Guest Post: Is Ryan Kelly's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph an American 'Guernica'?

Jennifer Wenzel, Columbia University

On Aug. 12, 2017, Charlottesville Daily Progress photographer Ryan M. Kelly captured the moment that Nazi sympathizer James Alex Fields, Jr. drove his Dodge Challenger into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring 19 and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. It’s probably the most enduring image to emerge from the weekend of “Unite the Right” rallies in Charlottesville, Va.

Eight months later, Kelly’s iconic photograph from that tragic day has earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography.

At first glance, the photograph is nearly impossible to make sense of visually or politically. Cars are not supposed to drive into pedestrians; fellow citizens are not supposed to kill each other over political differences. And there’s so much in the frame of the image – so many figures and forms crowded together, most only partially visible – that you can’t take it in all at once.

Pablo Picasso’s 1937 iconic mural “Guernica” might teach us how to interpret this image more closely, and why it is important to do so. Like Kelly’s photograph, “Guernica” conveys a moment of terror through a jumble of forms and fragments that seem to make no sense.

In April 1937, a different sort of “Unite the Right” moment took place in fascist Europe during the destruction of Guernica. At the request of General Franco, the leader of nationalist insurgents in the Spanish Civil War, German and Italian warplanes bombarded the Basque town in northern Spain. Terror rained from the sky: Hundreds of civilians were killed, while military targets were left unscathed.

Days later, as May Day protesters filled the streets of Paris, Pablo Picasso began what would become an anti-war masterpiece.

Pablo Picasso, ‘Guernica’ (1937).
Reina Sofia

There are uncanny echoes of Picasso’s “Guernica” in Kelly’s photograph. Picasso used the Cubist techniques of fragmentation and collage to create a visual cry of anguish at the destruction wrought by men at the controls of war machines.

To make sense of the painting, you must do the work of reassembling what has been rendered apart. Yet you will never make sense of such destruction. You cannot merely glance at this massive painting or take it in all at once; you must stand and look and witness. There is nothing beautiful about it. It refuses to console. However, in the painting’s abstraction – its matte shades of gray, its distorted figures that stand in for the wounded and the dead – there is a kind of mercy toward its viewers and these victims.

If there is any mercy of abstraction in Kelly’s photograph, it is that of time. The image captures the moment in medias res – when the bodies of the men near its center still evoke the beauty of the human form in its wholeness.

Ryan M. Kelly/The Daily Progress

Yet we know the victims are not whole; that is why it hurts to look. The contorted positions of the man in red and white sneakers and the man somersaulting above him make sense only in the realm of sports photography. But this is not a game.

Elsewhere the photograph captures only fragments: arms and hands, legs and feet, heads and faces. Empty shoes on the ground. Sunglasses. A cellphone in midair.

You will never make sense of this image because it makes no sense. (Or, rather, it makes as much sense as racism itself.) Yet to look away risks turning away from the truths it tells. A heavy aspect of our national tragedy is that we seem to lack a president – such as Abraham Lincoln – whose heart might break to see such carnage.

As he kept reworking “Guernica,” Picasso painted over a raised fist he had initially drawn near the center of the canvas. Then – as now – the raised fist is a symbol of solidarity against fascism. It makes an eerie reappearance on two posters in the top third of Kelly’s photograph.

“Guernica” includes small lines resembling newsprint. The Charlottesville photojournalist’s image is also crowded with text; some of it implicates the driver, while other words are a call to action.

Clear as day, there’s the incriminating license plate. No one can deny that this car drove into this crowd, as the colluding European fascists did when they claimed that Guernica had been bombed by Spanish Republican forces.

Then there’s the collage of protest signs and street signs that the neo-Nazi at the wheel didn’t heed: Peace/Black Lives Matter. Solidarity. STOP. LOVE. BLACK LIVES. STOP.

Kelly’s photograph redirects these injunctions to the viewer, who’s left to wonder whether this is what our democracy – or the state of our union – looks like.

This is an updated version of an article originally published on Aug. 17, 2017.

Jennifer Wenzel, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, Columbia University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

From the Archives: Review of a 1997 'Sunday in the Park with George'

Having previously thought that all of my theatre reviews from the late 1990s had been posted here for archival access, just this week I uncovered a piece that had been inaccessible because it had somewhat mysteriously been converted into an old WordPerfect format.

Yesterday I found an online resource that will convert text documents from one format to another and -- ta-dah! -- I have a review of the 1997 joint production by Washington's Arena Stage and Arlington's Signature Theatre of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sunday in the Park with George.

So, for the first time on line, here is my May 1997 review, which appeared in the Metro Herald under the headline, "Sunday Sings!"

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Washington audiences have an embarrassment of riches available this spring. Within a few days, Chicago, The King and I, and Sunday in the Park with George all opened. Together, these three plays offer examples of the best by the giants of American musical theatre: Bob Fosse, Rodgers & Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim.

In a historic collaboration, Arlington's Signature Theatre and Washington's Arena Stage have joined forces to present a play that neither could produce on its own: the Pulitzer-prize-winning Sunday in the Park with George, by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. This production is directed by Signature's Eric D. Schaeffer, whose work at the tiny but innovative Signature Theatre has earned him a national reputation, and produced by Arena's outgoing artistic director, Douglas C. Wager.

Like most Sondheim musicals, Sunday is not for everyone. For Sondheim fans, however, it is bedazzling. The intimate setting of Arena's Kreeger Theater is far superior to the larger auditoriums in which earlier Sunday productions have been staged. Sondheim's sophisticated lyrics and intricate melodies and counterpoints are far more easily heard in such a venue.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the smaller auditorium is the ability of the audience to see more closely Patricia Zipprodt's costumes. Because of the foresight of Schaeffer, the costumes used in this production of Sunday are the same ones used originally on Broadway (and since used by the Arlington Players a few years back). Zipprodt has successfully simulated the pointillist style of painting invented by Sunday's protagonist, neo impressionist Georges Seurat, for his masterpiece (now hanging in the Art Institute of Chicago) Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte.

Seurat's work and style of work is the focus of the first act. George (played by Sal Viviano) is obsessed by light, color, balance, design. He has discovered that it is possible to create the illusion of mixed colors by setting discrete points or dots of color side by side, in juxtaposition to each other. He is fully absorbed by his work, ignoring and therefore losing his mistress, appropriately named Dot (Viviano's real-life spouse, Liz Larsen). We meet the characters whom we see in the final painting, but whether they are real people or the imaginings of George is hard to say.

The second act focuses on another artist, also named George, who may be the great grandson of the first act's George. At least his grandmother, Marie, insists that this is so. Act II's George also works in a new medium, but his primary challenge is raising the money to pursue his art. Tired of criticism that he has lost his way, that his work is no longer new or creative, he travels to France to visit the island of La Grand Jatte. There, he encounters his (perhaps?) great grandmother, Dot, who counsels him to "move on."

This synopsis cannot do the play justice. Sunday in the Park with George is not a typical musical. This is not a simple boy meets girl, boy loses girl scenario. Indeed, there is no conventional plot at all. Through the integration of music, lyrics, movement, lighting, and costumes, composer and playwright raise important issues about artistic integrity, personal relationships, and the importance of family.

Viviano plays the two Georges in contrast. Act I George is cold, obsessive. At first Viviano's stiffness in the first act is off putting, but soon it becomes apparent that this is what drives Dot away, into the arms of the more caring Louis, the baker who takes her to America. Highly rational and highly intellectual, focused laser-like on his creative endeavors, this George will be all too familiar to Washingtonians, who encounter this type every day. Act II George is more well rounded, though still devoted to his work. He seems more able to connect to his fellow human beings, particularly his grandmother, and has a deeper understanding of his own faults and shortcomings.

As Dot and Marie, Liz Larsen is astonishing. Her voice is as clear as a bell, her emotions sincere and convincing. We know she genuinely loves George, but cannot spend her life with him because he has another love his art. Her warmth contrasts suitably with George's chilliness, and the comparison helps us better understand the central character. Singing "Children and Art" in the second act, we begin to understand what really counts in life. And her rendition of "Move On" to and with George in Act II makes it hard to believe that Sondheim has written anything more, well, moving.

The rest of the cast is uniformly excellent. Drawn from the professional ranks of New York, regional, and Washington theatre, this cast includes a number of Arena and Signature veterans.

Anyone who works in the non profit world or, for that matter, anyone who is engaged in campaign fundraising will be captivated by the action, lyrics, and dialogue of the Act II number, "Putting It Together," which describes the schmoozing and bootlicking that are necessary to keep one's head above water in these situations.

Schaeffer has done well in bringing Sunday in the Park with George up to date. The modern art in Act II is now computer generated graphics and music, rather than the laser light show that was so cutting edge in 1984. One quibble, however, may be necessary as future productions are planned. The script requires that Marie be born in 1885. With the second act set in 1984, this was not hard to believe many people live to be 98 or 99 years old. Now that the second act has been brought forward to 1996, however, it stretches our credulity to have Marie, now 111 years old, as the grandmother of a 32 year old grandson. Will a revival in 2007 have a 122 year old Marie?

The Arena/Signature Sunday in the Park with George is breathtaking. I hope it will have an extended run that will allow multiple visits for those of us who are truly moved by Sondheim's best work.

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As I dig through paper and virtual files, more surprises may turn up.  Please stay tuned!

Patrick Swayze and 'Red Dawn'

Fox News and other media outlets are reporting the death of actor Patrick Swayze:

After a very long and public battle with pancreatic cancer, actor Patrick Swayze died at home Monday with his family and friends at his side. He was 57.

Swayze, who was diagnosed in January 2008, defied the odds in many ways – living for more than a year-and-half with this extremely deadly form of cancer. During that time, he put together a memoir with his wife and even started filming the new crime drama “The Beast,” in which he refused to take painkillers because he was worried it would affect his performance.

A quarter-century ago, I wrote my first movie review. Written for the Journal of Civil Defense (not known for its arts coverage), the review was about Red Dawn, a Cold War-era drama directed by John Milius and starring, among others, Patrick Swayze (pre-Ghost and pre-Dirty Dancing).

Aware of the embarrassment likely to ensue from the reprinting of any juvenile work of criticism, I'm willing to take the risk and post that review here, as it appeared in the October 1984 (!) issue of the Journal of Civil Defense.

“The Outsiders” Meet Darth Vader:
Schoolkids Battle Red Army in RED DAWN
Richard E. Sincere, Jr.

Red Dawn — Directed by John Milius. Produced by Buzz Feitshans and Barry Beckerman. Screenplay by Kevin Reynolds and John Milius. Executive producer, Sidney Beckerman. A Valkyrie Film distributed by MGM/United Artists Entertainment, 1984. Rated PG-13.

What would America be like under Communist military occupation? To answer this question, United Artists has released a movie more frightening than The Day After, as suspenseful as The Empire Strikes Back, and as real as the war in Central America. Directed by John Milius (The Wind and the Lion), it is called Red Dawn and stars Patrick Swayze, C. Thomas Howell, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen, and Oscar-winner Ben Johnson. Former secretary of state Alexander Haig says of Red Dawn: “It’s a provocative and extremely interesting film which depicts the futility of war without underestimating the essential need to maintain the preparedness to fight war.”

The movie’s premises are stated flatly: Russia has suffered its worst wheat harvest in 55 years. The Green Party has captured a majority of seats in the West German parliament. Cuba and Nicaragua increase their armed forces to more than half a million; El Salvador and Honduras fall to their might. NATO collapses. Mexico has a revolution. Soviet troops march into Poland to suppress a workers’ rebellion. The United States stands isolated in the world …

As the film opens, a high school history class listens to Mr. Teasdale (Frank McCrae) lecture on the methods of conquest used by Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes. They would spread out over hundreds of miles, he said, pushing cattle, villagers, and soldiers towards the center — a policy of encirclement. In the midst of the lecture, paratroopers land in the schoolyard and start shooting anyone who steps in their path. World War III has begun.

Some of the students escape to nearby mountains in a pickup truck. Jed (Swayze) and Matt (Sheen) are brothers who know the ropes of hunting and survival; Jed’s namesake is mountain man Jedediah Smith. Daryl (Darren Dalton), the mayor’s son, is president of the senior class. Rounding out the group are frightened teenagers Robert (Howell), Danny (Brad Savage), and Aardvark (Doug Toby). Eventually they are joined by Erica (Thompson) and Toni (Jennifer Grey), the granddaughters of Mr. Mason (Johnson), a rancher who gives the boys food, horses, and ammunition.

On their first trip into town from the mountains, the boys discover that Cuban and Nicaraguan soldiers have turned the area into a massive concentration camp: the town — Calumet, Colorado — is forty miles behind the lines in Soviet-occupied territory. Beyond the lines lies “Free America,” a rump of the United States, mostly east of the Mississippi.

As they take over the town, the Cuban officer in charge (played sympathetically by Ron O’Neal) orders his Nicaraguan lieutenant to go to the sporting goods store and find all the gun-registration forms, so the guns can be confiscated and their owners rounded up and put into the ‘re-education camp” (what used to be a drive-in theatre). At the drive-in, the residents see movies with messages like “America is a whorehouse that has betrayed its revolution.” In town, the theatre marquee advertises “Alexander Nevsky -- All Day Saturday — Admission Free.” Posters of Lenin plaster the sides of buildings; Russian troops burn books.

After the boys see the conditions in the re-education camp, they decide to turn into guerrillas — or, as the Red Army major says, “bandits.” After they kill their first Russian soldiers, the authorities line up about a dozen civilians, who are executed as they sing ‘America the Beautiful.” Fifty other Americans are forced to watch the execution.

This sets the stage for a series of brilliant guerrilla attacks against the Communists, their camps, and their equipment. The plot takes several twists, some comic, some bittersweet, some plain bitter, punctuated by superb performances by Patrick Swayze as the group’s leader and C. Thomas Howell as the innocent teenager turned bloodlusted guerrilla. This is no lighthearted entertainment; its darker, tragic aspects compete vigorously with its inherent optimism.

The movie is bone-chillingly real. The Communist strategy of encirclement — no doubt culled from the experience of the Mongols, Russia’s overlords into the 16th century is in process now. The Cuban colonel, viewing the dead bodies of his troops after a guerrilla attack, says, “I’ve seen this before ... in Nicaragua, San Salvador, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Angola — but I’ve always been on the other side.” The use of terror against the civilian population — mass executions of innocents — is frighteningly reminiscent of Soviet tactics in Afghanistan, where booby-trapped toys maim and kill small children for the purpose of scaring their parents into submission.

The scenario, too, is realistic — much more so than the one we saw in The Day After. Early in the movie there is no indication of the use of nuclear weapons; later we learn that there was a very limited use of missiles, surgically striking missile bases in the Dakotas, SAC headquarters in Omaha, and communications centers like Washington and Kansas City. The United States fails to respond in kind, and the war stands at a conventional stalemate. The Soviet invasion’s first wave comes by commercial aircraft to California and the mountain states. Cubans and Nicaraguans infiltrate U.S. air and military bases in the South and Midwest, disrupting communications as a fifth column. The effect is Soviet occupation of the Great Plains up to Cheyenne, Wyoming; Denver is suffering a siege as bad as Stalingrad’ in the Second World War.

Pacifist Western Europe “decides to sit this one out.” Only two countries are fighting on our side: Britain and “600 million screaming Chinamen,” according to Colonel Tanner of the U.S. Air Force, who joins the kids in the hills. He’s asked: “The last I heard there were a billion screaming Chinamen.” Well,” he says, “now there’s only 600 million.” Silence.

The sheer terror of the movie, present in the constant watchfulness of the occupying troops, the KGB, the torture, the animal instincts to which our teenage heroes descend, the herding of civilians into concentration camps all this should be a lesson to the Helen Caldicotts of this world who were so moved by The Day After and Testament, two films which showed the aftermath of nuclear war without showing the alternative: slavery and faces mashed by hobnail boots.

Director John Milius is an anomaly on the Hollywood landscape. With films like Reds and Missing being praised so highly of late, it is rare to find a filmmaker who professes a belief in peace through strength and is willing to admit that yes, Cuban interventionism in Central America threatens America’s ultimate interests — our survival as a nation. Red Dawn portrays everyday American kids as heroes -- the Nathan Hales of the twentieth century — and can touch the heart of every American, It undermines belief in the heroism of "progressive revolutionary forces” and it shows the Communist slave-drivers as they really are: vicious, bloodthirsty, vindictive, brutal.

The film does yield to liberal sentiment in its expression of “What’s the fighting all about?”, “What’s the difference between us and them?” Yet the underlying theme remains: We fight because we love. If there’s nothing to die for, there cannot be anything to live for. The film does not shy away from death and gore; its heroes are not immune from suffering; no one tries to persuade us that war is pristine, a romantic, or cathartic. Indeed, one is comes away convinced that this dirty business has to be averted — but that it sometimes is just and obligatory.

Red Dawn echoes, in varying degrees, the Star Wars trilogy (rebels vs. the evil empire), Lord of the Flies (given the right conditions, even children can devolve into savages), The Green Berets, Sands of Iwo Jima, Battle Cry, and other heroic war movies, and The Outsiders (Patrick Swayze and C. Thomas Howell played brothers fending for themselves in a rough, violent world in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film of the popular teen novel). Moreover, it remarkably parallels the concrete experience of the Contras in Nicaragua, the freedom fighters in Afghanistan, and the European resistance movement of the 1940s. With insufficient provisions, no training, but with a lot of courage and chutzpah, even children can fight for the values we cherish: freedom, self-determination, honor, and love.

MGM/UA must be commended for making this film. Far from the vacuousness so characteristic of our San Fernando Valley culture of American filmmakers, this is a jarringly realistic portrayal of the the world as it might be. I predict it will be very popular among Americans in 1984, especially those who have overcome the “post-Vietnam syndrome” and look proudly on one major achievement of American strength, that since 1980 no nation has fallen captive to Soviet adventurism. In fact, American fortitude of has rescued one country — Grenada — from its alien rulers. Nonetheless, Red Dawn has a sharp message: It can happen here. We must prevent it — or suffer dire consequences.

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Richard Sincere, a member of the board of the American Civil Defense Association, has directed, designed, or acted in numerous plays and musicals, including Fiddler on the Roof, The Hot I Baltimore, God, The Fantasticks, The Brig, and (most recently) Company.

After earning $8,230,381 in its first weekend, Red Dawn went on to gross $35,866,000 in its initial U.S. release. It was not much of a critical success (its only significant award was a nomination for a Young Artist Award for supporting actor Brad Savage), but it has remained a guilty pleasure for many Reagan-era young conservatives. Years later, "Red Dawn" became the code name for the military operation that captured Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Was 1959 the Year Everything Changed?

This book review was written for publication in The Metro Herald of Alexandria, Virginia. (Look for it in next week's edition.)

Was 1959 the Year Everything Changed?
A Book Review
Rick Sincere
Metro Herald Entertainment Editor

One could forgive a certain solipsism among readers born in 1959 who may think that Fred Kaplan's 1959: The Year Everything Changed is about them personally.

That it turns out not to be so does not diminish the book’s entertaining and informative readability. Yet what it lacks in particular egocentrism (the author himself was born five years earlier) it makes up in idiosyncrasy.

What is most unfortunate about Kaplan’s collection of loosely related essays is that it simply does not live up to its subtitle. Then again, it hardly could, since every year has been (and will be) pivotal in one way or another. Pick a year out of a hat and one could list dozens of discoveries, innovations, inventions, or events that “changed everything.” (1776? The Declaration of Independence and the Battle of Trenton. 1941? Pearl Harbor and Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. 1969? The moon landing and Woodstock. Try it yourself.)

What’s more, Kaplan stretches his pivotal year to include events that could properly be placed earlier or later.

Take for example, two scientific advances that truly did have titanic cultural repercussions. These two, in fact, were more influential with regard to how we live now than most any of the cultural, artistic, and political events discussed elsewhere in Kaplan’s book.

Kaplan devotes one chapter, “Toppling the Tyranny of Numbers,” to Texas Instruments’ introduction of the solid integrated circuit (or microchip) at an electronics trade show in March 1959 – even though the invention had been made by John St. Clair Kilby already in August 1958, when he demonstrated it to other TI scientists and executives.

Another chapter, “Andromeda Freed from Her Chains,” is about the birth control pill. Kaplan places this invention in 1959 rather arbitrarily, because the FDA hearing to decide whether to approve the Pill’s use for birth control purposes took place in late December of that year. But the Pill had already been approved for other uses and had been prescribed by physicians for two years by then; its final approval for specific labeling as a birth control drug came on May 11, 1960.

It is hard to imagine a 21st century without microchips – which make possible nearly all the devices that populate our daily lives, including the laptop computer used to write this book review – or the birth control pill, which really did unchain women and free them to pursue happiness and productivity outside of a narrowly defined role as housewife and mother, as well as continuing in that role as a matter of their own choice.

Kaplan may allude to the reasons for his book’s idiosyncratic choices late in its pages when, under the heading of “Acknowledgements,” he writes: “… several years ago, it occurred to me that some of the most important – or at least some of my favorite – books, movies, and record albums were made in 1959. Was this just coincidence, or was there something significant about that year? The more I looked into it, the more it struck me that this truly was a pivotal year – not only in culture, but also in politics, society, race, science, sex: everything” (p. 245).

For all his enthusiasm about “everything,” Kaplan has a crabbed view of society and culture.

For one thing, his book is highly – and almost annoyingly – New York-centric. On page after page, we are introduced to artists, musicians, philanthropists, publishers, and others who live in Manhattan and who meet each other at cocktail parties, jazz clubs, and museum openings.

It is fascinating, of course, to learn that Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, Ornette Coleman, Allen Ginsberg, and Norman Mailer all traveled in the same circles, and that they and their friends and associates shared ideas, built upon them, and diversified them in their different genres. But Greenwich Village is not the center of the universe; it really isn’t.

Even when talking about arts and culture in New York, Kaplan has a narrow definition of what is important. He devotes two chapters (out of 25) to innovations in jazz by Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman and their associates, but he says virtually nothing about the theatre (on- or off-Broadway). This was the year of Gypsy, for instance, often called the best musical play ever written, and of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, a pathsetting drama that broke the color barrier on Broadway. Neither are mentioned; nor are the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! and The Miracle Worker, which made stars of Patty Duke and Anne Bancroft.

Similarly, when he talks about movies, he mentions popular Hollywood films only to denigrate them in passing. He focuses on John Cassavetes’ semi-improvisational film Shadows – shot entirely in New York City -- and suggests (though not in so many words) that it was the first independent (or “indie”) film, which it surely was not. It might have been innovative, but it wasn’t fundamentally so.

Except for a passing reference to the growth of television set ownership over the decade of the 1950s, Kaplan ignores television – as an art form or as a means of communication about news and public affairs – completely.

There are also irritating little slips in the text, some that could have been caught and corrected by copy editors or fact checkers.

In a list of the seven Mercury astronauts, for instance, Kaplan renders Deke Slayton as “Duke Slayton” (p. 73) and, several pages later, he refers to Fidel’s Castro’s visit to the “Lincoln Monument and Jefferson Memorial” (p. 95). Out of all the structures dedicated to presidents in and around the Nation’s Capital, only one is called a “monument.” Lincoln, Jefferson, and Franklin Roosevelt have memorials. Taft, Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt have bridges. Reagan has an airport; LBJ has a grove. Washington is the sole president with a monument.

There is also a strange bit of delicacy in his discussion of artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, of whom he says: “Soon they fell into an intense relationship, personally and professionally” (p. 174).

Well. In order to find out the whole truth – that they were gay and that they were romantic partners (the latter fact merely implied) – the reader must look up an endnote on page 289. Given that the endnotes are not marked in the conventional way within the text (that is, with a superscripted number to guide the reader to the note), it is unlikely that many will seek out this information on their own. Just whom is Kaplan trying to protect from this common knowledge?

We can grant that Kaplan can, and perhaps should, write about those subjects that most interest him (modern jazz, avant garde art, and Norman Mailer). If he chooses to ignore the wider culture in favor of a more elitist vision of arts, music, and literature, or to treat the rest of America as Saul Steinberg satirized Manhattanites in his famous “New Yorker’s View of the World” cartoon, so be it. That is his privilege as a journalist (and, perhaps, as a Brooklynite).

No matter how you look at it, however, Kaplan falls quite short in making the case for his hyperbolic claim that 1959 was the year that everything changed – or even the year that changed everything.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Fred Kaplan. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. 322 pp. (including notes, photographs, and subject index). $27.95.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Rick Sincere was born on April 7, 1959, when everything changed for his parents and himself.

It is interesting to note, via a search of Amazon.com that there are other books with similar themes and titles, such as Bernard Diederich's 2007 book, 1959: The Year that Changed Our World, and Rob Kirkpatrick's book, released earlier this year, 1969: The Year Everything Changed, and -- even older -- 1998's What A Year It Was! 1959, by Beverly Cohn.

(Crossposted to Virginia Free Press.)




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Politics at 'The New Yorker'

That staid journal that is read more often for its cartoons than its articles (take that, Playboy!), the venerable New Yorker, has three good political reports that are worth a look.

The first is a profile of Libertarian presidential candidate Bob Barr, written by Raffi Khatchadourian. Here's a sample paragraph:

For many people, including skeptical libertarians, Barr still has the reputation of a partisan, but his self-imposed exile from the Republican Party is representative of a broader disaffection among conservatives who did not immediately rally behind McCain. Republicans in the mold of Barry Goldwater, who believe in small government, minimal constraints on the free market, and expansive civil liberties, have become profoundly uneasy about the direction of the country under President Bush, who has presided over the largest increase in federal spending since the Great Society, raised the national debt to more than ten trillion dollars, suspended habeas corpus for enemy combatants, and recently proposed the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bailout of Wall Street. David Boaz, the executive vice-president of the Cato Institute, and David Kirby, the executive director of America’s Future Foundation, have argued that, because of such policies, the libertarian vote, which for decades has been solidly Republican, “may be the next great swing vote.” According to surveys, as much as a fifth of American voters hold libertarian values, and in recent years more than seventy per cent of them have voted as Republicans. But Boaz and Kirby noticed that in the 2004 Presidential election only fifty-nine per cent of them voted for Bush, and between the midterm elections of 2002 and 2006 three million of them drifted away from the Republican Party—a shift that Boaz and Kirby argue “may well have cost Republicans control of Congress.” In this year’s Republican primaries, Ron Paul, the congressman from Texas and a longtime libertarian, earned more than twenty per cent of the vote in Idaho, Washington, Montana, and North Dakota. “His supporters are the equivalent of crabgrass,” Frank Luntz, a Republican strategist, told Time. “It’s not the grass you want, and it spreads faster than the real stuff.” In August, Newt Gingrich warned that if McCain chose as his running mate Senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut, Barr would win fifteen per cent of the vote.

Two other articles focus on the major parties' vice-presidential candidates.

Ryan Lizza profiles Joe Biden, who was chosen to be the running mate of his former rival for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama. A sample:

On August 6th, Biden said, the Obama campaign “smuggled” him into Minneapolis, where Obama was campaigning, and the two senators stayed up late in a suite at the Graves 601 Hotel working out the details of a potential deal. Obama told Biden that the vetting had gone well—Biden assured me that it was “very complimentary.” Biden happens to be one of the least wealthy members of the Senate, although his family’s joint income was more than three hundred thousand dollars last year. (His wife, Jill, has a Ph.D. in education and teaches at Delaware Technical & Community College.) His relatively straightforward tax returns and uncomplicated financial situation made the process easier. “All these years and you still have no money,” Obama said to Biden, teasingly.

The conversation in Minneapolis ranged from foreign policy and possible appointments to the federal courts to the legislative strategy that would be needed to pass an Obama agenda. Obama wanted to know how Biden had managed his signature achievements—such as the 1994 crime bill, which added a hundred thousand federally funded police officers to city streets. He also tested Biden’s understanding of how broad his role would be, as opposed to that of another contender—apparently, Kathleen Sebelius, the governor of Kansas and the only woman known to be on Obama’s short list. “He said, ‘Well, you know, if I offered this to somebody’—he named her, a person—he said, ‘That person would be very happy if I assigned them to reorganize the government.’ And he said, ‘They’d be very happy doing that. How about you?’ ” That didn’t sound like much of a job to Biden. “No,” he told Obama. “That’s not what I want to do.”

Finally, Jane Mayer traces how Sarah Palin emerged as the leading contender for the Republican vice-presidential nomination. While Palin's name was known among political junkies for months before the GOP convention, she seemed to the general public to have sprung full-blown from the head of John McCain, who decided, without vetting, that he needed to have a Tina Fey lookalike at his side. Mayer sets the record straight. For example:

While Brickley and others were spreading the word about Palin on the Internet, Palin was wooing a number of well-connected Washington conservative thinkers. In a stroke of luck, Palin did not have to go to the capital to meet these members of “the permanent political establishment”; they came to Alaska. Shortly after taking office, Palin received two memos from Paulette Simpson, the Alaska Federation of Republican Women leader, noting that two prominent conservative magazines—The Weekly Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, and National Review, founded by William F. Buckley, Jr.—were planning luxury cruises to Alaska in the summer of 2007, which would make stops in Juneau. Writers and editors from these publications had been enlisted to deliver lectures to politically minded vacationers. “The Governor was more than happy to meet these guys,” Joe Balash, a special staff assistant to Palin, recalled.

On June 18, 2007, the first group disembarked in Juneau from the Holland America Line’s M.S. Oosterdam, and went to the governor’s mansion, a white wooden Colonial house with six two-story columns, for lunch. The contingent featured three of The Weekly Standard ’s top writers: William Kristol, the magazine’s Washington-based editor, who is also an Op-Ed columnist for the Times and a regular commentator on “Fox News Sunday”; Fred Barnes, the magazine’s executive editor and the co-host of “The Beltway Boys,” a political talk show on Fox News; and Michael Gerson, the former chief speechwriter for President Bush and a Washington Post columnist.

By all accounts, the luncheon was a high-spirited, informal occasion. Kristol brought his wife and daughter; Gerson brought his wife and two children. Barnes, who brought his sister and his wife, sat on one side of Governor Palin, who presided at the head of the long table in the mansion’s formal dining room; the Kristols sat on the other. Gerson was at the opposite end, as was Palin’s chief of staff at the time, Mike Tibbles, who is now working for Senator Stevens’s reëlection campaign. The menu featured halibut cheeks—the choicest part of the fish. Before the meal, Palin delivered a lengthy grace. Simpson, who was at the luncheon, said, “I told a girlfriend afterwards, ‘That was some grace!’ It really set the tone.” Joe Balash, Palin’s assistant, who was also present, said, “There are not many politicians who will say grace with the conviction of faith she has. It’s a daily part of her life.”

Palin was joined by her lieutenant governor and by Alaska’s attorney general. Also present was a local woman involved in upholding the Juneau school system’s right to suspend a student who had displayed a satirical banner—“Bong Hits 4 Jesus”—across the street from his school. The student had sued the school district, on First Amendment grounds, and, at the time of the lunch, the case was before the Supreme Court. (The school district won.)

During the lunch, everyone was charmed when the Governor’s small daughter Piper popped in to inquire about dessert. Fred Barnes recalled being “struck by how smart Palin was, and how unusually confident. Maybe because she had been a beauty queen, and a star athlete, and succeeded at almost everything she had done.” It didn’t escape his notice, too, that she was “exceptionally pretty.”

This issue of The New Yorker also has an article that gives hope to those of us who still have creative ambitions long past the date we might have been considered precocious. Malcolm Gladwell writes about the difference between youthful genius and artists who succeed much later in life in an article called "Late Bloomers."



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Counterprogramming

Serendipity, said Dutch Nobel laureate Pek van Andel, "is the art of making an unsought finding." In a similar vein, American novelist Lawrence Block described serendipity as what happens when you "look for something, find something else, and realize that what you’ve found is more suited to your needs than what you thought you were looking for."

Both thoughts apply to my experience last night, when I had planned on seeing the latest summer blockbuster, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, at a local cinema. When I went to Fandango to learn the showtimes, however, I saw the name of a film I had not previously encountered: The Rape of Europa.

To my surprise, the movie had nothing to do with cows or gods or crossing the Mediterranean. Instead, it is a documentary based on a 1995 book by Lynn H. Nicholas, and its subject is the systematic pillaging of European art by the Nazis, and attempts over the past six decades to retrieve it and return it to its rightful owners.

I was fortunate, too, in that The Rape of Europa is currently showing in only four cities in the United States and one in Canada: Albany, Calgary, Charlottesville, Richmond, and San Antonio.

Produced in 2006, the film is just now getting commercial distribution. It was screened at a number of film festivals in 2007, and its 2008 schedule indicates several dozen theatres have hosted it so far, with about two dozen more "coming soon." A DVD is scheduled to be released in August.

As for me, a Frostian twist of fate led me down the path less traveled, so that I and five and six other patrons at the Regal Cinema in downtown Charlottesville saw a moving, informative, and instructive film about 20th century history. It tells a story with a definite beginning and middle, with the end still sorting itself out more than 60 years after the end of the Second World War.

Although much of the narrative depends on "talking heads," the filmmakers -- Bonni Cohen, Richard Berge, and Nicole Newnham are all credited as producer/director/writer -- have combed the archives of Europe and the United States for rare film footage, still photographs, and newsreels (both Allied and Axis) that add dramatic heft to the project. In addition, they have isolated a couple of "subplots" that both humanize the topic and bring it up to the present.

One of these subplots features a German man who has made it his purpose in life to return Jewish religious artifacts to the families of Holocaust victims, using detective techniques to match items to names on cemetery headstones, for instance, and traveling across the Atlantic to make sure his finds reach their destination.

In another, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts discovers it has unwittingly acquired a painting by François Boucher, The Young Lovers, that belongs to the family of Paris art dealer Andrew Jean Seligmann. Doing the right thing, it returns the painting to Seligmann's surviving family members in a ceremony in Salt Lake City.

A third subplot, which serves as a framing device, discusses the complicated legal case of five paintings by Gustav Klimt that had been stolen from a prominent Jewish family in Vienna but which had been claimed by the Austrian government for six decades.

While the film makes reference to the larger atrocities of the Nazis, its focus remains firm on what Hitler wanted to do with art. I would have liked to have seen more attention to the "degenerate art" exhibitions that Hitler sent around Germany, as well as to his mediocre taste in what he considered "appropriate" art -- Hitler ripped a page from Plato in deciding that the government should determine the sort of art the masses could see, and anything that departed from that narrow category had to be destroyed or hidden.

What is most shocking about the Nazi plunder of European art is how systematic it was. The Rape of Europa implies that one of Hitler's motivations in invading various European countries was specifically to steal various works of art to add either to his personal collection, or to display in a vast museum he had planned to build in his hometown of Linz, Austria. He did, in fact, prepare lists of specific paintings, sculpture, and other works that were used by Nazi forces in "collecting" plunder from museums, private galleries, and homes. Specially targeted were Jewish families, whose belongings were carted off from their households after they themselves were sent to the death camps; their furniture, silverware, pottery, bed linens, and much more were put on trains and sent to Germany, where they were distributed to the families of Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe officers and Nazi party officials.

Also shocking, however, is the vindictiveness of the Nazis that led to the wholesale destruction of the treasures of European culture. From the outset of the war, Hitler intended that Polish culture be obliterated. (The story of the Nazis' targeting of the Warsaw Castle is especially touching.) The people of Poland would be eliminated so that their land could be repopulated by Germans; their untermenschen culture would be eliminated so that nobody would remember it. Libraries were burned, churches were looted, and museums were denuded.

As the war began to turn in favor of the Allies, moreover, Hitler ordered the demolition of buildings, bridges, and other immobile icons of local culture. Knowing they were about to lose Florence, for instance, the Nazis simply blew up whole city blocks.

In contrast, when the Allies destroyed something -- such as in the regrettable, tactically mistaken bombing of the monastery at Monte Cassino, for example -- it was done only when military necessity dictated it. When it became apparent that the Florence railway yard had to be demolished, the Allied air forces narrowly targeted it, with the result that there was relatively little collateral damage. (The people of Florence, the film reports, were pleased that the railroad was bombed.)

Yet the Nazis demolished art and architecture for the sheer joy of it. "Totalitarianism" is given a new and deeper meaning by such dastardly acts.

The U.S. Army, on the other hand, assigned art experts -- people like Lincoln Kirstein -- to the front lines, whose job was to identify artistic and architectural valuables and rescue them, if possible, from further damage. These "Monument Men" discovered caches of art works in caverns, salt mines, castles, churches, chateaux, and government buildings. There were literally millions of objects that had been stolen by the Nazis from France, Belgium, Poland, Russia, and other countries. When they were catalogued and returned, they filled hundreds of railroad cars.

Several of these Monument Men, still living, describe their experiences in The Rape of Europa. Others were honored by the people whose art they rescued after their deaths.

More detailed information about The Rape of Europa can be found at the documentary film's official web site. It is a story that deserved to be told, and in this film it is told in a colorful, provocative, and detailed manner -- or at least as detailed as one can be in 117 minutes.

As for me, I am grateful for Fandango's serendipitous listings.

Gifts for the Arts at MUHS

My alma mater, Marquette University High School, just announced that it is the recipient of two seven-figure gifts to underwrite improvements in the arts environment on the college preparatory school's Milwaukee campus. These large -- and welcome -- gifts will have a profound effect on the capacity of MUHS students to participate in the performing arts, as well as in various graphic and fine arts programs.

Writing in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Dani McClain reports:

Two families have donated gifts totaling $2 million to expand the arts progam at Marquette University High School, school officials announced today.

Jerry and Donna O'Rourke have given $1 million to transform the school's auditorium into a performing arts center. School officials said today that they plan to improve the auditorium's acoustics, upgrade the lighting and add a large elevator to move instruments from the band room to the stage.

The auditorium is already named after the family because of a contribution the O'Rourkes made to renovate the space more than a decade ago. Jerry O'Rourke is a member of Marquette University High School's class of 1955, Dan Quesnell, a spokesman for the school, said today.

Ken and Karen Yontz' gift of $1 million will establish a new fine arts center that will include chorus and ensemble rooms, a graphics computer lab, a ceramics room and kiln and a darkroom.

The Business Journal of Milwaukee adds these details:

Marquette University High School is in the midst of a $14.2 million building project that includes a two-story addition featuring the Yontz Fine Arts Center connecting to the O'Rourke Performing Arts Center.

"The generous O'Rourke and Yontz gifts ensure that current and future students will experience the highest quality fine arts program," Sazama said in a press release.

Especially in my senior year, I spent many hours in the then-unnamed auditorium. (Regular readers may recall seeing video footage of the auditorium from the 1970s -- the Prep Players' production of Guys & Dolls in 1977, and "Blazing Seniors," the Senior Follies of the Class of 1977, which was actually produced in November 1976.)

At last year's "Great Homecoming," I was able to snap a few photographs of the auditorium, which really has not changed much at all over the past 30 years. I hope that the transformation promised by the million-dollar-plus endowment does not eliminate its mid-20th-century charm. I especially hope that the decades of autographs painted on the walls beneath the stage and in the wings are not harmed in the construction phase -- that is a historical record well worth preserving, visual evidence of the ghosts who haunt every theatre.

No doubt history will be on the minds of the actors, musicians, and crew members who take part in this weekend's production of Ragtime (reviewed here and here), as well as the audience members who go to see the Prep Players' version of the 1998 Tony-winning musical play, set in the turbulent turn of the 20th-century and dealing with issues of racial equality and immigration that still vex us today.