Daily Archives: March 8, 2022

Basketball coaches love to play the role of amateur shrinks. They do it all the time. In Hoosiers, when Ollies about to take the most important free throws of his life, Norman Dale pulls out a trick coaches from CYO to the Celtics have tried going back to the beginning of time: he sets up a defense for when Ollie make the free throws, not if.

Mike Anderson has decided to borrow another gem from the coaching medicine cabinet.

Ive got four outfits, he said Tuesday.

He smiled as he said this, but he was as serious as a tax audit, of course. Because St. Johns gets one last chance to salvage a disappointing season starting Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden, first round of the Big East Tournament, facing off against their sister Vincentian school, DePaul. If they are to crash the NCAA Tournament it will require four wins in four nights.

Hence, four changes of clothes.

Everyone is zero and zero, Anderson said. Were looking forward to this tournament. The winner gets the automatic bid and thats our goal. Thats our quest.

It didnt have to come to this, but thats all prologue now. Its all prelude. Anderson pieced together a pillow-soft preseason schedule that meant the Johnnies were going to have to do their most damage in the Big East, except that never quite happened, not enough. They come into this tournament 16-14 overall, having lost 11 of their 19 Big East games.

We know, Julian Champagnie said, that its win or go home.

Logically, everyone else knows that this is more of a fools errand than a true quest. But there are a few things that St. Johns has on its side. For one thing, it was only a year ago that Georgetown entered the tournament 10-12 and all but buried except it proceeded to blow out Marquette, squeak by Villanova, handle Seton Hall and absolutely obliterate Creighton on four consecutive nights to steal the leagues automatic bid and craft a perfect blueprint for precisely what St. Johns must do right down to beating Villanova in Round 2 if they can survive DePaul.

St. Johns has other advantages, of course, but they have those advantages every year. The Big East Tournament is, essentially, a St. Johns home game whenever the Johnnies are playing. The fact it has only rarely been kind to them for most of the last 35 years is as stinging an indictment of where the program has tumbled as anything else.

But the fact is, its still the Garden. Its still New York. And no matter how many Villanova or Seton Hall or Providence fans are in the building, its still going to feel like Utopia Parkway in a close game, under two minutes to play. Some year, thats going to matter.

Maybe next year can be this year.

Maybe its our time, Anderson said.

There is this, too: St. Johns is exactly the kind of team the top-tier teams, the ones with NCAA bids already locked up, want no part of this weekend. The Johnnies 94-foot style is uncomfortable on any court, but especially the Gardens. And the Johnnies will have the advantage of desperation on their hands against just about anyone they play.

(Assuming they can survive DePaul, anyway.)

We have no choice, Anderson said. If were going to get in, weve got to win it.

You can call this a lot of things: fantasy, delusion, pipe dreams. The St. Johns team that scuffled most of the year will be lucky to make it to Thursday. But anyone who watched this team all year knows there is another team loitering, lurking and fully capable of disrupting the weekend. That version humiliated Seton Hall at Walsh Gym, twice lost heartbreakers to UConn, gave Villanova plenty to think about until the very end at the Garden.

Maybe that version of this team is destined to stay hidden. Or maybe, as the man with four outfits said, its their time. Their turn.

There comes a time when it all comes together, Mike Anderson said. And this would be the perfect time to come together.

No need to save it for the NIT.

Original post:

St. John's needs to put it all together now -- starting against DePaul - New York Post

HALF A CENTURY AFTER the publication of Post Office (1971), how should we understand Charles Bukowskis literary achievement? His publisher predicted that Bukowski would never reach a mainstream audience. And yet his books, including his poetry, have sold millions of copies in more than a dozen languages. Writing for The New Yorker in 2005, Adam Kirsch claims that Bukowskis liminal status and seedy persona were part of his appeal: He is one of those writers whom each new reader discovers with a transgressive thrill. Describing his verse as pulp poetry, Kirsch also notes the authors penchant for autobiography. Bukowskis poems are best appreciated not as individual verbal artifacts but as ongoing installments in the tale of his true adventures, like a comic book or a movie serial, he observes. They are strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation thereof. That combination made a strong impression on readers. The effect is as though some legendary tough guy, a cross between Philip Marlowe and Paul Bunyan, were to take the barstool next to you, buy a round, and start telling his life story.

The pulp comparison is on point in fact, Bukowskis final novel, Pulp (1994), draws on the conventions of hard-boiled detective fiction but Kirsch also mentions Bukowskis efforts to place himself in more reputable literary company. He occasionally took pains to align himself with a coherent literary tradition, writing about his admiration for Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, Cline, and Camus the classics of modern alienation, the biographers of the underground man, Kirsch writes. He was especially fond of Hamsuns Hunger, the story of a young writer demented by poverty and ambition. While Bukowskis literary ambitions were grandiose, he is, for Kirsch, essentially a genre writer: prolific, predictable, and popular.

Kirsch does not mention an equally coherent tradition to which Bukowski belongs, one that includes some of the most notable fiction and film produced in Los Angeles during his lifetime. This tradition is by no means at odds with the classics of modern alienation. In fact, Bukowskis favorite author was L.A. novelist and screenwriter John Fante, who also admired Hamsun. After achieving his own success, Bukowski persuaded his publisher to reissue Fantes novels, including Ask the Dust (1939). Demented by poverty and literary ambition during the Great Depression, Fantes protagonist passes his days at a saloon in Downtown Los Angeles, where he drinks bad coffee and obsesses over a Latina waitress. Bukowskis preface to the reprint recalls his own days as an impoverished writer in the city: I was a young man, starving and drinking and trying to be a writer. Scouring the L.A. Public Library for suitable reading, he was unmoved by modern fiction until he discovered Fantes novel. The beginning of that book was a wild and enormous miracle to me, he writes: Fante was my god and I knew that the gods should be left alone, one didnt bang at their door.

That homage suggests that Kirsch overlooked the most proximate influence on Bukowski, or at least on his fiction. In fact, Bukowski cannot be understood apart from his midcentury Los Angeles milieu. His vision of the city was an integral part of his output, and few writers have documented its squalor more meticulously. Nowhere is the citys significance clearer than in Post Office, Bukowskis first and most famous novel, and nowhere else does he tap the regions deepest literary tradition more directly.

In the opening pages of his 1990 book City of Quartz, Mike Davis sketches that tradition and identifies Los Angeless unique place in the public imagination. For him, the ultimate world-historical significance and oddity of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism. Davis attributes that double role to the interplay among the citys boosters, its debunkers, and the noir tradition. In his overview of the boosters, Davis pairs the Arroyo Set, led by Charles Fletcher Lummis, with the Chamber of Commerces effort to present Los Angeles as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon racial odyssey. The booster parlance was pithier, of course. The racist and anti-labor Los Angeles Times, for example, described the city as the white spot. Whether or not that phrase was an open expression of white supremacy, the Times certainly did not describe L.A. as the brown, black, or red spot. In fact, the newspapers coverage was mostly designed to burnish the regions image and thereby support the Chandler familys real estate investments and other ventures.

The Great Depression ushered in the debunkers, chief among them Louis Adamic and his recently radicalized friend, Carey McWilliams. In a 1930 magazine article, Adamic cast the citys boosters as grim, rather inhuman individuals with a terrifying singleness of intention namely, to turn huge profits by growing Los Angeles into the nations largest metropolis. The article also recounted the Great Water Caper the creation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct which permitted the citys rapid expansion in the first decades of the 20th century. Adamic moved east to edit Common Ground magazine, but not before McWilliams, who was Fantes best friend, published a short book about him in 1935.

After World War II, McWilliams retold the aqueduct story in Southern California Country: An Island on the Land (1946). Often regarded as the regions finest interpretive history, that book was part of a remarkable streak. Between 1939 and 1950, McWilliams turned out almost one book per year on a wide range of topics, including California farm labor, the Japanese internment, systemic racism, antisemitism, Latinos in the Southwest, and the early stages of McCarthyism. His output directly inspired Robert Townes Oscar-winning screenplay for Chinatown (1974) and Luis Valdezs Zoot Suit (1979). It was also cited in a Supreme Court dissenting opinion on the constitutionality of the Japanese internment. As a reward for his labors, McWilliams was red-baited relentlessly before and after he decamped for New York City to edit The Nation magazine. A decade after he died in 1980, however, Davis and others sang his praises. In City of Quartz, Davis described a fraction of McWilliamss work as one of the major achievements within the American regional tradition. Likewise, historian Kevin Starr, in his 2002 book, Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 19401950, cast McWilliams as the states most astute political observer and the single finest nonfiction writer on California ever.

Adamic and McWilliams took obvious pleasure in challenging Los Angeless ersatz history and image, but they were not alone. During the 1930s, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Nathanael West also subverted the popular conception of Los Angeles as a sunny paradise. So did film noir, which flourished in the 1940s and 50s and later influenced Chinatown and Blade Runner (1982). Yet even as the noir tradition propagated a sinister image of the city, it never stifled the regions utopian impulse, whose most fantastical expression was Disneyland. Pitched to the Baby Boom generation, the iconic theme park earned its right-wing founder a reputation as an urban utopianist. In the meantime, other authors, filmmakers, and musicians were also packaging and selling idealized versions of SoCal youth culture. Frederick Kohners Gidget, The Little Girl with Big Ideas (1957) launched a series of novels about teenage surfers in Malibu that soon morphed into a popular film and television franchise. The Beach Boys scored their first hit in 1962 and eventually produced dozens of Top 40 singles about surfing, girls, and cars. The Beach Party movie franchise, which also featured teenage frolicking, began its run in 1963; in 1965 alone, a dozen such films appeared before the genre virtually collapsed in 1968. Taken together, these works presented Los Angeles as a city of youth, romance, and healthy fun.

Bukowskis experience stood in stark contrast to that image. Born in 1920, beaten regularly and savagely by his father, his face and body ravaged by boils, Bukowski graduated from Los Angeles High School and attended Los Angeles City College for two years. He drank, wandered, lived in rooming houses, married, divorced, and was treated for a near-fatal bleeding ulcer in 1955. After leaving the hospital, he began writing poetry. For 15 years, he lived in sketchy East Hollywood, working first as a postal carrier and then as a letter-filing clerk. According to Howard Souness 1998 biography, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life, he told his literary friends that his work was triple super hell, baby. [] The post office is nailing me to the cross. Later, however, Bukowski said that the work helped him to master the terrain. You get the stink of L.A. in your bones, you know? he told one interviewer in an excerpt included in John Dullaghans 2003 documentary, Bukowski: Born into This. His contempt for Disneyland, which opened the same year he was released from the hospital, led one colleague (also cited in Born into This) to claim that Bukowskis entire body of work was dedicated to the de-Disneyfication of all of us. Against the boosterist vision of Los Angeles as a place of youth and healthy fun, Bukowski offered a vision of the city that featured aging, scabrous, tortured alcoholics.

When John Martin created Black Sparrow Press in 1969, Bukowski was 49 years old and writing a column called Notes of a Dirty Old Man for the Los Angeles Free Press. He appreciated the rapid dissemination of his work in the underground weekly, but he had no sympathy for the countercultures music, drugs, or politics or for political causes in general. Martin, who managed an office supply store, had a longstanding interest in modern writers, including Henry Miller and the Beats. After discovering Bukowskis poetry in an underground magazine, he sold his first editions of D. H. Lawrence and used the proceeds to open his press in Los Angeles. Although the two men never had a contract, Martin promised to pay Bukowski $100 per month for life if he resigned from the post office. After his final shift, Bukowski stayed drunk for days. After living in the cage, I had taken the opening and flown out like a shot into the heavens, Sounes quotes him as saying.

Martin encouraged Bukowski to write whatever he wanted, but he also indicated that a novel would be welcome. Three weeks after Bukowski resumed writing, he unexpectedly delivered the complete manuscript for Post Office. Its success, modest at first, convinced Martin that his press would survive. The novel sold especially well in Europe, and Martin used the revenue to publish Fante, Paul Bowles, Wanda Coleman, and other writers. Toward the end of Bukowskis life, Martin was paying him $10,000 per month and adding any balance due at the end of each year. In 2002, he sold the rights to the work of Bukowski, Fante, and Bowles to HarperCollins. Martin did not regard Black Sparrow as a publisher of pulp poetry; he described his operation, rather, as one of the only self-supporting, highly successful, widely distributed, purely literary presses.

More The Day of the Locust than How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Bukowskis first novel falls naturally into the dystopian strain of L.A. literature. Its protagonist, Henry Chinaski, is a middle-aged alcoholic trying to survive in 1960s Los Angeles. His job as a substitute letter carrier is a brutal exercise in alienation: the work is exhausting and degrading, his supervisor is a sadist, and his colleagues are browbeaten. The subs themselves made Jonstone possible by obeying his impossible orders, Chinaski says. I couldnt see how a man of such obvious cruelty could be allowed to have his position. Only Chinaski addresses their soup (i.e., superior) by his nickname, The Stone. His customers are lunatics, their dogs are a menace, and the postal service itself is a faceless, spirit-crushing bureaucracy. Even the weather, Los Angeless saving grace, is a perpetual threat. On the job, Chinaski is either soaked by ferocious rainstorms or sweating out last nights booze under a boiling sun. I was hungover again, another heat spell was on a week of 100 degree days, he reports. The drinking went on each night, and in the early mornings and days there was The Stone and the impossibility of everything. Along the way, he objectifies and occasionally brutalizes women in one episode, he angrily enacts a female characters rape fantasy yet he also expresses sympathy for their suffering. At the end of the novel, Chinaski resigns from the post office and launches an epic bender.

For all its bleakness, Post Office is a comic novel, and readers have many chances to relish Chinaskis sardonic outlook. A less obvious but central motif is the novels surreptitious utopianism. As much as any character in American literature, Chinaski seeks the good life, even if his jaded outlook and squalid surroundings belie that quest. The opening passage sets the bar comically low for human happiness. It began as a mistake, Chinaski says.

It was Christmas season and I learned from the drunk up the hill, who did the trick every Christmas, that they would hire damned near anybody, and so I went and the next thing I knew I had this leather sack on my back and was hiking around at my leisure. What a job, I thought. Soft!

A married woman who is big in all the right places emerges from her home and accompanies him on his appointed round. They arrange a tryst, and after a short affair, Chinaski reflects on his good fortune. But I couldnt help thinking, god, all these mailmen do is drop in their letters and get laid. This is the job for me, oh yes yes yes.

Chinaskis delight turns to misery as the job tightens its grip on him. He describes his travails and the post offices daily operations in its distinctive argot. The accumulation of detail strengthens the novels realism and underscores the petty cruelties that kill by slow torture. Chinaski occasionally witnesses real suffering, and the bureaucratic indifference to it, but even the quotidian observations are meaningful. For example, he notes that the regular postal carriers call in sick after holidays, or when the mail loads are especially heavy, or when the weather is intolerable. As their substitute, Chinaski must bear those burdens without the perquisites his colleagues enjoy, chalking up that inequity to human nature. At no point does he imagine work that is dignified or properly rewarded; even to entertain that notion is to misunderstand the full horror of his situation.

Despite his tribulations, Chinaski occasionally finds time to enjoy the good things in life. When his girlfriend Betty returns to work, he takes a leave of absence from the post office:

I got up around 10:30 a.m., had a leisurely cup of coffee and a couple of eggs, played with the dog, flirted with the young wife of a mechanic who lived in the back, got friendly with a stripteaser who lived in the front. Id be at the track by one p.m., then back with my profit, and with the dog at the bus stop to wait for Betty to come home. It was a good life.

That leisure, however, is impossible to sustain. After Betty drifts off, Chinaski marries Joyce, who comes from a wealthy family. Nevertheless, she insists that they live on their wages. Baby, thats grammar school, Chinaski protests. Any damn fool can beg up some kind of job; it takes a wise man to make it without working. He returns to the post office but eventually floats a proposition:

After dinner or lunch or whatever it was with my crazy 12 hour night I was no longer sure what was what I said, Look, baby, Im sorry, but dont you realize that this job is driving me crazy? Look, lets give it up. Lets just lay around and make love and take walks and talk a little. Lets go to the zoo. Lets look at the animals. Lets drive down and look at the ocean. Its only 45 minutes. Lets play games in the arcades. Lets go to the races, the Art Museum, the boxing matches. Lets have friends. Lets laugh. This kind of life is like everyone elses kind of life: its killing us.

Joyce is unmoved by his humane vision. No, Hank, weve got to show them, weve got to show them Attributing that urge to Joyces upbringing, Chinaski gives up. There is hope, but not for them.

At one point, Joyce acquires two parakeets, whose chattering bothers Chinaski. When he complains, she suggests that he put the birds in the backyard. He does, but he also opens their cage. Both birds looked at that cage door. They couldnt understand it and they could. I could feel their tiny minds trying to function. They had their food and water right there, but what was that open space? One bird leaps down from his rung, stands in front of the open door, and tries to decide his next move. Then something clicks in his tiny brain. He didnt fly, Chinaski says. He shot straight up into the sky. The second bird is more reluctant: He walked around in the bottom of the cage nervously. It was a hell of a decision. Humans, birds, everything has to make these decisions. It was a hard game. Finally, the second bird also flies the coop. The parable of the parakeets seems straightforward enough, but Chinaski later banishes all ambiguity by comparing his decision to leave the post office to their existential drama.

Before his final departure from the job, Chinaski has other brushes with the good life, especially at the racetrack. Having parsed the Daily Racing Form, he showcases his mastery of the idiom by analyzing one race:

The 6 horse had lost by a neck to the favorite in a mile race last time out. The 6 had been overtaken by the favorite after a 2 length lead at the head of the stretch. [] Both were coming back in the same class. The favorite was adding two pounds, 116 to 118. The 6 still carried 116 but they had switched to a less popular jock, and also the distance was a mile and a 16th. The crowd figures that since the favorite had caught the 6 at a mile, then surely it would catch the 6 with the extra 16th of a mile to run.

The crowds logic, however, is faulty. Trainers enter their horses in what seems unfavorable conditions in order to keep the public money off the horse, Chinaski explains. The distance switch, plus the switch to a less popular jock all pointed to a gallop at a good price. When he tells Vi, his female companion, that he is betting on the 6 horse, she calls it a quitter. Nevertheless, he places a $10 bet to win and collects at eight to one. She put that leg and breast up against me, Chinaski says, I took a nip of scotch and opened the Form. After another shrewd bet pays off, the couple move to the bar, where Vi really laid her body against me. His winnings cover their hefty tab, after which they repair to her apartment for a sodden attempt at intercourse.

If his sexual performance is subpar, Chinaski has shown that he can make it without working. The wins boost his confidence, and he starts to envision life beyond the post office.

Then I developed a new system at the racetrack. I pulled in $3,000 in a month and a half while only going to the track two or three times a week. I began to dream. I saw a little house down by the sea. I saw myself in fine clothing, calm, getting up mornings, getting into my imported car, make the slow easy drive to the track. I saw leisurely steak dinners, preceded and followed by good chilled drinks in colored glasses. The big tip. The cigar. And women as you wanted them.

By this time, readers can feel the pull of Chinaskis vision. It is not a dream of upward mobility based on freedom and opportunity, even less a belief in hard work and its rewards. To the contrary, the track represents the possibility of wealth without labor or soups. At the same time, it is not a place of leisure or social exchange. While Chinaski recognizes many regulars there, and his accounts suggest a certain bonhomie, his vision is not a social one. He is there to make money, and others are there to lose theirs. For him, success at the track is salutary as well as solitary. Betting tests his acumen, but it does not destroy his mind, body, or spirit. If the post office represents suffering without redemption, the racetrack offers the prospect of full humanity, Bukowski style.

Feeling confident, Chinaski requests a 90-day leave of absence. So I stood in the tour superintendents office, he says. There he was behind his desk. I had a cigar in my mouth and whiskey on my breath. I felt like money. I looked like money. The post office has treated him well, he says, but he has outside business interests that simply must be taken care of. The tone is comical, but Chinaski clearly relishes the shift from aggrieved worker to successful investor. He begins to visit the track down the coast. It was a good life, and I started winning. After the last race each night I would have one or two easy drinks at the bar, tipping the bartender well. It looked like a new life. I could do no wrong. Even the drive home is pleasant:

Every night was about the same. Id drive along the coast looking for a place to have dinner. I wanted an expensive place that wasnt too crowded. I developed a nose for those places. I could tell by looking at them from outside. You couldnt always get a table directly overlooking the ocean unless you wanted to wait. But you could still see the ocean and the moon, and let yourself get romantic. Let yourself enjoy life. I always asked for a small salad and a big steak. The waitresses smiled deliciously and stood very close to you.

Savoring his success, Chinaski reflects on his humble origins. I had come a long way from a guy who had worked in slaughterhouses, who had crossed the country with a railroad track gang, who had worked in a dog biscuit factory, who had slept on park benches, who had worked the nickel and dime jobs in a dozen cities across the nation. He has led, he concludes, a magic life. And I did not tire of it.

The enchantment ends abruptly when a new girlfriend and her male companion try to rob him in a motel room. Chinaski sees his attackers reflection in a mirror, drops him with a beer bottle to the mouth, kicks his stiletto away, and slaps around the treacherous girlfriend. Is that how you make it, cunt? Killing men for a couple hundred? She declares her love for him, but he grabs her dress and rips it to the waist. She didnt wear a brassiere. The bitch didnt need one. This is Bukowski at his pulpiest, but the incident also signals the end of Chinaskis winning streak. Somehow the money slipped away after that and soon I left the track and sat around in my apartment waiting for the 90 days leave to run out. He was back on the cross.

The racetrack recedes into the novels background, but Bukowski later (in comments excerpted in Dullaghans 2003 documentary) explained its significance. For him, the track was not only a setting for his fiction, but also a part of his literary process. When I dont go to the track, he said, I cant write. When asked what the racetrack meant to him, he described the faces he saw there and the inner lives behind them: They all have dreams, they want to win. Its a big arena, and you can see what they want and what they dont get. If the post office is a dystopian bureaucracy, the racetrack is a site for unbridled but ultimately thwarted desire. It stirs hopes of wealth that cannot be possessed, and of ease that vanishes as quickly as it appears. It is Eden, but after the fall. Once his girlfriend betrays him, Chinaski must live by the sweat of his brow.

After a series of personal setbacks, however, Chinaski can no longer tolerate the old routine. He quits the post office for good and debases himself even more energetically than usual. When his fellow revelers drop him off at his squalid apartment, he resumes drinking before collapsing on his bed. He says: In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe Ill write a novel, I thought. And then I did. Nothing prepares the reader for these final lines, which hold out the faint promise that Chinaskis novel will improve his miserable condition. After rubbing the readers nose in the stink of Los Angeles, Post Office concludes by alluding to the redemptive power of art, the most romantic notion of all.

Yet the ending also maintains the delicate balance between dystopian text and utopian subtext. To endorse Chinaskis hope in any way to imagine, for example, that his novel will sell millions of copies in a dozen languages would undermine Post Offices hard-earned realism. If Chinaski became an underground hero, the subject of a documentary film with appearances by Sean Penn and Bono and Tom Waits, the novel would no longer belong in the realm of modern alienation. If Chinaski ended up living in a large house near the ocean, earning $10,000 per month, sleeping with groupies, and driving a BMW, his life would become a louche version of a Horatio Alger story. If he were profiled in The New Yorker, well, no one would believe it.

Post Office is not a rags-to-riches story, but it illustrates Mike Daviss point about Los Angeless double role as dystopia and utopia for advanced capitalism. The city never transcends its essential shabbiness, but it gradually admits another possibility a world of easy living for aging lushes who understand the crowd and its desires. When that possibility is dashed, Chinaski resorts to wishing upon a star not at the track but in the fickle realm of fiction. Ironically, Bukowskis success would outstrip Chinaskis unspoken wish, adding another layer of oddity to the citys reputation. Well before any of that came to pass, however, Bukowskis stealthy utopianism had more in common with Walt Disneys vision than he probably cared to acknowledge.

Peter Richardson teaches humanities and American Studies at San Francisco State University. He has written critically acclaimed books about Hunter S. Thompson, the Grateful Dead,Rampartsmagazine, and Carey McWilliams. He received the National Entertainment Journalism Award for Online Criticism in 2013.

Link:

Charles Bukowski's Lush Life: Post Office and the Utopian Impulse - lareviewofbooks

After finding roots in Hollywood in the Fast and the Furious family and as the DCEUs Wonder Woman, Gal Gadot is keeping herself busy with a host of upcoming projects. One especially exciting one is a Mission: Impossible-style spy action thriller called Heart of Stone. The movie that was scored in a competitive bidding war by Netflix last year will star the actress alongside Fifty Shades Jamie Dornan. And Heart of Stone just added four more actors to the project.

The upcoming action flick will also star Army of the Dead fan-favorite, Matthias Schweighfer in an indisclosed role. The German actor had a breakout year in 2021 when he starred in Zack Snyders Netflix film and preceded to star and direct in the prequel Army of Thieves. Hes not the only new star boarding Heart of Stone either.

Per the Deadline report, Gal Gadots Death on the Nile co-star Sophie Okonedo will also re-team with the actress in the upcoming movie. Okonedo has an impressive resume across her thirty years as an actress, also finding memorable roles in Hotel Rwanda, The Secret Life of Bees and Aeon Flux.

Also, up-and-coming British-Chinese actress Jing Lusi is part of the Heart of Stone cast after finding a notable role in 2018s Crazy Rich Asians and coming off filming roles in the upcoming Henry Cavill-led spy thriller Argylle and the new season of HBO Maxs Pennyworth. Finally, Paul Ready, who is a television actor from The Terror and Utopia is also on board the big-budget Netflix project.

Its a solid lineup of actors who have put down solid work over the years and would fit right in a spy movie starring the likes of Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan. If Heart of Stone follows suit with the typical spy genre, wed expect these actors to either be part of Gadots entourage or amongst the villains shell have to infiltrate somehow.

At this time, we dont have much details about what Heart of Stone will be about, but the movie comes from a script by Greg Rucka, who penned the script for the 2020 Netflix action flick The Old Guard alongside Allison Schroeder, who previously wrote Hidden Figures and Christopher Robin. Aeronauts and Peaky Blinders director Tom Harper is directing the movie.

Heart of Stone just started filming this week, per an Instagram update by Gal Gadot. The movie does not have a release date yet, but well keep you posted as the production continues to progress. For the time being, check out what 2022 Netflix movie release dates have been set and hold your breath for Wonder Woman 3, its going to be a while.

Go here to see the original:

Gal Gadot's Netflix Action Movie Has Added An Army Of The Dead Star And More - CinemaBlend

Mitski and David Byrne appear together on "This Is A Life," the first single from Son Lux's soundtrack to new A24 movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. You can hear what the three artists cooked up together below.

"This Is A Life" is just one track on the massive, 49-song soundtrack to the upcoming movie. Other guests involved in the project include Andr 3000, Randy Newman and Moses Sumney.

"This Is A Life" is Mitski's second time on an A24 movie soundtrack already this year. Her version of Lily Chou Chou's "Glide" appears over the credits of the recently-released After Yang. A filmed version of Byrnes critically-acclaimed Broadway musical, American Utopia, directed by Spike Lee, was released in 2020.

Everything Everywhere All At Once is a surreal and comedic sci-fi action-adventure about an exhausted Chinese-American woman who can't seem to finish her taxes. Set inside a multiverse, the movie stars Michelle Yeoh, Stephanie Hsu, Ke Huy Quan, Jenny Slate, Harry Shum Jr., James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis. It hits theaters on April 8.

Excerpt from:

Mitski and David Byrne appear on Son Luxs This Is A Life - The FADER

Recent reports that half of women in England and Wales are now childless by their 30th birthday reveal a worrying new attitude amongst Gen Z. Parenthood, to the younger generation, isthe enemy of unfettered frivolity. Young women, we are told, would rather live for the moment than plan for the future. 'Being present' has become the mantra of the 'mindful' generation who see autonomy as the ultimate expression of a life well lived.

But how complicit are men in this myopic 'me-only' utopia we have created for ourselves? Are women actively rejecting the sort of men who would like to settle down or have the sort of men who once yearned to settle themselves become cynical about taking the plunge?

Whileboth sexes feel trepidation about losing cherished freedoms, men are experiencing a much darker existential anxiety that isnt simply about a loss of liberty. Although I-deserve-to-have-it-all infantilism has infected both sexes, women's pragmatism in the face of diminishing odds tends to wake them out of their complacency although this hasnt necessarily stopped many older women from delaying childbirth beyond the point of no return.

Historically men have never known when to leave the party and, as a result, tend to go along with their partner's desire to move to the next level. Although men are rarely the ones making the final decision about when to have children, there's a growing sense of bewilderment around the sisterhood's increasingly strident 'you-go-girl' attitude. If women are proud to declare 'we got this' where does that leave the other half of the population? I'm not suggesting that these men yearn for a return to the bad old days when women 'knew their place' only that they seem increasingly concerned about the pathologies aroundmale incompetency,where women's needs are presumed to take preference over their own, not least in matters of child rearing.

The modern autonomous woman is perfectly capable, in practical terms at least, of raising a child on her own. Single motherhood is no longer stigmatised, meaning women are much more open to the possibility of going it alone, an option that must seem increasingly attractive in a culture where men are seen as hopeless and mothers complain of partners 'always getting in the way'.

Men's apparent inability to perform even the simplest of childrearing chores such as changing nappies has become a well-worn comedy trope. The idea that we are all a bunch of hapless Neanderthals when it comes to the domestic sphere has leaked into men's psyches, often damaging their sense of self worth. As women's low expectations gnaw away at their confidence is it any wonder younger males are choosing to opt out of marriage and parenthood before they have even had a chance to prove themselves?They see cowed, emasculated men struggling to maintain a grip on their relationships while simultaneously being told they are somehow complicit in women's subjugation.

I was reminded of this strange paradox when I joined a workshop entitled 'changing masculinities' at a junior school in south London. The young men, many from deprived backgrounds, were astonished when the instructor explained how they lived under an oppressive patriarchal power structure and should therefore reject tyrannical institutions such as marriage along with all forms of traditional masculinity; this from a school where nearly all the teachers were women and over half the boys came from fatherless households. Telling young men they are responsible for structural inequalities must surely damage their ability to engage with the opposite sex later in life.

Despite our current obsession with demonising all things patriarchal, the evidence suggests we are in fact moving towards a more matriarchal society in which men are encouraged to stop talking and take a backseat. In a 2020 United Nations study entitled 'Tackling Gender Norms: A Game Changer for Gender Inequalities', Joanne Sandler, former Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (or UNIFEM) called for male leaders across the globe to 'step aside as an expression of their feminism.' Indeed our government's reaction to the pandemic has been overwhelmingly matriarchal in tone with the big state choosing to mollycoddle a helpless, infantilised populace that doesnt know any better.

The idea that we should replace one gender with another as some kind of virtuous payback for historic injustices doesn't foster trust between the sexes. Indeed, it mayeven inhibit men from taking the risks that inevitably come with marriage and fatherhood. If you keep repeating that men are a toxic liability while at the same time promoting the idea that only alpha females can save us from ourselves, what you're effectively saying is that men have become surplus to requirement. But how is this any different from the oppressive patriarchal system they seek to dismantle? In such a dispiritingly cynical age, why would any man choose to reproduce?

In her latest book What do Men Want, philosopher Nina Power argues that we do men a disservice by throwing around vague terms like patriarchy. 'We cannot in fact... "smash" the patriarchy, because it is not a being, but rather the structure of a certain kind of being, that is to say, how a society is organised. But organised by whom? Transmitted how? How and why have some - or many - women gone along with it?'She continues 'By dismantling patriarchy we have also collectively done away with all the positive dimensions of patriarchy as well: the protective father, the responsible man, the paternalistic attitude that exhibits care and compassion rather than simply places constraints on freedom. If anything, we have dismantled patriarchy in a rather extreme way, resulting in a horizontal, competitive society that suits consumer capitalism very well.'

In a culture that views traditional masculine virtues as a liability, there will inevitably be fallout, in a justice system for instance that appears to discriminate against fathers, as happened to an acquaintance of mine who recently lost a custody battle along with his house and all of his savings. Now effectively destitute, he told me how much he regrets his decision to have children; what was the point when he barely gets to see them? The trauma of separation has made his life almost unbearable.

This is the embittered culture young men now find themselves caught up in. A culture where cowed single dads fear being labelled misogynist if they step out of line, a place where those same fathers are too often hung out to dry by a system described by author Greg Ellis in his book The Respondent as 'the only branch of the legal system that doesn't begin with the presumption of innocence.' Outcasts find little in the way of succour or redress other than succumbing to the bitter extremism of Men's Rights Activism. Dare to speak out and chances are you'll be mocked as a whiny, over-privileged faux-victim.

Perhaps the female defence lawyer who contacted me recently was right when she expressed sympathy for young men's hesitancy around marriage and fatherhood, especially given the febrile, often one-sided nature of so many custody battles. Keen to share with me some of the injustices she had encountered during her dealings with men, she revealed how, during family court proceedings, women would often gain automatic custody of their children if there had been any sort of criminal complaint made. 'Since MeToo I've noticed a growing number of aggrieved mothers taking advantage of a system that demands we 'believe all women'. Desperate to maintain custody these mothers will make spurious accusations in a family court and then go on to make the same complaint to the police to shore up their position once they've secured a conviction in the family court. Social services then become involved, helping the mother gain full custody of the children. It's a system corrupted by anti-patriarchal ideologues and there is nothing a man can do once criminal charges have been made. He's on his own, literally.'

Under similar circumstances, men are rarely offered the same level of custody, 'I recently defended an accused husband who had made a controlling coercive cross allegation against his wife. Because he happened to be male and white she was black and female - he wasnt considered a vulnerable victim and his plea was rejected.'

Naturally, a rise in such cases doesnt sit well with the sort of men who might be in two minds about whether to settle down and have children especially when it appears that the law has already made assumptions about male guilt. The lazy stereotype of the wayward, feckless man continues to hold sway.

This year sees the thirtieth anniversary of the hit 90s sitcom Men Behaving Badly in which the obtuse, hopelessly irresponsible man-baby was first conceived. Coincidentally, two months before Men Behaving Badly first aired on the BBC, Loaded magazine hit the newsstands with its appeal to so called 'laddism'. Inside that very first edition, a letter from the editor gave an indication of what would become a cultural turning point 'a new magazine dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of sex, drink, football and less serious matters for the man who believes he can do anything, if only he wasnt hungover'. The die had been cast and a grotesque caricature of crude, nihilistic manhood lodged itself in the cultural mindset, a mindset that persists to this day.

And so we find ourselves trapped in a deeply demoralising conundrum where pathologised men fear the negative repercussions of marriage and child-rearing while their opposite number recoil from the toxic masculine template they have been force-fed for a generation. Neither sex seems willing to compromise but eventually sacrifices will have to be made, if only for the continuation of our species.

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Fatherhood is a risk men aren't willing to take - The Spectator

Hello gentle readers, and welcome to the SwitchArcade Round-Up for March 7th, 2022. Its a quiet one today. I was hoping to have some reviews ready, but I spent more time with my family over the weekend than I expected to. No regrets, but it means youll have to wait until tomorrow for some tasty review action. For today? There are some new releases to check out, though nothing too great. The sales are more interesting, thanks largely to the MAR10 Day discounts kicking off. Lets get to it!

Todays releases are pretty dire, friends. Well, nothing for it but to play on through. So this is a racing game of sorts where you play as a cat. And you race other cats. On the streets. Do well and you will earn points, and you can use those points to unlock more cats. I could imagine something with this concept being fun with other players, but this one is a pure solo act.

Work those traffic lights to keep the traffic moving smoothly without causing an accident. The stages get more challenging and complicated as you go. Weve seen games like this on the eShop before, and this is certainly another one.

This game is LIT. No, that is the actual name. I am not using slang to make a statement about its quality. Its LIT. Absolutely LIT. You can probably put it together using the games title and the above screenshot, but this is a puzzle game where you use mirrors to reflect the light beam into a particular target location. If youve been playing games for any length of time the odds are tremendously good youve encountered this kind of thing in some game or another.

This is a collection of more than two hundred cipher crossword puzzles. It basically works like a regular crossword except instead of using clues to figure out each word, you have to figure out which numbers represent which letters using a bit of logic. If that kind of puzzle sounds good to you, its really hard to argue against grabbing this for such a reasonable price.

A generic-looking sports game with creepy, dead-eyed human characters in it? Thats got to be a Pix Arts joint. And it is! Template flip, asset flip, or original game? I leave the exercise to you, dear reader. All I can tell you is that if you are looking for your hand ball pelota fix, this isnt going to help much. Single-player only, but at least you can use buttons to play. Smash it into the trash where it belongs.

(North American eShop, US Prices)

There are lots of sales that came in over the weekend, but the biggest news here is obviously the MAR10 Day sale. Nintendo does have the occasional sale on its Switch releases, but the odds of any one particular game showing up are small. That means that if you see a game in this list that youve been interested in, youd do well to grab it during this sale. Aside from the Mario games, there isnt a lot to jump up and down about. I will mention Spelunker HD Deluxe, which is an enjoyably challenging game that is easier to swallow at half its usual price. In the outbox, youve got things like Crysis Remastered Trilogy and Megaquarium to consider. Check those lists!

MAR10 Day Sale

Super Mario 3D World + BF ($40.19 from $59.99 until 3/14)New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe ($40.19 from $59.99 until 3/14)Mario Kart 8 Deluxe ($40.19 from $59.99 until 3/14)Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle ($9.99 from $59.99 until 3/14)Mario + Rabbids KB Gold Edition ($14.99 from $79.99 until 3/14)Mario & Sonic at the Olympics ($41.99 from $59.99 until 3/14)Luigis Mansion 3 ($40.19 from $59.99 until 3/14)Luigis Mansion 3 MP Pack ($6.99 from $9.99 until 3/14)Luigis Mansion 3 + MP Pack Set ($47.58 from $69.98 until 3/14)Yoshis Crafted World ($40.19 from $59.99 until 3/14)

Select New Games on Sale

Street Racing: Tokyo Rush ($5.99 from $11.99 until 3/10)Circa Infinity Ultimate ($1.99 from $10.99 until 3/11)The Game of Life 2 ($20.99 from $29.99 until 3/11)Art Sqool Deluxe ($1.99 from $13.99 until 3/11)Brawl Chess ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/11)Detective Di Silk Road Murders ($3.89 from $12.99 until 3/12)Bus Driver Simulator Countryside ($10.49 from $14.99 until 3/12)Farmers Co-Op: Out of This World ($9.09 from $12.99 until 3/12)Its Raining Fists & Metal ($4.54 from $6.99 until 3/14)Secret Files: Tunguska ($1.99 from $14.99 until 3/14)Secret Files 2: Puritas Cordis ($1.99 from $14.99 until 3/14)Secret Files Sam Peters ($1.99 from $6.99 until 3/14)Secret Files 3 ($1.99 from $14.99 until 3/14)Lost Horizon ($1.99 from $14.99 until 3/14)Lost Horizon 2 ($1.99 from $14.99 until 3/14)

Spelunker HD Deluxe ($12.49 from $24.99 until 3/14)Traffix ($2.49 from $4.99 until 3/15)Doodle Games Bundle ($9.42 from $22.45 until 3/18)Ghostanoid ($2.93 from $6.99 until 3/18)Galaxy Warfighter ($2.93 from $6.99 until 3/18)Demons Tier+ ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/19)Riddle Corpses EX ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/19)Xenon Valkyrie+ ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/19)Demetrios The Big Cynical Adv. ($3.99 from $9.99 until 3/19)Smashy Road: Wanted 2 ($1.99 from $7.99 until 3/25)Wild & Horror Pinball ($7.49 from $14.99 until 3/25)Viviette ($4.99 from $9.99 until 3/25)Race Track Driver ($5.99 from $11.99 until 3/25)Sports Car Driver ($7.79 from $11.99 until 3/25)Zombie Blast Crew ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/25)

Utopia 9 A Volatile Vacation ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/25)Arcane Arts Academy ($1.99 from $7.99 until 3/25)Epistory Typing Chronicles ($1.99 from $14.99 until 3/25)Good Night, Knight ($1.99 from $11.99 until 3/25)Tiny Lands ($1.99 from $5.99 until 3/25)Badland: GotY Edition ($1.99 from $5.99 until 3/25)DungeonTop ($1.99 from $13.99 until 3/25)Gravity Rider Zero ($1.99 from $6.99 until 3/25)Tools Up! ($1.99 from $19.99 until 3/25)Planet Quiz: Learn & Discover ($1.99 from $11.99 until 3/25)Door Kickers ($1.99 from $11.99 until 3/25)Blazing Beaks ($1.99 from $14.99 until 3/25)Mini Trains ($1.99 from $5.99 until 3/25)Warlocks 2: God Slayers ($1.99 from $17.99 until 3/25)Dex ($1.99 from $19.99 until 3/25)

Coffee Crisis ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/25)BIT.TRIP Series, Assorted ($1.99 from $4.99 until 3/25)Koloro ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/25)Tharsis ($1.99 from $11.99 until 3/25)Akuto: Showdown ($1.99 from $7.99 until 3/25)Not Not A Brain Buster ($1.99 from $2.49 until 3/25)Welcome to Primrose Lake ($1.99 from $7.99 until 3/25)Mana Spark Complete ($1.99 from $11.99 until 3/25)Hyper Parasite ($1.99 from $17.99 until 3/25)REKT Double Flip ($1.99 from $6.99 until 3/25)One Strike ($1.99 from $4.99 until 3/25)One Strike: Complete ($1.99 from $5.99 until 3/25)Akane ($1.99 from $4.99 until 3/25)Pocket Golf Mini Hole in One ($1.99 from $2.99 until 3/25)Om Nom: Run ($1.99 from $4.99 until 3/25)

Eyes: The Horror Game ($1.99 from $2.49 until 3/25)Space Pioneer ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/25)Real Boxing 2 ($1.99 from $14.99 until 3/25)Street Cats Race ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/27)Need a Packet? ($3.49 from $6.99 until 3/27)I, AI ($4.99 from $9.99 until 3/27)Mask of Mists ($7.49 from $14.99 until 3/27)Aircraft Evolution ($4.99 from $9.99 until 3/27)Normans Great Illusion ($2.49 from $4.99 until 3/27)Steam Tactics ($4.99 from $9.99 until 3/27)My Aunt is a Witch ($4.99 from $9.99 until 3/27)Dungeons & Bombs ($2.49 from $4.99 until 3/27)

Sales Ending Tomorrow, Tuesday, March 8th

Charterstone: Digital Edition ($12.49 from $24.99 until 3/8)Concordia: Digital Edition ($19.99 from $24.99 until 3/8)Crysis Remastered ($14.99 from $29.99 until 3/8)Crysis Remastered Trilogy ($34.99 from $49.99 until 3/8)Eight-Minute Empire Complete ($5.99 from $14.99 until 3/8)Evoland Legendary Edition ($4.99 from $19.99 until 3/8)Far: Lone Sails ($2.99 from $14.99 until 3/8)Foregone ($4.99 from $19.99 until 3/8)Genetic Disaster ($2.99 from $14.99 until 3/8)Guardian of Lore ($6.99 from $13.99 until 3/8)Guards ($1.99 from $4.99 until 3/8)Istanbul: Digital Edition ($9.99 from $19.99 until 3/8)Little Mouses Encyclopedia ($4.99 from $12.99 until 3/8)Megaquarium ($12.29 from $24.59 until 3/8)My Singing Monsters Playground ($27.99 from $39.99 until 3/8)

n Verlore Verstand ($2.09 from $13.99 until 3/8)Northgard ($13.99 from $34.99 until 3/8)Pinball FX3: Portal Pinball ($1.19 from $2.99 until 3/8)SGC: Short Games Collection #1 ($13.99 from $19.99 until 3/8)Steam: Rails to Riches Complete ($13.99 from $19.99 until 3/8)Super Toy Cars ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/8)Super Toy Cars 2 ($2.99 from $11.99 until 3/8)Tyd wag vir Niemand ($1.99 from $9.99 until 3/8)Under Leaves ($1.99 from $12.99 until 3/8)Voxelgram ($4.79 from $7.99 until 3/8)

Thats all for today, friends. Well be back tomorrow with a couple of new releases, some more sales, a review or two, and maybe some news. Im working hard on my review of Triangle Strategy, but its probably going to take a few more days at minimum. Its a lot of game. I hope you all have a magnificent Monday, and as always, thanks for reading!

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SwitchArcade Round-Up: MAR10 Day Sales Including 'Mario Kart 8', Plus 'Ink Cipher' and Today's Other New Releases and Sales TouchArcade - Touch...

Posted in Indiana Dining March 08, 2022by Tori Jane

Hey, so, quick question: what do you look for when choosing a place to go for, say, a day trip? Is it something about the surrounding natural beauty there, or is it the things to do in whatever town you end up in? Do you lean toward places where you already know people, or maybe places where you hope to make new friends? Okay, all of those are good starts, but what about pie? Yeah, pie. Hear us out: why not go somewhere that has a killer pie shop and simply expand your day trip from there? We think its genius. Well, it just so happens that Zionsville is the perfect place for this, and its home to a shop that might just have the best pie in Indiana. Once youre done with the pie, explore the rest of the town, too.

During these uncertain times, please keep safety in mind and consider adding destinations to your bucket list to visit at a later date.

We're not sure if it's all that love that goes into each and every recipe or what, but man, this place has got what it takes to be considered among the best pie shops in Indiana.

Good luck, however, figuring out what the heck you want. With more than 30 amazing flavors to choose from, we don't blame you for feeling a little overwhelmed (it's okay, we were too).

If cream pie isn't your thing, no worries - there's a huge selection of fruit pies, silk pies, seasonal pies, custom pies, and more. Pick up one (or 10, we don't judge) and indulge before checking out the rest of Zionsville.

It's got big-city spirit despite the fact it's a small town, and we think you'll love the sense of community shared here even with folks who are just visiting.

Head to the Zionsville Cultural District and enjoy local arts and entertainment, as well as eateries you won't find anywhere else but right here. For the more outdoorsy among us, did you know Zionsville is home to the largest land-per-capita parks system in Indiana? It's true - enjoy countless parks and lots of awesome natural attractions sure to keep you visiting every time you get a chance.

Zionsville is a little slice of utopia - or so it feels. Everyone here is just a little kinder, just a little friendlier, just a little more laid-back; you're sure to feel welcome and wanted here. It's definitely one of those places where everyone likes to learn your name.

We don't blame you; Zionsville is one of our favorite places, too.

For the full menu, as well as the most up-to-date hours and specials, be sure to check out the official My Sugar Pie website. Where do you find the best pie in Indiana? Tell us about your favorite spots in the comments!

Address: Zionsville, IN 46077, USA

Address: 40 E Pine St, Zionsville, IN 46077, USA

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The Small Town In Indiana Boasting World-Famous Pie Is The Sweetest Day Trip Destination - Only In Your State

Lee Yu Bin or simply known by her stage name Dami is a Korean artist under Dreamcatcher Company. She is also the main rapper, lead dancer and vocalist of K-Pop girl group Dreamcatcher and a former member of MINX. On September 18, 2014, she debuted as a member of MINX with the single Why Did You Come to My Home? On November 29, 2016, Happyface Entertainment announced that MINX would re-debut under the name Dreamcatcher, where two new members Gahyeon and Handong were added to the group.

In October, Dami, together with fellow members JiU, Siyeon and Yoohyeon, became contestants on the survival show MIXNINE. However, on December 10, it was announced that all four members would be leaving the show. With the third installment, the group announced their new comeback with their sixth EP, Dystopia: Road to Utopia and its lead single Odd Eye, which was released on January 26, 2021. Dami and Siyeon released an OST for the drama Black Hole in two versions, the original version debuted at number 1 on K-OSTs chart and on number 5 on the Rock charts.

On July 1, Dreamcatcher announced their management contract with Pony Canyon will end on August 31, 2021. On July 30, Dreamcatcher made their comeback with the song BEcause and the special EP Summer Holiday. In February 2022, it was announced that Dreamcatcher will release their second Korean studio album in April.

ALSO READ:SEVENTEENs The8 tests positive for COVID-19

Join the biggest community of K-Pop fans live on Pinkvilla Rooms to get one step closer to your favourite K-Celebs! Click here to join.

Is Dami eating breakfast with you? Let us know in the comments below.

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Eat your favourite breakfast and we'll tell you if Dreamcatcher's charming rapper Dami will join you - PINKVILLA

The book was probably unpublishable. About that fact both the author and his longtime editor agreed. But the author was determined, and he had on his side a brilliant publishing record. For more than a decade, starting in 1936 with his Inside Europe, the reporter John Gunther had been a fixture on the best-seller lists. From the mid-1930s through the 1950s, no one, save the romance novelist Daphne du Maurier, had produced more American best sellers than Gunther.

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

Gunthers unpublishable book was a memoir: an account of the death, in 1947, of his 17-year-old son, Johnny, from a brain tumor. Gunther had started writing while the experience of Johnnys illness was still raw, finishing the book in a few weeks, six months after his sons death. Hed set out with the idea of a privately circulated memoir, the sort of volume of remembrances printed in a few hundred copies that parents of soldiers killed in action sent to friends and relations. But as he finished the manuscript, he began to think it should be published for a wider audience.

Surely the book was too personal, Gunthers publisher, Harper & Brothers, objected. Who would want to read such a dismal book about a complete stranger? And wasnt it indecent to broadcast an intimate story of suffering in public? But Gunther prevailed. He and his editor came to an agreement: The book would be published with a notice on the jacket that neither Harper & Brothers nor Gunther himself would take any profits from its sale; all the proceeds from the book would go to fund cancer research for children. And with that disclaimer, a title borrowed from a John Donne poem, and a dignified buff jacket ornamented only by a small drawing of a dove, Harper & Brothers published Gunthers Death Be Not Proud in February 1949 in a modest print run.

Larger print runs quickly followed. By the time that I first read the book, in 1981, it was a mass-market paperback that had sold hundreds of thousands of copiesa publishing success well beyond anything that either Gunther or Harper & Brothers could have imagined. It had been translated into Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Hebrew, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Swedish, Hindi, and Portuguese, among other languages. For decades, Death Be Not Proud was required reading in many American high schools. In 1960, my mother read it in her tenth-grade civics class in Louisville, Kentucky. It is the only one of Gunthers books that has remained continuously in print.

In our time, when the intimate memoir has become commonplace, Harper & Brothers queasy reaction to Gunthers project is a reminder of an era when stringent rules of reticence still reigned. The publics unexpected embrace of the book is disorienting too. The usual assumption is that the modern, unguarded memoirs origins lie in the narcissism of the 1990s, or the self-revelatory zeal of the 70s. But Gunthers surprise hit points to a different genesis: the anti-fascism of the 30s and widespread revulsion at the dehumanizing horrors of World War II. The predominance of the genre todaywhich we think about as a celebration of Ihad its beginnings in an attempt to heal the collective we.

By the mid-1930s, the rules about what couldand couldntbe discussed in public were changing. The First World War had toppled hierarchies, fraying parental authority and upending rules of propriety. The popularization of Freudian ideas helped make talk about familial dynamics and sexual urges at least semirespectable. The newly founded tabloid papers took advantage of the publics interest in private lives, inaugurating I Confess! competitions that stoked a market for tales of infidelity, out-of-wedlock pregnancies, and other misdeeds. Send in the best confessionanonymously, of courseand the cash prize was yours. In Akron, Ohio, the first Alcoholics Anonymous group met in the summer of 1935, propelled by the idea that sharing, either for confession or for bearing witness, was a first and necessary step on the road to sobriety.

The agents provocateurs of this new culture of openness were people born, like Gunther and the AA co-founder Bill Wilson, in the couple of decades around the turn of the 20th century. They were members of the so-called Lost Generation, who, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald (a banner member of the club), had grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken. Many of them had lived for a spell in Europe, either as soldiers or as expatriates. Collectively, this generation went on to produce a landmark tell-all book about alcoholism and institutionalization (William Seabrooks Asylum) and the frankest account of a marriage ever published (Vincent Sheeans Dorothy and Red), as well as Gunthers pioneering Death Be Not Proud.

Even in rarefied literary circles, though, self-exposure was still risky. Take Fitzgeralds 1936 excursion into self-revelation: the three essays he published in Esquire magazine, later collected under the title The Crack-Up. By todays standards, Fitzgeralds account of his nervous breakdown, eloquent as it is, hardly registers on the confessional scale. He likened himself to a cracked plate, claimed (untruthfully) that hed quit drinking, and expressed his despair about the future of the novel after the advent of the talkies. His account of self-immolation was impressionistic and evasive, written as if from behind a veil. He avoided entirely the subject of his wife, Zelda, and her mental illness. Still, his longtime editor, Maxwell Perkins, felt he had committed an indecent invasion of his own privacy. Fitzgerald himself ended up fearing hed damaged his reputation permanently.

The fact that so many of the taboo-shredding American memoirists had lived in Europe wasnt a coincidence. They had seen up close the battle among fascism, communism, and democracy playing out after the First World War. Inevitably, they took sides and came to rethink their place in the world. This doesnt accord with the stereotype of the Lost Generation, its members drinking away their anomie in Parisian cafs. But as Brooke Blower noted in her insightful Becoming Americans in Paris (2011), that is because our conception of the Lost Generation is too limited. They werent simply running away; they were, as John Dos Passos put it, running toward the whole wide world.

The most avidly engaged expatriates were the foreign correspondents, like Gunther, whose job was to translate European news for American audiences. International journalism was thriving in the U.S., as papers such as the Chicago Daily News and the Philadelphia Public Ledger built up their own bureaus abroad rather than relying on wire services. Gunther spent his 20s and 30s dashing between European chancelleries, deciphering coup attempts and revolutions, trying to explain the rise of fascism and the consolidation of Soviet Communism.

Gunther had arrived in Europe in 1924, a cub reporter from Chicago, dreaming, like many of his journalist friends, of writing the Great American Novel. In 1925, he met Frances Fineman, a New Yorkborn Barnard graduate who had become a journalist, and the pair married two years later. An avowedly modern woman, Frances Gunther saw meaningful work and sexual fulfillment as her due: She expected marriage and a career, domesticity and adventure. A serious follower of Freud, she underwent at least four psychoanalyses, grappling with the ways that she frustrated herself, including by tryingand failingto write her own books. Stymied by a formidable writers block, she involved herself in Johns reporting, exhorting him to think harder about both the structural forcesshe was also a serious student of Marxand the psychological dynamics at play in a Europe recovering from a brutal war.

In part influenced by Frances, John came to recognize that the traditional tools of the newsroom hardly sufficed to convey what he was seeing. Objectivity was then, as it is now, the hallmark of the respectable paper. Yet Gunther found it impossible to report dispassionately on the rise of the Nazis or the Austrian dictator Engelbert Dollfusss bloody civil war against the Viennese Socialists. He felt mystified by the roaring crowds saluting strongmen and the seemingly irrational, passionate hatreds all around him. Writing articles on elections and bank failures struck him as simply scraping the surface of events. Like many young Americans, Gunther had taken for granted that the whole thrust of human history was toward freedom. But what if the leaders people freely chose were dictators rather than democrats?

Instead of looking for proclivities to authoritarianism in, say, German or Italian national character, Gunther trained his attention on the dictators themselves. He searched out Hitlers relatives in an Austrian backwater, trying to understand what had made him the man he was. Gunthers own psychoanalysis in Vienna with Wilhelm Stekel, one of Freuds first disciples, helped consolidate his views. Hed gone to Stekel wondering whether psychic strains might explain his worsening asthma, but soon was talking about his dissatisfactions with his work and marriage. In his reporting, he started to foreground unconscious urges: the psychological injuries of childhood, repression, frustrated sexual desires.

Feeling the world crashing in around them, he and Frances tracked for themselves how the patterns of public lifea dictators machinations, the betrayal of one nation by anothertranslated into private relations between husbands and wives, parents and children. This was what Virginia Woolf called in Three Guineas (1938) the inseparable interconnection between the tyrannies and servilities of the public and private worlds. The global economic crisis of the Great Depression, John thought, had precipitated his own personal upheaval.

Armed with a psychological framework, the Gunthers dedicated themselves to understanding how the pathologies of world leaders became the stuff of international crises. Gathering information about Stalins family life and Mussolinis marriage, about Atatrks mother fixation, about the emotional makeup of Hitlers henchmen, John broke the rules regarding fit topics for reporting. He put his argument right on the first page of Inside Europe: The fact may be an outrage to reason, but it cannot be denied: unresolved personal conflicts in the lives of various European politicians may contribute to the collapse of our civilization. So strong was the proscription against such disclosures that Gunther thought hed have to publish his book anonymously.

In the end, Gunther signed his name to the book, figuring he didnt want to stay a newspaperman forever anyway. Inside Europe became a sensation: hurriedly reprinted, translated into 14 languages, and banned in Germany, a fact that Gunthers other publishers ballyhooed in their advertising. President Franklin D. Roosevelts son Franklin Jr. took the book on his European honeymoon. The young John F. Kennedy toured the continent with Inside Europe in hand, his guide as he weighed the comparative evils of fascism and communism. The book made Gunther enough money that he could quit his day job as a reporter and devote himself, as hed always wanted, to writing books, novels as well as nonfiction. In September 1936, he, Frances, and Johnny, then 6, moved back to the United States after 12 years abroad.

In the decade that followed, Gunther scored two more publishing hits with his Inside Asia (1939) and Inside Latin America (1941), accompanied General Dwight Eisenhower in the invasion of Sicily, and became the sort of international expert asked to opine on everything from Japanese military strategy to the fortitude of the British home front. FDR invited him to the White House for a tte--tte. He and Frances separated in 1941 and then divorced in 1944, their troubled marriage a microcosm, they both thought, of a world at war. She went on to become an ardent campaigner against the British empire: an Indian nationalista confidant of Jawaharlal Nehrusand then a Zionist, and a leading figure in the American pressure campaigns for both causes.

In the spring of 1946, Gunther was busy writing the book hed planned about democracy, Inside U.S.A., when 16-year-old Johnny was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. The prognosis was grim; radiation therapy began immediately, and the doctors bills piled up. John cried so much that Frances feared hed collapse. But he had to work. Hed barely made a dent in the books projected 50-plus chapters and was running out of money. While Johnny was undergoing treatment, John visited him at noon and in the eveningsFrances was there all afternoonand returned to his office, writing until 1 or 2 a.m. every night. Thank God for the end of daylight savings time, he noted in his diary: It gave him an extra hour to work. The Book-of-the-Month Club had chosen Inside U.S.A. as its selection for June 1947, a guarantee of big sales. To make that deadline, Harper & Brothers was typesetting the book a chapter at a time, as quickly as Gunther finished them.

From the April 1997 issue: Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. on John Gunther and the writing of Inside U.S.A.

He met his deadline, and Inside U.S.A. hit the market with the largest initial print run in the history of American publishing, a half-million copies. Johnny died a month later, on June 30, 1947. At the end of the summer, Gunther put his sons papers in order: his schoolwork, his diaries, the letters he and Frances had exchanged with Johnny when they were away for eight months in 193738 reporting from Asia and, later, when he left for boarding school. John talked with Frances about writing a Johnny book. He arranged the hundreds of condolence letters theyd gottenbrief, embarrassed missives from friends and acquaintances, people never at a loss for what to say, acknowledging that the Gunthers grief was beyond words. Just after Christmas, he started writing.

The book, Gunther decided, would have three parts: his own narrative, then Johnnys lightly edited letters and diaries, and an afterword by Frances. Gunther had been jotting down notes and phrases all along on the colored slips of paper he always kept nearby. An old reporters habit: Hed recorded fragments of conversations, the offhand comments doctors and nurses made, Johnnys wry observations. His subject wouldnt be Johnnys lifethe usual territory of the In Memoriam volumebut how hed endured sickness. He was writing a blow-by-blow account of what happened to Johnnys brain.

It was, Gunther recognized, an unconventional approach. The standard mid-century source on American autobiography counts only 13 titles dealing with illness out of the more than 6,000 memoirs published before 1945. None of those is a chronicle of cancer, the subject of most illness memoirs today. After the Second World War, scientific advances in cancer therapeutics were just starting to extend survival rates, and with the new medical possibilities came a new narrative form, which derived its suspense from the twists and turns of treatment.

Gunther brought the skills of a spectacular newsman to bear on the story, taking the reader right into the situation with him. The call from Deerfield Academy, where Johnny was a junior, had come on an April afternoon in 1946. I think your child has a brain tumor, the doctor had blurted out. Gunther raced to western Massachusetts, picking Frances up in Connecticut on his way from New York. As soon as he saw the look on the doctors faces, he knew there was no hope of a recovery. Three days later, Johnny underwent a six-hour surgery at the Neurological Institute of New York. I got half of it, the surgeon told John.

David J. Linden: A neuroscientist with terminal cancer prepares for death

In the 14 months that followed, the Gunthers consulted more than 30 specialists. They searched for the latest medical miracle. Johnny was the first brain-tumor patient in the United States to be treated with mustard gas, an early form of chemotherapy; Gunther himself delivered the canisters full of the toxic stuff to the hospital. As Johnny grew sicker and sicker, they turned to the refugee physician Max Gerson, who insisted that a diet of fresh vegetables, no salt, no fat, and scant protein could cure cancer. And then, for some reason the doctors couldnt explainwas it the X-ray treatment, the mustard gas, or the diet?the tumor seemingly retreated. I was beside myself with a violent and incredulous joy. Johnny was going to recover after all!

Gunther wrote without euphemism. His metaphors were precise, his descriptions unflinching. The effect of that first surgery was akin to the explosion of a .45-caliber bullet, a doctor told him. He made use of a clinical vocabulary, translating the language of the medical case report: Papilledema, he explained, was swelling of the optic nerve; a ventriculogram required drilling holes through the skull. The surgeons left Johnnys skull open so that the tumor wouldnt be driven inward; the flap of scalp that covered the soft spot was the size of a mans hand. When the tumor began to grow again, a few months after the remission began, the surgeon excavated more than four inches into the brain, unable to find healthy tissue.

The multi-perspective memorial volume was a classic Victorian form, but Death Be Not Proud gave it a new purpose. Because each part struck a different emotional register, together they functioned as a sort of Inside Ustaking the reader into the familys private dynamics to understand how theyd coped. Gunthers tone was restrained and dignified: As to our own emotions I am trying not to write about them. He was reining in his feelings even as he was writing of intimate experiences, exposing just enough to make plain the weight he was carrying. The battle among the doctors over which course of treatment to pursue all but destroyed us. At times, Johnny seemed subconsciously hostile to me as if out of resentment at my good health. Johnny talked about death with Frances, but almost never with John, changing the subject when his father walked into the room.

Johnnys letters and diaries reproduced in the second part of the book bore witness to his character. They filled in the details of his life before the tumor: the affectionate young son writing home from summer camp, the prodigious schoolboy playing chess, experimenting in chemistry and physics. He maintained a chipper tone even after he got sick, valiantly cloaking his fear in humor. I have discovered Utopia here, Johnny wrote to a friend while in the hospital. No athletics, No worries. In his diaries, he admonished himself to make the best use of the time he had left, getting on with his schoolwork and his science projects. He fretted about his parents. In November 1946, as his tumor erupted again, he wrote: Ask parents what you can do to make them happy.

Francess afterword was the most personal and unabashedly emotional of the three parts. She wrote about her relationship with her son, her attempt to create of him a newer kind of human being: an aware person, without fear, and with love. To remake a war-ravaged world required people who cared about others, and Frances had started with her son. Shed reared him to become a cooperative rather than competitive person. But now that he was dead, she was consumed by guilt. She felt remorse about sending Johnny to boarding school; she regretted the divorce: I wished we had loved Johnny more when he was alive.

In 1949, the year that Death Be Not Proud was published, new ideas about both the individual and collective psyche were taking root. Rebuilding after the Second World War would require more than simply clearing away the bomb rubble and restarting industry; for the fragile peace to hold, a psychological reconstruction was imperative. President Harry Truman sent a message of encouragement to be read aloud at the American Psychiatric Associations annual meeting. The greatest prerequisite for peace, he observed, must be sanitysanity in its broadest sense, which permits clear thinking on the part of all citizens. To foster a sane and healthy postwar society, people would need to learn how to express the emotions theyd kept bottled up.

Caitlin Flanagan: The things I would never do

This was the context in which Death Be Not Proud caught fire. The old strictures on self-revelation that had hemmed in Fitzgerald hadnt entirely disappeared. According to the Hartford Times book critic, Gunthers book was just as breathtaking and shocking as would be a similar confession from a new neighbor, a complete stranger, who suddenly told you his familys most secret tragedy. But for every critic who objected to Gunthers almost indecent disclosures or the memoirs nauseating details, many more applauded its frankness and bravery. To read it was to undergo a magnificent human experience, wrote the Chicago Tribunes influential critic Fanny Butcher.

For John Donne, the phrase Death be not proud had conveyed a religious belief in immortality. Death, thou shalt die, Donne had written: One short sleep past, we wake eternally. Death Be Not Proud, by contrast, represented a bid for a secular afterlife, a testament to Johnnys courage. As much as it was about one boy, it was also about the worth of the individual writ large. In their sons illness, the Gunthers saw the same sort of dynamic that had haunted them in Europeit was as if the pattern of Johnnys illness were symbolic of so much of the conflict and torture of the external world. The battle between Johnnys fine mind and the savagery of the tumor was like the fight theyd witnessed in fascist Vienna and Berlin: A primitive to-the-death struggle of reason against violence, reason against disruption, reason against brute unthinking force.

To insist on the value of a single existence was to strike back at that shocking disregard for human life. Gunthers memoir was a literary counterpart to the work then under way in international law, where new concepts of human rights were being invented. As Death Be Not Proud went to press in the fall of 1948, delegates at the recently founded United Nations were debating the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That document proclaimed an inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and, still more novel, to develop fully ones own personality. After half a century of war and genocide that had claimed by conservative estimates more than 70 million lives, the defenders of the individual were gaining the upper hand.

The reading public received the book just that way. Thank God there are people like you who still realize the infinite value of one soul when the world is devising new means of mass killing, one woman wrote to Frances. Death Be Not Proud became an instant best seller. In American college towns as in county seats, it topped the list of the books that patrons requested in public libraries. As soon as the first excerpts appeared in Ladies Home Journal, then one of the largest-circulation magazines in the United States, the Gunthers found themselves deluged with letters. Readers thanked them for having the courage to put their own hearts into print. Some correspondents took the Gunthers relative openness about their divorce as an invitation to comment, and urged the couple to reconcile.

By far the largest number of letters, and there were thousands of them, came from grieving parents. Their children had died of meningitis, leukemia, or glioma; their sons had been killed in action in Germany or died in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. Mostly mothers wrote, but occasionally fathers did too. Some unburdened themselves at great length, filling pages and pages, as though they hadnt been able to talk to anyone. A ministers attempt at consolationWe know it must be for the best. God doesnt make mistakeshad proved no comfort at all. These parents blamed themselves, as Frances had. They felt guilty that they couldnt afford more treatments and private doctors, or they regretted subjecting their children to painful operations. Dont you ever feel bitter? they asked the Gunthers. I expect you did, but I suppose that doesnt help does it?

These letters comprise an astonishing archive of the repressed grief in mid-20th-century America. Readers peeled pictures of their loved ones out of photograph albums, to enclose with their letters. A mother whose baby had died of pneumonia cut A Word From Frances out of the book and put it in her Bible with her babys footprints. One father ordered 20 copies of Death Be Not Proud to send to his relatives; his son had polio. Gunther had put their familys suffering into words. In turn, readers adopted his manner of narrating the course of an illness, telling him their stories, interspersing the clinical details with everyday accounts of how theyd tried to cope. It was as if hed given them not just permission but a template for relating their experiences.

Beginning in the late 1950s, a different set of readersreaders like my mothertook up Gunthers book. English teachers assigned Death Be Not Proud; the tribute to selfless bravery fit well on civics syllabi too. It became a popular selection for teen book clubs. Young readers wrote to Gunther in increasing numbers. They wished theyd known Johnny: He was the sort of boy theyd like to befriend or, someday, marry. They saw him as a model against which their own character should be measured, certain that they fell far short of his example. I only wish that I could be half the person Johnny was! wrote one high-school girl from Scarsdale, New York.

Gunthers teenage readers recognized Death Be Not Prouds redemptive message. It was a book about an individual whose selflessness was his most salient feature. As an eighth-grade boy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, put it, His fight for life was not only for his mortal body but the lives of millions of people. But Johnnys wasnt the self-sacrifice of a Christ figure or the hardened courage of a soldier. It was something altogether more recognizable to young readers. Students put themselves in the shoes of Johnny, Frances, or John. Teachers encouraged that sympathetic identification by asking their pupils to write essays from the perspective of one of the characters in the book.

And yet, adolescents were so gripped by Death Be Not Proud precisely because it wasnt fiction. Like Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, which was translated into English in 1952, Gunthers memoir demonstrated how life had outpaced fiction, as millions of people all over the world, in the words of one Connecticut girl, shared in the tragedy of your sons death. It wasnt like the average book, she added, perhaps because this really happened. Teenagers requested photos of Johnny, details of his science experiments, more information about the couples divorce. Some people would say, Oh, its only a story, dont let it bother you, one reader wrote; but when you realize that it actually took place, it makes a person stop and think.

Gunthers young readers were the Baby Boomers, born into the prosperity and stability of a postwar world. Some of them later marched on Washington, protested the war in Vietnam, and eventually popularized the slogan The personal is political, an idea that owed much to the slippage between geopolitics and inner life that Gunther and his generation had first chronicled. Youth movements dont spend much time paying homage to their elders, and the rebels of the 1960s were no exception. But what the Boomers had learned from their transgressive 1930s forebears was that repression had to be combatted by openness and that no subject was beyond words.

Read: Why writing about bodies is vital

For this, at least in part, they had a once ubiquitous, now largely forgotten reporter and his ex-wife to thank. In 1926, Virginia Woolf had lamented how few writers had taken on the subject of illness. Sickness, she wrote, ought to be among the prime themes of literature, alongside love, warfare, and jealousy. John Gunther paved a way to talk about cancer and death in public, about divorce, pain, and parental remorse. He did so precisely because he was a reporter whod taken from the hellish world of the 1930s and 40s a conviction that the individual needed defending and that the full range of human experiences had to be told. In the next decades, when telling all became the norm, some part of that original impetus got lost, as the imperative to tend to the common good faded. If the I became detached from the we, that was above all else a measure of the late 20th centurys good fortune.

This article appears in the April 2022 print edition with the headline The Man Who Told All. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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How John Gunther's 'Death Be Not Proud' Inaugurated an American Genre - The Atlantic

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And a Happy Birthday shout-out to Andy Blankenbuehler, who turns 52 today!

Blankenbuehler was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and is a 1988 graduate of St. Xavier High School and 1984 graduate of Nativity School in Cincinnati. He received his bachelor's degree from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.

As a performer, he has appeared on Broadway in many musicals, from Guys and Dolls (1992-1995) to Fosse (1999-2001).

His Broadway work as a choreographer includes the musicals In the Heights (2007-08) and 9 to 5 (2008-09). He won the Tony Award and Drama Desk Award for his choreography for In the Heights. Other New York work includes choreography for the "Broadway By The Year:1930, 1938 and 1978" series, and the City Center Encores! productions of The Apple Tree (2006) and The Wiz (2009). He is the director and choreographer of Bring It On: The Musical, written by Jeff Whitty, with music by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Tom Kitt and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Amanda Green, which premiered at the Alliance Theatre, Atlanta, Georgia, on January 16, 2011. This production also performed at the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles where Blankenbuehler won the 2011 L.A. Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Choreography.

Additionally, Blankenbuehler choreographed the Frank Wildhorn world premiere production of Waiting for the Moon. The show featured 6 full-length dance sequences, including one that lasted over 10 minutes. He was nominated for a Barrymore Award for Choreographing the show.

Blankenbuehler has choreographed for Bette Midler and directed, choreographed, and co-conceived the production "Nights On Broadway" at Caesars Palace.

Blankenbuehler appears briefly in the 2008 documentary "Every Little Step" about the 2006 Broadway revival of A Chorus Line, with his Polaroid shown as one of the people being cut from a callback for the show.

He choreographed the 2012 Broadway revival of Annie. He is the choreographer for the musical Hamilton (2015), both Off-Broadway and on Broadway. He received a special 2015 Drama Desk Award for Hamilton. His choreography for Hamilton won the Tony Award for Best Choreography in 2016.

He both directed and choreographed a new musical, Bandstand, which premiered at the Paper Mill Playhouse (New Jersey) in October 2015. The music is by Richard Oberacker and book and lyrics by Robert Taylor and Oberacker. He directed and choreographed a developmental lab of this musical in August and September 2014, then titled Bandstand: A Musical.

In 2016, Blankenbuehler choreographed the revival of the movie Dirty Dancing starring Abigail Breslin and Shane Harper. He also choreographed the revival of the Broadway musical Cats with previews beginning July 14 and an August 2 opening.

See you bright and early tomorrow, BroadwayWorld!

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Wake Up With 3/7: Taron Egerton Collapses Onstage, and More - Broadway World