MUSIC
Youth Without Youth
Van Halen at First Mariner Arena, March 9

Behold the Dad Band, that shambling assemblage of guys on the far side of fifty jamming in America’s suburban basements. Laden with equipment they couldn’t afford at 18, they mortify their teenage children with Eagles covers and MySpace pages. Sometimes the kids get dragooned into playing along: Two of the year’s most-hyped reunions are DadBands— multigenerational endeavors that, depending on your take, are either heralds of rock’s end days or stirring affirmations of the genre’s age- and logic-defying powers. For Led Zeppelin’s historic reanimation in London in December, drummer Jason Bonham assumed his late father’s throne behind the kit, and the present incarnation of Van Halen features guitarist Eddie Van Halen’s 16-year-old son, the magnificently named Wolfgang, on bass.

It is, one hopes, a thrill for the teen Van Halen to maintain the bloodline and gig with Dad and Uncle Alex, but for local audiences, March’s show at First Mariner represents a more epochal event: the long-awaited return of clownish frontman David Lee Roth, who quit the band in 1985 to embark on a solo career in self-parody. (The band would soldier on for another decade-plus of commercial success in the company of journeyman belter Sammy Hagar.) The Diamond Dave restoration in 2007 after a twenty-two year interregnum, like so many rock reunions, is both implausible and somehow inevitable. The biological clocks on these guys are winding down. Roth is now a 53-year-old ex-radio jock (he did a brief turn as Howard Stern’s replacement on WNYC); Eddie is 52 and the survivor of a host of lifestyle-related infirmities: hip replacement, cancer, alcohol rehab, divorce.

And yet, here they come, lean and leathery and thrashing through “Hot for Teacher” with hammer-ons and scissor-kicks largely intact. Critics seem grudgingly impressed with this current Van Halen tour, all the more remarkable considering that the band’s pre-Hagar catalog is quintessential young men’s music—athletic, technically precise wank-o-ramas constructed around Eddie’s supernatural musicianship and Dave’s preening horndoggery. This is not material that ages gracefully, and there’s something odd about the prospect of hearing teen anthems like “Drop Dead Legs” and “Everybody Wants Some!!” performed by men of this demographic. But even if you haven’t laid a needle on Diver Down since junior high, it’s possible to celebrate the return of Van Halen as a Rocky Balboa-like feat of physicality, a triumph of the boundless boomer capacity to summon the roar of youth. And for all the Dad Bands out there in the crowd, it’s one last, precious chance to dance the night away.

—David Dudley



FILM
Quiet, Please
Woman in the Dunes at the Homewood Friends Meeting House, March 27

What’s the difference between a silent film, and a film about silence? See for yourself when Art On Purpose and the Baltimore Lyceum jointly screen Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes (1964) as part of their “What Takes Place in Silence” film series. The film is a dark, surreal satire of the matrimonial trap and the indentured servitude of the Japanese male. An amateur bug collector (Eiji Okada) searching for specimens in a remote seaside village is forced to lodge overnight with a local woman (Kyôko Kishida) when he misses the last bus out of town. Her home is a ramshackle hovel located at the bottom of a gaping crevasse of shifting sand. There’s sand on the floor, sand in the bed, sand in their food; every night she has to shovel out just enough to keep the house from being buried the next day. It’s a miserable place to live, but she’s lonely, and besides, this job is too big for one woman working alone.

When the other villagers don’t lower the rope ladder the next morning, the bug collector knows he’s stuck like a butterfly on a pin. With its hypnotic, droning score of atmospheric sound, Teshigahara’s twisted parable has more in common with Eraserhead—David Lynch’s 1977 art-horror film about arranged marriage and fatherhood—than with the samurai costume dramas normally associated with Japanese film. But silence doesn’t only mean an unobtrusive soundtrack: Much of this film—from the frighteningly passive-aggressive politeness of the woman to interval shots of shifting sand and scuttling desert insects—is about the meaning between moments, not in them. Once you understand, you’ll be eager to see the next films in the series, including Michael Haneke’s Caché (April 24). Woman in the Dunes is preceded by the hard-to-find Turkish film Distant (March 13), a sound film that nevertheless forgoes almost all dialogue.

—Violet Glaze

*Following the 7 p.m. screening there will be a discussion moderated by David O’Donaghue of the Baltimore Lyceum.



ART
Bright Ideas
Double-Take: The Poetics of Illusion and Light at the Contemporary Museum, through May 11

With subtle tweaks of light, cleverly selected hues, and simple gestures, the three artists featured in Double-Take: The Poetics of Illusion and Light toy with the viewer’s perception. Curated by the Contemporary Museum’s executive director, Irene Hofmann, the exhibition explores how slight visual shifts can create multilayered experiences.

A spinning wire sphere hanging from the ceiling confronts the viewer upon entering the exhibition. Made by Alexandra A. Grant, the wire comprising the large sculpture, Nimbus II, is meticulously twisted and shaped into words from Nimbus, a hypertext poem by Michael Joyce. Lit with theater lights, the sculpted words are projected as shadows that flicker against the walls.

Mary Temple also plays with shadows. At first glance, a section of the museum appears to be bathed in late-afternoon sunlight streaming through a plant-filled window. It takes a few moments to realize that there is no window—this is Temple’s piece Southwest Corner, Northeast Light. The shadows are actually painted on the wall, yet a sense of calmness pervades, as if the viewer could soak up the tromp l’oeil sunlight.

The work of Baltimore-based artist Bernhard Hildebrandt reconfigures art history concepts. In his film Un-erased de Kooning Drawing, sections of a de Kooning drawing that Robert Rauschenberg famously erased in 1953 are digitally restored. In his Untitled works, a white or black enamel painting is displayed next to a photograph of the same painting, creating a tautological reference to 1960s conceptual art. By juxtaposing representation with reality, Hildebrandt asks the viewer to contemplate perception as it relates to genuine and fabricated experience—a theme that emerges from this innovative exhibit as a whole.

—Ding Ren



POETRY
Digging for Clues
My Father's Speech by Katherine Cottle
Apprentice House

Although poet Katherine Cottle has been publishing her work for twenty years, her debut collection of poems arrived just this January. My Father’s Speech is also the first-ever winner of the annual Apprentice House Chapbook Competition, sponsored by Loyola College’s Apprentice House—the country’s only college-run, student-staffed book publisher.

“Apprentice House began years ago as a mock company developing pretend projects,” explains Gregg Wilhelm, director and editor-in-chief of AH. “But as printing technology caught up to the idea, students’ book projects were actually published.” The chapbook competition arose out of what he describes as “the great tradition of striving to give poets some exposure in a crowded marketplace.” (The next deadline for the Apprentice House Chapbook Competition is March 14; go to www.apprenticehouse.com for details.)

Selected from fifty manuscripts submitted by poets from across the country, Cottle’s chapbook takes an unflinching yet nostalgic look at the rural coal-mining life of her West Virginia ancestors. “My Father’s Speech centers around my own search for meaning in a world where I am continually digging for a place of understanding,” she says. Throughout the book, the Maryland resident references everyday objects and images—a spit can and coleslaw—to powerfully reflect her subjects’ hardscrabble lives. The final poems capitalize on this method to the greatest extent, bringing simple elegance to charged memories. In “Arrowhead,” Cottle gracefully portrays her father in both boyhood and old age as a passionate and troubled soul: “Even now … he dreams of the tool … and wakes to the grind of stone / against stone, the cry of his own / palms—silent, bleeding, alone.”

My Father’s Speech achieves its aim: communication of the lives bravely lived in a trying world.

—Molly O’Donnell

Katherine Cottle will sign copies of My Father’s Speech at Greetings and Readings in Hunt Valley on March 8, 1–3 p.m.



THEATER
Lighter Sides
The Pastor's Anniversary at Arena Players, March 28- April 20
Bad Theater at Mobtown Theater, March 27-30

The Arena Players’ new play, The Pastor’s Anniversary, revolves around the minister of a church called St. Peter and St. Paul Baptist, who, in anticipation of his anniversary with the church, points out congregation members’ failings: A mother has become addicted to prescription drugs; a man tries to pass as the female soloist in the choir by dressing in drag. “It’s a riotous play,” says playwright Robert E. Russell, a retired art and drama teacher for Baltimore City Public Schools.

The play is the third in a trilogy of faith-based comedies that includes The Church Mortgage Burning, about a minister who embezzles to do good works, and The Church Lottery Ticket, about a congregation divided over whether to use the proceeds of a winning ticket dropped in the collection plate. In its fifty-fifth year, the Arena Players is the oldest continuously run African American community theater company in the United States. Members of its youth theater have gone on to roles on Broadway and television, from The Jeffersons to The Wire.

While Arena Players looks to church groups to fill the house, the new company Theater for Rent targets young people who might think of plays as an old folks’ pastime. “There’s a stigma among young people that theater is boring; they’d rather go to a movie or a bar,” says company founder Peter Shipley.

The company’s first official production is Bad Theater, which tells the story of two playwrights who can’t seem to get it right—until their characters step in to help them out. “It’s got a kind of Stranger Than Fiction feel,” says company member Celeste Perilla, referring to the movie in which Will Ferrell plays a character in a novel who tries to re-direct his fate.

Shipley, a graduate of Goucher College, co-wrote the play with Alexander Hancock and says there’s nothing deep about it: “I just want to give the audience a jolt of pure entertainment.”

—Martha Thomas



BOOKS
Smart Set
by Susan McCallum-Smith

The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby (Pantheon)
The Soul Thief by Charles Baxter (Pantheon)
Day by A.L. Kennedy (Knopf)
The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa (Pantheon)

Sometimes it seems, to li’l ol’ me, that it is more acceptable in the United States to be perceived as harmlessly ignorant than rationally smart. To be an intellectual (a word currently synonymous with elitism, heathenism, liberal looniness, and a pig-headed attachment to public television and semi-colons) is somehow un-American, somehow not just us folks. The tragedy is, of course, that ignorance isn’t harmless.

And Susan Jacoby is hellfire-and-brimstone mad about it. Our nation, she writes in her new critique of contemporary culture, The Age of American Unreason, is “ill with a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance,” peopled by a public who derive opinions from “soundbites and blogs,” and are in thrall to “the fruit of the tree of infotainment.”

Jacoby scorches through “conversation avoidance devices” such as text messaging, e-mail, and, of course, TV. She berates parents who use Baby Einstein products as nannies for their kids, deluding themselves about its educational value and ensuring that future generations are “sucking at the video tit from cradle to grave.” The dangerous tendency in some media to present content without context and equate fairness with balance, that “bland centrism that always locates truth equidistant from two points,” infuriates her, and she argues, controversially, that we must approach religion with intellectual rigor. “One of the most powerful taboos in American life,” she writes, “concerns speaking ill of anyone else’s faith—an injunction rooted in confusion over the difference between freedom of religion and granting religion immunity from the critical scrutiny applied to other social institutions.”

Jacoby occasionally embodies the stereotype she is so desperate to dispel and sounds like a snob, and the threads of her arguments often tuft with woolliness. Still, I feel her pain when she wails, “What has been lost is the culture of effort.”
   
Charles Baxter’s eerie new novel, The Soul Thief, requires the culture of effort to appreciate its subtle exploration of the slippery nature of identity, but such careful reading is well rewarded.

At graduate school during the 1970s, Nathaniel Mason becomes entangled with two fellow students, sexy Theresa and enigmatic Jerome, and the consequences of this relationship haunt him the rest of his life. One night, Jerome and Theresa play a cruel trick on Nathaniel that leaves him reeling. “If you had died,” Jerome comments nonchalantly, by way of apology, “we would have become you. We would have taken you on.” In the following weeks, Nathaniel feels under siege; his apartment is robbed, and he realizes that Jerome has begun to “steal” aspects of his life, appropriating Nathaniel’s personal narrative. Years later, Nathaniel, now married with children of his own, is jarred by a sudden phone call from Jerome, who makes a strange request.

“You know,” Nathaniel’s wise stepfather once remarks, “few people really want to become individuals. People claim that they do, but they don’t.” To be an authentic individual, Baxter implies, takes guts, takes effort. His prose poem about identity concludes with a twist that may annoy some readers but, on reflection, underscores his theme.

Some books evoke certain colors, and A.L. Kennedy’s marvelous new novel, Day, evokes blue: the smoky blue of military uniforms, chilled skin, hunger, and the ashes of cities laid waste. Day, too, rewards effort, although its challenges are stylistic rather than thematic. The narrative voice—fluctuating between first, third, and the tricky realms of second person—throws “you,” the reader, off balance, forcing you to stand still and pay attention.
   
Twenty-five-year-old Alfred Day, a young man “sitting behind a young mustache,” is so severely damaged by his experiences in the British Royal Air Force and as a prisoner during the Second World War, that, like a child picking at a festering scab, he takes a job as an extra in a movie being made in Germany about prisoners-of-war.
   
As a teenager, Alfred “had decided to be a tail gunner and nothing else” and “had decided to kill his father.” His former decision feeds off his latter—Alfred’s soul is bruised by self-loathing, a result of his failure to protect his mother from a life of casual abuse. “They kill you,” he says, explaining why he’s volunteered to take the most dangerous role in the bomber crew. “That's why it’s been what you’ve wanted, from the very first time you heard.” His choice is not one of patriotism but pragmatism: He wants to get life over with, like yanking off a Band-Aid in one go.

During the war, Alfred restricts the number of people he meets and knows, inoculating himself against future heartbreak. He fears “he wouldn’t die … He would have to be there, be Alfie Day and feel.” And his fears are realized, for he bonds with his crew and falls in love with a married woman, who, in one of the most exquisitely lyrical sections of the book, leans against his shoulder and “covers his stripes, strips his heart back to the breech.”
   
The melancholy tones and cultural contexts of these three books remind me of Guiseppe de Lampedusa’s masterpiece, The Leopard, published posthumously in 1958. The Leopard opens in 1860 during the Risorgimento, the movement for the unification in Italy, at the moment of Garibaldi’s invasion of Sicily, the ball at the toe of Italy’s boot.
   
The Prince of Salina, whose family has held power on the island for centuries, holds himself aloof from world events, refusing to alter his daily schedule of stargazing and womanizing. When history inevitably knocks on his palace door, he gives the revolutionaries a gentlemanly hearing, thinking, “I understand now; … you don’t want to destroy us, who are your ‘fathers.’ You just want to take our places.”

With appalled admiration, he watches the devious machinations of the local mayor jockeying for political position, “free as he was from the shackles imposed on many other men by honesty, decency, and plain good manners.” Although the prince abdicates any responsibility in the new unified Italian State, seeing himself and Sicily as indivisible, both “hankering for oblivion … hankering for death,” he is shocked to discover that the referendum to decide whether Sicily should join the new state was rigged. Lampedusa’s triumphant novel charts how changes in government may often result in no more than the replacement of one form of feudalism by another, and that sometimes it is to the benefit of those in power to keep a populace uneducated.

Another reminder, as if one were needed, of the Thomas Jefferson-penned epigraph to Jacoby’s book: “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”



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