Arts District: Scene's Arts Blog

Unless you were of newspaper reading age at the time, odds are your understanding of the Viet Nam war is that it was generally bad. It went on too long, wasn’t fought with sufficient political will to win, and was fraught with the complications of fighting guerilla style in someone else’s war.

Dwight Jon Zimmerman and Wayne Vansant —both longtime Marvel Comics writers with plenty of experience on military issues—take up the subject with enough detail to cover significant military events and political turns to give a sound understanding of what happened there. In The Vietnam War: A Graphic History (Hill and Wang, 2009, 138 pages, 1995), they narrate the more than a decade, from battlefield events to political pressures, to the anti-war movement to the aftermath.

The book’s major strength is its neutral reportage. Quotes attributed to real historic figures are taken from documented statements by those people. Neither the pictures nor the prose sensationalize the events. In fact, both have the sober tone of journalism, from simple, news-y statements (“Viet cong attacks throughout the south escalated—including, as General Westmoreland feared, attacks on American air bases”) to the soberly realistic black and white art. But it’s done with the benefit of 35 years’ hindsight, so the authors are able to put events in context and measure their significance.

They also do something that the national appraisal of the war seems to fall short on, which is to give credit for successes. Soldiers went to do a job, and in many cases did it well—not just bravely, but with battlefield successes. It’s a good read which in a short time gives a substantial overview of our most influential conflict of the last half century.

Venezuela Ricardo Lorenz’s Rumba Sinfonica—for orchestra and latin band—has been played by no less than 22 orchestras, which is an astonishing number for a piece of new music.

No surprise. Everyone from hip hop artists to smooth jazzers to Dancing with the Stars wants a piece of Latin music these days.

And as Lorenz told Scene in an interview, the melding of styles is de rigueur in Cuban music.

“That is the story of Cuban music. You go back 100 years or more to the Son, that in itself was an attempt by operetta musicians from Spain who also wanted to gig in clubs.”

The band Tiempo Libre (which will appear on Dancing with the Stars in a show airing Oct. 27) will perform Rumba Sinfonica with the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, followed by a set of high energy timba, this Saturday at Severance Hall. Watch for a story about the music tomorrow in Scene's Arts section.

Meanwhile, Scene readers can get two for one tickets by using the code 7094 when they order tickets through the severance hall box office at 216.231.1111 or online at clevelandorchestra.com.

In the way that a spoon full of sugar can help the medicine go down, it seems a slew of publishers are using the visual sweetness of the graphic novel to help the information go down. A pile of graphic nonfiction books have arrived on Scene’s desk lately, and so we might as well dig in.

Rick Geary’s Trotsky: A Graphic Biography (Hill and Wang2009, 104 pp., hardcover, $16.95) is a great subject for the format. Trotsky lurks in the background of so much coffeehouse talk about the Revolution, but most of the talkers are long on his image as a thinker and writer, but short on specifics.

Geary—whose prior graphic nonfiction works include a bio of J. Edgar Hoover and a couple of true crime graphic series—offers a highly distilled, blow-by-blow account of his life events, beginning with his birth in 1879 as Lev Davidovich Bronstein. It’s told with elegant line art in the style of simple engravings.

If the book has a shortcoming, it’s trying to pack so many events into such little space. He communicates plenty of information, but the book suffers some from a lack of cultural context or nuance among the characters.

It does, however, effectively lay out a chronology of his life’s events without passing judgment, and that should serve readers’ next conversation about the revolution well.

Pianist and music director Jorge Gomez, of Tiempo Libre was in Los Angeles with his band mates this morning, getting ready to record an episode of Dancing with the Stars. The twice-Grammy nominated Timba band is busy lately, with a new album (Bach in Havana, released in May, 2009), and a steady stream of bookings with orchestras to perform Ricardo Lorenz’s Rhumba Sinfonica—which they’ll do next week here with the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, directed by Carl Topilow.

• Tiempo Libre

CIM will probably feel like a familiar place to the band, whose members were students at the Cuban national conservatory in Havana when they met in the eighties. Back then, Jorge says, the school was a lot more restrictive than it is now. “The bad situation was that in the school if they caught you playing pop music in the school, you were out.”

So the students kept the island’s infectious rhythms quiet while in school, but turned them loose later. “It was Bach and Tchaikovsky during the day, and by night you play in the streets—rhumba, guaguanco, timba.”

That’s how it’s going to go at CIM, too, when Tiempo Libre gives a benefit performance for the Cleveland Institute of Music. The band will join the CIM Orchestra for Rumba Sinfonica and works by Jose Pablo Moncayo, George Gershwin, and Joaquin Turina, followed by a set of butt-shaking timba. It’s at 8:30 Saturday at Severance Hall (11001 Euclid Ave., cim.edu, 216.231.1111) Tickets: Concert only, $25 to $35.

Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man: The Adventures of a Guilty Liberal who Attempts to Save The Planet and the Discoveries He Makes About Himself and Our Way Of Life In The Process (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, September, 2009 288 pages, Hardcover, $25) promises something big in the drama of its title, and the promise has certainly sparked some criticism by people who have read the book and decided he hasn’t added anything new.

Well, indeed he hasn’t really added anything new in the way of strategy or our understanding of global warming or that great big toilet style swirl of plastic in the pacific, or anything else. When his idea—to attempt for a year to make zero impact on the planet—began to get attention through his blog, media quickly began to pick up on the apparent absoluteness of that promise (No Impact) and to lob criticisms (like the valid point that the book is more about making the author famous than it is about saving the earth) or trivializing headlines, like the New York Times’ beauty, “The Year Without Toilet Paper.”

But of course the Times wrote its potty-provocative headline for the very same reason Beavan conceived his hook: to get readers’ attention. And if getting attention to his effort were his ultimate goal, that’s actually not such a bad thing.

No Impact Man—which is also a documentary, released concurrently with the book, is like a reality show for enviro-monks: No car, no electricity, buy nothing new, use nothing disposable, especially no take-out food packaging, buy only food grown within a couple hundred miles, and so on. He does ease into it over the course of a few months.

And a critical look is certainly rewarding: Colin Beavan allows himself all kinds of judgment calls that undercut the idea of zero. He allows occasional deviations on just about every front, whether it be social coffee (coffee doesn’t grow in New York, and so to have a cup of joe, he has to participate in commerce that involves shipping beans from around the globe via petrol burning ships and trucks) or the fact that he doesn’t come up with a way to cook with renewable fuel, or any number of other little breaks our hero takes with his remarkably tolerant and willing wife and child.

And it is even more important that the significant reductions he is able to make in his environmental impact—for example, life without a car—are made possible largely by living in a big city (wherein just about anything he could possibly want is within easy bicycling distance) and by his self employment as a writer (which allows him to have a flexible schedule and to make his day-to-day life a part of that work).

He couldn’t do this if he lived in Solon or Avon, or if he were an attorney working at a big firm that required him to be at work and wear a suit all day, every day. The small degree to which he addresses the advantages inherent in his situation are a significant shortcoming.

But Beavan has hit upon an intriguingly quixotic challenge, a little like a dietary fast. The payoff is two-fold:

First, the attention he draws to the effort is a good thing, even if he doesn’t make any discovery or substantively add to our knowledge of how to live in a way that is more mindful of the need to sustain our planet. Humans conceive superheroes to give us a standard to look up to, and No Impact Man—at least the idea of him— sets the environmentally sustainable bar pretty high.

And second, there is something in taking up the challenge. How many people criticizing Beavan for his many shortcomings have actually tried living without a car, raising a child without disposable diapers, buying almost no take-out food, buying nothing new, and turning off the electricity for a year?

No Impact Man will not save the earth at the end of this episode. But it might motivate a few more people to try.

—Michael Gill

Cleveland’s arts scene scored well in Travel and Leisure magazine’s 2009 list of America’s Favorite Cities, the Rock and Roll capital’s first appearance there. Our orchestras, conservatories, galleries, and theaters —plus a good supply of inexpensive hotels—made Cleveland the magazine’s Number One affordable getaway.

And it’s for reasons you might expect: No. 2 for its classical music scene (behind New York, of course, and ahead of No. 3 Boston and No. 4 Chicago), No. 6 for its theatre scene (behind New York, Chicago, Minneapolis, Providence, and Houston, in that order, but ahead of No. 7 Boston), and No. 7 for museums and galleries (behind the mostly Eastern Seaboard lineup of Washington, DC, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and Santa Fe, but ahead of Houston and San Francisco).

Whatever anyone thinks of such rankings (and this one even ranked the “attractiveness” of the surveyed cities’ people, with Cleveland ranking 28th—make of that what you will), Travel and Leisure’s annual scorecard does support the long-held contention that Cleveland’s arts scene compares favorably with that of cities many times its size.

The following was sent to Scene critic Keith Joseph by actor, writer and pianist Hershey Felder, in response to Joseph's review of Felder's Beethoven, As I Knew Him.

Recently, due to the many reviews and reports on my work, a well known publisher has asked me to create a collection of these reviews and comment on them for publication. Philosophical as I am about these things, it is rather interesting to have the opportunity. In general I will comment and respond on pieces that I think have interesting ideas, and yours is one. This letter, and your response if any, will be published in the collection.

I rather thought you had an interesting idea about creating a tale, or drama, about the ghost of Beethoven going to recollect two of his skull bones at San Jose State University. On the surface of it, it actually struck me as an idea with lots of possibilities and a playground for a good deal of fun. I do read critical press … after all, one never knows if somewhere lurking, someone has something really good to offer. We'll get back to this idea about the bones in a moment.

What is interesting to me with regard to Cleveland is that an old theatre adage seems to hold true: “Absolutely no one likes Hershey Felder's work — except the audience.” I find it very interesting, that for all three productions, aside from one or two student publications and of course , WCLV Radio, all printed reports in Cleveland have been negative. Still, daily ticket sales overshadow just about every other Cleveland Playhouse and locally produced theatrical productions. One can also look to the adage “Never underestimate the taste of the public,” but I don't do that, so perhaps, could the problem be that you are missing the point?

The point of these three works is not necessarily to create some kind of intriguing made-up tale. I've encountered so much of that in my theatre-going experience. Most of the time I find myself bored and untouched. For the longest time I felt alone in this, and so created a work setting a character in his proper environment, doing what the character did, and quite simply telling the story of that character's life as he himself would tell it. I thought that perhaps there were a few like me, who preferred this kind of work to the kind you suggest you prefer. Given the public's response, it seems I was correct. That said, while I don't argue with the notion that Herr Doktor Gerhard von Breuning is overwrought, and that Beethoven gesticulated and between the two of them overly dramatic hyperbolic statements were daily bread, I do argue with the rather self-serving idea, that we in this day and age know better as to how they back then should have really done it. 1870 was a time when the kind of presentation you witnessed was the norm, and Germans, and of course the Viennese, behaved (and still do) much like the behavior you witnessed. In that I live in Europe and speak German, and come from a part-German family, I can vouch for that.

But let's get back to your idea about the bones, and let's have Gerhard von Breuning, an actual eyewitness with a period testimony disappear but for instigating the notion of stealing the bones. Now, let us create the ghost of Beethoven, and take him on a dramatic journey to reclaim two occipital bones, of his now partial skull. If that is indeed the premise, are we to have him wearing a head bandage for much of the show until he gets the bones back? Are ghosts full images of what they once were? If so, once he gets the bones back, then what? But just think, a ghost chasing around two pieces of his skull for the better part of two hours. No matter how brilliantly crafted, just the simple practical psychology of the thing will have your audiences in a state of total disbelief. And of course, that play becomes about you, not about Gerhard von Breuning, how he behaved, what he saw, and what could very much so have been the style of the day.

Asked quite often what I make of critics, I respond with what I believe. There are critics who choose to be critics because they are good at what they do. And then there are those that give the rest of them a bad name.

Best wishes to you in your continued efforts.

Hershey Felder