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 means double edition!

⏰ Fiction

“The Dreamdrive” by Weiki Wang. One Ellis. indefinitely, interact, insomnia. It’s a shame that Wang decided to juice an otherwise well-calibrated psychological thriller with sudden moments of tangential and very broad humor about silly and inept doctors and quack medicine; they totally harsh the vibe. I was frequently reminded of a song about bewildered doctors from the Tim Minchin Groundhog Day musical; it’s a fun tune, but that’s not a compliment. In the interview, Deborah Treisman asks if it’s difficult to balance poignancy and humor; Wang says “Sometimes, though not really”, which, under the circumstances, seems more than a bit evasive. The story is otherwise about a recurring dream of driving which stands in for a continual attempt to gain capacity for forward progress and growth that the speaker finds disabling and depressing. The eventual solution – to rest, to park the car – might seem pat or just overtly Odell-ish if not for the story’s remove and lingering sense of hauntedness. There is also a bit of Male Loneliness Crisis buzzword ambience about this piece; again, though, Wang is too clever a writer to provide tidy propositions in that regard. Hands on ten and two.

⏰ Weekend Essay 1

“How Reading with My Dying Mother Revealed Her Life” by Nicholas Dawidoff. Two McClellands. professor, proposal, problem. A frank, lovely, deliberately muted meditation on learning to understand a difficult, “inflexible and thin-skinned” mother as she approaches her end. Dawidoff doesn’t reach for neat conclusions; he addresses his mother’s formative trauma in its gutting, unpoetic specifics, and shows how they fed the distance between her and himself. Dawidoff takes his sweet time getting to the two-person COVID book club that forms the impetus for this essay, but the extended history helps us know the anxieties driving both of them, so that their reflections in the second half of the narrative resonate – far better than if Dawidoff jumped back in time to sketch in the histories behind each remark. Dawidoff keeps a slight reserve, one his mother would probably appreciate; it keeps the story from feeling intrusive, and helps it retain some ambiguity, like any good novel, or any life.

⏰ Weekend Essay 2

“Can Art Teach?” by David S. Wallace. No McClellands. level, leisure, learn. Afraid to be criticism but totally lacking a thesis that would elevate it to essay, and largely incomprehensible in the mode of an iffy liberal arts professor delivering a rambling lecture that ends up being about almost nothing except whatever mediocre cultural products and thin, regurgitated theses about media engagement were on his mind. Wallace keeps circling back to The Pitt as, apparently, didactic in a righteous or maybe dramatically potent way; this is contrasted with various pieces of media, chosen seemingly at random, which are held up as didactic or not based on whether Wallace wants to praise them. Obviously the issue with didacticism is not its taking of sides but the didactic work’s insistence on the unimpeachability of its own view, certainly worthwhile with medicine – there really is a right way to do open-heart surgery – but iffier in many more human matters. The Pitt is the opposite of Brechtian, its focus firmly on achieving ideals of ‘realism’ despite its transparent messaging, and in fact Brecht’s use of didacticism in a radical context is inherently different and maybe opposite from the use of didacticism to enforce norms more broadly. I won’t rant; Wallace’s argument is too slippery to really engage with. The section on the apparently “simulated enrichment” of short-format media (as opposed to the ‘actual’ enrichment of… The Pitt? College? What?) and the “political signalling” it maybe encourages, is, frankly, intellectually vapid, and a signal that none of this should be taken seriously.

⏰ Random Pick 1

“The Taste of Today” (The Art Galleries) by Lewis Mumford. (October 1, 1932). One Whitaker. soon, somehow, sophisticated. It is surreal to read a critique of an exercise in picking specifically those masterpieces which are favored by the aesthetic preferences of a certain now-long-past era. After postmodernism, such an exercise would likely seem perverse and gauche, an indulgence in dehistoricization. (It would be sort of interesting, though. Most of what now appeals was once seen as unfinished, like Whistlejacket or da Vinci’s St. Jerome; or else speaks to modern forms, like a flatly lit, selfie-ish self-portrait by Serebriakova which periodically goes viral on Instagram for its contemporary vibe.) In a way, this verbal depiction of the inside of modernism, which frames its revolution as merely a matter of taste, is more telling than any modernist artwork; it reveals that the grandiosity of modernism is not a matter of inherent ideology but merely one of style. Poussin’s “studious mastery” and Chardin’s “rich appetite for the actual” are also the modernist subject’s. Maybe, after all, it isn’t dehistoricization to admit that we see our present in objects borne of the past.

⏰ Random Pick 2

“Hear Me Purr” (Annals of Journalism) by James Wolcott. (May 20, 1996). No Whitakers. gloat, gleam, glints. I haven’t read much of the magazine’s media criticism and have reviewed less, possibly out of fear that I will open a wormhole. This piece is constructed entirely of jump scares, whether they be from the repeated use of “chick” in a manner that was surely already offputting at the time or just from Remembering Some Public Intellectuals, like a citation that starts with “As Camille Paglia wrote in the on-line magazine Salon”. Eep! The spoiled-meat scent is heavy here, and while Maureen Dowd deserves most of what she gets, including but not limited to Wolcott’s belittlement of her trite style, she did get one thing right – Clinton was basically just who she pegged him as, and she did win that much-lusted-after Commentary Pulitzer for saying so. Wolcott oscillates so quickly between perfectly fair jabs (Dowd has “mastered the art of moralizing along the inseams”, her columns are “a series of cutie-pie captions” – and so they remain), indefensible jabs (he literally calls Colin Powell a Mandingo, with only a very thin application of irony in his defense), defenses of authority which have aged poorly (the Paglia quote praises Bill C. for his “‘emotional openness and enjoyment of life’”, which may as well be written in the shape of a bust), and defenses of norms which have merely aged depressingly (how has the Times opinions page’s “sense of social dimension” been doing lately?) that a reader will end up with motion sickness and the scent of spoiled meat on their tongue. Certainly unique!

⏰ And Another Thing

“What ‘The Sheep Detectives’ Doesn’t Understand About Sheep” (The Current Cinema) by Jill Lepore. One Thingy. clues, clouds, cleverest. Reader Kristina wrote in to ask what I thought about this piece, and since I caught the movie a few days ago, I’ll cover Lepore’s piece, even though it’s online-only and not accounted for by any of my usual segments. The film has three excellent qualities: The sheep animation is consistently superb and full of emotion (even where the voiceover acting isn’t always); the mystery is reasonably well-constructed; a human cast led by Nicholas Braun are game and energetic. Unfortunately, this is all in service of a film that is not nearly strange enough to pay off its delightful premise, and which mostly feels like a highly derivative, lukewarm, emotionally underbaked kiddie flick. I won’t judge¹, but I can’t imagine being moved to tears. I haven’t read the source material, but Lepore says that it was mangled, its soul removed, and this absolutely matches the film I saw. The media we are bound to hate most is that which takes excellent, personally meaningful source material and betrays its heart; I could absolutely write a Lepore-esque takedown of the Oscarbaiticized adaptations of Hamnet and The Hours, two films that left me incandescent with rage. The title doesn’t fit the piece – Kristina points out that Lepore is “very light on animal cognition and behavior” – but this can be chalked up entirely to the unfortunately click-baiting house style of the online edition. The piece itself, a defense of a novel and a critique of its adaptation as missing the spirit of the original, is completely justified; Lepore does a very good job selling Three Bags Full as a far more heartfelt and vastly superior execution of a delirious idea. She is not a born movie reviewer – the intro is outrageously clunky, and her prose is generally in online-only mode – but I can’t begrudge her this take.

⏰ Something Extra

Justice for Cynthia Nixon and Junior LaBeija. Otherwise the Tony nominations are acceptable.

Have seen some very good and very bad things of late. My parents were in town for a weekend and we stuffed it with four shows: 73 Seconds (meh), Well I’ll Let You Go (That ensemble was not going to let this fail, but the deliberate withholding of the first two-thirds made me itchy, and then I felt jerked around by the transparently tear-jerking theatrical feints and swerves of the last bit; If it worked for you, I do get why), Rheology redux at Playwrights (my favorite show of last year and still a fucking masterpiece, significantly technically tightened and perhaps slightly emotionally tightened since its first run; glad to know Chowdhury really does give the mom different notes on the cough every night) and finally Dad Don’t Read This, which I adored (can we be done with the parentheticals so I can use full sentences now?). The writer’s earlier Grief Camp was an awkward fit for the room at Atlantic and didn’t cohere, but the performances were tight and two of the better actors from that show have returned here. There is an informal troupe of performers around town playing high schoolers in somewhat similar works about self-discovery and pain – see also Calf Scramble, John Foster is the Villain, Your Own Personal Exegesis, definitely a few others – who both consistently elevate the work and also give all of it an alternate-universes quality. Dad Don’t Read This doesn’t transcend this genre, but it’s the tightest, most fully-formed, and most moving example of it I’ve seen yet.² Expertly modulating scene by scene between realism and fantasy, the show makes room for some astonishingly elegant speech-poetry without neglecting its various plots, which swirl and dissipate in the manner of real teen drama. All four of the cast members are excellent: Yoo balances emotional surface and depth with balletic ease, Powell has a killer faux-nonchalant smolder. But the discovery is Katya Thomas, who pinpoints a certain empathic anxiety common to the nerd-outsider type³ and surfaces the fear of incapacity beneath it, and delivers a showstopping dance solo (choreographed by Lena Engelstein, a Name You Should Know) full of animalistic limbiness.

And one more big thumbs-up: Vanessa is the most fully realized Heartbeat Opera production yet, a stripped down black-and-white take on Barber’s angular melodrama with a universally superb five-person cast, including Kelsey Lauritano enveloping the room in her vocal tone and Freddie Ballentine doing an enchanting wide-eyed cartoon-wolf routine.

And then I also saw two ensemble plays I strongly disliked for almost opposite reasons! Titans, the Clubbed Thumb opener, is well-meaning but clunky and misproportioned; don’t tell David Wallace but it’s a perfect example of the pitfalls of didactic art, re-teaching its audience tips for fighting ICE like a pill smuggled into a first-draft broad comedy. The Balusters is more technically successful – its broad comedy is second-draft, though still very cruise-ship-entertainment – but insidious in its liberal insistence that we forgive and feel for various obnoxious wealthy people, all of whom repent in words without taking a single action. It’s far and away the most politically repulsive production of the season (though I haven’t seen Giant yet) but also unfathomably smug; generally, if you’re going to be self-righteous you have to start by being righteous. The plot is beat-for-beat identical to Eureka Day; just swap out the subject matter for a brain-damaged riff on act two of Clybourne Park. If you can picture that, you’ve demonstrated exactly as much imagination as the whole of this show, which is exclusively for idiots. Its relatively good notices – a critics’ pick from Helen Shaw! – are depressing. (And just before publication it won the Drama Desk for best new play, beating five excellent shows full of genuine insight and earned wit.⁴ I mean, that’s just fucked.)

I appreciated that Anika Noni Rose pronounced Baltimore like a local. And honestly I did laugh at the nonbinary joke, but thanks anyway, Helen.

I don’t want to spin the theater reviews off into a separate edition, but maybe I should name them something other than “Something Extra” if I’m going to make them this unbearably long. Thoughts?

Sunday Song: