Arts

On Point, on Top, in Pain
By MANOHLA DARGIS

A witchy brew of madness and cunning, “Black Swan” tells the story of a ballerina who aches, with battered feet and an increasingly crowded head, to break out of the corps. Played by Natalie Portman in a smashing, bruising, wholly committed performance, the young dancer, Nina, looks more like a child than a woman, her flesh as undernourished as her mind. When she goes to bed at night, a nearby jewelry box tinkling “Swan Lake,” a crowd of stuffed animals watches over her, longtime companions that — as Nina and this dementedly entertaining film grow more unhinged — begin to look more like jailers than friends.

Crammed with twins — lookalikes, mirrored images, doppelgängers — the story follows that of the “Swan Lake” ballet in broad, gradually warped strokes. It opens with the artistic director of a fictional New York ballet company, Thomas (Vincent Cassel), announcing that the new season will begin with a “visceral and real” version of that old favorite. To that end he dumps his prima ballerina, Beth (Winona Ryder), and picks Nina to dance the dual role of the swan queen (an enchanted woman in bird form) and her villainous black twin. But as the pressure builds, things fall apart, or Nina does. She stumbles out of a spin and begins scratching at her skin. One day she strips a piece from her finger as lightly as if she were peeling a banana.

Part tortured-artist drama, “Black Swan” looks like a tony art-house entertainment. (Hey, there’s Lincoln Center!) But what gives it a jolt is its giddy, sometimes sleazy exploitation-cinema savvy. The director Darren Aronofsky is a well-schooled cinéaste, and in “Black Swan” he riffs on Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet masterpiece, “The Red Shoes,” and the pair’s “Black Narcissus,” among other influences. But it’s also likely that Mr. Aronofsky, who was born in 1969 and grew up in Brooklyn, frequented Times Square when it was known as the deuce and lined with movie palaces playing the best and worst in trash cinema. I bet he also caught a few episodes of the “Red Shoe Diaries” on cable.

That isn’t a knock. One of the pleasures of “Black Swan” is its lack of reverence toward the rarefied world of ballet, which to outsiders can look as lively as a crypt. Mr. Aronofsky makes this world (or his version of it) exciting partly by pulling back the velvet curtains and showing you the sacrifices and crushingly hard work that goes into creating beautiful dances. Nina doesn’t just pirouette prettily, she also cracks her damaged toes (the sound design picking up every crackle and crunch) and sticks her fingers down her throat to vomit up her food. Mostly, though, she trains hard, hammering her toe shoes into floor much as Jake La Motta pounded his fists into flesh. She’s a contender, but also a martyr to her art.

Mr. Aronofsky is happy to see her bleed. A filmmaker who likes to play around with genre while mixing the highbrow with the lowdown and dirty, he has built a small, vivid catalog by exploring human extremes with wildly uneven degrees of visual wow, sensitivity and intelligence. He trawled the lower depths in “Requiem for a Dream” and struggled to scale the metaphysical heights with “The Fountain,” a fable about eternal (as in, when will it end?) love. For his previous movie, “The Wrestler,” he proved his commercial smarts by taking Mickey Rourke out of deep freeze and dusting off a comeback story that was old when Wallace Beery wiped Jackie Cooper’s runny nose with the script for “The Champ.”

“Black Swan,” by contrast, surprises despite its lusty or rather sluttish predilection for clichés, which include the requisitely demanding impresario (Mr. Cassel makes a model cock of the walk) and Nina’s ballerina rival, Lily (Mila Kunis, as a succulent, borderline rancid peach). But, oh, what Mr. Aronofsky does with those clichés, which he embraces, exploits and, by a squeak, finally transcends.

Such is his faith in his ability to surmount the obvious (and the lethally blunt) that he turns Nina’s mother, Erica (a terrific Barbara Hershey), into a smother-mother who out-crazies Faye Dunaway’s Joan Crawford in the mommy dearest department. You don’t know whether to laugh or shriek (both are reasonable responses), and it is this uncertainty and at times delicious unease that proves to be Mr. Aronofsky’s sweet spot.

It’s easy to read “Black Swan” as a gloss on the artistic pursuit of the ideal. But take another look, and you see that Mr. Aronofsky is simultaneously telling that story straight, playing with the suffering-artist stereotype and having his nasty way with Nina, burdening her with trippy psychodrama and letting her run wild in a sexcapade that will soon be in heavy rotation on the Web. The screenplay, by Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, invites pop-psychological interpretations about women who self-mutilate while striving for their perfect selves, a description that seems to fit Nina. But such a reading only flattens a film that from scene to scene is deadly serious, downright goofy and by turns shocking, funny and touching.

With “Black Swan” Mr. Aronofsky has found a surprisingly accommodating vehicle for his preoccupations, including bodies in pain, and his ever more refined technique. Here, working with his usual cinematographer, Matthew Libatique, and largely shooting hand-held in both super-16-millimeter film and digital, Mr. Aronofsky opts for grit over gloss, an ideal strategy for a story with a harsh underbelly. Hand-held cinematography can be lazy shorthand for “reality” (as if life happens in shaky-cam), but here the hand-held visuals work because of their intimacy. The influence of the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne can be seen in the close, tag-along shots of Nina’s head as she hurries off, a point of view that brings you within breathing, at times panting, distance of a character whose behavior can be off-putting.

Though it had its moments, “The Wrestler” felt like the work of a director who, after proving his street bona fides and bombing at the box office, decided to try some pandering. It worked: Mr. Rourke was rediscovered, and Mr. Aronofsky’s future was salvaged, in part because he had closed the distance between the fallen star played by Mr. Rourke and the one he himself had become. Ms. Portman’s performance in “Black Swan” is more art than autobiography, and as a consequence more honest, but because it’s so demandingly physical the lines that usually divide actresses from their characters are also blurred. This is, after all, Ms. Portman’s own thin body on display, her jutting chest bones as sharply defined as a picket fence.

Although Mr. Aronofsky focuses on her head, shoulders and arms, mostly avoiding long shots that might betray a lack of technique, Ms. Portman does most of her own dancing (and plausibly, at least to this ballet naïf). The vision of Ms. Portman’s own body straining with so much tremulous, tremendous effort, her pale arms fluttering in desperation, grounds the story in the real, as do the totemic Lincoln Center buildings, the clattering subway and the grubby, claustrophobic apartment Nina shares with her mother. Together they create the solid foundation of truth that makes the slow-creeping hallucinatory flights of fantasy all the more jolting and powerful. Much like the new version of “Swan Lake” that Thomas creates, “Black Swan” is visceral and real even while it’s one delirious, phantasmagoric freakout.

“Black Swan” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Bedroom gymnastics and graphic violence.

BLACK SWAN

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Darren Aronofsky; written by Mark Heyman, Andrés Heinz and John McLaughlin, based on a story by Mr. Heinz; director of photography, Matthew Libatique; edited by Andrew Weisblum; music by Clint Mansell; ballet choreography by Benjamin Millepied; production design by Thérèse DePrez; costumes by Amy Westcott, ballet costumes by Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte; produced by Mike Medavoy, Arnold W. Messer, Brian Oliver and Scott Franklin; released by Fox Searchlight Pictures. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes.

WITH: Natalie Portman (Nina Sayers/the Swan Queen), Vincent Cassel (Thomas Leroy/the Gentleman), Mila Kunis (Lily/the Black Swan), Barbara Hershey (Erica Sayers/the Queen) and Winona Ryder (Beth Macintyre/the Dying Swan).
Star Tenor Starts a Tour, Minus the Muppets
By STEVE SMITH

Champagne flowed at Madison Square Garden on Thursday night, poured into plastic stemware at tables lining the hallways and tipped by well-dressed patrons. Taking in the festive bustle, you could imagine that you were at a gala opening, were it not for a dull stale-beer aroma that never entirely goes away. Still, for the latest appearance of the superstar Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli, the Garden put on airs.

The occasion was the start of Mr. Bocelli’s latest American tour, “My Christmas,” a six-stop excursion celebrating his best-selling 2009 CD of sacred and secular Christmas fare. But inside the arena, you noticed wide patches of empty seats among the thousands of eager fans present.

Has Mr. Bocelli’s star dipped? Unlikely. “My Christmas” has sold more than two million copies in the United States. Is the economy too soft to support a tour with prime seats priced at nearly $380? Possibly. Before the show started, I thumbed through Twitter to gauge the buzz. There was plenty, most of it about Mr. Bocelli’s new PBS television special, also called “My Christmas,” which was showing in a rerun at that very minute.

Mr. Bocelli, you were reminded, is ubiquitous.

Home viewers were treated to the sight of Mr. Bocelli singing with Mary J. Blige and the Muppets. Alas, those guests were missing here; instead, Mr. Bocelli was joined by a large, unnamed orchestra and chorus, efficiently conducted by Eugene Kohn.

The first half of Mr. Bocelli’s program was devoted to straightforward classical and opera selections. As Mr. Bocelli sang “Where’er You Walk” from Handel’s “Semele,” on a huge screen overhead he rode a horse across a grassy plain, and walked hand in hand with his wife down a tree-lined path.

Mr. Bocelli was in his element: his voice comfortably upholstered with amplification, his audience made up of devotees. Yet curiously, his set lurched in fits and starts, each rousing Verdi or Puccini aria dispatched with evident concentration and sincerity, followed by awkward inertia until the next selection commenced.

Repeatedly he ceded the stage to guests, who were met with polite applause. Anna Tifu, a Sardinian violinist, made fleet, scrappy work of a fantasy on themes from Bizet’s “Carmen.” Alexia Voulgaridou, a commendable Greek soprano, sang the “Jewel Song” from Gounod’s “Faust” expressively and played a touching foil to Mr. Bocelli in an extended sequence from Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” (with snippets from a staged “Butterfly,” starring Mr. Bocelli, projected overhead).

Mr. Bocelli seemed to relax during the second set, singing with greater ease and expressiveness in sentimental Neapolitan songs and selections from “My Christmas.” Guests fared better as well. Heather Headley’s megawatt smile warmed and lubricated her pliant tone in a duet version of “Blue Christmas.” And student singers from the Adderley School of the Performing Arts in Santa Barbara, Calif., were irresistible in “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

Santa failed to appear, but no matter: Mr. Bocelli had roused his admirers to a fever pitch by the end of his show, and he sustained that momentum through three standard encores: “My Prayer,” with Ms. Headley; “Time to Say Goodbye,” with Ms. Voulgaridou and Ms. Tifu; and a heartfelt “Nessun Dorma” from Puccini’s “Turandot.”

Andrea Bocelli performs on Saturday at the Prudential Center in Newark; (800) 745-3000, prucenter.com.
Last Supper’ for the Laptop Generation
By RANDY KENNEDY

IF you had tied on a blindfold, suspended disbelief and allowed yourself to be carried last week to a particular location just off Park Avenue near 66th Street, your reopened eyes would have had trouble telling that they were not inside the Santa Maria delle Grazie monastery in Milan, looking at a sight everyone knows and few have actually seen: a magisterial painting of 13 enrobed men seated oddly on one side of a long dinner table.

Even many experts would not have been able to distinguish the wall mural in front of them from the real one, Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” that “most beautiful and marvelous work,” as Vasari described it, doomed to crumble almost from the minute its tempera dried.

But a quick walk around this painting would have revealed a few anachronisms. On the back side the painting’s cracked, ancient-seeming plaster was mounted not on quattrocento brick but on Alucore, the kind of aluminum sheeting used for floors in jetliners. In front a ruler-straight seam was running through the head of St. James, a problem that a man high in the basket of a hydraulic cherry picker was trying to correct with a small paintbrush. That he and many of the workers with him spoke Italian — “Bene! Bene!” one called out from below — lent a little verisimilitude. But the view around them was not of a church from Milan’s gilded age. It was a view bequeathed by another gilded age, the 19th century one that gave rise to the Park Avenue Armory, in whose vast drill hall all this art-historical re-enacting was taking place. In other words, the traveling Peter Greenaway painting-cinema-lecture-installation-whatever-it-might-be extravaganza had finally come to town.

Beginning Friday and continuing through Jan. 6 Mr. Greenaway, the provocative British filmmaker, along with an international crew of theatrical producers, video experts and art makers will present, for the first time in America, the kind of splashy multimedia art exhibition he has shown to huge, appreciative audiences — and not a few irritated art scholars — around the world for three years now. The show inaugurates the first full season of programming by the Park Avenue Armory since it began reinventing itself as an unconventional arts center three years ago.

Mr. Greenaway’s exhibition, born of his desire to revive a visual literacy he believes modern eyes have lost when looking at paintings, enlists props, lights, advanced digital projectors, towering screens, recorded music, voice-overs, precise copies of paintings (though sometimes the real ones) and practically every other theatrical aid besides smoke machines and interpretive dancers in the cause of trying to bring masterpieces of Western art to life.

The exhibitions began in 2006 as an experiment, with projections onto the canvas of the real “Night Watch,” Rembrandt’s masterpiece at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Mr. Greenaway, 68, lives and is revered enough to have received permission to experiment with such a Dutch national treasure. (He was yelled at nonetheless by some viewers when the show opened. “To them, I suppose I was trying to put a fifth leg on a four-legged cat,” he recalled in an interview.)

The idea took off, and since then has involved the real “Last Supper,” onto which Mr. Greenway superimposed projections for one night in 2008; an exhibition with a replica of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana” last year in Venice; and two more “Last Supper” shows, in Milan and Melbourne, using the replica of the “Last Supper” that was recently shipped from Spain to New York in six panels.

A week ago inside the armory drill hall workers from Change Performing Arts, a Milanese theatrical production company, began building a life-size re-creation — its proportions exact to within millimeters — of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, where “The Last Supper” was completed by Leonardo in 1498 after several years of work.

The copy of the painting for the Greenaway show was made 510 years later in far less time, about five weeks, by a company called Factum Arte, based in Madrid and London, a pioneer in the use of high-resolution photography and three-dimensional scanning to recreate paintings and sculpture so precisely that it is now working, at the request of scholars and conservators, on projects involving paintings by Caravaggio and several tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The “Last Supper” replica — which the company prefers to call a clone, though it was made with borrowed photographic data less precise than the company generally uses — was “painted” by an inkjet printer that slowly covered panels of plaster, much like the kind Leonardo worked on, with paint that mimics the original but is designed to last much longer. (Leonardo used an experimental tempera mixture on dry plaster that proved disastrously fragile.)

By Thanksgiving the only major element of the production inside the drill hall that had not yet arrived was Mr. Greenaway himself. There were last-minute visa problems, caused partly by an overstuffed passport. But by Saturday morning he had made it and, dressed in what seems to be an unvarying uniform — dark pinstriped suit, dark shirt and dark knotted scarf — he was in constant motion in a swirl of consulting producers and workers, looking a little like the harried director Guido Anselmi in “8 ½” by Fellini, one of Mr. Greenaway’s heroes.

“It looks bigger than I thought it would, but that’s a pleasant surprise,” he said, craning his neck to take in the replica of the refectory, which looked like a kind of Renaissance spacecraft under repair beneath the hangarlike armory roof, with lots of room to spare (even with the addition of a huge second structure evoking an Italian piazza, where another part of the half-hour production projects images of Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana,” recreating the 2009 exhibition in Venice).

Over a cup of untouched tomato soup several hours later Mr. Greenaway talked about how his interest in creating these shows grew not only out of his own early training as a painter and his desire to use film for primarily painterly purposes. He has often described “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover” from 1989, probably his best-known movie and one that shocked audiences at the time, as being much more about color than about its ostensible themes of sex, death and cannibalism.

The motivation grew even more out of his waning interest in cinema, whose death he has been proclaiming loudly for more than a decade, even as he continued to make movies. In his view the motion picture, around for little more than a century, has exhausted its possibilities as an evolving art form and lost its hold on the imaginations of a Web-connected populace. What began to obsess him was the idea of seeing what advanced 21st-century movie technology (“The tools of cinema are now wasted on cinema,” he said) could do if harnessed to a few thousand years of its two-dimensional forefather, Western painting.

“On a basic level, if it itches, you have to scratch it,” he said. “So if I complain that cinema is bad, then I’ve got to try to put something back in its place.”

Of the paintings he has volunteered for this mission so far, and those on his wish list — among them, “Guernica” by Picasso; a major Jackson Pollock drip painting at the Museum of Modern Art; the Sistine ceiling as perhaps a grand final act — he said: “We don’t turn them into films. They’re not animated works of art. They’re not cartoons. But we can change the color, and we can change the contrast, and we can change the chiaroscuro, and by inference we can make these paintings cinematic in a curious way.”

A few days later, pacing pensively during a run-through of the production — a raised table evoking the “Last Supper” dinner table glowed ominously red and then blindingly white; Mr. Greenaway’s own basso profundo boomed forth like the voice of God. Projections of painting details wheeled vertiginously around a few onlookers — he said he was a little worried that the whole thing was dragging a bit, like a slow episode of “Masterpiece Classic.”

“It’s also my responsibility here to introduce notions of legitimate entertainment,” he said.

But Adam Lowe, the founder of Factum Arte and the creator of the “Last Supper” replica, stood by smiling, saying that he cared only about the theoretical approval of one viewer: a restless artist himself, who ultimately loved experimenting more than painting. “And if he were here today,” he said, “I think Leonardo would be the happiest man in the world.”
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December 2, 2010
Cracking Open a Holiday Classic

STROLL down Fifth Avenue this month, or along an aisle at Target, or through any other shopping establishment for that matter, and you will inevitably hear Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker.” The music is so ingrained in the Christmas routine that it can be hard to hear it amid the holiday hubbub. But that is what Mark Morris wants audiences to do with his creation, “The Hard Nut.”

For the first time in eight years Mr. Morris’s production, which had its premiere in 1991, is returning to the company’s home borough with performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, beginning next Friday. Mr. Morris’s version, based on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s dark tale, plays with traditional gender roles and skips the hordes of adorable children onstage in favor of a chamber-size troupe that puts the focus on the dancing and the score.

In his brightly decorated office in the dance center named after him in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, Mr. Morris spoke this week with Julie Bloom about reclaiming Tchaikovsky’s music, his own role onstage and why “The Nutcracker” is such an American staple. (It’s not what you think.) A condensed version of the conversation follows.

Q. What about the music first attracted you to “The Nutcracker?”

A. I heard the score through complete for the first time when I was probably 15 or 16 — because most versions mess with the music in some way — you know, everybody cuts something. So my point was to do the beautiful, gorgeous score through, beginning to end, with as much as the metronome markings by Tchaikovsky as I could. And to really appreciate the incredible music of Act I, which people usually sleep through. It’s amazing.

My point also was to get over my prejudice against the music from growing up as a dancer. You hear it as a Christmas shopper; every commercial has the “Sugar Plum”; it’s terrible. So if you grow up as a dancer, it’s terrifying, it’s numbing. It’s a sedative. And it’s not. It’s gorgeous, gorgeous music.

Q. What are some of your favorite sections of the score?

A. The party scene, which is extremely, in our production, active and rigorous and complicated. But the music is through composed, it keeps interrupting itself, new ideas keep entering and cutting things short. It’s not in discrete pieces like the second act is, with all the national dances. The first one has so many tones and modes in it emotionally that it never seemed to me that it should be about how children should behave in an ideal world of the late 19th century. The music is very much darker, and stranger and a little bit hostile. Drosselmeier is not everybody’s friend. Read the Hoffmann.

And then something like the Arabian number is way too slow in most productions, and so is the Tarantella, or it’s deleted, or the coda of the Sugar Plum. The coda of that music, which I love, that’s shocking, weird music.

Q. What did you like about the Hoffmann story?

A. The story within, that’s why it’s called “The Hard Nut,” it’s not a joke title. It’s the name of the story that Drosselmeier tells her [Marie, the heroine]. To me that makes way more sense, to go around the world and find the nut that cures her ugliness. It’s an actual story instead of Act I being, ‘Aren’t children adorable?’ and Act II being, ‘Here, let’s do some dances for you,’ even though you’re 9, and it won’t be that interesting for you, and you’re watching from the back anyway.’ Also, I did it with around 35 people instead of 135 people, so it’s a different thing.

Let me just tell you, kids love it. This piece being around so long, 20 years, it means that in Berkeley, where we’ve done it a lot, people are now bringing their children. That’s the first “Nutcracker” they saw.

Q. Have you discovered anything new in the music over the years?

A. I had a couple of sessions of looking at conducting it myself, with the help of some colleagues at Tanglewood. I had a string quartet and a pianist and my wonderful coach, Stefan Asbury. And we had a couple of sessions of that, we went all the way through the score, with me conducting, and it’s hard. There are some things that you learn. Something like the battle scene, it just turns into a melee, and it’s all noisy and funny and laughy, but the music is astonishingly advanced. There are so many ideas, there are different perceived rhythms and keys, and there are reminders and there’s foreboding, prefiguring stuff that is going to come later.

Q. Would you want to conduct it one day?

A. I’ve been thinking about it. Not this year. I hope some day that I may be qualified to conduct it.

Q. Are you looking forward to performing?

A. Some people had no idea I was in it, and I’ve been in, like, every single performance. Sorry if you missed me; that means I was a good actor. This year I got a promotion. I’m Dr. Stahlbaum. I’m not the inebriated party guest. I’m just learning that. It’s a new part for me.

Q. Can you talk a little about the “Waltz of the Flowers”?

A. I choreographed a lot of it while I was at Jacob’s Pillow with whoever in my company wasn’t teaching that day and I made up a new “Waltz of the Flowers” every day. I generated waltz material based on vegetation and flowers and the National Geographic Channel, which didn’t exist yet. It’s a bunch of different things. It’s predatory and it’s delicate and it’s sort of baroque. And it’s a corsage and it’s rotting fruit, and I love that. And it’s not all women, because flowers aren’t like that.

Q. There’s a lot of humor. Were you trying to subvert some of the elements of a classic “Nutcracker”?

A. Mine is fully classical; it’s more classical structurally and compositionally than a lot of classical ballets. I love a good “Nutcracker” that I didn’t make up better than anyone else, I love this stuff. It’s not a sendup. It’s a perfectly legitimate version with virtuosic dancing, and of course there’s funny stuff, and scary stuff and sexy stuff and, it’s sad.

Q. Why do you think “The Nutcracker” is such an American staple?

A. I think it’s an industry, so if you can pay the bills for the rest of the year from a few weeks of “Nutcracker,” congratulations. If, sadly, that’s the only thing that draws customers, then you have to relook at everything that you do the rest of the year. Our “Nutcracker” does not pay for the rest of the year. It’s an expensive production. We use a children’s choir instead of a synthesizer. You might as well use robot dancers and save money all the way around.

Q. Are there particular recordings that you’re fond of?

A. There’s a great Gergiev performance recently that’s beautiful, gigantic and super Russian crazy. But the Michael Tilson Thomas one is my favorite. That one from years ago has great mystery to it, and he uses toy instruments in the battle scene, and it’s very beautiful and haunting. But my favorite “Nutcracker” that’s not mine is the “Nutcracker Suite” from “Fantasia.” Whether Balanchine had something to do with it or not, we don’t know, but it’s exquisite, it’s the greatest. If it can be as magic as that, then hooray.

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Where Alcoholism Drinks in the Laughs
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

Television has a drinking problem.

And not only because David Hasselhoff’s new reality series on A&E, “The Hasselhoffs,” breezes over his alcoholism as if it were just another quirky passage in a colorful Hollywood career. On the premiere episode on Sunday Mr. Hasselhoff, the former star of “Knight Rider” and “Baywatch,” says that the infamous 2007 YouTube video that showed him lying blind drunk, trying to eat a Wendy’s meal off the floor, was a wake-up call that “led me to quit drinking.” He adds waggishly, “But I’m still addicted to cheeseburgers.”

This reality show isn’t about a reformed alcoholic struggling to stay sober; it’s another goofy Kardashian-ish showcase for an unreformed show-business addict who is willing to put everything, including his two daughters, on display. The blithe way Mr. Hasselhoff finesses his image problem might have been a problem in the past, but nowadays jokes about serious drinking aren’t taboo, they are de rigueur.

People booze it up more wantonly on television than ever before, but there is an element of denial in even the most extreme depictions. In real life drinking is fun until it’s not. Most television shows can’t deal with that kind of contradiction. Alcohol is depicted as either fun, as in the red wine fests on the ABC sitcom “Cougar Town,” or it’s a life-destroying scourge that requires drastic measures, as on “Intervention” on A&E or “Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew,” which returned last week on VH1 for a fourth season. Basically, television presents a conflicted, all-or-nothing portrait that isn’t realistic so much as it is a reflection of the American love-hate relationship with liquor — all or Prohibition.

Naturally, the few series that have a more sober take on drinking aren’t reality shows. “Jersey Shore” celebrates fall-down drunkenness; the puking and fighting that ensue are all part of the scene. (Arrests of cast members mostly seem to happen between seasons.) The same is true of “Bad Girls Club” and “The Real Housewives” franchise.

Inebriation on network television is a little like masturbation: a once-taboo topic that is now joked about so much that it’s almost a cliché.

“Mad Men” on AMC began by romanticizing the free-flowing martinis and manhattans of the early 1960s and then last season upended the drinks cart with a searing “Lost Weekend” look at the less savory long-term effects. “Mad Men” is to the cocktail hour what the History channel is to D-Day, but it’s also one of the few series that looks at both the pleasures and perils of drinking, without making it all end in A.A. or on the coroner’s slab. And it’s the obvious exception.

A more surprising one is “Two and a Half Men” on CBS. It’s a conventional sitcom that stars Charlie Sheen as an only slightly fictionalized version of himself: Charlie Harper, a dissipated playboy with a Malibu beach house. It’s a show that makes light of heavy drinking, but with a less lyrical tone than most.

When the show began in 2003, Charlie was more of a roué than a lush. Perhaps partly because of the star’s well-publicized record of arrests, substance abuse and rehab, the show’s writers have steadily painted his character’s drinking in harsher colors; he was a peacock, now he is mostly pathetic.

In a recent episode Charlie was flailing on the far side of Dean Martin drunk, staggering so much his brother put a biking helmet on his head. When told the new maid was given detailed instructions, Charlie says with a slur, “Did you tell her to roll me over on my stomach, so I don’t choke on my own vomit?” Later the new maid wonders if she should have made his bed with plastic sheets.

Other sitcoms mine the comedy of drinking without worrying too much about the morning after. Happy hour never ends on “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” an FX comedy set in a bar that pushes the extremes of political incorrectness, and among other things references drinking games, blackouts and blackout sex. But so do network shows like “How I Met Your Mother” and “Cougar Town.”

Comedy wasn’t always so buzzed. The characters on “Friends” met at a coffee shop; on “Seinfeld” it was in a diner. Even on “Cheers,” a sitcom which began in 1982 and was set in a Boston bar, few of the characters did much drinking. The bar owner, Sam (Ted Danson), was a recovering alcoholic; with the exception of Norm, Sam’s friends showed up for the company, not the beer.

“Sex and the City” put the cosmopolitan on the menu and guzzling girlfriends on the map. “Will & Grace” brought to the mix Karen (Megan Mullally), the pill-popping, vodka-swilling sidekick.

Nowadays it’s the heroines, not just the sidekicks, who swim in an endless sea of chardonnay and pinot noir. Jules (Courteney Cox) and her friends in “Cougar Town” tipple almost around the clock. (It helps that her boyfriend owns a bar.) In a recent episode Jules held a memorial service for her favorite (but now broken) oversized wine glass, Joe, which, as she puts it, “was always here when I needed him.”

Jules and her friends are a little like the champers-guzzling heroines of the British sitcom “Absolutely Fabulous.” But unlike those middle-aged women who wore their debauchery on their faces, Jules and her friends are slender, taut jawed and dewily wrinkle free: boozy suburban sybarites who look like vegan yoga babes at a spa getaway.

It could be that the vanity of American performers — or the tyranny of Hollywood standards — prevents actresses from looking the part.

But a disconnect between cause and effect is inevitable in a culture that wallows in fantasy and favors reality television over realism. Or, as Mr. Hasselhoff tells his eldest daughter in the premiere, “You gotta love a good rehab joke.”
Visual Culture Out of Africa
By ROBERTA SMITH

Africa is everywhere, so pervasive in our lives that we barely see it. Since it is in all likelihood the continent where human evolution began, it is literally in the bloodstream of everyone. DNA aside, huge portions of everyday life and cultural achievement are unthinkable without Africa.

What would Modern art be like if Matisse had never gone to Morocco or if he, Picasso and the German Expressionists had never set eyes on the sculptural innovations of sub-Saharan Africa? Very hard to say. And popular music? Around the world, it incorporates sounds and rhythms that originated in Africa. More locally, jazz — not Abstract Expressionism — was the first American art form of international stature.

“The Global Africa Project” at the Museum of Arts & Design tries to survey this pervasiveness, in terms of contemporary visual endeavors of all kinds: jewelry, fashion, architecture, basketry, ceramics, painting, utilitarian design. This sprawling cornucopia has been wrested into existence by Lowery Stokes Sims, former director of the Studio Museum in Harlem and, since 2007, international curator at the Museum of Arts & Design; and Leslie King-Hammond, former dean of graduate studies at the Maryland Institute College of Art and, since 2006, founding director of the institute’s Center for Race and Culture.

This show presents 200 works by nearly 120 people, teams and collectives. It represents artists, designers, artisans, D.I.Y. improvisers and people engaged in various combinations of those already fuzzy job descriptions, toiling in ways that blur aesthetics, sociology and philosophy.

Astoundingly ambitious for a relatively small institution, “Global Africa” aims, in the words of its news release, to explore the “impact of African visual culture on contemporary art, craft and design around the world.” Unsurprisingly, the exhibition does not fully meet that tall order. It suffers from an excess of high-end luxury items and a shortage of genuine quality-of-life-changing design solutions. And unfortunately, it almost completely ignores Africa north of the Sahara. It is also plagued by too much ersatz stuff in all categories.

But ultimately this show’s strengths surpass its weaknesses, or maybe merge with them. If it lacks coherence, that is because there is none to be revealed. While there are individual references to distinctly African traditions and formal vocabularies, no single look or style emerges, and that’s the point. The show’s massing of information and accomplishment is often incredibly moving.

As you make your way through the crowded displays, you can almost hear the seams of the building creak under the strain. Though that sound may sometimes be simply your brain, boggled by the inundation of insights and attitudes, or even the fresh juxtaposition of familiar entities.

I loved seeing the work of Joyce Scott, the Baltimore bead sculptor extraordinaire, in the same vitrine as the beaded and sequined voudon flags, or drapos, of the Haitian artist George Valris. Likewise, the nearby grouping of J. D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere’s photographs of the ostentatiously sculptural headdresses and hairdos of African women, with the majestic hats of Evetta Perry, owner of Harlem’s Heaven Hat Boutique, and the softer, nonetheless crownlike, crocheted hats of the artist Xenobia Bailey.

Most but not all of the participants are of African descent. One exception is the Italian photographer Daniele Tamagni, who is represented by photographs of proudly stylish Congolese dandies — mostly men — known as the Society for the Advancement of People of Elegance. His images are among the exhibition’s several photographic high points — along with the irreverent, cultural polyglot self-portraits of the Nigerian-born Iké Udé, and the real-life style mixings captured in Nontsikelelo Veleko’s street photographs of imaginatively dressed South Africans.

And most but not all of the participants work in the United States, Europe, the Caribbean or Africa. The exceptions are Ramijabi Madarsahib and Kairumbi Karimsahib, members of the Siddi Women’s Quilting Cooperative in Karnataka, India, descended from East Africans who started coming to India as early as the seventh century as sailors, slaves, servants and merchants. Each woman is represented by a small, bright, gemlike quilt made from discarded saris. The loose geometric patterns are a result of a process of all-over stitching (back and front) that is different from traditional American piecework.

Call them art, crafts or textiles, these quilts are among the most extraordinary aesthetic objects to be seen in any New York museum right now. If everything else here measured up to them, this show would be great beyond belief.

Despite its ups and downs, the exhibition delivers overreaching insights with inarguable immediacy. One of these is that categorical neatness is an exaggerated curatorial value. All museums should periodically assemble shows that ignore the distinctions among contemporary art, design and craft. The resulting friction between nonfunctional and functional, spiritual and practical, handmade and machine-made, and professional and self-taught is music to the eyes. What’s more, it is closer to the way visual culture really happens.

Other insights relate more directly to life. Foremost is the do-it-yourself ethic. Nothing happens if you do nothing. Taking action is a way to take responsibility, but also a way to inspire others to act. And often something can be made out of almost nothing.

Equally important is the role of well-made and/or beautiful things, functional and not, as life-sustaining nourishment. The visual vitality of objects foments human vitality.

One example argues both points: Tyree Guyton’s Heidelberg Project, documented here in photographs and a video. It began one day in the late 1980s when Mr. Guyton, with help from his family, began to clean out an abandoned house on their drug-dealer-infested block in Detroit. Mr. Guyton arranged the gathered debris in colorful assemblages and reliefs in vacant lots and went on to clean out and decorate other houses and lots in the neighborhood. Heart-warming, yes, and it also began a process that helped rid the neighborhood of drugs.

Another pertinent concept at large in the show is recycling trash and, related, the repurposing of existing materials. This occurs in the cosmopolitan dresses made from several patterned fabrics by the Nigerian-born fashion designer Duro Olowu, who lives in London; a sturdy cabinet made from recycled metal oil drums by the Senegalese furniture designer Ousmane M’Baye; and a marvelously evocative columnar sculpture, “Tchin-Tchin, BP!,” that Romuald Hazoumé, born in Benin, fashioned from plastic oil canisters. Inspired by the BP oil spill this year, it transcends the artist’s description of it as a kind of “ironic” Champagne flute to merge suggestions of human, tree and anthill.

Recycling is also apparent in the industrial design team of Birsel & Seck’s low, curving stools, made in Dakar from one of the country’s most plentiful byproducts: discarded plastic bottles and bags. Wahala Temi’s “Afrikea” chair — made from Ikea stools — puts a conceptual spin on it.

There are seemingly stark contrasts of intention and effect. Among the more opulent inclusions are the handsome hammered silver vessels of Ndidi Ekubia, a British-born daughter of African immigrants, and the BMW hand-painted with geometric patterns by the South African muralist Esther Mahlangu (surely the best result of the company’s self-serving art-car campaign).

Among the least opulent displays is a book set in a Plexiglas sleeve on the wall. “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope” tells the inspiring story of William Kamkwamba of the landlocked Republic of Malawi. Forced to forgo school as a teenager to help his family survive, Mr. Kamkwamba scavenged materials to build a windmill that took electricity and clean water to his village for the first time.

But again and again, simplistic oppositions don’t hold up. It helps to see each item on display as a marker for a larger story, like Mr. Kamkwamba’s book, to be extracted from labels or the show’s catalog. The glass-bead necklaces of Nomoda Ebenezer Djaba, also known as Mr. Cedi, have an attractive luminosity. The label reveals that they are made of recycled bottles, a process, the catalog elaborates, that has helped Mr. Cedi make his craft, handed down through several generations, more viable. This exhibition is full of such local success stories, in which craft traditions, recycling and human ingenuity coalesce, and lives are changed and even saved.

“The Global Africa Project” has a brilliant, concept-compressing name. The glowing alloy of its first two words — “Global Africa” — invokes a large continent and its worldwide influence, while “Project” paradoxically signals open-endedness: work in progress, loose ends, an interim report rather than a finished exhibition.

It is the kind of show that had to be done, that deserves to be done better and that may take a few attempts to get right. The Museum of Arts & Design should consider making it a recurring, truly continuing project, like the Whitney Museum’s biennial or the New Museum’s triennial. Every four or five years, take a trans-medium look at Africa and its global legacy; they will never become less important.

“The Global Africa Project” continues through May 15 at the Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle; (212) 299-7777, madmuseum.org.
A Big Box for an Overlooked R&B Career
By BEN SISARIO

FOUR years ago Syl Johnson, a Chicago soul singer beloved by R&B purists but otherwise not well known today, was approached by the Numero Group, a small record label that wanted to reissue some of his music from the 1960s and ’70s. Mr. Johnson said bluntly that he was not interested.

“I don’t like record companies,” he recalled this week. To drive the point home he raised his voice to a near-bark: “I hate ’em!”

Given his own frustrated history with the music industry, Mr. Johnson’s suspicion was not surprising. In a string of hits in the late 1960s — “Come On Sock It to Me,” “Different Strokes,” “Is It Because I’m Black” — he established himself as a powerhouse of bluesy, gritty soul, with a voice that could whoop like James Brown’s or caress like Al Green’s. But the big success that Mr. Johnson hoped for never arrived, and his career slowed; eventually he became embroiled in litigation with one of his old labels over the rights to his work.

But the Numero Group, which specializes in almost absurdly well researched collections of forgotten music, didn’t give up so easily, and after a long courtship — and the resolution of Mr. Johnson’s lawsuit — it made a deal and began sifting through decades of musical cobwebs.

The result is “Complete Mythology,” a four-CD, six-LP monolith of a boxed set, released in October. It solidifies a career narrative for Mr. Johnson — stretching from the blues scene of 1950s Chicago through socially conscious songs in the late 1960s into the Memphis of the ’70s — and has connected this 74-year-old singer with a new audience. On Friday he plays at Southpaw in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and on Saturday he plays with the indie-rock mainstays Yo La Tengo at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, N.J.

“The album shows you I was the real deal when I was young,” Mr. Johnson said in a telephone interview from his home in Chicago. “And I’m still cooking.”

“Complete Mythology” is exhaustive, even a bit excessive. The biggest and, at $75, most expensive product in the Numero Group’s six-year history, it has 52 pages of densely written liner notes and 81 songs recorded from 1959 to 1977.

Yet in a nod to the fetishism of all overserious collectors, it duplicates all 81 songs on both CD and vinyl. Ken Shipley, one of the three record obsessives who run Numero, said it would have been too expensive to make two versions of the boxes, and the LPs — which reproduce the artwork of Mr. Johnson’s original albums — add to the product’s overall aesthetic appeal, a key point in the Numero mission.

“We want to make things that people will want to own and display forever,” Mr. Shipley said. On Wednesday the label was nominated for its first Grammy Award: best boxed set for “Light: On the South Side,” an album and book of photographs of Chicago in the ’70s.

(In one sense the Johnson collection is not complete at all: it omits Mr. Johnson’s time in the 1970s at Hi Records in Memphis, Mr. Green’s label. Mr. Shipley noted that a serviceable two-CD set already exists. But like any true fan, he also has his bias: Mr. Johnson’s earlier stuff is just better, he said.)

The box tells a broad story about American music. Born Sylvester Thompson in Mississippi in 1936, Mr. Johnson moved to Chicago with his family at 14. His brothers, Jimmy and Mack Thompson, became prominent blues players, and Syl started out playing guitar with blues stars like Junior Wells and Jimmy Reed before embarking on a solo career. (A record executive chose his showbiz name for him.)

His earliest songs show traces of the sweet post-doo-wop style also heard in that era from the Impressions and Major Lance, and the box continues through big-beat soul in the vein of James Brown, many of the songs written and produced by Mr. Johnson himself. The late 1960s bring more somber, socially conscious material, and by the end of the box Mr. Johnson is in deep funk.

In conversation, Mr. Johnson is as tricky to follow as the twists in his career. Alternately shouting and cooing into the phone, he made bold declarations like “I am a multifaceted genius” and told long stories about the old record business that ended with his victimization at the hands of ineffective promo men. He sang snippets from his songs and blew bluesy harmonica melodies.

If Mr. Johnson’s songs have never become major hits, pieces of his music have nonetheless reached huge numbers of people as hip-hop samples. One of his songs, “Different Strokes,” from 1967, has been sampled no fewer than 50 times, by Ice Cube, the Wu-Tang Clan, the Beastie Boys, Kid Rock, Public Enemy, even Michael Jackson.

Not all of those who sampled him properly paid for the expropriation, particularly in the Wild West early days of hip-hop, and Mr. Johnson has been pursuing nonpaying labels since the beginning. His daughter Syleecia Thompson, who teaches at several business colleges, said that her father first learned that his songs were being used in the early 1990s and immediately began enlisting help.

“He would tell people in the neighborhood, ‘If you find any rapper who has sampled my music, I will pay you,’ ” Ms. Thompson said. “And so all the kids, we would go buy cassettes and listen to see if we could hear his ‘wow!’ and his ‘aw!’ ”

Collecting payments from sampling, sometimes through litigation, has given Mr. Johnson a lucrative side career. “I’m sitting in the house that Wu-Tang built with their money,” he said with a big laugh.

In the 1980s Mr. Johnson opened a chain of seafood restaurants and invested (very successfully, he says) in real estate. But he has never fully given up on music, and the comeback conditions have never been as good as they are now, with “Complete Mythology” making a strong claim for his historical importance and a young audience primed for vintage soul music by Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Eli (Paperboy) Reed and others. Mr. Johnson is already mixing with his musical descendants: he has been recording with the Dap-Kings, and they plan to make an album together.

The boxed set, too, is doing well: Mr. Shipley said it was on track to sell more than 5,000 copies by year’s end, a healthy number for an expensive, esoteric project like this. But Mr. Johnson says he doesn’t need the money: he just wants to show that he’s still here.

“Back in the day I didn’t get the proper chance, like a lot of people; I didn’t get the chance that I’m getting now,” he said. “But I didn’t drop out of my dreams, and now these people went back and picked it up and said, ‘This is gold right here, man, you missed the gold.’ And I think that once you check it out, you’ll like it.”
Frank W. Lewis, Master of the Cryptic Crossword, Dies at 98
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

For more than six decades, Frank W. Lewis mesmerized, mystified and miffed a circle of obsessed people by writing a devilishly quirky cryptic crossword puzzle for The Nation. But there were some bridges even he would not cross.

If the clue “BEFORE FALL” led to the answer “PRIDE,” for example, drawing from the Bible, he conceded that it would be “carrying things a trifle too far,” as he wrote in an essay, to use the clue “SUMMER.”

Cryptic puzzles are in a universe by themselves, but even there Mr. Lewis was famed for the freewheeling, idiosyncratic approach he took in the pages of The Nation, where for years his mind-twisters leavened the magazine’s weekly helpings of politically liberal reporting and commentary.

A cryptic puzzle usually gives two clues: one a definition, the other a play on words or letters, say an anagram. Mr. Lewis thought nothing of giving three clues. Or one. And, fueled by a huge vocabulary, his penchant for puns was puckish.

Mr. Lewis, whose day job for many years was to help spies solve top-secret codes at the National Security Agency, died of heart failure on Nov. 18 in Plymouth, Mass., his family said. He was 98 and had continued to create puzzles until a year ago.

After his death, even those who had yanked at their hair while attacking his puzzles praised his ingenuity.

“While we often cursed him, we never got tired of his puzzles,” said Henri Picciotto, a math teacher and puzzle constructor who huddled with friends in Berkeley, Calif., every week to swing at the best that Mr. Lewis could heave.

Another respected puzzle maker, Richard Maltby Jr., the Broadway director, said, “Misleading the solver is the name of the game in cryptic puzzles, and Mr. Lewis misled delightfully.”

Mr. Lewis got the job at The Nation after the man who had started the magazine’s cryptic puzzle in 1943, Jack Barrett, died in a boating accident. (Will Shortz, puzzle editor of The New York Times, said The Nation’s puzzle was “the first regularly published cryptic in America” and by far the oldest.) Readers chose Mr. Lewis to succeed Mr. Barrett in a contest, and he published his first puzzle on Oct. 18, 1947.

He went on to please his masochistic loyalists by dishing out odd and excruciating challenges for decades, winning fans like Kurt Vonnegut and Leonard Bernstein — not to mention conservative Republicans who held their noses as they bought The Nation.

At first Mr. Lewis was paid $25 a week. After almost 40 years, he timidly asked his editor at the magazine, Judith Long, if she might intercede with “the brass” about a raise. Didn’t a puzzle master who once gave a single letter as a clue — the clue, a capital “S”; the answer, “LARGESS” — deserve a raise?

He got the raise, to $100.

His profile was lowered a bit in 2008, when The Nation announced that his puzzle would begin appearing every other week. Readers were outraged. Psychology Today warned that the change meant “the end of Western civilization,” or at least signaled “a decline in our standard of living.”

Frank Waring Lewis was born on Aug. 25, 1912, in Salt Lake City. His father had emigrated from England with the family cattle, and after working as a cowboy was a postman.

The younger Mr. Lewis attended secretarial school and the University of Utah (later earning a degree in absentia) and passed the federal government’s civil service test. He then headed for Washington, where he earned a master’s degree in music from the Catholic University of America and took government secretarial jobs.

Col. William Friedman, who ran the Army’s cryptography operations, was looking for very smart people on the eve of World War II. He heard about Mr. Lewis, who was bored “to tears” in the civil service’s death benefits section.

Colonel Friedman hired him as a civilian employee, and Mr. Lewis went on to help break the code used to coordinate Japanese ships. He became addicted to British puzzles while posted in England at the Bletchley Park decryption station at the end of the war. He then followed Colonel Friedman to the National Security Agency, where he won plaudits for his service, started the N.S.A. Glee Club and created English-style puzzles for an N.S.A. magazine.

Mr. Lewis’s 2,962 puzzles for The Nation were proofread by his wife of 74 years, the former Sylvia Shosteck. She survives him, along with his sons, Larry and Frank; his daughters, Elaine Ryan and Wendy Lewis; four grandchildren; and one great-grandson.

Mr. Lewis published his last puzzle in the Dec. 21-28, 2009, issue of The Nation, which has since reprinted his old ones. It plans to hire a new puzzle maestro next year, but Ms. Long readily admits that there will never be another Frank Lewis — or, as he once referred to himself in a cryptic clue, Swank Filer.
A Spitfire Onstage, Singing of Young Love and Achy Hearts
By JON CARAMANICA

A little over two years ago Lykke Li played a show at Le Poisson Rouge to celebrate the release of her debut album, “Youth Novels.” Wednesday night she was back on the circular stage there, introducing songs from her coming second album, “Wounded Rhymes.” Certain things hadn’t changed.

As before, this Swedish moppet was a spitfire, stomping and slithering around the stage. As before, she was dressed in black, in billowy fabrics that gave her movements added sinuousness. As before, there was the drumstick, held in a death grip, that she used to punctuate many of her best songs, lending them an air of incipient violence that her sweet voice just can’t.

But wait, where was that sweet voice? It was the hallmark of “Youth Novels” (LL/Atlantic), full of naïve-sounding songs that radiated intelligence. That album was charming and light, with a real pulse behind it. But on the affecting “Wounded Rhymes,” Lykke Li has found new moods, desperate and sometimes angry. And the album is less concerned with the dance floor, instead bursting with echoes of ’50s girl groups and gothic country.

Lykke Li’s move from sweet to bittersweet is a pleasant sign of growth. Previously her onstage mania felt disproportionate to her songs, which were chipper even when expressing hurt. But now all the madness of her stage show has finally seeped into the songs. On “Jerome” she punched the air with glee, and on “Youth Knows No Pain” and “I Follow Rivers,” she and the members of her band coiled and uncoiled.

“Don’t make demands/I don’t take none,” she barked on “Get Some,” which closed her main set and recalled golden-age James Bond movie soundtracks.

But just as often the toughness of the new songs is in the words, not the music, an inconvenience her sharp band couldn’t get around during this show. Many of the new songs felt sparse and aerated, especially with older, propulsive ones like “Little Bit” and “Dance, Dance, Dance” sprinkled among them.

“Sadness Is a Blessing” was beautiful, but skeletal, barely staying afloat. “Unrequited Love” was equal parts dry California country and Nordic folk. On record it aches palpably; here, it was distant, relying heavily on Lykke Li’s singing, which is tougher and more leathery than before, and more emotive. That song came at the end of the encore, just after the slow march “Possibility,” from the “Twilight Saga: New Moon” soundtrack. Conceivably that song could have been Lykke Li’s breakthrough moment, but she treated it perversely, preferring to capture the empty ambiguity of young love rather than the thrilling rush.

Such restraint is new, and still a bit uncharacteristic for her. During the show she appeared more at home with her old songs, which were more lived in and could bear the heft of her natural flamboyance. She sang the howling “Breaking It Up” partly through a megaphone. And on “Dance, Dance, Dance” she took a break from walloping her drum to blow on a kazoo: a new touch that was utterly superfluous, but winning.
The Flesh and Blood Behind the AK-47
By PATRICK HENNESSEY

THE GUN

By C. J. Chivers

Illustrated. 481 pages. Simon & Schuster. $28.

It is no accident that C. J. Chivers opens “The Gun,” his bold history of the AK-47, not with the loud crack that is the report of the rifle but with the monstrous bang of the first detonation of a Soviet nuclear bomb. As Mr. Chivers’s detailed history then skirts as far back as the United States Civil War and brings us right up to the current conflict in Afghanistan, the message of his prologue is clear: For all that the escalating cold war shaped the last 60 years, no one was ever killed in conflict by a Russian nuke. By contrast untold millions have been wounded and killed by the AK-47 and related weapons, as they have proliferated and mutated from tools of engineering ingenuity, honestly wrought in defense of the socialist motherland, to the firearm of choice for both oppressor and oppressed.

The AK-47 was revolutionary because it was the first weapon to combine the portability of machine pistols that had proved popular in World War II with the accuracy of less portable, sharpshooting weapons and the firepower of the heavier, more traditional machine guns. It was also and remains beguilingly easy to use and maintain and unerringly reliable.

Mr. Chivers is a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and a former Marine with, one suspects, more than a nodding acquaintance with his subject. He writes both with technical precision and the humanity that comes with understanding the invariably unhappy and all too often horrific consequences of the weapon’s effects.

All this makes for a delicate and at times fascinating balancing act, as Mr. Chivers the enthusiast and expert shares the page with Mr. Chivers the historian and journalist — the expert dealing well with the detailed mechanics of his subject, the journalist at other times brilliantly illuminating the book with highly effective vignettes of human courage, ingenuity and, mostly, suffering.

There are as many inherent dangers as advantages in writing object history. The recent deserved success in Britain of “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” a collaboration between BBC radio and the British Museum, has shown how informative history can be when told from the perspective of a single object, but such histories can be selective.

Mr. Chivers succeeds in bringing his own disparate strands together into a mostly coherent narrative, but the history is necessarily a subjective one. He moves from topic to topic at a healthy pace. Certainly the reader doesn’t tire as we roam from Kremlin politics to the Tet offensive via diversions like the Hungarian uprising and the Munich Olympics.

Sometimes, however, he dwells, perhaps indulgently, on a particular theme or episode. We are for example more than a third of the way through before we encounter the sometimes pathetic, sometimes tragic figure of Mikhail Kalashnikov and his eponymous rifle.

Mr. Chivers’s account of the general development of automatic weapons and the men who pioneered them is impressive. The portraits of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s forerunners, Richard J. Gatling and Hiram Maxim (whose entertaining character comes across bizarrely at odds with the devastation his machine wrought on the fields of Flanders) stand in effective contrast to Kalashnikov, the curiously unsympathetic Russian sergeant, and lend the book depth.

From horse-drawn, hand-cranked cannons that subdued the enemies of the British Empire, Mr. Chivers traces the development of automatic weapons in the early 20th century and the often costly failings of conservative military leaders to understand their potential and effect. He deconstructs the Soviet mythology behind the AK-47’s development before charting its proliferation and rise to ubiquity. The book sometimes struggles to keep up with the various tactical and strategic changes occasioned by the development and distribution of the rifle, but this may be an accurate reflection of how the wider world has struggled to comprehend and cope with the spread of this powerful gun.

His broad reach allows Mr. Chivers to touch on diversions that he and many readers may well find interesting — a considerable discussion of the ill-fated introduction of the M-16 rifle to United States Marines in Vietnam is one example — but means that we are sometimes caught in a limbo between a necessarily limited canter through big events and a dense excursus on the gun itself. The book’s discussion of the difficulties of penetrating layers of secrecy and Soviet myth in deconstructing the historiography of the AK-47 will be fascinating to many historians, less so to casual enthusiasts.

Other elements of “The Gun” are perhaps unwittingly illuminating. Mr. Chivers skates over the murky distinction between romantic freedom fighters who wield their AK-47s against the brutal Soviet regime and the current terrorists who do so against its armies. While much of the detail on the development of the gun and the treatment of the man whose name it bears serves as a salutary reminder of the awfulness of life in Soviet Russia, Mr. Chivers can’t resist taking a few easy shots at the Soviets.

For an essentially international book about an international symbol, “The Gun” never quite escapes an essentially Western perspective. While our own shortcomings are often addressed with clarity and precision, it is hard to escape the feeling that the ill-use the rifles have been put to by our enemies gets more attention than when the butt has been on the other shoulder.

But these are minor quibbles that fall away when Mr. Chivers provides in harrowing detail a sense of the human cost of this sometimes too abstract symbol.

“Karzan Mahmoud toppled and fell, landing in a puddle of cold standing water,” he writes of the shooting of a young Kurd. “There he lay, on his back, blinking up into raindrops peppering his face. He had no idea how many times he had been hit. His body was broken; his mind, for the moment, was strangely detached. His blood stained the puddle red. He thought he heard thunder.”

Mr. Chivers adds: “Technical studies did not sketch this: what it looked and felt like when military rifle bullets smacked human life, when incapacitation meant not just preventing action but summoning death, when rifles and gunfights were stripped of engineering, politics, romance or any whiff of fable.”

He is right to address the “fable” of the AK-47. As someone who has been shot at and shot back with this weapon, I can testify to its enduring appeal. But for all that, “The Gun” is a history of 10 pounds of wood and steel. Its strength is that it can’t but be a human history: the history of the men who designed and built, did or didn’t purchase, correctly or incorrectly deployed, and triumphed or perished by an inanimate object.

Patrick Hennessey is the author of “The Junior Officer’s Reading Club,” a memoir of five years in the British Army during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Movie Review | ‘Barney’s Version’
Maybe a Dinosaur, Just Not Purple
By A. O. SCOTT

Barney Panofsky, a Montreal policeman’s son, meets his third wife at his second wedding, a gilded gala that he stumbles into halfway between his wayward bohemian youth and his distempered dotage. Barney, played with shambling energy and vulgar elegance by Paul Giamatti, catches a sudden, breathtaking glimpse of Miriam (Rosamund Pike) and pretty much forgets about the unnamed ninny he has just married (even though she is played by the lovely Minnie Driver).

The initial source of Barney’s attraction is obvious enough and is only affirmed by the melodious FM-radio timbre of Miriam’s voice. You might, however, be tempted to wonder what she sees in him. In addition to being freshly married, he is short, tubby, badly groomed and drunk, brandishing a stubbed-out Montecristo cigar along with his hackneyed pickup lines.

The answer to this riddle comes obliquely later that same evening, when Barney chases Miriam down aboard a train about to leave Montreal for New York, where she lives. In her hands is a paperback copy of Saul Bellow’s “Herzog,” possession of which surely signals, at the very least, a high tolerance for vain, verbose and vulgar Jewish men.

Barney — the picaresque antihero of “Barney’s Version” — is, in more ways than one, a cousin of Bellow’s Moses Herzog. He is the last surviving fictional brainchild and alter ego of Mordecai Richler, a novelist who, like Bellow, was born in Quebec but who, unlike him, stayed there, turning Anglophone Jewish Montreal into a northern sister city of Augie March’s Chicago.

The volume that the future (and eventually former) Miriam Panofsky carries is one of many signs that the director, Richard J. Lewis, and the writer, Michael Konyves, of “Barney’s Version,” have done their homework. In winnowing Richler’s 1997 novel into a workable screen story they have preserved important details and added some new ones consistent with their version’s altered chronology. (Paris in the 1950s, when both Richler and the novel’s Barney sowed their oats and drank their wine, becomes Rome in the ’70s).

But the filmmakers have been, if anything, too dutiful, too careful, and the movie that results from their conscientious, devoted labor illustrates the terrible, paradoxical trap into which well-intentioned literary adaptations so often fall. Mr. Lewis (an executive producer and director for the television series “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”), Mr. Konyves and the producer, Robert Lantos, display admirable patriotism as well as devotion to their source material.

“Barney’s Version” is explicitly dedicated to Richler’s memory, and also, by implication, to some of the cultural touchstones of his native land. It pays tribute to the Montreal Canadiens and also to a handful of Northern cinematic titans who traipse across the set in obliging cameo. Yes, that was David Cronenberg playing the hack director of a soap opera about a Mountie named O’Malley. And if you are likely to crack up at the sight of Denys Arcand (“The Decline of the American Empire”) playing a headwaiter — I confess I did — then “Barney’s Version” will not be a total loss.

The cast is beyond reproach. Selecting Dustin Hoffman to play Mr. Giamatti’s father is a stroke of genius, since it throws into relief the blend of intense seriousness and wry self-mockery that they have in common as screen performers. Scott Speedman twitches persuasively as Boogie, Barney’s gifted, drug-addicted best friend, and Rachelle Lefevre has some seductive moments as Barney’s first wife, Clara, whom he marries and loses in Rome. Bruce Greenwood, foreshadowed early, arrives late as the canoe-paddling vegan radio producer whom Miriam will marry after leaving Barney. (This spoils nothing, by the way. Most of the story is told in flashback, so that the denouement of Barney’s story is fairly clear at the start.)

It all sounds like the stuff of a pretty good movie: a crowd of interesting characters; a plot involving adultery, divorce, a grab bag of vices and even the possibility of murder; art, sex, religion, hockey. But the film plays more or less like a recitation of that list.

A few extended scenes, in which Mr. Lewis stops fussing to put every detail in place and stands back to let Mr. Giamatti spar one on one with another actor, have a vivid, unpredictable rhythm. Unfortunately they serve only to highlight just how inert the rest of the movie is, as if it were not Barney’s version of the story at all, but rather the wedding planner’s.

In spite of Mr. Giamatti’s ferociously energetic performance “Barney’s Version” never figures out just who Barney is. In Richler’s pages he is above all a voice — profane, sophisticated, tender, mean and funny — and the filmmakers prove unable to compensate for its absence. But their failure is more than just technical; in attempting to honor the spirit of the book, they extinguish it. It is a wild, unruly novel of character, in which the character himself is at once incorrigible and irresistible. The film tames and sentimentalizes him, and in showing respect for Barney’s author turns his creation into something unforgivably respectable.

“Barney’s Version” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has sex and sin, without feeling especially sexy or sinful.

Barney’s Version

Opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles.

Directed by Richard J. Lewis; written by Michael Konyves, based on the novel by Mordecai Richler; director of photography, Guy Dufaux; edited by Susan Shipton; music by Pasquale Catalano; production design by Claude Paré; costumes by Nicoletta Massone; produced by Robert Lantos; released by Sony Pictures Classics. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes.

WITH: Paul Giamatti (Barney), Dustin Hoffman (Izzy), Rosamund Pike (Miriam), Minnie Driver (second Mrs. P.), Rachelle Lefevre (Clara), Scott Speedman (Boogie), Bruce Greenwood (Blair), Macha Grenon (Solange), Denys Arcand (a head waiter) and David Cronenberg (a director).