newcritics

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In John Baker’s thought-provoking, elegant new novel, “Winged With Death,” the past leads the present in an unstoppable tango.
The past is 1970s-80s Montevideo, Uruguay, where the military dictatorship is burying people alive, and a milonguero, a master of the tango, dances in cellar salons. The present is present-day York, England, where the dancer [...]

Two nights ago, sitting in a small outdoor park hidden in the Wall Street area within view of New York Harbor, we saw Imitation of Life, a 1959 movie directed by Douglas Sirk.
Film experts like The Self-Styled Siren and NCYweboy can tell you all about the cinematography and the way different scenes work. But the [...]

For our anniversary, Manny and I saw the Classic Stage Company’s production of Chekov’s “The Seagull.” Like any time-honored masterpiece, the play overwhelmed me to the point where I hesitate to comment, since whatever I write will naturally be trite, silly, or as the characters often complain, “boring.”
That’s a major joke in the [...]

Not what you might think. For the first anniversary of newcritics (yeah, newcritics!), founder Tom Watson has asked for a few posts about “one bit of media that touched your life in the last year.” Perhaps not as confounding as “To be or not to be…” in Hamlet, the text which has recently enthralled me, [...]

Until recently, I could find little tolerance for anyone’s “love me, love my favorite rock band” attitude. It harked back to when I was a teenager and a serial girlfriend to guitar-playing boys. The guys talked about their favorite music for hours. If I disagreed out loud, I would leave the scene an ex-girlfriend. Their [...]

This morning, before Manny and I visited the National Museum of the American Indian’s exhibit on North Pacific tribes, it occurred to me that while some music we hate and some we love, there’s also music we need. At least, there’s music I need. It informs most of my day, every day. For the last [...]

Last night we attended the most upsweeping, coolest, most thrilling live jazz show I’ve had the joy to get captivated by in ages. Archie Shepp’s tenor sax carries the old-school sweetness you hear in classics by Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins. His tone is that mellifluous but his performance is wild, ecstatic, and a political [...]

Valerie Martin’s new novel, Trespass, achieves a rare balance between a powerful anti-war message and contemporary literature. Martin’s first novel since her Orange Prize-winning Property, Trespass portrays a privileged, intellectual family, Chloe and Brendan Dale and their cherished son, Toby, a junior at NYU. Chloe is frankly jealous of her son’s lovers, and especially so [...]

Perhaps it should surprise no one that this middle-aged white woman with no formal musical education enjoys hip hop so much. My daughter works for an indie record label and her boyfriend is a hip hop deejay and producer. Consider, though, that I loved listening to hip hop back when both it and I were [...]

Ms. Allen-Yazzie’s debut novel, The Arc and the Sediment, gives us a woman’s answer to the classic men on the road going nowhere novel. Her protagonist and narrator, Gretta, struggles mightily with the same turbulent hallmarks of American literature’s bad boys: taking to the road, driving fast and drunk, and searching for the elusive center of his (her) being.

But as a mother, Gretta is never going to be as independent as a man. Her desires will always circle back to her children. She hesitates and worries as she drives an old Chevy truck in search of her children’s father, an American Indian (or Native American—the political preference being in flux). Her babies cry and call for her, long for her and she for them even as she indulges in pints of Gilbey’s gin, or roadside, midnight sex.

In her failing truck, Gretta’s trip, from Ponticello, Idaho to Fort Defiance, Arizona, should take a little more than twelve hours. There she plans to ask her children’s father, Lance Bitsilly, a Navaho, if he will return with her to resurrect their marriage and family. If Lance would rejoin her and they were to drive directly home—or even if she were to learn she must drive back alone—the trip—and her babysitter—should require a day and a night and perhaps a part of the following day.

A friend, knowing my love for jazz, gave me two tickets to the Tribeca Film Festival for Anita O’Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer. Manny and I, already exhausted–it’s only Monday night–dragged each other to the packed theater on 11th Street. Now we are back and jazzed.

What a talent and what a life. From the age of 19, Anita O’Day , until she died Thanksgiving morning, 11/26/2006, sang, swung with big bands, bebopped with Charlie Parker, and proceeded into a solo career in which she matched Ella, Billie, and Sarah in her ability to make songs her own, not to mention her brilliant vocal improvisations. Perhaps the high point in her career–which was very much her life itself–was her performance at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival. She sang “Sweet Georgia Brown,” starting oh so slowly and then breaking out into a sexy rendition unlike any other. If you want to know why people make a fuss about Anita O’Day, watch the clip.

In the last six weeks, I’ve read comments by established writers declaring that “bad fiction writers” be stopped.
As a diligent but mostly unknown fiction writer, I beg to differ. The inherent quality of fiction, the pronouncement that it’s good or bad, is entirely subjective. Beyond that, fiction requires shelf-life. Many of our best writers finish [...]

Keith Lee Morris’ short story, Testimony, in the latest issue of A Public Space (03) is among the best I’ve read, which is saying a lot, since I have been reading mostly short stories for a year. On the surface, it is a straightforward tale in which a first-person narrator, under questioning in court, relates [...]