Books and Arts

“Ours was no chance meeting. Not fate, nor destiny,” Galadriel says. “Nor any other words Men use to speak of the forces they lack the conviction to name.” The line is a bit pompous, but then so is the hotheaded elven warrior (Morfydd Clark) who speaks it in Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Pomposity aside, Galadriel’s words reveal why the work of J.R.R. Tolkien is unique in a crowd of fantasy competitors. Anyone can give us elves and dragons and wizards. But few can match the anguished, longing note of hidden Providence in Tolkien’s Middle-earth. The Rings of Power has not yet achieved such depths of feeling — perhaps it will not be capable of doing so — but it has shown prudence in its stewardship of the story’s heart, which is encouraging.

The London premiere of Leopoldstadt in 2020 made this decade the seventh in which a new Tom Stoppard play has been delivered unto the world, and since the playwright has suggested it may be his last, some words about his legacy seem to be in order. Stoppard is often regarded as the greatest English playwright of the later twentieth century. Harold Pinter is the other popular choice. Both men picked up where Pirandello, Beckett and the absurdists left off. Their respective approaches form two sides of the same post-existentialist coin. Stoppard made his name with the expanded footnote: plays in which a sidelight takes center stage, often bristling with comedy, like the metatheatrical Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) or The Real Inspector Hound (1968).

In considering what makes a masterpiece of film, the critical community has its shortlist of highly artistic favorites: Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Battleship Potemkin, the like. But in the hearts and minds of average moviegoers, another kind of picture has come to encapsulate “the big screen”: one with less aesthetic ambition, perhaps, but an exceptional dose of romance and style. For this set, Casablanca remains something like the main attraction. Eighty years ago this November, Warner Bros.

The New York Times recently started a new series about introducing a friend to jazz in five minutes with a tribute to Duke Ellington. In many ways, Ellington is a sound choice. He was the bandleader par excellence, a brilliantly inventive composer who formed much of the modern jazz vocabulary. But matters can’t rest there. In any assessment of jazz’s founding fathers, Louis Armstrong has to stand as the most influential figure. Both his trumpet and voice are simply inimitable. A recent visit to his modest home, which is now a museum, during a trip to New York with my family offered a reminder of the magnetic attraction Armstrong continues to exert.

It was probably inevitable that the culture wars would come for Hamilton. The show had something for everyone — parents and kids, pop-culture enthusiasts and history buffs, right and left. It was the unifying, twenty-first-century Great American Musical, if we could keep it. We couldn’t, of course, and the dustup over a rogue Hamilton production in early August at The Door Christian Fellowship Church of McAllen, Texas, gives one indication why. The non-denominational church, situated not ten miles from the Mexican border at the very southern tip of Texas, presented a modified version, censoring risqué sections and making secular bits Jesus-centric. One scene has our hero Alex repenting his sins (his capitalism?

It was the middle of July 2007. The dead-summer streets of Phoenix, Arizona, were fairly smoldering, so I went into a comic-book shop to beat the heat. I was shipping out to Iraq with the Marine Corps in two days and needed something to distract me. Indulging in a bit of casual melodrama, I asked the half-stoned employee behind the desk what he would read if he had two days to live. Without a second’s pause, he gave a knowing smile and said: “The Walking Dead, man.” Robert Kirkman never expected his comic to turn into the dominant media phenomenon it has become over the past two decades. But nerd culture has a funny way of jumping the bridge into mass media.