Articles, History, Literature, Theater

How Shakespeare Sounded in Will’s Own Time

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When I was a teen, I used to read Shakespeare plays aloud with my mother, a high school English teacher, for fun during summer vacations. Mom and I tended toward the tragedies, but when my own daughter and I read Shakespeare’s plays during her high school summer vacations, we read most of his comedies together. We’d take two different well-footnoted editions of his works and our dog with us on a walk to the park. There the three of us would sit in the sunshine while Lily and I read through an act or two of As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing or A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Lily and I usually only got through one act a day because as we read, we compared the footnotes in each edition to better understand the allusions and puns and to get pronunciation suggestions along the way. Together we delighted in just how funny Shakespeare’s plays really are—how bawdy, how full of puns and mischief and made-up words his plays are! Lily had a knack for understanding Shakespeare, but we both benefited greatly from reading the footnotes so we could catch the jokes and puns and historical background that we otherwise would have missed. Pronunciation and word meanings have changed so much over 400 years that even Anglophiles and literature fans can miss a great deal of Shakespeare’s naughty wit without a bit of context.

This fascinating little video featuring English linguist David Crystal and his son, actor Ben Crystal, gives examples of how Shakespeare’s plays sounded when spoken during the playwright’s own lifetime, and explains some of the jokes that modern audiences miss. Give it a listen.

History, Politics & Current Affairs

The Myth of the Ever-More-Fragile College Student

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Photo by Matthieu Spohn for New York Magazine: Science of Us

New York Magazine’s Science of Us website, which features articles related to human behavior, shared this article  by debunking what has been a creeping assumption among media outlets, college counselors and other alarmists that Millennials are fragile, anxious and unfit for the “real world,” and have been coddled and weakened by our overweening, infantilizing society.

Cultural critics posit that today’s college-aged young adults are becoming more stressed, anxious, depressed and generally emotionally frail than ever before, and they say that colleges and society in general are babying them and causing increased neuroticism. This long, extremely detailed and well-researched article points to evidence that those who believe that today’s youth are going to Hell in a handbasket rely too much on their own confirmation bias; undervalue the importance of huge socioeconomic changes over the past decade (including a deep and damaging recession); and, most importantly, ignore actual metrics and provable data that show their negative assumptions about Millennials to be overblown at best and highly inaccurate at worst.

Those who deride Millennials often extrapolate from small samples while ignoring actual, repeatable results from larger longitudinal studies at colleges across the nation. I highly recommend this article for a more factually based and nuanced perspective.

Oddments

The Echoes of Careless Words

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My father, who was absent throughout most of my life, was a difficult and destructive man, and I was probably better off without him in my life for the most part. Still, like most neglected children whose parents ignore them, or don’t respond to their calls or letters, or don’t show up for visits and only call when drunk, I dearly wanted his love and acceptance. I wanted proof from him that I was worthy of love and support, and I did everything I could to entice him to visit me and help me feel that I mattered to him. Yesterday I learned through his own writing that what I feared most was true: I didn’t really matter to him. He didn’t miss me. He told lies about me and sullied my character in describing me to others so that he could justify his lack of concern for me to himself.

My father could be an awful person.

Although he died over two decades ago, I had never gone through the last small box of his papers until yesterday. I thought all that I had left unread were some newspaper clippings and some of his medical records—he had serious health problems throughout his short life for which I had always had great sympathy. I had often used the obvious pain of his disabilities as an explanation for why he self-medicated so frequently with alcohol and drugs. I thought it explained his withdrawn and angry personality. Yesterday I decided I would sort through these last few papers as part of the winnowing I’m doing of all my books, papers and other long-stored bits of memorabilia—why keep duplicate medical records and clippings, I figured? Sadly, among the medical chart notes I found a copy of a letter that I don’t think my father would ever have wanted me to see—at least, I hope he wouldn’t.

In the letter I found, my father wrote of his relationship with me to one of his doctors. He painted a distorted portrait of me, softened the truth about himself, and betrayed a coldness toward me and made ugly and wrongheaded assumptions about my relationships and behaviors that would chill the heart of any child.

Throughout my childhood I tried to prove myself worthy of his love and attention through letters, presents, cards, visits and earnest efforts to make him want to see me. I tried to be clever and witty, which he valued more highly than anything, but that inspired him to tease me about my erudition in insulting ways. He said he believed in thinking independently, but when I held an opinion that he didn’t share, he made mean assumptions about me and decided I was no longer worthy of his concern. When I finally allowed myself to show him five minutes of frustration and anger when I was 21, he turned his back on me and walked away while we were talking, then refused to see, talk to or write to me for four years. I found out later that he even refused to read the film reviews and humor pieces I wrote for Bay Area newspapers during that time. He would not take my calls nor see me when I went to his home to try to talk with him. He lied about me to his friends. And now, all these years later, I had to come upon these lies in written form, and see proof of his disdain for my efforts to contact him and to find ways for us to reconcile.

My father was abusive to the people to whom he owed the most in the world, and his volatility and arrogance caused him to behave in an ugly fashion to many lovely human beings. Though he was usually negligent rather than abusive toward me, finding his cold, self-serving and misanthropic thoughts in written form felt like a hard kick to the stomach. His letters of later years showed his depressive, self-absorbed, self-victimizing thoughts deepening and his beliefs about me becoming even more skewed and unreal. I know there was a large amount of mental illness involved in his warped views about our relationship (and indeed about ALL his relationships with family members and former partners, several of whom he physically battered).

I hope that the ugly letter that I found yesterday isn’t a true indication of his feelings for me in the long term. But since he left this horrible letter among his papers, all I have proof of now is that he was willing to harden his heart against me no matter how much love, kindness and openness I offered to him. All I can say with certainty is that he refused to show love, support or kindness to his only child, realized that about himself, and still didn’t think that my health or happiness mattered enough for him to send me a postcard or make a call for months, sometimes two years, sometimes four years at a time.

I understand now that his deadness of heart toward me wasn’t because I was unworthy of love, but as a child I felt that his love was entirely conditional. It had to be earned over and over. No matter how many songs I sang or drawings I made or letters I wrote to woo him, I would always be found wanting. I now have proof that my own parent thought me so unimportant that he felt moved to write a pompous letter to a doctor he hardly knew about his lack of concern over the four-year estrangement he imposed on me. In his letter, he showed no remorse, only surprise at his lack of feeling over having abandoned our relationship. I imagined during that time and during the decades since that he was at least suffering from our estrangement, as I was, that he was missing me as I missed him, that he thought of me and loved me, as I loved him. Sadly, it appears I meant very little to him for years at a time, perhaps for all time.

I have tried to piece together his mental lapses, his violent temper, his substance abuse and attacks on all the important women in his life. I see that he was mentally ill. All signs point to his having a classic case of borderline personality disorder. But when those with mental illness write of their ugly thoughts with such dispassionate lucidity that their pathological heartlessness is described with the emotionlessness and precision of a mathematical formula, it curdles the blood. That man was my daddy. I was his only child. How could I mean so little to him?

Sickened as I was to read how thoroughly abandoned I had been, the knowledge also frees me from trying to find something worthy and lovable in this man who caused me almost nothing but pain. For over 20 years I have taken comfort in learning of his kindnesses to strangers toward the end of his life, and of his willingness to spend what little he had to feed and clothe poor people who lived in the sad building in which he lived. He owed thousands of dollars to his brother, sister and ex-wives, none of them wealthy people, but he spent the few dollars he had to help those who had less than he did. I thought of his self-loathing and his desire to redeem himself by doing good to those who were worse off than he because he felt himself too debased to ask forgiveness from those whose lives he’d permanently scarred. But after reading about his willingness to sneer at me and at others in my family who sacrificed for him repeatedly, I think perhaps I gave him too much credit for the size of his irregularly beating heart. The pacemaker that kept him going for years was actually standing in for a heart that was more shriveled and more frigid than I ever knew.

I felt sympathy and love for him for so many years, and even if it was misplaced, it helped me to imagine and suffer when I thought of similar pain endured by others who were better people than my father. My compassion for my father’s miseries helped me to care more for others. But to feel more pain on his behalf now that I know how heartless he truly was would only be to harm myself. I will continue to keep my heart open to the sufferings of others and to show them compassion when they fail and make mistakes and inadvertently harm people. We all fall short, and we all deserve mercy. But it is no longer my job to elevate the father who repeatedly and sometimes violently dishonored our family, the father who brought shame and suffering and self-doubt to those in his orbit.

If you have among your possessions letters or diaries in which you or others share thoughts and feelings that would devastate those who come after you and find your words in years to come, please consider carefully whether you really want those words to be found and read by others, even if you are angry with them now. Words can reverberate through future decades and color others’ thoughts of you and beliefs about themselves for the rest of their lives. Those thoughtless words, shared in a moment of spite or weakness or frustration, can last forever and do great harm. Don’t let them poison the lives of others. I can never unsee the horrible words my father wrote about his relationship with me. And while I am strong enough after all these years to recognize that his abandonment and betrayal say ugly things about him and not about me, having to see his illness and carelessness in black and white afresh after all these years is sickening.

Please, if you have writings or other objects that would bring your loved ones great pain after you are gone, consider getting rid of them now, while you can. Finding such things among a dead loved one’s possessions can cause lifelong heartache and taint memories forever. Careless words can echo for lifetimes.

History, Politics & Current Affairs

Why the Boston Globe’s Trump Satire is Good Journalism

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The Boston Globe’s satirical front page warning of life under a Trump presidency, published in their opinion section on April Fool’s Day

This morning the Boston Globe shared a brilliant piece of satire in their opinion section: a mock-up of what their paper would be like one year from today if Donald Trump were to win the presidency. Predictably, social media is blowing up with explosions of outrage from people who don’t know the particulars or the place of opinion pieces in journalism and have no awareness of the importance and history of satire in affecting political change. They say they are appalled and offended and that the Boston Globe has lost all credibility. Let us pause to consider some important truths.

The mocked-up pages of the newspaper did not take over the front of the newspaper. Those who go to the Boston Globe will find the satire in the opinion section, the same section in which other political positions are taken every single day in thousands of newspapers and news sites across the nation and around the world in the form of editorials, op-ed pieces and political cartoons.

For those who cry “Outrage!” that the Globe would stoop so low as to share a political opinion in the form of satire, I ask them: does your favorite news source publish opinion pieces? Have you never seen a political cartoon? Do you not read infographics which selectively choose which facts to highlight every day? These tools have been used to sway popular opinion and have been integral pieces of journalism for hundreds of years. Newspapers and journals have always taken stands; very few of them do not endorse candidates for president. The best of them present their opinion pieces in the clearly labeled opinion section; they do their best to report the facts with little adornment throughout the rest of the paper and then put the opinions of their editorial board and columnists in a section expressly labeled as a place where people take sides and try to persuade. The Boston Globe did exactly this with their publication of their “Donald Trump’s world” satire.

Confused and misinformed modern readers often erroneously believe that it is the job of the media to be completely without bias at all times. Ironically, this idea is most often promulgated by followers of extreme-right news media whose every pronouncement has conservative political overtones. There is not a middle ground to every question, and the correct journalistic response to opposing views is often to refuse to sit squarely in the middle and pretend that there is no right or wrong answer when facts point clearly to one side over the other. In many situations, there is a clear and fundamental truth at stake, and not just a matter of opinion. Vaccines do not cause autism, for example, and sweeping worldwide climate change is real. Reporting on such issues as if they were controversial and unanswerable questions would be to mislead readers into thinking that established facts are mere opinions.

When trained journalists turn their well-informed and often cynical eyes on a world full of opposing opinions, murky details and obvious facts, it is their job to not only gather and separate facts from misstatements but also to ask questions about where those facts will lead us. It is their job to think of the likely consequences of a world in which each of the presidential candidates went on to be elected and then ran their administration according to their stated beliefs. Usually they do this in words or cartoons. In a world in which newspapers are quickly dying for lack of readership and most people gather the bulk of their news from online sources, the most effective way to get attention for their opinions is now to take chunks of information and spread them via Facebook or Twitter or Instagram alongside punchy visuals.

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Another page from the Boston Globe satire

By creating a stunning visual parody mini-newspaper as a warning of what could come, the Boston Globe knew that they would be able to get attention for their opinions and get people to consider consequences in a more visual, visceral and immediate fashion. They knew that they were taking an editorial risk, but that their message would be carried and discussed by thousands of news outlets and social media platforms around the world. They decided to present an editorial in visual form to get attention, yes, but they buttressed their opinions with facts, quotes and context in the way of a warning. This is their Orwellian admonishment to those who will not bother to read newspapers or consider facts anymore.

The job of any editorial board is to get attention and sway opinion by asking people to consider the consequences of their choices. Those who raise the alarm that the Boston Globe has now shown itself willing to trick people with fake news are the same people who haven’t bothered to actually look at the well-produced parody itself, nor to consider that they get much of their own information from avowedly conservative sources with axes to grind who are more than willing to publish opinion and pretend that it is fact.

As has happened throughout history, a large proportion of the population is bored by and tired of politics and won’t read the facts about the candidates’ actual stances on substantive issues. The average citizen of the U.S. only thinks of the candidates in broad, cartoonish terms without thinking through what the consequences of our electoral choices may be. People justify their political agnosticism and ennui by saying that all candidates are equally corrupt and evil and all of them will lead to the same bad outcomes, so their votes are meaningless and futile. This is demonstrably false.

Being a good citizen requires mental effort and a willingness to expend some time and expose one’s opinions to rigor. Lives and livelihoods depend on it. Rights are won and lost over such things. People starve or go without medicine or surgery because of politics. Wars begin and end, countries are invaded and people go to jail or are freed or executed based on the choices we make at the polls. The stakes are so incredibly high that those who spend their lives following politics obsessively and who report on these issues feel they have a duty to use every tool they have in order to get us to sit up and take notice when it’s time for us to make life-changing, world-altering decisions. The Boston Globe has done this using pointed and potent (and clearly labeled) satire. I applaud them for it.

Articles, Film & Television

The Revenant: Revelatory and Remarkable

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At the core of this grim film about pain, loss and revenge,  The Revenant is a story about steel-cored adventurers whose every day is full of extreme but self-imposed hardships. This film, a fictionalized account of the story of actual 19th century fur trapper Hugh Glass, shows better than any other the brutal conditions under which fur trappers lived on North America’s frontier. Nature is a living, breathing, bloody-clawed character in this film, as much a part of the cast as Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Hardy. Emmanuel Lubezki’s cinematography is stunning: he captures both nature’s grandeur and man’s brutality in this film.

Stories in which characters face extreme adversity allow actors to emote more dramatically, showing not only their acting ability but also their willingness to suffer for their art. When an epic is directed, shot, acted and edited this masterfully, the arc of the story, the flow of action, the building of character and the depth of each loss all reverberate more intensely within the viewer’s heart.

The Revenant overflows with evident extremes: constant cold (which left the actors courting hypothermia and frostbite more than once); bloody brutality; heaving, spitting, screaming vengeance; terrifying physical danger; a highly protective mother bear; hand-to-hand combat between invading white trackers and indigenous Native Americans; horses undergoing the worst possible disasters; even creatures seeking respite in the dead bodies of other creatures. It is to the great credit of the cast, and DiCaprio and Hardy in particular, that these characters feel not like strutting caricatures of good and evil but like actual human beings.

The scenes involving closeups that show flickers of the subtlest emotions are as thrilling as those involving CGI bears, horses or eviscerations. Hardy is almost unrecognizable, not only because of the facial hair and prosthetic scalped pate but also because of his quirky accent with its unexpected twangs and turns. His character is thoroughly unlikable, but also so uneasy that we can never trust ourselves to know him or anticipate his next move. Despicable as his actions may be, his motivations are clear, yet he leaves us perpetually off our guard. This keeps this long, intense movie from sinking under the weight of his character’s badness. In a year that also saw him give laudable performances in Mad Max: Fury Road and in Legend, the brutal but entertaining story of London’s deranged mobsters Ronnie and Reggie Kray, Hardy’s stunning portrayal of brooding, bloody John Fitzgerald in The Revenant is a career highlight.

After giving so many fine performances in his long career, Leonardo DiCaprio truly earned his Oscar for The Revenant. I was first moved by him when he was a talented teen giving stunning performances in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? and This Boy’s Life.  With the exception of Titanic, which I thought elicited some of his and Kate Winslet’s worst performances, I’ve watched his career unfold with great pleasure. His role in The Revenant has all the Oscar-friendly elements—the physical hardship, extremes of pain, fear, loss and vengeance—but it also requires that we utterly believe in the living, breathing reality of his character’s plight, and that we want to stay with him through each new horror despite our own great discomfort.

If the story were just about a wronged man seeking vengeance, we might grow tired of the chase or grow to hate the man who seeks revenge, but this long saga, which focuses heavily on DiCaprio during long solitary scenes, lets us feel and sympathize with the reasons behind his vengeance. We sense his great pain, his loss and his essential decency because Leo insists that we do. DiCaprio’s character must impress us with his fortitude and his ability to surmount the nearly insurmountable, time and time again, but in order to care about him we must be constantly reminded of his vulnerability, and no actor today is better able to display alternating vulnerability and quick-on-his-feet mental resourcefulness than Leonardo DiCaprio.

Director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s treatment of the story incorporates scenes of silent, lyrical natural beauty in the sweeping manner of director Terrence Malick. The two share the ability to step back from an engrossing, intense situation and remind us of the environment in which it takes place, allowing the audience to breathe. They let us rebalance ourselves to better evaluate the mental states of the characters to whom we feel so closely drawn. These directors share a penchant for magical realism and sensual naturalism, something that was evident in Iñárritu’s award-winning direction of the fantastical (and Oscar-winning) film The Birdman. That film was alternately claustrophobic and expansive, with the most explosive and off-putting scenes taking place within the confines of a theater, and the true expression of the main character taking place during bursts of real or imagined flight. In The Birdman, Iñárritu allows us to believe that a man can feel trapped and caged while alone in a barren landscape or free to fly while sitting cross-legged in a tiny theater dressing room, his mind miles away from his levitating body.

The Birdman threatened always to drift away into the realms of the irrational while simultaneously forcing the audience and the characters to face life’s real limitations and gravitational pull. The Revenant explores what it’s like to be bound to earth by pain, determination and oppressive nature while being urged forward by elements of the indomitable human spirit that are eternal, ineffable and stronger than gravity: one human being’s love for another, and a determination that even death might be conquered in order to honor and hold onto the spirits of those whom we have loved and lost.

Literature, Oddments

The Amorous Adventures of Bigfoot

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Above: A classic story of Bigfoot’s sexcapades from the late, lamented Weekly World News

There’s apparently a burgeoning market for a type of writing that could likely make me a tidy living if I didn’t mind writing sketchy, skeevy stories for money: it’s mythical creature erotica. I could even customize it for different localities and sell it in downloadable format on Amazon. Numerous enterprising young writers are making living wages by doing just that for an array of erotic niche markets: Minotaur erotica, troll porn, stories of hot and heavy encounters with dinosaurs and the ever-popular stories of scantily clad 40-foot-tall women running amok. (The market for stories about giant women is apparently surprisingly large according to David Sedaris.) If I wrote naughty Seattle-based mythical creature stories, I think the first one would have to begin like this:

“Brooke’s heaving bosom strained at the zipper of her olive green REI hoodie. Her pegged jeans were ripped and frayed, and she’d already lost a grande flat white AND a Teva sandal in the tussle with the eight-foot-tall beast. Drizzle was falling on the sculpture park, and the musky fur of the hairy behemoth who had dragged her away from the rhododendrons and toward the water began to curl in the damp air. She twisted and turned in the monster’s grip, and as he held her aloft, the big-footed brute was momentarily blinded by the glare from her septum ring which dazzled his monstrously large yet limpid eyes.

‘Ooook! Ook hmmmurgle’ he growled and grumbled, his breath reeking of salmon. He pulled her down hard into his chest, then fumbled for her iPhone. Grabbing it roughly from her hands before she could text her yoga teacher to ask for help, Sasquatch hurled Brooke’s last connection to civilization into Elliott Bay before he flung her over his matted shoulder with his huge, hirsute arms. Her asymmetrical lavender hair flew into his face, her tattooed fists bashed and battered his hot, hairy back, but he only grunted his assent: he liked his hipsters nice and feisty.”

But don’t you worry—in the end it turns out that our heroine and her hairy antagonist are just heavily into role-play. Brooke uses her safe word, her big-footed boyfriend respects her boundaries, and they put on vintage flannel shirts and then go out for Moscow mules and truffle fries at their favorite Belltown pub afterwards. It IS Seattle, after all.

Art, History

Jervis McEntee and the Hudson River School

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Jervis McEntee’s “Autumn Landscape,” 1867

“I start with no new vows or resolutions but with a fervent hope that I may be diligent, truthful and able to resist temptation in whatever form and to have the courage and the will to live up to my ideal of a true life.” — Painter Jervis McEntee’s diary entry from January 1, 1883

 

Jervis McEntee was a member of the Hudson River School of American painters, a mid-19th century art movement known for romantic, poetic landscape paintings. McEntee’s works frequently feature autumnal subject matter and an earth-toned palette, which lends his work a melancholic air. “Some people call my landscapes gloomy and disagreeable,” McEntee wrote in his journal. “They say that I paint the sorrowful side of Nature, that I am attracted by the shadows more than by the sunshine. But this is a mistake. I would not reproduce a late November scene if it saddened me or seemed sad to me. In that season of the year Nature is not sad to me, but quiet, pensive, restful. She is not dying, but resting.”

 

While McEntee never had the success of some of the better-known members of the group, such as Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, he was a close friend and traveling companion to major Hudson River School artists. Though best known for his quiet and solitary paintings, McEntee socialized regularly with other artists. He and his wife Gertrude, a singer, welcomed many painters, writers and performers into their home. Together they encouraged the arts in America much as French salonnières of the 17th and 18th century had done.

 

Upon McEntee’s death, his mentor Frederic Church wrote to the painter’s sister, saying, “You have lost a brother and I a lifelong friend—a man pure, upright and as modest as he was gifted.” McEntee kept detailed diaries describing his interactions with artists, his travels, exhibitions and prices of paintings sold at them and his chronic economic woes. While I find his paintings evocative and moving, he is today best appreciated for his diaries, which are kept in the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art. They give rich and fascinating insights into the lives of 19th-century American artists.
 
History, Politics & Current Affairs

Nothing to Fear But Fear Itself

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President Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the following statement during a campaign speech in November 1940, just over a year before the U.S. entered World War II:

“We are a nation of many nationalities, many races, many religions—bound together by a single unity, the unity of freedom and equality. Whoever seeks to set one nationality against another, seeks to degrade all nationalities. Whoever seeks to set one race against another seeks to enslave all races. Whoever seeks to set one religion against another, seeks to destroy all religion. “

This is a noble statement, but the president himself made the grave error of rounding up all people of Japanese descent and imprisoning them in internment camps during World War II on the baseless assumption that they would be less patriotic, loyal or law-abiding than people of other ancestries. He was wrong. Not one single Japanese-American was determined to have committed a treasonous act anywhere in the United States before, during or after World War II. Not one.

Indeed, many of those same Japanese-Americans fought nobly for the U.S. and Allied Forces during World War II, even as their families were imprisoned at home. FDR’s words quoted here are right and beautiful, but even he was blinded by fear. He had said at the outset of his presidency that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, and fear is certainly the source of hatred for people and ideas other than our own. Fear makes us turn inward, and that allows us to remain ignorant, to refuse to empathize, ask questions or try to figure out how it feels to be one of those people who frighten us.

Fear keeps us from facing the humanity of our enemies, and makes us see enemies among our friends. It makes American governors look at orphaned Syrian toddlers and see danger; it makes Trump rally audiences look at a single African-American man who asks to be treated as if black lives matter, and then beat him to a pulp because he peacefully but loudly speaks up about bigotry in public. It is only by seeing others as human first that we can figure out how to talk to and deal with them honestly, honorably and peacefully.

[Image source: missrevolutionaries.com]

History, Politics & Current Affairs

Einstein Was a Refugee

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When Albert Einstein came to the U.S. to escape persecution by the Nazis, prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh were warning the nation of the dangers of letting outsiders into the country. He and many popular politicians, religious leaders and businessmen (like Henry Ford) got on the radio, lobbied politicians, published antisemitic books and pamphlets and joined with white supremacist organizations to spread fear and hatred toward Jews. Many said that Jews were communist agitators without morals who would infiltrate the American way of life, degrade American culture and destroy Christian values. So this supposedly Christian nation turned away Jewish refugees out of irrational fear based on a lack of understanding of others’ religious and cultural beliefs. And it’s happening again. One state government after another is shutting its doors to Syrian refugees, describing them as dangerous jihadists and assuming that Muslims are all wild desert people without morals. ISIS/ISIL/Daesh wants a religious war, and we’re playing right into their hands. Don’t let us harden our hearts against refugees based on irrational fear. Don’t let the terrorists win.

Film & Television, Music

Dangerous Gems: The Subversive Music of Thomas Newman

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Some film score composers have styles so distinctive that one can tell from hearing just a few measures of one of their compositions exactly who wrote it. Danny Elfman’s bold, busy, occasionally bombastic scores for Tim Burton’s movies have a particular power and energy, and it’s hard to imagine Alfred Hitchcock’s films without Bernard Herrman‘s sweeping, urgent orchestral pieces. Randy Newman’s scores usually have a bit of his trademark ragtime shuffle somewhere, and sometimes a touch of Aaron Copland to them, and Randy’s cousin, the fellow film-score-composer Thomas Newman, has his own compositional quirks that often make his work especially compelling and recognizable. His penchant for odd instruments, time signatures and percussion make his compositions unlike anyone else’s.

The scores of Thomas Newman are distinctive in their use of unusual time signatures, heavily percussive instrumentation and unrecognizable sounds created by his collection of rare instruments, all layered together in rich and unexpected ways. His scores have included the sounds of the zither, hurdy-gurdy, psaltery and hammered dulcimer, aboriginal chants, and even the chirping of cicadas. He weaves synthesizers and lush string arrangements in among the more organic sounds, and alters his sonic findings to create aural oddities that nobody has heard before.

Newman’s theme to the groundbreaking HBO television series Six Feet Under was created primarily with recognizable instruments—strings and reeds, for example—that are overlaid with washes of dissonant, shimmering, zithery sounds that remind one of harp glissandi but aren’t. They are then warmed by melodic oboe lines and set off by strange background sounds similar to the low squeaks one accidentally makes when rubbing wet wine glasses in a tub of suds. For the film WALL•E, Newman collaborated with Peter Gabriel to create the Oscar-nominated song “Down to Earth,” a perfect melding of synthesized, metallic, otherworldly sounds and rich, earthy, very human voices. The song sounds at once very much like Newman while being perfectly in sync with Gabriel’s body of work, and is a delicious auditory morsel that’s quite an appropriate accompaniment to the story of the film.

Newman has worked extensively with the innovative director Sam Mendes, and his haunting and anxiety-provoking scores provide powerful backdrops for all but one of Mendes’s angst-filled films. These include Spectre, American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road, Skyfall and Jarhead. It is also hard to imagine the moody and intense Frank Darabont films The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile without the oppressive sonic blankets that Newman created to press down on us and make us feel the fear and claustrophobia inherent to prison life.

Often Newman draws out discordant musical phrases and refuses to resolve them, leaving us feeling perplexed, nervous and worried. His theme to Revolutionary Road is a simple, repetitive piano tune layered with cymbals and repeating string lines that serves to build a deep reservoir of pain that cannot be released, just as the film does. Hopeful woodwinds peek up among the swirling strings at times, like a drowning swimmer trying to rise up for air before sinking below the surface one last time. The piece “Road to Chicago” from the intense and underrated Sam Mendes film Road to Perdition also begins with a simple piano motif, but then it hums with danger as washes of strings begin to press down on the piano tune. We wait for the chords to resolve but they only recede, pulling us far down a lonesome road, fading like the lights on a car driving into a dark, cold night.

The score for Jarhead brims with the intensity and violence of war, jolting the audience to attention with discordant Middle Eastern-sounding motifs played on stringed instruments mingled with synthesizers and insistent percussion, the unrecognizably altered sounds stirring fear in our hearts and melting our brains like waves of heat in the deserts of the Persian Gulf.

Born in 1955, Newman is the son of legendary composer and conductor Alfred Newman, who was the composer of scores for over 200 films and the winner of nine Oscars, an achievement that no other film composer has ever matched. Thomas has himself been nominated for (but not won) twelve Oscars and has won two BAFTAs, six Grammys and an Emmy. While he is best known for his film work, he was first interested in musical theater, just as his father had been, and while he was at Yale young Thomas was mentored by Stephen Sondheim. He then moved to Hollywood to follow in the footsteps of his father and his celebrated uncle Lionel Newman, another major player in Hollywood history who himself composed scores for over 200 films as well as a number of classic TV show theme songs. Another uncle, Emil Newman, was also an accomplished Hollywood conductor of long standing.

Newman’s work, like that of his frequent collaborator Sam Mendes, is as unsettling as it is beautiful. Both are intended to push us out of our comfort zones, nudging us to see something stylish and beautiful among the shadows and ruins. Mendes’s work uncovers the sinister forces lurking near us and sometimes within us, and his films ask us to stare uncomfortably at the black cracks in our own psyches. Newman’s music is like the dark music that rises from those cracks—haunting, frightening, altogether new yet somehow familiar. His music and Mendes’s films also present to us a painful yearning and loneliness that can seemingly never be filled. That hollow, empty quality is what makes their darkest works so frightening yet so brilliant, so recognizable and unfathomable all at once. They are dark masters and their creations are dangerous gems.