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.

⏰ Fiction

“Ordinary Wear and Tear” by Thomas McGuane. One Ellis. replay, reply, replaced. I’m glad to see McGuane, at eighty-six, is not just still at it but has turned in one of his longest and most sweeping stories. What remains is the focus on Montanan masculinity, here channeled into a somewhat corny love-triangle narrative. If I found this story a bit hard to enjoy as a whole, I was at least able to enjoy it immensely line by line, McGuane’s humor and technical skill flagging not a bit. Look at all the gorgeous swerves in this paragraph, which contains nothing of direct relevance to the plot yet moves as balletically as a climax: “They passed a cornice that poured swallows overhead. Carl watched them as they spiralled above, but neglected to notice a man fishing from the bank and accidentally rowed across his line. Carl raised his hands from the oars and apologized, but the angler shook an enraged fist. Carl found that merely interesting and said, ‘Wow!’” Carl and Jed are too obviously foils for one another, but as characters in their own right they’re well-developed portraits of opposite flavors of avoidance and repression; Carl’s to-a-fault steadiness and love for his judgemental mother and Jed’s dissociated hedonism and self-perpetuating loneliness and victimization. (Jenny, on the other hand, seems largely to act in whatever way will drive the plot.) If you like McGuane’s usual calloused Montanan two-step, you’ll find plenty here to love. No need to go fishing.

⏰ Weekend Essay

“The Pain and Play of Divorce on Kids’ TV” by Jean Garnett. One McClelland. failures, faithfully, fairy. A bit scattered – the personal anecdotes work fairly well (Garnett’s mother wrote for Sesame Street? Hey, my mother animated for it!) but the history of kids’ shows is both scant and not necessary (if Garnett wanted to write that piece, she needed to do more interviews); the book feels less reviewed than mined for material, and the assessment of kids’ programming generally feels under-edited, not thorough enough to be a useful guide but not pointed enough to work as criticism. (The critique of Sesame Street desperately needs comment from its showrunners; the built-in divergence between the pedagogical techniques of Sesame and Rogers could easily be the crux of this whole piece, and it’s barely noted.) Garnett’s conclusions are all about the nature of play, but that thread is almost exclusively from the Bluey sections, and similarly needs expansion elsewhere. Still, those conclusions are wise: Children can be trusted to work toward understanding; other children – even recorded – are often the best guides through hard situations; kids’ movies can contain good messaging and still be bad movies, and there’s no telling what rubric your child will assess them with, or, maybe more importantly, what she’ll take away from them. Even just as a conversation piece, this is worth reading: How should parents help their kids with adverse events, autonomy, media experiences? These are some big questions about the small.

⏰ Random Pick

“The Old Lady What Eats High on the Cuff” (Television) by Philip Hamburger. (October 21, 1951). No Whitakers. poet, poker, poise. Theoretically, it’s very interesting to get a contemporaneous view of early broadcast television. Practically, this is a recounting of unfunny stories that’s too dry even to bite, followed by a recounting of a science program which demonstrates that apparently things that happen for an audience of children at every science center in America were, in the fifties, novel enough to appeal to a television critic. That’s sort of interesting, but not in the way Hamburger intends it to be.

⏰ Something Extra

No Singing in the Navy is a metafarce with some very strong moments; if it doesn’t hold together, it’s still a good time, and short. Holdren nailed my main criticisms, which keeps me from having to wrestle them into words.

Cassette vol. 1, the new Kyle Abraham dance at Skirball, was solid nostalgic fun; the Harlem Dance Theater’s Firebird was whimsical and extremely well-performed. Chess didn’t work for me: If the CIA agent and the KGB agent have significantly more chemistry than any combination of your love triangle, something has gone wrong. (Very good choreography, though, as everyone has already noted.) All three had me wondering how these works wanted to be seen, whether they presented as completely unironic (Firebird), cockeyed but entirely sincere (Cassette), or deliberately oscillating between patronizingly arch commentary and painfully sincere song (Chess). It feels rude to laugh at anything so whole-hearted, yet of course the element of camp is intended in all three cases… but when there’s no wink, one wonders who the joke is on; when there is a wink, one wonders how we’re supposed to take any of this seriously.

Sunday Song: