Southern Bookman

Distinguished actor Wendell Pierce inspired by his father's patriotism

Wendell Pierce delivers an inspiring Fourth of July message in the "House Call" feature in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

The New Orleans native and admired actor tells of growing up in a then-segregated Southern city, his war hero father's refusal to give in to bitterness over racism and his stellar career in film, television and theater.

Compiled by writer Marc Myers, the entertaining House Call feature in WSJ's Friday "Mansion" section looks at the childhoods of show-business stars.

The celebrities give first-person recollections of the homes in which they grew up, their families and how they received their big breaks to achieve fame.

Pierce, who recently received acclaim for his portrayal of Arthur Miller's Willy Loman in London and Broadway productions of "Death of a Salesman," recalls that his 98-year-old father, Amos, was for years denied medals for his heroism during the World War II Battle of Saipan, "known as the Pacific D-Day."

"At home, Dad never once let bitterness overwhelm him, nor did he stop loving his country," Pierce said.

The actor known for HBO performances as detective Bunk Moreland in "The Wire" and the New Orleans jazz musician Antoine Batiste in "Treme," grew up in Ponchartrain Park, a suburban-style New Orleans neighborhood developed after World War II for middle-class blacks. A ditch separated the community from the all-white Gentilly Woods.

His father used the GI Bill to purchase a house and attend Southern University, where he took classes for a commercial photography career.

After graduating from high school in New Orleans, Wendell Pierce was accepted at New York City's Juilliard School in 1981. His successful career also includes roles in the TV series "Suits" and the films "Ray," "Malcolm X" and "Waiting to Exhale." He's now starring in Prime Video's "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan."'

After Hurricane Katrina, Pierce helped rebuild his childhood neighborhood. He also gave the devastated city hope with a production of "Waiting for Godot," as recounted in his memoir "Wind in the Reeds: A Storm, a Play and the City That Would Not Be Broken." The staunchly liberal Pierce co-wrote the book with the conservative writer Rod Dreher, a fellow Catholic.

Pierce discovered in 2009 that his father, now 98, was entitled to six medals for his heroism at Saipan. The Army presented the medals to his father later that year at the World War II Museum in New Orleans. Pierce's brother, Ron, an Army officer, pinned on the medals.

Instead of bitterness, his father at the ceremony recalled the battle. "What I remember most are the many who died there."

Pierce was in tears when his father saluted and said "God bless America."

 

 

Martin Amis' "The Moronic Inferno" revisits 1980s America

Martin Amis' "The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America" gives a literary portrait gallery of 1980s American culture and politics.

After Amis' recent death, I ordered the collection of his early journalism, first published in 1986. The "Mornonic Inferno" presents profiles and reporting mainly written for the British publications the Observer, the New Statesman, the Sunday Telegraph, Tatler and the London Review of Books. The work precedes Amis' move to Brooklyn after achieving fame as a novelist.

The book is like a literary wax museum of the era, giving profiles of then prominent writers and entertainment personalities, most of whom are now dead.

Amis turns his lens on Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, Diana Trilling, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, Gore Vidal, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, William Burroughs and Joan Didion.

Taking a bemused view of the already well-established writers, Amis shows their vanity and quirks. He has not yet begun to rival them as a major author.

A few subjects remain current in the culture: Steven Spielberg, Gloria Steinem, Paul Theroux and Gay Talese.

In an article written for the then recently revived Vanity Fair, Amis examines the strange career of the film director Brian De Palma, a purveyor of gratuitous sex and violence to some and a brilliant auteur to others.

Amis' dismissive review of Albert Goldman's biography of Elvis Presley gains contemporary resonance following last year's lauded movie about the tragic rock star. While not completely sympathetic to Presley, "Elvis: He Did It His Way" blasts those who exploited him.

A 1979 account of then California Gov. Ronald Reagan's first campaign for the presidency raises the book's retrospective fascination. At the time, Reagan was challenging then President Gerald Ford, who eventually lost to Jimmy Carter. Amis perceptively examines Reagan's popular appeal that would lead to his two terms in the White House, and a seismic shift in American politics.

In a 1981 report for the Observer on the Atlanta child killings, Amis registers the terror that gripped the city. Amis updated the article with a postscript on the 1982 arrest of Wayne Williams, whose guilt is still disputed. The killings still haunt Atlanta, which recently dedicated a memorial to those slain.

"Double Jeopardy: Making Sense of AIDS," published in 1985 in the Observer, takes another early view of a historic event. The piece challenges the irrational panic the disease stirred when it first appeared. Looking back from today's vantage point, Amis'  report shows the AIDS epidemic as a precursor to today's cultural wars.

An amusing portrait of Palm Beach society written for the Tatler in 1979 seems prescient in light of Donald Trump's rise to the presidency and his recent debacles. The roots of Trump's Mar O Lago ethos are already visible.

Amis' Moronic Inferno blazes in today's America. 

 

SEC Media Days will come to Nashville for first time, exciting summertime football fever

Football's never far away for SEC fans.

Each summer, SEC Media Days give a taste of autumn. Football fever rises with July's heat as the league's coaches and star players gather to tout the approaching season.

This year, Nashville will host the ritual for the first time, supplanting Birmingham and Atlanta. Gridiron kings like Alabama's Nick Saban, LSU's Brian Kelly, Texas A&M's Jimbo Fisher, Georgia's Kirby Smart and Mississippi's Lane Kiffen will come to Music City's Grand Hyatt  July 17-20 to swagger in the media spotlight.

Stellar AJC sportswriter Chip Towers, who has valiantly covered UGA athletics for many seasons, previewed this year's event with a revealing article Wednesday about Nashville's ambitions to replace Atlanta as the South's college football capital.

Towers interviewed Bruce Spyridon, longtime CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp., who will soon retire after making the Tennessee capital a major tourist attraction.

With sports arenas, expansive convention venues and vibrant bars, restaurants and entertainment sites, Nashville's Broadway and surrounding streets remain packed with visitors cavorting down the sidewalks in cowboy hats and fancy boots.

Nashville, the home of the SEC's little brother Vanderbilt, has already landed the SEC men's basketball tournament. With the construction of a new domed stadium for the NFL's Tennesee Titans, beneficiaries of a record $1.2 billion public subsidy, Nashville hopes to land the SEC football championship, an Atlanta fixture since 1994.

Under Spyridon, whom Towers reports coined Nashville's gaudy moniker "Music City," the SEC Media Days will rock with a street party on Broadway, Nashville's honky-tonk strip.

The Grammy-nominated country band "Midland" will perform at a free concert on July 18, according to Towers. Receptions will be held at Bridgestone Arena and Titan Stadium, and the "SEC Nation" television show will broadcast live each day. ESPN and other national media will give the coaches' interviews extensive coverage.

With construction of the domed stadium, Nashville will seek the Super Bowl and the NCAA college basketball Final Four. Tennessee's booming capital city also wants a Major League Baseball team to join the Titans, the NHL's Predators and Major League Soccer's Nashville Soccer Club.

Atlanta will fight hard to keep the SEC football championship, one of college football's premier attractions.

But Nashville with its dynamic downtown and new domed stadium will be a tough competitor.

 

 

 

 

Farewell Jesse McReynolds, bluegrass mandolin virtuoso

Jim & Jesse McReynolds had the purest bluegrass sound.

One of the great brother acts of country/bluegrass, Jim & Jesse came out of rural Virginia, blending traditional mountain rhythms with sophisticated musical innovations in a stellar 55-year-career.

Jesse McReynolds, a mandolin virtuoso and dynamic singer, died Friday at the age of 93 at his home in Gallatin, Tenn., according to a New York Times obituary.

Following the death of Jim McReynolds in 2002, Jesse continued performing as the oldest member of the Grand Ole Opry and in concerts and recordings with other bluegrass masters.

Jim & Jesse's soaring vocal harmonies on songs like "Hard-Hearted" and "Truck Driving Man" displayed a choral sweetness of tone. Jesse with his pitch-perfect baritone and Jim with his soaring tenor both performed vocal solos and harmonies.

While Jesse's voice had impressive range and precision, Jim's ethereal singing took their harmonies to a higher dimension, haunting and spine-tingling. Backed by the masterful Virginia Boys, Jim's mandolin solos rose above Jim's rhythm guitar.

Jesse, with his cross-picking mandolin runs, was one of bluegrass' major innovators. Influenced by Earl Scruggs' three-finger banjo rolls, Jesse influenced generations of mandolin and guitar players, broadening its possibilities as a melodic instrument. In the New York Times obituary, Jesse said that he played the notes in reverse order from Scruggs. 

The McReynolds brothers in 1965 recorded a collection of Chuck Berry Songs, "Berry Pickin' in the Country." The album reflects the era's exciting cross-fertilization of rock, bluegrass and country, displayed in the opposite direction by Ray Charles' "Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music" and recordings by the Byrds, Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Bob Dylan and others.

Jesse exhibited his appreciation for rock music, playing mandolin on the Doors' "Soft Parade" and participating in a 2010 tribute album to the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter.

Along with the Delmore Brothers, the Louvin Brothers, the Everly Brothers, the Stanley Brothers, the Wilburn Brothers, the Statler Brothers, the Osborne Brothers and the Jordanaires, Jim & Jesse with their virtuoso musicianship influenced the wider world of music.

 

 

 

 

 

Lucinda Williams' memoir tells of rise to stardom from Southern upbringing

Lucinda Williams' memoir "Don't Tell Anybody The Secrets I Told You" recycles many of the stories already covered in her distinctive songs.

The influential singer-songwriter doesn't leave many secrets untold, from an unstable childhood to her many love affairs with the motorcycle poets to whom she's attracted. The title comes from one of her pleas to an abusive paramour.

As the memoir recounts, she often draws upon her life for her songs. She refuses her music's categorization as "Americana."

In her records and performances, she has carved a unique pathway, setting the stage for new generations of women performers who transcend country, pop and rock boundaries.

The 70-year-old singer-songwriter has found peace in a stable marriage to Tom Overby, now her manager. Her relationship with Overby is quickly summarized at the book's close.

Although a serious stroke in late 2020 left Williams unable to play the guitar, she's released albums and embarked on tours, along with publishing her revealing book, written with Sam Stephenson.

With bawdy humor and hard-won wisdom, Williams in the memoir recalls her long, grueling battle to gain stardom. After years playing in small clubs, struggling to land record deals and supporting herself with blue collar jobs, Williams received critical acclaim for her albums "Lucinda Williams" in 1988 and "Sweet Old World" in 1998.

But the 1998 album "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" was her major commercial breakthrough, earning a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album.

She had earlier received a songwriting Grammy for "Passionate Kisses," a 1992 hit for Mary Chapin Carpenter. After buying a new dress, Williams was too riddled with self-doubt to attend the ceremony.

The book gives a familiar story of women artists fighting for respect in the male-dominated music industry. Williams' songs were considered "too country for rock, and too rock for country." 

At last recording for smaller labels, she fiercely refused to compromise her artistic vision, earning what she calls an unfair reputation for strident perfectionism. She points out that exacting male artists like Bruce Springsteen escape such labels.

The daughter of renowned poet Miller Williams, Lucinda Williams grew up amid her father's literary friends, who gathered at his raucous parties to swap stories, start affairs and drink copious amounts of alcohol. In an amusing aside, she says she's found writers more decadent than musicians.

Before receiving tenure and stability at the University of Arkansas, Miller Williams led his family on an itinerant academic odyssey, from Lake Charles to Baton Rouge to Jackson, Miss., from Santiago to Mexico City.

Miller Williams, who died of Alzheimer's disease in 2015 at age 84, was a major influence on his daughter's songwriting. He told her about meeting Hank Williams as a young man, and as a girl she accompanied her father on a visit to Flannery O'Connor at her home in Milledgeville, Ga., where Lucinda played with the writer's famous peacocks.

Hank Williams and Flannery O'Connor are touchstones of Lucinda Williams' songs, many of them autobiographical. Her childhood journeys to small Southern cities laid the foundation for her work.

Lucinda's mother, Lucille Fern Day, was the daughter of a conservative Baptist preacher. She battled mental problems that led to several commitments to psychiatric hospitals.

Williams discloses her discovery that her mother was sexually abused as a child by her father and other male relatives. A talented musician, Lucille recognized her daughter's talent and introduced her to a range of musical genres.

After divorcing Lucinda's mother, Miller Williams married one of his students, Jordan Hall. who was 20 years younger than him. Jordan was 19 and Lucinda 12 at the time of the marriage. Called "Mama Jordan" by Lucinda and her younger sister and brother, the young woman proved a supportive stepmother. 

"Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You" after a promising start begins to feel hurried and slapdash.

Yet Williams' voice rings true on the book's pages, without reaching her songs' power.

 

 

 

 

Book Forum to return after purchase by the Nation magazine

Great news for literature lovers: Book Forum will return in August.

The Nation has acquired Book Forum from Penske Media Group, which shut down the literary journal in December after purchasing Art Forum, its sibling publication.

While overseen by Nation President Bhaskar Sunkara and publisher and editorial director Katrina vanden Heuvel, Book Forum will be run by its previous editorial team, according to the announcement.

The Nation received Book Forum's archives and intellectual property, according to the announcement, and will continue to run its own reviews and book articles.

Book Forum, which gained a devoted following with its reviews and book news that combined a hip tone and literary rigor, will mark its comeback with a special summer issue.

Founded in 1865 by abolitionists, the Nation is known for its left-wing political and cultural articles. Along with the Atlantic, Harper's, the New Republic, the New York Review of Books and The New Yorker, the Nation keeps alive the liberal tradition of American magazine publishing.

Book Forum's revival is a significant gain for the country's literature.

My late romance with Rachel Brosnahan and "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel"

I fell in love with Rachel Brosnahan as the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

Amy Sherman-Palladino's show about a Jewish housewife becoming a major comedian didn't hook me when it first appeared on Amazon Prime in my first days of streaming.

But I recently watched the show's concluding fifth season, enthralled by the series' evocation of New York City's show-biz glamour in the early 1960s.

Like "Mrs. Maisel's" TV talk show host Gordon Ford, I developed a serious crush for Brosnahan's Mrs. Maisel, with her gorgeous face, perky comments and stylish 1960s outfits and hats.

I was also enchanted by the show's references to 1960s pop culture celebrities like Jack Paar, Princess Margaret and Jane Jacobs.

A deep admirer of Lenny Bruce in my college days, I was especially intrigued by Luke Kirby's sensitive portrayal of the drug-addicted comedian, persecuted by police and a free-speech martyr after his death from a heroin overdose.

The romantic themes, show-business lore and portrayal of Jewish culture captivated me. The parade of characters, from mobsters to black entertainers, TV comedy writers, nightclub owners and newspaper editors and reporters, created a tapestry like that of a great novel.

At low moments, I'll look back at the splendid scene of Brosnahan and Reid Scott as the smitten Ford dancing in a grubby New York City diner to Ella Fitzgerald's "I'm Beginning to See the Light."

I saw the light of "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel."

Actor's Express boosts Atlanta theater with performance of Stephen Adly Guirgis' "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train"

The Actor's Express' staging of Stephen Adly Guirgis' "Jesus Hopped the 'A' Train" offers a daring theatrical experience all too rare in Atlanta.

While the production strains under the weight of Guirgis' ponderous themes, the dynamic cast directed by Eric J. Little delivers an electric performance.

Set in an isolation ward of Riker's Island prison in New York City, Guirgis' early play hurls trumpet blasts of theology, criminal justice, mortality, moral choices, natural beauty and redemption that often soar. Yet they can also crash, bringing more thunder than light.

In the play's central conflict, Seikou Laidlow as the serial killer Lucius and Christian Gonzales as the young accused murderer Angel explore an incendiary relationship in which fear and suspicion defeat offerings of compassion.

They face each other from separate cages aligned at each end of a central stage in scenic designer Seamus M. Bourne's setting. Like two rhetorical gladiators in a pit, they rage and equivocate as the audience watches from both sides of the stage.

Cara Mantella mixes misplaced idealism and ethical desperation in portraying Angel's passionate lawyer, bringing believability to the character's implausible downfall in seeking to subvert the criminal justice system. Yet, her strained effort to exonerate Angel by getting him to commit perjury remains dubious.

While his voice was at times rendered inaudible by the King Plow theater's poor acoustics, Luis Hernandez gives a complex performance as the sadistic, self-righteous prison guard Valdez, who stands as a rigid moral arbiter against Lucius and Angel's justifications for their criminal acts.  He symbolizes the state's power to impose justice upon individuals.

That extreme power is carried out with Lucius' execution for the vicious murders of eight people. Lucius' former compassionate guard D'Amico, replaced by Valdez at the start of the play, reappears to say he has witnessed Lucius' death, one of Aldis' too frequent uses of exposition.

Endearingly played by Jacob York, D'Amico decries the death penalty in delivering a poignant elegy for Lucius. Yet he reveals that traces of heroin and cocaine were found in Lucius' body, undercutting Lucius' claims to Christian redemption.

Angel, who has shifted from defiance to remorse,, closes the play with an expression of guilt that seems gratuitous, having no connection with previous events.

Tearfully recalling stealing the coat of a friend during childhood, Angel's at last totally defeated by the criminal justice system, to Valdez's satisfaction.

Despite that unsatisfactory conclusion, Actor's Express meets the challenge of Guirgis' ambitious but flawed play, the work of a major playwright not yet fully formed.

 

Farewell Saskia Hamilton, distinguished poet and editor of Robert Lowell's letters

Saskia Hamilton edited several volumes of Robert Lowell's letters, giving readers an autobiographical portrait of the troubled poet and major American literary figure from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Hamilton, also an honored poet and a professor and administrator at Barnard College, died June 7 of cancer in Manhattan at the too young age of 56.

Published in 2005, her "Letters of Robert Lowell" give a day-by-day record of the poet's life in his distinctive language, covering his manic breakdowns, travels across the world and career as one of the last nationally renowned American poets.

The letters begin in Lowell's youth and continue through his tumultuous marriages to Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick and Caroline Blackwood.

His language grows more frenzied and ornate before his breakdowns, and turns contrite and warm-hearted when he has recovered. The letters are packed with literary gossip and poetic lore.

Hamilton, who also edited a volume of Lowell's letters to his soulmate Elizabeth Bishop, made a major splash in the literary world in 2020 with the publication of "The Dolphin Letters: 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell and Their Circle."

Lowell after falling in love with Blackwood on a sojourn to England and leaving Hardwick used Hardwick's anguished letters to him in the poetry collection "The Dolphin," copying her words verbatim. Bishop was among those who vilified Lowell for appropriating Hardwick's private emotions.

Despite the controversy over Lowell's use of Hardwick's letters, "The Dolphin" won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Hardwick thought her letters to Lowell had been destroyed, but Hamilton discovered them in a collection of Lowell's papers at Harvard. Hamilton in 2019 published an expanded version of Lowell's "Dolphin" collection, "The Dolphin, Two Versions, 1972, 1973."

The publication of Hardwick's letters and the expanded "Dolphin" allowed scholars and readers to determine how closely Lowell had used Hardwick's words, reigniting the controversy for a new generation.

Critic and novelist Darryl Pinckney recently published an eyewitness account of Hardwick's turmoil and reconciliation with Lowell, who was returning to her apartment on New York City's Upper West Side when he died of a heart attack in 1977. Lowell was found in the backseat of a taxicab in front of Hardwick's home.

Pinckney built a close relationship with Hardwick and her friends connected to the New York Review of Books when he was a student in the 1970s at Columbia. Hardwick, a well-known literary critic and novelist whose fame increased after Lowell's death, taught seminars at Barnard and Columbia.

In his memoir, "Come Back in September," Pinckney gives a vivid portrait of Hardwick and New York City's avant garde literary scene in the 1970s. He looks back on encounters with Lowell at Hardwick's apartment near Central Park. Literary figures like New York Review co-editor Barbara Epstein also appear.

Hamilton's collections of Lowell's letters are among the last monuments of a long literary tradition. Digital technology has brought an end to authors and political figures writing personal letters. Email won't have the same permanence.

 

Kenny Leon sets "Hamlet" in contemporary Atlanta

"Hamlet" is transported from medieval Denmark to 2020 Atlanta in Kenny Leon's production of the play for New York City's Shakespeare in the Park.

Leon's hip-hop Hamlet, starring Ato Bankson-Wood in the lead role, officially opens June 28 and runs through Aug. 6 at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. Previews began June 6.

Shakespeare scholar and New York Public Theater adviser James Shapiro collaborated with the Atlanta-based Leon, cutting the scenes about European military rivalries and battles to reduce the play to two hours from the customary five. Leon, the founder of Atlanta's True Colors Theater, gained fame for his Broadway revivals of August Wilson's plays and other award-winning productions.

In an interview with Shapiro for the Atlantic, Leon said about the "Hamlet" production, "We're focusing on the relationships. We're focusing on the domestic part of the play. We're not focusing on the political, the military part of the play."

Solea Pfieffer, who stars as Ophelia, performs several new songs in the production, which opens with a musical rendition of the funeral of Hamlet's father.

While the production features a contemporary Atlanta setting and displays of black culture, Shakespeare's language is not changed.

Leon instructed his actors to carry out their lines as if to appeal to his late father, Leroy, an unsophisticated man who never left Tallahassee, Fla.

"This is a Shakespeare that we're trying to make clear for Leroy, a country guy who grew up in Tallahassee with outdoor plumbing," Leon told Shapiro.

The cast was also told to "let the culture in," Leon said.

"To me, it's not about reaching black people or white people or intellectuals or non intellectuals or theater folks," Leon said. "It's about reaching human beings, reaching people. And I think by making this specific to Atlanta, Georgia, without changing the words - making the the music specific, making the food specific, making their hair specific - we can do that."

Leon also placed Shakespeare in contemporary Georgia for the 2019 Shakespeare in the Park production of "Much Ado About Nothing," which later ran on the PBS show "Great Performances."

Bankson-Wood, who received a 2019 Tony Award nomination for "Slave Play," impressed Leon with a performance of the famous "To Be Or Not to Be" monologue, tying Hamlet's mental turmoil to "what young men were going through in America after George Floyd's death."

Shakespeare's 400-year-old play still speaks to us, as Leon demonstrates.