The Arts Fuse Newsletter, October 9
October Short Fuses, the Tedeschi Trucks Band, "The Year That Made the Musical"?, A Confrontation Between Margaret Chase Smith and Joseph McCarthy at Portland Stage, and "Joker: Folie à Deux"
From The Editor's Desk:
The best of the work of Marxist critic Fredric Jameson, blurbed n+1 editor Benjamin Kunkel, “has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms.” Over the top, yes, but apt for a writer who was a member of an invaluable cadre: critics of the arts who did not accept judgment as a consumer guide activity, a way to push product and self, to reward friends and punish enemies, to pick out watering holes of empathy for the ever compassionately minded. For Jameson, who passed away on September 22 at the age of 90, critical judgment involves moving and thinking — sometimes dialectically, sometimes not — among viewpoints and perspectives. Evaluating the arts amounts to a speculative exercise in social and political mapping, a survey of the intellectual and emotional territory landscaped by rapacious capitalism, all the while keeping a sharp eye out for precious signs of innovation.
Sure, Jameson was hepped up on historizing, as A.O. Scott states in the NYTimes. But he also searched for flickers of civic promise amid the formulaic, for furtive gleams of alternative visions. He was marvelously perceptive about nineteenth century giants, such as Émile Zola, but he was also into contemporary science fiction: "one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social existence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet.” And on those sparks could blow your mind. Jameson was a theorist, but judgment sat squarely in the middle, between theory and practice, between thought and action, between passivity and active change.
Reading him can be difficult. But David Foster Wallace went overboard when he charged that Jameson was part of a posse of academic critics whose “English is deformed,” whose “prose is appalling — pompous, abstruse, claustral, inflated, euphuistic, pleonastic, solecistic, sesquipidelian, Heliogabaline, occluded, obscure, jargon-ridden, empty: resplendently dead.” It comes down to where you look. For instance, Jameson’s 2024 collection Inventions of a Present is lively and lucid. The majority of its pieces were published in the London Review of Books and the New Left Review. Newish novels are the focus (among the considered, Robert Stone’s A Flag For Sunrise, Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, and Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate) though there is a sharp piece on TV’s The Wire. The standouts: a comparison between James Dickey’s Deliverance and Norman Mailer’s Why are We in Vietnam? that makes a case for Mailer’s much maligned novel, an amusing Q & A meditation on Karl Ove Knausgaard, and a review of one of my favorite Don DeLillo novels, The Names. Jameson liked the book enough to read it twice
—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief
Note: From the Editor's Desk -- By Popular Demand.
Readers have asked that I post these weekly opinion pieces in the magazine — request granted.
Concert Review: Tedeschi Trucks Band — Still Growing
By Scott McLennan
Tedeschi Trucks Band demonstrated the difference between actively engaging in a musical tradition versus paying tribute to it.
Book Review: “The Year That Made the Musical” Gets the Year Wrong
By Chris Caggiano
William A. Everett’s book is well researched, but it is based on a problematic premise. 1924 was not that memorable of a year for musicals.
Theater Review: “Conscience” — When American History Rhymes
By Martin Copenhaver
Tony winning playwright Joe DiPietro does a commendable job of dramatizing the true-life confrontation between Margaret Chase Smith and Joseph McCarthy while they were both serving in the United States Senate.
Film Review: “Joker: Folie à Deux” — “Morning in America” as Musical Nightmare
By Michael Marano
This is a work of towering, masterful, sustained cinematic rage set at the dawn of the Reagan Era.
Concert and Album Review: Fernando Huergo Big Band, “Relentless”
By Jon Garelick
If Fernando Huergo’s band of A-list Boston players sounded especially inspired, it was certainly in no small part due to what he was giving them to play.
October Short Fuses — Materia Critica
Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
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Editor-in-Chief
Bill Marx
wmarx103@gmail.com
