While some of Ricky Martin’s songs refer to things that are important to many, such as love, friendship, and family, I would not say that the songs reveal their importance or addto the meaning of their importance. This—Ricky Martin’s Life—is a forcefully entertaining recording—rigorously planned and executed, and though performed with some charm and energy, I would not confuse that with spontaneity or deep sincerity.
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A review of The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Alan Hollinghurst has talent, and talent for which he has won awards, but his expression of that talent seems limited by the assumptions he has inherited and accepted about the subjects he handles—and also by his consciousness of the effects…
A review of Eva Cassidy’s Songbird
“I Know You By Heart,” written by Diane Scanlon and Eve Nelson, is about the lasting intimacy of love, and Cassidy’s version of “People Get Ready” is the best version of the Curtis Mayfield song I’ve heard. Pete Seeger’s “Oh, Had I A Golden Thread,” apparently one of Cassidy’s favorite songs, has a wistfully maternal quality, while Harburg and Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow” skirts various sentimental associations but Cassidy does not embarrassingly indulge them.
A Great Singer, Not a Great Record: Al Green’s Everything’s OK
Al Green is a great singer, but Everything’s OK is not a great album. Should I say more? Al Green is an advising, asking, and beseeching man, a bragging, confirming, declaring, and desiring man, explaining, thanking, moaning, murmuring, proposing, remembering, seducing, sighing, soothing, and…surrendering. How do I know? It is in his singing—usually; however, I found his collection of songs Everything’s OK less than revelatory, actually disappointing.
Seeing Palestine from Italy: Private, directed by Saverio Costanzo
Of what use is a film or video, a work that gives us more of the images that we have seen—of cruelty—on the television news; of more of the questions that poets and professors have tried to speak to many of us for decades; of more of the history we have known, forgotten, known, and forgotten again? Privatemakes it possible for us to believe we are seeing individuals, that we are being given true emotions and thoughts.
A review of Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
But however present the moral question is in this story, it is never directly raised, and Ishiguro resists the urge to make it obvious. If these people are artistic and capable of love, is their tragedy any greater? If they…
A review of Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson
What is extraordinary about these stories is the intense fragility of the voice, which has an almost otherworldly texture sometimes. Or rather, no: not otherworldly. Instead, it is a voice that seems able to encompass both the next world and…
A Master of Music, Math, and Chess: Anthony Braxton’s Duets and Three Compositions of New Jazz
I haven’t listened to jazz in the last several years as much as I used to, as I have been impatient to hear direct and explicit thoughts, though there’s an expansive feel to jazz that I miss: and Anthony Braxton, devoted to music, mathematics, and chess, is a legendary and legendarily complex figure, and he has been the subject of various critical studies, including Forces in Motion: The Music and Thoughts of Anthony Braxton by Graham Lock (Da Capo, 1988) and The Music of Anthony Braxton by Mike Heffley (Greenwood Publishing, 1996).
Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers: Poverty and Possibility, Heroism and Decadence in Italy
How one family supports and exploits its members is shown—their connection to each other is strained, it breaks: the family is revealed as a primitive tribe, a complex but primitive tribe, part of a society that replicates (and inspires) the family’s impulses. Visconti, an aristocrat, treats these peasants and workers with a respect that is hard to imagine their equals in American film, especially those who are African-American or Latino, receiving even at this time: Rocco and his brothers are allowed moments of transcendence.
New Stereotypes: Carroll & Graf’s Freedom in this Village
The book assumes that race and homosexuality (blackness and gayness) are real categories, and draws part of its authority from the social and historical importance these subjects have been given by many people through the years, but the idea of race is as suspect as the idea of strict sexual orientations. Skin is not a significant emblem of existential being (despite hundreds of years of western racialism, and the 1930s Negritude movement in Africa, France, Haiti, and Martinique, and the 1960s/70s black arts movement in the United States).