{"id":7603,"date":"2021-11-29T07:34:32","date_gmt":"2021-11-29T07:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=7603"},"modified":"2021-11-29T07:34:34","modified_gmt":"2021-11-29T07:34:34","slug":"a-dry-cleaning-bill-to-remove-stain-on-reputations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2021\/11\/29\/a-dry-cleaning-bill-to-remove-stain-on-reputations\/","title":{"rendered":"A DRY-CLEANING BILL to remove stain on reputations?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A DRY-CLEANING BILL<\/strong> to remove stain on reputations?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman Warwick considers Impeachment<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Poniewozik is the chief television critic at The New York Times-. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics. He previously spent sixteen years with Time magazine as a columnist and critic. @poniewozik<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am still not sure whether my race to find catch-up tv of the first episode of Impeachment was despite or because of his detailed review but once I had caught up I was hooked, and have watched the subsequent episodes shown since, on BBC2, on time, every time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Poniewozik (left) opened his essay by making points that ar first suggested the series might noit be worth following.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a8One thing that jumps out at you in the opening hour of FX\u2019s <\/em>Impeachment: American Crime Story<\/em><\/a> is how layered it is<\/em>\u00b4, he began. \u00b4and by \u201clayered,\u201d I refer to the makeup!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The premiere ends with the revelation of what appears to be the animatronic replica of William Jefferson Clinton, though somewhere inside that carapace of cosmetics is, I am told, the human actor Clive Owen. Likewise, as Linda Tripp \u2014 the bureaucrat who recorded the former White House intern <\/em>Monica Lewinsky<\/em><\/a> (<\/em>Beanie Feldstein<\/em><\/a>) admitting to a presidential affair \u2014 Sarah Paulson gives an acute performance from behind a Halloween costume of prosthetics.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The uncanny-valley facial plasterwork, while distracting, is not a reflection on either actor\u2019s skill. But it is a metaphor for the challenge of a series like \u201cImpeachment.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is a docudrama\u2019s goal to recreate every detail of its subject with photorealistic precision? Or is it to interpret, to have an angle, to help the audience see a much-told story with new eyes? This is the difference between a drama that expands our view of the past and a star-packed Wikipedia entry.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Impeachment, leaves little out. There are few historical bases it does not tag. But despite several striking performances, its perspective and ideas break out only occasionally from underneath the pancaked strata of details.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Past installments of this Ryan Murphy-produced franchise took on the O.J. Simpson murder case and the killing spree of Andrew Cunanan. Impeachment, credited to head writer Sarah Burgess, focuses less on the White House and more on the women who drove, or were run over by, the scandal. You might say that this avoids the crime that the title promises. But it also invites you to ask what the crime was, if any, and who committed it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first half falls to the modern TV ailment of setup-itis, spending sombre hours skipping around the 1990s to recap familiar points: the sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton by Paula Jones (Annaleigh Ashford); the investigation by the independent counsel Kenneth Starr (Dan Bakkedahl); the beret; the blue dress. You may struggle to stay interested if you followed the case (i.e., were alive) at the time, or listened to the <\/em>\u201cSlow Burn\u201d podcast season<\/em><\/a> about it.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The through-line is the experience of Tripp and Lewinsky (characters shown right)<\/strong> and, to a lesser extent, Jones, each of whom became famous and vilified. Lewinsky meets Tripp after she\u2019s been exiled from the White House to keep the president from temptation and scandal. Lonely and bereft, she turns to her older colleague as a sounding board.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

At times, it\u2019s a delicate treatment of an ambiguous relationship \u2014 is Tripp genuinely concerned for Lewinsky, grooming her or both? But too often their conversations, which draw on Tripp\u2019s tapes and other records, feel more like dramatic re-enactments than interactions between real people.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tripp is a turbulent story engine, resentful, contemptuous of the President and her co-workers, nursing an inflated sense of importance. Paulson strives mightily for sympathy, finding in Tripp\u2019s desire to lash out and write a tell-all the frustration of a professional longing for respect. But she\u2019s working with a story that comes close to caricature, lingering, for instance, on Tripp\u2019s lonely microwaved dinners in front of the tube. (Though props for the prime-time deep cut of having her watch Ted Danson\u2019s \u201cGulliver\u2019s Travels\u201d mini-series in a 1996 scene.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jones gets less screen time, seized as a battering ram by the conservative activist Susan Carpenter-McMillan (a gale-force Judith Light) and exposed to the snickering attention of the media with her charge that Clinton propositioned her for oral sex. Ashford\u2019s human-scale performance runs into a script that often indulges the classist stereotypes (\u201csweet, dumb as a rock,\u201d in Carpenter-McMillan\u2019s words) it wants to deplore.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The show does some of its best work with the peripheral crew of conservative opportunists who seize on the scandal: the acerbic, cynical Ann Coulter (Cobie Smulders), the Web 1.0 gossip Matt Drudge (a perfectly cast Billy Eichner) and the literary agent Lucianne Goldberg (Margo Martindale), a dirt-seeking missile.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

If nothing else, it\u2019s exciting to be around people who love their work. \u201cImpeachment\u201d is at its sharpest about gossip, how it moves and confers power. The most spoken line may be a variation on, \u201cHow did you know that?\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the series lacks a clarifying focus. This could have been a story, \u00e0 la last year\u2019s <\/em>\u201cMrs. America,\u201d<\/em><\/a> about the birth of the vast right-wing attack machine, or a MeToo-informed reconsideration of Clinton\u2019s behavior.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

These ideas are raised but not deepened. (Though there is the nudge-to-the-ribs appearance of a young Brett Kavanaugh at a Starr team meeting saying, \u201cI never like to take no for an answer.\u201d) Opportunities are left on the table, like hiring the formidable Edie Falco as Hillary Clinton but using her as a passing presence (in the first seven episodes of 10), as if simply for the Carmela Soprano echo.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Episode 6, when Starr\u2019s investigators, accompanied by Tripp, ambush Lewinsky at a mall and question her at an adjoining hotel \u2014 a plan sleazily named \u201cOperation Prom Night\u201d\u2014\u201cImpeachment\u201d finds a voice. Suddenly, everything clicks: tone, tension, emotion. The cornered target nearly breaks down over the threat of prison, but also cannily holds her interrogators off, buying time with a trip to Crate and Barrel and a chain restaurant.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s like \u201cThe Americans\u201d by way of \u201cMallrats,\u201d with intrigue, farce and a jagged cut of betrayal. It is, dare I say it, entertaining, which is not a sign of disrespect to the subject matter but of engagement with it. (<\/em>The O.J. Simpson season<\/em><\/a> was deadly serious about race and sexism, but also a wild and swaggering ride.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Episode 7, \u201cImpeachment\u201d is back to Clinton \u2014 more an impression than a performance by Owen \u2014 and its broad-focus book report. But we\u2019ve gotten a glimpse at its most interesting subject. \u201cImpeachment\u201d argues for an idea of Lewinsky both more ordinary and more complex than the punchline of the leering media circus and late-night shows, even if Feldstein leans harder into the character\u2019s melodrama.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

But even here someone else has gotten to the subject before and more powerfully \u2014 the actual Monica Lewinsky, who serves as a producer and has been <\/em>reclaiming her story<\/em><\/a> with a sharp, funny public voice. In a <\/em>2014 Vanity Fair essay<\/em><\/a>, she wrote, \u00b4It may surprise you to learn that I\u2019m actually a person\u00b4. It\u2019s a worthy point; if only the rest of Impeachment were more surprising.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I agree with all the deficits Mr Poniewozik counts in this article, though whether they would have been as noticeable to me without his signposted warnings, I can never know. The characters, who let us not forget were real life big players, (for the most part) on a global stage, do seem to be wooden-puppet caricatures,\u2026..and as we approach episode five at the time of writing, Hilary has hardly even peeked round a corner. Actually when I call the characters caricatures, I think what I really mean is grotesques, and it is hard to feel sorry for any of them. The media seem less campaigners than muck-spreaders, the literary agents seem hard-nosed profiteers, the police seem a body that knows its place, the intern concerned seems enthralled rather than entrapped, (or are those two terms meaning the same thing?) and Clinton as both seducer and seduced rather than a Saville<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In fact these first four episodes have seemed even handed if only because none of the protagonists earn our respect or our sympathy. I hope the series might remind us where our sympathies should lie (I mean rest rather than be untruthful, or unfaithful) and who should be impeached and who should be pardoned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The tv series has thus far not impacted on me as much as did the film Primary Colours with Emma Thompson. That 1998 film was an American comedy-drama<\/a>  directed by Mike Nichols<\/a>. The screenplay by Elaine May<\/a> was adapted<\/a> from the novel Primary Colors: A Novel of Politics<\/a>, a roman \u00e0 clef<\/a> about Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992<\/a>, which was originally published anonymously, but in 1996 was revealed to have been written by journalist Joe Klein<\/a>, who had been covering Clinton’s campaign for Newsweek<\/a>. (no conspiracies there, then?) The film starred John Travolta<\/a>, Emma Thompson<\/a>, Billy Bob Thornton<\/a>, Kathy Bates<\/a>, Maura Tierney<\/a>, Larry Hagman<\/a>, and Adrian Lester<\/a>. The film didn\u2019t address Ms. Lewinshi but did show the proclivities for lechery that led the President to yet another tangled web.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Primary Colours was critically acclaimed but a box office bomb<\/a>, earning $52 million from a $65 million budget. Bates was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress<\/a> for her performance, and May was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Impeachment might yet shine a brighter light down what we know are the dark corridors of power (even if we may not find out who held that power) but meanwhile it is interesting to measure how the smooth, slightly weak character in Primary Colours grew up to be the seedier character of Bill Clinton and how neither of them grew up to be what most people would think of as Presidential.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile I await a tv drama series, perhaps called Don\u00b4t Touch, that will not be about  oral sex in the oval office but will instead ask who created covid and why and who were they targeting or was it all really camouflaging the breakdown of civilisation?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sleep well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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On air sign background<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

HOT BISCUITS<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Presenter Steve Bewick will this week feature in his Hot Biscuits Jazz broadcast extracts from a live set from the Freddy Garner Quartet at the Slug n Lettuce featuring Jim Garner (Sax), James Adolpho (Bass), Phil Bennett (Drums) and Freddie on keyboard. The broadcast further includes jazz from South Wales with Dick Hamer<\/a>, solo and the James Kilby Chadwick<\/a> Trio. New releases from Rez Abbasi<\/a> and a trio of Ian Shaw, Ian Bellamy and Jamie Safir will also be heard. If this sounds interesting then share it with your friends. Join us on Wednesday, or Thursday at 9pm, (GMT) or late Saturday at 11pm (GMT) at www.fc-radio.co.uk<\/a> For archives of my past shows go to www.mixcloud.com\/stevebewick<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The primary source for this article was written by James Poniewozick and published in The New York Times.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our occasional re-postings Sidetracks And Detours are confident that we are not only sharing with our readers excellent articles written by experts but are also pointing to informed and informative sites readers will re-visit time and again. Of course, we feel sure our readers will also return to our daily not-for-profit blog knowing that we seek to provide core original material whilst sometimes spotlighting the best pieces from elsewhere, as we engage with genres and practitioners along all the sidetracks & detours we take.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This article was collated by Norman Warwick, a weekly columnist with Lanzarote Information and owner and editor of this daily blog at Sidetracks And Detours.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Norman has also been a long serving broadcaster, co-presenting the weekly all across the arts programme on Crescent Community Radio for many years with Steve, and his own show on Sherwood Community Radio. He has been a regular guest on BBC Radio Manchester, BBC Radio Lancashire, BBC Radio Merseyside and BBC Radio 4.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a published author and poet he was a founder member of Lendanear Music, with Colin Lever and Just Poets with Pam McKee, Touchstones Creative Writing Group (where he was creative writing facilitator for a number of years) with Val Chadwick and all across the arts with Robin Parker.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

From Monday to Friday,<\/strong> you will find a daily post here at Sidetracks And Detours and, should you be looking for good reading, over the weekend you can visit our massive but easy to navigate archives of over 500 articles.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The purpose of this daily not-for-profit blog is to deliver news, previews, interviews and reviews from all across the arts to die-hard fans and non- traditional audiences around the world. We are therefore always delighted to receive your own articles here at Sidetracks And Detours. So if you have a favourite artist, event, or venue that you would like to tell us more about just drop a Word document attachment to me at <\/strong>normanwarwick55@gmail.com<\/strong><\/a> with a couple of appropriate photographs in a zip folder if you wish. Beiung a not-for-profit organisation we unfortunately cannot pay you but we will always fully attribute any pieces we publish. You therefore might also. like to include a brief autobiography and photograph of yourself<\/strong> in your submission. We look forward to hearing from you.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sidetracks And Detours is seeking to join the synergy of organisations that support the arts of whatever genre. We are therefore grateful to all those share information to reach as wide and diverse an audience as possible.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

correspondents                                Michael Higgins<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Steve Bewick<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Gary Heywood Everett<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Steve Cooke<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Susana Fondon<\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                                            Peter Pearson<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hot Biscuits Jazz Radio                      www.fc-radio.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

AllMusic  <\/strong><\/a>                                          <\/strong>https:\/\/www.allmusic.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n

feedspot                                              https:\/\/www.feedspot.com\/?_src=folder<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazz In Reading                                  https:\/\/www.jazzinreading.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazziz                                                 https:\/\/www.jazziz.com
<\/a>Ribble Valley Jazz & Blues                https:\/\/rvjazzandblues.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rob Adams                                         Music That\u00b4s Going Places<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lanzarote Information                        https:\/\/lanzaroteinformation.co.uk<\/p>\n\n\n\n

all across the arts                                 www.allacrossthearts.co.uk<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rochdale Music Society                     rochdalemusicsociety.org<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lendanear                                           www.lendanearmusic<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Agenda Cultura Lanzarote<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Lanzarote Art Gallery                  https:\/\/lanzaroteartgallery.com<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Goodreads                                        https:\/\/www.goodreads<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

groundup music                                  HOME | GroundUP Music<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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songfacts                                           en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/SongFacts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cImpeachment\u201d is at its sharpest about gossip, how it moves and confers power. The most spoken line may be a variation on, \u201cHow did you know that?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7609,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7603","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture-and-tradition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7603"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7613,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7603\/revisions\/7613"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7609"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7603"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7603"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}