money, rarely this kind of naive self-published account of ordinary kids, a good corrective to outsider’s assumptions.  I read this book with a growing stack of other books at my elbow, picking up relationships that were mentioned other places but never tied together until Bud told about them.  It’s a little like reading old newspapers from one area: events thicken until a multi-dimensional picture develops.  Names come up that I recognize from stories but also still see in the phone book.  Old feuds and catastrophes, not very significant at the world history level, have a sort of “butterfly effect” on how things have turned out a century later.

The problem of how to find local books is helpfully addressed by the used book market and categories via Amazon et al.  But the problem remains of knowing what to put in search engines when you have no inkling that it exists in the first place.  I put in <"Glacier Park"  bibliographies> and got a lot of interesting stuff.  I put <“East Glacier, Montana”> into Google and then hit “images” which brought up page after page of images, both sublime and banal, but I don’t know what they would mean to an “outsider” without the stories about who built the businesses or named the mountains (and then renamed them for political reasons as well as giving the town itself at least three names, not counting railroad sidings).  In the end a person just has to go there and spend time sitting around listening to stories.  

This year the sequester means Logan Pass will be plowed out late and the campgrounds will have fewer amenities.  But the waterfalls will be turned on again and the trails will be unrolled.  The layout of local businesses is different every year -- some come, some go.  Locals follow the cooks rather than the cafes.  The restaurant in what was “Mike’s Place” is scheduled to open again.  I don’t know who’s cooking this summer.  Buzz and Bud will be supping elsewhere.

Scott Company Publishing

PO Box 9707

Kalispell, MT 59904

1-800-628-0212

scott@scottcompany.net

$15.95 plus s&h