The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three Ellises (for fiction), McClellands (for essays), or Whitakers (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one Ellis, McClelland, or Whitaker indicates a generally positive review.

Double issue! One fiction piece, two weekend essays, and three – count ‘em – random picks.

⏰ Fiction

“Something Familiar” by Mary Gaitskill. One Ellis. taxi, talking, tail. Gaitskill is one of the great writers of sexual politics, and she’s firmly in her pocket here; psychologically, this is astute and troubling stuff, with an exceptionally clear-eyed view of sex work and male violence. Unfortunately, I just don’t think Gaitskill has nailed the tone she’s aiming for; the continual descriptive flourishes in the first two-thirds feel both inexact and inapt, almost as though this is a script that was hastily retooled after Gaitskill realized she needed to stay with these characters a bit longer after they said goodbye to each other again. The sections with the driver are admirable in their empathetic imagination, but they’re also clouded by too much perfume and film-noir lighting. A starker touch was needed. Also, while the title is decent on its own terms, it had me expecting a comedy tonight! Instead I got, well, something portentous. Not quite polite…

⏰ Weekend Essay

“Losing Faith in Atheism” by Christopher Beha. One McClelland. route, rosary, romantic. Misguided, sure, but unexpectedly honest and well-written, in an oh my god, he admit it sort of way. Basically, Beha says that after losing his religion he tried out scientific materialism but was too smart for it (who isn’t?), so he tried out what he hilariously calls romantic idealism, but it bummed him out because it revealed the emptiness of his liberal ideals. Beha elides this a bit, but it’s clear that instead of discarding those liberal ideals, though, he decided to pivot back to religion while villainizing moral relativism as the pastime of fascists and commies. As to commies, he has a point – and Beha is essentially making as straightforward and self-aware an argument in favor of bourgeois morality as you’ll find – while fascists are at most moral particularists, ones any true Nietzche enthusiast would surely reject.¹ Beha’s point is that, since liberalism is failing our country, and since liberalism has no actual guiding principals except that it works, we ought to tie liberalism to religion, thereby ensuring the advancement of both. This is a hopeless cause, surely, but reading Beha will prove enlightening to any good-faith opponent of liberal capitalism. Know thine big-tent frenemy!

⏰ Weekend Essay Two

“A Childhood in Jewish New Orleans” by Nicholas Lemann. One McClelland. restriction, resistance, respectability. I knew nothing of the early German Jewish population in New Orleans, who were among the early Jews practicing an assimilationist politics that became increasingly tenuous throughout the first half of the 20th century. I did know the basics of Jewish-American history – I’d better! – but Lemann’s recap is exceptionally good; detail-dense, fairly comprehensive, only a bit dry. Is the whole piece a backdoor defense of Zionism at this late date? If so, it doesn’t quite spring that trap on us, merely nudging our ribs a bit; this is an excerpt from Lemann’s new book Returning, which may push things further in that direction, or may swerve. It’s clear he was pained, even scarred, by his family’s attempts to assimilate; still, his choice of overt tribalism, and his skeptical quotation of a relative who doesn’t “‘have any faith in nationalism whatsoever’”, are surely not the way forward. This is the beginning of the story; as such, it’s partial, and hard to judge. It’s troubling, but it’s interesting!

⏰ Random Pick

“Devilment” (The Current Cinema) by David Denby. (March 7, 2005.) No Whitakers. gangsters, gauntness, garbage. I cannot believe how much I did not need or want to get scolded by David Denby for enjoying media that trivializes and makes light of the iconography of the Catholic Church, something that is, according to him, only happening to the Catholics. I know it’s been twenty years, but shut the fuck up.

⏰ Random Pick Two

“The Casualness of It” (Profiles) by Whitney Balliett. (September 19, 1988.) No Whitakers. wringing, writing, wrong. Balliett is best known as the longtime jazz critic; here, he’s interviewing Jackie Mason in the block-quote-dense style of an earlier era at the magazine. Unfortunately, Mason isn’t the sort of comedian that’s naturally funny; his shtick is great, but it’s full-bore, and here he relaxes and shoots the shit, which is entirely the wrong mode. Also, when you don’t hear his words in a Jackie Mason voice, he just comes across as sort of a shithead, griping about his bad luck and bragging about his good luck. The rest of the piece – what little there is – is mostly very literal descriptions of Mason routines; as I’ve said many times before, good standup almost never reads on the page, and Mason’s act fares especially poorly. Oy gevalt!

⏰ Random Pick Three

“The Sounds of a City” (A St. Petersburg Childhood) by Igor Stravinsky. (September 24, 1960.) Alright, so only the first section actually concerns sound; and yes, the continual litany of Stravinsky’s favorite streets and buildings grows wearying. Other than that, this is a delightful and erudite little memory piece; what a wonder to discover that Igor Stravinsky’s prose is as fiery and flourish-laden as his music. (“My own olfactory bearings were conditioned by a felt bashlyk, or hood, that I was obliged to wear during the winter months, and my palate still retains a strong residual reek of wet felt.” He could have written librettos!) In swiftly bringing old St. Petersburg to life, it’s as though Stravinsky is holding up his hollow coin in the exact midpoint between me, here in the present, and that now-vanished city. Sixty-five years, two millimeters of metal, sixty-five years.

⏰ Something Extra

Lots to report!!

The far-and-away highlight is Parched, the centerpiece of the three-show puppet festival at HERE through March 1. It’s a bizarro post-apocalyptic Western, complete with stellar live banjo, in which a mushroom-headed child and a cowboy corpse are inhabited (can a spirit be haunted?) by their human pasts. The technical achievement is unmatched by any puppet piece I can remember, and there is never a sense of running out of tricks – every moment has something new to gape at. SO many puppet shows have tried to grapple with environmental collapse², but I found this one to have by far the deepest and most nuanced things to say. I sensed, overhearing conversation afterward, that I was one of the few audience members who kept up with the plot to a degree they found satisfactory (though it’s hard not to miss a few things; there is no dialogue and a lot of incident, not all of it to be taken literally). So come caffeinated and ready to think; while this show is child-appropriate, it’s not going to hold your hand. I say thank goodness for that. I was deeply moved by this authentically visionary work.³

Cimino’s Defeat, at the wonderful townhouse venue Torn Page, is an antic biography play recounting the director’s time shooting Heaven’s Gate, the once-derided, now-acclaimed – at least in France – post-Western. Farce is a very difficult genre, and this was admirably tight, if more amusing than funny. I appreciate that director Sam Cini played fast and loose with the script, finding shadings that were surely unintentional; the show sometimes seemed to be its own parody, which works well for this sort of thing (as Oh, Mary! grandly proves.) Both present and past Ciminos were superb impersonations, but the show was stolen by Gia Bonello as Cimino’s sometime partner-in-crime and Jeremy Cohen as a coked-up horndog producer; they found the fastest tempo and added the most shades.

without mirrors, the latest David Greenspan monologue, is more of a tone poem; I was entirely transported, vibing off its rhythm completely, and more specifically I was transported to the delirious out-of-body heights of my quarantine misery. Not everyone will go there, and some that do probably won’t like going there. (The oddly perfunctory and un-subverted expository opening monologue doesn’t help things.) But I was down. Through March 7.

I love the one-night-only programming running now at Ars Nova. It’s like the world’s best queer nightclub added seats, heaters, and reasonably priced drinks. The best thing I saw across two nights was a Cronenberg-played-for-laughs set by drag king Sweaty Eddie.

And last but also least, two to avoid: A dreary, endless, accidentally heteronormative Coriolanus at TFANA (shouts to Kevin Alicea as Adrian, the only spark of light in a tiny, thankless role), and Meat Suit at Signature, in which an obviously game creative team does mean-spirited clowning exercises for an hour straight and then swerves off the highway into cludgy sincerity for the last forty minutes. Truly disastrous.

Sunday Song:

Finally got around to listening to this, the experimental decolonized Andean electronic dance-noise album that was Pitchfork’s favorite of the year. My top track is #3, at 12:00 in the video.