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ESSAY 5|
contents 14 |
A THOUSAND WORDS
OPINION
The Cellist: A Novel by Daniel Silva
EXHIBITIONS
Kev Marcus
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Graphic Content/Caretoons National Liberty Museum It’s Personal: The Art of Robert Beck Michener Art Museum The Summer Show Bethlehem House Gallery
NEW BOOKS
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Wil B.
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The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything by Mike Rothschild
Black Violin
The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance by Ross King
Kev Marcus and Wil B. are not your stereotypical duo. Not these guys. Wil B. and Kev Marcus broke the rules and invented a new way to think of music.
Harry Versus the First 100 Days of School by Emily Jenkins and Pete Oswald
ON THE COVER:
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead: A Novel by Emily Austin
NEW BOOKS (Cont.) The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat by Matt Siegel
Island
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ICON
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Since 1992 215-862-9558 icondv.com facebook.com/icondv
The War for Gloria: A Novel by Atticus Lish
PRESIDENT Trina McKenna trina@icondv.com
The Ambassador: Joseph P. Kennedy at the Court of St. James’s 1938–1940 by Susan Ronald
EDITORIAL Editor / trina@icondv.com
FILM ROUNDUP
Raina Filipiak / Advertising filipiakr@comcast.net
In the Heights Lisey’s Story The Sparks Brothers Wrath of Man
PRODUCTION
CLASSIC FILMS
CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
Stage Door Last Year at Marienbad High and Low Teorema
A. D. Amorosi
Dominic Reposa Adam Cramer
Robert Beck Jack Byer Peter Croatto
ETCETERA
Geoff Gehman
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Harper’s Findings Harper’s Index
Mark Keresman
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Washington Post Sunday Crossword Puzzle
Susan Van Dongen
SINCE 1992, the arts have been integral to our mission—and to our lives in large and small measures. We too often don’t realize their importance. The arts, the economy, and ICON, as well as well as mom and pop businesses and Fortune 500 companies, are subject to the vicissitudes of life and fortune. We’re all together now in this time of historic insecurity. ICON has supported the arts since 1992, through good times and bad. We think of ourselves as their partners, their cheerleaders. We haven’t skipped an issue in nearly 30 years, so if you can’t find ICON one month, if we skip an issue here and there, be assured we’re just resting until the arts—and all of us—are healthy and confident again. Black Violin. Photo: Mark Clennon
The intersection of art, entertainment, culture, nightlife and mad genius.
George Miller
Keith Uhlich
Subscription: $40 (12 issues) PO Box 120 • New Hope 18938 215-862-9558 ICON is published twelve times per year. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is strictly prohibited. ICON welcomes letters to the editor, editorial ideas and submissions, but assumes no responsibility for the return of unsolicited material. ICON is not responsible for claims made by advertisers. ©2021 Primetime Publishing Co., Inc.
a thousand words
STORY & PAINTING BY ROBERT BECK
Island
MANY EXTRAORDINARY PAINTINGS DEAL with funerals, and, like the events themselves, the images have more to do with the living than the deceased. Death asks big questions that, despite our accumulation of knowledge, remain unanswered. Or, for many, the answers remain unacceptable. Sometimes we prefer fabricated explanations to none. I’m confident that when we die, we go back to where we came from, and this time we spend here is what we get, in all its meaning and inconsequence. I’m not afraid, but I’m not eager. The death of anyone we know brings a lot into perspective. It calls for passing torches, restating positions, and allocating responsibilities. Our culture does its part to make it a mysterious and sometimes macabre experience. A lot of feelings get mixed up in it. Love and fear. Outward and inward. Pain, grief, and occasionally, relief. But it’s an inevitable part of life wherever you look. Death is not the goal, but it is the line.
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| OPINION I’m a conservative who believes systemic racism is real By Michael Gerson The phrase “systemic racism,” like “climate change” and “gun control,” has been sucked into the vortex of the culture war. The emotional reaction to these words seems to preclude reasoned debate on their meaning. But a divisive concept can be clarifying. I know it has been for me: I don’t think it’s possible to be a conservative without believing that racism is, in part, structural. Most on the American right have dug into a very different position. They tend to view racism as an individual act of immorality. And they regard the progressive imputation of racism to be an attack on their character. In a free society, they reason, the responsibility for success and failure is largely personal. They’re proud of the productive life choices they’ve made and refuse to feel guilty for self-destructive life choices made by others. It’s an argument that sounds convincing—until it’s tested against the experience of our own lives. I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood of a middle-class suburb in a Midwestern city. I went to a middle-class high school, with middle-class friends, eating middle-class fried bologna sandwiches. And for most of my upbringing, this seemed not only normal but normative. I assumed this was a typical American childhood. Only later did I begin to see that my normality was actually a social construction. By the time I was growing up in the 1970s, St. Louis no longer had legal segregation. But my suburb, my neighborhood and my private high school were all outcomes of White flight. The systems of policing, zoning and education I grew up with had been created to ensure one result: to keep certain communities safe, orderly and pale. I had little hint of this as a child. It seemed natural that I hardly ever met a person of color in a racially diverse city or seldom met a poor person in a place with some of the worst poverty in the country. All I knew was that I shouldn’t get lost in certain neighborhoods or invite Black people to the private pool where we were members. (My brother did once, and there was suddenly a problem with processing our membership card.) But none of this was neutral or normal. Systems had been carefully created to ensure I went to an all-White church, in an all-White neighborhood, while attending an all-White Christian school and shopping in allWhite stores. I now realize I grew up in one of the most segregated cities in the United States. Was this my fault? Not in the strictest sense. I didn’t create these systems. But I wish I had realized earlier that these systems had created me. This is what I mean by systemic racism. If, on my 13th birthday, all the country’s laws had been suddenly, perfectly and equally enforced, my community would still have had a massive hangover of history. The structures and attitudes shaped during decades and centuries of oppression would still have existed. Legal equality in theory does not mean a society is justly constituted. For me, part of being a conservative means taking history seriously. We do not, as Tom Paine foolishly claimed, “have it in our power to begin the world over again.” We live in an imperfect world we did not create and have duties that flow from our story. There is an important moral distinction between “guilt” and “responsibility.” It is not useful, and perhaps not fair, to say that most White people are guilty of creating social systems shaped by white supremacy. But they do have a responsibility as citizens, and as moral creatures, to seek a
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Lauren Boebert, lost in a cacophony of crazy By Dana Milbank Poor Lauren Boebert. The QAnon-admiring first-term Republican congresswoman from Colorado has tried everything to get noticed. Since she burst on the scene by tweeting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s whereabouts during the Jan. 6 insurrection, she has attempted one stunt after another. To protest President Joe Biden’s immigration policy, she noisily unfurled a foil blanket and covered herself in it during Biden’s address to Congress. She announced at a town hall that she had “very good information” that a secret scandal would oust Democrats from power before 2022, a popular QAnon claim. Two hours after the Boulder shooter killed 10 people in her home state, she sent a fundraising email asking donors to tell “radical liberals” Pelosi and Biden “‘HELL NO’ to taking our guns.” But she has languished as a poor man’s Sarah Palin and a third-rate Josh Hawley, as others seize the spotlight with superior antics. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., another QAnon aficionado, inflamed the House with her antisemitic talk of Jewish “space lasers” and likening public health guidelines to the Holocaust. Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Tex., spoke at a confab of QAnon types where the violent overthrow of the U.S. government was contemplated. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., compared the Jan. 6 insurrection to a “normal tourist visit.” Boebert had to raise her game. And on Wednesday, she gave it her best shot. She assembled 10 colleagues in the House TV studio to announce her new resolution to censure Biden—a reprimand that a chamber of Congress has delivered only once in U.S. history, to Andrew Jackson—over Biden’s border policy. “The Biden regime has punched our Border Patrol agents in the face!” she shouted, after calling Vice President Kamala Harris “Cackling Kamala.” Not bad. But Boebert was immediately overshadowed by her colleagues, who put on a clinic in crazy talk. Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-N.C., called Biden “a reckless lawbreaker” who “spits on the laws,” “prioritizes napping” and wants “to lead America to ruin.” Gohmert proposed that Biden “had no clue what was going on” with the border and “has some real mental issues that need to be evaluated.” And then there was Greene, who endorsed the “censor” resolution—but then one-upped Boebert. Biden “doesn’t need just censured, he needs impeached,” Greene said. Boebert, beaten, had no choice but to follow suit. “It’s a very light action to censure him,” she admitted. “This is actually worthy of impeachment, and that is what we should be doing right now.” Censure? Never mind. The event was on brand for Republicans. While the world-leading vaccine rollout in the United States and the sweeping covid relief have propelled the U.S. economy to faster growth than other developed countries, Republican lawmakers and the Fox News echo chamber have established a parallel universe in which the country is overrun by crime, illegal immigrants, killer coronavirus vaccines, critical race theory, cancel culture and defund the police. Some of these issues are real; Biden, responding to a substantial increase in violent crime over the past year, rolled out new measures Wednesday to address the problem. Others range from tendentious to outright fictitious. A few hours before Boebert’s event, House Republican leaders held a news conference in the same studio, declaring it “probable” that covid-19 came from a Wuhan lab and speculating that Democrats are being blackmailed by communist China. With such a cacophony of conspiracy theories, it’s understandably hard
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exhibitions
Hippocampus, 2020, oil on panel, 24 x 32
Jon-Michael Frank, “Bath Salts,” Colored pencil, marker, and gouache on paper, 7 x 10
Graphic Content National Liberty Museum June 18–November 7 Opening and adult after-hours party Caretoons 2021 June 18–November 7 June 18, 5pm 321 Chestnut St., Philadelphia, PA Libertymuseum.org Friday-Sunday 10am-5pm The National Liberty Museum’s newest exhibition, Graphic Content, features 36 artists, including 27 artists from Philadelphia, who use confront and respond to societal issues: systemic racism, homophobia, environment. As a companion exhibition, the Museum will show a selection of pieces from Caretoons, a popular annual exhibition and competition of political cartoons that ran from 2005-2010. Graphic Content contains a number of uncensored work—violence, profanity, nudity, and racially sensitive imagery—this exhibition may not be suitable for all ages. Caretoons is for all ages.
Ana Nottingham, “Love Your Neighbor,” Colored pencil, marker on paper, 8.5 x 11 8
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It’s Personal: The Art of Robert Beck Michener Art Museum 138 South Pine Street, Doylestown, PA 215-340-9800 michenerartmuseum.org July 30, 2021 through January 2, 2022 This exhibition focuses on Robert Beck’s place in the storied world of the New HopeLambertville arts community. Beck has played an important role in advancing and expanding the region's traditions of Impressionism and Urban Realism, with distinctive oil paintings of the people, places, and occupations of our time. He is well known for documentary paintings, as he refers to his paintings done on site in one go. Whether single works or multiimage “visual essays,” these distinct paintings record his world much like the Pennsylvania Impressionists recorded theirs in their time. Unlike those images, Beck describes a world that contemporary audiences recognize as their own. While New York, Bucks County, and the villages along the upper coast of Maine, present subjects and contrast for his examinations, the exhibit includes work from series he created in the American West, Europe, and Africa. It is a remarkable story of a contemporary artist establishing a voice, becoming part of a community, and creating a body of work that will resonate in Bucks County and well beyond for many years.
Dupont Circle, 2012, oil on panel, 16 x 20
Between Two Blue Pillows, Abbey Rosko, 12 x 16, Oil on canvas
The Summer Show Bethlehem House Gallery 459 Main St., Bethlehem, PA 610-419-6262 BethlehemHouseGallery.com Through October 2, 2021 Closing reception Oct. 2, 6-9PM Wed., Thurs. 11–7; Fri., Sat. 12–9; Sun. 12–5
Face of the Island, Rigo Peralta, 30 x 30, Acrylics on Canvas
Palm Springs, Cody Abrachinsky, 20 x 20, Acrylic on canvas
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new books
The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything by Mike Rothschild Melville House, $22.99 Release date, June 22, 2021 On October 5th, 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark in the State Dining Room at a gathering of military officials. He said it felt like “the calm before the storm”—then refused to elaborate as puzzled journalists asked him to explain. But on the infamous message boards of 4chan, a mysterious poster going by “Q Clearance Patriot,” who claimed to be in “military intelligence,” began the elaboration on their own. In the days that followed, Q’s wild yarn explaining Trump’s remarks began to rival the sinister intricacies of a Tom Clancy novel, while satisfying the deepest desires of MAGA-America. But did any of what Q predicted come to pass? No. Did that stop people from clinging to every word they were reading, expanding its mythology, and promoting it wider and wider? No. Why not? Who were these rapt listeners? How do they reconcile their worldview with the America they see around them? Why do their numbers keep growing? Mike Rothschild, a journalist specializing in conspiracy theories, has been collecting their stories for years, and through interviews with QAnon converts, apostates, and victims, as well as psychologists, sociologists, and academics, he is uniquely equipped to explain the movement and its followers. In The Storm Is Upon Us, he takes readers from the background conspiracies and cults that fed the Q phenomenon, to its embrace by rightwing media and Donald Trump, through the rending of families as loved ones became addicted to Q’s increasingly violent rhetoric, to the storming of the Capitol, and on. And as the phenomenon shows no sign of calming despite Trump’s loss of the presidency—with everyone from Baby Boomers to Millennial moms proving susceptible to its messaging—and politicians starting to openly espouse its ideology, Rothschild makes a compelling case that mocking the seeming madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Rather, his impassioned reportage makes clear it’s time to figure out what QAnon really is—because QAnon and its relentlessly dark theory of everything isn’t done yet. The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance by Ross King Atlantic Monthly Press, $24.49 Release date, April 13, 2021 10
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The Renaissance in Florence conjures images of beautiful frescoes and elegant buildings―the dazzling handiwork of the city’s skilled artists and architects. But equally important for the centuries to follow were geniuses of a different sort: Florence’s manuscript hunters, scribes, scholars, and booksellers, who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and, through the discovery and diffusion of ancient knowledge, imagined a new and enlightened world. At the heart of this activity, which bestselling author Ross King relates in his exhilarating new book, was a remarkable man: Vespasiano da Bisticci. Born in 1422, he became what a friend called “the king of the world’s booksellers.” At a time when all books were made by hand, over four decades Vespasiano produced and sold many hundreds of volumes from his bookshop, which also became a gathering spot for debate and discussion. Besides repositories of ancient wisdom by the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and Quintilian, his books were works of art in their own right, copied by talented scribes and illuminated by the finest miniaturists. His clients included a roll-call of popes, kings, and princes across Europe who wished to burnish their reputations by founding magnificent libraries. Vespasiano reached the summit of his powers as Europe’s most prolific merchant of knowledge when a new invention appeared: the printed book. By 1480, the king of the world’s booksellers was swept away by this epic technological disruption, whereby cheaply produced books reached readers who never could have afforded one of Vespasiano’s elegant manuscripts. A thrilling chronicle of intellectual ferment set against the dramatic political and religious turmoil of the era, Ross King’s brilliant The Bookseller of Florence is also an ode to books and bookmaking that charts the world-changing shift from script to print through the life of an extraordinary man long lost to history―one of the true titans of the Renaissance. Harry Versus the First 100 Days of School by Emily Jenkins and Pete Oswald Anne Schwartz Books, $17.99 Children ages 5–8 Release date, 06/29/2021 An acclaimed author and a #1 New York Times bestselling illustrator team up to bring us a funny, warm, and utterly winning chapter book that follows, day by day, the first hundred days in one first grader’s classroom. In just one hundred days, Harry will learn how to overcome first-day jitters, what a “fami-
ly circle” is, why guinea pigs aren’t scary after all, what a silent “e” is about, how to count to 100 in tons of different ways, and much more. He’ll make great friends, celebrate lots of holidays, and learn how to use his words. In other words, he will become an expert first grader. Made up of one hundred short chapters and accompanied by tons of energetic illustrations from bestselling illustrator of The Good Egg and The Bad Seed, this is a chapter book all first graders will relate to—one that captures all the joys and sorrows of the first hundred days of school. Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead: A Novel by Emily Austin Atria Books, $26 Release date, July 6, 2021 Gilda, a twenty-something, atheist, animalloving lesbian, cannot stop ruminating about death. Desperate for relief from her panicky mind and alienated from her repressive family, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic church, and finds herself being greeted by Father Jeff, who assumes she’s there for a job interview. Too embarrassed to correct him, Gilda is abruptly hired to replace the recently deceased receptionist Grace. In between trying to memorize the lines to Catholic mass, hiding the fact that she has a new girlfriend, and erecting a dirty dish tower in her crumbling apartment, Gilda strikes up an email correspondence with Grace’s old friend. She can’t bear to ignore the kindly old woman, who has been trying to reach her friend through the church inbox, but she also can’t bring herself to break the bad news. Desperate, she begins impersonating Grace via email. But when the police discover suspicious circumstances surrounding Grace’s death, Gilda may have to finally reveal the truth of her mortifying existence. A delightful blend of warmth, deadpan humor, and pitch-perfect observations about the human condition, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead is a crackling exploration of what it takes to stay afloat in a world where your expiration—and the expiration of those you love—is the only certainty.
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disruptors
SUSAN VAN DONGEN GRIGSBY
Classical Meets Hip-Hop Stereotypical duo? Not these guys. Wil B. and Kev Marcus broke the rules and invented a new way to think of music
ORE TELLS US THAT Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was warned, “Your music doesn’t sound right, and you simply can’t do that,” which fired up the young genius even more. The warning resonates for Wil B., violist for the duo Black Violin. He understands how hearing “no!” makes a creative person even more determined. “If someone tells you ‘you can’t do it,’ that’s more reason to prove them wrong,” he says. Since 2004, the guys in Black Violin have combined hip hop with their strenuous classical training to create an inventive sound. Originally from Fort Lauderdale, the duo is violinist Kev Marcus (Kevin Sylvester) and Wil B. (Wilner Baptiste). Joining them onstage are DJ SPS and drummer Nat Stokes. The two met in the 1990s at the Dillard High School of the Performing Arts in Fort Lauderdale. Then Kev Marcus went on to Florida International University, and Wil B. chose Florida State while collaborating, sharing music, and producing other musicians. Kev and Wil pushed through the naysayers to record a series of groundbreaking albums, including the 2020 Grammy-nominated Take the Stairs. On the way, they’ve worked with the likes of Kanye West, the late Tom Petty, Alicia Keys, and Wu-Tang Clan. Black Violin has also evolved into more than a genre-challenging phenomenon by becoming part of the Kennedy Center’s Turnaround Arts program, founded by President Barack Obama in 2012 to bring arts education to struggling schools in underserved communities. (The duo has a sweet connection with the 44th President of the United States: they played at the Kids Inaugural Concert, a special tribute to military families, and one of President Obama’s Inaugural Balls in 2013.) Through their own Black Violin Foundation, the duo reaches more than 100,000 students a year through free performances and their work through youth symphonies, community centers, and schools. They want to break down cultural barriers to encourage people of all races, ages, and socio-economic strata to come together through music. Black Violin will be at the Wind Creek Steel Stage at SteelStacks, Bethlehem, Sunday, August 15. We spoke to Wil B., who was at home in Florida preparing for a tour, Black Vi-
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Wil B. and Kev Marcus of Black Violin.Photo: Lisa Leone
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new books
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10 NEW BOOKS
The Secret History of Food: Strange but True Stories About the Origins of Everything We Eat by Matt Siegel Ecco, $27.99 Release date, 08/31/2021 An irreverent, surprising, and entirely entertaining look at the little-known history surrounding the foods we know and love Is Italian olive oil really Italian, or are we dipping our bread in lamp oil? Why are we masochistically drawn to foods that can hurt us, like hot peppers? Far from being a classic American dish, is apple pie actually . . . English? “As a species, we’re hardwired to obsess over food,” Matt Siegel explains as he sets out “to uncover the hidden side of everything we put in our mouths.” Siegel also probes subjects ranging from the myths—and realities—of food as aphrodisiac, to how one of the rarest and most exotic spices in all the world (vanilla) became a synonym for uninspired sexual proclivities, to the role of food in fairy- and morality tales. He even makes a well-argued case for how ice cream helped defeat the Nazis. The Secret History of Food is a rich and satisfying exploration of the historical, cultural, scientific, sexual, and, yes, culinary subcultures of this most essential realm. Siegel is an armchair Anthony Bourdain, armed not with a chef’s knife but with knowledge derived from medieval food-related manuscripts, ancient Chinese scrolls, and obscure culinary journals. Funny and fascinating, The Secret History of Food is essential reading for all foodies.
name off his kill list. Before him was the receiver from his landline telephone, a half-drunk glass of red wine, and a stack of documents.… The documents are contaminated with a deadly nerve agent. The Metropolitan Police determine that they were delivered to Orlov’s home by one of his employees, a prominent investigative reporter from the anti-Kremlin Moskovskaya Gazeta. And when the reporter slips from London hours after the killing, MI6 concludes she is a Moscow Center assassin who has cunningly penetrated Orlov’s formidable defenses. But Gabriel Allon, who owes his very life to Viktor Orlov, believes his friends in British intelligence are dangerously mistaken. His desperate search for the truth will take him from London to Amsterdam and eventually to Geneva, where a private intelligence service controlled by a childhood friend of the Russian president is using KGB-style “active measures” to undermine the West from within. Known as the Haydn Group, the unit is plotting an unspeakable act of violence that will plunge an already divided America into chaos and leave Russia unchallenged. Only Gabriel Allon, with the help of a brilliant young woman employed by the world’s dirtiest bank, can stop it. Elegant and sophisticated, provocative and daring, The Cellist explores one of the preeminent threats facing the West today—the corrupting influence of dirty money wielded by a revanchist and reckless Russia. It is at once a novel of hope and a stark warning about the fragile state of democracy. And it proves once again why Daniel Silva is regarded as his generation’s finest writer of suspense and international intrigue.
The Cellist: A Novel by Daniel Silva Harper, $28.99 Release date, 07/13/2021 Viktor Orlov had a longstanding appointment with death. Once Russia’s richest man, he now resides in splendid exile in London, where he has waged a tireless crusade against the authoritarian kleptocrats who have seized control of the Kremlin. His mansion in Chelsea’s exclusive Cheyne Walk is one of the most heavily protected private dwellings in London. Yet somehow, on a rainy summer evening, in the midst of a global pandemic, Russia’s vengeful president finally manages to cross Orlov’s
The War for Gloria: A Novel by Atticus Lish Knopf, $28 Release date, 09/07/2021 Corey Goltz is fifteen years old when his mother, Gloria, is diagnosed with ALS. Estranged from his father, and increasingly responsible for meeting both his mother’s needs and his own, Corey is determined to be the hero Gloria needs --at any cost. But when his father Leonard re-enters the picture, Corey’s beliefs— about honor and love, duty and devotion, and the uses and misuses of power—are sorely tested. Charismatic and cruel, Leonard is a man of outsize influence and dubious moral character, a man whose neg-
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lect of his wife and son amounts to a kind of barbarism. The closer Corey gets to understanding his father’s role in their family, the closer he comes to unmasking a violence that is beyond even his worst imaginings. Set against the backdrop of a small town in Massachusetts in the early 2000s, where the working class world collides with the professional and academic worlds of nearby Boston and Cambridge, The War For Gloria tells the story of a young man straddling childhood and adulthood, whose yearning to protect his mother requires him to dismantle the myth of--and possibly destroy--his father. A gripping, indelible work from a fearless new voice in American fiction. The Ambassador: Joseph P. Kennedy at the Court of St. James’s 1938–1940 by Susan Ronald St. Martin’s Press, $29.99 Release date, 08/03/2021 On February 18, 1938, Joseph P. Kennedy was sworn in as US Ambassador to the Court of St. James. To say his appointment to the most prestigious and strategic diplomatic post in the world shocked the Establishment was an understatement: known for his profound Irish roots and staunch Catholicism, not to mention his “plain-spoken” opinions and womanizing, he was a curious choice as Europe hurtled toward war. Initially welcomed by the British, in less than two short years Kennedy was loathed by the White House, the State Department and the British Government. Believing firmly that Fascism was the inevitable wave of the future, he consistently misrepresented official US foreign policy internationally as well as direct instructions from FDR himself. The Americans were the first to disown him and the British and the Nazis used Kennedy to their own ends. Through meticulous research and many newly available sources, Ronald confirms in impressive detail what has long been believed by many: that Kennedy was a Fascist sympathizer and an anti-Semite whose only loyalty was to his family's advancement. She also reveals the ambitions of the Kennedy dynasty during this period abroad, as they sought to enter the world of high society London and establish themselves as America’s first family. Thorough and utterly readable, The Ambassador explores a darker side of the Kennedy patriarch in an account sure to generate attention and controversy. n
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KEITH UHLICH
In the Heights
film roundup
In the Heights (Dir. Jon M. Chu). Starring: Anthony Ramos, Melissa Barrera, Leslie Grace, Corey Hawkins. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s wispy stage musical (the one that’s not Hamilton) gets an eager-to-please and sadly lifeless screen adaptation. A youthful quartet—Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), Nina Rosario (Leslie Grace) and Benny (Corey Hawkins)— hailing from the Washington Heights section of Manhattan melodiously navigate love, heartbreak, a sweltering heatwave, and dreams endlessly deferred, though the hip-hop-inflected ballads they croon express little beyond the skindeep. True passion is in short supply, replaced with a belt-it-to-the-cheap-seats energy that grows wearying over the two-and-a-half hour runtime. Only the centerpiece number by neighborhood matriarch Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz)—in which her life passes mellifluously 16
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before her—has any kind of visual punch and emotional pull to it. Director Jon M. Chu did much stronger work in his two Step Up movies, perhaps because they weren’t freighted with the expectations that burden anything with Miranda’s name attached. [PG-13] HH Lisey’s Story (Dir. Pablo Larraín). Starring: Julianne Moore, Clive Owen, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Joan Allen, Dane DeHaan. Stephen King adapts his own novel for this Apple TV limited series, a time-skipping portrait of the marriage between a bestselling horror author, Scott Landon (Clive Owen), and his wife, Lisey (Julianne Moore), who is charged with shepherding her spouse’s legacy after his untimely demise. There are many pluses, such as the sublime rapport between Moore and her two costars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Joan Allen, playing Lisey’s sisters
Darla and Amanda. (In a prime example of casting against type, Leigh plays the normal sibling!) In addition, the great cinematographer Darius Khondji is on board for every episode, the series providing a prime playground for his robust color palette and his eye for evocative angles. Unfortunately, Dane DeHaan nearly sinks the entire enterprise with his hootably one-note performance as a psychotic bad fan in the Annie Wilkes mode (King’s much superior Misery treated many of the same themes here with much less bombast and bloat). And of series director Pablo Larraín, an unflappable hack with pretensions of grandeur, the best that can be said is that this is not Jackie. [N/R] HHH
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KEITH UHLICH
Last Year at Marienbad
classic films
Stage Door (1937, Gregory La Cava, USA) What makes a classic comedy? Mostly kismet—the right people in the right place at the right time. Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers head just such a dream cast in this screwball beaut, directed by Gregory La Cava, that also features Adolph Menjou, Constance Collier, Eve Arden, Ann Miller and a fresh-faced talent named Lucille Ball. The setting is a theatrical boarding house in New York, where Hepburn’s snooty up-and-comer actress Terry Randall comes to live. She proceeds to run afoul of most of the residents, Rogers’ flip dancer Jean Maitland chief among them. There’s plenty of Hayes Code-friendly bitchery, always delivered at the perfect rhythm and flow (two other keys to great comedy). But underlying all the cutting surface pleasures are a keen sense of how camaraderie often blossoms out of conflict. This is the movie in which Hepburn spoofs her 1934 theatrical performance in The Lake (“The calla lilies are in bloom again”), which was famously panned by Dorothy Parker (“[Miss Hepburn runs] the gamut of emotions from A to B”). (Streaming on Amazon.) Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais, France) There may be no more classic mindbender than Alain Resnais’ black-and-white masterpiece, his follow-up to the equally challenging Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959). You could say Last Year at Marienbad takes the form of a mystery, with an unnamed man and woman (Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi) wandering a palatial hotel, the one insist18
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ing repeatedly that they met the year before, the other assuring they did not. There may have been an affair, there may not. There is a husband (Sacha Pitoëff)…perhaps. Time and narrative sequence are jumbled. The disorientation is pervasive, which only makes the journey more hypnotic. Resnais collaborated with the nouveau roman writer Alain Robbe-Grillet on the production. Robbe-Grillet’s highly detailed screenplay served as a blueprint for Resnais to follow and to dream beyond. The film has a reputation as a forbidding object, inscrutable to the point of existential terror, though this misses out on the frequent playfulness of the widescreen imagery by Sacha Vierny, which illuminates the deadpan comic facets of the deceptively dour central couple. See if you can spot the Where’s Waldo?-esque cameo by a famed American director’s unmistakable silhouette. (Streaming on MUBI.) High and Low (1963, Akira Kurosawa, Japan) The title promises a lot—an equal examination of two extremes. Know that the literal translation of Akira Kurosawa’s classic crime thriller is “Heaven and Hell,” which suggests a metaphysical aspect very much apparent in the crisp black-and-white widescreen photography of Asakuzu Nakai and Takao Saito. It’s there in the performances, too, by Toshiro Mifune as a quietly rapacious businessman (the prime target in a kidnapping plot gone awry); by Tatsuya Nakadai as the level-headed inspector assigned the case; and by Tsutomo Yamazaki as the mastermind, such as it is, of the abduction. We
think we know where our sympathies should lie, but as the tense slow-burn of a narrative unfolds, our loyalties shift, our beliefs get muddied. It’s evident, by the end, that everyone has their reasons in a world that prizes rich over poor, a divide that’s built in even to the architecture of the metropolis in which they live. This a genre story (loosely adapted by Kurosawa and his co-screenwriters from the Ed McBain novel King’s Ransom) as a philosophical cri de coeur, and certainly among the best of its kind. (Streaming on Criterion Channel.) Teorema (1968, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy) There’s no charm, discreet or otherwise, to the bourgeoisie in this classic caustic satire from Italian provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini. A wealthy family is visited by a mysterious man known only as The Visitor, played by Terence Stamp at the height of his leonine beauty (at one point the camera unashamedly zooms into his crotch, anticipating the orgy of debasement to follow). The Visitor gives so fully of himself to each member of the household, including sexually, that his eventual departure lays bare the tensions brewing under the brood’s conformist surface. Like several Pasolini films, the sacred and the profane are inextricable bedfellows, and the agita that results is incomparably sublime in its sense of feral shock and spiritual awe. No other filmmaker breaks down his characters to quite as subhuman a level, leaving the possibilities of redemption and rebirth to that void to which we are all destined to return. (Streaming on Criterion Channel) n
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12 BLACK VIOLIN
olin’s first since the pandemic forced an 18month time out. How was it for you during the pandemic? Did you continue to be creative? Although it sucks to not be on the road, we wanted to stay safe, to make sure our families were safe. And being able to be with our families was a plus. We took advantage of the downtime with virtual performances, Zoom concerts, and recorded a Christmas album, Give Thanks. You raised eyebrows in both genres when you combined classical music with hip hop. People were taken off guard, but they didn’t react badly, or at least we didn’t care; we were so focused on what we wanted to do. This is who we are, so it was very natural foxr us to do this thing, and we love doing it. You’ve said how both classical music and hip hop bring people together. [Back in the 1700s/1800s], if you were a person with money, someone with influence, and you were putting on a party, you’d hit up the Mozarts of the world for something new and nice. That’s no different from today for any musician or producer. Do you get folks who might not be interested in classical music enthusiastic about it? It’s especially great playing for Black kids. They see the way we look, they see themselves in us, and it’s been an amazing thing to inspire them. When they hear the blend of classical and hip hop, they think, “Wow, it seems impossible, but these two genres are coming together.” This translates to the kids thinking that they can do anything. You originally wanted to play the saxophone. Did you ever think you’d be decades into a career playing the viola? I was placed in the wrong class, in a string class, and everybody ignored the viola. So I chose it, thinking, “I’m not going to be playing the viola for a long time, so it’s OK.” I continued because I fell in love with the instrument. People might associate the viola with elitism, but I wanted to stick with it to prove something to myself. I loved it, and I still do. There’s this idea about classical music, that it’s boring and daunting, but we make it cool; we make it fun. Classical needs new listeners, new people to engage with it. So, what we do helps classical music, too, helps it to stay alive. n Black Violin will perform on the Wind Creek Steel Stage at SteelStacks, Bethlehem, Sunday, August 15. Tickets cost $15; Steel Terrace, $139. (610) 332-1300. Visit steelstacks.org or musikfest.org. Black Violin: blackviolin.net. 20
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6 DANA MILBANK
for Boebert to break through. In the past couple of weeks alone, she falsely claimed that liberals “legalized knowingly spreading HIV,” asserted that her election “is certainly a sign and a wonder, just like God promised,” attacked a trans woman weightlifter with the message “Welcome to the Woke Olympics” and declared that “Critical Race Theory is now mainstream.” The former proprietor of Shooter’s Grill in Rifle, Colo., also claimed she could carry her gun in the Capitol and refused to allow the U.S. Capitol Police to search her purse after setting off a metal detector. She even compared Biden’s German shepherds to violent illegal immigrants. But she has failed to rise above the din of crazy coming from her colleagues. Wednesday’s censure gambit fared no better. Fox News’s Chad Pergram asked Boebert— twice—to contrast her Biden censure with the Jackson censure, in 1834. Both times, Boebert’s answer betrayed no indication that she knew who Andrew Jackson was. While Boebert struggled, Greene used the questions to deliver unrelated rants about socialism, Fauci, antifa, BLM and defund the police. “This is systematic destruction to our country,” she said. “We have many members in the Democrat Party that you could definitely look at . . . and you could call them communist.” Boebert stood silently, hands clasped. She was in the presence of a master. n Follow Dana Milbank on Twitter, @Milbank.
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6 MICHAEL GERSON
society where equal opportunity is a reality for all. It is true that “wokeness” can be used as a political weapon. It is true that shame culture can be cruel and misdirected. And, as a conservative, I believe that equal opportunity, rather than mandated economic equality, is the proper goal of a free society. But what if we are (to employ a football analogy) not 30 yards away from the goal of equal opportunity in the United States, but 70 yards? What if equal opportunity is a cruel joke to a significant portion of the country? Shouldn’t that create an outrage and urgency that we rarely see, and even more rarely feel? Though our nation is beset with systemic racism, we also have the advantage of what a friend calls “systemic anti-racism.” We have documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, the 14th Amendment—that call us to our better selves. We are a country that has exploited and oppressed Black Americans. But we are also the country that has risen up in mass movements, made up of Blacks and Whites, to confront those evils. The response to systemic racism is the determined, systematic application of our highest ideals. n Michael Gerson’s email address is michaelgerson@washpost.com.
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16 FILM ROUNDUP
The Sparks Brothers (Dir. Edgar Wright). Documentary. A tribute to the power of sticking around, market forces and mass-audience taste be damned, Edgar Wright’s documentary revels in the oddball charm of its sibling subjects, avantpop musicians Ron and Russell Mael aka Sparks. Over 25 studio albums, the California-born brothers have crafted a body of work that follows its own strange path, and in many cases influenced the styles of more popular acts. (Hence the talking-head testimonies here of folks like Beck, Duran Duran, New Order and Flea.) Wright’s film charts a more straightforward route, attending to the Sparks discography chronologically, with fan and collaborator commentary leaning toward the appreciative at worst and the ecstatic at best. There may, however, be method to the linear madness as it allows Ron (the Hitler-mustachioed weirdo) and Russell (the handsome and strapping, uh, also weirdo) to say everything and nothing, maintaining their peerless mystique while appearing to reveal all. [R] HHH1/2 Wrath of Man (Dir. Guy Ritchie). Starring: Jason Statham, Holt McCallany, Josh Hartnett. British upstart Guy Ritchie tames his more overwrought instincts for this very effective thriller in which a mysterious man named H (Jason Statham, that ever-dependable chunk of granite) infiltrates an armored car company for apparently vengeful reasons. The film jumps around between time periods and perspectives, doling out H’s motivations, and those of his security force colleagues, in dribs and drabs. It’s always compelling, though the twisty narrative is more an excuse for Ritchie to revel in the virile pleasures of his stellar supporting cast—Josh Hartnett as a pretty-boy blowhard; Eddie Marsan as a dweebish supervisor; Jeffrey Donovan as a meticulous criminal mastermind (a cinematic cousin to De Niro’s Zen thief in Michael Mann’s Heat); and best of all, Holt McCallany as a loyal company man who is not everything he initially seems. [R] HHH1/2 n Answer to this month’s puzzle
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5 ISLAND
I’ve been familiar with N.C. Wyeth’s 1939 egg tempera, Island Funeral, for a long time. I’ve seen other funeral images as well. The burial on the prairie. Pilgrims in the woods. Island is an excellent metaphor for how we live our lives. Corbet, Manet—they all touched on things I’ve felt, but there’s something about the way Wyeth put the observer up with the gulls that resonates. It’s a view of people gathering to pay respect to the life of Rufus Teel, who lived on the island the whole of his 97 years, rather than one focusing on a person as a body. I made friends at the Maine Maritime Museum when I had my exhibition there, and I stopped by on subsequent trips north to say hello. One time, the chief curator said he had something to show me, and he took me to a large storage shed where they kept many of the amazing boats in their collection. He turned on the lights, and there was N. C. Wyeth’s 28foot lobster boat, Eight Bells, which the family gave to the museum. Wyeth painted Eight Bells into Island Funeral as one of the boats delivering mourners to Teel Island. I got to put my hands on her hull and feel the ghosts of the boat builders and the painter himself. Creating my version of the event wasn’t in the forefront of my mind then, but a link was subconsciously made.
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ince then, pieces of the puzzle have appeared here and there. I’m in that phase of life where time limits are considered in all decisions, and
downsizing is the future. I’ve lost friends at home and in Maine. My view is, increasingly, up with the gulls. Of all the ways I considered addressing the “fourth quarter” (as I‘ve thought of it for a while now), Wyeth’s version influenced me the most, with its narrative of community and the metaphor of the island. The subject is very sobering and real. Inescapable and darkly interactive. The longer I took to consider the painting, the greater the chance of not getting it done. I have in the past addressed subjects that have been well conceived by other painters, such as Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze and The Burning of Center Bridge by Edward Redfield. In each, I purposefully described the event from another physical and imaginative viewpoint; the same story told differently. The one I did of Washington’s crossing is from the New Jersey side, with an eye toward authenticity rather than symbolism. My burning bridge is from the Stockton side. Redfield saw the waning moments of the fire in person (he lived near it), whereas my depiction of the fully involved structure is conjecture. My Island Funeral is not the perspective of a participant or remote observer. It’s that of the destination. My work is not a string of individual images but a continuum where one painting leads to the next, illustrating things that matter to me in life, informed by those that came before. They’re statements about there and then, and reflect what was going on at the time, with me, with all of us. But the past is why we’re here. It’s forgotten or ignored at great risk. So I painted Wyeth’s Eight Bells—the uppermost boat—into my image. The past enlightens the future, and in a small way, sustains a memory of Rufus Teel. n
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harper’s FINDINGS Researchers concluded that who is president is the largest factor in U.S. income inequality. U.S. health-care costs rise in part because the system does not put a monetary value on human life. Attorneys with less-masculine voices win Supreme Court cases more often. Old American men adhere to a 1950s and ’60s ideal of masculinity that fails to prepare them for senescence. Mortality fell in Spain during their economic crisis because the lives of poor people became either less risky or more healthy. Brexit may alter the pattern of nurse migration to the U.K. The “Afghan Girl” was arrested for violating I.D. laws. Among Swedish men born in 1933, 15% were found to have become permanently stressed by age fifty. Jung’s anti-Semitism was found to have been mild. Rational and ridiculing arguments were found to be equally effective in countering conspiracy theories. Linguistic analysis revealed that pro-vaccine comments about Mark Zuckerberg’s baby on Facebook were less logical and rational than anti-vaccine statements. Gaëtan Dugas, referred to as H.I.V.’s Patient Zero, was actually Patient “O” but was subsequently misidentified. Fifteen percent ofhomeless Los Angeles youth are Juggalos. Agent Orange was not understood as a poison among residents of A Luoi until the late 1990s. Humans are good at recognizing partially obscured snakes. Great white sharks were becoming trapped in diving cages. A new theory of gravity may explain the existence of dark matter.
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The idea of cooperation among chimpanzees was cast into doubt, because such cooperation requires that the dominance of any given group member be artificially constrained. Mob behavior allows hyenas to wrest food from lions. If voice commands conflict with gestural commands, dogs obey the gestures. Authoritarian parents exhibit reduced neural response to seeing their adolescent children win money; adolescents with permissive parents exhibit reduced neural response to seeing their parents lose money. By “losing” both stamped and unstamped letters around Perth and seeing how many were eventually mailed, Australian researchers concluded that both financial costs and low socioeconomic status dampen altruism. The more severe the violation of a social norm, the more reluctant bystanders are to call it out, for fear of retaliation. Time pressure does not change the behavior of subjects playing dictator games. Women playing dictator games are more altruistic if they have been exposed to an odorous compound derived from testosterone. Debate continued as to whether the tears of women dampen the sexual responses of men. Sixteen heterosexual men reported an interest in ejaculating on women’s faces while generally believing that the women themselves would not be interested. It remained unclear whether there are benefits to unrealistic optimism.
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Quantitative bioscientists described an oscillating tragedy of the commons. Every aspect of life on earth has been affected by climate change. In 2017, the world’s 2nd largest hypersaline lake was at 20 percent of its 1960 level. Thousands of scrotum frogs were found dead near Lake Titicaca. Tropical bedbugs were reported in Florida for the first time in sixty years. A North Korean zoo chimp continued smoking a pack a day. The odds of a multidecade megadrought occurring in the U.S. Southwest this century are as high as 50%t, and Mayan civilization may have collapsed because of a failure to change habits of consumption during water shortages. The bulwark of old, stable Arctic sea ice was rapidly disappearing. Greenlandic fossils revealed the recoveryof life on earth after 90% of all species died at the Permian–Triassic boundary. It became easier to identify the last signals from stars that were consumed by black holes. Water-rich planets orbiting Proxima Centauri are probably habitable. n 22
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INDEX % by which the number of international borders with barriers has increased since 2014: 48 Year in which the U.S. Census Bureau added a category for people from the Middle East and North Africa: 2020 % of immigrants seeking asylum who are successful in an Atlanta court: 2 In a New York City court: 84 # of statues in New York’s Central Park that depict women: 19 % of those statues that depict fictional women: 100 # of Shakespeare’s plays that the Oxford U. Press now co-credits to Christopher Marlowe: 3 # of emoji acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2017: 176 % change since 2000 in the purchasing power of U.S. Social Security checks: –22 Portion of new U.S. parents who have taken a lower-paying job because it offered better family benefits: 1/2 % of U.S. teachers who leave the profession each year: 8 Average % pay cut a U.S. worker would take to be able to work from home: 8 Average salary of a Harvard University cafeteria worker, including a raise given after a strike in: $35,000 Total value of Harvard’s endowment: $35,700,000,000 # of deaths in Japan attributed to overwork in 2015: 189 % of donated organs in New England that came from victims of drug overdoses in 2010: 4 2011: 27 # of years in prison to which an Indonesian woman was sentenced for poisoning a friend’s iced coffee: 20 % by which the café has raised the price of its iced coffee since the murder: 37 % change since 2003 in the number of bank heists in the United States: –46 In complaints of internet fraud: +131 Chance that an American adult is searchable in facial-recognition databases used by U.S. law-enforcement agencies: 1 in 2 % of local U.S. jails that have implemented video visitation: 14 Portion of those jails that have abolished in-person visitation: 3/4 # of African countries that opted to withdraw from the International Criminal Court: 3 % of people charged by the International Criminal Court who are African: 97 Length, in years, of the maximum jail sentence under a proposed South African law criminalizing racial slurs: 10 Estimated # of gay and bisexual men whom the United Kingdom posthumously pardoned for sexual crimes: 50,000 Portion of the leaders of Scotland’s major political parties who are gay or bisexual: 3/5 Estimated portion of female parliamentarians worldwide who have been subject to physical violence while in office: 1/4 # of members of the Pirate Party elected to the Icelandic parliament in October: 10 # of hours after the first U.S. election polls closed that the Canadian Immigration Services website crashed: 5 Average % change in the stock value of the five largest U.S. defense contractors the week after Trump’s election: +8 Estimated # of votes by which Donald Trump won the state of Wisconsin: 27,000 Of registered Wisconsin voters who lacked voter identification: 360,000 # of newly elected senators who are non-white females: 3 Year in which the U.S. population of eligible voters is projected to be majority minority: 2052 # of men elected to the U.S. presidency before 2016 despite losing the popular vote: 4 Portion of those victors who went on to be one-term presidents: ¾
SOURCES: 1 Élisabeth Vallet, Université du Québec à Montréal; 2 U.S. Census Bureau (SuitlanMd.); 3,4 Executive Office for Immigration Review, U.S. Department of Justice (Falls Church, Va.); 5,6 New York City Department of Parks and Recreation; 7 Gary Taylor, Florida State University (Tallahassee); 8 Museum of Modern Art (N.Y.C.); 9 Senior Citizens League (Barboursville, Va.); 10 Social Security Administration (Baltimore); 11 Bright Horizons Family Solutions (Watertown, Mass.); 12 Learning Policy Institute (Palo Alto, Calif.); 13 Amanda Pallais, Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.); 14 Local 26 (Boston); 15 Harvard Management Company (Boston); 16 Scott North, Osaka University (Suita, Japan); 17,18 New England Organ Bank (Waltham, Mass.); 19 Central Jakarta District Court (Indonesia); 20 Olivier (Jakarta); 21,22 Federal Bureau of Investigation; 23 Georgetown Law Center on Privacy and Technology (Washington); 24,25 Prison Policy Initiative (Los Angeles); 26,27 International Criminal Court (The Hague); 28 South Africa Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (Pretoria); 29 U.K. Ministry of Justice (London); 30 Stonewall Scotland (Edinburgh); 31 Inter- Parliamentary Union (Geneva); 32 Pirate Party (Reykjavík, Iceland); 33 Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (Ottawa); 34 NASDAQ (N.Y.C.); 35 Associated Press (Washington); 36 Leland Beatty (Austin, Tex.); 37 Center for American Women and Politics, Rutgers University (New Brunswick, N.J.); 38 Brookings Institution (Washington); 39,40 Gil Troy, McGill University (Montreal).
Four of a Kind by EVAN BIRNHOLZ
SUNDAY CROSSWORD PUZZLE ACROSS 1 8 14 19 20 21 22 23 25 26 27 28 29 32 33 34 39 41 42 43 45 48 51 53 54 56 57 58 60 62
64 65 68 73 74 76 77 78 80 82 85 87 91 on 94
Moundville Native American Festival’s state “Come on, move it!” President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Diatribe over a president’s record, e.g. Arriving when expected “You can stop saluting now, private” Ecclesiastical official Gomez’s texting sign-off to his hairy relative? Line that intersects a curve at two points Result of a math test? “Fine and Mellow” singer Jones ___ Aviv Gives cards to Social pressure source Toasted lunches, often Promise to provide congers and morays? Papier-___ Maker of giant rubber bands (for tripping roadrunners) Like the first digit of pi 2020 World Series runners-up Transcript listing Inactivity activity Take part in a consumer protest over sporty car roofs? Play to the crowd Big bird with tiny wings Styx guitarist Tommy “Tell us how you really feel!” Informal guess Jazz saxophonist Brown Hamm who was the first woman inducted into the World Football Hall of Fame Mixed martial artist Diaz ___ Majesty the Queen Labels for gory movies, as assigned by the Beatles’ Ringo? “Da 5 Bloods” director Spike Rest ___ (driver’s stop) Scratch out, with “out” Fireplace residue Fireplace residue Skip, as school Human right? Olive in cartoons Steep-walled passages Striped hyena relative featured ESPNU? Actor who provided the voice of the octopus Hank in “Finding Dory”
96 Exercise with a form called Playing the Lute 97 Ward of “The Fugitive” 98 “A long time ago in a galaxy ___, ___ away ...” 99 “The Eye” actress Jessica 100 Ones exposed by fact-checkers 102 When a Looney Tunes hunter launches an invasion? 106 Desert elevation 108 Upper part of a torso 110 Recipient of a neonatologist’s care, informally 111 Frida Kahlo’s field 112 Glass part of a skylight 113 Shade on the Chicago Bulls uniform 114 Inventor of the flute, per Greek myth 119 Disgusting shipwrecked ship on a TV sitcom? 124 Got down during a knighting ceremony 125 Opposite of cheerful 126 Savanna antelope 127 Made surgical cuts in 128 “___ we all?” 129 In a nimble way 130 Groups of four, and what’s spelled out by the groups of four in this puzzle’s theme answers DOWN 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 21 24 26
Hackathon projects Passed-down tales “Doctor Zhivago” actor Guinness “The Wooden Prince” composer Bartók “Gone” actress Seyfried Bit of skiing wear, maybe Good badminton service Not distracted Societal instability ___ Rasmussen, first openly transgender mayor in the United States “Deck the Halls” contraction British record co. Opera singer Fleming “___ way!” Poker player’s action Last-fighter-standing contest Till now Moves, as product Pull in, like a magnet Newsletter tidbit Large hammer
81 “LOL” 30 Large amount 83 Like the taste of milk chocolate 31 Roman emperor who fiddled, as 84 Ring, as a bell legend has it 86 Flipped (through) 32 “Tricked you!” 88 Adorn, as some jewelry 33 The only carbon-negative 89 “Able was I ere I saw ___” country in the world (since 2017) (palindrome) 34 [I’m freaking out!] 90 Wow, as in a drag show 35 Sch. where the first Internet message was transmitted (in 1969) 92 Home of the jets 93 Device with a bulb 36 Churchgoer’s affirmation 95 With 124 Down, setup with a 37 Strips for oboists snare 38 Puts down 98 Setting for many a high-speed 40 Collapsible beds chase 44 “Same for me” 101 Hot bodies in space 46 Petty vindictiveness 103 “Afternoon of an Elf” composer 47 Cosmetics titan Lauder Garner 49 Subjects of many viral videos 104 Singer Reeves with the album 50 Quite cross “Beautiful Life” 51 Odom Jr.’s role opposite 105 Pick up Miranda’s Hamilton 106 Vented rock 52 They may wear matching 107 Entering this answer at 106 outfits during their youth Down, e.g. 55 Ruin the appearance of 109 Round before the finals 59 Cookie cutter? 112 Soft summons 61 Tax-deferred plan, briefly 115 Recipient of a land grant? 63 1960s-style suffix that means 116 Animated daughter of King “in abundance” Agnarr and Queen Iduna 65 Lacked 117 Constant care, to an infant 66 Comedian Rhodes 118 Includes, with “in” 67 Chain component 120 One in a family tree 69 Prepares for a book club 121 Misbehaving kid meeting 122 Host of the “Louder Than a 70 Beginning on Riot” podcast 71 “If ___ heart fails thee, climb 123 Rejection in the Senate not at all”: Elizabeth I 124 See 95 Down 72 “Any moment now” 75 Pea family shrub 79 Sneaker pattern Solution to this month’s puzzle on page 20 ICON | JULY/AUGUST 2021 | ICONDV.COM
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