The Weekend Special

Pieces are given up to three KATs (for fiction), Anunobys (for essays), or Brunsons (for random picks). As with restaurant stars, even one KAT, Anunoby, or Brunson indicates a generally positive review.

🏀 Fiction

“Chuck Murphy’s Last Run” by Kevin Barry. No KATs. This will succeed or fail for any given reader based entirely on how charming and funny they find Barry’s over-the-top Irishisms and goofy-stance prose rhythm. (“‘How in the name of all that’s holy do you go and get yourself conceived in Strandhill, County Buttfuck?’ Barney said.”) None of it does much for me, and the narrative here – tough guys trying to scatter a friend’s ashes – is a preexisting cliché; see, most famously, the third act of The Big Lebowski, but also the misbegotten comedy Grown Ups and a British film, Last Orders, which I haven’t seen but seems to have an identical scenario. Barry doesn’t put any twist on the plot beyond some quick bickering with surfers (the best material here), and toward the end his sentimentality grows especially overbearing. (The narrator’s dreams “of sombre mountain roads” tell him “of the lonelier roads to come”. Yeah, we got that.) Still, a lack of narrative ambition can help humor come across, and this is, at the very least, a fun one to read aloud.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“How I Became a Lock Picker” by Shayla Love. Two Anunobys. The accidental-landlord narrative is significantly too freighted to serve as the charming opener Love hopes for. Quickly, though, this becomes a story about a small group of European nerds who obsess over locks. This is more fun. Picking is a “practical and tactile skill” that also has a frisson of illicitness; the nerds bristle at any implication of criminality, which is understandable, but surely part of the appeal of picking is its implied rebellion against an authority who wants you out. Love nails the tactile pleasure, too, making a pick sound orgasmic: “As I concentrated on what I was feeling, my field of vision drifted out of focus.” A climactic anecdote, in which a picker’s idea of success and “value” diverges from the norm, is a wonderful way to sum up this corner of the world. Love has this brief, delightful appreciation on lock.

🏀 Random Pick

“Broken Vows” (Books) by James Wood. (March 11, 2013). Two Brunsons. Having recently read Wood’s newest book review in the magazine (spoiler alert: Excellent!), which discusses organized religion and addiction, I was keyed in to his fixation on the spiritual, which is also central to his view of Jamie Quatro’s short stories here; he teases out a Christian dichotomy between “judgement and forgiveness” as key to her writing on adultery. Wood, a minister’s son, is always thinking about literature as a secular form; his framework is distinct but generally not doctrinaire. He provides plenty of Quatro quotes – a few big chunks and some well-chosen lines – and is hugely convincing as to her merits. He addresses her flaws in a more euphemistic manner – prose can be “something dangerously close to M.F.A. filler”, demonstrated by a doing-one-thing-then-doing-the-next-thing excerpt that I thought was perfectly fine; but also, she can be “conventional and sentimental”. Whose conventions and sentiments? Quatro’s two novels have done well but not spectacularly; perhaps the very short story is a more natural fit.

Since the section formerly known as Something Extra has long turned exclusively into the culture-reviews section, I’m renaming it. I’ve taken the “About Town” the magazine snipped off the “Goings On” section and combined it with the newsletter’s name. Introducing:

🏀 Last Week About Town

I recently saw what will surely be my favorite show of the year, a one-woman prose-poem astonishment, The Nicest Body Ever Seen Around These Parts. Sharon Feldman translated the original from Catalan, keeping both its sensitivity and its full-body funk; Rachel Crowl imbues it with a ferocious, searching heart. Any description may make it sound like “just another” one-person show; it’s a series of monologues by different characters who sketch out an insular town’s waking-dream tragedies and horrors. But it feels even eerier and more unusual than that description suggests. A show like this succeeds on the quality of its language, and there’s not a moment here that feels too pat or too fixed; the world keeps dropping out from under you. Unlike some so-called poetic stage writing, there’s no reliance on cliché or received truth; even at its most abstract, there is a metallic sheen to the language, sharp like blood in the mouth. Superb, understated sets (by Jian Jung, always doing something interesting, who will now have designed both my favorite and least-favorite shows of the year) and lighting (by Kate McGee, very good as ever and increasingly everywhere) are indispensable; this is a high-wire show in which any false note could prove ruinous. All the more exhilarating, then, just how well it comes together. Tickets are very cheap, and the run is short-ish. Run don’t walk.

Khankhana, the latest Nrityagram Dance show at the Joyce, was a gorgeous, sometimes trance-enducing feat of rhythm.

Beyond the Stardust at the Flea, an afrofuturist queer dance-music performance with a movement ensemble, was a very fun time.

Waiting for Lefty at Classic Stage has no idea whether it wants to be a realistic, contemporary, political take on a pro-labor text or a stylized slice of history. Half the actors are doing forties accents and half sound like valley girls. A number of good performances (Adam Kantor, doing but not overdoing a tortured conscience, is the highlight), good songs, and good scenes, even if nothing coheres.

I also caught the Steve Reich 90th Anniversary concert at Carnegie Hall, which was fuckin’ superb. How many musicians have made canonical works across such a long career? Hard to think of many.

Sunday Song: