Liars and Saints

  "The Odyssey" is the story of Circe, a witch on an island. (In a 1990s version, Circe was Bernadette Peters, but I have to admit that Samantha Morton is better.) Having endured sexual assault, Circe trusts no one. She feigns generosity, then sets a trap. As Odysseus's men eat Circe's stew, Circe casts a spell. She turns the men into pigs. In a great twist, the current "Odyssey" imagines that the transformation involves *physical* labor. Circe sculpts the pigs as if sculpting clay. It's like something from "The Fly." Really appalling. Odysseus pleads with Circe--these men intended no harm, and in fact they did not harm Circe. But Circe does not miss a beat. "They WOULD HAVE harmed me," she says. (And I think everyone in the audience will agree with Circe, not with Odysseus.) Circe refers to a human form as a "disguise"; her guests are pigs, and she has simply removed the disguise. There is a parallel between Circe and Oydss...

 We live in the wilderness--sometimes, this is cute. It's cute when groundhogs frolic in our backyard. Or bunnies. Or when my daughter tries to talk to the birds. I'm reminded of the woodsy interludes in "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty." The moment when Aurora shares her deepest feelings with a barn owl. Things are less cute when I consider the problem of waste disposal. One of the most horrifying things I've ever seen is a "garbage can invasion" on a Friday night. My spouse and I were returning from a film. One raccoon popped out of the trash can. Then--I swear--I saw ten or twelve more. One after another after another after another. Spilling from the can's bowels. I'm led to think of that moment in "Alien," when an encephalopod "births itself"--the "cost" is one young man, and specifically that man's abdomen. Like many other issues, garbage in my town is an opportunity for virtue signaling. A prefer...

  "The Lost Boys" is a musical about Ronald Reagan. He appears on a TV screen, giving a lecture about family values; later, he takes the shape of Broadway star Paul Nolan, a nerdy guy in a suit who talks about what happens when the country is "overrun" with single moms. (You might think, why does Paul Nolan have such an apparently small role? Just you wait.) Pitted against Paul Nolan is Shoshana Bean, who just wants a job, a romance, an intact family, and a sense of instant community. Bean's desperation leads her to make questionable choices--should she really agree to work at a video rental outlet without anything like a basic "candidate interview"? If a new friend makes approving remarks about Goldwater, should Bean stick around? Bean becomes aware of her mistakes; before it's too late, she grabs a stake and murders a trickster vampire. This raises questions. Bean may have eliminated Ronald Reagan--but is she any closer to a job, a romance, an in...

  "The Invite" is a showcase for Seth Rogen, who just wants to remember what it's like to have sex. Penelope Cruz has questions about Rogen's self-esteem. "Do you like yourself?" she asks. "Would you have sex with yourself?" "Yes! I'm the ONLY one who fucks me. I fuck myself often!" I get the sense that Rogen's best lines may be improvised. Having learned that his noisy neighbors like to host orgies, he tries to negotiate. "It just gets very loud. Maybe take the BIG sex parties offsite, to a motel. You know, if it's a birthday or an anniversary. Or Arbor Day...." Penelope Cruz wonders aloud which particular birthday Valentina--a favored sex partner--celebrated at a recent dinner. "Next time you're preparing to enter her," says Rogen, "you should just count her rings...." Rogen's performance reaches its climax when he tries to perform a sultry dance, then trips, falls on a stack of books, a...

 Maggie Haberman's title--"Regime Change"--is multi-faceted. It's a reference to some of Donald's Tweets in the buildup to the conflict in Iran: "Time for a Regime Change!" It's also a reference to one of the classic books in the "current events publishing" world: "Game Change." Finally, it's an invitation to think about the word "regime." We might imagine that the change was from Biden to Trump. But--in the Biden years--had the Trump regime really ended? Is it possible that it simply changed? Trump 1.0 was somewhat cautious--at least when you compare him to Trump 2.0. Haberman suggests that America would have been better off enduring two Trump terms back to back; the 2020 Trump would have been unpopular and therefore hamstrung. Instead, Trump 2.0 could profit from American dissatisfaction toward the (deeply dissatisfying) choices of Joe Biden. Trump 2.0 is like Ursula the Sea Witch--*after* she has morphed and assum...

 I don't live in Montclair, but I'm there often. A feature I dislike is the canonization of one resident, Stephen Colbert. Anytime there is widespread adulation for anyone, I become skeptical. Colbert's slightly patronizing ads for the "Montclair Film Festival" drive me batty. A better facet is the Montclair Book Center. This eccentric bookstore may or may not carry all of the current major titles you'd expect, but it does have tattered four-dollar mass market editions of forgotten Golden Age mysteries. Also, hardcover editions of old titles are kept *separate* from the paperbacks--so you get the thrill of discovery TWICE. It's like two bookstores within one building. The last thing I'll say about Montclair is that there are several "Bosch" houses up in the hills. These are upside-down houses--they are perched almost on top of Manhattan. Sometimes, the "consumption" of volume and surface area is astonishing; it's exciting just t...

 The NYT says that "West Side Story" is Bernstein's classic mix of "discord and schmaltz." Bernstein likely believes, deep down, that he is constructing an opera--and that is suggested by his self-conscious song title, "Quintet." We are meant to think of Mozart. I love "Quintet" above all the other numbers because the discord and the schmaltz are right there together. Singing on his own, Tony can be just a bit insufferable: Oh moon, grow bright-- And make this endless day, endless night-- Tonight! But Anita cuts through the nonsense, thinking about her *own* lover: He'll come in hot and tired. So what? Don't matter if he's tired-- As long as he's hot. Sondheim could simply have the rival gang members puffing themselves up, but instead he chooses to look at self-deception. He has the gang members half-acknowledge their plans to use illegal weapons. "Well, IF things start to go too far...." With this kind of writing, S...

  I know a wealthy WASP. She attended Saint Ann’s and Yale; she then became a stay-at-home mom. The family owns multiple properties on various continents. The WASP’s parents—two elderly alcoholics—host elaborate parties with baffling rules and codicils. If you violate a rule, the WASP family speaks laughingly about you as if you aren’t in the room. If someone wrongly suggests that you know a great deal about Jane Austen, then the WASP produces trivia questions to stump you. Once you are stumped, the WASP seems satisfied. She then hands you supplemental Austen material—“as a gift.”   The WASP’s mother likes to pretend to complain about when the WASP was a child star in the City Opera revival of “A Little Night Music.” Of course, “Claire Bloom had the Gingold role—and Claire was  not  friendly.”   These are all terrible behaviors—and I was happy to see them parodied in “Pineapple Street.” A wealthy couple leaves their townhouse to one child and his “gold-digger” w...

An annoying thing happened at my child's school. His teacher inexplicably disappeared for three months--and the district, frantic for coverage, hired a sixteen-year-old replacement. No, she was not sixteen. But she was pretty close. My shrewd son quickly sussed out the truth--the new teacher was not adequately familiar with her "steering wheel." No one was captain of the ship. This caused distress for my son--who could not express his distress in complex sentences. So he began to pull down his pants. Pulling down one's pants is a not uncommon choice in the context of a speech delay. But the choice was terrifying for the sixteen-year-old--who chose not to share her concerns with my spouse or with me. To me, this choice has just a whiff of (unexamined) homophobia. It's hard to believe--if my child had a mom--the situation would have been handled in the same way. Long story short. My son essentially lost three months of instructional time because the classroom was sp...

  Alice Munro married Gerald Fremlin and began writing about him. He inspired the central man in “Labor Day Dinner”—he was the man making fun of Roberta’s body. Speaking with a reporter, Munro said, “My husband doesn’t read my stories.” And Gerald made a correction: “I read them. We just don’t talk about them.”   Gerald popped up as Orpheus in “The Children Stay,” as Ladner in “Vandals,” as the murderer in “Dimension.” Although Rachel Aviv does not mention “Floating Bridge,” I think Gerald was there, too—he was the emotionally abusive partner. He was the suicide case in “Comfort.”   After Gerald died, Alice asked not to be buried near him. While senile, Alice mentioned that she never “wanted that pedafil”—she seemed to invent a word somewhere between “pedophile” and “pitiful.” Rachel Aviv writes about cycles of trauma—Alice once moved far away from her own mother, and later, Andrea Skinner detached herself from Alice. Skinner once observed a vacancy in Alice’s eyes; “it w...

  Critics are celebrating Matthew Rhys for his WTF fuck. It’s a great face—but all Rhys faces are great faces. Rhys in horror, yes, but also Rhys in discomfort, Rhys in frenzy, Rhys in anger. The Rhys of “Widow’s Bay” is sweaty, desperate, and needy—he is relatable. There must be a cost to exposing so much inner weakness. What a gift Rhys has.   In “Widow’s Bay,” Rhys has lied to his adolescent son: “Your mother died in childbirth.” In fact, the mother lived for years, and her schizophrenic letters are waiting to be discovered. Rhys learns that he can lift a curse on “his” island—to promote tourism, he just needs to murder a certain tainted citizen. (There is an elaborate story about a poisoned bloodline.) The problem is that the citizen in question is Rhys’s octogenarian receptionist—can he really bring himself to smother her with a pillow?   People have written about “Widow’s Bay” and its relationship to history. In America, we try to build industries on nostalgia—but, ...

  Sondheim writes big iconic introductions--some of the most famous intros in Broadway history. "The Jet Song," "Comedy Tonight," "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd." These songs establish a mood; they tell us what we're going to get.  When you're a Jet-- You're the top cat in town. You're the gold-medal kid With the heavyweight crown! When you're a Jet-- You're the swingin'est thing. Little boy, you're a man. Little man, you're a king! By contrast, the opening of "Sunday in the Park" initially feels small. It's a rare case in which we do *not* start with a choral number. We get two people--one singing, one making bitchy comments. Dot does not want to model so early in the morning. She also has doubts about George's romantic commitment. This doesn't interest George--who is comically over-invested in making a perfect sketch. Given that this is Sondheim, Dot drowns in ambivalence. She finds George's pric...

  Growing up, I enjoyed "To Kill a Mockingbird," and I dreamed of living in some version of Harper Lee's community (without the racism). Lee--an obvious talent--transformed her own memories of childhood into a kind of picture gallery. All the denizens of the town presented themselves on various sunporches. The mean old lady addicted to opioids, the upright lawyer, the quirky gay kid, the "scandal" family. In the novel, little Scout learns about human behavior by studying her neighbors. By observing what is said and what is *not* said. My own hometown had characters. One mom would not allow her kids to play "Sega Genesis" because the brand name seemed to include a veiled allusion to the serpent in the Bible. A lonely old man distributed candies--maybe because of a warm heart, maybe because of certain unsavory wishes. A widow--a former soldier's wife--comforted herself by staring at her tricorn flag. She would ask me to march around with it while the...

 Recently, I saw an ineffective movie called "Pressure," in which Dwight Eisenhower tries to predict how the weather might impact the Normandy invasion. The weather is not a great "big bad"--that's because you can't fight the weather. You just wait to see if it does what it seems to want to do. By contrast, "Jaws" is a masterpiece. You *can* fight a shark. The movie is structurally unusual. We begin with a town in its entirety. The mayor doesn't want to concede that a celebrity shark is dangerous--shutting down the beach would mean losing profit-making opportunities. (In this way, "Jaws" seems to be an ancestor of the buzzy series "Widow's Bay.") Meanwhile, local kids cause chaos by "becoming" the shark; they purchase fake fins and hide underwater. (Spielberg seems to be offering a self-portrait here; we perceive the director's empathy, his sense of a connection with his own childhood.) But here is what I m...

 My daughter is falling for books. Not reading. She has no interest in phonics (and in this way she reminds me of me). But she likes to listen--especially to the tales of Jack and Annie in the Magic Tree House. I love what Susie herself does with words. She knows that her doctor--Dr. Buono--is friendly, so she has invented a kind of shorthand; the doctor is now "Dr. Elmo." Susie knows that a hotel is a source of excitement, like "show and tell." So a hotel is now a "hoe and tell." Aware that dragons are a common wellspring of terror, Susie sometimes speaks breathlessly about Boris Karloff and "Victor Dragon-stein." So I appreciate Donna Leon's recent thoughts on words--she has written about how words become seductive (below). One of the best kids' books I know of is--literally--nonsense. It's James Marshall's "A Pocketful of Nonsense," and it features Marshall in a "Dr. Seuss" mode. There was an old man of Blac...

 Scientists write about "deep holes" in your personal timeline--moments when you seem to age by ten million years. You were thirty yesterday; today, you are one hundred years old. In my youth, I would have skimmed over this--but, now, I see the brutal reality. In various photos, I have a full head of hair--then, suddenly, I do not. "A receding hairline can be charming," says my shrink, because, yes, I talk about this in therapy. (Joyce Carol Oates recently complained about inane navel-gazing in fiction. "I'm reading Percival Everett on the history of lynching--then I have to read some white man's thoughts on his latest divorce?" ....I empathize, but maybe not every rough patch in a life has to be tantamount to a history of lynching.) There is no universe in which I will feel charmed by my own receding hairline--so I just change the subject. My spouse and I go to see the movie "Tuner," which features a young man named Leo Woodall. And Wood...

  The NYT is celebrating 50 years of Sandra Boynton in print. I'd like to nominate one Boynton title as the greatest--it's "The Belly Button Book." In this tale, a group of hippos celebrate their belly buttons. We always like to get balloons... And I know why. Do you? It's because we like to think balloons Have belly buttons, too. Boynton then moves the action to "Belly Button Beach": Where hippos like to stand around In bathing suits too little-- Because we hope you will admire  The button in our middle. But life's pleasures are fleeting, and Boynton has a brutal conclusion, surprising and inevitable. We love to show our belly b's-- We show them off with pride. But not in chilly wintertime-- When belly buttons hide. No, not in chilly wintertime-- When belly buttons hide. A mic-drop kind of performance. Not a word is wasted.

 I have made clear that my own personal Broadway diva is Victoria Clark. I'm a great fan of Clark's intelligence and cunning--her watchfulness. Good acting--which is rare in a musical, even a Broadway musical--involves a magic trick. You have to have full control over your eyes; the eyes have to telegraph a message. I am actually in the place and in the time that the words of this musical are referring to. I am not in New York City, in a theater, in 2026. Whether she is speaking or not, Clark has "Olivia Colman" eyes. She is a brilliant performer. All that said, Heather Headley is also on my Mount Rushmore. Headley's slightly mannered performances feel "extreme"--they remind me of the work of Liza Minnelli. Either you love Headley or you do not. I think she gets away with intense melodrama because she conveys a sense of utter conviction. Here--for Miscast--she is performing a colleague's big number, "Endless Night." On one level, she is sin...

 It took me a long while to get to "Mindhunter," because I prefer procedurals. I get nervous if something is billed as experimental. And "Mindhunter" has problems; it has one of the most tedious "opening credits" sequences I know of. It features a gay actor whose gayness seems almost palpable--yet no one speculates about the related character being possibly "in the closet." (Knowing David Fincher, I'm sure that the casting of a gay actor, Jonathan Groff, in an apparently "heterosexual" role is part of a bigger strategy. The strategy is unclear to me for now.) But there are things I like very much. One genre of old movie--"let's put on a show"--dramatizes the conflicts within a group of creative people as we move from "table read" to opening night. That's essentially what "Mindhunter" is. It's the story of a creative act. Three oddballs decide that they are going to rewrite the rules of murde...

 What we lack is a terrific blockbuster scary movie. Last summer, quite early, we were all treated to "Final Destination: Bloodlines," an experience of pure pleasure. There is nothing like "Bloodlines" right now. Summer should mean thrills--that's because of Steven Spielberg. That's because of "Jaws" and "Jurassic Park." Spielberg's current offering--"Disclosure Day"--is bloodless and boring. At a recent screening, my spouse and I both fell asleep. The best I can offer in terms of Spielberg-ian wonder, at the moment, is the soundtrack from the Broadway musical "Six." My family listens in the car. Why--asks my daughter--why would Henry VIII murder people in his own clan? I explain that he sustained a head injury in a jousting accident; this led to bad choices, and because he was King, no one questioned him. My daughter then wants to know how--if two of the Queens are dead--how is it possible that they are singing on...

  "The Best Minds" is worthy of the hype; it's an astonishing story told by the *correct* storyteller. As the NYTimes observed, it's "pin-you-to-your-couch" storytelling. Michael is a bright and egotistical kid in New Rochelle. He is interviewed at the school paper's office; if he were offered the spot of managing editor, rather than editor-in-chief, would he accept? Despite the fact that the editor-in-chief will be his close friend, Michael throws a tantrum. This moment of poor judgment does not hurt in the long term; Michael is offered a spot at Yale. He lives in Silliman College and graduates in three years. Summa cum laude. Phi Beta Kappa. He goes off to work at Bain, which pays Yale graduates to spend long weekends memorizing all of the operational details that form the skeletons of various industries. (The Bain employees then offer their consulting services.) At this point in his life, Michael has started imagining that flames are licking the floor...