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.

It’s celebration season for the rest of the year.

🏀 Fiction

“Mutter” by Esther Yi. One KAT. lieu, living, light. A sliver of a piece, cooly written but heartbreaking. The opening wordplay/linguistics didn’t hit for me, though; it wasn’t until the superb scene at the zoo, involving the sort of encounter that creates a realization of the perceived distance between you and those you love, that the piece spread its wings. And then it cracks open into sorrow. Can you catch the wavelength of this piece? That depends on your willingness to lean in and listen close. Consonants will not be enunciated.

🏀 Weekend Essay

“Kate Millett Disappears” by Rachel Cusk. No Anunobys. violence, visual, vainly. Another big dose of chilly, violence-obsessed gender-essentialist feminism from Cusk. Less predictably, she’s trying to make the argument that a writer making art is some sort of unthinkable act; she speaks of her own writing as relinquishing “a certain freedom”, and while she claims this is a conservative frame, she also seems to buy into it to a really odd degree. Sure, some people may be grumpy about interdisciplinary work, but it’s not newer than, like, Da Vinci. She projects a range of interpretations onto Millet – most disturbingly, a charge of “madness” which is meant as laudatory but is still a messed-up thing to say about a woman who was involuntarily committed, and became depressed due to the perception of those around her that she was crazy, according to her description. Regardless of how much theory you cloak it in, the way Cusk tells Millett’s story is fucked up and presumptive. And it’s not even very interesting as theory!

🏀 Random Pick

“Talks About Talks” by John Newhouse. (December 31, 1984). No Brunsons. challenge, channels, chiefs. Surely there is a better way to convey mind-numbingly circular discussions than by giving us every single detail of those discussions without a hint of humor or even interest. Even if you really wanted to know about Reagan’s obviously doomed Star Wars space-laser project and its role in mid-eighties Soviet negotiations, and were hoping to find out about it from this magazine, I’d still probably point you to Freeman Dyson’s articles on the topic from earlier in the year. I haven’t read them, but nothing could be worse than this. I audibly groaned on the subway as I kept scrolling and this piece kept going on. It’s a picture of a moment right before Chernenko died and everything did rapidly change under glasnost, and that Newhouse’s analysis insists things aren’t about to change doesn’t mean he’s dumb, just that – as ever – the future is very hard to predict. It’s easy to win most of your bets by saying that nothing ever happens, but one mustn’t go all in on that position.

🏀 Something Extra

No total hits recently, but some shows with fascinating and successful elements:

Dionysus at the Equinox, the second free Domino Park show in this year’s series, had probably my favorite first fifteen minutes of any show this year, a delirious breakdown in which performers (including the always delightful Lisa and Lena of Friday Night Rat Catchers, plus Paul Zimet from Talking Band) encircled, climbed, and meshed with the stage in a delirious, literally orgiastic introduction to this bizarro riff on The Bacchae. The band were dressed as bundles of grapes. At one point performers wrapped in red turned themselves into a giant human bottle of wine from which the last of them glugged. The Prince of the park tried to put a stop to art; a policeman stripped into a god. It was fucking exhilarating. Unfortunately, the show quickly and entirely exhausted its ideas, then spun its wheels for the rest of its hour runtime. Isa Spector is still a major voice, and I’d love to see him develop this material further.

The Glorious and Stunning Death of a Faithful Mormon was, in the end, surprisingly serious and literal in its Death of a Salesman riff by way of Thornton Wilder; given its zany title and trippy sequencing, I expected more textual subversion. But there were certainly plenty of productively bizarre moments in the over two hours of journey on the way, including lots of discussion of gnomes and also a literal gnome.

In the Devil’s Hands, possibly the smallest show I’ve ever been to (there were about twelve audience members, one of whom I’m fairly sure was the director), had two big things going for it: An extraordinarily committed lead performance by Rory Greenwood, who sweated and wept and never left the stage, and a gorgeous felted island of a set. The script was quite old-school, and couldn’t nail down its tone, but it was still fairly interesting.

The Table was a visceral bit of performance by up-and-coming group Pink Fang with some surprisingly convincing live projection.

Sunday Song: