The Arts Fuse Newsletter, July 16
The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll — Sharing What We Know at Mid-Year and Confessions of a Bad Voter along with reviews of "Eddington," "Apocalypse in the Tropics," and "The Slip"
More on the magazine this week: Debra Cash adores the new Doris Duke Theatre at Jacob’s Pillow; Bob Katz evaluates activist/organizer’s Michael Ansara’s memoir The Hard Work of Hope; Sarah Osman believes the HBO Max historical reality series Back to the Frontier to be the welcome return of a fading genre.
From The Editor's Desk:
A hundred years ago this week, tongue-slashing social commentator, acidic literary critic, and veteran reporter H. L. Mencken was hunkered down in Dayton, Tennessee during a heat wave, covering what he had proclaimed to be “the greatest trial since that before Pilate!” High school teacher John Thomas Scopes was being tried for violating a state law that forbade teaching evolution to young minds; the proceedings became a national sensation. The Baltimore newspaper for which Mencken worked, The Evening Sun, supplied Scopes’ bail. Mencken had earlier coined the term “The Bible Belt,” and he gifted this legal spectacular with a derisive label that has stuck ever since — “The Monkey Trial.”
At first, Mencken was pleasantly surprised by Dayton. “I expected to find a squalid Southern village,” he noted, “what I found was a country town full of charm and even beauty.” But, from the get-go, he saw that religious fundamentalists were in charge: “It was no more possible in this Christian valley to get a jury unprejudiced against Scopes than would be possible in Wall Street to get a jury unprejudiced against a Bolshevik.” Mencken’s reportage has been accused of being crude and reductionist — the march of Christian Nationalism today, via a combination of realpolitik and fear, underlines the prescience of his vision of religious power-mongering and censorship.
As for the secular forces opposing religious fundamentalism, Mencken offered this trenchant characterization in his 1956 book Minority Report: “Democracy, in the last analysis, is only a sort of dream. It should be put in the same category as Arcadia, Santa Claus, and Heaven. It is always a mistake to think of it as a reality. It never really exists; it is simply a forlorn hope.” A hundred years on, that hope is looking scarily fragile.
—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief
Archive: From the Editor's Desk 2025
The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll — Sharing What We Know at Mid-Year
By Tom Hull
We are all part of a community with a deep commitment to this extraordinary but way-too-often unappreciated musical art, and the late critic Francis Davis believed we should work together and share what we know. His poll was one important way to do just that.
The Annual Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll at Mid-Year — Listomania! Confessions of a Bad Voter
By Jon Garelick
So what am I saying? That the system is imperfect, corrupted by bad voters like me (there must be a few others who didn’t listen to even close to everything on this list — show of hands?)
Film Review: “Eddington” — Grifter Nation
By Steve Erickson
The story’s surprising degree of feeling for Joaquin Phoenix ‘s Joe saves Eddington from simply serving as fodder for overheated social media discourse and crusading op-eds.
Doc Talk: MAGA Mirrored in “Apocalypse in the Tropics”
By Peter Keough
In her new documentary about the crises in Brazilian democracy, Petra Costa examines a factor involved in the election of Jair Bolsonaro that was largely overlooked in the first film — the toxic power of the evangelical movement.
Classical Album Review: The Korngold Symphony — The Great American Symphony?
By Jonathan Blumhofer
Could it be that Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Symphony in F-sharp is the big kahuna of our symphonic music?
Book Review: “The Slip” — An Epic Exploration of the Elasticity of Identity
By Clea Simon
The Slip raises issues of race and entitlement, as well as the malleability of identity, all in one big, sloppy, and occasionally gorgeous package.
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Editor-in-Chief
Bill Marx
wmarx103@gmail.com
