→ August 8, 2019
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Annihilation (book).

I enjoyed the 2018 film adaptation of Annihilation, a gripping sci-fi horror story starring Natalie Portman as the lead scientist on an expedition into an unknown biological anomaly called “the Shimmer” that has taken over a portion of what is probably the southern United States and appears to be expanding. Previous expeditions have ended in varying disasters; the one preceding Portman’s included her husband, who came back alive but was a shell of his former self. The nature of the Shimmer was never explained, but was also beside the point of the story.

The movie was a very loose adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s novel of the same name, the first part of the Southern Reach trilogy. The book is also very good, but there’s not that much in common between the two other than the general setup, the main character’s identity, and her husband’s history on a prior expedition. The movie was a psychological thriller with a touch of violence, preying on your expectations and the constant uncertainty of an essentially alien environment where the rules by which we live in our world no longer applied. The book also has those rules, and the vague sense of horror from the environment, but VanderMeer seems far more interested in exploring the main character than the region, known as Area X, or the mystery behind its creation and expansion.

No characters are named in the book; the narrator is simply the biologist, the character portrayed by Portman in the movie. She’s part of a four-woman expedition along with a psychologist, a surveyor, and an archaeologist; they cross the border into Area X after the psychologist hypnotizes them so they won’t experience or remember it, presumably because the transition is somehow upsetting or traumatic. Inside Area X, they find a pristine ecological habitat with seemingly impossible life forms, including what appears to be living writing on a tower wall, but something in the area is also clearly hostile to their presence. The team itself starts to fall apart between the strain of the mission, one member’s treachery, and the influence of one or more unfriendly life forms in the area. The text is the biologist’s journal of the expedition’s gradual implosion and a document of what she learned while inside Area X about the strange life forms she found there, with intermittent flashbacks to her life before the mission, including her life with her husband before he entered Area X and the brief period after his surprising return.

The assumption is that the biologist at least survives to the end of the book, so the multiple times she appears to be in mortal danger, you know she’s going to make it out alive – but you never know what’s going to happen to the other characters, especially given the high fatality rate on previous expeditions, and Area X itself appears to be some sort of sentient life form and thus another character in the book. VanderMeer focuses as much on the conflict between the biologist and the ecology of Area X as on anything else, using it as a way to explore the psyche of the narrator by putting her into multiple situations where she is both at odds with colleagues on the team and threatened by the immediate environment. Much of what goes awry with the team itself is predictable, at least a general level – we’ve seen plenty of stories in print and film of groups collapsing under pressure – but the bio-horror of Area X is novel and means that she can’t take many basic aspects of life for granted. It’s as if she’s been put into a biological hot zone without adequate protection, and has that stress as well as the stress of the mission, her husband’s vanishing, and the failure of the team to hold together for even a few days after crossing.

This is just part one of three, and it feels incomplete as a result; the world-building aspect is more successful than the biologist’s story. I never felt like I understood her character well, and the journey on which she goes is itself incomplete and a bit unsatisfying. I’ll almost certainly finish the trilogy, though, given how much I enjoyed the world he created and the many mysteries of Area X, even if I never get more details on the biologist’s motivations for doing what she does.

Next up: Still reading The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

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→ August 7, 2019
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Climax.

Gaspar Noé has a strong reputation among critics for provocative movies that often skirt the line of good taste, and seems to revel in his ability to shock or even repulse audiences while similarly challenging them with his stories. This year’s Climax is probably his best-received film, even though it was made with just a loose outline, employed mostly non-actors, and took just a few weeks to film. It’s a nightmare come to life, one that is more revealing than horrifying, but also clearly crosses the line into poor taste.

Climax is based loosely on an actual story of a French dance troupe whose afterparty was spoiled because someone spiked their drinks with LSD, although in that case no serious harm came to any of the dancers. That is not true in Noé’s retelling here, as the party devolves into Lord of the Flies-level savagery because someone spiked the punch, made by the troupe’s den mother Emmanuelle, with LSD or a similar psychotropic drug. (The very end of the film makes it seem like it was LSD, although the dancers never know this.)

Things don’t fall apart until about halfway through the brisk 93-minute film; the first half includes an impressive, long modern dance number that incorporates numerous styles and presents more to the viewer than the eye can possibly follow. The party starts out well enough, but eventually the dancers who drank the punch start to feel unwell; no one speaks of hallucinations, but they become disoriented and paranoid, and start to revert to base instincts. As it becomes clear that the punch was tainted, they begin to band together to try to identify the culprit, blaming Emmanuelle, then blaming the two dancers who didn’t drink it, never considering that the person who spiked the punch may in fact have consumed it themselves. This devolution also sees them lose many of their inhibitions, giving in to violence and sex, and by the time the police arrive the next morning there are several dancers dead or grievously wounded, while others are simply damaged by what’s occurred.

The drugs really are beside the point in Climax, which explores the nature of fear and how quickly we come to distrust others when we think we’re in danger. Noé wrote an outline and some general directions but asked the actors, most of whom were professional dancers without acting experience, to simply act as they would if under the influence, showing them videos of people who’d taken LSD or other hallucinogens. There are two professionals in the cast, Sofia Boutella (Selva) and Souheila Yacoub (Lou), who do more heavy lifting than anyone else, the former as the de facto social leader of the group, the latter the one character with something resembling a storyline.

Noé’s hand is all over the film even though there wasn’t a proper script. There’s one continuous shot that runs over 40 minutes, shifting perspectives and angles, drifting to different characters, that helps convey the dancers’ disorientation to the viewers. He also moved the closing credits to the beginning of the movie, and the typical title card with cast listing to the middle, which felt more like a gimmick to me than an important change. (Plus Adam McKay did it better in Vice.) He made one truly regrettable decision, the part of the film that crosses the line into needless suffering; Emmanuelle’s son is at the party, and while I won’t spoil it, what that child is put through did not need to be in this movie at all. Noé could have accomplished everything he wanted to accomplish without that. Assuming the boy’s inclusion was an active decision by Noé, it was a blatant attempt to shock the audience for shock’s sake.

Several days after watching Climax, I can’t decide if I think the film is good. I would say I didn’t enjoy watching it, because it is so unpleasant (by design) to watch the dancers lose control of themselves and their situation, wandering around a dark building that looks like an abandoned school or mental institution. I also couldn’t stop watching it, and was past the halfway mark before I even thought about how much time might have passed, and it’s certainly had me thinking about it in the time since I watched. There is something essential about stories that remind us of the thin line between the way we live and utter anarchy, of the tiny genetic barrier that separates us from chimpanzees, of the social norms we take for granted that allow us to live our daily lives. When one brick is removed, the entire edifice could collapse. Noé is willing to stare into that abyss and show us what he sees.

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→ August 6, 2019
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A Kiss Before Dying.

Ira Levin wrote seven novels in his long career, as well as the long-running Broadway play Deathtrap, garnering raves from critics and his peers for much of his output despite working across a broad range of themes, with novels as seemingly disparate as Rosemary’s Baby and The Stepford Wives. His debut novel, A Kiss Before Dying, was a straightforward noir thriller, a grim take on a ‘perfect’ murder that uses shifting perspectives to keep the reader guessing in the first half of the novel and raise the stakes for the second half. (It’s out of print; the link above goes to the Kindle version.)

The first third of the novel centers on Dorothy, the daughter of a very wealthy copper magnate, who is dating a charming classmate at her college and has just revealed to him that she’s pregnant, which does not comport with his plans to marry her for her expected inheritance. Assuming she’ll be cut out of her father’s will for becoming pregnant outside of wedlock, the boyfriend first tries to get her to abort the baby and, when that fails, decides to kill her and make it look like a suicide. He succeeds, at least at first, but Dorothy’s sister Ellen can’t believe Dorothy would kill herself – especially since no one knew she was pregnant – and decides to go investigate.

At this point, Levin switches the point of view and you realize that he never named the boyfriend in part one, so you enter the college town with Ellen and share her ignorance of the killer’s identity – just a very rough description of his appearance, which means it could be any of several men, and Levin utilizes that puzzle to ratchet up the tension for the first half or so of Ellen’s section. Once you find out who it is, which I didn’t see coming, the story flips, putting the reader into the chase and the mystery of whether anyone will catch Dorothy’s killer before he kills again while exploring the depths of his sociopathy, eventually introducing us to the girls’ father, Leo, and making him a central character in the story even though he tries to avoid accepting that Dorothy was murdered.

The book has been filmed twice, once in 1956 to positive reviews and once in 1991 to negative ones, although in both cases the screenwriters changed the story enough that I don’t think either could possibly match what Levin accomplished here in the book. The murderer here isn’t so much twisted as callous and insensate, viewing Dorothy as a mark to make himself wealthy, and viewing all of his victims as obstacles, with no apparent compunctions whatsoever about killing to protect his own interests. Levin also takes advantage of the author’s privilege of hiding key information from you that would have to be revealed on a screen, which raises the stakes for the reader, makes the reveal especially potent, and then lets him play with perspective throughout the third part of the book, where you’re unsure if the killer will get away with his crimes or if the ‘good guys’ will figure it out in time. It’s very classic, straight noir, with a dim view of humanity that leans a bit towards Jim Thompson but with more balance between the good and the bad.

Next up: Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

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→ August 5, 2019
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Music update, July 2019.

I always feel a bit disappointed when my monthly playlists are on the short side, like this one is, as if I didn’t look hard enough for good songs. There is so much music released each month that it seems like even a “bad” month should still have at least twenty or so great songs, right? I did look, though, and stalled out with this list, which probably includes a song or two I might have omitted had the list been longer (including a cover and an unreleased track from the 1980s). Anyway, as always, you can access the Spotify playlist directly if you can’t see the widget below.

Prince – Holly Rock. Prince wrote and produced the original “Holly Rock” for Sheila E., whose version appeared on the Krush Groove soundtrack, but this is the first time that his own recording of the song – which is more polished than the demos his estate has been releasing this year – has appeared in official form. It’s vintage Prince with a heavy funk influence and Sheila E.’s ornate percussion work.

Ride – Repetition. I wonder if it’s even fair to call them shoegazers any more; their sound across two albums and a few singles since their return from a 17-year hiatus has been far more upbeat and accessible. It’s a positive evolution, though; I liked their early stuff but have connected more with their post-hiatus output.

Lauren Ruth Ward and Desi Valentine – Same Soul. A very bluesy duet from one of my new favorite singers in Ward and a classic R&B singer in Valentine, who had a modest hit in 2016 with “Fate Don’t Know You.”

Of Monsters and Men – Róróró. The Icelandic band’s third album Fever Dream dropped two Fridays ago, and it’s a definite shift in their sound, with more electronic elements, a mixed bag of a handful of tracks that showcase Nanna Hilmarsdóttir’s voice and others that lose her amidst generic drum machine sounds and weak melodies. This, “Alligator,” and “Wild Roses” are among the highlights.

Frank Turner – The Death of Dora Hand. Turner’s new EP No Man’s Land has three very intimate acoustic tracks that almost feel like Americana (interesting, since he’s English) rather than his usual folk/punk style.

Ceremony – In the Spirit World Now. Ceremony’s transition from hardcore punk band to direct descendants of Joy Division continues with this title track from their forthcoming album, due out August 23rd.

White Reaper – Real Long Time. White Reaper’s punk-pop sound hasn’t failed me yet – they have a real knack for strong, new hooks that always sound just a little bit familiar to me.

DIIV – Skin Game. This is DIIV’s first new track since founder/singer Zachary Cole Smith spent six months in rehab for addiction.

Ben Gibbard – Keep Yourself Warm. This is easily my favorite track from Tiny Changes: A Celebration Of Frightened Rabbit’s ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’, a cover album in memory of the Scottish band’s lead singer Scott Hutchison, who took his own life in May of last year.

Floating Points – Coorabell. The B side to his single “LesAlpx” is also brilliant – another pulsing, driving electronic track that stays accessible despite its experimental leanings.

Just Mustard – October. Speaking of shoegaze, this Irish band’s music might have fit better in that early 1990s movement than it does today.

Vivian Girls – Sick. The Vivs are back together … okay, I didn’t really know their work prior to bassist Katy Goodman’s solo project La Sera, but they’ve now reunited after a five-year absence with their pre-hiatus lineup.

The Struts – Pegasus Seiya. This song doesn’t sound like anything the Struts, who are kind of a glam/pop band with hard rock trappings, have done before – it’s like a strange homage to Judas Priest-era British metal, and I can’t get the thing out of my head.

High on Fire – Bat Salad. This instrumental, part of a three-song EP that includes covers of Celtic Frost and Bad Brains, first appeared for record store day in April, and just hit digital last month. It’s outstanding, and a good track for folks who like heavy guitar riffing but can’t deal with Matt Pike’s yelling vocals.

Opeth – Heart in Hand. Maybe my favorite song of the month, “Heart in Hand” (also released in a version with lyrics in their native Swedish) is a nine-minute prog metal opus that seems to draw equally on the complex progressive styles of 1970s icons like King Crimson while providing more 1980s-level thrash and metal riffing than Opeth has given listeners in their last two albums.

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→ August 3, 2019
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Stick to baseball, 8/3/19.

Busy week on the baseball front; I had five pieces reacting to deadline trades, on the Stroman trade, the Bauer/Puig/Trammell trade, the Greinke deal, the Jesus Sanchez/Trevor Richards trade, and some smaller moves that didn’t merit full writeups. No chat this week as I’m at Gen Con.

I’ll resume my free email newsletter on Monday; I had one mostly written but never had time to finish and send it before the deadline, and while I love TinyLetter it doesn’t work correctly on my iPad.

And now, the links…

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→ August 2, 2019
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Amity and Prosperity.

If you’ve heard of fracking at all, it’s probably for bad reasons; the practice of fracturing rocks to free and capture natural gas has caused substantial environmental damage, from earthquakes to groundwater contamination to air pollution, across wide swaths of the Midwest, down through Oklahoma and Texas. The practice was once hailed as a way for the United States to achieve energy independence, or at least reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East, and was even embraced by some Democrats, including Barack Obama, who would have said in the next breath that they favored policies to protect the environment.

Eliza Griswold’s Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America documents the horrendous effects of fracking on one town, Amity, in western Pennsylvania, where the drilling company Range Resources ran amok, ignoring environmental regulations or simply lobbying the state to alter them, sickening local residents – possibly to the point of causing cancer – and making multiple homes unlivable. She reported for eight years on this story, getting close to two mothers in the area in particular whose children and animals were sickened by groundwater and air pollution from Range’s fracking and mishandling of waste materials, and won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction for this book. No Range executives were fined or charged; the company was only modestly fined, despite violations of environmental regulations and false claims in its advertising; and the homeowners most adversely affected received a pittance after years of litigation against Range and Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection.

The story all takes place in the northern Appalachian region, atop the Marcellus Shale formation of sedimentary rock, which it turns out contains a large quantity of natural gas that must be retrieved via hydraulic fracturing, now called “fracking” for short. This involves the high-pressure injection of a slurry of water, sand or other proppants, and various additional chemicals to hold the fractures open, reduce friction, lubricate the drill bit, prevent scale deposit buildup, or serve other purposes. The result of the process, in addition to copious supplies of natural gas, is a lot of wastewater that can contain hydrogen sulfide, ethylene glycol, arsenic (released from the rock that has been fractured), and other chemicals or elements that are harmful to human health when ingested or inhaled. The national desire for cheap domestic energy sources, the (mistaken?) belief that natural gas could serve as a “transitional” fuel between coal/oil and renewable energy sources, and extensive lobbying by the oil and gas industry have led to a regulatory environment that is, to a large extent, dictated by the companies the agencies, including Pennsylvania’s toothless DEP, are supposed to be monitoring and sanctioning. The DEP, in this case, was defanged by Democratic governor Ed Rendell, then further hamstrung by Republican governor Tom Corbett and the GOP-controlled legislature, which passed a law that was likely written in large part by the oil and gas lobby; it should surprise no one that the DEP completely whiffed on the Range fracking endeavor in the Marcellus shale region, but it should surprise and enrage you to hear that lawyers for the company and the agency worked together in the lawsuits filed by the sickened homeowners.

Fracking continues largely unabated in states controlled by the Republican Party, which touts their job-creation potential (and that isn’t in dispute) and potential to provide cheap energy from within our borders, although many, many Democratic politicians have gone along with fracking for their own reasons. What is clear, however, is that the process requires substantial regulation if it could ever be made safe for citizens anywhere in the vicinity of the wells. Any drilling within a mile of community water sources puts the water at risk of contamination, and that’s even if the fracking company handles its waste water correctly. Range, according to Griswold, used open waste “ponds” to store its toxic sludge, didn’t line them properly, and then ignored evidence of leaking while fighting any effort to get them to take responsibility. (Several Range executives Griswold named not only escaped any accountability, but have since moved on to better jobs in the industry.) One of the two mothers Griswold profiles, Stacey, kept diligent notes on the appearance of foul odors in the air (hydrogen sulfide, like the smell of rotten eggs, which can indicate bacterial contamination as well) and the increasing illnesses of her kids, one of whom missed a year of school because of fracking pollution, and the deaths of many of her animals. Yet despite all of this evidence, the state of Pennsylvania tried to pass a law, some of which was struck down by the state Supreme Court (but not all!), that would have prevented local governments from banning or regulating fracking in their area; prevented doctors from discussing poisoning cases possibly caused by fracking with each other; and excluded private water wells from pollution/leakage notification requirements.

Griswold’s telling of this story is fundamentally humanist – she never, at any point, loses sight of the people suffering from Range’s actions, the people who reside at the heart of the book – but it is also very much a story of institutional failure. Pennsyvlania, which was gerrymandered into another dimension, let many of its citizens down in the most basic way. We take certain government protections for granted, yet here, the people who were supposed to be protecting the state’s water, air, and land resources – it’s one of only three states with an environmental rights amendment to its state constitution – did no such thing; at best, they looked the other way when Range wanted to drill and frack, and at worst, they aided and abetted the polluters, including helping them fight against the state’s own citizens when the latter tried to assert their rights under the amendment. It bears repeating: Pennsylvania didn’t just do nothing. They worked against their own citizens. If you live there, you should be angry. If you live anywhere in the United States, but especially somewhere where there’s fracking, you should be angry. Once this garbage is in the groundwater, entire towns will become unlivable, maybe for generations. If you’re cool with wide swaths of Oklahoma looking like the Love Canal, I guess that’s your choice, but I wasn’t okay with it before I read Amity and Prosperity and I sure as hell am not okay with it now.

Next up: Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, the story of how he threw two consecutive no-hitters.

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→ July 31, 2019
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Raiders of the North Sea.

The tabletop game Raiders of the North Sea was the first of Shem Phillips’ series of worker placement games that will reach its fifth title this fall with the release of Paladins of the West Kingdom, and earned a Kennerspiel des Jahres nomination in 2017, two years after its initial appearance. (I didn’t review or rank it that year because it wasn’t actually a new title; release dates in the board game world are a nebulous thing, and I’m sure I’ve missed titles here and there because of it.) Each game in the series, which includes three North Sea games and now two West Kingdom titles, has some different quirk in how you place or use your meeples, part of how Phillips has managed to extend one theme over so many different titles.

Raiders of the North Sea now has a gorgeous app adaptation from Dire Wolf Digital, makers of the app versions of Lanterns and Lotus as well as the digital card game Eternal (soon coming to tabletop), although I think the initial release of the app could use some updates. If you haven’t played the physical game, or like me had very little experience with it, it’s a great introduction to the title, but I did find that after a handful of plays I was too good for the one AI level included in the app.

Raiders of the North Sea

The Raiders board has two parts – the village where you’ll place meeples to recruit warriors, collect food, and exchange plunder for more food or for points; and the various harbors, outposts, and fortresses you’ll raid over the course of the game for points and glory. The big difference between this and most worker placement games is that all meeples are shared, and you get two actions on your turn: one when you place the meeple you had to start the turn somewhere in the village, then a second when you remove a meeple from another location in the village. Each location has a unique action, and you thus get two different actions on every turn when you do stuff in the village. Once you have enough warriors, food, and sometimes gold to go raiding, you instead use one meeple to go attack a specific location on the top of the board, taking the plunder shown on that space, gaining a different meeple, and possibly getting points if your warriors’ total strength exceeds the lowest listed value on the space. (You always get the plunder, even if you’re not strong enough.) Most spaces you’ll raid include one or more black skulls, which means you’ll have to sacrifice one of your warriors, sending them to Valhalla, when you attack.

The new app looks fantastic, and the animations for the attacks are particularly fun. Dire Wolf has taken all of the game’s distinctive artwork, animating some portions of it and pulling some of the character images off the cards to show who’s in your crew (as opposed to the characters still in your hand). Their decision to depict the board isometrically was brilliant; the physical board is big and quite long north to south, and the app only shows you a portion at a time – the village fits into a single screen, and then you can scroll up to see all of the potential targets for attacks.

I did have a few small technical issues, including occasional crashes when first loading and difficulty moving the meeple from the lower right corner of the screen to place it if I had the map oriented in a way that there was a village location too close to the same spot. The app only comes with one AI level right now, and I found it too easy, mostly because it would do suboptimal things like attack some targets without sufficient strength to garner points. I also would love a one-touch way to jump between the top and bottom halves of the board, as scrolling is awkward, and the app doesn’t automatically reset you to the village after an opponent attacks.

The app also comes with a campaign mode that includes multiple rules variants, most of which are fun and require you to think a little differently, although I don’t think the campaign bears playing more than once. It’s similar to the campaign mode in Jaipur, but those variants were good enough to try multiple times, while here I always felt like the variations were cool but not as good as the base game.

Games take 10-20 minutes against the AI, depending on how quickly you try to move to the top; I’ve found the long play is best for beating the current AI options, because they don’t try to rack up the largest bonuses up top. I am assuming/hoping some of the minor bugs will disappear with updates, along with a stronger AI option, because the way this app plays and looks is outstanding.

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→ July 30, 2019
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Curios.

Curios, which will be released this week at Gen Con, is a fun trifle of a deduction game, playing two to five players in a very quick little game that asks you to bet on which of four ‘artifacts’ will prove most valuable based on the cards in y our hand and those you see. It’s a clever little idea that could probably have been built into a more significant game, but instead it’s a fast-playing filler.

The heart of Curios is a deck of sixteen cards in the four colors of the artifacts, showing the values 1, 3, 5, and 7 for each. Regardless of player count, the dealer sets up the game by dealing one random card from each color, face down, next to each artifact’s card, which will be the value of those artifacts when the game ends. Each player then gets some cards at random to start the game, the number depending on the player count, and will then place their tokens on each of the artifact cards to claim artifacts based on the values they deduce from the cards they hold and others revealed during the game. Once the supplies of two of the four artifacts are exhausted, the game ends; the four hidden values are revealed and players add up the values of the artifacts they’ve collected during the game.

Where the game goes a bit awry for me is in the way the players claim those artifacts. Each card has columns with one space, two, three, and four columns (two); to place your tokens on a card, you must fill the leftmost empty column. You start the game with five such tokens, so you run out of ways to bid on different artifacts very quickly in each round. When you fill a column on a card, you take one artifact of that color; when all players have placed all of their tokens (or can’t place any more), the player with the most tokens on each card gets a bonus artifact.

At the end of a round, each player may choose to reveal one of their hand cards and gain an extra token for the next round. The benefit of having an additional token probably justifies doing this, although by revealing a card you share useful information with other players; in a five-player game, you only get two cards apiece, so it may make more sense to hold one back there than in a two-player game, where you each get four cards. Regardless of player count, the way the columns work means you find it very hard to ‘bet’ on more than one artifact in a round, which means that you end up with a lot of luck involved in every game – maybe too much in a game of deduction, especially with five players. I think it’s ideal with three, and it works as well with two because you set up a neutral third deck of the remaining four cards and reveal one each round, and it’s pretty portable, so as a quick filler game for travel that can introduce novice players to deduction games, it’s fine, but I prefer deduction games that rely more on your mind and less on luck.

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→ July 29, 2019
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The Vanishing Velázquez.

I’m largely a philistine when it comes to art, and was completely in the dark when it came to Diego Velázquez, a Spanish painter from the 1600s whose work remained tremendously influential into the 20th century. He is known for his ability to create illusions in two dimensions, for his brushworks, and for the complexity of his portraits. His work influenced painters whose names or work you probably do know, including Picasso, Dali, and Manet.

Velázquez’s magnum opus, now hanging in the Prado in Madrid, is Las Meninas, a complex scene that includes the young Infanta Margarita Teresa, the daughter of the Spanish King Philip IV; and the painter himself, at a canvas, looking out at the viewer. It is a complex image of various people, at least most of them real, in various poses and at varying distances from the viewer, a cross-section of personages at the royal palace that plays with light and focus to give the illusion of depth.

In the 1840s, a Reading, England, bookseller named John Snare purchased what he believed to be a previously unknown portrait of Charles Stuart, painted by Velázquez, at the era’s equivalent of a yard sale, paying a few pounds for a painting that should have been worth a few thousand. His story is the backbone of Observer art critic Laura Cumming’s book The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, in which Cumming intertwines what she could piece together of Snare’s tragic life with a history of Velázquez in general and Las Meninas in particular. It’s an interesting, erudite book that I also found intermittently confusing, as Cumming is so invested in explaining to us the importance of this still (I think) somewhat obscure Spanish painter – certainly his name and work are less known than Van Gogh, Monet, Picasso, et alia – that she often loses track of Snare’s story. I was confused at several points about what paintings she was discussing, especially since, as was the custom of the time, Snare’s portrait of Charles Stuart was untitled.

Snare grabbed the painting at the country house auction, consulted a few experts, had the painting cleaned up, and concluded that he had a lost Velázquez. He exhibited the painting locally, taking a small fee for visitors to come see it, but kicked up two controversies that would eventually send him and the painting into exile. Two art critics decided, perhaps for the wrong reasons, that the painting wasn’t a Velázquez, but was by the Dutch painter Van Dyck or someone else less important in art history. The estate of the local earl, where the painting was presumed to have previously hung, decided to file a frivolous action against Snare, even seizing the painting briefly and forcing him to defend himself in court at great expense, a proceeding which Cumming can recount in some detail thanks to court records.

Snare eventually fled to the United States with the portrait, leaving his pregnant wife and three children behind, never to see them again. His exact reasons for doing so are unclear, and while he exhibited the painting in the United States, Cumming also can’t tell us what Snare did with the proceeds – he lived in impoverished circumstances in New York, so perhaps he sent the money back to England, but this is all speculation. He died around 1884 in New York, bequeathing the painting to his youngest son, Edward, who traveled to the United States to meet his father for the first time, but after the painting appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1885, it vanished from sight and all records. It may still exist somewhere in a private collection, or even be stored somewhere, but its fate is unknown, and no images of the portrait survived either.

Cumming tells this story well enough given the paucity of source material, but she largely alternates chapters about Snare with those about Velázquez’s life, work, and masterpiece Las Meninas. The latter parts are informative, but I can’t say they’re interesting; even when she goes to great lengths to explain why the Spaniard’s work remains important and influential, without seeing the paintings – the book has fewer than a dozen images of his paintings, including Las Meninas and Juan de Pareja, a portrait of Velázquez’s slave who became his student and whom the painter granted his freedom – it’s hard to grasp Cumming’s finer points about brushstrokes or how the painter created the illusion of three dimensions on a canvas. Perhaps you need more of a foundation in art, or specifically in the type of baroque art in which Velázquez excelled, to fully appreciate this part of the story. I found myself a bit lost in these explanations, and for parts of the book was unsure which painting exactly Snare had found. I will say, at least, that Cumming made me want to see some of his work up close, and I’d especially love to see Las Meninas in person some day to appreciate a painting that Picasso tried to emulate in 58 separate sketches and that Manet called “perhaps the most astonishing piece of painting that has ever been made.”

Next up: Ira Levin’s A Kiss Before Dying.

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Stick to baseball, 7/27/19.

My two ESPN+ posts this week covered a slew of low-A and short-season prospects for the Yankees, Phillies, Red Sox, and Orioles, including Roansy Contreras and a third look at Grayson Rodriguez; and my wrapup of this year’s Under Armour game, full of high school prospects for the 2020 draft. I held a Klawchat on Thursday.

At the moment, it looks like I’ll be in Bristol on Wednesday for ESPN’s Trade Deadline special, driving home that night and flying out to Gen Con the following morning. That probably spikes a chat for this week, but I’ll return for one on the 7th or 8th.

You can still subscribe to my free email newsletter to get additional writing, typically of a more personal nature than what you find elsewhere. My deepest thanks to all of you who sent such kind replies to my most recent newsletter, and a seriously-fuck-off to the one guy who decided it was a good time to be an ass to me.

And now, the links…

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