Liars and Saints

You know what really irritates me? Certain Bob Marley songs. I feel blasphemous just making this small confession. Maybe it's not even the songs. It's the habit white Park Slope residents have of playing these songs over and over and over again. I'm thinking of the painfully tedious "Don't Worry about a Thing." (Well, the song is actually called "Three Little Birds.") Has there ever been a more vapid and thrillingly wrongheaded set of lines than this chorus: Don't worry about a thing. Cause every little thing gonna be all right! Singin': Don't worry about a thing. Cause every little thing gonna be all right! It's like nails on a chalkboard. The folksy speaker--despite racking up record deals and the trappings of international celebrity--cannot be bothered with something as fussy as a linking verb or a hard "g" on the end of "singing." And the apparent profundity of the first two lines is so overwhelming,...

The NYT did an audio/video clip about Zedd. It's about his new song, "The Middle." A twenty-three-year-old woman in Australia wrote it. She had been sent a melody, and then, into her head came: "Baby, why don't you just meet me in the middle?" And: the rest is history. A sound engineer somewhere really liked the sound a medieval axe flying through the air and smacking into a piece of wood--because of "Game of Thrones"?--and he especially liked that you generally don't hear this sound in top-40 hits, and so he added that (apparently). And then Zedd--the mesmerizing young pixie man from Russia(?)--became involved. It's not entirely clear to me what Zedd added. Well, he did find the singer--Maren Morris. He looks into the camera and says, somberly, "I knew the vocalist needed to sound just like the songwriter--but better." This is said with the self-seriousness of God announcing the Ten Commandments. Apparently, some A-list singers...

Tonight gives us a chance to revisit Lin-Manuel Miranda. That’s because the original Aaron Burr--Leslie Odom, Jr.--will be on PBS, 9 PM. Tune in. Some thoughts. “In the Heights” was a big deal for me. That’s because Nina’s culture-shock issues resonated with me. Nina is groomed to be an academic star. She recalls spending her childhood studying; others would gather, “rapping with buddies, volume high,” but Nina would “walk on by.” (“In the Heights” really thrives on local color, in a way “Hamilton” cannot. In his first big musical, LMM is writing about his own childhood, and that makes the lyrics special.) Nina gets maybe the most poetic line LMM has ever written; she recalls girlhood, thinking that “the world was just a subway map, and the 1/9 climbed a dotted line to my place.” That image is so powerful because, of course, children do think the world is small and easily navigable. (For many years--too many--I thought the Upper West Side was the entirety of Manhattan.) The verb “cli...

The Golden State Killer is found! Should you read Michelle McNamara’s “I’ll Be Gone in the Dark”? I’d argue yes. Regardless, some thoughts: -This book caused me to start using the deadbolt in my Park Slope home. I actually read it while in California, not Sacramento--thank goodness!--but Palm Springs. The house where I was staying had several massive glass walls that looked out on a quiet, sprawling property, and I felt certain that every agitated palm tree was my rapist/killer, hunting me down. That’s the treat you’re in for--when you pick up “Gone in the Dark”! -The rapes and killings are a bit repetitive. McNamara will give you a thumbnail sketch of the victim-to-be. Then the assailant will appear. He goes after couples, over and over. He puts some kind of plate on the man’s chest and says, if I hear this plate shatter, you’re dead. (So the man has to stay paralyzed.) He has the woman jerk him off for a while--witness after witness will describe the “small penis”--and then there...

I can’t call myself a Rachel McAdams super-fan. I haven’t seen “The Notebook” or “About Time.” I would rather eat glass than sit through Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder” (I’m certain). But I very much appreciate the profound weirdness of McAdams’s career--from Regina George to a Meg Ryan-ish vehicle (“Morning Glory”), to many months of total silence (who does that?), to Brian de Palma, to “Spotlight,” to light comedy. Throw in a Philip Seymour Hoffman spy movie, along with the second season of “True Detective,” where, it seems, McAdams was the only one who managed to win praise. This is a genius weirdo we’re talking about. If you look on Wikipedia, you’ll see RM does not have any movies currently in production, and this worries me. During her hiatus, she revealed, “I never really wanted to be a movie star. I never wanted to work outside Canada, or outside the theater.” The theater work seems to have occurred during her college years, and I wonder if she’ll ever return to that. She d...

I worked for Random House. I had obtained the job through a writing teacher. People say a young male is not fully mentally developed until his mid twenties? I think that's true. I had no idea what I was doing. I should not have been permitted to ride the subway, let alone hold down employment. I went to look at a place on 5th Street, in Park Slope, and I panicked, on a downtown train, when I heard the "F" W. 4th St. option announced. W. 4th? Surely this meant I was in Brooklyn already? It had not occurred to me that, passing from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I would have gone over, or under, a large body of water. So I ran up the steps, onto W. 4th, and breathlessly asked a stranger to confirm that I was in "the Slope." Cold, silent stares--a New Yorker tradition!--rained down, and down, and down on me. My flashiest overlord was Kate Medina. She wasn't my boss, but really she was everyone's boss. Look her up. She had managed the literary careers of Sandra Da...

Sondheim built his career on empathy for monsters and outcasts. The idea recurs again and again--in Sondheim's depiction of Rose, the Witch, Sweeney, Mrs. Lovett, Fosca, Georges's Mother, the discarded opera about Norma Desmond. These aren't heroic figures. My sense is that--in stretching himself to get inside the heads of these problematic figures--Sondheim is really wrestling with the ghost of his own problematic mother. (And he would reject such a facile and Freudian line of argument.) "Assassins"--which Sondheim says is his most perfect musical--is a sort of climax for the freaks-at-center-stage story. "In case you missed what I was doing with Sweeney, I'm going to write a show for *twelve* Sweeneys. It will be one Sweeney after another. There will be no sweet Johannas. Because: why not?" It's easy to overlook "Unworthy of Your Love." The joke is maybe stretched thin. But I actually don't think Sondheim is mocking his two sp...

Lately, when I run, I run with Sutton Foster. In my ears. Not physically present, but available through a cast recording. The song is the opening number from “Violet.” This show is a bit muddy; it doesn’t totally make sense to me. In it, Sutton Foster is a woman with a badly damaged face. She sustained some kind of terrible blow in childhood. The plot of the story is: Sutton takes a journey. She is going to meet a faith healer, who will magically remove her disfigurations. (I think we’re in the early 1900s). Along the way, she meets two men, and there’s sort of a love triangle? I guess? And maybe she realizes she is a worthy person regardless of the facial scarring--or even BECAUSE OF the facial scarring? It has been a while since I’ve seen the show. Extra-credit points to the writers for devising a bizarre scenario for a musical. No romantic comedy, this. There’s a mangled face, and there’s a faith healer. Someone--at some writer’s desk--was reaching for the brass ring. I ju...

Amy Schumer is back today. One thing I love about her is that, when asked how she could begin to defend the blatant product placement at the end of "I Feel Pretty," she says, "I can't defend it. I wanted it out of the script. I think it's a wrong choice." Refreshing! Another thing I like: She is a writer. That is clearly what she is. Her preferred activity is being home on the couch, watching reality television with her two siblings. I believe this. She says money has given her security, and she remains as unhappy as she ever was. I believe this, as well. She made her own career by traveling around to clubs while also working day jobs (I think she was often a waitress). Very quickly, she realized that her kewpie-doll persona contrasted in a stark way with her sailor's mouth. If you heard a pretty, pasty blonde lady talking about cum-on-the-face, and about a condom getting wedged up way too high, trapped permanently--well, that's notable. That's...

So: the promised additional bits on Anne Lamott. The young lady was an office worker who discovered no one really cares what you do at the office. You could write all day and, if you were cheerful and reasonably well-dressed, no one would notice. Lamott had written, in childhood, about a day at the beach. She'd written about a crab in the sand--or something like this--and you could sense the crab's presence, right there, in the words she had chosen. A textbook company opted to use this prose as a sample of good writing. And so Lamott was hooked. In her early adulthood, she discovered that her father was dying, and so she turned this raw material into a memoir-ish novel, "Hard Laughter." (Get it? They laughed so hard, their sides hurt. But, also, the laughter was emotionally difficult, "hard," laughter.) "Hard Laughter" did well enough to send Lamott on a drinking/drug-use binge, and her twenties became a big mess. And, later, one of her favorite ...

We're all still reeling from one skit on SNL this weekend, "Lobster No. 1." In this skit, a young man joins his friend at a diner. Standard business: The two men have carved gang signs into the baby-changing station attached to the restroom. (Welcome to New York.) The gruff waiter chuckles at one man's wish to replace the fries with the salad; he calls this order "vagina-style." But then something bizarre happens to shoot us out of our Ordinary World. The other young man wants to order the lobster. This is Maurice getting kidnapped in "Beauty and the Beast"; it's Simba losing his father in "The Lion King." We are plunged into unfamiliar waters. (John Mulaney, an observational comic, has crafted an Enchanted World out of something no one has ever used before--the quandary of the lobster option on a diner menu. "They don't want you to order seafood! Look, they put the word SEAFOOD in quotation marks!" ...You can imagin...

One great gift of my most recent job has been Stephen Sondheim's "Hat Box." This is two volumes: "Finishing the Hat" and "Look, I Made a Hat." Sondheim had intended to cram all his thoughts into one volume, but he realized, midway, this endeavor would be preposterous. It's a tremendous joy to watch Sondheim savoring his own crankiness. He takes down so many false idols: his own mentor, Oscar Hammerstein (!), Noel Coward, Lerner, Gilbert and Sullivan, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin. Sondheim says, "We're often told, don't speak ill of the dead. But I think: DO speak ill of the dead. BECAUSE they can't defend themselves. And because you can't hurt the dead. Stay away from the living." (It's nice, too, to see Sondheim subtly "throwing shade" here and there. He makes reference to trailblazing contemporaries--Kander and Ebb, Bock and Harnick, Adam Guettel--again and again. Conspicuously missing from that list, alwa...

It's Monday, and I know what we're all asking: What's Laura Dern up to these days? Never fear. She'll be back. She's rumored to have an appearance in the upcoming sequel to "Jurassic World." And she's starring in a sex-abuse movie. And she's at work on the second season of "Big Little Lies," which will also involve Meryl Streep. (HBO stepped in hot water when an executive said, "BLL, and GAME OF THRONES, are *raping* this network, financially, right now. Because of those two shows, we don't have any money." Some people thought that that was a silly use of the verb "to rape.") As we prepare for the next Season of Laura Dern, let's look back at one of her odd mid-career triumphs, "Year of the Dog." Here, Dern is sort of the villainess. She's obsessed with her little child--so obsessed that she won't allow the child to experience the world. Molly Shannon gives a copy of "Babe" to th...

Another prized object. "Bird by Bird." Anne Lamott. This is a favorite because of its practical writing advice. Make your narrator likable. (But no! you may say, if you are avant garde. A narrator can be anything I want him to be! And Anne Lamott--and Ethan Canin--roll their eyes. Just make the guy likable, especially if you're fresh and new, starting out. Make things easier for yourself. Make him--or her--relatable.) Give yourself permission to write poorly. Better to do that than to not-write. Dream up a character, and start somewhere good with that character, travel somewhere bad, and then wind up somewhere good again. That's all. That's a story. Take a photo and, instead of fighting to describe everything in the photo, focus on maybe one square inch, and try to get down everything happening in just that square inch. That's your day. Give yourself assignments, and then finish them. Actually finish your writing assignments. If you're at a loss, write...

Let's talk "Scandal"! It is ending. The Times has published an invaluable interview with Shonda Rhimes, along with the invaluable Kerry Washington, the invaluable Bellamy Young, and the less invaluable Tony Goldwyn. Shonda makes good points. Why wasn't Olivia Pope more of a role model? "Because I saw her as the protagonist--and if you're the protagonist, you get to be cruel, weak, strong, heroic, unpredictable, admirable, appalling. You get to be all of those things." (Ms. Rhimes could say the same thing about "Carousel," which has some PC viewers all in a tither.) Did she wonder if it would be impossible to have a prime time network TV drama with a black female protagonist? To have the likable president murder a Supreme Court justice? To have Olivia quietly persuading a vice president to take poison and die? "I didn't worry about any of this," says Shonda, "because, in my view, nothing is impossible." We learn that ba...

Here it is! The opening night playbill for the Broadway revival of "Carousel": http://www.playbill.com/article/flip-through-the-carousel-opening-night-playbill And so it seems right to notice some things about Oscar Hammerstein today. Has any other popular writer been so interested in the natural world? "June is bustin' out all over. All the rams and the ewe-sheep are hopin' there'll be new sheep..." "I feel so gay--in a melancholy way--it might as well be spring." "I haven't seen a crocus or a rosebud--or a robin on the wing..." "I'm bromidic and bright as a moon-happy night, pouring light on the dew!" Hammerstein was keenly aware of pragmatic difficulties, and he altered his writing to meet practical demands. For example, Mary Martin refused to sing a duet with Ezio Pinza; she thought his big baritone would upstage her. So Hammerstein invented the "Twin Soliloquies"; Nellie would murmur somet...

A memento from my twenties. "Heat: Real Men Tell Their Gay Sex Stories." This is a paperback. The cover has a young man in fine condition, peering through blinds at something. We can imagine what the something is! Each chapter is its own vignette. In "Cycle Sluts," two strangers meet on a loop--maybe the loop in Central Park!--and retreat to the bushes to get to know each other. One story involves a narrator sniffing his neighbor's underwear in the communal laundry room, and you can guess where this leads. And a third: Naval captains, or something like that, have forbidden passion on the last night of "active duty." In the morning, they won't even acknowledge each other. Heaven knows where my ex acquired this book. I kept it, during and after the separation. This wasn't deliberate. I guess I felt I had earned it. There's a secret in the world of smut. It's this: Verbal smut is better than filmed pornography. Think about it. It's...

My hero, Junot Diaz, is in the news. Two things. After a long silence, he's back with a picture book-- "Islandborn." More on that later. (It's a thing for writers of serious contemporary fiction to dabble in children's stories. Amy Bloom wrote "Little Sweet Potato." Lorrie Moore wrote "The Forgotten Helper.") And: Diaz has written a piece in "The New Yorker" about having been raped when he was eight years old. A fan noticed the recurring role of sexual abuse in his stories, and asked about it. Thus: the piece. (On at least one other occasion, Diaz used a note from a fan to prompt a new piece of work. That was when someone asked, "What do we do now that Trump is elected?") Here are some things to notice in a Diaz piece. The language seems simple, but it's relentlessly poetic. Bits of figurative inventiveness all over the place. "She treats me like I ate somebody's favorite kid." "She's sm...

“Carousel”--! It’s coming. Here’s what you need to know. -“Is it possible to be struck and not to feel a thing?” This is the line that gives people such concern. How can we have a female character saying these words? Don’t we need Strong Female Characters??? To that, I say: Pshaw. I’m reading Philip Roth’s “Patrimony” right now. It’s about struggling to accommodate human weaknesses. It’s about Roth walking with his aging father, who behaves in some bearish and embarrassing ways; it’s about Roth struggling--and generally succeeding--to find compassion for his father, who is, after all, a flawed and suffering human being. That’s what “Carousel” is about, as well. If you can’t handle that, then go and spend your money on a Marvel superhero movie. -This is a profoundly strange story. In “Psycho,” Hitchcock famously kills off his heroine around the halfway point of the movie. Something like that happens in “Carousel,” as well. Billy Bigelow falls for Julie Jordan; they’re too young; the...