Liars and Saints

"Guys and Dolls" has some Song-of-the-Century moments. "Luck, Be A Lady," recycled by a million commercials and lounge singers. "If I Were a Bell," which became the title of the best episode of "Transparent." "Sit Down, You're Rocking the Boat," an eleven o'clock number that has almost nothing to do with the plot of the musical, but it's still great. These moments are so iconic, they make it easy to overlook the craftsmanship in some of the quieter songs. Sky can't quite give himself to Sarah, at first; he thinks she is silly. He dismisses her sense of rigidity; "You have dreamt yourself a Scarsdale Galahad...the breakfast-eating, Brooks Brothers type." (Maybe it says more about Sky than about Sarah that Sky would think "breakfast-eating" is a sign of hopeless rigidity.) But Sky does start to melt and to "offer himself" to Sarah, and it's not just through dancing and hammy declarat...

I can't stop thinking about "Merrily We Roll Along." People say it's Sondheim's "most tuneful" score. That it has Sondheim's best overture. People say Sondheim was tired of the "HE CAN'T WRITE A MEMORABLE MELODY" allegation. So, right before "Merrily," he gave us "A Weekend in the Country," from "A Little Night Music." That melody was so damned hummable, it wedged itself permanently in many, many brains. In "Merrily," famously, Sondheim puts one of his critics centerstage: "How 'bout a tune you can hum? How 'bout a tune you go BUM BUM BUM DEE DOO?" For his opening number, Sondheim thinks hard about the weird, slightly archaic jauntiness in the sentence: "Merrily we roll along." (Sondheim borrowed his title from an old play.) The childlike quality of the sentence--along with the idea of life as traveling, "rolling"--gives Sondheim all he needs for his first t...

There's nothing more dreadful than the thought of "going out" for New Year's Eve. I watch the bovine masses in Times Square; to mix metaphors, those folks bray, proudly, about how they've peed in a jar for the past thirteen hours, over and over, just to have a shot at a close-up view of Anderson Cooper. Few things make me feel more like an alien than the act of scrutinizing those joyous crowds. The thought of all those humans--bossy, loud, aggressive. The unwanted physical contact. The standing. The visual dullness: ugly, garish Times Square, beating down on you, hour after hour after hour. The enforced cheeriness. The pressure to feel that this next year will be *so different* from all the ones that have come before it. The crazy desire to reform all of one's bad behaviors. The grating sound of cheap plastic "noisemakers." One gift New York City gave me was the possibility of an alternative New Year's Eve. I hadn't known there was anot...

"Guys and Dolls" closely resembles Lena Dunham's "Girls": Both works concern themselves with intrigue, deception, self-deception, misbehavior. Lines of dialogue have "top spin": A character doesn't always mean what she believes she means. "I'll know when my love comes along," sings Sarah, "I won't take a chance." But of course the opposite is true: Sarah has *not* recognized her love, and she *will* end up taking a chance. "I thought that each expensive gift you'd arranged was a token of your esteem," sings Adelaide, in concert, "but when I think of what you want in exchange, it all seems a horrible dream!" This is a few yards shy of "ingenuous." The speaker knew well, all along, what her gentleman wanted from her; the gap between speech and thought is indicated by a strip tease. The speaker seems to be saying, "Get out," but, at the same time, she is making herself naked f...

To me, something seems missing in all the Frank Loesser discussions. It's this. Frank Loesser was a Pulitzer Prize-winning lyricist. He also had an Oscar. Sondheim--among many others--holds Loesser up as one of the greatest lyricists of all time. Loesser's masterwork--"Guys and Dolls"--is the stuff of Broadway legend, and it's been said that even a terrible high-school production can't run G-and-D's charms. The thing that bothers me in the Loesser debates: Who ever said that Loesser was holding up his male and female speakers as exemplars of moral behavior? Who said that these two characters need to be taken as gods? Why are we meant to conclude that Loesser's writing "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is akin to an endorsement of everything the man and woman say in the song? When people go down this fallacious road, it makes me think of "Macbeth." Should we stop producing "Macbeth" because some of the characters do thing...

One of the bizarre and wonderful things about Bernadette Peters's Royal Albert Hall concert--and I watched the VHS of this pretty much constantly, throughout high school--was the moment BP chose to cover "Later" from "A Little Night Music." This is not a song that anyone covers. It needs context. Also, it's a song for a young man. And yet: There was BP, singing it. Do you love the song "Later"? Do you think about it, still, on occasion, even though you haven't seen the Royal Albert concert in years? Then join me, reader. Let's take a look. This is a song about an emotionally- and sexually-constipated twentysomething. It's a monologue from a man who very much wants to sleep with his new stepmother. Of course! Broadway musical behavior! A feature I love: Henrik is "all dammed-up inside," at least for a portion of the monologue, and this is captured in the actual syntax of his song. Henrik cannot express himself well; he ...

(5) It's the season of Nicole Kidman. Not only is "Destroyer" on the way, but also we can expect the second truckload of "Big Little Lies." Here are some things I've learned from reading obsessively about Nicole Kidman. She doesn't care too much if the art that emerges is perfect. She just keeps making movies, as an act of exploration. I really buy that rhetoric. Maybe I'm just diva-smitten. Kidman insists on having a busy work schedule, because, otherwise, she becomes shy and forgets to trust her instincts. For "Destroyer," she demanded to play both her character-in-youth and her character-in-maturity. ("I wanted the full story, even if this required CGI.") As a Dostoyevsky-reading child, Kidman developed an interest in human behavior, and that interest hasn't really led her too far astray yet. Thank you for bearing with me. (4) As you prepare for "Merrily We Roll Along," there is one other thing you should note...

Beyond "Good Thing Going," there's at least one more major standard from "Merrily We Roll Along," and it's "Not a Day Goes By": Not a day goes by Not a single day But you're somewhere a part of my life And it looks like you'll stay As the days go by I keep thinking when does it end Where's the day I'll have started forgetting But I just go on thinking and sweating.... This became a Bernadette Peters staple. It's the ultimate Bernadette Peters song. No one does inner conflict like BP, and this number has conflict in spades: The speaker is trying to remain composed while relaying, to us, just how devastated she is. (A classic BP gesture: the quick, furious wiping-away of tears.) Sondheim likes to think about time and space. One of his earliest songs, "Somewhere," gave us a bit of both: "There's a place for us.....There's a time  for us...." Here, in "Not a Day," years after "Somewhe...

(1) Exercise is meant to be a form of self-care . I learn this, then forget, then learn again. It seems to me, the more you can view the treadmill as a means of self-"pampering", the better off you are. The alternative is feeling impatience and self-disgust, i.e. WHY AM I NOT SEEING RESULTS RIGHT NOW? That doesn't get me far.  (2) Guy de Maupassant wrote novels. Who knew? I thought it was just short stories. One of his novels, "Like Death," is creepy and sad, and also lets you imagine the kind of wonder with which GDM likely viewed the world. (That said, GDM died young, having attempted suicide at least once, and he was plagued by complications from syphilis.) (3) If you're making a stir-fry, less is more. The bell pepper bits need only 1 minute. Just 1! (4) An apology is a wonderful thing. Yesterday, I spoke sharply to my spouse, which was not a big deal, but then in my head, I thought and thought about how tightly-wound I am at Christmas, and how a...

In the spirit of Nora Ephron, not because I'm dying, but just because these lists seem useful to me: (1) Almost the entirety of the Mariah Carey Christmas album (the exception is "I Miss You Most on Christmas Day," which seems to have been written by committee). (2) The opening of "Ramona the Brave," where Ramona thinks that she is assisting her sister and is in fact making a small problem worse. This is the story of my life, this idea of seeing oneself one way and then being confronted with objective truths. Also, I like that Ramona imagines that having an unwieldy nickname might be "interesting." Problems--bits of drama--often *are* interesting, though we don't want to admit this. (3) Meatballs--which you can make in a Crock Pot. Additionally, I'll miss almost any Crock Pot recipe that requires five ingredients or fewer. (4) My husband, in part because he occasionally invents bizarre, seemingly pointless stories--for fun. This is what...

There's nothing as awful as Secret Santa. Bear with me. In its Platonic Ideal Form, Secret Santa is about getting to know one's coworkers. One sets up secretive meet-cutes. One goes on covert fact-finding missions. It's all a bit like "She Loves Me": That weirdly nosy Kindergarten teacher was  in fact   my  stealthy mask-wearing friend! My angel in disguise! But here's how Secret Santa actually works, in 2018. You use a system called "Elfster." Elfster is an "app." On this app, people actually list their material wants--brands, costs, links specified. So, if you're assigned to someone, you needn't make any actual effort to get to know that person; you just shop from a pre-made list. Whatever the client has ordered. Even in the absence of Elfster, Secret Santa rarely works the way it's meant to work. What happens is: You make a sincere resolution to get to know your colleague, then you forget to do the work and just end up ...

Stephen Sondheim has three tips for good writing: 1. God is in the details. 2. Less is more. 3. Content dictates form. It's useful to consider these tips in relation to "Spotlight," which has one of my favorite screenplays. - God is in the details. This script shows us Mark Ruffalo asking Michael Keaton, "Are you golfing?" Keaton says, "Golfing is not a verb." We know this conversation has happened before. We know Keaton is precise and mildly irritated. We know Ruffalo is absent-minded and could not care less. We also know we are in a world of writers, where the issue of "to golf" would be, well, an issue. Masterful. Rachel McAdams will struggle to reconcile her journalistic duties with her ties to her Catholic family. We see this right away, with a chat about "Father" at the dinner table, tense murmuring during a dish-washing session, McAdams seeming watchful and strained at Sunday mass. (And McAdams doesn't do any ov...

My reading tastes were shaped, in a major way, by Amy Bloom. It seems to me Bloom understands that reading should be for pleasure; though she has a "literary sensibility," she also enjoys plot. She enjoys well-written stories in which things actually happen. As opposed to stylish stories in which nothing happens (Rachel Cusk). Or awkwardly-written, lumpy stories in which *everything* happens. (e.g. "I Am Pilgrim.") I *like* this Amy Bloom-ish way of operating. So, for example, asked by the New York Times what she should choose for the beach, Bloom chooses thrillers written with style. Val McDermid, P.D. James, Alan Furst, Ed McBain, Benjamin Black. She says, "Death, suffering, resolution, and a well-shaped sentence seem to go so well with sun and sand." Notice that inclusion of well-shaped sentence . Without that, you have nothing. The more-"literary" writers Bloom names in this piece are writers who enjoy telling an old-fashioned story. Th...

As we all prepare to see Jeff Daniels in the new staged version of "Mockingbird," here's some useful trivia to consider: (1) Truman Capote didn't exactly encourage rumors that he had secretly written "Mockingbird," but, really, he didn't *discourage* those rumors. He and Lee grew apart as they aged. Capote torpedoed several additional friendships when he wrote "Answered Prayers," which was a gossipy, bitchy account of the private lives of various famous people. (2) P.S. Hoffman of course won the Oscar for "Capote," but do you recall that Catherine Keener was nominated? Best Supporting Actress--for embodying Harper Lee, or one version of Harper Lee. (3) When Lee was young, wealthy friends of hers gave her the gift of one year of financial support. Such was their belief in Lee's talent. They believed she could make a book. She did crank out a book--"Go Set a Watchman"--but it wasn't very good. An editor said, ...

Yesterday, dismayed, I considered my local movie options. "Green Book," a movie by a man about men. "Roma," a movie about a woman (I think!) by a man. "A Star Is Born," a movie half-concerning a female stereotype, made by a man (and a movie I've seen already). And the sequel to "Wreck-It Ralph," a cartoon about a man, made by men (or, more likely, by robots, having been designed by a committee of men). Can we give all the Oscars to women this year? Best Picture: "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" Best Actress: Melissa McCarthy in "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" Best Director: Heller, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" Best Supporting Actress: Jamie Lee Curtis, "Halloween," tied with Vanessa Kirby for the new "Mission: Impossible." Best Script, Adapted: Holofcener, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" Best Actor: Kathryn Hahn, "Private Life." Best Supporting Actor: Catherine Keener, "Enough Said,...

“I’m Charles Baker Harris,” he said. “I can read.”  “So what?” I said.  “I just thought you’d like to know I can read. You got anything needs readin‘ I can do it…”  “How old are you,” asked Jem, “four-and-a-half?”  “Goin‘ on seven.”  “Shoot no wonder, then,” said Jem, jerking his thumb at me. “Scout yonder’s been readin‘ ever since she was born, and she ain’t even started to school yet. You look right puny for goin’ on seven.”  “I’m little but I’m old,” he said.  Jem brushed his hair back to get a better look. “Why don’t you come over, Charles Baker Harris?” he said. “Lord, what a name.”  “‘s not any funnier’n yours. Aunt Rachel says your name’s Jeremy Atticus Finch.”  Jem scowled. “I’m big enough to fit mine,” he said. “Your name’s longer’n you are. Bet it’s a foot longer.”  “Folks call me Dill,” said Dill, struggling under the fence.  “Do better if you go over it instead of under it,” I said. “Where’d you com...

There is life before--and life after--Barbra. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-uqPHLX4Kg I fell in love in high school. Barbra had released a duet with Celine Dion. "Tell Him." "Hooooold him cloooose to feeeel his heart beaaaaaattt!" TIME Magazine made some observations. TIME said that Celine was a pale imitation of Barbra. Celine did not know how to build a song. Celine started at 11 and stayed at 11. If she wasn't at the top of her lungs, then she was forgettable; her attempts at "quiet" were a nasal, unpleasant whisper. Whereas Barbra could build. She could start soft and scintillating. She could then become loud and scintillating. I would put Barbra's "Back to Broadway" on the tape player, and then I would close the door of my bedroom. And then I would become Barbra. Several aspects of "Back to Broadway" were frustrating, and this was just part of becoming a Barbra acolyte; in love with Barbra, one must contend with e...

Five great recent bits of journalism/criticism: (5) The Times piece on Ellen DeGeneres. Delightful. ED has some concerns about joke theft--but she does not acknowledge that her new idea, mocking the concept of "relatability," has been fertile ground, already, for Chelsea Peretti and Louis CK. (At the least. Interesting.) I love the analysis of ED at work--how she is relaxed and charismatic, at this point, and also not particularly "stretched." (You might sense some boredom.) I also love how the piece shows ED editing herself; at times, she has had a joke she has opted to suppress, so that she doesn't stomp on the sunny aura of the show. And then: To have ED wander onstage and say, "Fuck." Brilliant--because, as Tig Notaro observes, it's a joke that has been building on itself for at least fifteen years. Sometimes, you can pack a great deal into one word. I look forward to this special. (4) Emily Nussbaum, rounding up the year's best in TV...

Here, I'll complain about an "iconic" diner. You know which diner I'm talking about. It's on lower Sixth Avenue, near the West Fourth stop. Many of the businesses in this area seem to have disappeared; I can remember a Barnes and Noble, and an Urban Outfitters, and a Banana Republic, and a Duane Reade, and I note, each day, they're all "no longer." The Waverly Diner has clung to the rope of life--perhaps because everything is ludicrously overpriced. It's brutal. If you want a BLT and a side of fries, you will pay almost twenty dollars. Twenty dollars! There's nothing notable about the BLT; standard diner-issue spit-up-resembling cup of "cole slaw," standard limp, aged lettuce. There's an excessive amount of bacon, as well, which is maybe the way that the owners justify the high price. (I have to admit that the French fries are admirable--crispy and golden and fresh. It pains me to state that.) The Waverly, like any diner...

Just a note that Amy Chozick's "Chasing Hillary [Clinton]" has been weirdly overlooked in "Best Of" book lists. Maybe people are uncomfortable with Chelsea's response. Chelsea took to Twitter to say she has never had her hair straightened. (Chozick says otherwise.) Chelsea also said, on Twitter, "I didn't drink champagne the night of the defeat." (Chozick reported the opposite.) The Tweets had a heat, an anger, I hadn't seen in Chelsea before. (Not that I know much about Chelsea.) There was clearly a goal: Discredit Chozick. Chelsea wrote with an enjoyable cattiness; her Tweets accomplished their goal. (The Tweets themselves could be the subject of an epilogue in yet-to-be-seen new editions of Chozick's book.) Let's say Chozick's assertions were not correct. Even so, they're gripping. What an image: Chelsea sipping alcohol as she begins to understand the magnitude of her mother's loss! Another image: Chelsea embroi...

Like the crime novel, the addiction story has certain predictable  sign posts . Hitting rock bottom, making amends, struggling with relapse, forming new bonds, reentering the world. There happens to be one Master of the Addiction Novel, and it's Michelle Huneven. Her work hasn't entered Pulitzer territory, and I think that's likely just because it's too smart and real and beautiful. In the absence of a flashy gimmick--commentary on Syria, for example, or the use of a narrator with autism--Huneven has not become a household name. She should be a household name. Huneven's masterwork is "Blame," which is dazzling from start to finish. A bright academic with a drinking problem finds herself assaulting the ear of a child; she is going to perform an at-home piercing, and the procedure goes awry. Shortly thereafter, the protagonist wakes up behind the steering wheel of her car, and she infers that she has mowed down and murdered two pedestrians (or: has she?)...