Scarlet Poppies and Ultramarine Butterflies: The Language of Color
The Allentown Art Museum
Please Stand By
Tim Higgins
Digital Art Exhibition
Bethlehem Town Hall
Rotunda Gallery
Lehigh Art Alliance’s Plein Air Nazareth Exhibit Nazareth Center for the Arts
JUNE/JULY
Though beloved as the Blue Note jazz label’s current president (for the last 15 years) and a renowned producer for artists as wide-ranging as the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, the B-52s, Wayne Shorter, Bob Dylan, Charles Lloyd, Iggy Pop, Willie Nelson, and John Mayer, Was’ own artistry has always been his ace in the hole.
SUSAN SEIDELMAN
“I think I am always interested in telling unusual stories about women who act against the grain, who are interesting. If you look at everything that I’ve done on film that I chose to make — feature or short — is about strong women in unusual situations. Or even ordinary women in unusual situations.”
The intersection of art, entertainment, culture, nightlife and mad genius.
Since 1992
215-862-9558 icondv.com
PUBLISHER & EDITOR
Trina McKenna trina@icondv.com
ADVERTISING
Raina Filipiak filipiakr@comcast.net
PRODUCTION
Joanne Smythe
How
Mariana Giorgino
WRITERS
A.D. Amorosi
Ricardo Barros
Robert Beck
Geoff Gehman
Fredricka Maister
David Stoller
Keith Uhlich PO Box 120 New Hope 18938 215-862-9558
THE EARTH IS SOFTunder my feet. It’s rarely disturbed or compacted here, and the natural freeze and thaw cycle keeps it supple. Here and there are small areas of flowered ground cover—maroon, yellow, and blue passages playing harmony to the Spring green carpet. The groundskeeper has avoided those with his mower, possibly to let them complete their quiet song. It’s that kind of place.
On this sunny day, lazy, vaporous clouds sail in the cobalt sky—the best blue of the year. The dogwoods are flowering white, and the cher-
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Robert Beck is a painter, writer, lecturer and ex-radio host. His paintings have been featured in more than seventy juried and thirty solo gallery shows, and three solo museum exhibitions. His column has appeared monthly in ICON Magazine since 2005. www.robertbeck.net
STORY & PAINTING BY ROBERT BECK
exhibitions
Please Stand By
Tim Higgins Digital Art Exhibition
Bethlehem Town Hall Rotunda Gallery
10 E. Church St., Bethlehem, PA bfac-lv.org
July 3–August 13
Monday-Friday, 8–4
Reception: Sunday, July 14, 2–4
Scarlet Poppies and Ultramarine Butterflies: The Language of Color
The Allentown Art Museum
31 North Fifth Street, Allentown, PA 610-432-4333 AllentownArtMuseum.org
Through September 29, 2024
In his 1814 book Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, Scottish painter Patrick Syme sought to create a reference for use across the arts and sciences. Featuring affixed color samples that defined colors through examples from the natural world—“animal, vegetable, and mineral”—the guide was used by naturalist Charles Darwin during the collecting expeditions that led to his theory of evolution.
Inspired by Werner’s Nomenclature, this exhibition presents a selection of artworks in which color predominates. Visual artists’ explorations of color remind us of the unique way in which we each see the world. For example, artist Georgia O’Keeffe related her painting Red and Orange Streak (1919) to what she heard on the plains: “The cattle in the pens lowing for the calves day and night was a sound that has always haunted me.… It was loud and raw under the stars in that wide empty country.”
The Language of Color is curated by Elaine Mehalakes, vice president of curatorial affairs at the Allentown Art Museum. This is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.
Lehigh Valley artist Tim Higgins is a multi-disciplinary artist who has worked in graphics, painting and short film. His works are composed of hundreds of collaged images and elements depicting themes from comics, pulp fiction, TV, film and everyday life. High Art meets Low Art as Tim creates new works from material originally sourced or appropriated from a variety of media. The works are printed on paper and framed or mounted on glass.
Lehigh Art Alliance’s Plein Air Nazareth Exhibit
Nazareth Center for the Arts
30 Belvidere Street, Nazareth, PA 484-554-5867 www.nazaretharts.org
Opening Reception on Sun., 6/9, 1–3pm June 7–July 13
Hours: 12–3PM
LAA Plein Air Nazareth event and exhibit is held yearly in the month of May with plenty of time and opportunity to paint Plein Air around Nazareth, Pennsylvania. This event is a fun, low stress activity to promote plein air and The Nazareth Center for the Arts. Please join us for the 5th Annual LAA Plein Air exhibition at the Nazareth Center for the Arts with a portion of the proceeds to benefit NCA. The LAA Award for Best Nazareth Scene will be announced at the Reception on June 9.
Sonia Delaunay, Blaise Cendrars: The Prose of the Transsiberian and of Little Jehanne of France (detail), 1913, pochoir with hand coloring and type on paper. Allentown Art Museum: purchase, Leigh Schadt and Edwin Schadt Art Museum Trust Fund, 2000
Please Stand By
Tyranny of Nature
Kristin Kjorlaug, Water Lilies (detail), watercolor
Wendy Stoudt, Stone Barn House, oil
the art of poetry
Big Fruit
In the late Cretaceous
From a steamy oasis Rose earth’s first natural fruit.
Flavors and fragrance, A savor so sweet, Was added to the soup.
Jumbo-sized was still prized; Fruit a new “design within reach.” Eons later, a taste so sublime — The pleasure of a peach.
Had fruit gotten bigger, what perils unleashed —
Eating a peach, so messy and charming,
Might have occasioned a severe flood warning;
And a bite of an apple, such a crisp splendor,
Might have revealed a mammoth worm at its core.
No, we like our fruits as they are, Delicious and peculiar …
About the earliest cultivated crop — I don’t give a fig …
And no pear should be eaten alone. How happy is the peach pit — Whorled stone seed Of a fuzzed face so smooth. By the way, who needs permission To eat a persimmon?
And who gave the orange such agency?
Tell me why the coconut, So aptly named, is not a nut?
Let’s pity the creamy Paw Paw, Forgotten in its own time … Time for a rebranding!
Oh, I could die happy
If I understood how it is That the tomato is a fruit.
And finally, just to wonder — What is it about those plums, So sweet and so cold?
THIS MIXED-MEDIA PICTURE, Big Fruit, by one of Bucks County’s most noteworthy working artists, Mavis Smith, has delighted me for years. Indeed, Mavis has portrayed BIG FRUIT — note the tiny hand on top of the knife protruding from the painted surface (sorry if the three-dimensionality is hard to discern). It set me to exploring when exactly in natural history“fruit” first showed up, what its primitive antecedents to the myriad shapes, colors, and tastes of today’s modern fruit, and wondering — what if fruit took the same evolutionary turn as did the giant reptiles and mammals which thrived for millions of years, and became … big fruit! My poem, Big Fruit, is the result of such considerations and Mavis’s unique way of presenting a surreal edge (the knife’s edge?) to seemingly serene images, hinting at something stranger, darker perhaps
Mavis’s career included early work as an illustrator of children’s books. She later developed her celebrated painting technique with egg tempura, a medium exquisitely suited to her ability to create intricate detail and luminous layers of color. She has continued to expand the scope of her work, more recently into larger scale works in oil and graphite, like her Thicket series, depicting twisted roots and branches that seem to pull away from the canvas and envelop the viewer — generating the same sense of nature’s mysteries lurking just beneath the surface that one finds in her painting Big Fruit. One final note on the poem — the last lines allude to a favorite poem by William Carlos Williams, This Is Just To Say, a wonderful and strange poem about fruit. Plums in this case. n
David Stoller has had a career spanning law, private equity, and entrepreneurial leadership. He was a partner at Milbank Tweed and led various companies in law, insurance, live entertainment, and the visual arts. David is an active art collector and founder of River Arts Press, which published a collection of his poetry, Finding My Feet
DAVID STOLLER
portfolio
HOW ART MUSEUMS COLLECT
MANY ARTISTS DO NOT understand how art museums choose artworks for their collections. It is a fallacy that "only the best" pieces are selected. To begin with, every museum has particular areas of interest. Examples may include regional painters, photography, civil rights, and feminist art. Your only chance of getting in is if your work matches their interest. Then, assuming a favorable match, does another artist already fill your niche in their collection? If not, which of all possible matching artists is most emblematic of the genre? And for that artist, which piece is most representative? Sometimes, museums acquire early works by a mature artist to tell the story of that artist's development. Or, as Harvard Art Museums' curators ask, "How does this work relate to, complement, or challenge our existing collections and narratives?"
And then there is the horse-trading. Many museums have different curators for various media, and they all compete for the same acquisition funds. One curator told me that their museum acquires through a voting process. In presenting a work for acquisition, a curator must make a compelling case for the artist and artwork and then receive their colleagues' support. A favorable outcome is never assured.
Remember that museums seek to curate, preserve, and present important ideas and significant artworks. Their time frame is "forever". In
stark contrast, we artists live in the moment. Museum acquisitions intentionally lag behind recent developments to ensure that the artwork under consideration stands the test of time.
Moreover, museums are acutely aware of their responsibilities once they acquire an artwork. Their first consideration is housing. Like everyone else's, museum storage space is finite. As importantly, there are overhead costs associated with maintaining an artwork. Temperature and humidity control, secure facilities, staffing, and maintenance are among them. Darkened paintings may need restoration. Patinas may need periodic treatment to resist atmospheric degradation. Aged or fragile materials may need repair. There is a cost for all this. In accepting an artwork, the museum agrees to pay this recurring bill forever.
It is a noble endeavor to seek museum acquisition, but for their own well-being, artists should understand how museums collect and why they are so selective. They should know that museums routinely pass on acquiring genuinely great artworks. Yes, artists whose works are collected are undoubtedly talented. Among talented artists, though, those who clearly articulate how their work aligns with the museums' interests will have an advantage. Yet even those artists must hope for fortuitous timing, just like the rest of us. n
Ricardo Barros’ works are in the permanent collections of eleven museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He is the author of Facing Sculpture: A Portfolio of Portraits, Sculpture and Related Ideas
PHOTOGRAPH AND ESSAY BY RICARDO BARROS
the list
VALLEY
GEOFF GEHMAN
Jerry Seinfeld seems to be that rare comedian who seems really happy offstage. He’s got a loving family, a ton of money, and successful projects galore: talking shop with fellow funny folks in his vintage sports cars; reuniting with his Seinfeld pals on Curb Your Enthusiasm; directing and costarring in a fictional film about the cut-throat race to introduce a toasted, frosted, fruit-filled breakfast snack. His solo shows are perennially popular, with Seinfeld dispensing wry, sly musings about minutiae, turning foibles into navel lint. The last time The Last Standup Standing squirmed a bit was during the making of the 2002 documentary Comedian, which follows his post-Seinfeld pot-holed path to creating his first new act in 15 years. (July 26, Wind Creek Event Center, 77 Wind Creek Blvd., Bethlehem; 610-297-7414; windcreekeventcenter.com)
Richard Thompson is a champion chameleon. The singing, composing guitarist excels at waltzes and dirges, brutal romances and beautiful kiss-offs, exquisite yearning and endearing sneering. Who else could have dreamed up a minstrel ode to a red-haired lass, a doomed thief and an exotic motorcycle? (Well, maybe Mark Knopfler). He surfs the wavelengths on his latest album, Ship to Shore, siphoning Motown and 1930s Berlin cabaret, inhabiting snake-oil peddlers and a traumatized soldier. He considers himself a musical siren, seducing with rosy melodies and pricking with thorny lyrics. (July 26, Musikfest Café, 101 Founders Way, Bethlehem; 610-297-7100; steelstacks.org)
The Merry Wives of Windsor revives Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s most
CONTINUED ON PAGE 24
CITY
Combining summer’s first months into one neat package is a happy task as it takes the June-July burden from Independence Day. Treat July 4’s fire hydrants, burger brawls, and hot-tempered hot dog events as part of a longer continuum, and you nearly miss the messiness of what wrong will be done in the name of freedom.
June 11 at Lincoln Financial Field is a time for Hackney Diamonds and the return of The Rolling Stones. It goes without saying that every time Jagger, Richards, Wood, and Co play out now, it is a race to death as the collective age of those three men alone averages out to be 240 years old. But they’re making old age into nothing but a tiny-minded number with such rocking-out rage and agility in the toughed-up tone
of their newest music. Besides, while none of us will be here forever, The Rolling Stones are closer to their close as they are their start and sound as if they’re making the most out of every second. Plus, this is their first time in Philly without late, original Stones drummer Charlie Watt — pouring a 40-ouncer out at the 50-yard line.
On June 20, if you are both any kind of Phillies fan and country music aficionado, you’re at the Tim McGraw show at Wells Fargo Center. Maybe you’ve only recently witnessed McGraw on Taylor Sheridan westerns recently, and maybe you haven’t heard a Tim tune recently.
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A.D. AMOROSI
CITY / CONTINUED FROM PAGE 12
But in the Delaware Valley, he’ll always be the Tugger’s kid – the son of the late. great, championship-winning Philadelphia Phillies pitcher and all-around good guy Tug McGraw. Find a seventh inning stretch during Tim’s concert, and stretch it for Tug.
June is Pride Month throughout the entirety of Philadelphia, and while several key LGBTQIA+ events and activities will be happening on June 8’s Pine Street part and QUEERAPALOOZA block party and music festival hosted by Giovanni’s Room is the hugest of live queer band blasts and drag queen extravaganzas. If you want to do something equally gay but less Pride noisy, check out June 25 afternoon and evening at Ensemble Arts’ Kimmel Center, checking out its Commonwealth Plaza pop-up drag performances for free, then wait for the main event at 7 pm with Conductor Designate Marin Alsop, RuPaul’s Drag Race star Sapphira Cristál, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the ANNA Crusis Feminist Choir, The Philadelphia Gay Men’s Chorus and Philadelphia Voices of Pride in Verizon Hall for a concert of music by Bernstein, Copland and other queer and allied composers. Wow, that’s a mindful mouthful.
When playwright, poet, and fashionista Roger Q. Mason joins forces with Philadelphia Theatre Company Co-artistic director Taibi Magar and Philadelphia’s favorite actor Frank X for the existentialist rigors and the mythical Egyptian afterlife of The Duat in its world premiere production
at the Suzanne Roberts Theater until June 23… anything can happen on that stage.
From Barbra Streisand to Lea Michelle, the rags-to-riches story of Ziegfeld Follies vocalist and actor Fanny Brice has been the stage stuff
that dreams are made of. Still, the Jule Styne and Bob Merrill musical needed a tweak; they got it with an updated book from Harvey Fierstein based on the original classic by Isobel Lennart, which found itself on Broadway again and now to Broad Street and the Academy of Music on July 16 –July 28 as Funny Girl rolls on. And yes, you’ll be singing “People” loudly, no matter how corny.
With Daft Punk gone and Air mostly dematerialized, only the Parisienne men of JUSTICE are still around in order to make hard, slamming French electronic disco for the masses. On July 31 at The Met Philadelphia on North Broad, expect a rave-centric, strobelit taste of all-thingsfunky-French and loud. n
Sapphira Cristál
Frank X
Roger Q. Mason
Funny Girl at the Academy of Music
Gaspard Augué Xavier de Rosnay
WWAS & still is
Bassist-producer-Blue Note label President Don Was takes it to the next phase with his new Pan-Detroit Ensemble
WHEN GENRE-JUMBLING BASSIST, COMPOSER, producer, and Blue Note label president Don Was brings his new big band, Don Was and The Pan-Detroit Ensemble through its first live paces this spring — ending its initial run of dates June 2 at the Ardmore Music Hall — it’s as if the musical polyglot never stopped crafting his own unique sound.
Though beloved as the Blue Note jazz label’s current president (for the last 15 years) and a renowned producer for artists as wideranging as the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, the B-52s, Wayne Shorter, Bob Dylan, Charles Lloyd, Iggy Pop, Willie Nelson, and John Mayer, Was’ own artistry has always been his ace in the hole.
Along with playing bass for Grateful Dead frontman Bob Weir’s solo project The Wolf Bros, Was was the titular made-up brother within Was (Not Was), his absurdist free jazz-R&B-funk ensemble with boyhood pal David Weiss and any number of guest vocalists including Mel Torme, Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, and Ozzy Osbourne. While each Was (Not Was) album was wilder than the one before it, the duo’s last album was 2008’s Boo!, and with it, a seriously sad lack of solo music from Don Was
Don Was: We think about it all the time. If you come to my office at Blue Note, you’ll see our framed pictures of Alfred Lion, Francis Wolff, and Bruce Lundvall, the people I’ve succeeded. It’s hard to remember a time when I wasn’t doing this. I often refer to the Blue Note manifesto that its founders wrote in 1939, dedicating themselves to the pursuit of authentic music, giving artists uncompromising freedom of expression.
When I’m listening back to a session, I DON’T EVEN LIKE TO ZERO IN on things like the hi-hat. I CAN’T LISTEN FOR MISTAKES. I listen to the music as a whole. THE WHOLE HAS TO MOVE YOU.
Now Was is returning to free-form funk with Don Was and The Pan-Detroit Ensemble, which features longtime collaborators Dave McMurray on sax and Eminem’s Oscar-winning collaborator keyboardist Luis Resto among its dozen players.
I sat down with Was to discuss Blue Note Records’ 85-year-old legacy, old and new, his time with the Rolling Stones, and his newest live ensemble.
A.D. Amorosi: It’s almost 15 years since you became the Blue Note label’s president. I remember you saying at the start how privileged it would be to maintain Blue Note’s legacy while steering its present and future. Now that you are that heritage, what do you think about the challenge?
A.D. Amorosi: So you researched all this before you took the gig. Don Was: I did. I mean, I can remember buying Blue Note albums in 1966. We had to figure out what it was about this music that was still valuable, and to new generations that makes it relevant, that makes it enduring after 60, 70 years of having been recorded. In every era of the label’s history — like Thelonious Monk who mastered the fundamentals of all that came before him while creating something brand new. Not everyone does that. Many artists get the knowledge and repeat it as if it were a museum piece. Blue Note gravitated to people who always pushed the boundaries. You can say the same thing about Thelonious and Ornette Coleman in their time, Wayne Shorter and Herbie Hancock in theirs, Robert Glasper ten years ago, Joel Ross, and Immanuel Wilkins.
A.D. Amorosi: Funny you mention Immanuel, as my next question is where does the next John Coltrane come from, and my bet has been Immanuel for some time, in terms of history, spirituality, and invention.
Don Was: Before we spoke, I was listening to our new Kenny Barron album that Immanuel plays on, and something like that is the best example of how Immanuel has absorbed what came before him. You listen to his albums and you realize how he has turned all that into something brand new. That’s the essence, the whole ball of wax. Same with Joel Ross, Nduduzo Makhathini, and Aaron Parks. Their vision is to see what’s happening next. Our job is to help them realize that vision and stay out of their way. I don’t believe in shortcuts like telling musicians what to do or having them add features. I believe in the long game.
A.D. AMOROSI
A.D. Amorosi is a Los Angeles Press Club National Art and Entertainment Journalism award-winning journalist and national public radio host and producer (WPPM.org’s Theater in the Round) married to a garden-to-table cooking instructor + award-winning gardener, Reese, and father to dog-daughter Tia.
A.D. Amorosi: Do you have your finger on everything at Blue Note, the new Tone Poet Series, the fresh Lee Morgan Sidewinder reissue, the new Bill Frisell album?
Don Was: Yeah. I’m aware of everything that goes on there, and stay involved. I even produced Nduduzo’s new album. You sign artists you want and try to stay invisible. Even when I was just producing, you want to stay out of the way, like I didn’t need to leave my fingerprint on Bob Dylan’s forehead when we worked together.
A.D. Amorosi: Which itself sounds like a Bob Dylan project. Since we’re talking about producing — you did a million Rolling Stones albums, save for the new Hackney Diamonds which was produced by Andrew Watt. What do you think?
Don Was: I think it sounds amazing. Really well done. One of the things that the new album demonstrates is that if you set them in a modern-sounding context, they stand up against all other bands. Mick Jagger has wanted to do that for as long as I’ve known him. He wants to bring young people into the Stones’ fold. Keith [Richards] and I were always arguing with Mick because I had a more traditional view. However, Mick Jagger had the right to make any album he felt like making. And I didn’t want to be a force of negativity, so I stepped away. I introduced them to Andrew Watt. If they wanted to do that, they should be working with
someone who makes modern-sounding records. Don’t buy new records to see what’s going on and second guess what you’re doing. Collaborate with someone doing just that. That’s Andrew.
A.D. Amorosi: It’s interesting that you recommended Watt for the Stones as he also followed you into making records with Iggy Pop as well. Where Was goes, Watt follows.
Don Was: Andrew’s cutting his own swath, and I see parallels between him and me. Andrew reminds me of myself from thirty years ago.
A.D. Amorosi: Speaking of time passed, you’ve been working live with Bob Weir on the Wolf Brothers, and now you’re playing bass for and leading your Pan-Detroit Ensemble. How do you see and hear the evolution of your bass playing, its sound, and your sense of improvisation as a musician?
Don Was: As an improvisational musician, working with Weir did wonders. I mean I started out playing in bars with jazz guys in Detroit, so I have a background in improv. However, there’s something about how the Grateful Dead approached music with a total fearlessness that I admire. When Bob called me about playing, that was a long-range goal
CONTINUED ON PAGE 28
Don Was.
Photo courtesy of the artist.
conversation
F
REVENGE
is best served cold
Film director, producer, and writer Susan Seidelman returns to the scene of the crime
FILMMAKER SUSAN SEIDELMAN HASlong been renowned for her independently-lensed Downtown New York stories about independent women when there was still a downtown to crow about and made her way to the Cannes Film Festival when female directors were scant (her first film, 1982’s Smithereens, was the first American independent film invited to compete for Cannes’ prized Palme d’Or).
For all of her wizened NYC moxie and street-savvy comedy, the likes of which can be witnessed in classics such as Desßperately Seeking Susan (famously, Madonna’s first and still best film role), Seidelman — from an Abington childhood through to her current home in Bucks County — is a local with an eye for fashion (she studied design at Drexel University) and the French New Wave of directors such as Godard and Truffaut.
In June, Seidelman’s memoirs, Desperately Seeking Something, are published by St. Martin’s Press with a slate of reading dates and screenings of Smithereens. In the Philadelphia/Bucks County area, Seidelman will read, screen and speak at the ACME Screening Room (25 S Union St Lambertville, NJ) on June 22.
I spoke to Susan Seidelman before she left town for her Desperately Seeking Something book tour.
A.D. Amorosi: It’s fascinating that you started your book with the question, “Can you be ordinary with something extraordinary to say?” You continuously answered that question with quixotic, quirky film work. Didn’t you think you were fascinating growing up?
YOU KNOW, I THOUGHT BACK TO FRIENDS AND ASSOCIATES THAT I HAVE KNOWN WHO WROTE THEIR MEMOIRS IN THEIR 50S, AND IT SEEMED WEIRD — YOU’RE ONLY HALFWAY THROUGH.. WHAT DO YOU REALLY HAVE TO SAY?AT 70, YOU’VE EARNED IT, AT LEAST IT’S BEFORE 80 WHEN YOU FORGET ITALL. MAYBE I HAVE SOME LESSONS TO PASS ON TO THE NEXT GENERATION.
Susan Seidelman: Once I started watching movies and thinking about them more seriously than just going to the local mall and watching whatever was showing there — once I started thinking about storytelling — I realized, too, that fashion is about storytelling. It’s a way of visually presenting yourself to the world in a very quick and fast manner. What you wear when you walk outside your house tells a lot about who you are. Along with loving to tell stories, I liked music, and film encapsulated all of that. You could truly enter into other worlds with film. As a kid, I always wanted to be somewhere other than where I was. In that way, I related to Alice in Wonderland — the idea of another world out there, and wouldn’t it be fun to go there. I originally went to Drexel because they had a great fashion program, but at age 19, I suddenly realized that fashion involved sitting down at a sewing machine all day and needing to learn all of the things that a designer had to know in order to be successful: how to make patterns, tailoring, all of the skills. At that age, I was too impatient to sit and sew for all those hours. With film, I could make my ideas about fashion. I could make them dance and tell their own stories.
A.D. Amorosi: At the start of the 1970s, did you feel like a fish out of water more as a woman filmmaker in New York City or as an incoming Philadelphia filmmaker in New York City?
Susan Seidelman: I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and I didn’t really find my passion until high school. I was an ordinary student. I was a less-than-ordinary athlete. I liked to have a good time, but I was a typical teenage girl of the 1960s — except I was always very curious. I knew there was a bigger world out there than the suburban, small-town existence I was living in, so in that way I had my sights set further afield than some of my other friends.
A.D. Amorosi: You had a great attraction to fashion and fashion history and used that knowledge deep within the crevices of Smithereens to start. Why did film win out over a career in fashion?
Susan Seidelman: Probably as a woman filmmaker, as when I started taking film classes at NYU, there were only 35 people in my class, five of them women. We were definitely the minority. But being part of that minority motivated me to work harder to prove myself.
A.D. Amorosi: One of the things that I most remember about Smithereens when it came out was its graphic sensibility. You captured the checkered, kitsch, DIY look of early punk-into-New Wave. The whole film had the look of every flyer that its lead character handed out.
Susan Seidelman: You have to use the tools you have before you, and sometimes you have to make those things part of your aesthetic. The fact that I was making a movie with very little money and the fact that I was living on the Lower East Side, I wanted to use all of the
A.D. AMOROSI
AS A KID, I ALWAYS WANTED TO BE SOMEWHERE OTHER THAN WHERE I WAS.IN THAT WAY, I RELATED TO ALICE IN WONDERLAND. THE IDEA OF ANOTHER WORLDOUT THERE,AND WOULDN’T IT BE FUN TO GO THERE
things that were interesting to me about the Downtown New York world at that time and make it all part of the style of Smithereens. I didn’t want to compete as a Hollywood film. I wanted to use my weaknesses — lack of money and lack of production design — as strengths. Its cheapness became its aesthetic. Plus, when I moved to New York, it was during the financial crisis so everything was pretty funky. Everything was dirty and crumbling. All that turned the city into a cheap playground. No one was monitoring the city. The police were underfunded so there was graffiti on every subway and every sidewalk. That was all very interesting, and all the tools were used.
A.D. Amorosi: Let’s talk about the pluses and minuses of working with dynamic women who were mostly new to the movies, but outstanding in their fields. When you made them your leads — I’m thinking about Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, Ann Magnusson in Making Mr. Right, Rosanne Barr in She-Devil. Why look to women outside traditional acting circles?
Susan Seidelman: It started with Smithereens with most of its actors being first-timers. I mean, only Richard Hell was well-known at the time as a Downtown New York punk icon in his own way. I had such a positive experience working with them, and my goal was always to capture what was so fascinating about them as people and get that on celluloid. That was a no-brainer, really. I just took that same technique moving forward. With Madonna, I wasn’t casting her because she was experienced as an actor. I wanted to capture her energy, what was
interesting about her, and that the whole world was soon to see what was interesting about her. Same thing with Rosanne Barr. In some weird way, there was also something great about working with Meryl Streep in a fashion she had never done before. She hadn’t done comedy until she did She-Devil
A.D. Amorosi: You did the pilot for Sex in the City, a crossover to television from film that — at the time — didn’t happen all that much. They were separate mediums with different taste levels. Plus, your Sex in the City pilot — looking at it again, now — was surprisingly gritty.
Susan Seidelman: I started out as an indie filmmaker where luck and timing just happened to be on my side. Smithereens was more successful than I had imagined it could ever be.
A.D. Amorosi: You went to Cannes with Smithereens too, another thing that didn’t happen for indie directors making their first movie. And that led to Desperately Seeking Susan which was even more successful.
Susan Seidelman: That’s true. I became a feature filmmaker with that. Pre-cable TV, however, I had zero interest in television. Mainstream network television had zero appeal for someone so interested in visual language. The camera moves on network sitcoms of the time were just so limited — three-camera shoots with a master shot and a
CONTINUED ON PAGE 26
Susan Seidelman directing Boynton Beach Club
film roundup
Challengers (Dir. Luca Guadagnino). Starring: Zendaya, Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor. Anyone for tennis? There’s drama on and off the court in Luca Guadagnino’s confidently light romantic comedy. Interweaving several time periods, the film follows the horned-up travails of a trio of ‘racket’-teers: Best friends and should-be lovers Art (Mike Faist) and Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and the woman, Tashi (Zendaya)—at first a come-hither colleague, later a taskmaster coach—who comes between them. Guadagnino is one of the few modern popular directors unashamed of onscreen sex (whether actual or implied), so there are plenty of scintillating glances between actors and erotic camera framings, mostly of the men, courtesy the great cinematographer Sayombhu
Keith Uhlich is a NY-based writer published at Slant Magazine, The Hollywood Reporter, Time Out New York, and ICON. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle. His personal website is (All (Parentheses)), accessible at keithuhlich.substack.com.
Mukdeeprom. The story spans nearly two decades, though the cast remains youthful throughout, playing up the passage of time via stiffness of body or unkemptness of appearance. This is a tale of how age constrains us—physically, emotionally, morally, spiritually—and how breaking free from those bonds can require god-like levels of exertion.
[R] HHHH
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (Dir. George Miller). Starring: Anya TaylorJoy, Chris Hemsworth, Alyla Browne. The hair-shorn, mechanicalarmed heroine of the 2015 chase-movie blockbuster Mad Max: Fury Road gets a sprawling origin story in George Miller’s oft-lunatic prequel. Played as a young girl by Alyla Browne and as a near-mute twentysomething by Anya Taylor-Joy, the film charts the sweetly-named Furiosa’s steely coming of age as she is kidnapped from her verdant home the
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KEITH UHLICH
Challengers
film classics
Black Narcissus (1947, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, United Kingdom)
A group of nuns living in an isolated Himalayan convent—what could possibly go wrong? This lush Technicolor masterwork from the incomparable Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (nickname: The Archers) revels in the discord as the zealous Sister Clodagh (Deborah Kerr) attempts to establish a school and hospital within a mountaintop former palace. The views are spectacular—both the elevated scenery and the sweat-stained Mr. Dean (David Farrar), whose macho brio acts as a kind of holy vows-upending aphrodisiac. Illnesses of varying sorts abound among these cloistered brides of Christ, most notably in Kathleen Byron’s lovesick Sister Ruth, who, as the film progresses, becomes
more and more of a fiery tart and, in the unforgettable cliff’s-edge climactic sequence, a demonically sallow specter. Powell and Pressburger fascinatingly constructed almost every scene of this far-flung parable on a London soundstage, aided behind the camera by the supremely talented Jack Cardiff, whose images sear both mind and spirit.
(Streaming on Max.)
The Comfort of Strangers (1990, Paul Schrader, United States, Italy, United Kingdom)
The dark side of Venice, and human nature, is on full display in this Paul Schrader-helmed, Harold Pinter-scripted psychological thriller adapted from a novel by Ian McEwan. Natasha Richardson and Rupert
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KEITH UHLICH
Black Narcissus
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merry, most mischievous, most melancholic, most misunderstood fools. This time good/bad Sir John wrecks hilarious havoc in his bawdy, brawny pursuit of two wealthy widows, whose schemes, both counter and under the counter, are snazzier than his. The Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival production features festival favorites Anthony Lawton (Parson Hugh), Ian Merrill Peakes (Dr. Caius), Jim Helsinger (Justice Swallow) and Suzanne O’Donnell (Misses Quickley), who’s married to Helsinger. Thirty four years later, I still remember the exceptional work of O’Donnell and Helsinger in a festival Twelfth Night, where she ruled the roost as a whipper-snapping Olivia and he stole the roost as Malvolio, the painfully vain peacock. (June 26-July 7, Labuda Center for the Performing Arts, DeSales University, 2755 Station Ave., Center Valley; 610282-WILL; pashakespeare.org)
I’m sure that one summer the Shakespeare festival will present Kiss Me, Kate!, where The Taming of the Shrew is an onstage and offstage musical war of wits between an actor/director and his leading lady, who happens to be his ex-wife. In the meantime you can enjoy the Pennsylvania Playhouse’s versions of Brush Up Your Shakespeare, Always True to You (In My Fashion) and other Cole Porter delights. (July 26-28, Aug. 2-4 and 9-11, 390 Illick’s Mill Rd., Bethlehem; 610-865-6665; paplayhouse.org)
West Side Story opens Northampton Community College’s summer theater season, the first one without Bill Mutimer, its founder, producing artistic director and resident sage. He died at age 60 on March 6, three days after the closing of his last production, Mamma Mia!, at Northwestern Lehigh High School, where he directed drama. NCC’s season is dedicated to Mutimer, a rare five-tool theater pro. He was an entertaining educator who challenged his troops with challenging works; balanced the slate with classic comedies, obscure dramas and memorable hybrids, pinched pennies with the best, and worked his ass off like no other. (June 5-16, Lipkin Theater, Kopecek Hall, 3835 Green Pond Rd., Bethlehem; 484-484-3412; northampton.edu)
The summer’s oddest couple may be Jesus Christ Superstar in a German heritage/social club. Then again, a bar could be a natural place for an irreverent rock musical chronicling the tumultuous rise and fall of an original spiritual entrepreneur. Supervising the grass-roots production is Robert Fahringer, a retired high-school theater teacher and a veteran of Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs and British music-hall drinking ditties. (July 7, Coplay Saengerbund, 205 S. Fifth St.; 610-262-9937; coplaysaengerbund.com)
Maybe you sang “Edelweiss” and “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” with strangers during a big-screen, public viewing of The Sound of Music. Maybe you time warped and tossed toast with costumed strangers during a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show Ah, but have you watched a terrible movie being verbally destroyed? You’re Gonna Hate This invites spectators to eavesdrop as two SteelStacks programmers annihilate a cinematic disaster picked by a colleague without their knowledge. (July 20, SteelStacks, 101 Founders Way, Bethlehem; 610-297-7100; steelstacks.org)
Ready to have your senses run amok like a runaway truck? Try Monster Jam, where drivers of monstrously big vehicles compete in races, twowheeled tricks and jumping two-story tires over long rows of buses and other obstacles. An extra added attraction is a pit party where spectators schmooze with Grave Digger and his fellow daredevils. (July 13-14, PPL Center, 701 Hamilton St., Allentown; 610-224-4625; pplcenter.com) n
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Green Place and enslaved by the diabolical warlord Dementus (a go-forbroke Chris Hemsworth). The flights of fancy are frequent, particularly in the case of a mid-film chase scene that goes for fifteen propulsive
minutes and features antagonists parachuting in from the heavens above. Though Furiosa is narrative kin to the propulsive Fury Road, aesthetically and thematically it plays more like a reworking of Miller’s effects-heavy fantasy romance Three Thousand Years of Longing, its protagonist’s exploits elevated to an often-Biblical level of myth. [R] HHHH
In a Violent Nature (Dir. Chris Nash). Starring: Ry Barrett, Andrea Pavlovic, Reece Presley. It’s a clever conceit: A slasher movie mostly from the killer’s point-of-view. Yet writer-director Chris Nash’s feature directorial debut goes well beyond this skeleton of an idea, toward ends both blackly comic and existentially terrifying. A Jason Voorhees-esque monster known only as Johnny (Ry Barrett) rises from his woodland grave after some teenagers disturb it. He then stalks and stalks and stalks his way through the woods, followed from behind by cinematographer Pierce Derks’s camera, the lush woodland imagery suggesting what might happen if the Hungarian artiste Béla Tarr helmed a nature documentary in and around Camp Crystal Lake. A group of victims are eventually found and the murdering commences (you won’t soon forget what can only be described as ‘the yoga kill’). And still Nash sticks with Johnny, equating him to a kind of environmental wraith whose bloodlust grows out of the imbalance between man and Mother Earth. A lastact shift in perspective to ‘final girl’ Kris (Andrea Pavlovic) brazenly and bravely takes the horror to an interior plane where dread of what could happen (to our species and to the world we think we lord over) rules the day. [N/R] HHHH1/2
Janet Planet (Dir. Annie Baker). Starring: Zoe Ziegler, Julianne Nicholson, Will Patton. The film directorial debut of playwright Annie Baker is a supremely and subtly unnerving object. It’s 1991 in Massachusetts and the beyond-awkward young Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) abruptly leaves summer camp to spend the dog days with her mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) in their home in the forest. The placid surroundings belie the tempestuous emotions that arise as Janet rotates between two boyfriends—a mentally unbalanced divorcee (Will Patton) and a charmingly cult-like guru (Elias Koteas)—while also housing a flighty acquaintance (Sophie Okenedo) whose outward compassion masks an intensely judgmental interior. Behavior is implied more than explicated and with rare exception the drama hardly rises above a whisper. Yet Baker still manages to conjure a uniquely adolescent hellscape in which a girl on the cusp of maturity becomes alarmingly privy to the adult machinations surrounding her and the likelihood she’ll follow in those very destructive footsteps. [PG-13] HHHHH n
Challengers
uriosa: A Mad Max Saga
SUSAN
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close-up and a reverse close-up, all pretty standard stuff. That held no interest for me. What happened, then — maybe around 1996 —HBO and Showtime came on the scene, and they started making TV shows that didn’t look like typical network TV shows. They were bolder, their look, their subject matter, their scripts. They looked and felt like cinema.
A.D. Amorosi: If it came up, you could see a way to take your grittier visual style and your brand of New York stories to that medium.
Susan Seidelman: I just liked the script for Sex in the City. Darren (Star) sent me the pilot script. I knew those characters and I could see and hear them in my head. I saw how I could make their city which was my city come alive. If he wanted to hire me, I wanted to do it.
A.D. Amorosi: What is your impression, now, of the Netflix rescreening of Sex in the City? People find it out-of-touch, tone deaf and overly cruel. They find Carrie hedonistic and wasteful.
Susan Seidelman: I didn’t know. I guess I don’t read the new reviews. I knew there was a backlash with the issues of white privilege on the new iteration of the show, And Just Like That. That it didn’t represent the diversity of New York City.
A.D. Amorosi: It seems to be a silly critique for an older television show. I mean, we don’t bother bashing Petticoat Junction for misogyny and overly simplistic depictions of rural America.
Susan Seidelman: It’s certainly a different world now. Gender politics are different. Political correctness is different. The show, for the time it was made, was bold. Women didn’t talk like that on television in 1997. It was fresh then.
A.D. Amorosi: From 1982’s Smithereens to 2017’s Cut in Half: what would you say is the single throughline that runs through everything that you did or do, as a filmmaker?
Susan Seidelman: I think I am always interested in telling unusual stories about women who act against the grain, who are interesting. If you look at everything that I’ve done on film that I chose to make — feature or short — is about strong women in unusual situations. Or even ordinary women in unusual situations. That was my mission statement from the start, because people weren’t making movies about women in 1976. I wanted that.
A.D. Amorosi: Along with how you got here as, in your words, an ordinary woman, you start the book talking about the desire to write down your memoirs for fear of being erased because women don’t always age well in the film industry. And you end it by not only aging well, but provocatively and proactively. Is this the best revenge?
Susan Seidelman: It was the book’s motivating factor. A few things coincided to make it happen. I had lived in New York for 43 years, and two years before the pandemic — not knowing obviously that there would be a pandemic — I moved out of the city and into the farmland area of New Jersey right outside of Bucks County in Stockton. New Hope is a ten-minute drive from my house. That was a big life change, moving from Soho to farm country. The pandemic then became an even more different life as suddenly I was living an isolated life. I had a lot of time to think, to get in touch with my past. I also turned 70.
A lot of the films I made, even Sex in the City, they were all about
Answer to BOWL GAME
Susan Seidelman
younger women in New York. About being young, adventurous and living the life you wanted to live. So, I began thinking about age. From 50 years old onward, you begin thinking of such things. I could still fool
myself that I looked younger for my age. I felt upper-middle-aged what with people living longer. [laughs] Then you turn 70, the six turns to the seven, and all of a sudden, you truly think of life differently. You get this overview of all the things that you have done in your life, career, relationships, and you put everything in perspective. You know, I thought back to friends and associates that I have known who wrote
their memoirs in their 50s, and it seemed weird — you’re only halfway through. What do you really have to say? At 70, you’ve earned it, at least it’s before 80 when you forget it all. Maybe I have some lessons to pass on to the next generation. n
Actress Dyan Cannon and Director Susan Seidelman attend the premiere for Boynton Beach Club held at the Pacific Design Centre Silver Screen Theatre in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Directing Meryl Streep in She-Devil
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of mine — to learn how to be more fearless as a player and then apply that to other parts of my life. I also learned about being a better producer, too. When I’m listening back to a session, I don’t even like to zero in on things like the hi-hat. I can’t listen for mistakes. I listen to the music as a whole. The whole has to move you. As a bassist, I’m listening to what everybody else is playing. From there, everything I do will come naturally. It’s a weird thing — it’s like shooting skeet. You just have to feel where things are going to be next. It’s mystical. You just become the thing
A.D. Amorosi: How have you evolved as a Detroit musician in order to run and play the Pan-Detroit Ensemble? There’s a particular swagger to all Detroit music. It’s a big question when you consider that we lost Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson from the MC5 mere weeks from each other?
Don Was: I’ve always been just THAT — a Detroit musician. I can remember this period in the 1990s and working with, in a row, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, and the Stones. Arguably, these were all the greatest songwriters of our time. And, what happened was that every time I sat at the piano to write, I thought, ‘What’s the point of this? These guys do it so much better.’ So, for five or six years, I couldn’t write anything. I knew I didn’t have that natural gift as did these songwriters. What I did have, however, is that I grew up in Detroit, and in the 1960s, you saw the MC5 and the Stooges play at the Grande Ballroom. You hung out at the Drome Lounge and heard Coltrane’s sax wafting into the alley because you were too young to hang
inside. I saw the Motown Revue play at the Fox Theater or matinees at 2 PM. Willie Nelson could be a lot of things, but he couldn’t be that — that experience. That sound combined. So, I decided to just be myself and be the best version of myself. That’s how I got a fighting chance at being different, having a distinct voice, and saying something real.
A.D. Amorosi: Which became your Pan-Detroit Ensemble. Don Was: Yeah. It was a flukey thing when I got the opportunity to do this, to put a new band together — something I haven’t done in years and years. The great jazz trumpeter Terrence Blanchard curated a series for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and asked me if I wanted to do a show. I said ‘yes’ without actually having anything together, so starting last October, I began making sure I’d have musicians for this thing. So, being the best version of myself [laughs], I went back to Detroit and found homegrown, like-minded individuals together to play what felt right, some of whom I’ve been playing with for 45 years, so that it wasn’t a total mystery. They came from the same roots and musical milieu. Now it’s a thing — it sounds like Detroit, which always means that it has that rough edge. It excels in honesty and straightforward truth without pretentiousness. The music matches the people who live in the city. Detroit was forever tied to the auto industry. My parents were both teachers. When the industry got bad, the workers moved away, and the teachers would get laid off. Barbers got laid off. Waitresses got laid off. It was a vicious cycle. There was no point in renting a Mercedes to impress your friends. You had to just be yourself because everyone could see through you. The music reflects that.
A.D. Amorosi: When Don Was creates a band, the first thing that I think of is Was (Not Was) with David Weiss [aka David Was, Don’s stagebrother] and all that happens there with its twists on free funk, jazz, and R&B. How is the Pan-Detroit Ensemble different from Was (Not Was)?
Don Was: It’s not totally dissimilar. There is, of course, a deep groove underneath everything. The new band is just stretching out a little more. We’re a little more free with more room to play. Playing with Bob Weir, we never play the same show twice. Ever. We can go four or five nights without repeating a song in the setlist, and if we do repeat, it’s not going to sound like it did last time or the time before that — expect that from the Pan-Detroit Ensemble. Let’s just see where it lands. Where lies the adventure. Was (Not Was) was a great band, and it was a tight band. There wasn’t that much room for adventure. Now, there’s structure, but we’re free to stretch out. I don’t have set bass parts to play. It’s looser. That’s thrilling. It may be jazzy and have R&B, but it’s never smooth. n
Was (Not Was) with Sir Harry Bowens, Hillard “Sweet Pea” Atkinson, MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, and Don Was when they hit the Billboard Hot 100 on April 1, 1989
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Everett play Mary and Colin, an unmarried couple vacationing in the watery Italian city. While sightseeing, they meet the snakish yet charming Robert (Christopher Walken) whose stories of a life lived on the knife’s edge of cynicism and contempt both repel and attract the couple. The further and further they drift into Robert and his wife Caroline’s (Helen Mirren) orbit, the more tensions of varying kinds come to a head. Schrader knows this tempestuous emotional terrain well and he revels in every turn of the narrative screw, as the abstractly gruesome space conjured by the quartet’s interactions become murderously literal. Among the film’s many highlights are a recurring monologue Walken’s character recites about his father’s moustache that encapsulates the movie’s dueling aura of banality and seductiveness. (Streaming on Criterion.)
Liverpool (2008, Lisandro Alonso, Argentina/France/Netherlands/Germany/Spain)
The story is simple verging on nonexistent: A merchant sailor, Farrel (Juan Fernández), labors on a cargo ship, eventually leaving port for an unknown destination. He barely speaks a word and is fixated, depending on the moment, on work, walking, or drink. He’s an ambling enigma, which jives with the aesthetic aims of Argentinean writer-director Lisandro Alonso, a favorer of the rewardingly slow and obscure. (His most recent movie, the time- and genre-slipping Eureka, is also well worth a watch.) Even at 84 minutes, Liverpool feels as if it traverses several lifetimes and locales, which gives Farrel’s cryptic quest a folkloric aura. In this case, the journey is the destination, though that doesn’t mean the movie’s stopping point lacks for emotional ache. The final shot, indeed, grapples with notions of symbolism and closure that resonate far beyond the film containing it. This classic is one of those rare cases where so seemingly little gives us so transcendently much. (Streaming on MUBI.)
The Straight Story (1999, David Lynch, United Kingdom/France/United States)
“Walt Disney Pictures Presents”/”A Film By David Lynch” might be the most WTF! two opening title cards ever juxtaposed. Though the great filmmaker’s G-rated drama is still firmly rooted in his surrealist wheelhouse. Adapted from a true-life tale, the movie follows the elderly and infirm Midwestern farmer Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) as he journeys to visit his estranged brother. The twist is that he must do so on a John Deere lawnmower, lacking other means of transport. It could be argued that this is also a form of penance, taking the slo-o-o-o-w route so that a vast and long-stagnant emotional chasm can be bridged. Along the way Alvin meets various folks in different stages of life. Wisdom and regret pass freely through all, everything pitched at a level of sincerity and sweetness that feels moment-to-moment tenuous. It’s hard work to bear witness to one’s flaws, to be kind when cruelty and chaos (those paths of least resistance) are always there to tempt and upend. That’s of a piece with Lynch’s long-time artistic concerns and The Straight Story is perhaps his most distilled vision of a character pushing hard against the void that’s consumed him for most of his life. (Streaming on Criterion.) n
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ry trees add puffs of cool pink to the landscape. Everywhere are fresh, soft, newborn colors. The shrubbery is not overly manicured, and there is no pavement. This place is as natural as you get. It’s hard to imagine a more peaceful place to walk.
The stone walls surrounding this Quaker cemetery date back to the early 1800s. Each heavy rock was found in this earth, dug out, and hauled to the side by someone with a pick, shovel, and cart. They were stacked with precision, not as a barrier but more as an orderly and attractive way to relocate them and define the space with dignity.
I left the car near the entrance and walked through, reading the headstones. They have a modest, uniform size and shape, with little decorative carving. Low and gray, they cover more than two hundred years of being the last word and final place. You can read most of them, but the earlier ones, those closer to the meetinghouse, have been worn away by the weather. Softer stones such as marble have lost their letters and their form, appearing to be part of the earth rather than on top of it.
The stump of a 150-year-old Norway Maple cut a foot from the ground sits among the earlier markers, the tentacles of its base reaching out like a sea creature. An old gravestone is held in a crotch of the roots, almost totally enveloped.
The rows of stones have a general layout, but as sections were added, the patterns changed. Not all plots have stones or occupants, so each row is a piano with missing keys. It can be hard to determine how the markers orient to their namesakes. Sometimes, two of them face each other. Some plots with a headstone have a flat marker in the middle with a different name. Unusual things can happen in a community cemetery, given a couple hundred years.
Buying a plot and using it are two distinct events, and there is no saying who will end up there, or when. You will come across a family or an individual, from another century or last year. I recognize names from farms, businesses, towns, and roads in the area, as well as the history books. Men, women, famous, obscure, wealthy and not, from different times and of all ages, side by side, marked by modest stones that will last longer than they did, but in the long view, not by that much. Neighbors forever.
I was surprised by a couple of them. One was a friend and fellow painter whom I ran into often. He lived along the canal at the end of my road and died seven years ago. I didn’t know he was here. I also came across a person of long and notable standing in town. My wife and I had dinner at their house. Just us. An elegant and superb evening. The husband cooked a delicious French meal. He passed away just a couple of years ago. Below his name on the stone is his wife’s, with no dates.
There are often stories to be found in graveyards that have served a local community for many generations, but the ones here are simple and brief. A few markers mention military service or have a short phrase that reveals thoughts of those left behind, but those run contrary to the Quaker practice of not distinguishing one person from another, even in death. Mostly, you get who and when, nothing more.
Part of my reason for coming here to walk was that I hoped I could find the plot of a friend who died last year. There were only two recently unearthed spots that weren’t identified, and no reason to believe either was his. I’ll have to wait until the marker is put in place and keep my eye out for his name on my next visit, along with the other two I know to look for now. n
harper’s FINDINGS INDEX
Microplastics were found in sixty-two of sixty-two human placentas from a biobank in Texas; in half the arterial plaques of Campanian carotid endarterectomy patients; in the gastrointestinal tracts of three bottlenose dolphins and a harbor porpoise in the Black Sea; in shrimp in South Africa’s Crocodile River; in two-thousand-year-old archaeological remains buried seven meters underground; and in the gonads of adult oysters in the Mangrove Coast of the estuarine Brazilian Amazon. Microplastics were determined to increase nitrogen retention in Fujianese mangrove sediments and to either increase or decrease CO2 emissions from Hainanese mangrove sediments, depending on the precise concentration. Abyssal microplastics appear to sink from the surface of the open ocean, and polystyrene particles increase the bioaccumulation of SSRIs in brine shrimp. Blue is the dominant color of microplastic found inside Guiana dolphins on the coast of Espírito Santo, and polypropylene is the dominant synthetic polymer found on Ulva rigida seaweed. Artificial plants with fenestrated leaves retain the most surface microplastics, whereas natural plants with smooth leaves retain the least. Microplastics in the human male reproductive system are associated with urban living, home-cooked meals, and the use of body and facial scrubs.
The tail of a crayfish contains less ionic lithium than its gastrointestinal tract, gills, and hepatopancreas. Humans are losing their ability to digest cellulose. Animal models exhibit an association between a wide range of neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders and an altered brain pH. An analysis of 1,156,703 selfies found that Chinese women experience their lowest lifetime acne levels between the ages of forty and forty-four, Chinese scientists reconstructed the face of Emperor Wu of Northern Zhou, teeth from a graveyard near the royal palace at Westminster were found to belong to imported jousting horses, and a researcher attempted to improve the dating of elite tombs of the Goguryeo kingdom on the basis of painted depictions of the Northern and Southern Dippers. A prehistoric fen folk village built above a river was found to contain beads from Persia and a skull worn smooth by touch.
The mating call of the male Albert’s lyrebird was differentiated into loud gronking and rhythmic gronking, and it was posited that the males’ shaking of stick piles or vine tangles may trick females into thinking predators are nearby. Japanese tits use an “after you” wing gesture to defer nest entry to their mates. Namibian spotted hyenas were found to catch and eat red-billed queleas at a rate of one every three minutes. Dwarf rock-wallabies were found to have unusually large teeth. “If I were a vegetable,” said a skull-shape researcher, “I would not mess with a pygmy rock-wallaby.” Mice who received fecal transplants from mice who had received double oophorectomies gained weight. Some heritable eye diseases may be caused by gut bacteria. Bone-marrow transplants can give mice Alzheimer’s. Daytime events are more likely to be consolidated into long-term memories during sleep if they are followed immediately by five to twenty sharp wave-ripples generated in hippocampal neurons. Object words appear to activate mental representations in dogs, and children who touch their faces more often recognize their reflections earlier. Toxicity has remained a consistent feature of online interactions since 1989. Researchers concluded that, when generating a page of text, AI can emit up to thousands of times less CO2 than human writers do.
% of white Americans who say they enjoy Juneteenth less than an average day: 29
% of Republicans who say so: 42
% of Americans who say that people seeing racism where it isn’t is a bigger problem than missing it where it is: 45
Portion of U.S. public school teachers who say that the history of slavery does not affect black people’s place in society today: 1/4
Portion of children expelled from U.S. public preschools who are black boys: 1/5
Portion of Chicago children under the age of 6 who have been exposed to lead-contaminated drinking water: 7/10
% by which U.S. black voters are more likely than others to be concerned about climate change: 12
% decrease in the volume of climate-change coverage in corporate broadcast news between 2022 and 2023: 25
% of corporate broadcast news coverage that was dedicated to climate change last year: 1
% by which the New York Times has quoted Israeli sources more often than Palestinian sources since October 7, 2023: 78
By which the Times was more likely to feature Palestinians as subjects of passive-voice clauses than Israelis in that period: 67
% of U.S. adults who believe that Israel is trying to minimize harm to civilians in its attacks on Gaza: 38
% of family members of active-duty U.S. military personnel who said in 2016 they would recommend military service: 55
Who say so now: 32
Portion of active-duty military personnel not receiving mental-health care but would like to receive it: 1/4
Number of U.S. insurance claims related to psychotic disorders that were filed in 2023: 4,477,140
% change in the quantity of these claims since 2019: +15
% of Americans who have not heard of long COVID: 22
Rank of the United States among countries in terms of happiness in 2023: 15 In 2024: 23
% of U.S. employees in therapy who say their therapist has an effect on their mental health: 41
% of U.S. employees who say their boss does: 69
% of Americans over the age of 50 who say they have a friend they met at work: 44
Of American adults under the age of 30 who say so: 21
% of U.S. college students who say reproductive-health laws were at least somewhat important to their school choice: 71
Who say they were highly important: 38
% of Republican college students who would prefer to attend a school in a state with greater access to reproductive care: 63
% of U.S. teenagers who say their parents have looked through their phones: 43
% of U.S. parents of teenagers who say they have done so: 50
Number of reported unintentional shootings by children in the United States last year: 411
Portion of U.S. adolescent overdose deaths in which a bystander who could have intervened was present: 2/3
% by which BMW drivers have a higher rate of DUIs than the average driver: 14
% by which Subaru drivers do: 29
% of American wine drinkers who think they could differentiate a $10 bottle of wine from a $100 bottle: 35
Number of U.S. states in which corn polls as the most popular vegetable: 32
% by which Americans are more likely to say they want to be remembered for creativity than for intelligence: 55
Portion of Americans who say they are worried about their memory: 2/3
% of U.S. adults who say widespread use of computer chips implanted in the brain would be positive for society: 10
% of those aged 18 to 29 who say they probably or definitely would consider getting such an implant this year: 13
SOURCES: 1,2 YouGov (Washington); 3,4 Pew Research Center (Washington); 5 Office for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education; 6 Benjamin Huynh, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (Baltimore); 7 Brookings Institution (Washington); 8,9 Media Matters for America (Washington); 10,11 Writers Against the War on Gaza (NYC); 12 YouGov; 13–15 Blue Star Families (Encinitas, Calif.); 16,17 LexisNexis Risk Solutions (Alpharetta, Ga.); 18 Pew Research Center; 19,20 World Happiness Report (Oxford, England); 21,22 UKG Workforce Institute (Lowell, Mass.); 23,24 Jeffrey A. Hall, University of Kansas (Lawrence); 25–27 Gallup (Washington); 28,29 Pew Research Center; 30 Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund (NYC); 31 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta); 32,33 Insurify (Cambridge, Mass.); 34 YouGov; 35 B&G Foods (Parsippany–Troy Hills, N.J.); 36 OnePoll (NYC); 37 McKnight Brain Research Foundation (Orlando, Fla.); 38,39 YouGov.
BOWL
GAME BY EVAN BIRNHOLZ
The answer to this week’s metapuzzle is a two-word phrase.
ACROSS
1 Feature of Louis Armstrong’s voice
5 Unsuitable
10 Parts of bridal ensembles
15 Actress Paulson who played the title role in “Ratched”
16 Site of the Goryeo dynasty
17 Band that played in Sweden, Germany and Italy during its Final Countdown tour, appropriately
19 Headline noting that a Canadian politician was reelected, thus extending their tenure at Parliament Hill?
22 Fabricate, as facts
23 Aaron who dueled Alexander Hamilton
24 Structure guarding against overflowing
25 Huffy mood
27 Teatro ___ Scala
29 Swimming venue that’s familiar to me?
33 Company opening?
34 Blends together
36 Continue ___ (proceed quickly)
37 Nature trail sighting
39 Extended period
40 “Mr. Paisley has some reservations”?
44 Shandling with jokes
46 Greek symbol for pseudorapidity
47 Runner-up’s comment
48 “Society’s dirty work, usually done by kids cleaning up failures perpetrated by adults,” per Karl Marlantes
49 PC support specialists
52 Dirigible’s locale
53 Holy hardships?
59 It means nothing to soccer fans
60 “Not a chance”
62 Backyard social areas
63 Take a cruise
64 “This is all my ___!”
66 Twangy-sounding abbey figure?
69 “Inside the NBA” analyst Smith
70 Columnist Bombeck
71 Daniel’s rival in “The Karate Kid”
72 Sandy landform
74 “Sleeping Beauty” still
75 Classroom session led by “Rent” actor Anthony?
77 Mention
79 Circulatory channel
81 See 71 Down
82 Sites visited by Indiana Jones and Lara Croft
84 Molecule letters after messenger or transfer
85 Nevada senator Jacky
88 “In that case ... how could you betray me, Ms. Dion?!”?
94 Elect (to)
95 Org. that posts PßDFs about hazardous waste on its website
98 Some garments designed by Ritu Kumar
99 Operating system whose mascot is Tux the penguin
100 Fashion designer Wang
102Chaos lover?
106 Field section
107 “The Starless Sea” author Morgenstern
108 Hostile party
109 Western actor Jack
111 Pack animal
112 Caribbean archipelago resident’s information?
118 Calm
119 Lassie’s friend
120 Openings for quarters
121 Part of a flower supporting a petal
122 Range of activity
123 “Auld Lang ___”
DOWN
1 Scampering rodent
2 ___ Republic of Egypt
3 Cut into pieces, as lumber
4 SNL alum Jay
5 Comedian Barinholtz
6 “Not by might, ___ by power, but by my spirit”: Zechariah 4:6
7 Limb with a radius
8 “Nope” director Jordan
9 Grimm creations
10 Thin layer of wood
11 Longtime Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Ormandy
12 Roth plan letters
13 Much, informally
14 Oscar winner Octavia
15 “How ___ Got Her Groove Back”
18 Report reviewer
19 Crude ship
20 The idea that it was all a dream, in
cinematic plot twists, e.g.
21 Steve ___, former world record holder in the men’s mile run
22 Ram’s offspring
26 Like atoms
28 Poisonous snake
30 Surgery with beams
31 In an aloof way
32 Stop order?
35 Refrain from participating in
38 “Jeepers creepers!”
41 That’s a wrap!
42 Tea- and silk-producing state in India
43 “Awesome,” in the ’50s
45 Stem (from)
48 “The Grand Budapest Hotel” director Anderson
49 Derive logically
50 Royal ball headpiece
51 Like a juicy peach
52 Rulers until the Iranian Revolution
54 Crawford featured in “The Super Models”
55 Streaming device brand
56 Sticker at Medieval Times?
57 Eyelid cosmetic
58 With cunning
61 Deep-dish pizza chain, informally
62 Paper towel measure
65 Slip in one’s memory
67 Noise one may hear during a sleep study
68 Invalidate
69 Modicum, as of truth
71 With 81 Across, wealthy world travelers
73 DEA operative
76 Fallon’s predecessor
77 Sam who won 82 tournaments on the PGA Tour
78 “___ Boy” (Osamu Tezuka manga series)
80 “The Godfather” actress Shire
83 Iconic role for Ingrid
85 Roam
86 Works with recitatives
87 Significant steps
88 High things at high tide
89 Not up for a late night out on the town, say
90 Totally ineffective
91 Like “WALL-E” and “CODA”
92 Health-care provider
93 They’ve split
96 “9 to 5 (Morning Train)” singer Easton
97Creator of a trail of breadcrumbs
101 “The Mist” actor Braugher
103 Neglects to include
104 Pessimistic one
105 Rebound in a basketball game, say?
110 Satellite with craters
113 One chin-up, e.g.
114 Non-___ foods
115 Home plate figure, briefly
116 “Pass the bill!”
117 Indigenous group that participates in the Sun Dance ceremony
