"Blumhouse's Fantasy Island"

The enigmatic Mr. Roarke makes the secret dreams of his lucky guests come true at a luxurious but remote tropical resort, but when the fantasies turn into nightmares, the guests have to solve the island's mystery in order to escape with their lives. PG-13, 2:36, Premiere, Duluth 10, Lakes 10

"Downhill"

A woman starts to have second doubts about her husband after he runs away from an approaching avalanche, leaving her and their two sons behind. R, 1:26, Premiere

"The Photograph"

When famed photographer Christina Eames dies unexpectedly, her estranged daughter, Mae, finds a photograph tucked away. She soon finds herself delving into her mother's early life an investigation that leads to an unexpected romance with a rising journalist. PG-13, 1:46, Duluth 10

"Sonic the Hedgehog"

Sonic tries to navigate the complexities of life on Earth with his newfound best friend -- a human named Tom Wachowski. They must soon join forces to prevent the evil Dr. Robotnik from capturing Sonic and using his powers for world domination. PG, 1:40, Premiere, Duluth 10, Lakes 10

"Pocahontas"

This is the Disney animated tale of the romance between a young American Indian woman named Pocahontas (Irene Bedard) and Capt. John Smith (Mel Gibson). G, 1:31, screens Friday through Sunday only, Duluth 10.

Second annual Classic Horse Movie Night screens "The Man From Snowy River," 6:30 p.m. today, Feb. 13, Zeitgeist Teatro, 222 E. Superior St. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. with happy hour and silent auction. Tickets: $10 for adults, $5 for youth.

The director and executive producers of "The Hunter," a full-length narrative art film shot in Duluth and currently in post-producton, will be hosting a Cinematic Evening," with sample footage, 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 15, Zeitgeist Teatro Zuccone, 222 E. Superior St.

"1917"

During World War I, two British soldiers Lance Cpl. Schofield and Lance Cpl. Blake receive seemingly impossible orders. In a race against time, they must cross over into enemy territory to deliver a message that could potentially save 1,600 of their fellow comrades including Blake's own brother. R, 1:59, Premiere, Duluth 10, West, Lakes 10

"Bad Boys for Life"

Old-school cops Mike Lowery (Will Smith) and Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) team up to take down the vicious leader of a Miami drug cartel. R, 2:04, Duluth 10, Lakes 10

"Bombshell"

When Gretchen Carlson slaps Fox News founder Roger Ailes with a lawsuit alleging sexual harassment, not a soul could predict what would happen next. Her decision leads to Fox News correspondent Megyn Kelly coming forward with her own story, as well as multiple other women, inciting a movement that reverberates around the world. R, 1:49, Zinema 2 Note: 7 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 16 screening offers open captioning.

"Doolittle"

Dr. John Dolittle (Robert Downey Jr.) lives in solitude behind the high walls of his lush manor in 19th-century England. His only companionship comes from an array of exotic animals that he speaks to on a daily basis. But when young Queen Victoria becomes gravely ill, the eccentric doctor and his furry friends embark on an epic adventure to a mythical island to find the cure. PG, 1:31, Premiere, Duluth 10, Lakes 10

"Frozen II"

Elsa the Snow Queen and her sister, Anna, embark on an adventure far away from the kingdom of Arendelle. They are joined by friends, Kristoff, Olaf and Sven. PG, 1:43, Lakes 10

"Gretel & Hansel"

A girl and her younger brother unwittingly stumble upon the house of an evil witch in the dark woods. PG-13, 1:27, Duluth 10

"Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey"

After splitting with the Joker, Harley Quinn joins superheroes Black Canary, Huntress and Renee Montoya to save a young girl from an evil crime lord, Black Mask in Gotham City. R, 1:49, Premiere, Duluth 10, Lakes 10

"Jumanji: The Next Level"

When Spencer goes back into the fantastical world of Jumanji, pals Martha, Fridge and Bethany re-enter the game to bring him home. But everything about Jumanji is about to change, as they soon discover more obstacles and more danger to overcome. PG-13, 2:03, Lakes 10

"Knives Out"

A detective and a trooper travel to a lush estate to interview the quirky relatives of a patriarch who died during his 85th birthday celebration. PG-13, 2:10, Zinema 2

"Little Women"

Following the lives of four sisters, Amy, Jo, Beth and Meg, as they come of age in America in the aftermath of the Civil War. Though all very different from each other, the March sisters stand by each other through difficult and changing times. PG, 2:15, Duluth 10

"Parasite"

Greed and class discrimination threaten the newly formed symbiotic relationship between the wealthy Park family and the destitute Kim clan. R, 2:12, Duluth 10, Zinema 2

"Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"

The surviving Resistance faces the First Order once more as Rey, Finn and Poe Dameron's journey continues. With the power and knowledge of generations behind them, the final battle commences. PG-13, 2:22, Duluth 10, Lakes 10

Summaries from IMDb and official movie websites.

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In theaters - Duluth News Tribune

Los Angeles City Hall was packed with hundreds of climate change activists and several celebrities Friday morning. Though their backgrounds were diverse speakers ranged from indigenous community leaders to actors Jane Fonda and Joaquin Phoenix they all shared a unifying message: Our house is on fire and the climate crisis must be confronted.

The participants congregated for the citys first Fire Drill Friday, an ongoing environmental activism movement that was spearheaded by Fonda and Greenpeace last year. Fonda, a lifelong activist who supported the Civil Rights Movement and opposed the Vietnam and Iraq wars, has dedicated much of the last few months to the movement; she moved to Washington D.C. and started protesting outside the Capitol every Friday to urge elected officials to address the planets ongoing climate crisis.

Though filming duties for Netflixs Grace and Frankie required Fonda to move back to Los Angeles, she brought Fire Drill Fridays with her, and the movement has continued to grow. The Los Angeles-based Fire Drill Fridays will only occur the first Friday of each month due to Fondas work schedule, but once Grace and Frankie filming wraps up, Fonda plans on touring the nation with Greenpeace and hosting local events, with the end goal being to make the 2020 presidential election more climate-focused.

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Many news headlines regarding Fire Drill Fridays have focused on the arrests of its high-profile activists. The typical Fire Drill Friday event includes a variety of speakers, which leads to acts of nonviolent civil disobedience, usually for crowding or obstructing. Fonda was arrested five times during the Fire Drill Friday events in Washington D.C. (one of those arrests prevented her from accepting a British Academy Britannia Award in-person) and stressed that civil disobedience was a powerful political tool, particularly when used by celebrities with a strong public platform.

Every week you have the opportunity to put yourself on the line, Fonda said in an interview. Civil disobedience is not a first resort, but its a step up. Youve petitioned, marched, pleaded, and begged, and you havent been heard, so you take the next step. To align your body with your values is very empowering, and this offers that opportunity.

Civil disobedience is not a requisite of Fire Drill Friday events. Though Fonda still speaks during each gathering, she noted that she cannot participate in civil disobedience for three months due a court agreement stemming from her D.C. arrests.

Joaquin Phoenix participates in the Fire Drill Friday climate change rally.

ETIENNE LAURENT/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock

A Greenpeace spokesperson said that several dozen participants gathered at Maverick Natural Resources (a company that operates a large number of oil and gas wells in Southern California and the Central Valley) in an act of civil disobedience Friday afternoon. No arrests were made, per the spokesperson.

While the mainstream media and the cultural zeitgeist have begun paying more mind to climate-related issues in recent years, Fondas Fire Drill Fridays has enjoyed particularly rapid growth thanks to its high-profile participants. Celebrity activism is a key component, and the latest events other participating Hollywood workers included Joaquin Phoenix, Amber Valletta, Bonnie Wright, Brooklyn Decker, June Diane Raphael, and Norman Lear, though most of their speeches were intentionally brief and served to hype up the events primary speakers, who were all environmental activists or community organizers.

Fonda also led the movements teach-in events, where shed join prominent activists and climate change experts to discuss climates impact on subjects ranging from jobs, agriculture and the military, with the talks broadcast via Facebook Live.

While courting well-known individuals such as Phoenix who was arrested during a Fire Drill Friday event in Washington D.C. last month helps raise awareness about the movement, Fire Drill Fridays celebrity elements are primarily intended to provide a platform for more overlooked demographics to stress the importance of climate activism, according to Greenpeace executive director Annie Leonard.

The high-profile celebrities draw the spotlight, but understand that the real voices needing to be amplified arent theirs, Leonard said in an interview. The celebrities have the role of introducing the speakers, drawing the cameras, elevating the issue, and growing the audience. They create an incredible spotlight that we use to prioritize the voices that are marginalized in national conversations, such as women, youth, and indigenous people who often live at the forefront of climate change.

Fonda noted that the movement has expanded far more quickly than she anticipated. Fonda reached out to Leonard to discuss climate activism last September and the duo found that they were influenced by the same activists, namely Greta Thunberg hence the movements oft-repeated warning that our house is on fire and author Naomi Kleins On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal. The work of anti-apartheid activist Randall Robinson, who also practiced civil disobedience with well-known influencers, was another key influence and inspired the duo to get additional celebrities involved with their environmental movement. Other celebrities who have participated in prior Fire Drill Friday events include Martin Sheen, Ted Danson, Susan Sarandon, and Sam Waterston.

Fire Drill Fridays was created during a fraught period for environmental politics in America. President Donald Trump and many prominent Republican politicians reject the scientific consensus on climate change. Though Democrats have been more open to climate-oriented legislation, several Democrats rejected the Green New Deal, a much-discussed package of environmental legislation that the Fire Drill Fridays movement strongly supports. Fonda said that she met with senators to discuss how Fire Drill Fridays could promote environmental legislation last year. They told Fonda to build an army.

Were growing in numbers and want more people to be comfortable being out and demanding, Fonda said in an interview. We always focus on the science and the demands are: No new fossil fuel expansions, phasing out existing fossil fuels over 30 years, and supporting a Green New Deal.

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Jane Fonda Is Building an Army to Defend the Earth with Fire Drill Fridays Movement - IndieWire

Large-scale retrospective exhibitions at major venues generally serve to cement a leading artists place even more firmly in the canon, but they rarely change peoples minds. The recent Andy Warhol exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York or the Joan Mir show at the Grand Palais in Paris, for example, basically gave a certain amount of shading and definition to a well-known body of work, while affirming for a wider audience the artists ongoing importance. Surveys of less familiar but still well-established figures like Francis Picabia or Simon Hanta (at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, respectively) have taken pains to highlight unexpected facets of their oeuvres, so that we say, I didnt know they did that. And finally, certain monographic shows, driven by the efforts of an important critical thinkerscholar and curator Kirk Varnedoe on behalf of Gustave Caillebotte, for example, or biographer Hayden Herrera for Frida Kahlohave resulted in an artist long considered second-tier being vaulted into prominence, their work suddenly aligned with the contemporary zeitgeist.

The case of Dora Maar, however, is intriguingly different. The subject last summer of a full-scale Centre Pompidou survey that is now at Tate Modern in London (and travels this spring to the Getty Center in Los Angeles), Maar, for contemporary audiences, especially non-French ones, was until recently virtually unknown as an artist. If remembered at all, she was thought of as one of Picassos longer-lasting love interests, slotted in between Marie-Thrse Walter and Franoise Gilot, or maybe as the subject of Picassos famous 1937 series Weeping Woman, but scarcely as an important artist in her own right. Yet to see her simply as Picassos muse is to sell her seriously short.

The traveling exhibitiontitled simply Dora Maar and featuring well over four hundred works and documentsputs that error to right, offering an in-depth examination of a productive and multifaceted artist, a photographer and painter of real interest and complexity. In addition, the catalogue and various responding articles open up an expanded view of the Surrealist enterprise and of the French art world of the late 1920s through the 1940s. These texts bring into focus not just Maars considerable contributions but also those of a network of women friendsincluding Jacqueline Lamba, Nusch luard, Lee Miller, Claude Cahun, Rogi Andr, and Lise Deharmeall of whom were part of the Surrealist circle.

Maar (19071997) led a long and complex life. She was born Henriette Thodora Markovitch (Dora was a childhood nickname) in Paris to a French Catholic mother and a Croatian architect father who was quite possibly Jewishalthough Dora, a fervent Catholic from the mid-40s onward, denied it. She spent her early years in Buenos Aires, where her father went to practice. Fluent in both French and Spanish, she traveled back and forth between Paris and Buenos Aires, going to school in both places, until she returned to France permanently with her mother in 1920. In 1923 Markovitch (as she was then still known) began her art studies at the Union centrale des Arts dcoratifs, a school that prepared young women for careers in the decorative arts. There, she became involved in the citys cultural scene and met a lifelong friend, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, who was to become the second wife of Andr Breton, the acknowledged leader (and gatekeeper) of the Surrealists. Following graduation, Markovitch attended classes at the Acadmie Julian and at the atelier of painter Andr Lhote. At Lhotes studio, she got to know Henri Cartier-Bresson, then still determined to be a painter. Urged by her friend the art critic Marcel Zahar, Markovitch enrolled in the cole technique de photographie et de cinematographie. In 1927 she took the advice of Emmanuel Sougez, the photography director of the magazine LIllustration, and abandoned painting to pursue photography.

This was both a practical decision and an artistically fruitful one. Although she was to shift her focus away from photography in the later 30s to return to painting, the camera allowed Maar to fully hone her technical skills and develop the wide-ranging aesthetic that gives her work a strong claim on our attention today. Painters of any stripe had a hard time making a go of it in interwar Paris, and women faced additional obstacles. But photography, being a more multivalent enterprise in which the line between the artistic and the commercial was hazy, provided ambitious women a better chance of finding a place in the creative world and earning a living from their work. The medium scarcely challenged painting or sculpture for preeminence, and this enabled women photographers like Maar and her friends to get past the defenses of men who were artists themselves or who wrote about them. In addition, photography carried with it a strong sense of the fashionable and sexysomething that the Surrealists were especially keen to cultivate. In this exhibition, photographys relationship with Surrealism (seemingly obvious now, but not so earlier on) is clearly and thought-provokingly evident.

In the late 20s and 30s there were not the same clear-cut divisions between photographic disciplines that came later. Maar could, at roughly the same time, produce high-end fashion photographs, artful advertising pictures, flattering studio portraits, figure studies, soft-core pornography for a charm magazine, gritty street scenes, documentary shots, politically inflected images, rigorous formal compositions, and the complex, disturbing, and beautifully crafted Surrealist photomontages that are her most memorable creations. When she returned to art photography later in life, she investigated direct gestural manipulation of the negative, producing striking work that is entirely abstract.

Maar approached the craft of photography carefully and deliberately, picking up technical expertise and cultivating the sort of contacts that she would need. She met Brassa as he was starting out on his career in photography and shared a studio with him in Montparnasse. She also became friendly with Man Ray, who offered his help and advice, and with his then lover Lee Miller. She worked as the assistant to a successful fashion photographer, Harry Ossip Meerson, whose studio was on the same street as Rays. In 1931 she formed a professional partnership with Pierre Kfer, a film-set designer, and they opened a studio. At that point, she changed her professional name to Dora Maara shortening of Markovitchand for a number of years her photographs were stamped with Kfer-Dora Maar, although she likely did almost all the actual photography.

Maars fashion and advertising photography feels remarkably advanced, subordinating obvious glamour to Surrealist-inspired invention. Les annes vous guettent (The Years Lie in Wait for You), ca. 1935, probably used in an advertisement for an anti-aging cream, shows a spider in its web superimposed in white over the beautiful, pensive face of Maars close friend Nusch luard, wife of the Surrealist poet Paul luard. Nuschs face is placed above the centerline of the frame, and to the left, with the spider set directly between her eyes. The lighting (a specialty of Maars) is both soft and highly contrasted. It is a strange and compelling image, and if we were not aware that this was an advertising picture, we would see it as a successful artistic photograph in its own right.

The same might be said for Shampooing, or Femme aux cheveux avec savon (Shampoo, or Womans Hair with Soap), 1934, an elongated horizontal image, which consists of a womans head in profile, her hair whitened with soap and flying out straight in front of her. Hands push at the back of her scalp, seemingly setting the hair in motion. The image looks like a Greek or Roman bust, but an extraordinarily strange one.

Even the more straightforward fashion pictures, like a 1935 image of a model in a white satin dress, are imbued with individuality and invention. The photograph was shot from a low angle, the models body canted, her head in the corner of the frame, and her long gloved arm set at an angle to the bodys tilt. The photo features full Caravaggio-style chiaroscuro, and the models smoothly crimped blond hair and impassive face again bring to mind Classical statuary seen through a Surrealist lens. Moreover, the dress with its stiffened, vaguely fleur-de-lis bodice is odd but completely gorgeous. It is, of course, much easier to see these photographs as art when they are taken out of the context of advertisements, framed and printed on good paper, isolated and stripped of their utility and ready recognizability by both the passage of time and the removal of text.

Advertising photography at the time set its sights on the expanding womens market, promoting the idea of the modern woman as independent, adventurous, and athletic. This was largely an alluring commercial fiction. Most womenbound to the home, shop, or factorydid not enjoy that degree of liberty, but Maar and her friends actually lived such lives. And they put their exceptional autonomy to use. Even while Maar did work for hire that highlighted glamour and fashion, she was actively engaged with the political left, associating herself with the agitprop theater company Groupe Octobre, joining the anti-fascist group Contre-Attaque (founded by Georges Bataille and Breton), signing petitions, and participating in explicitly partisan exhibitions and projects. In line with her social convictions, she traveled to London and Barcelona to photograph, quite sensitively, working-class people.

Untitled (Blind street peddler, Barcelona), 1933, shows a man dressed in a white smock sitting on a chair in front of a closed, corrugated storefront gate, his head tilted slightly to the side and up. Impassive and unsmiling, he presents a kind of internal stare, cradling a rounded, cloth-wrapped object in his left arm while delicately gripping a white bowl in his right. His scuffed-up white cane is hooked over his left thigh and under his right. The subtle play of diagonalsthe angle of his head, the counterbalanced slant of his shoulders, the differing tilt of the objects he is holdingcreates an image that combines stillness with the potential for movement. More than anything, the pose evokes in the quietest of ways a Madonna and child or a piet.

Balancing the somber feeling of that photograph is the jolly picture of four laughing people at la Boquera, Barcelonas lively (and still active) food market. Caught in a geometric composition, they all apparently work at a charcuterie stand, amid a welter of hanging scales, meat on hooks, and assorted lights, chains, and wires. One of the women rubs or playfully covers one eye with her hand; another has placed a hand on her forehead. The four are clearly chummy, working hard but enjoying themselves. Maars photographs of laborers, the unemployed, and the marginalized are never sentimental or condescending, and never overtly ideological. Taken in the midst of the Depression, the pictures capture, above all, their subjects humanity. In the process Maar creates images of real compositional and tonal complexity, imbued with the same technical expertise and idiosyncratic formal sensibility that characterize her other photographic work.

Maars Surrealist photos, her best-known work, use the full range of her skillsespecially darkroom techniquescombined with the new freedom of imagination and the loosened expectation of logical causality that Surrealism allowed its practitioners. Most of the examples are collages, re-photographed to remove them from the realm of handiwork. This gives the pictures a smooth, distanced surface, drawing on photographys implied verisimilitude to convey a dreamlike uncanniness, a cognitive ambiguity.

One of Maars most affecting reshot photo-collages is Le Simulateur (The Pretender), 1935. To create it, she used one of her Barcelona street photos, which features three young boys hanging out on the street. One of thembent sharply backward, feet over head, but supported upright somehowseems to be walking up a wall. For the new photograph Maar excises this figure and places his feet on the ground in a torqued, claustrophobic stone hallway. The architectural structure is a detail from an old photographic print of the Palace of Versailles, and the mood evoked is one of barely contained hysteria. Hysteria is no longer used as a term for a specific psychiatric condition, but the Surrealists were especially fond of the conceptseeing it as a useful tool (rather like automatism or dreaming) and a portal to another state of reality. Hysteria was, for them, something to be cultivated rather than cured.

Maars single most famous Surrealist picture, Portrait dUbu (1936), is a straight photograph, but a deeply strange one. Softly lit, closely cropped, it depicts a not immediately recognizable creature (in all likelihood an armadillo or an armadillo fetus) set against a dark background. The subject is scaly, rubbery, and clawed, with a bulbous head, a long snout, and darkened partially hooded eyes (only one of which is turned to the lens). It gazes at us with indifference mingled with menace, and the image speaks of the irony-tinged cruelty that so fascinated the Surrealists. The title of the photograph is to the point. Pre Ubu, the kingly character created at the end of the nineteenth century by the playwright Alfred Jarry, was a favorite of the Surrealists (who also esteemed the Marquis de Sade). Ubu is funny, absurd, ridiculously arbitrary and impulsive, but also cowardly, cruel, grasping, and viciousa concoction of pure id.

In the mid-30s, Surrealism was well entrenched in the French cultural scene. Its combination of transgression, mystery, eroticism, and political engagement, along with a call for total personal freedom, proved irresistible to manyamong them, not surprisingly, Picasso. The Surrealists were a tightly knit group, so once he became associated with the movement, it was inevitable that he would cross paths with Maar. They first met, according to Brassa, in late 1935, and drew closer to each other in 1936. They became a couple, but their relationship was fatally damaged by Picassos affair with Franoise Gilot, whom he met in 1943 and became seriously involved with the following year. Maar and Picasso broke up completely in 1946.

But back when they originally got together, Picasso was already in his mid-fifties, more than twenty-five years older than Maar, and as renowned as any contemporary artist in France. Although he famously possessed a forceful character, Maar was a formidable and independent woman and could well hold her ownin the early part of their relationship, at least. Maar and Picasso worked closely together, she giving him technical advice and helping with photographically related prints, he inspiring her art.

Importantly, Maar documented the painting of Picassos mural Guernica, from May 11, 1937 (shortly after its beginning on May 1), to its completion on June 4. Photographing such a huge painting was a technically daunting job, made more difficult by the studios poor lighting, and required extensive darkroom work. The visual record was commissioned by Christian Zervos for his journal Cahiers dart. Maars eight pictures show a fascinating evolution, highlighting Picassos concentration on the interplay of light and dark and reinforcing the black-and-white paintings connection with photography. Not only was Picasso intimately involved with a photographer who was a darkroom expert and thus keenly aware of the emergence and control of tones, but the images of devastation that inspired the painting were black-and-white shots from newspapers and the newsreels that Picasso, a regular moviegoer, in all likelihood saw. While infused with a host of art historical references, Guernica, shown at the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris International Exposition and used to generate support for the embattled Republican government, was also intensely of its momentsomething that its photographic connection clearly reinforced.

In the summer of 1937, evidently under Picassos influence, Maar returned to painting. Her artistic production during their relationship was closely attuned to his. The lively, colorful Cubist work from the late 30s, seen to good effect in two nicely articulated pastel portraits of Picasso, is skillfully executed and well-composed, but the paintings of the war years, including various fully recognizable still lifes along with more abstracted images like La Cage (1943) and Les Quais de la Seine (1944), touch us more directly. Like Picassos works from the same period, they use a subdued and darkened palette and employ a limited set of objects and forms. They are quiet, somber works, imbued with the air of sadness and fear that pervaded occupied France.

In the immediate postwar years, Maar, although embarked on a promising painting career, withdrew from the world of exhibitions. She continued to work on her own, but the momentum was broken. Those times were difficult for Maar. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1945, and was hospitalized and treated with electroshock therapy (by Jacques Lacan). In 1946, her old friend Nusch luard collapsed and died from a cerebral hemorrhage while they were having lunch together. Soon thereafter, her relationship with Picasso came to a definitive end. These were real blows, but Maar was, as ever, determined and resourceful. Fortified by her religious faith, she persevered. Before her split from Picasso, she hadwith his helpbought a house in the southern French town of Mnerbes, where she would spend part of the year for the rest of her life. She had many friends there, including the painter Nicolas de Stal, and maintained an active socialand, to a certain extent, professionallife in Paris and Provence for a number of years.

Maar continued painting, producing a wide range of works, from portraiture to semi-abstract landscapes to gestural works to complex geometric constructions. None of her postwar works remotely resembled Picassos. She also resumed her photographic investigations, moving away from easily read imagery to photograms and abstract manipulated prints and negatives. The late works are technically and conceptually adventurous, and in the case of some of the untitled hand-colored negatives from the 1980s, ravishingly beautiful. One particularly appealing image features a diagonal wave of color, rising from left to right, held in check by a transparent linear geometric form that picks up the swoop of the wave, but transforms its colors into bright reds, lavenders, and yellow-oranges.

Maars life and art encapsulate a most interesting set of concerns and problems. Chief among them is the place of a varied oeuvre. A wide-ranging practice is fine if you are, say, Gerhard Richter or Picassoartists not just of great material, stylistic, and formal variety, but of immense productivity. It has traditionally been a harder struggle, however, for women who have moved between mediums to convince the world that they are suitably focused and serious. Being associated, as Maar was, with a much better-known male artist (a vexed status shared with her contemporary, the brilliantly inventive Sophie Taeuber-Arp) makes that problem all the more difficult. Maars overall career amply illustrates the importance of luck, persistence, and a long-sustained presence in the art world. It also exposes the double-edged nature of fashionability (what is most au courantas certain aspects of Surrealism once wereinevitably falls quite out of favor in due time), as well as the iffy-ness of a career push offered by a romantic association with a powerful artista real plus (especially at the beginning) but one that comes at a high reputational price.

We are fortunate that the curatorstwo photography specialists from the Pompidou and one from the Gettyput this thorough and well-researched exhibition into play now. The times are ripe for a deepened appreciation of the role of photography in early to mid-twentieth-century art, particularly in relation to Surrealism, and it is now accepted that stylistic and material diversity in a larger oeuvre is not a negative. But most of all, there is a consensus, many years in the making, that women have been seriously underrepresented, that the history of modernism is not a closed book nor a zero-sum game, and that women need to be given their due. Maars well-deserved ascendance from obscurity to serious institutional acceptance does nothing to diminish the accomplishments of others, but rather gives added resonance to a period of great aesthetic, social, intellectual, and political interest, showing us in the process a very fine artist at work.

1 The ground for this retrospective was prepared by four smaller museum exhibitions that originated in Europe between 1997 and 2014. (See the Chronology section of Damarice Amao, Amanda Maddox, and Karolina Ziebinska-Lewandowska, eds, Dora Maar, Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019, p. 191.) Previously, Maar was very much under the radar. When she died in 1997, her art was auctioned off, most of it in barely documented lots. The sale did generate a good deal of public interest, but only because it included several Picassos that Maar had owned.2 Having Jewish roots in France during the war put you at considerable risk. While Maar stayed in France with Picasso, her father returned to the safety of Buenos Aires shortly after France was occupied.3 Surrealist photographythat is, work that is Surrealist in itself rather than depicting Surrealist artoccupied a relatively small place in the movements major exhibitions, which concentrated on objects and paintings. Photography was more commonly included in publications connected to Surrealism. The current reevaluation of Surrealisms relation to photography started in earnest with Photographic Surrealism (1979) at the New Gallery (now the Museum) of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, and gathered momentum in the early 80s. Today it would be scarcely thinkable to have a broadly based Surrealist show without a sizable photographic presence.

This article appears under the title The Missing Surrealist in the February 2020 issue, pp. 4047.

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Dora Maars Surrealist Photography Eclipses Her Reputation as a Modernist Muse - ARTnews

Ever since the victory of Protestant Prussia over Catholic Austria at Kniggrtz (Sadowa) in 1866, there has been talk in conservative-Protestant and liberal circles in German territories of the ultramontanes, those people who were guided by forces beyond the Alps. My conservative grandfather also spoke like this, his meaning clear: a vom Hagen is Prussian and therefore Protestant.

I grew up in the 1970s and 80s in the Wrttemberg region in West Germany, where every old church is Protestant. The pastor came once a year to visit us for four oclock coffee and cake, and for confirmation we had to memorise Luthers 95 Theses. Only refugee families from Germanys old East, migrant workers, or a few folks from the Swabian Alb or the Black Forest were Catholic. There was no Catholic church in my town until the 1950s, and new Catholic churches were modern and ugly. Most of my classmates were Protestant, and Catholics seemed as foreign as Orthodox classmates from Greece or Muslims from Turkey.

At university at Lake Constance, I formed a close friendship with a fellow student who had attended a Jesuit boarding school in the Black Forest and enjoyed telling me about this mystical world in evenings over red wine. As a reserve officer, I was impressed by the strict discipline of the Jesuits that he described in his stories. A sign at the Konstanz Minster Square reminded us hikers that it was 2,340km to Santiago de Compostela the thought of such a journey excited us.

Yet it was during an internship in a provincial city of Gujarat that my Christian values became clear to me. To my surprise, I found that the deep sympathy I felt for the plight of the poor was not shared by the general Indian population. Only at one place were the beggars provided with alms a Catholic church. There, long queues of Hindu beggars would form each day. I must confess that I was almost shocked to discover my Christian values so abruptly.

Once I returned to Germany, I began attending church services regularly, but it was difficult to find a traditional Protestant congregation. Nonetheless, these services offered me time for reflection and transcendence, even if the sermons felt superficial and the communion wine was merely white grape juice.

Once I emigrated to Halifax, Nova Scotia in 2006, I found a Lutheran congregation, which was comprised of parishioners with German ancestors as well as some who had come to Canada after the War. Unfortunately, however, the congregation was quite liberal. One evening, I attended a lecture by an Anglican priest at the local theological college. Afterwards we went to the pub, where I found myself more or less press-ganged into the local high church Anglican congregation. What a ceremonial world full of choral singing, bells and incense!

I was able to come to terms with the fact that the Queen was supreme governor of the Church of England, the mother church of the international Anglican Communion, as this particular congregation was founded in the 18th century by German immigrants. The Anglo-Catholicism maintained in that parish is a small movement within Anglicanism that has existed since the 19th century, when, under the leadership of John Keble, John Henry Newman and Edward Pusey, the Oxford Movement attempted to revive many of the Catholic beliefs and practices underlying Anglicanism.

Worship in this high-church parish familiarised me with the saints of the Western Church and Cranmers Book of Common Prayer. It also led to me to a soulmate. The evening before St Matthiass Day, a young woman named Tracy and I attended Evening Prayer and were afterwards invited home for dinner by the parish priest, who had become a friend. The following year we were married in a wedding service of more than two hours. Tracy had a doctorate in theology from St Andrews, Scotland, where she had become an Anglican, and so the secular year was for us increasingly determined by the church year and feast days in honour of the saints. We took part in retreats, and my theological interest was stirred.

After a few years my wife became gravely ill, and in 2016 she was given only six months to live. Tracy was an avid reader of National Geographic, and the December 2015 issue was devoted to the worldwide Marian apparitions and their associated pilgrimages. She was convinced that the Mother of God could also heal her. Our priest pointed out that there was a Marian shrine for Anglicans in an English village called Walsingham. The Virgin Mary had appeared there in 1061 and had asked for the replica of her birthplace (the Holy House) to be built next to the monastery. During the Reformation, both the monastery and Holy House were destroyed, but the Oxford Movement had made Walsingham a place of pilgrimage again.

Yet Tracy was too weak to make the arduous journey from Canada to England, and she died at the end of the summer of 2016. The grief threw me into turmoil for more than two years. Our friend, who had married us, was now in Oxford, where he was responsible for the Anglo-Catholic Pusey House. He invited me there, and I took the opportunity to go to Walsingham on behalf of my wife.

On the day I landed, I took the train from London to Norfolk. From there I made a pilgrimage by foot over two days on trails and along roads to the Marian shrine, where I arrived late at night. The Anglican priests celebrate the liturgy there three times a day, and a sacred spring rises directly under the shrine church, where a replica of the Holy House stands. Praying for Tracy in the midst of that holy village I felt the closeness of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and a great lightness came over me. Our Lady of Walsingham ultimately healed me of the pain of my grief.

Back in Halifax, however, I became painfully aware that the devotion to Mary that can be found in Walsingham is largely an exception among Anglicans, even among Anglo-Catholics. The high church service became desolate to me, and when our congregation recommended a woman for ordination, I knew it was time to cross the Tiber to Rome.

I had discovered that a Franciscan order had been in existence in Halifax for over a dozen years, and its Franciscan sisters and friars make their home at a local parish. There I was offered a shortened Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults (RCIA) programme, which was led by a sister who oversaw my instruction in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

In the summer of 2019 I was received into the Catholic Church in front of the congregation. It may just be the Franciscans, but since joining the Romans, as they are termed by traditional Anglicans, such a cheerful world of devotion has opened up to me.

More than this, the rigour and significance of the seven sacraments has left a lasting impression on me. And at the same time, I feel a lightness that has its origins in my encounter with the Blessed Virgin Mary in Walsingham. She seems to be everywhere with her blessings, and nothing ever seems to happen merely by chance any more. In receiving her as a Mother, I finally found Jesus as a Brother: their love led me to take off the worldly armour I wore for so long and allow Her Son to enter my heart.

In this regard St Maximilian Kolbe used the title Immaculata for Mary. Her purifying role in Christs work of salvation is unique. Mary leads those who give themselves to Her to Jesus Christ. The Militia Immaculatae, a secular order founded by Fr Kolbe in 1917, therefore advocates that Christ be recognised again in the world, knowing that there is, as St Pius X said, no other more effective means against the evils of today than restoring the sovereignty of our Lord.

Crucifixes, rosaries and friars habits have an almost shocking effect on people in the West who consider themselves to be progressive and tolerant. To them such trappings are as irritating and alien as they once were in the German Empire over a hundred years ago. If, as a true conservative, one does not want to pay homage to the current hedonistic zeitgeist, one can but seek refuge and a new home in the Catholic Church.

So, ironically, liberalism must watch as its supposed triumph leads to a traditionalist regeneration of the Church. Many countries of the West are witnessing a small but brilliant and powerful Catholic renaissance. Devout Catholics are not like the broad masses, because they have a clear conception of man and adopt a coherent ethics based on faith in Jesus Christ. Under the banner of the Immaculata, they form a small but growing army, which survives even the greatest tests of our times and ultimately prevails against the supremacy of indifference, decadence and evil. As Mary predicted in Fatima, In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph!

This article first appeared in Die Tagespost and is printed here with permission

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Raised Lutheran, I found my way to Anglo-Catholicism before a final twist - Catholic Herald Online

There is such a distinct quality to 60s psychedelia. It has an instant know-it-when-you-hear-it type sound. Characterized by heavy, riff-based guitar work, distortion and fuzzy tones, the genre still endures today.

While bands like the 13th Floor Elevators, Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead expertly encapsulate the feeling, other relatively unknown bands if you consider a Spotify following of just over 91,000 unknown can have the same effect.

Enter Ultimate Spinach. Whether it be drugs, peace, love, anti-establishment or the like, bands of this era molded the original, and now ever-morphing culture of psych rock. Ultimate Spinach contributed to the mix with the release of their sophomore record, Behold and See, and over 50 years later, it still reverberates.

Ultimate Spinach was an American psychedelic rock band from Boston composed of members Ian Bruce-Douglas, Russell Levine, Richard Nese, Geoffrey Winthrop and Barbara Jean Hudson. The band formed back in 1967, right at the peak of psych rock, at the height of the Summer of Love and just two years shy of Woodstock. Impeccable timing, huh?

The record opens with the rich, vibrato-heavy voice of Hudson in Gilded Lamp of the Cosmos, eventually transitioning to that of Bruce-Douglas. It is a sensory overload as Frozen sounds cascade from your hands and Whispering fires envelope and tint everything that you see.

Behold and See only has eight tracks, but its overall message still gets across: prioritize the inner journey. This is most evident in track four, titled Mind Flowers.

Mind flowers/Pretty mind flowers/Take a trip to the center of your mind, the song opens.

As their most popular track, it boasts over 2.5 million streams on Spotify, a huge feat considering the remainder of their discography has never once surpassed the 1 million mark.

The Bosstown Sound, once a prolific and revered marketing campaign promoting psych rock bands in Boston, has since faded into the droning soundscape of psychedelias past. But a listen to Behold and See can quickly revitalize its significance.

The campaign harnessed the hallucinogenic essence of psychedelia, or acid rock, in order to drive the movement forward. While numerous bands were involved, Ultimate Spinach was at the helm.

While lacking the characteristic keyboard solos of their debut, self-titled album, the bands sound is still recognizable. As for the vital message of prioritizing the inner journey, the instructions for successfully embarking on it are quite vague.

And shouldnt you do some growing, go away/And dont come back until youve got something real to say/Because youre playing a game and baby life just aint that way, Bruce-Douglas sings in Where Youre At. So, what exactly constitutes what is real to say? And what is life, according to these standards?

Its confusing, but I will say, the explosion into the controlled chaos of drums and guitar suddenly makes it make sense, at least sonically.

Jazz Thing is also a notable track.

You come on strong, you need nobodys help/Its plain to see you just dont know yourself. Again, the band accuses listeners of lower planes of consciousness, vaguely urging exploration of what is beyond.

The song does end on a positive note, though.

You worked out all the tension inside your head/Because you found reality instead/Now theres peace within your love/At last you found what you were dreaming of.

Congratulations, youve found yourself! Although the transition from a lack of self-awareness to sudden self-awareness does not contain a step by step instruction manual, the song does emphasize what the ultimate goal is: peace and love.

While artists like this often try to take on the role of some sort of enlightened guru who has attained self-actualization, which can seem a little pretentious, there is some value embedded in the lyricism.

The 60s were a zeitgeist of the inward journey and counterculture, after all. Ultimate Spinach fed into the rapture of a significant cultural moment. And I think we have a pretty good idea of what exactly this ultimate spinach symbolizes.

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Ultimate Spinach's urging of the inner journey echoes 50 years later - Hilltop Views

When we were kids, if our parents didn't talk about what was happening to our bodies (many didn't) and our schools didn't teach about it (again, most didn't), then we were left to seek out information from either our friends or a textbook with a few clinical diagrams, and both the friends and the books seemed to evoke in equal parts disgust, fear, and confusion.

Fast-forward to parenthood in the 21st century. Our kids are managing all the same physiological and emotional byproducts of hormones that we contended with decades ago. But today they are simultaneously bombarded with images and messages that sexualize them to a degree we never experiencednor could we ever have imaginedwhen we were their age.

The new leaders of the body and sex-ed movement aren't looking to replace your voice in your child's head, though sometimes they may; rather, they just want to acknowledge what's happening under the hood. In doing so, they are able to meet our kids where they're (hormonally) at, jump-starting their education often well before we might recognize their thirst for it. But, for boys, in particular, this subgenre is more than informationalit releases conversations around puberty and sex into the zeitgeist, making it watershed.

Here are eight tips on how to talk to boys about sex:

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Raising Sons? Here Are 8 Ways To Teach Them About Sex, From A Pediatrician - mindbodygreen.com

Danez Smith was born into a devout Baptist household in St Paul, Minnesota. Smiths grandmother still lives there, in one of only two black households on a street that was mixed but is becoming increasingly white. Smith grew up, on this border between the blacker areas and the white middle-class enclaves of the city, as a black, queer, God-fearing child.

The future poet and spoken-word artist would listen to family members and friends telling stories on the porch, impressed by their way with words. The friends came and went but there was always one constant: church. Smith may have struggled to fit in among the congregation but Sunday morning meant worship, and more importantly a sermon. It was that rousing religious oration that opened up the world of writing and performance.

The first writing I ever loved was the Sunday sermon, Smith says when we meet in Manchester, ahead of a live performance. There are moments in a Baptist church when the pastor gets caught in the spirit I think thats what Im trying to do. I just have to get it out. Just let me get it out.

For the last decade Smith who is non-binary and uses the pronouns them/they has been letting the spirit take over. Three books of searing, brazenly queer and political poetry have made them one of the most discussed poets of their generation, and placed them at the vanguard of an African American movement that has seen spoken-word artists move from stages and backrooms to book deals and awards success.

Smiths 2014 debut, [insert] boy, marked the arrival of a new voice; their 2017 collection Dont Call Us Dead confronted issues that were raging in the US as the Black Lives Matter movement gained momentum, holding a mirror up to Americas racism and advocating urgently for change, while touching on Smiths own HIV diagnosis. It was a finalist for the National book award in the US, and at 29, Smith became the youngest ever winner of the Forward best collection prize, beating US poet laureate Tracy K Smith to take the top honour.

The poem dear white America became a viral sensation, with Smiths intense performance of it earning comparisons to Howl Allen Ginsbergs exasperated condemnation of the US in the 1950s.

i tried, white people. i tried to love you, but you spent my brothers funeral making plans for brunch, talking too loud next to his bones. you took one look at the river, plump with the body of boy after girl after sweet boi & ask why does it always have to be about race? because Jordan boomed. because Emmett whistled. because Huey P. spoke. because Martin preached. because black boys can always be too loud to live.

Dont Call Us Dead was a collection that spoke truth to white power and made Smith a literary star. But their new book Homie is different. This book does not care about white people, Smith says bluntly. Its about saying hello to the people of colour in the room, lets talk.

In person Smith is softly spoken and polite, carefully crafting each response, though still standing out in the hotel where we meet, with their basketball shoes, nose rings and Whitney Houston T-shirt a hint of the performer that lies beneath.

Maybe that was the thing with Dont Call Us Dead, it was a lot angrier with white people, Smith says. With Homie I stopped asking myself: What should I do with the white gaze? Because I realised I wasnt interested in it. I asked myself: Why am I spending so much time worried about this gaze? I think white people can learn a lot from the poems, but thats not who Im writing for.

I didnt want trauma porn. I dont think thats what I ever created but it was being used as that

That imagined reader is a specific group Smith calls Beloveds: the largely black and queer friends and acquaintances Homie addresses. Originally, the book was going to have poems named after black people killed by state-sanctioned violence, with a section about a friends suicide. The latter part stayed but Smith decided to make the titles and themes more personal. I was writing to friends, to family, to people I wanted to speak to. I had to shut off the idea that my poems are now being read by this wider audience. Im still invested in this intimate and small table: I can name the people that my poems are for.

Another reason for this more inward-looking perspective comes from Smiths struggle with writers block in the lead-up to the deadline for Homie. Theyd had bouts of it before but this was different the usual stimulants of exercise, sex or weed (Smith says they have a long-term relationship with marijuana) were useless. I was writing, but it was just all shit, says Smith, who put it down to the strain of living up to their newfound reputation. I felt a lot of pressure after Dont Call Us Dead was a thing. It meant a lot to people and it won awards, and as much as I like to say that stuff doesnt affect you, it does. Its great, its a confidence booster, but it also fucked with me for a while.

I was in my own head for a little bit, asking myself: What does it mean if my next book doesnt win the National book award or some big thing? I dont like that side of myself. I felt like I had been to the top of something. I had to come back and say: That is not at all why I started writing poems. Thats not why I still write poems.

The New Yorker said of Dont Call Us Dead that Smiths poems cant make history vanish, but they can contend against it with the force of a restorative imagination. That imagination was honed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Smith studied before going on to form the Dark Noise Collective with other artists including Franny Choi, with whom Smith co-hosts the poetry podcast VS.

Today, Smith makes a living from book sales, touring and teaching in Minnesota, where they still live, but has struggled with the idea of making money from a book so expressly about black suffering. Youre doing the work because you want real change for your folks, but that also means capital gains for yourself. I felt I was profiting.

Dont Call Us Dead pigeonholed Smith as the person the media went to for angry black poems; an easy fix for white editors and publishers looking to tap into the zeitgeist. I want my work to be useful, says Smith. So it felt good to know a poem was good for healing and rage or whatever for my people. But it also felt really gross.

I couldnt write Dont Call Us Dead again, they add. There will always be America in the news and real black people will always be in my poems, but maybe thats why the focus of Homie is a lot more personal. I didnt want trauma porn and I worried about that. I dont think thats what I ever created but it was being used as that.

Homie is deeply moving and funny, with poems such as all the good dick lives in Brooklyn Park combining a story about a booty call with the tragic decline of a lover dying from an unnamed illness. But it is a step change from Smiths earlier work. With Homie, Smith decided to focus on the theme of friendship and what they refer to as a deep investigation of the n-word. That process starts from the very first page. A note says: This book was titled Homie because I dont want non-black people to say My Nig out loud. This book is really titled My Nig. If that doesnt hit home, the contents page will. Poems titled niggas!, shout out to my niggas in Mexico, white niggas, and an explicit quote from a Lil Wayne song make the point again. Its playful, provocative and serves as a kind of warning to those unprepared for what is about to come.

For Smith, it is important that Europeans include themselves in those conversations about race and language: not being a white American does not absolve European readers from the burden of racism. At readings in the UK and Europe, Smith often addresses the elephant in the room directly. I think that sometimes folks forget that, just because America seems to be the most proud of what it does to its black, brown and indigenous folks, Europe invented that shit and spread it, says Smith.

There was always this idea that Britain was done with racism but Meghan Markle left because you guys were racist

The poet has been coming to the UK for a decade, since being invited by Manchesters Contact theatre, which has always been on the cutting edge of queer culture. Over that time Smith has observed the hypocritical standards of the race debate in Britain. There was always this idea that racism was a thing that Britain was done with and had been for a long time, they say. But Meghan Markle is Canadian now. She convinced a whole prince to leave because you guys were racist. They tried to send all the Jamaicans back too. Look. You are still up to it. So its just to pull back from that moment and say: Hey, I might not be talking about your particular situation but you can find yourself a seat at the table.

Many of the column inches dedicated to Smith have concerned performance and identity: either their own or their works exploration of it. But Smith says they are fundamentally a formalist, who loves to geek out over sonnet crowns and voltas. In her New York Times review of Homie, critic Parul Sehgal identified a new form invented by Smith in the poem how many of us have them, called the dozen, whereby each stanza grows by one line until the final one, comprising 12 lines. Id like to invent or order up new adjectives to describe the startling originality and ambition of Smiths work, she wrote.

Does the general focus on Smiths identity rather than the work grate? That is the story of the black writer throughout time, says Smith. I think that is true but its not particular to me. Some reviewers, Smith argues, are so blinded by identity that they dont realise they are being marvelled by craft. They are connecting to the work, but they are having a different journey to someone who can understand the authors point of view.

With a more forgiving eye, there are ways in which all of us come at the work with whatever references we have because that is just what we know, Smith says. So there are people I have been compared to more canonical folks who I dont even know. I might have read a poem or two in school but I dont really bang heavies with whoever that might be. But there are ways in which other influences come to you. You might be a student of Whitman because one of your favourites really liked Whitman.

For Smith, the bigger crime is that too few reviewers are aware of many of the established poets who have been influences people such as Patricia Smith, Lucille Clifton and Amaud Jamaul Johnson. If your understanding of black radical art starts and ends with Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez, then you dont really know a lot of the archive. I think a lot of folks only know the canon, but there are so many canons to pull from, Smith says. All writers deserve that type of deep reading and seeing.

Danez Smith

lately has been a long timesays the girl from Pakistan, Lahore to be specificat the bus stop when the white manask her where shes from & thensays oh, you from Lahore?its pretty bad over there lately.

lately has been a long timeshe says & we look at each other & the look saysyes, i too wish dude would stopasking us about where we frombut on the other side of our side eyesis maybe a hand where hands do no gooda look to say, yes, i know lately has beena long time for your people too& im sorry the world is so good at makingus feel like we have to fight for spaceto fight for our lives

solidarity is a word, a lot of people say itim not sure what it means in the fleshi know i love & have cried for my friendstheir browns a different brown than mineive danced their dances when taught& tasted how their mothers miracle the ricedifferent than mine. i know sometimesi cant see beyond my own pain, past black& white, how bullets love any flesh.i know its foolish to compare.what advice do the drowned have for the burned?what gossip is there between the hanged & the buried?

& i want to reach across our great distancethat is sometimes an ocean & sometimes centimeters& say, look. your people, my people, all that has happenedto us & still make love under rusted moons, still pullchildren from the mothers & name themstill teach them to dance & your pain is not mine& is no less & is mine & i pray to my god your godblesses you with mercy & i have tasted your food & understandhow it is a good home & i dont know your languagebut i understand your songs & i cried when they camefor your uncles & when you buried your niecei wanted the world to burn in the childs brief memory& still, still, still, still, still, still, still, still, still& i have stood by you in the soft shawl of morningwaiting & breathing & waiting

From Homie, published by Chatto on 20 February.

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Danez Smith: White people can learn from it, but thats not who Im writing for - The Guardian

For the past two weeks, the controversial and overhyped novel American Dirt topped The New York Times Best Sellers list, no doubt aided by the Oprah bump. On Jan. 21, Oprah Winfrey tweeted her choice for her book club's March read:

From the first sentence, I was IN. Like so many of us, I've read newspaper articles and watched television news stories and seen movies about the plight of families looking for a better life, but this story changed the way I see what it means to be a migrant in a whole new way.

I was opened, I was shook up, it woke me up, and I feel that everybody who reads this book is actually going to be immersed in the experience of what it means to be a migrant on the run for freedom. So I want you to read. Come read with us, and then join the conversation with Jeanine Cummins on Apple TV+ coming this March.

Within moments, the backlash that had been growing since December 2019, primarily on Latin@ social media and articulated by prominent Latin@ authors, hit the mainstream with justifiable indignation. At the heart of the responses are multi-layered arguments intersecting on questions of representation, especially when those being represented number among those made vulnerable by underrepresentation.

Author Jeanine Cummins intends for her novel to be a means for portraying the humanity of migrants by focusing on a created character in a fictionalized genre. In her author's note at the end of her almost 400-page tome she writes:

I hoped to present one of those unique personal stories a work of fiction as a way to honor the hundreds of thousands of stories we may never get to hear. And in doing so I hope to create a pause where the reader may begin to individuate.

Cummins' tale centers on Lydia, a bookstore owner in Acapulco married to a journalist, Sebastin. A woman of moderate means, who is also fluent in English, she flees her home with her young son Luca in the aftermath of the assassination of 16 members of her family at the hands of a drug cartel. Ostensibly, the hit appears related to the publication of her husband's expos naming the kingpin and crafting a psychological profile that describes Javier Crespo Fuentes as simultaneously not flashy or charismatic, enlightened yet merciless and delusional, "a thug who fancies himself a poet."

The thread that runs throughout the narrative is the non-innocent relationship between Lydia and Javier, a flirtation that matures into friendship and to an intimacy she had "seldom experienced outside of family." Later it is revealed that the suicide of Javier's beloved daughter Marta, who was studying in Barcelona, triggered the retaliation. Sebastin's article found its way into Marta's hands and the truth about her father was more than she could handle. Apparently besides having a wife (la reina de mi corazn) and a mistress (la reina de mis pantalones), Javier's true loves were his daughter and the bookseller (la reina de mi alma) he just met.

From my perspective, American Dirt is as much about Mxico and immigration as Mario Puzo's The Godfather is about Italian American culture and family. In some ways the plots bear a striking resemblance in that organized crime networks drive the storylines. Both authors attempt to generate sympathy for men who are ruthless yet oddly vulnerable. Both books center on an immigrant to the U.S. and depend on stereotypes. The fact that they share a character named Luca is probably a coincidence. In The Godfather, Luca is a brutal enforcer for the don, Vito Corleone.

Cummins seeks to challenge traditional stereotypes of migrants. I guess it could be said that this very atypical migrant accomplishes that goal while feeding into every other cultural and national stereotype available regarding Mxico in particular. Lydia and her story do not represent the complex, multinational, global, socioeconomic mess that is migration in all of its lived realities. Real people are struggling to survive on the threshold and in the shadows of a nation whose current administration lives out xenophobia and exclusion in rhetoric, enforcement, practice and policy. Their faces and stories are not reflected in these fabricated tribulations more suitable for a romance novel trading in what some critics have called trauma porn.

The violence that drives folks from home disproportionately impacts poor people and is more often than not intricately and historically connected to domestic and foreign policies generated by the U.S. Those fleeing threats of death from cartels are targeted arbitrarily or victimized and not because of casual romantic flirtations. Women running with children rarely have the benefit of available cash and fluent English. The trail of migrants and asylum-seekers travels to and through Latin America from across the globe. Curiously absent from this novel and from many popular portrayals of migrations are the faces and stories of the increasing flow ofblack migrants from Africaand the Caribbean, as well as the new majority from Central America.

In the summer of 2001, I visited a facility in El Paso, Texas, housing men and women detained for crossing or attempting to cross the border without proper documentation. These migrants and refugees were set off from the rest of the population, namely those incarcerated for criminal activity, by the color of their prison-issued clothing. Further sequestered in their company was a group of young Asian men, probably minors in their teens. Officials did not know what language they spoke and had no translators who did. They were captured, so the story went, by showing up and handing their coveted identification cards over to border patrol agents, expecting entry to the U.S. The problem was that these alleged official IDs were library cards procured, no doubt at great expense, from their coyotes, who had exploited their linguistic limitations.

My point here is to counter the claim of Cummins, which comes across as both ignorant and arrogant, that she began researching and writing this book four years ago, long before talk of walls and migrant invasions "entered the national zeitgeist." Thanks to cable television, syndicated radio, print publishers and the internet, we have been fed a steady diet of anti-immigrant and anti-Latin@ rants throughout the 21st century by the likes of such media darlings as Lou Dobbs, the newly knighted Rush Limbaugh, academics like Samuel Huntington and politicians like President Donald Trump. The first decade witnessed immigration battlegrounds like Hazelton, Pennsylvania; Farmingville, New York; and Postville, Iowa. Throughout this timeframe (and long before), Latin@ writers have responded: journalists, social scientists, scholars, authors of fiction, memoirs, plays, music and yes, even theologians and biblical scholars!

While Cummins acknowledges some of these Latin@ authors, many who themselves are immigrants, she still feels compelled to function as a bridge between a world she does not come from and "regular people like me." Her misrepresentation of that world cannot be reduced to a matter of skin color, wishing "someone slightly browner" than herself would emerge to fulfill this task. In fact, many across the pigment scale that complicates latinidad have committed their works to that task she even names some as her sources but somehow, she really doesn't listen perhaps because "regular people" need something more entertaining to move their hearts.

Oprah's endorsement plays right into this marketing hunch. Why does it take a fictional plight of a fictional atypical migrant set against the backdrop of unresolved sexual tension to shake up "regular people"? Why are the countless stories, faces, tears, separations, detainments, deportations and well over 9,000 actual deaths in the Sonoran Desert since 1994, communicated in real time by contemporary media, not enough to move "regular people" to feel? If the image of a father face down in a river with his little daughter's arm wrapped about him, or the countless videos of crying children in cages, or the litany of deceased children Darlyn Cristabel Cordova-Valle (age 10), Jakelin Caal Maquin (age 7), Felipe Gmez Alonzo (age 8), Wilmer Josu Ramrez Vsquez (age 2) Juan de Len Gutirrez (age 16), Carlos Hernandez Vasquez (age 16), Mariee Jurez (age 20 months) doesn't wake up "regular people," what the hell will? The imaginary life of English-competent Luca?

Or is it that "regular people" need suffering migrants that actually look and sound like them you know "regular" English-speaking, lighter skin, educated, preferably heterosexual, middle class or higher, in order to care enough to be opened?

Years ago in my book Theologizing en Espanglish, I coined the term ortho-proxy to explain the concept of "right representation." To "stand in" for another requires permission of sorts and an obligation to not confuse solidarity with sanction to usurp another's agency. Ortho-proxy does not assume voicelessness; rather it recognizes and responds to obstacles that might hinder or actively impede someone from speaking out or up. The responsibility to represent takes ethical care to avoid misrepresentation.

Fortunately, Latin@ authors have represented. A prominent pool of 141 writers sent a letter to Oprah requesting that she remove her imprimatur from the book, because "we believe that a novel blundering so badly in its depiction of marginalized, oppressed people should not be lifted up." This was not a call for censorship or silencing; rather it was a challenge to an influential colleague, and through other venues, to publishers and marketers, to place the work in perspective, a perspective that was clearly limited because those being represented were underrepresented in the publishing industry at every level. Ordinary Latin@s have also represented. Across social media platforms, readers posted critiques and recommendations of other books, mostly by authors who are immigrants and/or from underrepresented communities, books that didn't make Oprah's Book Club or The New York Times Best Seller list or the Kindles of "regular people."

All of these efforts elicited aresponse from the president and publisherof Flatiron Books, who was "surprised by the anger that has emerged from members of the Latinx and publishing communities." The letter acknowledged insensitivity and overreach on the part of the press in its publicity and promotion events, yet it could not resist framing the legitimate critiques in terms that appease white citizen fragility:

We are saddened that a work of fiction that was well-intentioned has led to such vitriolic rancor. While there are valid criticisms around our promotion of this book that is no excuse for the fact that in some cases there have been threats of physical violence.

For that reason, they canceled the book tour out of a concern for safety, yet they failed to substantiate the existence of any threats. The aggrieved were now misrepresented once again, this time as the potential perpetrators of imaginary violence because they dared to speak out.

Early in American Dirt Javier opines, in the context of a conversation about a book club, "sometimes the experience of reading can be corrupted by too many opinions." In light of the subsequent controversy surrounding this book, this somewhat innocuous observation seems to be more of a portent of things to come. Sometimes, however, the experience of writing can be corrupted by "well-intentioned" misrepresentation that results in erasure. From this experience a movement of politico-literary action, leadership and resistance has arisen under the hashtag #DignidadLiteraria, advocating for change in the publishing industry and questioning who gets to "host" the conversation and on what terms.

[Carmen M. Nanko-Fernndez is professor of Hispanic theology and ministry, and director of the Hispanic Theology and Ministry Program at Catholic Theological Union (CTU) in Chicago. The author ofTheologizing en Espanglish(Orbis), she is currently completingEl Santo?: Baseball and the Canonization of Roberto Clemente(Mercer University Press).]

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Good intentions, right representation and writing latinidad - National Catholic Reporter