Arts Reviews

On January 23, Dr Stephen D. O’Leary, a retired professor of communications at the University of Southern California, posted a poem by George Eliot to his Facebook page. It begins: ‘O May I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again’. For 25 years Stephen was one of my closest friends in the world. I still can’t believe that I have to use the past tense when talking about him. He pressed ‘send’ on that Facebook post at 4:47 p.m. At one in the morning he joined the choir invisible. Although his heart attack was unexpected, we knew we were going to lose him. He called me the day after he was diagnosed with liver cancer. ‘I’m not afraid of dying. It’s going to be interesting,’ he said.

A true adaptation of David Copperfield is neither possible nor even desirable. It would last as long as it takes to read the novel, say, two weeks. The principal cast would number in the dozens, and the extras — the clerks, lawyers, policemen, landlords, cooks, chimney sweeps, pickpockets, sailors, ministers, soldiers, beggars, porters, carters, fishermen, coachmen, pimps, gypsies and whores — in the hundreds of thousands. Replicating the cellars, garrets, galleries, museums, bridges, pubs, factories, shipyards, docks, scaffolds and debtors’ prisons of Victorian London would require construction on a Himalayan scale.

Jazz has traditionally been a male preserve — all 15 of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra are men — but jazz singing is the exception. Later this year, Netflix will release Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, based on the superb play by August Wilson and starring Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis. If the movie adheres to the spirit of the play and its subject (Rainey, the ‘Mother of the Blues’, sang frankly sexual songs in a moaning style), it is sure to ignite a fresh interest in her tempestuous life and career. The imperious Rainey wasn’t simply a gifted singer, but also an astute talent-spotter.

Batavia, New York With the first blizzard of every winter I take John Greenleaf Whittier’s Snow-Bound off the bookshelf, and though I never quite make it through to the end, when the snow is ‘melted in the genial glow’, I feel as if I have hunkered down for the week with the ‘Barefoot Boy’ poet’s besieged shut-ins. So when the Kung Flu — excuse me; I forgot for a moment that mild humor is now as verboten as sweaty raves and square dances — kicked its way into our lives, but before the local library shut down, I, like everyone else — well, like a tiny sliver of the populace — reached for Camus’s...Camus’s...oh, the hell with it: The Plague by Albert Camus.

Netflix’s Tiger King has been touted as ‘the only show that’s crazier than the world outside right now’. Besides being weird beyond measure — a seven-part freak show combining meth-heads, involuntary amputees, firearms, sex cults, gay polygamy, cocaine, rednecks, attempted murder and, yes, more tigers than you could shake a flaming torch at — it offers fascinating parallels with the most important debate of our time: the eternal conflict between liberty and authority. As you may have noticed, this coronavirus pandemic has brought out the best and the worst in people and produced two highly polarized visions of the world.

Late on the afternoon of November 29, 1984, Susan Rosenberg and Timothy Blunk were loading boxes into a blue Oldsmobile Cutlass sedan and a U-Haul trailer parked at a self-storage facility in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, not far from Philadelphia. The boxes were heavy, so despite the autumn chill and the wind, Rosenberg and Blunk were working up a sweat. Both wore glasses as part of their disguises. Blunk had an ill-fitting wig that he barely managed to keep on his head. An FBI wanted poster called Rosenberg armed and extremely dangerous, and the Bureau wasn’t wrong. On the front seat of the Olds, purses held semiautomatic pistols — an Interarms Walther PPK .38 caliber and a Browning Hi-Power 9mm. They were both fully loaded.

Most of the podcasts that sell relationship advice imply that romance is synonymous with sex. The theory of that equivalency has been a theme in the arts for centuries: Shakespeare, Flaubert, Thackeray and Tolstoy all exposed its follies and truths. Unsurprisingly, the podcast hosts have a less poetic, nuanced note than the classic writers, such as giving the advice: ‘If you’re having a dry spell, listen to us or break up.’ Tony and Alisa DiLorenzo are a Christian couple who have married for 23 years. Perhaps surprisingly, their podcast, ONE Extraordinary Marriage, depicts sex and romance as interchangeable. Tony and Alisa, who couple on the page in their co-authored book 7 Days of Sex Challenge, start each episode with a ‘hug’.

The banjo was present at the creation of jazz but, like the clarinet and the fiddle, it fell from favor, and for similar reasons. The saxophone and the electric guitar were easier to play, more expressive and much, much louder. The banjo was on the way out even as it was on the way in — in the Hot Five recordings of December 1927 that instituted the jazz solo as we know it, Johnny St Cyr played both banjo and guitar — but the banjo had somewhere else to go. The fleet-fingered took their four-and fivestringers to the hills — the Appalachians, for instance. There, the banjo thrived with those other refugees from early jazz, the fiddle and the steel-strung guitar. Metropolitan contempt caught up with it in the Seventies.

Don’t be put off by the slow first episode, which makes you fear it’s just going to be another of those so-so emo magical-fantasy adolescent dramas in which Netflix abounds: Locke & Key is superior, addictive and bingeworthy stuff in the league of, or possibly even better than, Stranger Things. It begins with an achingly clichéd scenario — family driving across America to seek new life in exotic location, kids bickering in the back, awkward high-school experiences awaiting them, etc. — and the familiarity never lets up.