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Time - Man of the Year
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1993-04-08
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REVIEWS, Page 75SHORT TAKES
TELEVISION: A Grueling Tale of Frontier Horror
In 1846 a band of settlers left Illinois for California.
They ended up stranded in the Sierra Nevada at the outset of
the worst winter ever recorded there. By the time the starving
survivors straggled into Sutter's Fort, THE DONNER PARTY had
written one of the darkest chapters in American history, a tale
of humans reduced to the most desperate circumstances --
including, famously, cannibalism. For this PBS documentary, Ric
Burns, a co-producer with his brother Ken of The Civil War, uses
the same techniques as that series -- archival photographs,
readings from diaries and letters -- to re-create the story with
harrowing scrupulousness. A grueling, unforgettable trip.
MUSIC: Bedtime Story
The catch in Tammy Wynette's voice sounds like a
heartbreak that's become a habit. For 25 years, Wynette has been
one of country music's best habits. The 67-song CD set Tears of
Fire offers a lot of fine down-home hits (Stand By Your Man,
We're Not the Jet Set) and a little social history, so often
does Wynette sing about the soul-scarred Southern woman. Some
of her best songs (I Don't Wanna Play House, D-I-V-O-R-C-E,
Dear Daughters) are bedtime stories for a child from a ravaged
home; they translate complex hurts into simple poetry. That
could be a definition of country music, and Wynette is its most
plangent hard-luck heroine since Patsy Cline.
MUSIC: The Abbe's Road
Turn-of-the-century pianism is shrouded in a golden-era
haze, but just how good was it really? A new double CD from
Pearl Records, THE PUPILS OF LISZT, provides some clues. Here
are such pedagogic scions of the Hungarian firebrand as Eugen
D'Albert, Moriz Rosenthal, Arthur Friedheim and six others. Even
allowing for poor recording quality and the advanced age of some
of the performers, what is remarkable is how ordinary most of
the playing is. Only the dazzling if sometimes clumsy Rosenthal
and the elegant Jose Vianna da Motta would get a second listen
today. Friedheim, in particular, is appalling in selections by
his mentor and Chopin. Memory does play tricks.
THEATER: Married to the Muralist
Everything about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was high
drama. In pain all her life after a streetcar accident, she
battled drugs and despair, had a tumultuous marriage to muralist
Diego Rivera and conducted affairs with women and men, including
Leon Trotsky. FRIDA, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next
Wave Festival, adds to her stature as cult figurine. Mexican
musical motifs blend with spoken monologues and lyrical,
character-defining songs, while masks and puppets recreate the
magic realism of her paintings. In the title role, Helen
Schneider conveys the radiance and explosive fury of the woman
whose art was, in the words of Andre Breton, a "ribbon around
a bomb."
BOOKS: Sodom High
A few good things about Madonna's sex: she's in splendid
shape physically; the text offers helpful dating tips ("Everyone
is a sucker for garter belts"); Steven Meisel's photos have a
chummy decadence about them, like "Activities" pix from the
Sodom High yearbook. An acid test for your queasiness quotient,
Sex (Warner Books; $50) displays the protean pop icon in many
a raunchy pose with many a tattooed or manacled partner. Madonna
means it all to be therapeutic. In the age of AIDS, she
suggests, fantasies of power and pain should not be taboo; they
are all some people have left. She also knows that stardom, like
any other form of exhibitionism, is about surfaces, not
essences -- which is why dust, not sulfur, rises from these
pages. Much of Sex is S&M camp, a nostalgia item from an era
that existed mainly on French postcards. Six months from now it
will be the first aluminum-covered soft-porn book ever to grace
the remainder bin.