Moons Over St. Louis: The Power and Glory of Prisonshake

The tumult of the autumn at Richard Byrne Inc. led me to put a number of essential tasks to side. One of the most important was to obtain the long-awaited Prisonshake double record -- Dirty Moons -- and let it sink in long enough to have something intelligent to say about it.

Finally did so. Put simply, Dirty Moons is more than worth the 15 year wait since the last Prisonshake record, 1993's The Roaring Third.

You're excused if you're not familiar with the 'Shake. God knows they can be hard enough to track down. Infrequent gigging. A back catalogue scattered over mere continents. But when the band has erupted into song (1986-1992ish in Cleveland; 1993-1995 in St. Louis; now), they're among the best rock bands in the United States: brainy without being wonky, muscular riffs bouncing off lyrics both cynical and tender.

Ringleader Robert Griffin (who also runs Scat Records) and lead vocalist Douglas Enkler have formed the spine of the band from its conception, but the addition of drummer Patrick Hawley and bassist Steve Scariano added power and fluidity to the band that really pays off on Dirty Moons.

In line with the "brainy not wonky" line above, while there is no high concept here, there are some elegant conceits and jagged formalistic moves (the "suite" on side two; traditional vinyl sides dubbed as "multiple entry points"). Don't let them turn you on or put you off. Most of what's here is good ol' American rock and roll -- recorded in analog at various levels of fidelity but with unflagging inventiveness and energy.

I could reel off a bunch of moments that stand out on multiple listens: "Fake Your Own Death" swerves from its jammy introduction into moody and sinister Jeff Beckisms before disintegrating and coalescing again a few times, or the moment when that aforementioned side two suite revs up for take off on "Rebecca, You're the Rain."

But for me what shines through are the sometimes dueling, but more often complementary sensibilities of Griffin and Enkler. For all of his dinged and dented hardboiled aesthetic shell, Griffin writes some of the best love songs in rock. (Just check out the furious romanticism of "Dream Along," or the unabashed erotic revelry of "Crush Me" -- the latter song married to smash and grab riffing.)

And Enkler? Well, the acidity of his observations cut through any and all bullshit posing, and the record is studded with his sharp lyrical gems. "The Cut-Out Bin" is worth quoting at length because of the song's savage look-back-in-anger at a life in rock:

Back in the day, before songs were numbered
And only bikers and sailors had tattoos
I'd work all day, selling records to assholes
Huffing boo and screwing you

Some say rock and roll has died
And at times like these I wish they were right
Watch 'em spawn a litter, watch none survive

No one gets a twilight to their career anymore
No one gets a chance to make
Mediocre record number four
When they bring back the cut-out bin
Save a place for us behind the Pretty Things

The other highlight on the record for me is Enkler's performance on "Fuck Your Self-Esteem," which may be one of the most finely-chiseled bits of rock on the topic of sexual mayhem ever penned, and yoked to savage riffs that propel the song along:

Well the next free moment she tells me, "fuck you"
I say that's not nice I'm the only one who loves you
That's not a brain, that's flaps and triggers
Slots and levers like a Mousetrap game
Does someone need a punch in the mouth?
Please don't let on that I knew you when....

You can get Dirty Moons on e-music, but everybody (except me, of course) makes more money if you order it directly from Scat Records. (The Dirty Moons page at the Scat site also has an mp3 of "Crush Me.") Griffin also keeps an indifferently updated blog about the record; there's plenty of cool back matter there.

What Can Renaissance Journalism Tell Us Today?

So at long last, my piece on an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library -- "Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper" -- has been published by The Nation in its latest issue. (You can see it online here.)

The good news is that though it took awhile to get it published (I wrote it back in November), the exhibit itself continues until the end of January, which gives you plenty of time to go see it yourself. (Details and opening hours are here.)

In all the clatter and cacophony of debate about how the newspaper is dying, it is useful at times to have a look back at history and see what it tells us about the seeding and blossoming of an industry. Christopher Kyle (a historian as Syracuse University) and Jason Peacey (a historian at University College in London) did a masterful job of doing that.

I hope you'll read the whole article -- and particularly if you're in journalism -- take a quick trip over to the Folger and have a look around. It's the sort of exhibit that will inform -- in a subtle but powerful manner -- the decline and transformation of the print news industry.

Image of the front page of the "Mercurius Rusticus" courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library

Švejk vs. Schweyk: Encounters with Brecht

Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier Švejk and His Fortunes in the World War is my favorite novel. Sure, there are others that give me plenty to chew on, and plenty of entertainment. (I think number two would have to be Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita.)

But Hašek's book has given me by far the most to think about in my career -- about war, about the human condition, about beer and grog. Plus, it has the advantage of being the ultimate Balkan and Bohemian book -- set mostly in Prague and South Bohemia (and Budapest and Galicia) -- and yet starting with the key Balkan event of the last two centuries: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914.

The key to Švejk's enduring relevance is the profound mystery of its protagonist's character. For a literary invention that has often been advanced as a symbol of the Czech national character (much to the chagrin of some Czechs), this mystery seems particularly crucial. Is Švejk -- as he so often explains as he seeks to shirk military service for the hapless Hapsburgs -- "a certified idiot?" Or is he a supremely cunning and subversive force?

The argument for idiot is the sheer pathos and farce of the situations in which Švejk finds himself -- jail, mental hospital, the train station in Tabor drinking beer after beer with a Hungarian, causing a riot in Kiralyhida, and then literally captured by his own troops. What normal and sensible -- let alone a crafty and cunning -- person would place themselves willingly in such situations? And yet Švejk so often outwits and flanks the officers, judges and bureaucrats who would crush him that it would seem foolish to accept the "patent idiocy" that he produces as a catch-all excuse for his behavior.

My own theory is that Švejk is neither idiot nor savant, but rather that a sense of play -- the innocent and yet often brutal play of children -- so deeply permeates his character that it forms the blueprint of his behavior in any situation. It is a sense of play that results both in punishments and in tiny triumphs of the human spirit. (My theory also addresses that notion of Švejk as an expression of the Czech character: Švejk does tap deeply into a mischievous and cruel vein of Czech humor as a resistance to cruel and oppressive realities.)

These deep thoughts about Švejk bring me in roundabout fashion to the question of Bertolt Brecht's attempt to interpret Hašek's iconic character. I recently tackled the German playwright's Schweyk in the Second World War -- which reimagines Švejk as he might have functioned in the more brutal and efficient thrall of the Gestapo.

If The Good Soldier Švejk is my favorite novel, why wait so long to check out Brecht's take? Well, there's a natural inclination to keep one's favorite thing pure somehow within the mind. (Impossible, yes. And yet we try...)

But there's also my own complicated dramatic relationship with Brecht. It's hard to argue that Brecht's best works (Dreigroshen Oper, Mutter Courage, Galileo, Arturo Ui and many of the poems) are among the last century's greatest. But there is a stridency and oversimplicity-- not to mention Brecht's fraught relationship with his collaborators -- that gives me pause, and puts me in the camp of Peter Handke in preferring Odon von Horvath's work. Handke wrote back in 1968 that "Horvath ist besser als Brecht" -- and have you read The Measures Taken lately? Read it and then read Horvath's Faith Hope and Charity. The gulf between the sensibilities and moral feeling of these writers is immense, but boil down to Brecht's feeling (and sometimes "unfeeling") for humanity as a striving mass, whereas Horvath sees -- and feels -- the individual and the power of jargon to warp and pervert societies.

I finally succumbed to curiosity, however. (It didn't help that Brecht scholars feel the play to be in the middle ranks of his works: John Willett and Ralph Manheim write in the introduction that"the whole notion of pitting Hašek's beautifully ambiguous figure... against Himmler and the SS is a deep misconception which distorts both recent history and Hašek's novel.")

Having read it now, I vigorously disagree. There are certainly moments when the critique above applies -- particularly in the ending dream sequence where Švejk encounters Hitler outside Stalingrad. But Brecht succeeds on two key levels in his Schweyk: he keeps much of Švejk's sense of mystery and play and yet skilfully adapts the original material to meet a transformed historical context. Brecht's play is darker and less comic than Hašek's novel (which is dark enough despite its comedy), but one feels the intrusion of Brecht the propagandist in the moments where the play drifts toward pastiche of the German war effort. In its adaptation of the novel to the much-less ambiguous patriotism of the Czech resisatnce, however, it is terrific -- and Brecht has incredible mastery of the pub talk and bureaucratic subversions that fuel Hašek's classic.

So yes, Brecht's Schweyk is imperfect. But if you're interested in how Hašek's iconic figure has transformed other writers and been transformed in turn, it's more than interesting. It is, in its way, quite brilliant.

More Kundera Kontroversy......

We've had an enforced hiatus here at Balkans via Bohemia. Call it "The Unbearable Heaviness of Workload." Plus, an election.

To make it up to loyal readers, a bit of an update on the twists and turns of "L'affaire Kundera" since last we blogged it in mid-October. In a nutshell, archivists at the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes (USTR) who were researching the case of a Western spy stumbled upon a record of Milan Kundera denouncing that agent to police in 1950 -- thus effecting his arrest.

In my previous post (and in an article in The American Prospect), I argued that this wasn't really a scandal, considering the context of the times and Kundera's known pro-Communism beliefs in that era. I concluded that the document is likely accurate, and also speculated that his intensity of his fervid denials of the insident now were rooted in his own deeply-held views about art and the privacy of the author.

Now, however, it's becoming a bit of a scandal/ Not only will Kundera not back down from those denials, but he's enlisted a group of 11 literary heavyweights to write the much-dreaded "public letter" about the case.

The letter is sickening, largely because it offers so little scope for truth-telling and free inquiry. Simply doing archival research and reporting the results is transformed by these authors into "an attempt... to stir up a defamatory campaign with the aim of sullying the reputation of Milan Kundera."

Puh-leese. Kundera's relationship with his native country is complex. And while there are many in the Czech Republic who do not like him or his work, the article reporting the denunciation was sober and backed by very firm evidence. The presentation of the documents was no orchestrated campaign. The defense, however, seems very orchestrated. And Kundera is dicing with his legacy.

At the wonderful Sign and Sight website, Anja Seeliger has more wise words on the literary dust-up.

(Photo of Milan Kundera by Fredrik Rafusson from the HarperCollins website.)

Catonsville Nine Reading in DC: 11/3/2008

Back in late 1992, when I was a staff writer at Baltimore City Paper, I convinced my editor that tracking down the Catonsville Nine on the 25th anniversary of their revolutionary protest against the Vietnam War and other US military incursions of the era (including Guatemala) in 1968 would make a good article.

Part of the reason that I wanted to write it was the outsized influence that the incident had in my own childhood and teenage years in suburban Philadelphia. I was precocious enough to follow the heated discussions in the Catholic community -- both in my family and in larger circles -- about the Berrigan brothers and their forthright campaign of civil disobedience against US military and foreign policy -- a line that went from the Baltimore and Catonsville actions in 1968 through their decision to go underground as fugitives after their convictions to later actions against nuclear war in the 1970s and 1980s.

Little did I know that it would be one of the best articles in my journalistic career --and one of the most cited pieces in subsequent literature about 1960s protest and the mobilization of American Catholics against Vietnam.

I managed to track down seven of the nine men and women who stormed into a Selective Service office in Catonsville, MD in 1968, seized draft records, dragged the out into an adjacent lot and burned them with napalm. (One protester, David Darst, died in a car crash shortly after the group's trial and conviction; the second, Mary Moylan, had spent years underground before turning herself in to authorities in 1978. I was not able to convince her to be interviewed.) I also managed to track down the officer who arrested them, the prosecutor of the case and numerous others involved in the saga.

The best part of the reporting and writing of the story was getting to know the ringleader of the action: Phillip Berrigan. History is going to judge him as an important figure in the history of civil disobedience and forceful, confrontational nonviolence. He was a towering personality, fierce in his convictions, and yet possessed of a personal gentleness and generosity. He made some mistakes but even those foibles and errors bring to mind Nietzsche's notions that the errors of great men are more venerable than the truths of little men. There was a lot to learn even in Phillip Berrigan's missteps.

I reminisce about this long-ago story of mine because the play that Phillip Berrigan's brother, poet and activist Daniel Berrigan, wrote about the action and the subsequent trial -- The Trial of the Catonsville Nine -- will be given a staged reading on Monday night, November 3, as part of a reading series on War and Ethics organized by Journeyman Theater and Theatre J.

The staged reading is directed by Rahaleh Nassri (who readers of this blog may recall was the widely-praised Romeo in Taffety Punk Theatre Company's all-female Romeo and Juliet) and the performance will be followed by a panel discussion that features the host of this here blog.

If you've got the pre-election night jitters, what better way to shake them off and prepare for the act of voting then hearing the tale of one of the great acts of nonviolent civil disobedience in American history? The reading starts at 7:30 pm.

More info on the reading here. More information on the Catonsville Nine here. Video of the protest is here.

Václav Havel's Temptation in DC

Saw Constellation Theatre Company's production of Václav Havel's Temptation in Washington, D.C. last night. It's a wonderful production, but since a number of the local reviews have taken aim less at the staging than Havel's play itself, I thought it might be useful to talk about the play as well as what I liked about this production.

I really like what Allison Arkell Stockman, the director of the play and the founding artistic director of Constellation, did with Temptation. A.J. Guban's set design was wonderfully inventive, and the use of choreography to link scenes and set changes really propelled the play forward.

The production boasts a number of strong performances. Frank Britton's Fistula is every bit as fussy and compelling as Havel wrote him. (And his bony Nosferatu fingers are a wonderful touch.) Heather Haney's Vilma has just the right dose of surface insouciance and interior pathos. And Jesse Terrill's Director was pitch perfect -- and got the loudest laughs of the night.

As a play, Temptation presents a couple hurdles for a production. The first is the sheer range of styles that it presents. In a way, Temptation weaves multiple themes favored by Havel -- the office politics of The Memorandum, the quest to "live in truth" in a state of totalitarianism and paranoia that he made stageworthy in his trio of Vaněk plays, and the satiric possibilities in a fusion of philosophy and seduction in The Increased Difficulty of Concentration.

Temptation distills and concentrates all of those modes -- and blends in Havel's own reworking of the Faust legend rigged up to advance his own views that humanity is brutalized not only by its own innate foibles and moral failings but also by its worship of science and technocracy. (In a neat twist, Havel has Fistula -- the tempter -- reduce the conscience of the play's Faust figure -- Dr. Foustka -- to a neat psychological category: the "Smichovsky Compensation Syndrome.")

Constellation navigated this trickiness with great skill -- and its choices of emphasis in the production have helped translate this knotty play quite successfully. As an example, let me point to the end of the play, which -- as written by Havel -- is a bit of a mess that ends with the audience being driven from the theatre by smoke and a fireman with an extinguisher. But Stockman skillfully uses the ring dance and smoke that Havel calls for to relink the play back to the Ur-Faust of Marlowe and (sort of) Goethe. It's a wonderful stroke that is emblematic of the overall quality of this production.

In sum, if you're interested in Havel as playwright but have never seen his work performed, Constellation's Temptation is a great place to start. And for those who do know the work, you'll be delighted by the company's grappling with this very difficult play.

Tickets here.

The Case of Kundera

So my article on Czech historians' discovery that Milan Kundera denounced a Western spy in 1950 is up at The American Prospect. The short version is that (a) I think this incident did happen; (b) it was completely understandable in the context of those times in Czechoslovakia; (c) it's ludicrous to paint Kundera as some kind of collaborator with the regime based on this incident, and (d) his true betrayal to his own work is in trying to deny it happened now that it's out of the bag.

I feel very confident in making the (a) argument. State archivists have confirmed the document's authenticity. Indeed, the fact that it is only being discovered now is testimony to the fact that Kundera has very minimal contacts with the Czech secret police (StB). If his contacts had been more extensive, we would have know about them by now -- whether those revelations came from the communists in the late 1960s, 1970s or 1980s as an effort to tar his reputation as a dissident, or in the orgy of delving into the secret police files after the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

Others, however, are trying to deny or elide this incident -- which will certainly force readers to reexamine Kundera's corpus and reevaluate his writings on totalitarianism, memory and betrayal. (I make a quick stab at it in my article.) You can check out some counterarguments here and here. I find them quite unconvincing -- desperate lunges for some plausible denials.
And Kundera's denial -- which I tackle in the article -- is a knotty and lawyerly construction.

At bottom, this incident (and the public revelation of it) is not the "assassination of the author" that Kundera has made it out to be. There's a compelling context for it, and our knowing about it may even make the work richer. But the author of Testaments Betrayed -- which compared such investigation and analysis as a trial -- is certainly going to see it as a conviction of himself in a kangaroo court of history.

Pox, Punks & Poetry: Charles Nicholl's The Lodger Shakespeare

Writing a biography of Shakespeare is a difficult task. In fact, that degree of difficulty is what's kept the dim bulbs of the "Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare" movement burning. There are many gaps in the record. Years in which we have absolutely no idea what Shakespeare was doing -- particularly in his early adulthood. The holes in the narrative have tempted some to rely upon conjecture and informed guesses to fill in many of the gaps -- or exploit holes in the narrative to deny Shakespeare his due.

The last major effort to write Shakepeare's life -- Stephen Greenblatt's 2004 book Will in the World -- filled those gaps with forays into historical context and the fashionable hypothesis that Shakespeare's early years may have been spent in the home of a recusant family. James Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599 took a similar tack in a more telescoped fashion. (I interviewed Greenblatt and other scholars for this article when his book was published.)

Over the last few weeks, I have read another Shakespeare biography of sorts that is among the best things I have ever read about the dramatist/poet. Charles Nicholl's The Lodger Shakespeare takes as its starting point the playwright's curious role in a bitter lawsuit waged between a French emigre (from whom he rented a room) and his son-in-law over a promised and largely-undelivered dowry.

Nicholl notes that Shakespeare's deposition in the case bears "one of six surviving signatures, and the earliest of them," but he adds that it is the dramatist's statements within the document that also carry special weight :

We know the thousands of lines he wrote in plays and poems, but this is the only occasion when his actual spoken words are recorded.

Yet The Lodger Shakespeare is much more than a close reading of legal documents. Nicholl uses that starting point to examine the world of high fashion, extramarital affairs and seedy taverns and whoring that most certainly surrounded Shakespeare in his rented quarters. He also points out the precarious situation of foreigners in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, and teases out the ways in which Shakespeare's proximity to the "foreign" may have impressed itself in his works.

Nicholl has a keen nose for finding bits of Shakespeare's London and the milieu in which he must have slept and written after long days and nights at The Globe in the plays. In one passage, Nicholl tackles the perplexing issue of why none of Shakespeare's comedies or tragedies are set in England itself -- and what Shakespeare was trying to accomplish by such displacement of setting for plays that were so distinctively English in every other way:

In Shakespeare, and particularly in Shakespearean comedy, real English life as it was experienced by the audience was shown to them through a prism of foreignness, by which process it was subtly distorted and magnified. In this sense the foreign -- the 'strange' is an imaginative key for Shakespeare: it opens up fresher and freer ways of seeing the people and things which daily reality dulled with familiarity.

The author of The Lodger Shakespeare also tackles an even more perplexing issue: what was Shakespeare doing hanging out (let alone collaborating on Pericles, Prince of Tyre) with George Wilkins -- a violent brothel keeper whose Elizabethan rap sheet included brutal attacks on women (many of them prostitutes) and, in one case, "woundinge one John Ball in the head with a Welshe hooke."

Nicholl argues quite convincingly that Wilkins provided a hot commodity for Shakespeare and his company, the King's Men -- plays with a hot off the presses vitality and cutting edge. He is particularly compelling in his analysis of one of Wilkins' plays -- The Miseries of Enforced Marriage -- which was performed by Shakespeare's company.

The Miseries of Enforced Marriage was based on the same brutal and bizarre crime -- a father's murder of his two children and attempted murder of his wife, hyped in garish pamphlets of the period -- that inspired Thomas Middleton's A Yorkshire Tragedy. But in Wilkins' hands it becomes as much a farce (happy ending?) and a ripped-from-the headlines potboiler as it is a tragedy. "The Miseries does not have the intensity of the Yorkshire Tragedy but its lack of artistry makes it valuable in another sense -- we hear Wilkins and his world throughout it." (Having finally obtained a copy of the play --which has been unpublished since 1964 -- I can attest to its crude vigor, which leaps off the page.)

The Lodger Shakespeare is one of those rare books that not only confirms the genius of Shakespeare -- but places it carefully within its context of the squalor and chaos of his London. It is a brilliant piece of scholarship.

Black in Berlin: Paul Beatty's Slumberland

In the tumult of the last couple weeks at Richard Byrne Inc., it's been terrific to have a book on hand that completely rivets your attention away from the life at hand and pours it into something that's not merely diverting, but revelatory and even transformative.

For me, that book has been Paul Beatty's novel Slumberland -- which is a breathtaking mash-up of post-socialism and jazz, soul, funk. Stripping it down to plot, Slumberland is the tale of an L.A. DJ's immersion in pre-Wende Berlin and his effort to track down a legendary musician in that city with nothing but a postal address and an amazing song used as a soundtrack for a decidedly-bizarre porn film. (I'm not going to spoil the joke.)

But Slumberland is so much more than that It's a jukebox-driven juxtaposition of A sides and B sides: Berlin and L.A., white and black, East and West. It's smart, funny, sad and damning. And, yes, it's brilliant.

Beatty's kicked around for awhile in literary circles, breaking out of the Nuyorican poetry slam scene in the late 1980s. He's written two other novels -- The White Boy Shuffle (1996) and Tuff (2001). And as fiction goes, Slumberland does have a poetry about it -- especially in the way that the novel's near-encyclopedic clutter of American black music's cultural signifiers surf Beatty's relentless prose rhythms and riffs. As his narrator, DJ Darky, observes early in the book:

Though I'm purportedly black-- and in these days of racial egalitarianism, a somebody--I'd never felt more white, more like a nobody. DJ Appropriate but Never Compensate. I was amanuensis Joel Chandler Harris ambling through the streets of Nigger Town looking for folklore to steal. I was righteous Mezz Mezzrow mining the motherlod of soul, selling gage in 125th Street, tapping my feet to Satchmo's blackest beats. I was Alan Lomax slogging tape recorder and plantatiuon dreams through the swamp grass misama looking to colorize the blues on the cheap. I was 3rd Bass's MC Serch making my own version of the gas face. A rhyme-tight, tornado-white, Hebrew Israelite, stepping down from the soapbox and into the boom box to spit his shibboleth.

Slumberland is studded with such wonders of music criticism, turbocharged by plot and by a fierce moral indignation. The latter is cleverly masked by a surfeit of hipster swagger, but punches through particularly hard when it comes to politics:

Listening to America these days is like listening to the fallen King Lear using his royal gibberish to turn field mice and shadows into real enemies. America is always composing empty phrases like "keeping it real," "intelligent design," "hip-hop generation," and "first responders" as a way to disguise the emptiness and mundanity.

Slumberland is stuffed with anger, slang and hard-earned wisdom. It darkens perceptibly by the end but remains bouyant. And as snappy and sharp as Beatty's style is, the book is suffused with a certain tenderness, particularly in moments where Beatty does one of the hardest things that a writer can do: translate what music actually sounds like -- down to its very nooks and crannies -- into prose.

At one moment about a third of the way through Slumberland, Beatty's character DJ Darky talks about one of my favorite songs, Oliver Nelson's "Stolen Moments." It's a beautiful passage:

"Stolen Moments" is Oliver Nelson's signature tune, a song I find to be the ultimate mood setter; it's a classic jazz aperitif. Oftentimes, when I play hardcore underground hip-hop or punk gigs, after three or four especially rambunctious tunes the mosh pits begin to resemble the the skirmish lines of a Bronze Age battlefields, the warehouse windows start to shake, the record needle starts to skip, the women have that "I'm down with the pogrom" whatever-motherfucker look in their eyes, and I know the party is one more Wu-Tang killer bee sting or Bad Brains power chord from turning into Attica, I ply fifteen to twenty seconds of "Stolen Moments" to ease the tension, to keep the peace. Its incongruous beauty brings about the wry existential lugubriousness of the Christmas Eve carol coming from the enemy encampment on the other side of the river ina hackneyed war movie. "Stolen Moments" is that type of intrusion, a lull in the fighting, a time to finish that drink and forgive and forget.

Buy Slumberland at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Powell's

Simon Gray Dies at 71

Sad news out of Britain today: playwright and essayist Simon Gray is dead at the age of 71.

I was introduced to Gray's work in graduate school via Jim Nicholson's playwriting class at Washington University. For me, he's a vastly underrated playwright who was often dismissed as slightly on the verge of middle-brow. The work is a lot deeper than that, however. (Harold Pinter's close working relationship with Gray, I think, is a true sign of that depth. Pinter directed many of Gray's plays.)

The obituaries have fastened on Butley, Otherwise Engaged (one of the most nihilistic plays I've ever read), The Common Pursuit and Quartermaine's Terms -- and, of course, his tartly hilarious diaries. But for my money, The Rear Column is my favorite Gray play. It's been a really big influence on what I write -- which often touches on history. And I did manage to see Hidden Laughter near the end of its run in 1990.

Here's a great profile from The Observer in 2004 that gives you a sense of the man. He'll be missed.

All the President's Mad Men

I have a new article up on The American Prospect's website on the continuing relevance of Joe McGinniss' classic, The Selling of the President 1968. There's a nod to the book's influence on Mad Men and lots of classic Nixon video.

As I mention in the article, McGinniss' book was the first political book that I ever read. I think it ended up in my parents' house as a Book of the Month club selection. I was intrigued by the cover during the long summer leading up to Nixon's resignation -- and dug as deep into it as a precocious 8-year old could dig. I do remember being mesmerized by the language spoken by the campaign operatives -- salty and jazzy -- and also by those scripts! It taught me that politics was a pageant of sorts. Nothing was an accident. There was drama and planning involved in it.

Forty years on, it's still a brilliant book with a lot to teach us all.

Dada Delight at Capital Fringe

A wee bit more Capital Fringe Festival blogging. Tonight I saw Manifesto! -- a production of Happenstance Theater -- at the Source on 14th Street. Verdict? Terrific.

The hour-long piece is a (very) playful homage to the Dadaist movement -- which has enjoyed a bit of a critical renaissance in the past few years. The big exposure came from a much-ballyhooed 2006 retrospective that toured major museums in Washington, New York and Paris. But there's also been a number of scholarly reexaminations of the phenomenon -- including The Dada Reader: A Critical Anthology (University of Chicago Press) and a slew of books from MIT Press that expand the scope of criticism on the movement to its manifestations in Eastern Europe and the Netherlands and to marginalized figures such as Francis Picabia.

So what does Happenstance do with Dada? Well, first, and best, they foreground the physical comedy of Dadaist performance -- the frenetic clowning, the farts, and the high-pitched exotic nonsense of it all. They remind the audience, even at a knowing remove, that Dada was meant to insult and offend and even physically repel those who were not in on its nihilistic joking.

Second, the company's mash-up of various texts reads Dada back into its particular milieu of contested avant-gardism. Sure, Dada was a revolt against the nationalism, capitalism and imperialism that created the First World War. But it was also a movement that bloodied the nose of other competing movements -- especially other artistic "isms" that included the Futurism spearheaded by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, which was co-opted and corroded by its adherents' preening, vulgar delight in war and destruction. It's no accident that Happenstance's production literally kills off and chalk marks the body of a Futurist, or that it presents capitalism and communism in a sado-masochistic tango that tickles, slaps and collapses in on itself.

The performances by Mark Jaster, Sabrina Mandell and Scott Burgess (as the clowns who staff a "Cabaret Révolte"), Maia DeSanti (the cabaret's hostess) and by Taffety Punk Theatre Company's Lise Bruneau and Marcus Kyd (who embody any number of the "isms" at war in the piece) are a winning blend of craft and playful anarchy. It's a rare thing to see texts which are largely the province of art historians and literary critics brought to life and brought to laughter. Happenstance is to be congratulated for doing so.

There are three more performances of Manifesto! -- Sunday, July 20, Wednesday, July 23 and Saturday, July 26. Tickets are here.

The cover of Theo van Doesburgs' 1923 brochure Wat is Dada is in the public domain.

Marat/Sade: A Forum Rave

I went to the opening night of Forum Theatre's production of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade -- better known as Marat/Sade -- in DC tonight.

Bottom line: This production of Peter Weiss' play is miraculous.

Let's start with the handicap: Marat/Sade is a quintessentially 1960s play. Playwright Peter Weiss hijacked the continuing immediacy of the French Revolution in post-1945 politics (with more than a nod to Georg Buchner's 1835 play Danton's Death). Just check out the movie based on the Royal Shakespeare Company's staggeringly brilliant 1967 production of the play -- all atom bombs and sexual revolution.

But director Michael Dove re-imagines this play so wonderfully in the Forum production, however, that you will (at least for the moment) forget the RSC version. Where RSC director Peter Brook went for anarchic sex and apocalypse, Dove angles for something more tangible and contemporary: madness, sensuality and war.

In 2008, the easy route for a director of Marat/Sade would be to angle for the stagecraft and song of the play: Armageddon as cabaret. And the actors who carry the music of this production -- Jesse Terrill (who wrote dazzling new music for this staging), Barbara Papendorp, Lisa Lias, Colin Smith, Michael Grew, Ashley Ivey, Colin Smith and Emre Izat -- skilfully inhabit the songs and placards that Weiss writes into the play.

For me, however, the center of the play is the fierce dialectic between Marat (Danny Gavigan) and the Marquis de Sade (Jonathon Church). Dove's version foregrounds this bitter conflict, and uses it as the engine of the play, enlisting the animating energy embodied in the pivotal roles of Charlotte Corday (Katy Carcuff), Simonne Evrard (Helen Parfumi) and the rabble-rousing priest Jacques Roux (Eric Messner) to spur it along. (Corday's assassination of Marat is downright sexy.)

The danger of doing Marat/Sade in 2008 is indulging in perverse nostalgia -- leaning on Bobby Kennedy and mutual assured destruction and a Europe where revolution is taking the barricades against the bourgeoisie. Forum's Marat/Sade scrolls forward to an America where war and religion and history are contested categories. The questions that this Marat/Sade poses are worth pondering. The Forum production pushes forward in all directions -- the futility of revolution is (almost) fun; assassination is as sexual as it is brutal, and politics is a carousel of sensual brutality.

Tickets -- and they are highly recommended -- are here.

Jeff Sharlet's The Family

Reviewed here by yours truly in the latest BookForum. And as you'll read in the review itself, I'm not entirely convinced that soul-searching is the answer to this sort of stealth political fundamentalism.

See also Scott McLemee's take on François Cusset's French Theory:

The guiding question in Cusset’s book is, How did it come to pass that a group of French intellectuals who were seldom closely affiliated, pursued radically incompatible lines of thought, and were often quite passé at home turned by the mid-1980s into hotly coveted exports for the American intellectual market? Indeed, these thinkers were transformed into something like the various models of a single brand—repackaged, cross-promoted, and vended with the steep discounts made possible through economies of scale.

Uncle Tupelo: An Early Glimpse

If I was identified with any particular band as a music critic back in the Midwest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was Uncle Tupelo. It's been fascinating to watch as the story of their improbable rise and untimely demise thickens into myth, and how Jay Farrar and Jeff Tweedy have forged incredible careers for themselves out of that wreckage.

I still get a lot of questions about those times from the most unlikely sources, but it's only rarely that I feel compelled to write about those long-departed days. (I wrote enough as it is, much of it hungover, and it's only fair to let the Greg Kots of the world have their turn.)

This is one of those times, however. A couple weeks back, I caught wind that a bunch of very early video of Uncle Tupelo had gotten onto YouTube courtesy of a gentleman who goes by the moniker PantsElderly. Tupelo fans will want to check it out. (It'll kill the better part of the afternoon, especially if you also like Son Volt.)

Among the videos posted were two that were of particular interest to me. They were recorded back in May 1989 at a benefit concert at the Soulard Preservation Hall in St. Louis, MO. It was the very first time I saw Uncle Tupelo, and it has an odd back story that also involves Chicken Truck (who later became the Bottle Rockets).

The situation was as follows: After a long flirtation, I had just become the music critic for the Riverfront Times in November 1988. I was writing a lot about local bands, feeling my way through the scene in my most hectic semester of grad school at Washington University. (In addition to the column, I was teaching two English composition classes, finishing my poetry thesis, dramaturging Wash U's production of A Midsummer's Night's Dream and then wrestling my own first play -- Untangling Ava -- through its production at the university's Drama Studio.)

The first great band I saw in St. Louis was Chicken Truck, who played the 1989 New Year's Show at the in/famous Cicero's Basement Bar along with Rugburn. They tore the place up with blazing metallic versions of the songs on their legendary Rosetta Stone (the so-called "90 Minute Tape"), and they were the first band about whom I wrote a long feature in the RFT.

Chicken Truck had really just started gigging in St. Louis, and I think they were a little stunned by the attention. But I knew already that they were an amazingly original band. They played their own songs. (Believe me, it was rare in that era of STL rock. ) They had a vision, too, however warped. Songs on that original 90 minute tape became staples of the Bottle Rockets' subsequent discography: "Dead Dog Memories," " Get Down River," "Coffee Monkey," "Financing His Romance," "Perfect Far Away," "Waitin' on a Train" and a hefty amount of the first two records.

But little did I know, however, that by writing about Chicken Truck, I had stepped into a local rivalry of sorts. Uncle Tupelo had also just started busting out of their little cubbyhole in Belleville IL, and they were already gaining fierce partisans. Which sets up the Mississippi River Center benefit show.

Because I was still relatively new to the St. Louis music scene, I relied on people at the RFT to help me sort through it all. And the impression that they left me with was that Uncle Tupelo was a Grateful Dead cover band. (!) Which was, precisely, the last thing I wanted to be writing about.

So the benefit arrives and I head down to South St. Louis. Chicken Truck was third on the bill. Uncle Tupelo was last. I watched the Truck rip it up and headed to the bar. That's where I was accosted by Steve Scariano -- a St. Louis musician of some renown himself in subsequent years with the Love Experts and Prisonshake -- who was one of the band's early believers. (Did he work with Jeff Tweedy at Euclid Records yet? Not sure. Whatever.)

Anyway, Scariano tore into me. It was one of those finger in chest diatribes. In sum, the message was pretty simple: I was a total dumb ass for writing about Chicken Truck and ignoring Uncle Tupelo. I remember feebly protesting. Why should I write about a Dead cover band? (And let me say here that I think Steve did very much the right thing. So much so that I started engaging in similar theatrics almost immediately. Though I have to give myself a bit of a mulligan. In St. Louis circa 1989, it would have made perfect sense for a Dead tribute band to have headlined a benefit like this.)

So anyway, I stayed. And you can see some of what I saw in this video, and another one here.

It's really rare, I think, that you can relive such a seminal moment in one's own career. I've told this story like, 300 times (including to Kot in his Wilco book) and to be able to actually watch what set me off into evangelizing for this band to the point of ridicule is pretty amazing.

All the legendary things are here: Shambling, earnest and yet incredibly intense stage presence. A brilliant, full-formed original song ("Graveyard Shift") and a blistering rethink of an already savage Creedence song. Jay's skull and crossbones guitar strap. Jeff's mama with a bowl-style haircut. And check out the 1:27 mark in the "Fortunate Son" video, where Mike Heidorn tosses up one drum stick, then another. Yikes.

It was all there already pretty much. I'm really happy that I saw it. And eventually Tupelo and the Truck became fast friends, to the extent that lead Trucker Brian Henneman ended up as Tupelo's guitar tech/de facto encore guitarist. But those are tales for another day.

It's Here

Yep. I have taken the plunge. Please feel free to linger. Check out the articles on the right if they intrigue you. Patronize the blogs that have been linked at the bottom. Don't leave a mess.