Monthly Archives: February 2022

The world is in turmoil, and even our calm and friendly neighbors to the north might no longer be immune to the strains of totalitarian right-wing lawlessness that have infected other countries, most prominently the United States. Is Canadas recent anti-government uprising an indication that there truly are no remaining safe havens from reactionary populist violence and nihilism?

In two recent columns on Verdict (here and here) and a companion column on Dorf on Law (here), I noted that more Americans than ever are considering leaving their country in search of a safer alternative. With large numbers of Republican politicians excusing violence, and with open talk of a civil war, it is understandable that people might think this is the time to move elsewhere.

I noted in those earlier columns that I am unlikely to join this migration, but I did refer to myself as someone for whom this is a viable option. Most people in non-professional jobs, and even the vast majority of those in the professions, simply lack the resources to consider emigrating, while others have children in school or non-transportable economic relationships that essentially require that they stay in the United States, for better or (more likely, unfortunately) worse. The pool of potential emigrants is thus not large as a percentage of the population, but it could still involve enough people to become a very important phenomenon if things continue to spiral downward in the US.

In those earlier columns, I concluded that Canada was a fairly definitive first-best answer to the question: Where to move? But is that answer likely to change, now that the Great White North has seen Trumpish disruptions that could be the harbinger of worse things to come? Although the future is yet to be written, the signs are still good that Canada and some other countries will continue to be relatively safe places for those who increasingly fear living in this country and who might be willing and able to bug out.

Before I address the changed political situation in Canada, there is a related question that I ought to address up front. After my first column was published, one very nice reader contacted me to ask about the legal barriers to moving to Canada. Because my focus in that column was on the where and the why, I had not talked about the how. Even if a person wanted to move to Country X, this reader asked, what is the legal process?

That is an important question, and it was especially pertinent to that particular reader, because he and his husband have actively been investigating a possible move to Canada. They are finding that the process is (unsurprisingly) complicated and expensive, and it is possible that even countries such as Canada that have relatively welcoming societies might nonetheless have laws in place that would rule them out as destinations for Americans who do not meet various entry criteria.

At a fundamental level, however, providing that kind of granular information is simply not what columns like this one are about. That is not my best value-added, as economists would say, because I am not an immigration lawyer. Fortunately, not only are there many good immigration lawyers out there, but the internet exists, and there is a treasure trove of information about the logistics of migration at our fingertips. Among other things, the governments of the countries to which I have referred in these columns all have extremely good official websites (offered in English, even in countries with other official languages).

In my Verdict columns last month, I noted in passing that a surge of Americans trying to move to Canada could quickly overwhelm their immigration system. Even short of that, there is no question that relocating across national borders is a unique challenge in the best of times, and it might not be possible at all.

I also noted, however, that an American who moved to Canada decades ago had sent me an email saying that someone in my situation (a mid-career academic with extensive international experience) would have an easy time meeting the Canadian immigration standards. His word, not mine. Going into any further detail would have turned the column into something far too specific, so I left it at that.

Rather than ignore the logistics entirely, however, it does make sense for me to write a future column in which I analyze the various criteria that countries have set in place to sort among potential entrants into their countries. Even though the focus of my analysis is still on why and whether to move, not how, I will summarize in that future column a few basic facts about Canadas criteria as well as similar key information about the rules for immigrating into a few other plausible destinations, including the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, and Australia.

Again, however, the purpose of these columns is very much not to provide nuts-and-bolts advice. It is to analyze the growing threats of authoritarian and even fascist takeovers in what are thought of as stable democracies and to compare and contrast recent developments in the constituent nations of what has long been known as the free world.

Several weeks ago, a fringe group of big-rig truck drivers in Canada decided to protest a new rule that required truckers crossing the border into the United States to be fully vaccinated. This was a rule promulgated by the US government, mirroring a Canadian rule (that only applies to non-Canadians driving trucks into Canada), which surely seemed risk-free to the Biden administration, because Canadian truckers cannot vote in the American midterm elections.

The kindest thing one can say about the Canadian protests against the new American rule is that they were an attempt to petition their government to use its influence to convince the United States to change its vaccination laws. There is strong reason to doubt that such a nuanced thought process was ever a part of this outbreak of lawlessness, but even if it might once have been defensible in that way, the on-the-ground reality is a different story entirely.

The protest quickly became an occupation of the central area of the seat of Canadas national government in Ottawa, Ontario. The list of grievances became more and more unhinged, including demands that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau immediately resign or be removed from office.

Notably, the Canadian Teamsters union has been clear that it opposes this action. That is, this is not a truckers versus the government story but a tiny subgroup of truck drivers joining with other anti-government extremists to push a quasi-anarchist agenda. The protesters have been receiving money and lavish amounts of attention from American right-wing media and Republican politicians. It should, given all of that, come as no surprise that some of the protesters have been carrying Confederate battle flags around Ottawa.

Moreover, the protests have gone far beyond the familiar bounds of marching and rallying to seek redress. For weeks, the capital city has been enduring nonstop truck airhorns, diesel fuel-fouled air and noise from revving engines, and other disruptions. The people who live in those areas, many of whom are (because of Canadas welcoming culture) non-White, are being harassed with racist slurs and physical intimidation. And because hatred comes as a packaged deal, there is a great deal of misogyny as well.

What might once have been called peaceful protests have become illegal blockades, not only in one large city but on key border crossings into the US. The supposed defenders of regular guys thus ended up putting auto workers and those in related industries on both sides of the border out of work. But American opportunists like Senator Rand Paul are cheering this on, calling on American truckers to clog cities here in the US.

As we saw in the January 6 insurrection last year, government responses to lawlessness are much gentler when the protesters are White than when the gatherings are mostly others. Even so, Prime Minister Trudeau did finally take action, with the editorial board of The Washington Post praising him and saying that his government is right to proceed with caution to restore order. I am not, of course, saying that Trudeau should have acted rashly, but it does seem that he put up with far worse behavior from White protesters than even Canadians would have tolerated had this been a progressive, multiracial protest.

There is plenty to worry about in this situation, even for those who would never consider moving to Canada. But for those who might have been thinking about it, what has changed, if anything? In my January 20 Verdict column, I referred to the obvious choice for any American who thinks for even a moment about leaving this country: Canada. Is the choice less obvious now?

No, at least not based on what we currently know. One good sign is that, [a]ccording to a poll released Monday, 3 in 4 Canadians are fed up and want an end to the protest. Trudeaus popularity is apparently now sky-high, and the political situation in Canada is still very much opposed to Trumpish tactics and goals.

One of the Canadian scholars whom I have cited as being very worried about the deteriorating situation in the US is Stephen Marche. Is he worried about Canada going in the same direction? Given his clear-eyed pessimism about the degradation of democracy and the threats that right-wing populism pose to stable republics, I was relieved to hear him say the other night that the situation there is not spinning out of control.

Indeed, Marche pointed out that even Canadas conservative politicians are shunning these protesters, saying that the very few conservatives who have sort of flirted with supporting the trucker convoy have all backed away. Canadian conservatives have really kept their integrity and kept their decency, and they do not want disorder for disorders sake. He concludes: Canadian conservatives are opposed to this in a broad sense, and I think that that is something that is very important for our country. (Marche also wrote about this in an article in The Atlantic this past weekend.)

A member of the Canadian comedy troupe Kids in the Hall had a famous quip that a Canadian is like an American, but without a gun. Thus, it should not be surprising that there is a subset of Canadians who are like a subset of Americans in their extreme anti-government views. But the without a gun part of the story is very real, and it is no joke. Canada allows more gun ownership than many other countries do, but their country is not awash in military-grade weapons in the hands of unlicensed and untrained civilians.

Police in Alberta did announce the other day that they had seized a large cache of guns and ammunition from a group that was plotting to use violence in the ever-escalating trucker standoff, so domestic terrorism is a threat there, as it is everywhere.

Still, if one were thinking purely in terms of personal safety, the recent news from Canada would not come close to tipping the balance back toward the United States. And even short of the violent aspect of the recent unrest, knowing that all but the most extreme Canadian politicians are refusing to try to foment and escalate the lawlessness is reason to feel some confidence in Canadas future tranquility.

Again, this column is not a how-to guide to emigration. It is, instead, an observation that the sense of foreboding that many people in this country feel is being mirrored by unfortunate developments in even the most placid foreign countries. As it stands, however, the last few weeks in Canada serve less as a warning of trouble brewing and more as confirmation that their inclusive political system and welcoming society continue to be quite inhospitable to the kinds of tear-it-all-down extremism that have become sadly mainstream in Americas Republican Party.

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Second Thoughts? How the Anti-Government Protests in Canada Affect Americans Who Might Want to Move There - Justia Verdict

Plenty of movies capture the punk rock attitude and aesthetic as it exploded in the late 1970s and early 80s: Repo Man, D.O.A., The Great Rock & Roll Swindle, The Decline of Western Civilization, even Sid and Nancy. But perhaps no movie captures the nihilistic pull of punk in the shadow of the 60s countercultures collapse than Dennis Hoppers nearly lost Out of the Blue, which opens in a gloriously restored edition at the Hollywood Theatre this weekend.

Hopper, who rocketed to directorial prominence with 1969s Easy Rider, was just as suddenly cast into the wilderness after the debacle of his followup, 1971s The Last Movie. Nearly a decade later, he was cast in Out of the Blue as Don, the father to the films teenaged protagonist, CeBe, played by Linda Manz. The story goes that, a couple of weeks into production, Hopper took over the directing chores, rewrote the screenplay, and ended up producing a stunningly potent drama that doesnt come by its nihilism cheaply.

Truth be told, there are two geniuses to thank for Out of the Blue, and Manz is the other. From her screen debut in Terence Malicks Days of Heaven, Manz exuded a unique, genuine combination of spunk and vulnerability. Her CeBe is a paradigm of lost youth, worshipping Elvis and the Sex Pistols in equal measure while pining for her pop, whos in prison after drunkenly driving his semi into a school bus full of children. Left in the care of her drug-addicted mother (Sharon Farrell), CeBe runs away to join the punk scene in Vancouver, B.C. Theres a fantastic sequence, in which she attends a show by a band called Pointed Sticks and gets to sit in for the drummer briefly, that captures the thrill of collective rebellion and unfettered expression beautifully.

Alas, CeBes escape is only temporary, and shortly after shes returned home, Don is paroled. (Six years for multiple vehicular homicide seems light, but this is Canada) He gets a job at the local garbage dump, and theres the barest hint of redemption in the air. But Don is, it turns out, irredeemable. His coming-home party devolves into drunken, rage-filled mayhem. CeBe, who has preserved an image of her father in her mind all these years, finally comes face to face with his true, despicable nature.

The movie gets its title from Neil Youngs My My Hey Hey, which reprises repeatedly throughout and seems to have inspired the character of CeBe. (The king is gone but hes not forgotten; this is the story of Johnny Rotten.) And, as Young sings, the only way out of the blue is into the black, so thats the path CeBe takes. If Hopper thought that Out of the Blue was his chance at a directorial comeback, he certainly didnt compromise in order to make it more commercial.

Out of the Blue premiered at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival, but despite good reviews from Roger Ebert and Vincent Canby, it didnt get a (token) U.S. release until a couple years later. It then basically vanished, although Sean Penn liked it enough to hire Hopper to direct Colors, the film that did jumpstart his filmmaking career, later in the decade. This new 4k digital restoration, presented by indie stalwarts Natasha Lyonne and Chloe Sevigny, looks amazing, especially considering the movies minimal budget.

Hopper was always unfairly tagged as a sort of hippie auteur, but what made him and his work so complicated was his appreciation for the dark side of the counterculture. With Out of the Blue, he holds an unflattering mirror to the disillusionment and psychic hangover of the post-Vietnam years, a mirror that reflects both its specific time and a universal, generational rage. (Opens Friday, Feb. 18, at the Hollywood Theatre.)

Strawberry Mansion: The character actor Kentucker Audley has maintained a thriving parallel career as a director of no-budget films, and this, his latest, is his most ambitious. Its set in the year 2035, and centers on James Preble (Audley), an ordinary tax auditor. Ordinary, that is, except for the fact that what he audits are dreamsin this future, were all taxed on any products that appear in our dreams. He arrives at the home of an elderly, eccentric artist (Penny Fuller), who hasnt paid her taxes in years. To audit her dreams, which are preserved on thousands of VHS tapes, he must watch them all using a sort of deep-sea-diver helmet contraption.

Wait, it gets weirder. As Preble investigates the womans dreams, he finds himself drawn to the younger version of her (Grace Glowicki) he meets there. He also comes across a devilish, capitalistic conspiracy designed to bring advertising into our subconscious minds. Theres also a saxophone-playing waiter with the head of a frog, sailors with rat heads, and a lot of fried chicken. In other words, its a gloriously weird cult classic in the making.

Strawberry Mansion, which Audley co-wrote and co-directed with Albert Birney (who plays Frog Waiter), is a masterpiece of inexpensive ingenuity, using handmade practical effects and convincing, lo-fi digital work to conjure a vision thats somewhere between Michel Gondry and David Lynch. And the message at its core is one that a filmmaker such as Audley can surely appreciate: never let the people with money tell you what to dream. (Opens Friday, Feb. 18, at the Living Room Theatres. Many of Audleys previous films are available to stream through Amazon Prime.)

Breaking Bread: The latest culinary documentary to come down the pike combines mouth-watering foodie fare with a positive political message. It follows Dr. Nof Atamna-Ismaeel, the first Arab winner of Isreals Master Chef, who starts a festival where Arab and Israeli chefs collaborate on dishes that honor their respective traditions. Maybe resolving this regions age-old problems involves more than just not being hangry, but its a good place to start. (Opens Friday, Feb. 18, at the Living Room Theaters)

TAG! Queer Short Festival: The 2022 edition of this fest is streaming-only, but is presented by the Hollywood Theatre. It features dozens of short films from around the globe, exclusively directed by queer and trans folk. The movies are organized into six themed blocks, one of which will debut online each day between Feb. 21 and Feb. 26. Purchasing a ticket to a given block will allow access through March 6. For more information, go here.

Marc Mohan moved to Portland from Wisconsin in 1991, and has been exploring and contributing to the citys film culture almost ever since. As the former manager of the landmark independent video store Trilogy, and later the owner of Portlands first DVD-only rental spot, Video Vrit, he immersed himself in the cinematic education that led to his position as a freelance film critic forThe Oregonianfor nearly twenty years. Once it became apparent that newspaper film critic was no longer a sustainable career option, Mohan pursued a new path, enrolling in the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in the fall of 2017. He cant quite seem to break the habit, though, of loving and writing about movies.

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FilmWatch Weekly: 'Out of the Blue' and 'Strawberry Mansion' - Oregon ArtsWatch

Fyodor Dostoyevsky by Vasily Perov, 1872.(Photo by VCG Wilson / Corbis via Getty Images)

The first act of Fyodor Dostoevskys Crime and Punishment is not what you would call straightforward. The novel opens with a dropout law student heading to the apartment of a local pawnbroker, where he sells a trinket and then plans how he will murder her later. He then goes to a dive bar and listens to the endless sob story of a drunken civil servant, escorts him home, and goes to bed. The next morning he wakes up and reads a 10-page letter from his mom, wanders around the city, passes out in a bush, and has a nightmare about a bunch of guys beating up a horse. He then wanders around some more until he overhears the pawnbrokers sister saying shes going to leave their apartment the following evening, at which point he returns to his bed and sleeps through most of the next day. He wakes up in the evening, walks downstairs, steals an axe, heads to the pawnbrokers apartment, and murders her with it, then murders her sister when she unexpectedly shows up and finds him in the apartment.

As is ever the case with the novels of Dostoevsky, the opacity of this narrative is part of the reason for its irreducible magnetism. The works of the great Russian novelists major period often feel like they have been assembled post facto by some kind of collage artist, or else have been abridged at crucial points by a redactor who believed rationality and evenhandedness to be cardinal artistic sins. When reading Dostoevsky, one often gets the paranoid feeling that the real story is happening somewhere else, just around the corner or on the other side of town. Perhaps the best description of this phenomenon is from a long-lost lecture by T.S. Eliot, who states that in Dostoevskys novels there are everywhere two planes of reality, and that the scene before our eyes is only the screen and veil of another action which is taking place behind it.BOOKS IN REVIEW

The inscrutability of Dostoevskys fiction is also what has attracted so many of its interpreters. The gnomic pronouncements that fill his pages almost cry out for easy explanation, and that is what Kevin Birmingham tries to provide in his new book, The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece. Intertwining the tale of Crime and Punishments composition with the story of Pierre-Louis Lacenaire, an infamous French spree killer whose deeds fascinated Dostoevsky, the book announces itself as the first to provide sustained attention to what Lacenaire meant to Dostoevsky and how his years-long consideration of the French murderer shaped his understanding of both the nature of evil and the way it was evolving amid the centurys new ideas and tribulations. The author of a book about James Joyces Ulysses that discusses the novel in light of the censorship controversy that followed its publication, Birmingham attempts to do something similar with Lacenaire, using the real-world story of the French murderer to throw light on the famous character of Raskolnikov. The result is unsatisfactory on two counts. The first is that Birmingham has great difficulty proving his central claim, that the gentleman murdererinspired a masterpiece. The second is that the claim itself is not a very interesting one. What makes Crime and Punishment so great is not the character of Raskolnikov but the dark moral universe that he inhabits.

It takes quite a while for Birmingham to arrive at the book and Lacenaire. The first half of The Sinner and the Saint is devoted to a truncated biography of Dostoevsky, from his childhood until the time he began work on Crime and Punishment at the age of 44. The authors life story is one of the strangest and most compelling in literary history, so its understandable Birmingham wants to review the greatest hits. He shows us Dostoevsky ranting at his engineering academy classmates about Schiller, fainting in front of a blonde lady at a ball, getting condemned to death for taking part in a radical reading group, receiving a commutation from the czar just before his execution, gawping at fellow convicts during his eight-year sentence in Siberia, returning home to develop a roulette addiction, losing his brother to a liver ailment and his first wife to a disease that made blood gush from her throatyou get the idea.

The authoritative biographies of Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank and Leonid Grossman are bound to loom large over anyone who writes about the novelist, so Birmingham focuses on the material most relevant to Crime and Punishment. He interrupts Dostoevskys gruesome life story to tell us about the development of nihilism as an intellectual movement in Russia, running from the devilish German egoist Max Stirner to the famous radical thinker Nikolai Chernyshevsky, author of the seminal proto-socialist handbook What Is to Be Done? But Birminghams biggest innovation in the first half of the book is to splice into its sections some biographical chapters on Lacenaire, a well-to-do layabout poet who murdered two innocent people in the 1830s to provoke bourgeois society. These chapters build, and soon we begin to realize where they are going: A year before he began work on Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky started studying Lacenaires crimes. He did so not for a novel but an article about instincts and Lacenaire, an article he abandoned around the time he began Crime and Punishment.

The idea here is clear enough: Birmingham wants to show that Dostoevsky drew on the intellectual precedent of nihilism and the biographical precedent of Lacenaire in creating his famous murderer. The former claim is well-established, as a number of contemporary philosophers espoused an egoism that bears a resemblance to Raskolnikovs own professed belief system. The latter claim, though, gives Birmingham a bit more troublehe cant demonstrate in any meaningful way that Lacenaire was a primary influence on Crime and Punishment.

The first problem is that the differences between Lacenaire and Raskolnikov could not be more pronounced, choice of murder weapon notwithstanding. Lacenaire was a kleptomaniacal dandy who seems to have possessed a sincere enjoyment for violent acts, and he delighted in the hysterical attention he received from the press and the youth of Paris after his capture and imprisonment. Indeed, his prison cell became a kind of literary salon in which he would receive starstruck visitors and dispense memorable mots for dissemination in the newspapers. Raskolnikov shares his philosophy that humankind can be divided into headsmen and victims, but in everything else he is Lacenaires opposite: He is broke, erratic, self-loathing, and remains unsure about his murderous intentions up until the very moment the axe hits the pawnbrokers skull. Despite his ranting self-justifications, he has little interest in robbing the pawnbrokerhe neglects to take most of her money, for one thing, and he hides what little he does take under a rock in the courtyard of an apartment building. Current Issue

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The second problem is that there were several other obvious models for Raskolnikov, some of them even more interesting than Lacenaire. First there was Orlov, an unrepentant murderer whom Dostoevsky met in Siberia and whom he described as a new type of man; then there was Chistov, a religious schismatic (or Raskolnik) who murdered two women with an axe and whose story made Dostoevsky sick for weeks. Even after the first volume of the novel was published, two more sources of inspiration appeareda law student named Danilov, who murdered a pawnbroker in Moscow (the similarities seem to be a coincidence), and a political radical named Karakozov, who attempted to assassinate the czar in broad daylight. All four of these models made deep impressions on Dostoevsky while he was writing Crime and Punishment, and though Birmingham has to mention them in order to stay faithful to the history, he never explains why Lacenaire gets star billing as Raskolnikovs prototype, especially since the two are so dissimilar in temperament . (This is to say nothing of Birminghams assertion that the lives of thepoet-murderer and convict-novelistfaintly resemble each other, a claim in dire need of emphasis on the word faintly.)

Birmingham thus understandably leaves it up to the reader to infer the parallels between Raskolnikov and Lacenaire, a tack that doesnt help out all that much given that Dostoevsky left a trail of evidence that undermines this thesis. The novelist drafted many hundreds of pages of notes for the noveloutlines, philosophical summaries, deleted scenes, alternate endings, even pictographic character sketchesand yet he does not appear to mention Lacenaire in any of them, at least not the ones that Birmingham has excavated for inclusion in his account. Indeed, the notes show that Raskolnikov was not modeled on any specific person or idea but rather hewn over the course of months out of a whole universe of psychological and philosophical material. Like Stavrogin in Demons and Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, Raskolnikov is not the facsimile of an existing person imported from the real world but an organic creation, the manifestation of a particular species of delusion and bad conscience.

The mystery [of Crime and Punishment] is not who killed the pawnbroker, Birmingham writes at the start of his book. The mystery is why. Is it, though? Thats what every high schooler who reads the novel is told, but in the narrative itself the question is far from mysterious. The erratic Raskolnikov is remarkably consistent throughout the novels 500 pages about his two reasons for murdering the pawnbroker: First, he wants to steal some money to raise himself out of poverty, and second, he wants to take a new step in the tradition of great historical figures like Napoleon. He offers this reasoning to himself and to the prostitute Sonya, and he even hears it repeated back by the detective whos trying to goad him into a confession. In one of the novels more ham-handed plot points, its even revealed that Raskolnikov wrote a law article called On Crime in which he justifies murder on the exact same grounds.

When it comes to Crime and Punishment, the question of motive may be the least interesting way to approach the great novel. As Birmingham himself points out, Dostoevsky refrained from bringing most of Raskolnikovs inner impulses to the surface of the narrativewe dont see him thinking to himself that hes falling in love with Sonya, we get almost nothing on the loss of his father, we dont even know why he dropped out of law school. That Dostoevsky confines all this material to the novels subtext but takes great pains to narrate Raskolnikovs reasons for committing the murder should tell us something about where he thought the true heart of the novel lay.

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Only once you look beyond Raskolnikovs motivation can you appreciate Crime and Punishment for what it is: a battle royal between psychologies. The novel isnt just about the nihilistic murderers journey into the arms of the all-virtuous prostitute but also about the cramped social sphere in which both his crime and his redemption take place. You cant understand Raskolnikov without setting him alongside his dithering mother, his all-seeing younger sister, the babbling and disgraced civil servant Marmeladov, the loving Sonya, and the pretentious fop Luzhin, to say nothing of the depraved and cynical landowner Svidrigailov, a presence so malign and irresistible that he hijacks the last portion of the novel altogether, overpowering Raskolnikov in a tense barroom conversation and stealing the show for a solo scene that leads up to his dramatic suicide. These characters reproduce the social types of their day, but they also transcend them, so that the novel is more a drama of spiritual fragmentation than it is one of ideological competition. Crime and Punishment is about more than one form of spiritual degradation: It asks not just what could drive an individual to murder but also what else can happen in a world where murder is possible. To focus on the historical genesis of Raskolnikovs motives and methods misses the forest for the trees: The murderer only becomes mysterious and inscrutable in the context of the psychological carnival that surrounds him.

Dostoevsky began Crime and Punishment as a first-person confessional in the tradition of his earlier Notes From Underground, but he changed to the third-person omniscient midway through the writing process, as new characters like Svidrigailov and Marmeladov came to take up more space in the narrative. Just as Dostoevsky had a reason for shifting his novel from the first to the third person, he may also have had a significant reason for calling the book Crime and Punishment instead of, say, Murder and Penal Servitude or even The College Dropout. There is more than one type of crime in the novel, and more than one punishment. It is understandable that Birmingham might want to focus on why Dostoevsky wrote about a man who kills a pawnbroker and gets sent to Siberia, but an attentive reader is apt to find that the novels true subject is a different kind of punishment, one that has nothing to do with the judicial system. This is the punishment of consciousness in a raucous world, Dostoevsky tells us; this is the punishment of living in a sinful universe and knowing that the afterlife may be nothing more than, as Svidrigailov puts it, a room full of spiders. Readers interested in criminal behavior will find no shortage of contemporary literature that can satisfy their curiosity better than Crime and Punishment or Birminghams exegesis on the novel. Those who are interested in the more profound sweep of human experience, though, will find that Dostoevsky still has a great deal to say.

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What Inspired Crime and Punishment? - The Nation

Read the reviews that the German conductor Michael Gielen received during his career, and you find a running theme.

He looks like an academician, Raymond Ericson reported in The New York Times after Gielens New York Philharmonic debut in 1971. His baton technique is not flamboyant; it is clear and precise.

A year later, the Times critic Harold C. Schonberg wrote, of a concert with the National Orchestra of Belgium at Carnegie Hall, that his Mahler was almost painfully literal.

A sensuous approach is exactly what the unsentimental Mr. Gielen is unprepared to give, he added.

Eleven years after that, Donal Henahan complained of a Carnegie visit with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which Gielen led for six seasons in an initially confrontational, eventually admired tenure: Even Bruckner wants to sing and dance at times. This rather schoolmasterish performance denied him that pleasure.

These were meant as barbs. But Gielen gloried in the critical discomfort, in defying the expectations of a culture industry he thought had its priorities all wrong. When a Cincinnati Enquirer reporter asked in 1982 if he was too cerebral an artist for his own good, Gielen said, If I compare what I do to what I hear of certain less intellectual colleagues, then I must say I agree myself. Nothing is more horrible than stupid music-making.

Nobody could possibly accuse Gielen, who died in 2019, of that. One might now think him narrow in his doctrinaire modernist focus; or see him as misguided, even elitist, in forcing listeners to hear what he thought good for them; or not share the ever more pessimistic leftism that informed his work.

But Gielen raised fundamental questions in his conducting. He interrogated music for what it had said at its creation, and asked what it had to say to the present. He insisted that old and new works said similar things in different accents, and he thought audiences lazy if they could not hear that. He believed it dishonest to settle for easy answers: Beethovens Ninth Symphony so troubled him in the century of Auschwitz and Hiroshima that he spliced Schoenbergs A Survivor From Warsaw between its slow movement and its Ode to Joy finale, a choice that expressed his lifelong commitment to shattering complacency.

Art offers the opportunity to encounter the truth, Gielen wrote in 1981 to Cincinnati subscribers who were rebelling against his rule. And thats not always pleasant.

Even if Gielen mellowed a little over the years, pleasant would be the wrong word to describe the recently completed Michael Gielen Edition from SWR Music: 88 CDs that cover five decades of recordings and offer the deepest insight yet into this conductors work, from Bach to Zimmermann.

Many have been available before; some are new to disc; other important releases must be found elsewhere. But there is more than enough in its 10 volumes to confirm Gielen as one of the most stimulating conductors of the 20th century.

He made the bulk of these recordings with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg, the radio ensemble that he led from 1986 to 1999 and worked with until just before its demise in 2016 in part with the intention of using its practically unlimited rehearsal time to make an archive of recordings as close as possible to his intentions.

Those intentions were often provocative, in the best sense. With his strict analytical clarity and his facility for transparency, Gielen stripped as much personal emotion out of scores as he could, which had immense payoffs in Mahler, even in Beethoven. His Haydn does not chuckle as freely as it might; his Mozart is robust, not prettified; his Bruckner has little interest in storming the heavens he denied, though it does plumb the depths he saw all around him.

But relaxation or enjoyment could more properly be found eating well, or taking a good shower, than in engaging with music, Gielen told The Times in 1982. His recordings were made for the head more than for the heart. Gielens was conducting to think with, and he is worth thinking with still.

Music and politics were combined from the start for him. Born in Dresden in 1927 to Josef Gielen, a theater and opera director, and Rose Steuermann, a soprano noted for her Schoenberg, Michael and his family fled the Nazis, eventually settling in Buenos Aires in 1940.

Surrounded in Argentina by refugees who had no sympathy for the style of the conductors who stayed behind to serve the Third Reich, Gielen, a rptiteur and budding conductor at the Teatro Coln, gravitated toward the textual literalism of his two antifascist idols, Erich Kleiber and Arturo Toscanini. He shunned what he called the gigantomania of Wilhelm Furtwngler, under whom he would uncomfortably play continuo for Bachs St. Matthew Passion in 1950.

Back in Europe, Gielen focused on opera during the first half of his career, though not exclusively so. He was a staff conductor at the Vienna State Opera, then had spells leading the Royal Swedish Opera and the Netherlands Opera, before eventually triumphing as general music director of the Frankfurt Opera, then the most aesthetically ambitious house in Germany, from 1977 to 1987.

Lamentably little of Gielens operatic legacy survives. But working with the dramaturge Klaus Zehelein, he built Frankfurt into a crucible of Regietheater or directors theater, in which the directors vision tends to dominate hoping to restore something like the original shock of pieces that he thought had become bland under the weight of performance traditions.

For Gielen, there were two ways to do something similar in the concert hall. One was to come up with programming that radicalized the old and contextualized the new. So he made a montage out of Weberns Six Pieces and Schuberts Rosamunde; put Schoenbergs more classically-inclined works next to Mozarts more Romantic ones; and stuck Schoenbergs Expressionist monologue Erwartung before Beethovens Eroica.

Gielens other method remains bracingly apparent on record: an interpretive technique that prized restraint. Other musicians working at the same time explored period instruments as a way to recover the shock of the worn, but he thought that path illusory (even if he invited Nikolaus Harnoncourt to conduct in Frankfurt). Putting on a wig doesnt make me an 18th-century man, he wrote in his memoirs.

Instead, Gielen tried to clarify structures through a careful analysis of tempo relationships, and to expose details, though not so many as to muddy the overarching form. Critics often suggested that he aimed for an objective interpretation, but he knew that there were many ways to expose the truths he found in a work. The three accounts of Mahlers Sixth that are available on SWR, from 1971, 1999 and 2013, take 74, 84 and 94 minutes: the earliest brisk, streamlined; the middle one the dark heart of his essential complete Mahler survey; the last unbearably slow and heavy, consumed from the start with a desperate nihilism.

Gielen thought he would be remembered as an exponent of the Second Viennese School and of contemporary music, and the two SWR sets dedicated to that work are exemplary. There is anguish in his Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, but also a forlorn lyricism; like much of Gielens conducting, these sit somewhere between the clinical angularity of Pierre Boulez and the warm intensity of Hans Rosbaud, Gielens predecessor in Baden-Baden. The six-disc volume of post-World War II music one CD, dedicated to Jorge E. Lpezs astonishing Dome Peak and Breath Hammer Lightning, comes with a health warning for its extremes of volume is a despairingly intense affair. Ligetis Requiem, which Gielen premiered in 1965, practically smokes with rage.

But Gielens approach generated equally fascinating, complicated results in other music, too. His taste for detail fully convinces in late Romanticism, where his repertoire was particularly broad. Rachmaninoffs The Isle of the Dead comes off as a colossal masterpiece; Schoenbergs Gurrelieder is given expansive treatment, a Klimt glittering blindingly; Schrekers Vorspiel zu einem Drama has never sounded so glorious.

Gielens ability to seem as if he was getting out of the way of the music he conducted lets these kinds of scores stand in full bloom, with the effect of demonstrating exactly why later composers reacted so strongly against them including Gielen himself, in his few, stark works.

Elsewhere, Gielen felt it necessary to stamp out overkill in Romanticism where it was unwarranted above all in his Beethoven, which still has unusual energy, even if many conductors have since come around to Gielens once-unusual insistence on trying to keep up with the composers controversial metronome markings.

That energy is not at all benign; for Gielen, the violence in Beethovens scores is as much a part of their humanity as their idealism is. While the Eroica was for him a genuinely revolutionary piece that built a new social existence around individual dignity in its finale he recorded it repeatedly, and enthrallingly the Fifth Symphony he believed a terrible awakening. The relentless C major hammering of its finale evoked not triumph or freedom, Gielen wrote, but affirmation without contradiction, and with it the trampling of any opposition, imperial terror. If his 1997 recording does not fully convince it sounds empty, even barren you suspect its not supposed to.

Complexity where others found simplicity; enigmas where there might seem to be answers. For Gielen, there was no escape. You see me helpless before the confusing picture of the last century, he wrote near the end of his autobiography.

All that was left was to think about music. That always had more truths to offer.

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His Conducting Wasnt Always Pleasant. But It Was the Truth. - The New York Times