Liars and Saints

Clearly, the Tony Awards will not be happening "on schedule" this year--if at all--so the NY Times ran a piece about Ben Brantley's "all-time greats." These were the live performances that shook Brantley to the core. The argument: A live performance really exists in a class of its own. A taped performance can't compare, because the electricity is missing; there is no longer a kind of dialogue between the performer and the audience. Brantley lists several great theatrical performances, and the ones I recall are Cherry Jones ("Glass Menagerie"), Christopher Plummer ("Barrymore"), and of course Jennifer Holliday ("Dreamgirls"). I didn't get to see any of those shows, but if I could have my own special, weird Tony Awards, where I hand out prizes to any stellar performer, from *any* year in my own personal past, the winners would be: *Bernadette Peters, over and over again. ("Hello Dolly," "A Little Night M...

My husband bought another Tushy. This is a device that somehow converts your toilet into a bidet. The device reroutes water from your sink--I think?--and shoots it up your butt. I say "another" Tushy, because the first Tushy we owned is now defunct. We had to abandon it when we moved from one house to another. Some people say the reason adults today are so messed-up is that certain beautiful bodily processes were once finessed as sources of shame. We're all weird about sex because our teachers tiptoed around that subject. We're weird about poop because, years ago, no one really talked about poop. So, in 2020, there are aggressive countermeasures: Now, kids get sex ed at very, very early ages, and you can find picture books with titles like "Who Pooped in the Park?" I'm all for candor, but I'm a hypocrite. I talk the talk, but I had a moment of deep embarrassment when I had to deal with the Tushy packaging. Recycling, in...

My old roommate, Tom Toro, became a cartoonist for "The New Yorker" after college. You can find his work online. I think my favorite of his cartoons has a cowboy approaching a Wild West saloon. Some barflies are watching. Bizarrely, the cowboy's feet are not visible underneath the doors--those weird half-doors that we tend to envision in Wild West saloons. So Barfly One draws the only logical conclusion: "THAT is one bow-legged cowboy." Think about it. I'm really enchanted by this silliness--I'd love to spend more time with that cowboy--and it's the same kind of silliness you can find in Toro's debut picture book, "How to Potty Train Your Porcupine." This is available now; it's a beautiful book. The story involves a family eager to adopt a porcupine. But you can't put a diaper on a porcupine; the quills will poke holes in the cloth. This is a particularly intellectual porcupine, so if you set out newspaper f...

Summer is around the corner, and here are the summer titles that have my interest: *"Gone at Midnight." Elisa Lam may have had mental health struggles; she checked into the Hotel Cecil, a notorious hotel for criminals (Richard Ramirez once stayed there) and went missing. Eventually, hotel guests complained of a foul smell, and it was discovered that "corpse water" had been trickling into various sinks. Lam had been dead and submerged in a water cistern for days and days. Suicide? Terrible accident? Murder? Well, sure, I will read about this case. *"Fire in Paradise." A major fire in California resulted in the deaths of over eighty people in a town, a town called "Paradise." Disaster stories tend to involve memorable character portraits--think of the brave pregnant woman in "Chernobyl"--and that's what I anticipate here. *"More than Love." Natalie Wood had three Oscar nominations before she was 25! She had thre...

A guy is falsely accused of having murdered his wife, and he goes on the run. A U.S. Marshal is assigned to the case; let's call him Tommy Lee Jones. The story runs on two tracks. Zone One: Our fugitive disguises his appearance and jumps over waterfalls and researches creepy one-armed men, in an effort to stay alive. (There is nothing inherently creepy about being one-armed; I'm just saying, in this particular movie, there is a group of suspects who happen to be *both* one-armed *and* creepy.) Zone Two: Tommy Lee Jones barks commands and fires guns and decodes mysterious recorded phone conversations, in an effort to find the fugitive. And that's all. That's the entirety of the story. When I was a kid, I felt particularly obsessed with the one-armed man, in the facts-blur-with-fiction style of childhood. "The Fugitive" came out in the early nineties, when I was especially captivated by big movies and big stories about death. (I also loved "Juras...

Last week, Joe Biden made a stupid remark, which is a tendency he has. He said, if you vote for Trump, "You ain't black." Yikes! This is the guy whose candidacy we have to support! Having noted that, I want to tip a hat to Wanda Sykes, who had the best, smartest response I'm aware of: Biden feels at home speaking to the Black community. He made a joke. Comedy ain’t easy, but he didn’t say 2 go shoot Clorox in our tits. Now, I wouldn’t make a blanket statement to say that voting for Trump means you’re not Black. I would say that it means you’re not smart. This is a brief work of genius, and the obvious highlight is: "2 go shoot Clorox in our tits." The numeral "2," and the specificity of "Clorox" and "tits," make me very happy. Also, in very few words, Sykes is making a complex, thoughtful argument--and, cherry on top: She is correct. So Wanda Sykes is my writer-hero of 2020. I recommend her Netflix special, ...

One of the great features of life in New York City is the American Songbook series. These are wildly overpriced concerts that happen at Columbus Circle; you wander through the little mall, with the J. Crew (once upon a time!) and the Williams Sonoma, and you take a secret (not really) elevator, up, up, up to a grand hall (the Appel Room). The concerts themselves are very short, so I think the crazy ticket prices are mainly related to the view you get from this one big room. An entire wall has been replaced by windows, so you gaze out at the southwestern corner of Central Park; you see cars trudging along Central Park South. And horses. At Christmas, lights are everywhere, and you feel you're looking down from a spaceship. Several American Songbook concerts are being televised, in these Covid days, and I want to give my recommendation: * Sutton Foster . Skip right to "Sunshine on My Shoulders," "Take Me to the World," and "It All Fades Away,...

About Michael Connelly's classic novel, "The Last Coyote": On paid leave, LAPD Detective Harry Bosch decides to open an investigation into his mother's murder, to pass the time. He misses his mother; this woman worked as a prostitute and wanted to win, for her son, a better life. (The name "Bosch" is invented, and it has to do with our hero's admiration for the paintings of *another* Bosch....the way the many creatures in the "Garden of Earthly Delights" bring to mind colorful characters from Southern California.) Trying to determine who killed his mother, Bosch meets: a possibly-shady former cop, a damaged painter who may be suicidal, a talkative fellow in a nursing home, a tough, outspoken reporter. The case twists and turns, and Bosch almost continuously lies, in big and small ways, to get what he wants. He endangers his own life and the lives of others, and we're still just talking about the first half of the book. Sally Ro...

My current favorite YouTube clip is Gavin Creel, singing "Something's Coming," from "West Side Story." "Something's Coming" is like THE canonical version of the "I Want" song, the moment when the hero steps downstage, early in the show, and tells us about his ambition. Sondheim was actually more or less finished with "West Side Story" when someone noticed that Tony lacked a major "I Want" moment--and this is when "Something's Coming," maybe the strongest song in the show, came about. I could blather on and on about Sondheim, but here's just one thing I particularly like in this song. For a while, Tony is singing in a passive way about "something coming." "Something's coming....don't know when....but it's soon....Catch the moon! One-handed catch!" BUT, late in the song, there's a shift; Tony becomes more active. Instead of waiting, he is now issuing a com...

James Marshall retold four folk tales, and they're all now canonical: "Goldilocks" (the award winner), "The Three Little Pigs," "Little Red Ridinghood," and "Hansel and Gretel." In each case, Marshall sticks pretty close to the source material; he isn't distracting you with self-conscious, arty flourishes. ("The Wolf: HIS Perspective"--!) I sense that Goldilocks is a character who especially "activates" Marshall's imagination; Goldilocks doesn't do what she is told, and Marshall seems to enjoy cataloging her bits of naughtiness. ("Sweet-looking girl!" says one villager. And another rolls his eyes. "That's what YOU think.") By contrast, Little Red Ridinghood simply follows rules, and I sense that Marshall keeps himself interested, in that case, by crazily drawing dozens of cats, in the background, in several of the scenes. After "Goldilocks," "The Three Little ...

Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are sisters; they're both smart and hot, and they don't have any money. Marianne is a thing some journalists would label "a messy bitch." She pays limited attention to the social graces. If someone near her is an idiot, she can't be bothered to do the good girl thing where you're like: I'm working really hard to pretend you're not an idiot. Instead, Marianne is just short of openly contemptuous, and then she'll wander off and inspect her host's private library, and the host is like: Wait, you're my guest. You should be chatting with me right now. Elinor is sort of insufferably perfect, and she is invested in judging things accurately. It's childish to find drama where there isn't drama, to exaggerate, to stir and stir and stir the pot. (The fools in this novel like to use the adjective "monstrous." As in: "I'm monstrous excited to meet that new horse!" Or: "I'm mo...

My husband has a crush, and it's Andrew Lloyd Webber. He now sends tweets to Sir Andrew. Over the weekend, Andrew told his many fans that his cat had died--roadside accident....And my husband wrote to express sorrow over A's "lost kitty." When my husband shows me a tweet like this, there's a crazy look in his eyes, as if he is begging me to talk him down from the ledge. "I did it, I did it," he says, with defiance, but he also seems to be saying,  Can you calm me down??? When T.S. Eliot released his cat poems, a crabby lady from St. Louis wrote to complain. And T.S. Eliot answered in verse: a long, rambling poem about how cats are wonderful, and how there isn't a worthier subject for literature. My husband read this poem to me, in its entirety, then did twenty minutes of research on the crabby lady from St. Louis. Watching "Cats," Friday, I had moments of epiphany. For example, I was certain that Terrence Mann, in the origin...

My favorite short story is "Between Here and Here," by Amy Bloom. Bloom borrows a fair amount from Jane Austen, who was interested in the struggles of a sensible person in the company of a lunatic. (See Elizabeth in "Pride and Prejudice," or Elinor in "Sense and Sensibility.") "Between Here and Here" has Alison, a tough, reasonable human being, who struggles in the presence of her boorish father, Alvin. It's not that Alvin ever physically attacks anyone. But he is unhappy and unpleasant; he makes mess after mess after mess. Moments I love: Alvin's son tentatively comes out of the closet. Alvin's wife cries and says something appropriate. Alvin, by contrast, pokes his son's large stomach and says, "Fat fag....No fun in that." (And so Alvin has insulted both his son's sexual orientation and his son's girth, in one breath. Makes my jaw drop!) Alvin gets irritated at the dinner table, and throws the c...

The place I miss most is the Maplewood Cinema. Many New York City screening rooms have a professional, impersonal vibe, and my new local cinema is not like that at all. My new cinema is more like the screening rooms I grew up with. It's a shit show. It's staffed by twelve-year-old kids; no movie can be screened before 4 pm, because the kids are doing their school work. (I imagine I'm not the only mildly-depressed stay-at-home parent who craves a 1 pm Tuesday screening now and then.) The Maplewood Cinema puts up film ads seemingly at random; advertising a particular movie is no guarantee that that movie will air in Maplewood, tomorrow or any day after that, even if the little plaque says, "Coming Soon!" I still eagerly await the chance to see the mediocre Glenn Close vehicle, "The Wife," once advertised on the Maplewood Cinema's walls, though I'm certain my local screens will never actually bring me that chance. The twelve-year-old...

A little girl stumbles into a pet shop. We're led to believe that the creepy store clerk semi-accidentally murders this girl.....but, later, it's revealed that the clerk's elderly mother did the deed. (Shades of "Psycho" here.) An African-American woman is targeted by a wealthy white businessman. Conveniently, the woman seems to drown in a fountain. Or did she murder her roommate, toss her roommate in the fountain, and leave some "clues" to suggest that heavy drugs played a role they hadn't actually played? A woman in need of cash suddenly loses her heavily-insured engagement ring. Did someone really steal that ring--or is it hidden underneath an African violet, in the living room? These are all scenarios that interest the novelist Laura Lippman, and they're all a part of "Lady in the Lake," Lippman's most-recent novel. Lippman likes to borrow from actual life--her novel, "What the Dead Know," e.g., takes details fro...

"Cats," the musical, rather than the movie-musical, will air this weekend. To get prepared: *The original Broadway production of "Cats" had an iconic ad campaign: two cat-eyes, and instead of pupils, you see the silhouettes of Broadway human-cat dancers. No one really knew what the show was about, including the writers of the show, so the ad people chose a suitably mystifying slogan: "Now and Forever." Worked like a charm. *"Cats" was a strange moment in ALW's career. He had parted ways with Tim Rice; he and Rice had written some fairly conventional musicals.... "Evita," for example, and "Joseph." "Cats" is not a conventional musical. It's not in the tradition of Richard Rodgers. It's more like "Hair" and "Company," with several vignettes, and the skinniest little coat-hanger of a plot....Blink, and you'll miss the story. *We can also understand "Cats" as a n...

A story is nothing without great characters, and "Scream" gives us: *Gale Weathers (her name is Gale Weathers!!! ), who would really like a book deal. Gale is maybe the most gripping invention in "Scream," an amoral, ambitious journalist, never fully unsympathetic. She must pretend to have motives different from her actual motives--but couldn't you say this about *any* journalist? This is heady stuff for a horror movie. *Sidney Prescott, who must contend with a murderer, a complex response to her own mother's brutal death, a pushy interviewer, and a particularly insensitive boyfriend who really, really wants to lose his virginity. Most of us would crumble if even just two of these things were on our plate--but Sidney is like a superhero. I'm especially interested in her thoughts on sex; she maybe wants, and doesn't want, to cross that line; also, after she does have sex, she has to probe, very subtly, to see if she can trap her bedmate into c...

This past weekend, we were all given a treat, which was not one but two classic Chloe Fineman bits. Fineman is the young genius on SNL who made waves months ago with her Laura Dern impression. Fineman, an NYU grad, once dreaded life as a "serious actress," before realizing the thing she loved most in the world was impersonating actual crazy people who live in the actual world. She began with skits about her loony acting teacher; soon enough, she was also Drew Barrymore, Ivanka Trump, and Meryl Streep. And the list grows and grows. This past Saturday night, SNL spoofed the "Master Class" series; you know, that thing that advertises itself to you whenever you use YouTube. You can pay money and see James Patterson self-seriously murmuring: "Some advice for you....Feel free to SUCK in your first draft...." Chloe Fineman became Phoebe Waller-Bridge on Saturday, and she was pitching a Master Class in "journaling." Several areas became targe...

One of my favorite authors is Ian Rankin, who launched his own artistic career while studiously not-writing a dissertation on Muriel Spark. Rankin writes about flawed detectives in impossible situations, in Edinburgh, and he cranks out approximately one extravagantly-praised novel per year. Around 2008, Rankin seemed to grow tired of his signature creation, Inspector Rebus, so he went in a new direction. He invented a character, Malcolm Fox, who had little in common with Rebus. Rebus is, famously, a drinker--and he is a guy who struggles with authority; by contrast, Fox has renounced alcohol, and he *is* authority, he watches the cops. Fox made his debut in "The Complaints," in 2009, a novel that won praise from the grand master of European crime fiction, PD James. "The Complaints" refers to Fox's office--he handles and investigates complaints filed about other cops--but it also refers to something broader, more existential: The novel explores things we ...

If I had to choose a favorite work of non-fiction, I might go with The Ladies who Punch: A History of Barbara Walters and THE VIEW (more on that later), or I might go with The Secret Life of the American Musical. It's possible no other book haunts my thoughts the way American Musical does. Jack Viertel argues, in American Musical , that, although each successful show has "its own magic," there is also a standard blueprint that a show sort-of-needs to follow. An opening number should set the tone and establish the kind of humor you're going to encounter: "Little Shop of Horrors," "Alexander Hamilton," "Comedy Tonight." This leads to one--or several--"I Want" songs. In an "I Want" song, our heroes will present their urges in straightforward terms. The wishes should be larger-than-life; we're not here to see someone dreaming of a new book from the library. "I Want" songs include: "My Shot,...

On Tony Scott's "Unstoppable": A new guy, Chris Pine, wants to work on the trains. His elder, Denzel Washington, has misgivings. A train veteran, sizing up Pine: "I don't like feeling like I work at a Pre-K." And Pine, in return: "I don't like feeling like I work at an old folks' home." Pine and Denzel go off to do their work, which involves riding a train through Pennsylvania. But, elsewhere, a thug falls asleep on the job, and a rogue rival train gets loose. The rogue train has dangerous chemicals, and if it crashes near a town, the entire town could explode. It's possible to derail the rogue train in the wilderness, so no lives are lost, but "corporate" doesn't like the plan. Why sacrifice all that money? So corporate hatches a bad alternative response, which of course results in unnecessary deaths, and the rogue train continues to evade "capture." It's up to Denzel and Chris--frenemi...

"Insecure" -- Season Four -- continues to tip a hat to Lena Dunham's "Girls." (I think sometimes young writers dislike being compared to Lena Dunham. But, look, Dunham made waves. The influence is real. I'll go to my grave insisting this. Also, Issa Rae is now passing on her own baton; when Samantha Irby pitched a show to HBO, or some other service, she called it "INSECURE, but with fat people.") Both "Girls" and "Insecure" get narrative juice from the idea of "the breakup." Adam and Hannah split up; Hannah struggles with, and eventually profits from, her post-breakup grief. In "Insecure," we imagine Lawrence is out of the picture, but he isn't; he seems to be flirting with his ex, Issa, a fair amount this season. "Insecure"'s big problem is that Lawrence is nowhere near as compelling as Dunham's "Adam." It feels as if no one has taken time to imagine a three-dimens...

An ambitious young tennis coach reads Dostoyevsky on the weekend. He--let's call him Jonathan--has a good deal on his mind. His client notes this. Some luck: The client is attached to an extraordinarily wealthy family. The client's father--let's call him Brian Cox--needs a new well-paid worker. Jonathan suddenly has a high-prestige job. Jonathan also has a girlfriend--Brian's daughter--who has a certain feigned meekness that can be wearying. Instead of proposing a tennis game, she feels the need to dance around the issue, until someone near her actually guesses her intentions and states them *for* her. But the meekness conceals a secret steeliness, and this will become clear, in time; let's call the meek character Emily Mortimer. A final twist: Jonathan, attached to Emily, actually finds that he prefers the company of his pseudo-sister-in-law, Scarlett. Because Scarlett is part of the family, she is continuously in Jonathan's orbit. Double-crossing e...

Certainly one of the biggest events in my son's young life was his bris. I have complex feelings about organized religion; my memories of religion involve a white guy talking at me for many hours, sometimes lecturing me on my church wardrobe. But a bris was important to my husband, so we compromised. The main compromise was this: If we were going to go ahead with the ceremony, then we would at some point sing "You Are My Sunshine" with the guests. (If I have a church, it's Broadway, but I couldn't see a way to make the guests sing "Send in the Clowns" while Josh was getting circumcised. Who knows all the words to that one? "You Are My Sunshine" seemed like a suitable substitute.) As the actual snipping occurred, the chorus reached its crescendo: You make me happy when skies are gray.... You'll never know, dear, how much I love you... So please don't take my sunshine away... And the rabbi offered an explanatio...

My favorite book is (possibly) "Where the God of Love Hangs Out," by Amy Bloom. I bought it at the Borders next to the Kips Bay AMC, in an era when Borders outposts still existed, and the cover features a vaginal peach and a penis-stem--a stem jutting out from a cherry, meant to evoke thoughts of the human penis. A story is nothing without great characters. Bloom's book--her third and most recent story collection--has characters who "speak to me": *The crabby middle-aged woman in the middle of an affair. Her boyfriend can't accept the watch she just bought; "I already have one, and my wife will connect the dots." So our heroine calmly takes the old watch, drops it on the road, and runs it over with her SUV. "So sorry," she says. "Terrible accident. Enjoy your new watch." *The woman who can't stand her own father, and sometimes doodles an image of his gravestone, as a form of therapy. She also sends him cigars, in the h...

If you aren't yet listening to "The Rewatchables," please know that my obsession grows and grows. Even just skimming the list of movies selected is a pleasure: *Notting Hill *While You Were Sleeping *The Dark Knight *The Sixth Sense *Remember the Titans *Training Day *Election *Zodiac *Michael Clayton *Edge of Tomorrow *Fatal Attraction *Silence of the Lambs *Gone Girl *The Town *Contagion *Scream *Godfather I and II *Field of Dreams *The Social Network *The Talented Mr. Ripley *Collateral *The Insider ....and on and on and on. Can you really say that you wouldn't enjoy rewatching those films? Literally every title above is a title I'd rewatch without complaint. I especially admire the group's refusal to kowtow to critics. For example, "Being John Malkovich" comes up. This is a movie adored by newspapers. But the podcast says: Nope. Not really rewatchable. And it's true. When I try to watch BJM a second time, my mind ...