Arts Reviews

Bob Dylan has just concluded the first leg of his revitalized “Never Ending Tour,” which was paused, along with the world, after March 2020. Scheduled to travel to Japan last April, Dylan canceled his dates in Tokyo and Osaka, and presumably sheltered at home in California. He wasn’t resting, though. Just after midnight on March 27, 2020, his website posted a nearly 17-minute-long song, “Murder Most Foul,” circling around and about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Excited rumors of a record of new Dylan songs proved true when Rough and Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio album, was released on June 19, 2020. A year and a half later, Dylan and a newly constituted band finally took the record on tour.

The box office news from earlier this December was mixed. The stupendous success of the latest Spider-Man sequel, No Way Home, indicated that fears of the Omicron variant have not deterred audiences from coming out in the millions: it grossed $260 million at the US box office and $600 million globally. But it also trampled other less franchise-friendly films. Guillermo del Toro’s new picture Nightmare Alley debuted to a dismal $3 million, and Steven Spielberg’s version of West Side Story will be one of the director’s greatest flops, having grossed a mere $18 million in the US so far. The chances of either film — expensively mounted period pieces from A-list directors — recouping their production budgets at the theater, let alone their advertising costs, is zero.

Ah, Christmastime, the season for pheasant dinners, fancy ties, the land of Toyland from which you can never return, the time of year when everyone falls in love, when snowmen fly away to Snowland to become Eskimos, and when kids run around crying “dickory dock!” Right? All of these are bits and pieces from old Christmas songs that have mostly been forgotten, whose imagery and language failed to take hold in the general imagination. It’s quite fascinating how such a small number of songs, from a very narrow moment in American life, have contributed so heavily to defining the mood and feel of our secular Christmases.

Frank Capra was almost too embarrassed to pitch his greatest film to Jimmy Stewart. At the time, both men were veterans in a post-war slump. Capra was losing his first confidence in a shelved Cary Grant vehicle-that-wasn’t, a script that had been torturously adapted from a short story by a fractious committee of writers. He stumbled through the premise for Stewart, trying to explain that the story starts in Heaven, and it’s about this fellow who thinks he’s a failure in life, so an angel named Clarence has to come down and stop him from jumping off a bridge, except Clarence can’t swim so the fellow has to save him… Here Capra paused, mopping his brow to confess, “This doesn’t tell very well, does it?

YouTube just sent me down a spiral rewatching old Glee clips. I was never a Glee fan per se, but it was one of a handful of shows I watched when my kids were in Peak Mode, old enough to be interesting as people but not yet old enough to realize I was not interesting. My kids are adults now; did TV help form them? It did. And what we all learned, and especially how we learned it, is a lesson on the failure of 2021 wokeness to achieve change and instead just piss people off. In 2021, Glee strikes me as influential. When it first aired, it was thought of as, at least in a suburban way, edgy. I’m sure eyes all across Brooklyn are rolling but they miss the point. Glee being suburban was the point.

Casting was recently announced for the film Renfield, an apparently humorous and contemporary take on the character of Count Dracula’s long-suffering assistant. The actor Nicholas Hoult, who has displayed fine comic timing in projects such as The Favorite and The Great, is to star as Renfield, and he will be joined by the hyphenate actress-rapper-comedian Awkwafina. Yet the most exciting news is that none other than Nicolas Cage will be playing Dracula. After a decade in which he has largely eschewed mainstream Hollywood, it's a career comeback that even the undead would be delighted by.

There's a new film out about the Beatles. It's about them being in the studio doing stuff that you do in studios. It's really good. Have you heard about it? Of course you have. I am referring to the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Get Back, Peter Jackson's reanimation of the Beatle Band’s last days in the bunker. It's a bit like Downfall, but without Hitler. As a middle-aged doctor of rock 'n' roll, I am required to take the cultural temperature of what we now call Heritage Rock. This is the music that middle-aged (and rising) men like when they can't keep up with young people’s music anymore. Think Neil Young, and that pretty much covers it. And when Neil Young is not re-releasing live albums from his pomp, then think the Beatles.

My wife, who spent much of her childhood in Northern California — and whose grandparents owned orchard land and kept horses and other animals — always laughs at me during our yearly trip to the county fair. The reason is my fear of walking past the horse stalls. I’m a transplant to rural Michigan from New York City. Farm animals were an abstraction for most of my life. I pass by rows of Clydesdales, hindquarters facing me on either side in uncomfortable proximity, and imagine my own demise if one should decide to kick. My father is no horseman, but he's had a long career in manufacturing. He can make or fix most anything. (Once, in the ‘70s, he fell from a catwalk onto a floor where F-14 Tomcats were being assembled below.

The composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim’s death at the age of ninety-one does more than simply rob the world of musical theater of its most distinguished practitioner. With the exception of Tom Stoppard, there was probably no greater figure in contemporary world drama. To mourn his passing, even at his extraordinary old age, is only to pay dutiful homage to one of the most extraordinarily diverse (in its usual meaning) and accomplished canons of work that any figure in English-language drama has ever produced. He was born in New York City in 1930 and remained the most Manhattanite of talents all his life.

Dense Poems and Socratic Light: The Poetry of John Martin Finlay, edited by David Middleton, Wiseblood Books, 2020 To say that the poet John Martin Finlay has been forgotten is not quite right. He was never “remembered” — read by a significant number of people — in the first place. But his best work is as good as the best work of many of the poets of his time, and Wiseblood Books is hoping to set things right with a two-volume collection of his poetry and prose. Born in southern Alabama on a peanut and dairy farm in 1941, Finlay went to university in Alabama and Louisiana, where he graduated with a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 1980 and converted to Catholicism that same year.

“Put your phone in your pocket and keep it there.” So I was told by the guard blocking the entrance of the Georges Bergès Gallery. I wasn’t going to argue. That’s because I was about to become one of the few to see The Journey Home: A Hunter Biden Solo Exhibition. I can’t think of many other art shows that have been more heavily discussed than seen. This critic is guilty as charged. But the press, and the public, are not all to blame for the ratio'd attention. The Journey Home has been open “by invitation only” for just about its full run. Invitations have not been abundant. You will not find the show listed on the gallery website or given any sense of its start or end.

It has been quite the 2021 for Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. When she wasn't publishing children’s books or giving birth to her second child, the trollingly named Lilibet, she was winning court cases and dropping in at the United Nations. Little wonder that some have speculated that, in the not too distant future, she might even consider running for the highest office in the land. But more than anything else, this year has been dominated by interviews for Meghan. The conversation that she and her husband-cum-comic relief sidekick Prince Harry had with Oprah Winfrey in March certainly enlivened lockdown with endless conversations about whether the Duchess’s much-vaunted "truth" was anything of the kind, and launched a thousand opinion pieces.