Memorable Scene Research Articles

Ivo van Hove and Almodóvar: Remixing The Human Voice

Ivo van Hove and Almodóvar: Remixing <i>The Human Voice</i>

Author Response

Author Response

I'll Have What She's Having: The Jewish Deli by Cate Thurston, Laura Mart, and Lara Rabinovitch

Reviewed by: I'll Have What She's Having: The Jewish Deliby Cate Thurston, Laura Mart, and Lara Rabinovitch Sarah Bunin Benor (bio) I'll Have What She's Having: The Jewish Deli. Curated by Cate Thurston, Laura Mart, and Lara Rabinovitch. Skirball Cultural Center, Los Angeles, California ( 04 14– 09 4, 2022). https://www.skirball.org/exhibitions/ill-have-what-shes-having-jewish-deli. Additional venues: New York Historical Society ( 11 11, 2022 – 04 2, 2023), Holocaust Museum, Houston, Texas ( 05 4– 08 13, 2023), and Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, Skokie, IL ( 10 22, 2023– 04 14, 2024). "I'll have what she's having." This line evokes a memorable scene in When Harry Met Sally. It is also the title of a delightful, informative exhibit originating at the Skirball Cultural Center that explores the setting of that scene: the Jewish deli. The title seems to refer not only to the status of the deli within popular culture but also to the influence of Ashkenazi Jews on American society. At delis in urban areas around the United States, non-Jewish customers have demonstrated this influence, deciding, "I'll have what the Jews are having." One of the early panels introduces the exhibit's central narrative: "The Jewish deli is a community forged in food—a venue where families and friends gather, politicians campaign, and filmmakers, comedians, and musicians find inspiration. Although originally created by European Jewish immigrants to serve Jewish customers, delis have become a gathering place for Americans of many different backgrounds." The exhibit highlights this multicultural gathering through an impressive array of media: images of Nelson Rockefeller, Ted Cruz, and Tammy Duckworth campaigning in delis; publicity photos of Elvis Presley and Guns N' Roses in delis; and clips of deli scenes from film and television. Beyond the venue, the food itself has influenced American society. Visitors see mouthwatering images—and Japanese-style plastic models—of foods that Ashkenazi Jews introduced to America, from knishes to kugel, from matzah ball soup to pastrami on rye. A less obvious domain of cultural influence is language. Next to the food models is a glossary of Yiddishisms that have become part of American English—not only deli-relevant words like noshand fressbut also more general words like meshuggahand shayna punim. This placard highlights how deeply intertwined food, language, and culture are in the contributions of Jews to American society. I'll Have What She's Havingalso highlights the confluence of multiple culinary vectors. "Jewish delicatessen is a fusion food born of immigration. It combines regional food traditions from Central and Eastern Europe with available ingredients in the United States, resulting in an entirely new American Jewish phenomenon." An example is bagels, lox, and cream cheese. Originally part of the appetizing tradition, today [End Page 331]this sandwich is a staple of deli fare and, more broadly, Jewish (and American) brunch. The exhibit hints at the streams of immigration and historical developments that resulted in this delectable dish but does not have the space to discuss the socioeconomic factors and implications that Jeffrey Marx analyzes in his 2017 scholarly essay, "Eating Up: The Origins of Bagels and Lox," published in Tastes of Faith: Jewish Eating in the United States. Instead, we are treated to a riveting 1979 video detailing the kneading, rolling, boiling, seeding, and baking of bagels in a Brooklyn bakery, immersing visitors in a particular historical moment of the bagel's development. This exhibit incorporates and builds on scholarship such as books by Hasia Diner ( Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration, 2001) and Ted Merwin ( Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli, 2017). I'll Have What She's Havingtraces the history of the deli as it relates to waves of immigration, urban enclaves and suburbanization, technological advances in meat production, labor unions, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the current artisanal culinary aesthetic. It also presents an innovative section on delis owned and frequented by Holocaust survivors. Using examples from Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, the exhibit argues that these delis "provided a livelihood and purpose" for survivors...

The Zealot

The Zealot Kevin Lozano (bio) Crossroads by Jonathan Franzen Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 592 pp. Before I read any of his novels, I knew Jonathan Franzen's face, from the cover of Time. In the magazine's story, which coincided with the release of his fourth work of fiction, Freedom, Franzen dramatized the ascetic intensity of his ideal writing environment: he had not only removed his laptop's wireless card, so that the computer could no longer latch onto a WiFi network; he'd superglued an ethernet cable into one of its ports and then snipped the wire, to ensure that this hunk of plastic, metal, glass, and silicon would never be able to connect to the web again. It was a conspicuous and silly PR stunt, but it compelled me enough to start his new book. Who was this Luddite? I read both Freedom and The Corrections on an iPod Touch, surely a form of reading Franzen would've hated, but it was the only place I was going to get his books for free during my senior year of high school. I illegally downloaded the e-book files and scrolled through their hundreds of pages on a 3.5-inch LCD screen. What emerged was a cautious appreciation for Franzen's unfashionable disposition, his yeoman's sense of craft, and his dedication to the ridiculous project of writing a great American novel. Later, I came to realize that his eternal faith in literature's supremacy over other cultural forms had value all its own. I bring up this personal history because the bizarre circumstances of my first time reading Franzen color everything that followed. Before I knew him as the (mostly) acclaimed, liberal, grumpy face of mainstream literary fiction, I thought of Franzen as but another star in a constellation that I had yet to be versed in (a college education, social media, nonethnic white people). He was an important writer for me as I crawled my way to an understanding of the world of literary magazines and book reviews, some of which implied [End Page 122] that Freedom was better than (or as good as) books like Middlemarch, Humboldt's Gift, and American Pastoral. One phrase in particular—;from a rhapsodic series of "responses" published in a Brooklyn-based little magazine—;is still jammed in my head: the novel in Franzen's hands was a "feeling-machine." It was an accurate descriptor. I marveled at the nuts and bolts of Franzen's books, which I could admire even from a handheld screen. His plots felt meticulously crafted, his sentences and structures well-oiled and efficient. Like John Updike before him, Franzen maintains careful control of narrative space (and an abiding, blue sense of humor), constantly sowing seeds to reap later. Consider, for instance, how a memorable scene from The Corrections—;in which Chip, a disgraced professor, steals a piece of salmon from a high-end grocery store by stuffing it in his pants, where it "[spreads] down into [his] underpants like a wide, warm slug"—;echoes another infamous passage hundreds of pages later, when Chip's dementia-stricken father, Alfred, defecates in bed, and his turd slowly makes its way down his leg. This is all to say that Franzen's books are readable, funny, and embraced by the mass market because he is exceptionally good at the basic task of novel writing. And the volatile fuel of his feeling-machines is one of the oldest power sources available to the Western novelist: the heterosexual family. Of course, ever since its invention, humans have used the novel to work out our kinks about marriage and kinship and inheritance, but The Corrections and Freedom were infected with a unique sense of desperation and survival. Despite all the debasement of our times, these novels suggested that the family—;and novels about families—;could not just endure but explain modern life. The many catastrophes and redemptions that might strike the average bourgeois household were the only examples one needed to understand a place and time in America. His Midwestern broods, like horsemen of the apocalypse, rode through the books' pages heralding various endings: of eras, of bygone mores, of...

John McGahern and the Big House Trope in the 1980s

John McGahern and the Big House Trope in the 1980s Yen-Chi Wu (bio) In a memorable scene in John McGahern’s screenplay The Rockingham Shoot, we see the nationalist teacher Reilly beating up his students with terrifying ferocity. On the surface, he punishes the kids for skipping class, but what really incurs his fury is that some students went to help at the annual shooting held in the Anglo-Irish Rockingham Estate. Dismissing the students for willingly skivvying and acting like peasants in the service of “our overloads,” Reilly hits the kids so hard that the cane he uses for beating gets shredded.1 By the end of the corporal punishment, Reilly—a fervent Irish nationalist and ambitious local politician—is “dishevelled, out of breath and sexually aroused.”2 Linking post-independence nationalism with unwarranted violence and perverted sexual desire is a hallmark in McGahern’s early fictions. Reilly’s abusive behavior is reminiscent of the veteran-patriarch figures in McGahern’s previous novels, such as the fiery-tempered sergeant Reegan in The Barracks (1963) and the domineering father Mahoney in The Dark (1965). But McGahern’s employment of the Big House trope in The Rockingham Shoot separates it from his earlier work. In fact, the Anglo-Irish Big House is a prominent trope in McGahern’s mid-career works, often revealing his sympathy toward the Big House residents and their marginalized status in the nationalist climate. To that end, the screenplay is indicative of McGahern’s creative outputs in the 1980s when he discovered a well-suited marriage between his social critique of conservative nationalism and the revisionist reiteration of the Big House trope. However, McGahern’s turn to revisionism and the Anglo-Irish tradition in the politically turbulent 1980s also raises questions concerning the intersections between historical debates, sectarian politics, and literary production. In the 1980s, except for the second edition of The Leavetaking, McGahern did not publish a new novel. Instead, he wrote The Rockingham Shoot, which was first broadcast on BBC Two Northern Ireland in 1987. His third short [End Page 27] story collection, High Ground, came out in 1985. The 1980s was also when he prepared Amongst Women, which was published in 1990. A noticeable thread running through his works of this period is McGahern’s interest in the Big House trope. In addition to The Rockingham Shoot, three stories in High Ground—“Oldfashioned,” “Eddie Mac,” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”—feature Anglo-Irish Big Houses.3 Amongst Women could be read as a Catholic version of the Big House, where the rural homestead Great Meadow is an isolated estate and the Morans its aristocratic residents. While Amongst Women adopts the Anglo-Irish literary tradition elusively, McGahern’s early Big House stories often contain historical allusions and draw inspiration from his childhood memory. Some critics thus rely on biographical materials and McGahern’s admiration for Anglo-Irish writers to account for his preoccupation with the Anglo-Irish literary tradition.4 Others attend to the historical and political significance embodied in the Anglo-Irish Big House to complicate the biographical reading.5 While these discussions are admirable pursuits that shed new light on McGahern’s oeuvre, they tend to treat his Big House stories as unproblematic revisionist critique of conservative nationalism. This treatment misses the subtle differences among the stories. It also downplays the significance of the 1980s, when revisionism was under revision itself and a strand of historical revisionism that colluded with modernization ideology suffered from increasing scrutiny. While some of McGahern’s Big House stories are aligned with revisionism, others—especially Amongst Women— employ the traditionally Anglo-Irish literary tradition more creatively. The ways in which McGahern modified his use of the Big House trope deserve more attention in order to fully understand how he responded to contemporary debates on revisionism. McGahern’s Kirkwood stories—“Eddie Mac” and “The Conversion of William Kirkwood”—share revisionist ideologies, and they are open to the criticism [End Page 28] voiced by postcolonial scholars. But in “Oldfashioned” and Amongst Women, McGahern is able to render the Big House trope more creatively to interrogate the throes of Ireland’s socioeconomic modernization, instigated by Seán Lemass’s...

Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles dir. by Max Lewkowicz

Reviewed by: Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles dir. by Max Lewkowicz Debra Caplan (bio) Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles, directed by Max Lewkowicz, Dog Green Productions, 2019. https://thefiddlerfilm.com A man with a violin sits on a rooftop terrace in New York City. Eyes closed, he plays the iconic opening theme to Fiddler on the Roof, the 1964 hit Broadway musical that has captivated audiences for decades. Later, we find out that this man is Sheldon Harnick, Fiddler's lyricist. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles is a documentary about musical theater that foregrounds music in a way that I've never seen before. Not only does the film open with an extended musical sequence, but filmmaker Max Lewkowicz weaves music throughout, deftly interspersing interviews with production footage of some of Fiddler's most beloved songs. Fiddler's soundtrack forms the structural backbone of this documentary. Lewkowicz tells the story of Fiddler On the Roof—its genesis, its key productions, its impact, and its legacy—through close readings of the songs, organizing his storytelling around them. Through "Matchmaker," Lewkowicz considers Fiddler as a story about female empowerment. "If I Were a Rich Man" becomes a conversation about casting Topol over Zero Mostel for the role of Tevye in the 1971 Fiddler film. The "Anatevka" section explores Fiddler's depiction of the refugee experience and contemporary resonance. Alongside these classics, Lewkowicz also includes songs that were ultimately cut from the show. There's a clip of Bock and Harnick performing a version of the title song that was later cut on a television show, and a memorable sequence about "When Messiah Comes," a comic number about God apologizing to the Jews for what he put them through that was cut during Fiddler's Detroit tryout. The inclusion of these songs offers fascinating insight into how Fiddler's creators developed and edited the musical. It's an unusual structure for a documentary, but by and large it works, presenting viewers with the story of how Fiddler on the Roof came to be through fresh perspectives on songs that most of its viewers already know by heart. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles features an impressive roster of interviewees. Lyricist Sheldon Harnick is interviewed at length about the [End Page 655] show's beginnings, alongside Harry Stein, son of the late Fiddler book writer Joseph Stein. Many other key figures from Fiddler's early days appear in the film, including producer Harold Prince and actor Chaim Topol. Steven Sondheim recalls what he thought the first time he heard the score and shares fascinating details on how notoriously difficult Jerome Robbins was to work with. Scholars, such as Alisa Solomon and Jeremy Dauber, offer historical context and background—though I sometimes found myself wishing that the filmmaker had made more use of his interviews with scholars and that there were more scholarly voices included in this film. Actors, and directors from various Fiddler productions reflect what Fiddler has meant to them and their audiences. There are also some delightful surprises. Lin-Manuel Miranda speaks at length about acting in Fiddler on the Roof in his very first school play and about what this musical means to him; later in the film, there's a memorable scene in which he visits Sheldon Harnick's apartment and the two musical theater composers talk about their writing. Itzhak Perlman visibly tears up on camera talking about what the song "Sabbath Prayer" means to him. The interviews are beautifully shot and edited, and it is clear that Lewkowicz loves Fiddler on the Roof just as much as his subjects and his audience do. However, as fascinating as this documentary is, it has a blind spot in its singular focus on Fiddler's universality. Again and again, the film emphasizes how Fiddler on the Roof tells a universal story with which almost anyone can identify. According to Lewkowicz, this universality explains Fiddler's remarkable staying power. True, Fiddler has touched audiences around the world, Jewish and non-Jewish. The film includes a famous and oft-repeated story that when Fiddler on the Roof first came to Japan, the producer asked Joseph Stein whether or not audiences in America understood the...

The archipelagic turn: nationhood, nationalism and early modern studies, 1997–2017

In a memorable scene in the 2001 satire Mike Bassett: England Manager, the historic tensions of the Atlantic archipelago are played for darkly comic effect. The England football team, spying Scotla...

Continental Scope and Its Discontents

Continental Scope and Its Discontents Ankhi Mukherjee (bio) In a memorable scene in Orange is the New Black, the web television series created by Jenji Kohan for Netflix, the inmate Suzanne Warren, aka "Crazy Eyes," played with manic and poetic fury by Uzo Aduba, recites a Shakespeare monologue to hapless teenage visitors to the prison: You common cry of curs! whose breath I hateAs reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prizeAs the dead carcasses of unburied menThat do corrupt my air, I banish you{And here remain with your uncertainty!… thus I turn my back.There is a world elsewhere} (Shakespeare 2013, 316–17) This occurs in season 1, episode 11 of the popular television series. A group of juvenile delinquents is visiting Litchfield, a minimum-security federal prison in upstate New York, and the inmates have been asked to "act tough" to scare the girls away from leading a life of crime. Suzanne is aggrieved that other prisons get to do "Shakespeare and shit" and seizes this as an acting opportunity. Suzanne suffers from mental illness, aggravated now by stressors associated with the degrading conditions of prison life. She receives no care in captivity and is terrified of being returned to "Psych" or the psychiatric unit of [End Page 814] the prison, widely acknowledged to be more tormenting than SHU, or solitary confinement. An adopted child of white middle-class parents who are loving but obtuse to Suzanne's emergent mental health needs, the flashbacks show a jagged process of identity formation marked by painful social alienation, attachment disorders, and borderline personality traits. The adoptive mother does not engage with the pain caused by Suzanne's inarguable blackness in a predominantly white circle of family and friends: in a rare moment of haptic connection experienced by the child Suzanne, we see an African-American nurse calm her down at hospital by offering to fix her hair. In Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Act III, scene iii begins at the Forum in Rome, addressing the howling crowd to whom Coriolanus has been appealing for the title of Consul, and who have demanded his banishment in ungrateful response. The words lend themselves surprisingly well to Suzanne Warren's improvised theatre. She is the tragic wounded hero to the plebeians, alone (another Coriolanus watchword) in the forced intimacy of a crowd of common people. Suzanne delivers the lines with aplomb, the intense alliteration of common/cry/curs or reek/rotten building up to the exhalation of "my AIIIR." The curious displacement whereby Coriolanus's "I banish you" becomes the coerced and choiceless self-banishment of "I turn my back/There is a world elsewhere" adds poignancy to this mock assumption of sovereign power in Litchfield's ongoing drama of the dispossessed. For this reader, this scene proleptically posits some of the meditations put forth in Thinking Literature Across Continents, by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller (2016): on why literature matters; on its transnational mobility and lability as well as its transcultural knots and glitches; on the unstable and often self-cancelling relationship between pedagogies and performance; on literature as the ground of comparison between disparate entities, whose placeholders, in this instance, are Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Orange Is the New Black's Suzanne Warren. The authors, however, do not discuss Orange is the New Black or any cultural form of literary transmission remotely relatable to this prison drama. And therein lies a glaring oversight of work. Let me clarify that I am not holding Ghosh and Miller responsible for not watching Orange Is the New Black or Netflix or even popular television entertainments (Miller, for one, openly decries the fate of literature in "an age of prestidigitalization" {68}). I will, however, begin my critique of the book by asking why, given the excursive as well as inclusive pedagogies informing this unique transcontinental collaboration, do we end up discussing (again) "The [End Page 815] Daffodils" and Derrida, Beckett, Arnold, Tagore and Wallace Stevens, Sanskrit literary theory and Chinese classics, not undiscovered or non-credentialised authors, texts, and literary milieu? Why does a mode of critique that proudly identifies itself as the "(in)fusion-transnow thesis" (7) not engage with...

L’autre Simenon par Patrick Roegiers

Reviews 249 Roegiers, Patrick. L’autre Simenon. Paris: Grasset, 2015. ISBN 978-2-246-80461-1. Pp. 298. 19 a. This historical novel is based on the life of Christian Simenon, the younger brother of the Belgian writer Georges Simenon. Roegiers provides a psychological analysis of this younger son, his mother’s favorite, who never had any sense of self-worth or meaning in his life until he became associated in the 1930s and 1940s with a pro-fascist political group in Belgium called Rex. The leader of this organization was a political agitator named Léon Degrelle, who escaped prosecution after World War II by seeking refuge in Franco’s Spain. Less fortunate were many of his followers, who were either shot for treason and crimes against humanity or died on the Russian front fighting for Nazi Germany. In Roegiers’s novel, Christian is among the latter group, but in the appendix we learn that the real Christian Simenon joined the Foreign Legion and later was killed in Vietnam. In both fiction and reality, he was condemned to death in absentia for being one of the leaders of a mass murder that took place in the town of Courcelles in 1944 as a reprisal for the killing of a collaborator and his family by the Belgian Resistance. The character of Christian has a contemporary relevance for our day. He exemplifies the misfit who tries to give his existence some significance by allying himself with a destructive hate group, losing his soul in the process. Roegiers’s book becomes both a description and an indictment of the fascist mentality in Belgium that led to collaboration with the Nazi occupation on the part of political and religious conservatives. The reader is given a painful sense of the horrendous atmosphere of violence, hatred, and betrayal then prevailing. No one could be trusted, and everyone was subject to the most blatant violations of their basic human rights. This work is thus as much about Belgium in that period as it is about one individual. In some ways it is an accusation of a whole generation. The spirit of collaboration permeated in varying degrees a wide swath of people. Christian’s brother Georges receives almost as much attention as the protagonist. Although he was exonerated from charges of collaboration after the war,Georges Simenon is considered by Roegiers to have been guilty of shameful self-indulgence and a thoughtless disregard for the plight of so much suffering humanity while living in occupied France. (Although not mentioned in this book, Belgian cartoonist Hergé, creator of Tintin, came under a similar cloud of suspicion.) There is a memorable scene in Roegiers’s novel wherein Georges and his friend André Gide enjoy a luxurious meal of pressed duck at the Tour d’Argent before the Libération, at a time when there were severe food shortages. Roegiers’s book is highly thought-provoking. He is excessively given to neo-Rabelaisian verbal outbursts based on enumerations and word associations. He also punctuates his narrative with brief exchanges in dialogue form that serve as a kind of Greek chorus. University of Denver James P. Gilroy ...

Rebel Girls and Singing Boys: Performing Music and Gender in the Teen Movie

Midway through the 1986 teen movie Pretty in Pink comes a strikingly memorable scene. The film's main character, Andie (Molly Ringwald), sits nonchalantly in the local record store where she works. Adorned with posters of mid-1980s post-punk groups like New Order and The Smiths, the store represents Andie's strong alternative music identity. In this particular scene, however, Andie's boss places a recording of Otis Redding's Try a Little Tenderness on the turntable, instantly transforming the mood. From out of nowhere, Andie's best friend, the overly-dramatic Duckie (Jon Cryer), bursts into the store and for the next two minutes proceeds to lip sync, dance, and gyrate his way through the climactic second half of Redding's 1966 soul classic. It is an enraptured, exuberant performance, almost as if he is physically possessed by the music. Andie, the object of Duckie's affections, however, is clearly unimpressed. Soon after his musical display, the deflated Duckie sadly learns that Andie's romantic longings lie elsewhere. His thinly masked musical cry for affection and tenderness has been in vain. As unique and unforgettable as this scene is, the gendered dichotomy that it presents between females as musical connoisseurs and males as emotional performers is far from rare within the teen movie genre of the mid-1980s to early 2000s. From Some Kind of Wonderful (1987) to 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and Juno (2007), again and again we see female characters positioned as social outsiders via their devotion to alternative musical tastes. Likewise, in films as varied as American Pie (1999), She's All That (1999) and Napoleon Dynamite (2004), teenage boys repeatedly assume the roles of dynamic performers. By breaking out into song, and often dance, adolescent males attempt to overcome social challenges. These recurring tropes raise important questions about the teen movie genre and its use of popular music. How and why does the teen movie divide its musical scores along gendered lines? What do these musical differences tell us about the contrast between female and male adolescence? What is the significance of the Rebel Girl within the history of the teen movie, (2) and how are we to interpret the teen boy who bursts into song onscreen? My goal in this article is to dig more deeply into these questions by viewing the teen movie's soundtrack through the lenses of gender identity, musical genre, and the cinematic conventions of popular song scoring. As a coming of age film, the teen movie deals specifically with the gendered rites of passage that mark the symbolic transition from adolescence to adulthood. Music in these films can thus help underscore a character's social transformation. Regardless of how the music guides our understanding of these characters, popular song functions differently for boys than for girls. If we commonly find boys performing their gender in spontaneous moments of public music spectacle--what I call a form of karaoke masculinity--girls are more likely to maintain a consistent outsider musical identity. A female character like the rebel girl is granted a stability through her musical connoisseurship, only to meet with various threats and tests as she navigates her way through the teenager's turbulent social world. I begin this exploration by presenting a brief historical overview of the teen movie genre's birth in the mid-1950s and its musical scoring practices. From there I describe the changes that occurred in the early 1980s which ultimately served to redefine the teen movie. Specifically, this new wave of teen movies began to portray adolescence in a way that resembles anthropologist Victor Turner's description of the liminal journey, a socially defined process marked by rites of passage towards adulthood. Director and producer John Hughes is often credited with popularizing this narrative story structure, and from his very first teen movie feature, Sixteen Candles (1984), he deployed music as a way of enhancing character development, particularly along lines of gender, age, taste, and performance. …

Book Review: Glenn O’Brien, Ed., The Cool School: Writing from America’s Hip Underground

Book Review: Glenn O'Brien, Ed., Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground. New York: Library Classics, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-598532562 (Hardcover). 471 Pages. S27.95.[Article copies available for a fee from Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2015 by Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]A memorable scene in Robert Stone's National Book Award winning novel Dog Soldiers (1974) features Hollywood hustler Eddie Peace introducing the protagonist Ray Hicks to a couple of adventure-seeking squares. Adventure, in this case, is heroin, intravenously injected, which Hicks arrives on the scene to administer. Raymond [Hicks] is the operator, Eddie Peace tells the squares. He's the original hip guy. whole world is goofs to him.In one indelible moment, Stone collapses nearly all the qualities that manifest as hip or cool or underground in Glenn O'Brien's anthology, Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground: illicit substances (in some cool schools, the harder the hipper), hustlers, thrill seekers, danger, and, in the center of it all, a character who knows the score better than anyone and cannot be surprised. [NB: Stone's scene does not appear in O'Brien's anthology-I'm not complaining-but it could, especially because so many of O'Brien's selections conjure its action, milieu, and characters.] Stone has commented that the creation of Hicks derives in part from Neal Cassady, whom Stone knew. Cassady, immortalized as Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouac's On the Road, a cool school bible, might qualify in his own right as an original hip guy. Indeed, his Letter to Jack Kerouac, March 7, 1947 (Kansas City, Mo.) appears in the book, as, of course, does Kerouac in essay form in his The Origins of the Beat Generation. Kerouac and Cassady flow-chart into so many of the book's other hipster representatives: Gregory Corso, Diane Di Prima, Carl Solomon, Herbert Huncke, Amiri Baraka, Joyce Johnson, John Clellon Holmes, William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Ed Sanders, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Gerard Malanga, and so on-the Beats and their constellation are well represented, but Cool School shows that America's hip underground flows within them and without them.Can one quibble with the selection? Well, let's look at the numbers: of the fifty-seven entries, forty-six are male, nine female. Two of the entries by women are song lyrics (Fran Landesman's The Ballad of the Sad Young Men and Annie Ross's Twisted), and as such, nearly throwaways, but we also get two lyrics from the men (King Pleasure's Parker's Mood, and Richard Hell's Blank Generation). That leaves forty-four prose (or play or transcript) entries from men up against a mere seven from women, which begs the question: whither Patti Smith, Jane Bowles, Karen Finley, Hettie Jones, Memphis Minnie, Kathy Acker, Jayne Cortez? collection includes a half-dozen entries that directly or indirectly celebrate black culture, including Mezz Mezzrow's If You Can't Make Money, Teny Southern's You're Too Hip, Baby, Jack Kerouac's The Origins of the Beat Generation, Bob Kaufman's Walking Parker Home, Norman Mailer's The White Negro, Del Close's Dictionary of Hip Words and Phrases, but only seven black writers-six, if you don't count Anatole Broyard's A Portrait of the Hipster, given that Broyard passed as white in his hip-cool-beat NYC life. One may also wonder if his long-term employment at the New York Times Book Review compromises any of his hipster cred? At any rate, four of these seven come from the world of jazz, including excerpts from Miles Davis' Miles: Autobiography, Babs Gonzales' I Paid My Dues, Lester Young, from the interview LesterParis59, and the aforementioned Parker's Mood by King Pleasure. In contrast, there is nothing from Melvin Van Peebles, Claude McKay, Greg Tate, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, Chester Himes, or Claude Brown. …

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Copyright © 2014 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA Daisy Buchanan is one of the most enigmatic characters in American literature. Many first-time readers of The Great Gatsby are frustrated by Nick’s account of Daisy and wonder why Gatsby would risk so much for such a woman. However, they miss the point. Daisy represents something indefinable—an idealized love. As Roger Lewis says in “Money, Love, and Aspiration in The Great Gatsby,” “the love becomes more important than the object of it” (49). Daisy herself is not his goal. Gatsby’s goal is to keep hold of the love that she once inspired, the memory of her, which is colored by his idealization of her. This nostalgic longing for a feeling rooted in the past is sentimentality at a profound level. In fact, at the end of chapter 6, Nick listens to Gatsby recount his first kiss with Daisy and describes Gatsby’s words as “appalling sentimentality” (Gatsby 111). Daisy’s effect on Gatsby is perhaps the biggest paradox of the novel. Based on her actions, it is difficult to gauge how she exerts a hold on Gatsby. Nick comes closest when describing her voice, which, Gatsby later notes, is “full of money” (120): “When the melody rose, her voice broke up sweetly, following it, in a way contralto voices have, and each change tipped out a little of her warm human magic upon the air” (108). Daisy’s “magic” is hard to define, and Nick seems to catch glimmers of it; but he is always at the periphery, unable to tell exactly what Gatsby sees in her. Especially after the car accident, Nick is amazed that Gatsby endangers himself by staying when he is, in Nick’s words, “worth the whole damn bunch put together” (154). Film producers are uncomfortable with ambiguity, however. In general, all the film versions of Fitzgerald’s novel have followed a predictable route. Their marketing campaigns claim that they have tried to evoke the spirit of the novel, yet they boost the sentimentality of the story with great deliberation, pushing the use of pathos far beyond what Fitzgerald would have sanctioned. Most egregiously, producers and filmmakers try to make Daisy a more sympathetic character by changing her storyline. For Fitzgerald readers, this change in Daisy’s character is a continual disappointment. There have been five big-budget, filmed adaptations of The Great Gatsby: 1926, 1949, 1974, a 2000 television production, Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

Sentimentalizing Daisy for the Screen

&lt;em&gt;Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984−1992&lt;/em&gt; by Dagmar Schultz

Reviewed by: Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984–1992 by Dagmar Schultz Tiffany N. Florvil Dagmar Schultz. Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984–1992 New York: Third World Newsreel, 2012 With publications such as Zami, Sister Outsider, The Cancer Journals, and The Black Unicorn and public appearances at international conferences and symposia, prominent Afro-Caribbean feminist, poet, and activist Audre Lorde has influenced individuals across the United States, the Caribbean, New Zealand, and Africa. Less well known is that Lorde also had a significant presence in Western Europe, where she incited social change through her theories, speeches, and essays. Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years, 1984–1992 offers an account of Lorde’s experiences and time in Germany.1 German feminist and activist Dagmar Schultz produced and directed this poignant documentary, which commemorates the twentieth anniversary of Lorde’s death in 1992. Schultz, a close friend of Lorde and publisher of her translated works, was responsible for bringing Lorde to Berlin as a visiting professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University in 1984, where she taught three courses.2 Schultz’s film reflects upon Lorde’s little-known experiences in Berlin during the 1980s and 1990s. Combining sources such as personal photographs, video clips, audio recordings, and interviews, Schultz seeks to present Lorde’s readings, lectures, and exchanges in Germany to a wider international audience. During a memorable scene in the beginning of the film, viewers are transported to a house party in Berlin, where the youthful presence of Audre Lorde, Gloria Joseph, Dagmar Schultz, Afro-German intellectual May Ayim, and African American scholar Tina Campt come into view. Smiling coyly into the camera, a barefoot Lorde moves toward the dance floor and begins to dance to upbeat music with Joseph, Ayim, and other women. Lorde appears carefree as she dances away, laughing and loving the moment, the people, and the space. This emblematic scene captures Lorde’s warm spirit and energy during her trips to Germany. The film also includes archival footage from another documentary on Lorde, entitled A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, directed by Michelle Parkerson and Ada Gay Griffin in 1995. Like this earlier work, Audre Lorde: The Berlin Years captures how Lorde transcended borders through her literary works and public engagements by emphasizing mutual understanding and the negotiation of differences. While the films [End Page 201] overlap, Schultz’s film, in particular, shows how Lorde’s personal and public exchanges and newly forged relationships with individuals in Germany, including Afro-Germans, rejuvenated and sustained her in ways that helped to prolong her life. “Berlin,” as Lorde’s partner Gloria Joseph remarks in the film, “added years to her life.” Lorde’s experiences in Berlin affected her life, pedagogy, and work, especially as she wrote a number of poems from the city. It is also here that she actively searched for and met Afro-Germans. Interweaving audio clips from the short documentary Hope in My Heart: The May Ayim Story, directed by Maria Binder and produced by Dagmar Schultz in 1997, as well as recent interviews from Ria Cheatom, Jasmin Eding, Judy Gummich, Marion Kraft, and Ika Hügel-Marshall—women in the Afro-German movement—the film details how Lorde remained a friend, role model, confidante, and mentor to women in this African diasporic community. Through her interactions with Afro-Germans, as interviewees repeatedly acknowledge in the film, Lorde pushed them to document their histories, to claim and retain visibility, and to establish their own organizations that helped to usher in a new diasporic identity and movement in German society. Yet Lorde’s influence goes beyond Afro-Germans as she also inspired white feminists and other women of color in West Germany and then a reunified Germany. Berlin also enabled Lorde to pursue alternative medical treatment for cancer with Manfred Kuno. The film engages the viewer on visual, sonic, and affective levels, to borrow terms from Tina Campt’s recent publication, Image Matters.3 The visual archive of Lorde’s Berlin experiences not only explores different aspects of her persona as a public intellectual—aspects that those familiar with her work will cherish...

Remembering ‘the poor soul walking in the rain’: Audience Responses to a Thwarted Makeover inWoman in a Dressing Gown

This article emerges from a 2004–5 research project on audience memories of the 1957 British film Woman in a Dressing Gown. It provides general information on the project's objectives and methods before going on to detail one of its major findings: an unexpected degree of consensus among its participants when identifying the film's most memorable scene. The film's heroine makes an effort to improve her appearance by getting her hair done, before her transformation is suddenly and cruelly undone by bad weather; this scene stood out in participants' recollections to a greater extent than any other moment from the film. This article aims to account for the recurrent selection of that specific scene by offering a close reading of respondents' memories of it, with particular reference to the scene's central motif of a thwarted makeover.

Playing Dead: Mock Trauma and Folk Drama in Staged High School Drunk Driving Tragedies.MontanaMiller. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012.

Playing Dead: Mock Trauma and Folk Drama in Staged High School Drunk Driving Tragedies Montana Miller. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2012.In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain creates a memorable scene of Tom and Huck watching their own funeral:They felt like heroes in an instant. Here was a gorgeous triumph; they were missed; they were mourned; hearts were breaking on their account; tears were being shed; accusing memories of unkindnesses to these poor lads were rising up, and unavailing regrets and remorse were being indulged: and best of all, the departed were the talk of the whole town, and the envy of all the boys, as far as this dazzling notoriety was concerned. This was fine. (qtd. in Miller 100)A similar scene proliferated in high schools all over America in the form of the folk drama Every 15 Minutes (E15M for short), an elaborate two-day enactment of a fatal teen drunk-driving accident and its aftermath. In Playing Dead, Montana Miller investigates the gruesome educational event, which sprang up and spread quickly in the early 1990s as an attempt to prevent teens from drinking and driving, even though, as she contends, it not nationally organized or sponsored and has neither a precise origin or nor one 'official' version (1). Its name is derived from the often repeated, but now erroneous, statistic that one person is killed every fifteen minutes in a drunk-driving accident. The current figure, one every forty-five minutes, presumably lacks the punch of E15M. As Miller demonstrates, emotional effect, not reality, dominates E15M. But some participants get so caught up in the emotion that they forget they are acting. In the words of one frantic student who was playing the drunk who caused the accident that killed his friend, All of a sudden everything felt real (60).Miller's slim volume, the second in Utah State University Press's Ritual, Festival and Celebration series edited by Jack Santino, combines theories of play, framing, and folk drama with ethnographic research in order to find the meaning of this popular and, ultimately, very complex social drama. To research her topic, Miller attended dozens of E15M performances, conducted formal and informal interviews, did archival research, scoured YouTube and the Internet, and compiled a database that included hundreds of local versions of the program, from a California suburb to a tiny rural school in Maine (6). A specialist in folklore, she was interested in both the consistencies and variations in E15K enactments, as well as in the functions the performances served for students and their families, high school personnel, and the community. She determined the following common elements in E15M: The Grim Reaper who pulls students out of class to designate them dead; The Living Dead who are separated from their families and friends and sometimes taken away overnight; Obituaries, Cemetery; Death Notifications to Parents; Mock Accident; Victim's Death at the Hospital; Tours for the Living Dead; Retreat for the Living Dead, Letters to Parents; Assembly/Mock Funeral; and, finally, Evaluation, formal or informal, of the program (37-40). With no precise script to follow, students and administrators put their own marks on the performances, with variations in time, space, personnel, costumes, make-up, speech, music, touch, props, and other details. …

Dr Lecter's Taste for ‘Goldberg’, or: The Horror of Bach in the Hannibal Franchise

ABSTRACTThe repeated use of the ‘Goldberg’ Variations in the Hannibal Lecter saga offers a route into the complexities of cinema's appropriation of Western art music. To an extent, the affiliation of Bach with a cannibalistic serial killer rehearses the notion of ‘classical music’ as socially and culturally other. Yet at the same time, from its first appearance in a memorable scene in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), the music is tied to the workings of a mass-media phenomenon. This becomes evident in the sequel, Hannibal (2001), where the ‘Goldberg’ Aria, used as title song, crossing in and out of the diegesis and mixed with sound effects, becomes part of the development of the character into a media franchise, of the romanticizing of his masculinity and the spectacularization of his violence. Thus, in the process of capitalizing on Lecter's success, the saga at once insists on classical music's otherness and blurs its difference from film music.

Duelin' Registries

Duelin' Registries

Are social technologies really invented? [Reflections

In a memorable scene from the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is deposed by a lawyer for the Winklevoss twins, who are suing him, claiming that Zuckerberg had stolen their idea for Facebook. Zuckerberg's attention wanders. When he is accused of being inattentive, he comes out of his fog and points his finger across the table at the Winklevoss twins and their lawyer, saying, have part of my attention. You have the minimum amount. The rest of my attention is back at the offices of Facebook, where my colleagues and I are doing things that no one in this room, including and especially your clients, is intellectually or creatively capable of doing.

Calling Dr Kildare

MY EARLIEST DREAMS OF BECOMING A PHYSICIAN began while sitting far too close to an Admiral television set and watching the 19611966 NBC series Dr. Kildare. As a boy, I was astounded at how the bright intern James Kildare, played by Richard Chamberlain, and his irascible but wise mentor, Dr Leonard Gillespie, portrayed by Raymond Massey, always managed to cure their patients and send them on their merry way in a span of 60 minutes, including commercials. Years later I learned that this television show hardly represented the first time Dr Kildare had commanded a national audience. During my college days, a local cinema society presented the 9 Dr Kildare films produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) between 1938 and 1942 and starring Lew Ayres as Kildare and Lionel Barrymore as Gillespie. Also showing were the 6 Dr Gillespie films MGM made from 1942 to 1947. These subsequent movies did not include Dr Kildare—or rather Lew Ayres— because the actor declared himself to be a conscientious objector during World War II. Even though Ayres subsequently distinguished himself as a noncombatant medical corpsman, the studio dropped his contract. Over the course of a Michigan winter, I saw all 15 films. At the conclusion of each, I exited the auditorium into the frigid night, warmed by the prospect of someday walking the wards of a hospital, like Kildare and Gillespie, for the benefit of humankind. I was reminded of these idealistic impressions by the DVD release of the first Dr Kildare film, Internes Can’t Take Money, produced by Paramount in 1937. Featuring Joel McCrea as Kildare and Barbara Stanwyck as an ex-convict and single mother in search of her stolen child, this fast-paced melodrama exemplifies how much medicine has changed over the past 73 years. Its most memorable scene involves a gangster who staggers into a bar after being gunned down. Bleeding profusely and in need of urgent medical attention, he cannot risk going to a hospital for fear of being incarcerated. Dr Kildare, who happens to be enjoying a glass of beer between cases, instantly assesses the situation, plucks the strings off of a patron’s violin for sutures, shouts for boiling water, cutlery, and rum, and commences to operate in the bar’s back room. As the bartender admiringly exclaims during the procedure, “The kid’s got eyes in his fingers.” The next day, Kildare nobly refuses the mobster’s offer of $1000, saying, “I’m not allowed to take money. Internes can’t do that while they’re serving time at a hospital. If we took money, then the patient who couldn’t pay wouldn’t get the same care.” Despite excellent reviews, Paramount relinquished the literary rights to the Kildare stories, leaving them for its rival, MGM, to snap up. The MGM films that followed were equally inspirational in emphasizing that caring for patients trumped Scene from the 1939 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer production of The Secret of Dr. Kildare. Kildare, played by Lew Ayres (standing behind the patient with his arms crossed), is treating a young socialite with hysterical blindness. Reproduced with permission from the collections of the University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine.