Set in Paris, Berlinand Baltimore, and interweaving two time periods, 1939 and 1992, Half-blood Blues relates the black experience in Nazi Germany and occupied France.

In 1939 Berlin, Sid Griffiths, who narrates the story in a jazzy black vernacular, and his friend Chip Jones, both African Americans, are members of a popular jazz band, the Hot Time Swingers.  The band also includes a Jewish piano player and a brilliant young trumpeter, Hieronymous “Hiero” Falk.  Hiero, the son of a French African soldier and a white German mother, is part of a particularly hated racial group in Germany.  With the growing Nazi threat, all the members of this interracial band, but especially Hiero, are in danger, exacerbated by the fact that the Nazis identify jazz as the degenerate music of blacks and Jews.  After the Nazis deport their Jewish piano player, Sid, Chip and Hiero flee to Paris, where they believe they will be safe.

Stranded in Paris during the months leading up to German occupation, they record a song Hiero calls “Half-blood blues.” Eventually Hiero is arrested and the others escape.

I loved the very vivid atmosphere and rich dialogue created by Edugyan in this powerful and original story.  A sense of dark foreboding and dread is palpable throughout the novel and keeps you on edge as the story unfolds.  The world inhabited by these jazz musicians is both dangerous and exciting and takes many twists and turns.  The vibrant tones of their music and their conversations are in stark contrast to the impending doom all around them.  While I didn’t always understand the motivations of the characters, I did think that they were believable as they struggled to survive in dire circumstances.

The second part of the narrative set in 1992 follows Sid and Chip as they journey back to Europe where Chip publicly accuses Sid of complicity in Hiero’s arrest all those years ago.

This is a story not only about war and its horrors, but also about the power of human emotions and the resilience of the human spirit.

Posted by Audrey, Reference Librarian

Little remembered now but once one of the richest men in America, Hearst built a commercial empire founded on newspapers, radio and film. In the late 19^th century, in an era long before television and the Internet, he was among the earliest titans of mass communication and entertainment, the media baron of his age, who used his holdings to wield political power and to shape public opinion.

Like a feudal lord presiding over his own kingdom, Hearst lived an outsized, fantasy-filled life in a palatial estate on a property in northern Californian half the size of Rhode Island. But he was a very old man when the young Orson Welles made Citizen Kane and by then his power had diminished.

Orson Welles was a born showman (like Hearst) with a taste for sensation who arrived in New York City in the late 1930s from small-town Wisconsin accompanied by his talent, a large ego and one very big idea: to revolutionize the New York theatre world by staging the great plays for the American masses. And so he did, presenting Macbeth in Harlem with a non-professional, all-black cast and Haitian backdrop financed with a grant from FDR’s administration. He did Julius Caesar (memorably depicted in the recent movie Me and Orson Welles), DVD M47915 but set it in Fascist Italy, the production of which is still regarded by many as the single most important ever done on the American stage. Time Magazine put him on its cover and called him, ”The brightest moon that has risen over Broadway in years. Welles should feel at home in the sky, for the sky is the only limit to his ambition.”

He was widely proclaimed “the boy genius,” an “enfant terrible,” for whom the New York theatre world was no longer enough. He became a popular and frequent presence on radio; he started his own show on CBS called Mercury Theatre on the Air, on which he staged, most famously, an adaptation of H.G. Welles’ War of the Worlds. It terrified—terrified, quite literally—millions of listeners who thought the alien invasion depicted was a disaster unfolding as a real-time event. Welles feared this would end his career, but it did just the opposite. He became a household name—and Hollywood came calling, offering him unrestricted control to do what he wanted, though he had never made a movie—and all at the age of twenty-three.

In Hollywood, Welles had some very high-brow concepts for various film projects, but abandoned them as unfeasible. His friend and sometime drinking buddy Herman J. Mankiewicz gave him the idea for Citizen Kane. It was a perfect fit—a uniquely American epic about a giant of a man who starts out as an altruistic young social reformer but ends as an isolated old reactionary, bringing ruin to himself and all around him. It would be the classic stuff of tragedy. 

Welles must have thought he could get away with it for we know that he ran the idea by his lawyers. Perhaps his experience in New York City suggested to him that in upsetting the apple cart—even one belonging to Hearst—he could do no wrong; that any controversy stemming from the movie’s blatant biographical content could only be beneficial. And if Hearst sued, that would be great, as the film would be news everywhere.

But how wrong he was …

Hearst caught wind of Citizen Kane almost right away and he was absolutely furious: and not just because it striped bare his own life, much as he had done in his tabloid newspapers to countless others (like Fatty Arbuckle, in the 1920s), but most especially because it presented an unflattering portrait of his long-time lover, the actress Marion Davies (depicted in Citizen Kane as a talentless, alcoholic “floozy”) with whom the married Hearst lived quite openly on his San Simeon estate.

Though Hearst was a diminished figure by 1940, made nearly bankrupt by the extravagant sums of money he spent throughout the Great Depression, he still had clout—and lots of it inHollywood. Forget about lawsuits—what Hearst did in response was threaten the studios (and not just RKO, Welles’ backer of the film, but in effect all of Hollywood) with a war of mass sensationalism by releasing to the public, through his gossipy radio shows and the newspaper columnists who worked for him, every secret in Hollywood about its most lucrative assets: the lily-white actors and actresses populating its films. One of his minions, Louella Parsons, is quoted as saying to RKO’s George Schaefer: “Mr. Hearst has authorized me to tell you that if you boys want private lives, he’ll give you private lives.”

Hearst even threatened a thinly-disguised anti-Semitic campaign in his papers decrying the presence of “swarthy foreigners” in Hollywood—an unmistakable attack upon Jewish studio heads and recent émigrés from Hitler’s Europe. He then tried to destroy the film by buying the rights to it and burning every print. Louis B. Mayer, the head of MGM, Hollywood’s biggest studio, assembled his fellow studio chiefs and in their name offered RKO $800,000 for the negative to the film with the express purpose of doing what Hearst wanted: destroying Citizen Kane. RKO responded by sending a print of the film toNew York where the heads of the corporations that owned theHollywood studios would view the film and decide on its future. Orson Welles was there; before the assembled Wall Street titans he made a speech about the need to fight tyranny at loose in the world and the uniquely American value of free speech in doing so.

By all accounts Welles’ heights of oratory made for stirring stuff; but for whatever reason, perhaps a public fight over the Bill of Rights (Welles had threatened his own lawsuit); or perhaps Hearst’s imminent bankruptcy, the corporate heads stood by Citizen Kane. Well, somewhat …. Though the film opened for a short engagement in New York City and even garnered nine Oscar nominations from a sympathetic film community in Hollywood, Hearst was not done with him. His papers threatened the theatre chains: if you run Citizen Kane we will not take advertising for any of your other movies. As a consequence there was a blackout of Welles’ movie; it was little seen outside a few big cities and as a consequence lost lots of money. Finally, RKO retired Citizen Kane to its vaults where it remained for fifteen years.

And that was not all. Welles’ affair with the married actress Dolores Del Rio was made public knowledge; and a whisper campaign initiated that questioned his loyalty to the United States. Reporters started following him everywhere; he was accused of being a communist. The FBI opened a file on him, concluding that he was a threat to the nation’s internal security. RKO yanked control away from him on his follow-up movie, The Magnificent Ambersons, gave it to someone else to finish, and then released it in a badly truncated version.

It is not the least of ironies that Welles success had peaked by the age of twenty-five. Though he was to go on to make some great, if little appreciated, movies in later years, someone who was once as well known as President Roosevelt was now known as America’s youngest has-been. “Alls well that ends Welles,” people would joke; and “Showmanship instead of Genius,” RKO would make their slogan in the year after dumping him. In later years, he became something of a vagabond patching together low budget films like The Trial and Mr. Arkadin based on a salary of acting jobs and TV commercials around the world. He also left behind many unfinished projects. He even once borrowed $250,000 from Marion Davies nephew, the money from whom came from her estate.

While Citizen Kane didn’t come back into public view until the middle of the 1950s; by the early 1960s it started to appear on lists of the greatest movies of all time; and it is still widely regarded as such today. By most accounts, William Randolph Hearst died thinking he had killed the movie. But in the end, the images that Welles and his collaborators created in Citizen Kane are now the images most of us think of, if we think of Hearst at all.

This incredible story is marvelously told in two DVDs: the HBO movie RKO 281 DVD R6265, with Liev Schreiber (as Welles) and John Malkovich (as Herman J. Mankiewicz); as well as the superb PBS documentary, The Battle Over Citizen Kane DVD 791.43 B335, from which much of the above information comes.

Posted by Steven, Movie Librarian

My So-Called Life

DVD TV M99575

This show only aired for about six months in 1994-1995, and consists of a grand total of 19 episodes, but it has achieved legendary status for being one of the only shows to get adolescence right.

Claire Danes was just 15 when she began working on the show, and the fact that she and most of the rest of the cast were actually in their teens was a huge reason why their characters felt so genuine.

The show focuses on Angela Chase, a high-school sophomore, who is just at the brink of redefining herself and her relationships. She pulls away from her childhood friends Brian and Sharon, and instead befriends the wild Rayanne and her friend Rickie, who is gay and being raised by his abusive uncle. She also has a serious crush on a good-looking, rebellious, garage-band-belonging boy named Jordan Catalano, which naturally leads to a lot of angst.

I was a little bit too young to watch this when it was first on TV, but I’ve been hearing about it forever as one of those shows that was just too good to last. Last year I took it home from the library, and I was amazed at how much I enjoyed it. Angela reminded me so much of myself at her age, and everything happening in her life was so familiar, so real, and a lot like my own memories of fifteen. Everything is so small and yet so big, every setback a tragedy and every success a triumph. I’ll even admit, here in the public realm, that more than once I got all wistful and misty-eyed while watching. The teenagers here are as real as they get on TV – they look young, they have questionable dress sense, and they’re not being played by 30-year-olds.

It’s such a shame that My So-Called Life didn’t go on longer, but then again I suppose that the best shows are the ones that end when they’re still in their prime.

Posted by Kayleigh, Desk clerk

The Office UK, DVD TV O3261

I’d argue that most people here in Canada or in the United States are most familiar with the American version of The Office, but before that there was this series, from the UK, which ran from 2001-2003 (in typical English style, the show consisted of two seasons of only six episodes each, plus a Christmas special).

Ricky Gervais plays David Brent, the awkward, inappropriate, desperate-to-be-funny manager of theSloughbranch of the Wernham Hogg paper company (“Life is stationery”). Gareth is his lanky, self-important, overly serious assistant manager who is constantly bringing up his training with the Territorial Army. He’s the frequent victim of pranks by his deskmate Tim (American counterpart: Jim), a sales rep who struggles to keep his sense of humour in an office environment he sees as totally pointless and soul-sucking.

Most of the series focuses on David’s utterly cringe-worthy attempts to ingratiate himself to his staff: he makes jokes that aren’t funny, backpedals when he’s called out on his gaffes, makes constant unconscious sexist and racist remarks, and generally makes people uncomfortable. It’s filmed in a mock-documentary style, so often a lot of the humour comes from the contrast between what people say about themselves in their individual interviews and how they actually act out in the office.

This series is much less zany or goofy than its American version. The awkwardness gets laughs, but a lot of the time the social exchanges highlight embarrassingly outdated attitudes or unintended rudeness that can be just as infuriating as it is comedic. Most of the time, as I was watching, I both felt irritated by David’s mortifying gaffes and pitied his pathetic inability to form friendships or romantic attachments. It was a curious blend. The series has a sort of poignancy to it, not only in David’s failures, but in the portrayal of office life as a dead end where several of the characters’ aspirations died. There is also a very sweet storyline that runs through both seasons having to do with the relationship between Tim and Dawn, the receptionist.

Both versions of The Office are great TV, but they are very different, and I’m most drawn to the mix of pity and outrage that this one stirs up.

Posted by Kayleigh, Desk Staff

30 Rock, DVD TV T4475

I love Tina Fey’s impersonation of Sarah Palin as much as the next bleeding-heart liberal, but I have a special place in my heart for Liz Lemon, the character she plays on 30 Rock. My girl LL is the head writer of a sketch comedy show at NBC. She’s got a great job, but she spends a lot of time wrangling with her lead actors, prone to awful schemes and outlandish vanity, and dealing with Jack Donaghy the network executive, who’s brought in when GE buys NBC at the beginning of the series.

30 Rock has this style of humour that comes at you from left field a lot of the time – ridiculous smash cuts, unexpected sentence endings, and a solid amount of disregard for the fourth wall. Every character has a laundry list of idiosyncrasies, especially Liz. I have a suspicion that everyone who watches 30 Rock laughs at her not because she is so flawed, but because she reminds them so much of themselves. But at the same time as there are gags flying at you from all angles, the show manages to keep a certain amount of storyline and continuity going from episode to episode – Jack’s struggle to maintain two relationships, Liz’s choice between moving to Cleveland and staying in New York, the search for a new cast member.

30 Rock and Tina Fey herself have earned a lot of props for putting this character out there who is arguably a more recognizable, relatable woman than you usually see on TV – she has lame dates, she can’t stick to a workout routine, she acts weird at parties, she has terrible dance moves. She is also in charge of an entire writing team and works 70-hour weeks. A considerable amount of Liz’s storylines deal with her effort to balance her life and her job, or, in 30 Rcck parlance, to “have it all!” (with echoes of encouraging magazine articles for “working moms”). Personally I’m not sure that I agree with the idea that Liz Lemon is some kind of groundbreaking feminist icon, but that’s for another blog post. She and the rest of the characters are, though, charmingly different from a lot of your standard TV archetypes (they are also very, very funny).

Posted by Kayleigh, Desk Staff

Battlestar Galactica

This series made me appreciate science fiction.

I could dedicate several blog posts to this show, both because I have so much to say about it and because I’m not generally known for my conciseness. There are, in fact, many geeks fans who have dedicated entire blogs to it. So please, please bear with me.

In 2003 I was going out with a guy who was majorly into sci-fi. He was mostly a Star Trek fan, but when this remake of Battlestar Galactica came out, he made me watch it with him. The original series was a cheesy 70s Star Wars ripoff where the space fighter pilots wore outfits involving helmets shaped like futuristic pharaoh headgear over faux-Han-Solo haircuts. It WAS a gritty reboot (see my post on Bleak House), but I was dubious. I watched anyway. I peppered the commercial breaks with questions about Cylons and humans and the Twelve Colonies in that tone of voice that says “I’m interested, but I want to pretend that I’m not.” At some point an elegant, classy-looking woman appeared on screen, wearing black-rimmed glasses and a skirt suit. I asked the boy who she was. He answered, “She’s the president.” A female president? And she’s over forty and one of the central characters? And she has glasses and fabulous hair? Hooked!

I watched through all four seasons. The relationship with the boyfriend ended, and I kept watching. The show was extremely popular with sci-fi freaks and even relatively popular with people like my parents (who do not fall into the latter category). It had critical acclaim, it won awards, and best of all it was available on the Sci-Fi channel and Space and not on fancy-pants HBO or Showtime.

The basic storyline is this: in another part of the universe, away from our own solar system, there are twelve planets, known as the Twelve Colonies, inhabited by people who look and act more or less like us. Their technology, though, is considerably more advanced, and their mastery of artificial intelligence led to the creation of cyborgs called Cylons. The Cylons rebelled against the humans and fought a long war that ended in an uneasy armistice that, at the show’s opening, had lasted for about forty years. The eponymous Battlestar Galactica is an aging space battleship that is about to be decommissioned and turned into a museum. On the day of the ceremony, however, the Cylons reappear out of nowhere and more or less nuke the Twelve Colonies into glowing radioactive rubble, killing millions of people and destroying most of the Battlestar fleet in the process. All that’s left is the mismatched and overwhelmed collection of ships, both civilian and military, which happened to be in flight and away from their home planets when the attacks happened.

Most of the military command structure and the political hierarchy are dead or missing, and there’s no one to lead the survivors but Galactica. Her commander, William Adama, finds himself in charge of the entire military, and Laura Roslin, the fabulous-haired woman from further up the page, gets a dizzying promotion from unremarkable Secretary of Education to President of the Colonies in just a few hours. She’s sworn into office aboard a commercial spacecraft in a scene inspired by Lyndon Johnson’s in-flight inauguration after Kennedy’s assassination. And oh yes, she’s just been diagnosed with breast cancer.

After all that, those humans who are left discover that while Cylons used to look like hulking metal robots, there are now twelve models who look, speak, and act just like humans, and no one knows who they are. The water and food supplies are limited. Everybody has lost almost everyone they knew. The one bit of hope left is the long-circulating legend about the thirteenth tribe that left the Colonies for a new planet, and knowing that the fleet needs a purpose and a direction to follow, Adama announces that they will be beginning the search for the planet called Earth.

And THAT, my friends, is just the first few hours of the show. As the seasons progress the plot becomes more and more layered and complex, taking on issues of religion (the humans have a polytheistic religion with a certain Hellenistic flavour, whereas the Cylons worship a single God), destiny and choice (a huge, HUGE theme), and the political and cultural toll of fighting a constant, long, exhausting war (which, considering the 2003-2008 timeframe of the show, has more than a few shades of the actual political climate at the time). Some of the most absorbing episodes for me come in the first season, when everybody left in the fleet must radically adapt their thinking to their new situation. One that I particularly remember is about President Roslin’s struggle to decide whether or not abortion can still be allowed in the fleet.

I won’t say any more because this has been longwinded enough, but even if you can’t stand Stars either Wars or Trek, at least try watching the three-hour miniseries that opens Battlestar Galactica. It’s gripping. All four seasons are available here at the library (DVD TV B3366), and if you like it, come tell me – I’ll happily chat about it until I’ve taken up too much of your time and the whole thing gets kind of awkward.

Posted by Kayleigh, Desk Staff

The reason why this is (arguably) important to this blog is because she is prominently featured on the cover for the 2005 BBC miniseries Bleak House (DVD B6462), which is an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ novel (F D548bl, if anyone’s interested). I haven’t read the novel and frankly I’m not into Dickens, so really I took it out just to see if Scully can be English (spoiler: she can). Needless to say I was surprised to find that I loved it.

The story revolves around three young orphans. Two of them, Richard Carstone and Ada Clare, are the potential beneficiaries at the centre of a long-running litigation inEngland’s Court of Chancery involving the estate of a late relative who made several conflicting wills (this is much more gripping television than it sounds). The legal process of sorting out the inheritance has taken many years and cost tens of thousands of pounds, and some people have spent their lives waiting for the outcome to be decided. The two cousins have been made wards of John Jarndyce, who is also involved in the case. The third orphan, Esther Summerson, has been made their companion. Esther’s parentage is mysterious, and she was raised by a woman called Miss Barbary, whom she thinks of as her godmother. She becomes very close to Ada and Richard, supports them when they announce that they are in love and plan to marry, and sticks by them when the pressures of living their lives waiting for the court’s decision get to be too high.

Our woman of the hour Gillian Anderson plays Lady Dedlock, a “bored to death” wife of the wealthy Sir Leicester. They live at Chesney Wold, an estate close to John Jarndyce’s home Bleak House, and prove to have their own connections to the Jarndyce case. Charles Dance plays Tulkinghorn, the ruthless and manipulative Dedlock family lawyer seeking to blackmail Lady Dedlock in order to control her.

The plot is complex and the cast of characters is large. It took me a couple of episodes to figure out exactly who was who. And, to be honest, the very dramatic and stylized editing threw me off at first, though I did eventually appreciate it. It’s that style, in fact, that gives the series a strangely modern and very appealing feel. It was also one of the first British TV programs to be filmed in high definition. The cinematography is reminiscent of the handheld documentary style that has become popular recently, and the overall effect of the camera work is to put the focus of the series not on elaborate period costumes or grandiose sets, but squarely on the human emotion and intense interaction that drives the story. It also doesn’t hurt that the quality of the acting is fantastic and the characters compelling. There’s very little trace of that vague tweeness that I tend to associate with Dickens, even with the presence of characters named Pardiggle and Turveydrop. They have a whiff of “charming Victorian stereotype” about them, but they’re also people with real problems. Part of me is tempted to be coyly topical and call this a Dickensian gritty reboot, but the truth is that I think this realism and humanity is what’s at the heart of Charles Dickens’ work (but, as you will see, readers, I can be sold anything if someone uses the words “gritty reboot”).

Posted by Kayleigh, Desk staff

It is a moving story of a family’s search for their mother, who is separated from her husband and disappears one afternoon into the crowd at the Seoul subway station. They were on their way to visit one of their four grown children. Each chapter of the book is told through a different point of view: daughter, son, husband. Each expresses their sadness over the loss of Mom, their regrets, and much belated appreciation for her. Chapter four is narrated by Mom herself, along with her own secrets and stories. 
 

This beautifully written novel reminds us of how often we take our loved ones for granted. You will never think of your mother the same way again after you read this book.

Posted by Christina, Reference Librarian

There is absolutely nothing that I could write in this blog that would do justice to their legacy or talent. Formed in 1983 Bon Jovi consisted of Jon Bon Jovi, Richie Sambora, David Bryan, Tico Torres and Alec John Such (Such has since left the group in 1994 and was replaced by Hugh McDonald).

Bon Jovi has reinvented itself over the decades, new look, new hair styles but their music has only gotten better with time. Their Greatest Hits has all of the old favorites to rock along to like: Livin’ on a prayer — You give love a bad name — Lay your hands on me –It also includes newer hits like my personal favorite –Always–and previously unreleased hits like – No apologies.

This is a group that will stand the test of time.

Posted by Karen, Customer Service Coordinator

This vaguely chilling title is what drew me to the book when I spotted it in the returns bin one afternoon a couple of weeks ago. That, and the cover text, which looked to have been picked out in stitches of black surgical thread.

The book is set in a sanitarium in rural Finlandin the early twentieth century, sometime between the two world wars. The women who come to Suvanto are either local Finnish women in need of acute care, or foreigners whose husbands work in the timber towns, and whose ailments are more questionable. These so-called “up-patients” (because their ward is on the upper floor of the building) treat the hospital like a wintertime social retreat, a place to be looked after, to have their needs catered to and their trumped-up illnesses fussed over. Sunny Taylor is the head nurse of the up-patient ward, an American in her forties who fled to Finland to escape a life spent caring for her chronically ill mother. Sunny is relatively content with her life at the hospital, where she has her own apartment, her privacy, a bicycle to ride through the woods, and the ability to maintain a barrier of cool professionalism toward her patients and her colleagues. Her work, however, seems pointless to her – in a ward where no one is truly at risk, all of her duties seem like unnecessary pretending, like playing at nursing.

One summer a new woman arrives, an elderly former dance instructor called Julia Dey, a Dane who has been living in Finland for most of her adult life but has still failed to integrate into Finnish society. She is mean, manipulative, and angry, but finds a niche for herself amongst the foreign patients and begins to deliberately stir up the tensions that simmer beneath Suvanto’s quiet surface. Over the following winter, a new doctor comes to the hospital with the aim of practicing and perfecting a new surgical stitch to be used for Caesarean sections. He sees Suvanto as an ideal place to recommend several hysterectomies – he will be able to work on his technique while performing surgeries that he sincerely believes will improve the lives and conditions of the women at Suvanto. But his very first operation leaves fierce violence in its wake as the undercurrent of discomfort, strong emotion, and suppressed rage bubbles to the surface.

The strength of this book is its eerie, uneasy atmosphere. Chapman evokes a place where moods and notions shift with the weather, where the minds and emotions of Suvanto’s occupants are at the mercy of the seasons, and where the patients fill their days with soothing activities, vaguely medical treatments, and subtle, strange conversation. The voice of Chapman’s unnamed collective narrator (the unknown “we”) is deliberate, hallucinatory and dreamlike, and though some things have to be inferred and teased out from the writing, and other things never quite become clear at all, the novel is suffused with a creepy and fascinating beauty.

Posted by Kayleigh, Desk Staff