I mentioned recently that Netflix, in its attempt to focus my attention solely on those of its offerings it feels would appeal to me, has created several categories of television shows and movies to capture my attention. They often seem remarkably specialized, as when it collects together Goofy Musicals or 1970s Sitcoms with a Strong Female Lead. Sometimes, it seems almost a little too specialized, as when the service offers up Campy Comedies Featuring Cross-Dressing Stars, or Cerebral Dramas with Exquisite Cinematography Set on Wind-Swept Moors and Cast with Actors Sporting Impenetrable Accents.
And then other times, it'll gather up Hot in Cleveland and Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas and Xena: Warrior Princess and old episodes of Top Chef and lump them in a category called Aw, Who the Hell Are We Kidding? We Know You'll Watch Anything.
But Netflix does seem to have glommed onto the fact that my favorite of these categories it creates is a little something called Holy Crap Even Gwyneth Paltrow Speaking with a British Accent Will Get You Going, Won't It, You Bloody Anglophile? After my excursion into bodice-and-bustle territory with the breathless Lillie, an interminable biography of British professional hussy Lillie Langtry, I naturally segued into related territory with Edward the King, a thirteen-part miniseries about the lives and times of King Edward VII, whose major life accomplishments seem to have been not taking the throne because Queen Victoria decided to live a very long life simply to spite him, and not being riddled with syphillis.
During the first eleven episodes, Edward the King was a ripping watch—simply because Annette Crosbie's turn as Queen Victoria was so positively unhinged that every time she was on the screen, I'd stop whatever I was doing, just in case she started screaming like a banshee. The last two episodes, it was mostly a crabby King Edward coughing and hacking up phlegm.
I was also treated during the run to another example of one of my unfavorite trends of these nineteen-seventies period productions, the casting of (shall we discreetly say) an Actress Of A Certain Mature Number Of Years as a teenaged-girl. I was appalled by it when thirty-two-year-old Francesca Annis was bustin' out all over as fourteen-year-old Lillie Langtry. So I wasn't all that happy in Edward the King when in the second or third episode I saw then-thirty-year-old British TV favorite Felicity Kendal show up wearing a massive hoop skirt, in pigtails, and murmur in a simpering voice something like, "But mama, I know you are the Queen yet I cannot bring myself to marry the future Emperor Frederick III of Germany for he is a man of advanced years and I am but a tender reed of sixteen."
Which had me drop everything I was doing and to glare at the screen and yell, "Oh, come on."
Like Francesca Annis, Felicity Kendal is another of my childhood favorites. She was charm personified in the BBC sitcom The Good Life, which ran on U.S. PBS stations in the nineteen-seventies as Good Neighbors. You remember it! It was about the Goods, a suburban couple who decide to become self-sufficient. Richard Briers played Tom, who was gruff and blunt and thoroughly irritable. Kendal played Barbara, who mucked about in the gardens and was winsome and adorable and who, when she was frightened or angry, made high-pitched little strangled noises, and when she was Very Serious, would pull on an adorable pair of oversized spectacles.
Well! When I saw that Netflix was carrying the horticultural amateur detectives series from the mid-2000s, Rosemary and Thyme, which also stars Kendal, I had to watch it it. I missed it the first time 'round, somehow. It's about a couple of women who decide to become detectives. It stars Pam Ferris as Thyme, who is gruff and blunt and thoroughly irritable. Kendal plays Barbara—excuse me, Rosemary—who mucks about in gardens and is winsome and adorable and who, when she is about to be bludgeoned by the murderer-of-the-week, makes high-pitched little strangled noises, and when she's Very Serious And Investigating A Clue, pulls on an adorable pair of oversized spectacles.
The two shows are very different from each other.
You see, every week, Tom and Barbara—I'm sorry, Thyme and Rosemary—head out to a posh residence, or boarding school, or resort spa, where a bunch of toffs mill about, spouting off vague threats to each other that later will be consider Hard Evidence For Murder by the local constabulary. Someone dies, Tom and Barbara—sorry, 'Rosemary'—decide they're better-equipped to nose into it than the police, and they proceed to ask so many irritating and unsubtle questions ("Lady Worthington-Smythe, exactly how much do you know about the creation of untraceable poisons from common household ingredients? Oh, no reason. Just making polite conversation!") that five minutes before the show's over, the writers just bring about a hasty conclusion by having the murderer get so irritated that he attempts to kill one of the pair.
This is usually when my interest perks up.
But no. The killers' attempts to bring down Tom and Barbara—let's just stick with those names, since I'm more comfortable with them—always fail. Instead of trying to make getaways, like gauche Americans or the lower classes might, the killers then stand about and confess everything in front of the police, because apparently that's what they do in the United Kingdom, being jolly good sports about being foiled and all.
The level of detective work involved in a typical Rosemary and Thyme installment isn't exactly Encyclopedia Brown-level. Hell, Encyclopedia Brown would roll his eyes at this crap and outsource his services to Scooby-Doo and company. If someone has an alibi like "I was with dear mummy in Little Cruddington watching a world-famous Polish pianist perform," Barbara is sure to stumble across a copy of The Little Cruddington Gazette with a (I'm not kidding!) three-inch headline typeface declaiming, WORLD-FAMOUS POLISH PIANIST CANCELS TONIGHT'S CONCERT!!! The killers magically forget to roll down their sleeves and keep covered the tattoos that link them to the special military forces that are the only known folk trained to use a special death-grip that leaves no marks about the throat.
Hell. Most of the time the plot's such a muddled mess that Tom and Barbara figure out absolutely nothing, and it's only the murderer inevitable denouement monologue that sorts everything out. Yes, it's a sloppy and appalling show . . . but I can't stop watching it.
Part of my fascination with Rosemary and Thyme is how academic an exercise it is to the writers. The cozy mystery is a genre I've enjoyed since I first read a Miss Marple novel, and it's obvious that the writers want this show to be a part of that tradition. In most cozies, though, the murder is disruptive; it tears apart the community and lays bare its secrets.
In Rosemary and Thyme, murder and violence barely go noticed. When Barbara has a former student who throws himself (or DID he?) off of a balcony and is writhing in pain, near death, on a carefully-tended gravel path, his fiancee and brother and Barbara all show up at the sound of impact. But where normal people would be shouting Oh my GOD someone call an ambulance!, the fiancee and brother just stand around for a bit and have a Conversation Full of Potential Clues, while Kendal's character lurks behind a hedge and eavesdrops, adorably. No concern for the injured bloke whatsoever. Not a blip. Also, at the end of every episode, after Tom and Barbara have 'solved'—and I use the word loosely—the mystery, they'll exchange japes with the widow or widower and everyone will laaaaaaugh, just like they used to when Barbara would say something endearingly silly at the end of The Good Life. Never mind that someone JUST GOT SHOT AND KILLED the night before. That's all water under the bridge to these people.
Even though the show's based on violent acts taking place, they're all so muffled and muted by the cozy comforts of country living that they vanish the moment they're over. I was watching an episode in which the killer snuck up on Barbara as she puttered around with test tubes and a microscope or something (I don't know. She's supposed to have a scientific mind, even though she can't remember to call an ambulance when someone drops off a high balcony) and proceeded to attempt to strangle her with piano wire, which naturally made me root for him to succeed. But no, a kindly caretaker hits the murderer over the head with an old framed photograph, causing him to collapse to the floor in a heap.
And does the caretaker say anything like, Cor blimey, what was that chap doing to you, Mistress Barbara? No. He says, "Good thing I was stopping by with this framed photograph to help you solve the mystery of the withering grass on the estate grounds, ma'am!"
And does Barbara say anything like, Thank GOD you arrived to SAVE MY LIFE! This man has murdered twice in the last two days! Help me restrain him quickly while he's still unconscious before he can leap to his feet and attempt to murder us both . . . again . . . and let's call the constable? Oh heck no. She pulls out her oversized glasses and says, in quite a normal tone, "Oh, how fehscinating. Let's have a look."
Then the murderer leaps to his feet and attempts to murder them both . . . again.
Idiots.
As I said, I can't stop watching. Perhaps picking on a television show that's long passed its expiration date is a little like shooting tuna in a rather small bucket of water, but it's hard not to have an affection for something the creators were obviously banking upon to appeal to a somewhat mature, if not outright decrepit, demographic that has fond memories of Kendal from thirty-five years ago. Myself included.
Even so. Whenever the killer of the week gets Barbara—fine, whatever—'Rosemary' by the throat, I'm the first to be shouting out at the television, "Need a hand with that?!"
Friday, March 16, 2012
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Yelpaholics Anonymous
A year and more ago, when Craig and I were grappling with the reality that he'd just accepted a job in Connecticut and until our house sold would be moving here without me like, immediately, we made a couple of trips to this fair state in order to suss it out a little. Highly stressful trips they were, too, for the both of us. From our base at an off-ramp hotel, we had no idea how to get around, or where was good to visit and where was better to stay away. And when you come from Detroit—I love you, Detroit, but you know it's true—you learn that there are definitely areas of cities you avoid.
Worst of all, we had absolutely no idea where to eat. Now, usually when we're dining out, we handle it a little like this:
Under the high stress circumstances of relocation, however, these conversations would take on a slight edge:
I know that Yelp is not a newfangled web site that all the hep kids have suddenly started visiting. It's not now, it wasn't then. In fact, we'd known a couple of people who were admitted obsessive Yelp reviewers, an activity to which most of us would gently ignore in public, as if the hobbyists had confessed they'd taken up public masturbation as a suitable leisure pursuit.
We hadn't used Yelp much in Michigan because the midwest is largely the land of the chain restaurant, and really, does one need to consult a database in order to decide whether one Applebee's is better than the next? Connecticut is a state in which the seeds of chain restaurants find no purchase, however. There are hundreds upon hundreds of mom and pop restaurants, and there's plenty of fine dining, but there are remarkably few restaurant chains.
Unless you're Dunkin' Donuts, that is. Dunkin' Donuts franchises are the weeds that flourish even on salted, barren land, up here. I could tell you where one Dunkin' Donuts was in Michigan. One. And that's only because it was attached to a gas station. There are about thirty Dunkin' Donuts within a one-mile radius of me here, and they're building another two blocks down the street. Oh, and pretzel chains. Connecticut loves its hot pretzel chains. Dunkin' Donuts, if you ever come up with a pretzel-flavored donut for citizens of the Nutmeg State to dunk, you will have a hit on your hands of astronomical proportions.
You're welcome. I only ask for credit. And a small development fee.
But anyway. Yelp. I was hungry, and desperate, and so on my phone I punched in a request for a restaurant that was within a couple of miles and was cheap and served—yes—Mexican, and we ended up eating at a tiny little dive that had some really incredible food. It was so spicy I walked out with sweat marks on my back and on my thighs, but I like it like that. We used Yelp again for the other meals on those short trips. We'd look for a type of food, check out the reviews, and try the ones that seemed to be popular and get a lot of stars. It worked out well for us.
And it still does, since we continue to use the site to find places where we can grab a bite. It's especially handy when we head into Manhattan, with its bewildering abundance of choice. I find it generally easier to get a sense of what dishes are popular, of how much to expect to pay, and of whether or not I might like a place from reading through a dozen Yelp reviews, than I do from looking at a restaurant's website or accepting the word-of-mouth recommendations of local acquaintances.
If you sense there's a big but coming, you know me well. Because there's one thing about Yelp that really bugs me: I simply cannot stand many of its reviewers. We're talking about a small percentage here. Small, but super-irritating. I've noticed that a lot of Yelp reviewers provoke in me the same reaction I have when I hear someone is rubbing his hands all over an inflated latex balloon: I want to march over and make him stop. Preferably with a good slapping.
It's a phenomenon that seems almost endemic to this part of the country, too. When I was using Yelp back in Michigan, the reviews largely tended be along the lines of I like potatoes. This place serves good potatoes! The potatoes with cheese are good! The steak with cheese is great, and it comes with good potatoes! I really like the chicken with cheese too! I mean, throw a little cheese on something and the good people of Michigan are happy, simple folk who write happy, simple Yelp reviews as they loosen their belt buckles a notch.
But the East Coast Yelpers are complainers. A little bit of cheddar jack isn't going to distract them. Oh no. They're too savvy for your stinkin' dairyland legerdemain. They want to gripe about something, even if it's largely imaginary. In fact, many of them will complain without exactly knowing why, so there are a plethora of seemingly gentle, neutral reviews with a bit of a stinger at the end, like the two-star review of a coffee shop that reads:
One wonders what more the poor reviewer would require from a coffee shop to get him out of that malaise. A cotton candy machine? A Zoloft dispenser?
The worst breed of Yelp reviewer, though, is the Yelper with Attitude. They know everything about food, and they want you to know that they know it. And they're going to make sure you know it in their hundred-word Yelp review, damn your eyes. Yelp on the East Coast is full of reviewers who write mini-essays that are less about the restaurants in question, and more about the reviewers themselves, and their psychological dramas.
I'm usually all in favor when a person makes the broadest of statements about his qualifications for making sweeping judgments about a restaurant. I wouldn't bat an eye at someone saying, I eat a lot of Indian food and this place had some yummy stuff! I do, however, find my eyebrow arching and my hackles rising at something like:
Because that review is not really helpful. All it tells me is that the reviewer wants me to know he travels, that he spends a lot of money traveling and wants everyone to be aware of that fact, and that he is very concerned with the number of stars his hotel has received.
If I'm dining at Chip's Pancakes, which serves fifty-two varieties of pancakes (I've only worked my way through three, but I've got time and an elastic stomach), I can be sure that here in this area of the country, tucked among the many rapturous reviews from pancake lovers, will be one Yelper who declaims:
No, Yelper, you really shouldn't. We're talking about Chip's Pancakes, which advertises itself with big fat pictures of big fat flapjacks on monster-sized signs that loom over I-95. We're not discussing Le Bon Creperie du Fwahfwah down in the Meatpacking District. At the Creperie you can get your refined eating. At Chip's you get a big fat plate of big fat pancakes with a design made in them out of blueberries. Shove some in that bag fat piehole of yours and spare me.
This type of reviewer is the sort that will often go to great lengths to let others know exactly how well-educated he is, how sophisticated, and how truly attuned to excellence is his palate. You can smell 'em coming a mile away, especially when a review begins:
Oh yeah. These reviews sound like a blast to mock. And they are, for about the first dozen. But I get the impression that most of these self-absorbed reviewers are not the kind of people I'd want to hang out with. They just get nasty. They write irate, outraged, self-righteous reviews in which they admit they weren't dissatisfied with the prices, the decor, or the food itself, but because of some imagined slight that sent them into a tizzy—they were seated too near the kitchen, say. It seems instead of making a good faith effort to resolve the problem (like, by asking someone nicely, "Can we maybe get another table?"), the reviewer stews and sits stonily and is even more outraged when the wait staff don't notice their obvious, passive-aggressive displeasure.
Then he runs home and pounds out a scathing Yelp review, of course. Because that'll show 'em.
I've seen reviewers write exquisitely-detailed screeds about the disputes they'll have with restaurant owners and waiters that would make even the most die-hard proponent of the motto the customer is always right raise an eyebrow and admit, "Well, maybe except in this case." The amount of pride that some of these people take in stiffing their servers on a tip, or attempting to get them fired, makes me want to track down the reviewer in a restaurant, wait until they've ordered a hamburger, then ambush them and drop a loogie on top of the pickles and lettuce myself.
But even when they're not going to those extremes, up here the Yelpers always find something to complain about. The place in Hell's Kitchen that specializes in cramming homemade ice cream between homemade glazed doughnuts and then covering them with gooey syrups? It doesn't have healthy alternatives, one Yelp review will sniff. The fantastic ice cream shop down the street that serves exquisite little half-pint cups of gourmet ice cream layered with homemade cookie dough, in exotic flavor combinations, served with a little wooden paddle like they used to when I was in second grade? It lacks an attractive view from the front windows, says one Yelper with a lofty, two-star dismissal.
You know what, Yelpers? Moderate your expectations. Seriously. Find a healthier dessert place among the several hundred cluttering Hell's Kitchen. Resign yourself to the notion that a street-level storefront tucked among the residences on West 47th is not going to have the same view as a chi-chi place atop the Time-Warner Center. If the food sucks, fine. Tell me. If the service was truly rotten, I want to hear about it. But if you're more interested in informing me that you have impossible standards to which very little can match, I'm already yawning and rolling my eyes.
If Maria Callas were alive today, she wouldn't be teaching master classes. She'd be writing Yelp reviews.
Worst of all, we had absolutely no idea where to eat. Now, usually when we're dining out, we handle it a little like this:
CRAIG: Where do you want to eat?This conversation will go on for a half-hour or so in its own amiable, ambling little way, by the way, until finally we get into the car and go to the same Mexican restaurant we always patronize.
ME: I don't know. Where do you want to eat?
CRAIG: I don't have a preference. Where do you want to eat?
ME: I don't have a preference. What're you in the mood for?
CRAIG: I'm not in a mood for anything in particular. What do you want to eat?
Under the high stress circumstances of relocation, however, these conversations would take on a slight edge:
CRAIG: Where do you want to eat?Well. When we started coming to Connecticut, in order to avoid any more of that kind of thing (which was already spontaneously happening every twenty-three minutes), I turned to Yelp for a little assistance in finding places to dine.
ME: WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS TO ME? CAN'T YOU SEE I'M STRESSED?! AAAAIEEEEE!CRAIG: OH GOD I'M RUINING BOTH OUR LIVES!
I know that Yelp is not a newfangled web site that all the hep kids have suddenly started visiting. It's not now, it wasn't then. In fact, we'd known a couple of people who were admitted obsessive Yelp reviewers, an activity to which most of us would gently ignore in public, as if the hobbyists had confessed they'd taken up public masturbation as a suitable leisure pursuit.
We hadn't used Yelp much in Michigan because the midwest is largely the land of the chain restaurant, and really, does one need to consult a database in order to decide whether one Applebee's is better than the next? Connecticut is a state in which the seeds of chain restaurants find no purchase, however. There are hundreds upon hundreds of mom and pop restaurants, and there's plenty of fine dining, but there are remarkably few restaurant chains.
Unless you're Dunkin' Donuts, that is. Dunkin' Donuts franchises are the weeds that flourish even on salted, barren land, up here. I could tell you where one Dunkin' Donuts was in Michigan. One. And that's only because it was attached to a gas station. There are about thirty Dunkin' Donuts within a one-mile radius of me here, and they're building another two blocks down the street. Oh, and pretzel chains. Connecticut loves its hot pretzel chains. Dunkin' Donuts, if you ever come up with a pretzel-flavored donut for citizens of the Nutmeg State to dunk, you will have a hit on your hands of astronomical proportions.
You're welcome. I only ask for credit. And a small development fee.
But anyway. Yelp. I was hungry, and desperate, and so on my phone I punched in a request for a restaurant that was within a couple of miles and was cheap and served—yes—Mexican, and we ended up eating at a tiny little dive that had some really incredible food. It was so spicy I walked out with sweat marks on my back and on my thighs, but I like it like that. We used Yelp again for the other meals on those short trips. We'd look for a type of food, check out the reviews, and try the ones that seemed to be popular and get a lot of stars. It worked out well for us.
And it still does, since we continue to use the site to find places where we can grab a bite. It's especially handy when we head into Manhattan, with its bewildering abundance of choice. I find it generally easier to get a sense of what dishes are popular, of how much to expect to pay, and of whether or not I might like a place from reading through a dozen Yelp reviews, than I do from looking at a restaurant's website or accepting the word-of-mouth recommendations of local acquaintances.
If you sense there's a big but coming, you know me well. Because there's one thing about Yelp that really bugs me: I simply cannot stand many of its reviewers. We're talking about a small percentage here. Small, but super-irritating. I've noticed that a lot of Yelp reviewers provoke in me the same reaction I have when I hear someone is rubbing his hands all over an inflated latex balloon: I want to march over and make him stop. Preferably with a good slapping.
It's a phenomenon that seems almost endemic to this part of the country, too. When I was using Yelp back in Michigan, the reviews largely tended be along the lines of I like potatoes. This place serves good potatoes! The potatoes with cheese are good! The steak with cheese is great, and it comes with good potatoes! I really like the chicken with cheese too! I mean, throw a little cheese on something and the good people of Michigan are happy, simple folk who write happy, simple Yelp reviews as they loosen their belt buckles a notch.
But the East Coast Yelpers are complainers. A little bit of cheddar jack isn't going to distract them. Oh no. They're too savvy for your stinkin' dairyland legerdemain. They want to gripe about something, even if it's largely imaginary. In fact, many of them will complain without exactly knowing why, so there are a plethora of seemingly gentle, neutral reviews with a bit of a stinger at the end, like the two-star review of a coffee shop that reads:
This quiet, cozy establishment always has soft music playing in the background, and there's always a comfy chair to sit in. The atmosphere is collegial and friendly. Books and magazines line the walls and in the winter months there is a fire roaring in the fireplace. The coffee is delicious—the best I've ever had. So yeah, I find the place depressing and that's why I give it only two stars.
One wonders what more the poor reviewer would require from a coffee shop to get him out of that malaise. A cotton candy machine? A Zoloft dispenser?
The worst breed of Yelp reviewer, though, is the Yelper with Attitude. They know everything about food, and they want you to know that they know it. And they're going to make sure you know it in their hundred-word Yelp review, damn your eyes. Yelp on the East Coast is full of reviewers who write mini-essays that are less about the restaurants in question, and more about the reviewers themselves, and their psychological dramas.
I'm usually all in favor when a person makes the broadest of statements about his qualifications for making sweeping judgments about a restaurant. I wouldn't bat an eye at someone saying, I eat a lot of Indian food and this place had some yummy stuff! I do, however, find my eyebrow arching and my hackles rising at something like:
I have been on vacation to Phuket twice and I can say with authority that the $6 bowl of pad thai I ate from this establishment did not compare to the masterful culinary delights prepared by trained chefs with the freshest ingredients at the resort hotel at which I stayed.
Because that review is not really helpful. All it tells me is that the reviewer wants me to know he travels, that he spends a lot of money traveling and wants everyone to be aware of that fact, and that he is very concerned with the number of stars his hotel has received.
If I'm dining at Chip's Pancakes, which serves fifty-two varieties of pancakes (I've only worked my way through three, but I've got time and an elastic stomach), I can be sure that here in this area of the country, tucked among the many rapturous reviews from pancake lovers, will be one Yelper who declaims:
I decided to bring my hard-earned consumer dollars to Chip's because after a long drive along the highway after my vacation at the Cape, I was definitely in the mood for some rustic, simple fare after a week of seafood dining. What a mistake on my part! I was horrified when I stepped into this establishment to find at my table an assortment of flavored 'syrups', the containers no doubt made sticky by the countless grubby fingers of children, judging by the placemats, which have illustrations for young people to 'color' while waiting for their food. The 'maple' syrup was only maple flavored, a faux-pas I was happy to point out to the confused and badly-trained wait staff. The 'butter' (which I darkly suspect was really margarine, and was not whipped, as I prefer!) arrived in a 'patty' served in a CARDBOARD tub! But the last straw was when I saw my pancake! I am accustomed to my pancakes being of a thinner and more crepe-like consistency! I suppose I should not expect refined eating at an establishment that panders to the lowest common denominator.
No, Yelper, you really shouldn't. We're talking about Chip's Pancakes, which advertises itself with big fat pictures of big fat flapjacks on monster-sized signs that loom over I-95. We're not discussing Le Bon Creperie du Fwahfwah down in the Meatpacking District. At the Creperie you can get your refined eating. At Chip's you get a big fat plate of big fat pancakes with a design made in them out of blueberries. Shove some in that bag fat piehole of yours and spare me.
This type of reviewer is the sort that will often go to great lengths to let others know exactly how well-educated he is, how sophisticated, and how truly attuned to excellence is his palate. You can smell 'em coming a mile away, especially when a review begins:
It was a blustery autumn day, and I had just emerged from the rehearsal of the Jacobean revenge drama in which I was starring, and had a few minutes before my class in African tribal drumming was to begin. I carried a copy of the exquisite Colombian poetry of Anabel Torres beneath my arm. I paused before the door, hesitated, and with mild interest ripening into piquant curiosity, at last stepped over the threshold into the quaint establishment known as Swanky Frankie's Hot Dog Shack.
Oh yeah. These reviews sound like a blast to mock. And they are, for about the first dozen. But I get the impression that most of these self-absorbed reviewers are not the kind of people I'd want to hang out with. They just get nasty. They write irate, outraged, self-righteous reviews in which they admit they weren't dissatisfied with the prices, the decor, or the food itself, but because of some imagined slight that sent them into a tizzy—they were seated too near the kitchen, say. It seems instead of making a good faith effort to resolve the problem (like, by asking someone nicely, "Can we maybe get another table?"), the reviewer stews and sits stonily and is even more outraged when the wait staff don't notice their obvious, passive-aggressive displeasure.
Then he runs home and pounds out a scathing Yelp review, of course. Because that'll show 'em.
I've seen reviewers write exquisitely-detailed screeds about the disputes they'll have with restaurant owners and waiters that would make even the most die-hard proponent of the motto the customer is always right raise an eyebrow and admit, "Well, maybe except in this case." The amount of pride that some of these people take in stiffing their servers on a tip, or attempting to get them fired, makes me want to track down the reviewer in a restaurant, wait until they've ordered a hamburger, then ambush them and drop a loogie on top of the pickles and lettuce myself.
But even when they're not going to those extremes, up here the Yelpers always find something to complain about. The place in Hell's Kitchen that specializes in cramming homemade ice cream between homemade glazed doughnuts and then covering them with gooey syrups? It doesn't have healthy alternatives, one Yelp review will sniff. The fantastic ice cream shop down the street that serves exquisite little half-pint cups of gourmet ice cream layered with homemade cookie dough, in exotic flavor combinations, served with a little wooden paddle like they used to when I was in second grade? It lacks an attractive view from the front windows, says one Yelper with a lofty, two-star dismissal.
You know what, Yelpers? Moderate your expectations. Seriously. Find a healthier dessert place among the several hundred cluttering Hell's Kitchen. Resign yourself to the notion that a street-level storefront tucked among the residences on West 47th is not going to have the same view as a chi-chi place atop the Time-Warner Center. If the food sucks, fine. Tell me. If the service was truly rotten, I want to hear about it. But if you're more interested in informing me that you have impossible standards to which very little can match, I'm already yawning and rolling my eyes.
If Maria Callas were alive today, she wouldn't be teaching master classes. She'd be writing Yelp reviews.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
Med, Med Passion
Guess WHAT, y’all? Apparently Oscar Wilde wasn't gay.
I KNOW.
I have spent more time than I care to admit this week under the spell of Lillie, a 1978 British ITV miniseries starring Francesca Annis as Lillie Langtry. It is freakin’ ridiculous. And I can't stop watching it.
I was flipping through the streaming Netflix on my TV when this juicy thirteen-part miniseries popped up in the 'Recommended for You Because You’ll Watch Anything With British Accents, Sucker!’ section. I was thumbing over it on the way to some reality TV selection when I saw that Annis was the star.
Now I love me some Francesca Annis. She was gorgeous in her prime, and really quite charming in the Agatha Christie Partners in Crime Tommy and Tuppence mystery adaptations, umpteen years ago. In fact, Annis is so charming when she's laughing and being silly, and so beautiful, that it really has managed to distract me from the fact that when she gives the occasional stab at Serious Dramatic Acting, capitalized, she only comes off as a mildly-constipated and thoroughly-campy moo-cow.
So anyway, Lillie begins with Annis-as-Langtry being wooed by some kind of army captain or somesuch, on the shores of Jersey. You can tell he’s important, because the costume department has really gone to town with the gold braid on his uniform. He's lovestruck by her beauty as the pair of them race their stallions across the glittering island sands. Okay, their stunt doubles race for them, in a very blurry long shot apparently filmed through several layers of gauze. Annis and her beau mostly stand still and cling onto their horses for dear life while they Emote, with a capital E.
Annis is a apparent mute on a horse, who responds to the captain’s questions by hiding behind her girlish curls and batting her lashes so fiercely that they stir up a medium-sized monsoon. She’s gorgeous, in a slightly big-eyed bovine way, but she’s got all the acting subtlety of one of the pre-talkies Gish sisters. She’s also, how shall we say . . . very busty?
Smitten by her mute beauty, the army captain races to Langtry's father to ask for her hand in marriage, and her father says something like, "Yes, she has something of her mother's handsome good looks and maturity.” Which I think is a tactful synonym for busty. “But tell me sir, did you not notice that she's...?"
And my brain automatically supplies, "...forty-five?"
Only the father says, "... a mere slip of a girl of age fifteen?"
And this is the point I sat up and screamed at the television, "FIFTEEN?!" Because I'm thinking, you know, it's only EIGHT years later that Annis is playing Kristin Scott Thomas' cougar MOTHER in that horrible Prince movie, Under the Cherry Moon, for chrissakes. Immediately I ran to IMDB and calculated that Annis had been THIRTY-THREE when this was abomination was made.
GOOD LORD. FIFTEEN?
But then when I realized that Lillie was one big ol' camp-fest, I started getting into it. It's the kind of plummy miniseries that isn't made any more, in which the passions and the period costume budgets run high, and in the name of getting the grand sweep of history wedged into, god help us, thirteen long hours, none of it quite makes any sense.
The result is a lot of disconnected, though sumptuous, scenes that involve people rushing into a room removing their gloves while breathing out exposition-heavy lines straight out of the Encyclopedia Britannica like, “Heavens above I cannot believe it was three years ago that I was last at home here in Jersey only twelve nautical miles from the Cotetin Peninsula of France in the home of my father the noted Dean of Jersey and how sad it is that now I am here for the funeral of my beloved brother Reggie born 1862 died 1881!”
Or in which the actors playing royalty shorthand their goodbreeding by replacing all of their Rs with Ws, so that they can spit out dialogue like, “Weally, Weginald! We wespect your views, but how can you wevel in the company of a mawwied woman with only a single dwess to her name? You are an awistocwat!” Or in which in all his appearances, Prince Leopold staggers and clutches at the scenery with such dramatic foreshadowing that you half-expect one of the extras to shout out, “Hey, Leo? Hemophilia acting up again?”
And of course, in order to give the viewers not on a sense of time and place, but a snobbish sense of having had a good-enough historical education, all of the nineteenth-century's notables all attend the same smart parties, where the dialogue inevitably runs like this:
ANYWAY.
I have had the scales of hidebound tradition simply LIFTED from my eyes by Lillie’s revelation that Oscar Wilde wasn't at ALL a devotee of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Especially in 1978. Because he speaks her name all the time, and it’s LILLIE, baby!
You see, according to the screenwriters, Wilde had the hots for Lillie Langtry Aged Twenty-Sixish. She was his vixen, his goddess, his New Helen. She was WOMAN, baby. But she was so pure, so sweet, so beautiful, and so devoted to her husband that what could he do but renounce all earthly desire on the spot. and remained devoted to her forevermore. She ruined him for all lesser mortals, and remained his muse, his unrequited crush, his med, med pession, his womantic tweasure.
I don't care about whole mess with Lord Alfred Douglas and the Marquess of Queensbury, or his jail time. Whatever. Scwew documented history. Wilde was Langtrysexual. That’s what the writers of Lillie tell me, and I’m sticking to it.
I KNOW.
I have spent more time than I care to admit this week under the spell of Lillie, a 1978 British ITV miniseries starring Francesca Annis as Lillie Langtry. It is freakin’ ridiculous. And I can't stop watching it.
I was flipping through the streaming Netflix on my TV when this juicy thirteen-part miniseries popped up in the 'Recommended for You Because You’ll Watch Anything With British Accents, Sucker!’ section. I was thumbing over it on the way to some reality TV selection when I saw that Annis was the star.
Now I love me some Francesca Annis. She was gorgeous in her prime, and really quite charming in the Agatha Christie Partners in Crime Tommy and Tuppence mystery adaptations, umpteen years ago. In fact, Annis is so charming when she's laughing and being silly, and so beautiful, that it really has managed to distract me from the fact that when she gives the occasional stab at Serious Dramatic Acting, capitalized, she only comes off as a mildly-constipated and thoroughly-campy moo-cow.
So anyway, Lillie begins with Annis-as-Langtry being wooed by some kind of army captain or somesuch, on the shores of Jersey. You can tell he’s important, because the costume department has really gone to town with the gold braid on his uniform. He's lovestruck by her beauty as the pair of them race their stallions across the glittering island sands. Okay, their stunt doubles race for them, in a very blurry long shot apparently filmed through several layers of gauze. Annis and her beau mostly stand still and cling onto their horses for dear life while they Emote, with a capital E.
Annis is a apparent mute on a horse, who responds to the captain’s questions by hiding behind her girlish curls and batting her lashes so fiercely that they stir up a medium-sized monsoon. She’s gorgeous, in a slightly big-eyed bovine way, but she’s got all the acting subtlety of one of the pre-talkies Gish sisters. She’s also, how shall we say . . . very busty?
Smitten by her mute beauty, the army captain races to Langtry's father to ask for her hand in marriage, and her father says something like, "Yes, she has something of her mother's handsome good looks and maturity.” Which I think is a tactful synonym for busty. “But tell me sir, did you not notice that she's...?"
And my brain automatically supplies, "...forty-five?"
Only the father says, "... a mere slip of a girl of age fifteen?"
And this is the point I sat up and screamed at the television, "FIFTEEN?!" Because I'm thinking, you know, it's only EIGHT years later that Annis is playing Kristin Scott Thomas' cougar MOTHER in that horrible Prince movie, Under the Cherry Moon, for chrissakes. Immediately I ran to IMDB and calculated that Annis had been THIRTY-THREE when this was abomination was made.
GOOD LORD. FIFTEEN?
But then when I realized that Lillie was one big ol' camp-fest, I started getting into it. It's the kind of plummy miniseries that isn't made any more, in which the passions and the period costume budgets run high, and in the name of getting the grand sweep of history wedged into, god help us, thirteen long hours, none of it quite makes any sense.
The result is a lot of disconnected, though sumptuous, scenes that involve people rushing into a room removing their gloves while breathing out exposition-heavy lines straight out of the Encyclopedia Britannica like, “Heavens above I cannot believe it was three years ago that I was last at home here in Jersey only twelve nautical miles from the Cotetin Peninsula of France in the home of my father the noted Dean of Jersey and how sad it is that now I am here for the funeral of my beloved brother Reggie born 1862 died 1881!”
Or in which the actors playing royalty shorthand their goodbreeding by replacing all of their Rs with Ws, so that they can spit out dialogue like, “Weally, Weginald! We wespect your views, but how can you wevel in the company of a mawwied woman with only a single dwess to her name? You are an awistocwat!” Or in which in all his appearances, Prince Leopold staggers and clutches at the scenery with such dramatic foreshadowing that you half-expect one of the extras to shout out, “Hey, Leo? Hemophilia acting up again?”
And of course, in order to give the viewers not on a sense of time and place, but a snobbish sense of having had a good-enough historical education, all of the nineteenth-century's notables all attend the same smart parties, where the dialogue inevitably runs like this:
THE BUTLER ANNOUNCING ARRIVALS: The poet and illustrator John Everett Millais!Okay, maybe in my fever to plow through the series I have confused some of the party guests, but the miniseries is so gleefully anachronistic that you half-expect to see some woman in a leather aviator hat stomp into the party with a glint of derring-do in her eye, so that Wilde can shout out, "Ah, Miss Earhart! Leaving on a trip?"
LONG-HAIRED EFFETE POET CARRYING A GIANT CALLA LILY LEFT OVER FROM A COLLEGE PRODUCTION OF PATIENCE: Begorrah, but what a true vision of loveliness my eyes behold before me! So fresh, so young! If there is any justice in the world, there would be a portrait of you growing fearsome in age, mouldering in some attic! Begorrah!
SOME OTHER VICTORIAN PANSY: Why what a fine idea for one of your stories!
LONG-HAIRED POET: You’re always after me Lucky Charms!
THE BUTLER: Upstart novelist Charlotte Bronte and the tart Emily Dickinson!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED TWENTY-THREE: Sir, I can tell by your brogue that you must be of the Emerald Isle. Are you a poet?
OTHER VICTORIAN: Is he a poet! Only the best poet I know! Mrs. Langtry, permit me to introduce Mr. Oscar Wilde!
OSCAR WILDE: Why thank you, Mr. Robert Browning!
THE BUTLER: Alexander Graham Bell!
OSCAR WILDE: And here is my good American friend, John Whistler!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED TWENTY-FIVE: How d’ye do, Mr. Whistler.
WHISTLER: Peachy-keen! I am Amerrrrrrican. I am not a Burrrrritish actorrrr speaking very brrrrroad Rs to disguise that I am frrrrom Hampshirrrrrre. Why, you arrrre prrrretty as a picturrrrrrre, Mrs. Langtrrrrry.
OSCAR WILDE: You should make a portrait of this divinity, John. He was so desperate for a subject, Mrs. Langtry, that he was considering painting his mother next!
LILLIE LANGTRY, AGED THIRTY: Hah-hah-hah!
WHISTLER: Hah-hah-hah!
THE BUTLER: Charles Darwin, Arthur Conan Doyle and Florence Nightingale!
ANYWAY.
I have had the scales of hidebound tradition simply LIFTED from my eyes by Lillie’s revelation that Oscar Wilde wasn't at ALL a devotee of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name Especially in 1978. Because he speaks her name all the time, and it’s LILLIE, baby!
You see, according to the screenwriters, Wilde had the hots for Lillie Langtry Aged Twenty-Sixish. She was his vixen, his goddess, his New Helen. She was WOMAN, baby. But she was so pure, so sweet, so beautiful, and so devoted to her husband that what could he do but renounce all earthly desire on the spot. and remained devoted to her forevermore. She ruined him for all lesser mortals, and remained his muse, his unrequited crush, his med, med pession, his womantic tweasure.
I don't care about whole mess with Lord Alfred Douglas and the Marquess of Queensbury, or his jail time. Whatever. Scwew documented history. Wilde was Langtrysexual. That’s what the writers of Lillie tell me, and I’m sticking to it.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Book Review Roundup
I’m making another roundup of books I’ve read and reviewed on Goodreads.com. My Mindy Kaling review has been oddly popular. It’s not even that vicious.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
by Mindy Kaling
A quick warning about an otherwise good book: the last third of The Office writer Kaling's memoir is a scattershot, hit-or-miss affair. With short essays like "Why Do Men Put on Their Shoes So Slowly?" and "In Defense of Chest Hair", which graze their topics no more deeply than the titles suggest, Kaling almost sounds like she's half-heartedly trying out for the late and perpetually cranky Andy Rooney's vacated gig on 60 Minutes.
It's a shame, because the first two-thirds of Kaling's effort is an engaging memoir chronicling a thoroughly conventional upbringing and an unlikely rise to notoriety and television scripting fame. Her circuitous route to her career is both affable and a fun read—which makes it all the more disappointing that once she reaches the heights at NBC, the rest of the book sputters out when it has nowhere to go.
It seems unfairly reductive that the memoir will inevitably undergo comparisons with her same-network compatriot Tiny Fey's Bossypants. I found Kaling's effort the more charming of the two, and the less labored.
Little Dorritt
By Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit's opening chapters begin with long stretches of dialogue in which the speakers remain nameless and unintroduced. Yet it's a book obsessed with names—characters obsessed with keeping their names out of the mud, characters with false names, or infamous names, with exalted names that lead dozens of the book's protagonists to financial ruin. Tattycorum, a young woman in the book, runs away from home primarily because of the awful name her benefactors have given her. The titular character prefers a mawkish nickname given her by a complete stranger to the name of Amy, given her by a failure of a father.
There are parts of the novel that bog down—I had great difficulty getting through any of the lengthy chapters about the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office. For every Barnacle (and there are plenty) there's a delightfully-comic Flora, or a heartbreaking young John Chivery or sweet-natured Maggy to balance it out. And by the time everything comes crashing quite literally down at the end, it's almost impossible not to marvel at the complexity and satisfactory conclusion of Dickens' creation.
11/22/63
by Stephen King
A disclosure: I haven't read a Stephen King novel since high school, when Cujo came out and I thought it was lousy. That said, King managed to push enough buttons with the premise of his latest novel—Time travel! Someone attempting to prevent the Kennedy assassination! A secret wormhole in Maine that travels to the Mad Men era!—that I was intrigued enough to give it a look.
I confess that there were parts of 11/22/63 that I enjoyed. The mini-novella that forms the book's first third, in Derry, is tense and atmospheric. The romance that overwhelms the latter half of the work is sweet; its resolution is unexpectedly touching.
But that's really about it. The book's set-up is bafflingly underdone—so much so that it makes the protagonist seem a little more dim-witted than King intends. The hero has no personal obsession with preventing Oswald from killing JFK in Dallas. He merely undertakes the task, with remarkably little persuasion required, because some guy he barely knows who owns a restaurant where he occasionally eats, tells him it'd be an awesome idea. Nor is it really explained why the Kennedy assassination is the lynchpin of the modern era that so desperately needs to be undone. Why not the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or Watergate? Why not 9/11? Intriguing as the premise might be, it's laid out so arbitrarily, and given such an easy out if the time-traveling thing doesn't work, that it's difficult to care much.
King's pacing can be terribly off, too. The scenes involving Lee Harvey Oswald grind the book to a halt, and sometimes read like the determined regurgitations of an author who did a lot of research, dammit, and who intends to use every last bit. An episode of coma-cum-amnesia right before the climax was so transparently a ploy to zip through a few months straight to the confrontation in the Texas School Book Depository, that I felt a little embarrassed for the author for stooping to use it.
There's some excitement here, and some sweet moments, but there were also more points in which picking up 11/22/63 felt like a chore than a pleasure. And I still think Cujo was pretty lousy, too.
Charles Dickens: A Life
by Claire Tomalin
Brisk, thorough, and wisely free of ephemera, Tomalin's biography of Dickens manages to be informative without either lionizing the author, or ignoring his greater domestic lapses and faults.
The Brontë Myth
by Lucasta Miller
Miller's book isn't a biography—all the Brontes are dead and buried by the end of chapter two. Instead, it's an examination of the ways in which a manufactured and tweaked familial biography has informed and, at times, overshadowed the literary accomplishments of the three Bronte sisters.
Miller chronicles how, after the shocked and repulsed reaction of their contemporaries to the collected pseudonymous works of Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, Charlotte Bronte immediately began fabricating a public image designed to thwart her critics. Her own ability to present herself as a modest paragon of humble womanhood, haunted by a remote upbringing, was amplified further by Elizabeth Gaskell's posthumous biography, which largely disregarded fact in favor of myth-building. By the late nineteenth century, the Bronte cult was so captivated by a romantic (and largely inaccurate) picture of the Bronte's upbringing, that any sober consideration of their actual works seemed beside the point.
It was a myth that, in more modern times, Miller shows to have been transformed by changing tastes and the needs of popular culture. Twentieth-century reinterpretations of it sexed it up, used it as a mirror for its own theoretical lenses, and even thrust what they perceived as dowdy Charlotte into the background in favor of neglected and modern-spirited Emily. It would seem that to every era, the story of the Bronte family becomes what it needs to become—regardless of what it actually was.
Given her focus on myth-building and on sorting out the facts of the Brontes' upbringing from the fictions that have since accumulated, it seems churlish to wish for more of a consideration of the novels than Miller makes in this volume. But to decry previous generations for the same neglect she exhibits herself, by and large, seems to undo a tiny bit of the good work she's done here in this engrossing volume of social and literary history.
Changes (The Collegium Chronicles, #3)
by Mercedes Lackey
I find insulting the suggestion that Lackey's latest Valdemar entry is more suitable for young adults.
Insulting to the YA audience, that is. They're better than the weaksauce plotting here, and the book's bland characters. Nor would they tolerate the protagonist's spoken dialect—an apostrophe-laden mess that makes Mark Twain's use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn look positively light-handed, and which had me praying for chapters at a time that the protagonist would be gagged, rendered mute, or would sleep so that I wouldn't have to read it. And any generation raised on Harry Potter would see through Kirball as the blatant Quidditch rip-off it is.
I rather enjoyed the first two books in Lackey's return to Valdemar. It's a shame that the third not only progresses the series not an inch, but makes absolutely no sense at all .
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
by Kate Summerscale
The Road Hill murder case, in which three-year-old Saville Kent was abducted and killed under mysterious circumstances in the dead of night, in his family's remote yet overcrowded home, so scandalized Victorian England that the fascination surrounding it continued for years. During that time, the incident laid the foundations for not only the Victorian novel of sensation, but a more enduring literary form: the British detective novel.
Many of the literary tropes we take for granted in the genre arise from the detectives investigating the case--particularly the Mr. Whicher of the title. The Road Hill case had it all: a senseless murder with no apparent motives, a thorough search for evidence (the first appearance of the word 'clueless' in the English language stems from the case), the 'hunch' of the detective, the suspicion of innocents, ruthless courtroom drama, and even a murderer's confession. Throughout her thorough narrative of the events of the Road Hill case and its outcome, Summerscale carefully delineates how the murder and its investigation sparked the literary imaginations of Braddon, Dickens, Collins, and an entire generation of novelists who capitalized upon the case's notoriety.
Yet Summerscale's own surprising twist of how she imagined the night of the murder, and the years following, to take place appear as something as an afterthought. It's supported on the page not by any evidence collected at the time, but more by the authors and novels that came well after the murder. It's not at all unreasonable to trace these novels as arising from the Road Hill events; to suggest an almost sentimental solution to the crime based on a reading of nascent literary archetypes is a little silly.
I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
by Alan Partridge
A-hah! Finally, Norwich's most inescapable talk show host has released a biography that shines a light on one of one of history's most underrated and misunderstood broadcasters. (1) True—his notoriety rests almost entirely on the fact that during the last minutes of the last show of his BBC2 series, Knowing Me, Knowing You, With Alan Partridge (2), he shot and killed one of his guests. After that bombshell (3), what the BBC overlooked, as Alan Partridge points out in his scathing exposé, is that in none of the previous five episodes, no one got shot at all. (4)
The fictional Alan Partridge was one of the UK's most infamous and funny forerunners in the Comedy of Discomfort epitomized later by the original version of The Office. He's also one of its most long-lived, having survived a roller-coaster career that hit rock-bottom during a debilitating Toblerone dependency, and soared to heights attainable only by judicious use of a sturdy stepladder. Peppered with the wry humor that made his radio and television outings so successful, I, Partridge is a must-read for fans of Alan, though it might be incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with his several series.
Do not skip Partridge’s footnotes, which are as amusing as the text itself.
(1) Himself, if that wasn't clear.
(2) Also known as KMKYWAP, as Alan pointed out to a guest who immediately told him that his name was an anagram of 'Anal Prat Dirge.' Ungrateful lot, those guests.
(3) Not literally.
(4) Insulted, yes. But shot, no.
Patti LuPone: A Memoir
by Patti LuPone
It's tough for anyone not actively sharing a stage with the diminutive star to determine whether Patti LuPone is as difficult to work with as her reputation would have it. Too often, 'difficult' is a label applied not only to entitled divas of both genders, but also to artists who dare to protest when wrongly abused by directors or producers and their sometimes shady money-making tactics.
After reading LuPone's memoir, however, it's tough to want to side with anyone other than the woman who originated the American Evita. Though she's capable of throwing tantrums with the best of them, LuPone is disarmingly candid about her own shortcomings, including her temper and her seeming inability to tell composers and directors to send offers to her agent, rather than asking her commit to new projects before it's wise. She's earthy: she calls still-living actors 'assholes,' and bluntly says things of other professionals such as, "He sucked." She's frank about her heartbreak over the much-publicized feud with Andrew Lloyd Webber over being denied the American debut of Sunset Boulevard, and her cold detente with Glenn Close, who supplanted her. Underlying the barbs is LuPone's wry sense of humor, though, in addition to a remarkable grasp of the drive and discipline needed to maintain a career as a working actor—much less the stuff of legend.
LuPone's frank memoir is a quick and fun read that crackles with gossip and an insider's view of the Broadway and London stages. Even if LuPone is a bit of a diva . . . well, it's still awfully tempting to cheer her on.
The Magicians
by Lev Grossman
I know that saying The Magicians is like the bastard love child of the Harry Potter books and Donna Tartt's The Secret History would compel a certain subset of my friends to rush out and read it, if they haven't already. So let me amend that slightly by emphasizing that this grown-up fantasy novel about youths matriculating through a school of magic is indeed very much like those—if all the youths were from Slytherin.
Grossman's cast is largely overprivileged and seemingly determined to squander their advantages on alcohol, whoring, and dissipation; his hero is moody and unsympathetic, and largely unable to grasp or appreciate the wonders to which he's miraculously made privy. I'm usually the last to insist that a protagonist be entirely appealing, but even my patience was tried.
And yet The Magicians has a richness of detail and texture that makes it a compelling read, despite the mopey and largely stiff cast. Its land of magic is not only believable, but has the alluring scent of the many classic worlds, from Narnia to Hogwarts, from which it derives.
The Magician King
by Lev Grossman
The big attraction to many—including myself—of Grossman's first novel in this series, The Magicians, was the fussy pedagogical narrative involving the protagonist's matriculation at Brakebills, an institute for the magically talented. There's precious little of the imaginary Brakebills in The Magician King, and yet oddly, the sequel manages to be more confident, and more lyrical, without the expected and much-trodden literary tropes of tales of school days.
I originally had little affection Quentin, the protagonist in The Magicians. I found him and his set of friends too moody, too overprivileged, too emo. That Grossman allows Quentin to ripen here, as he makes adult decisions about which quests are for him, and which to be left unapproached, is remarkable. There's a grace to his maturation that's both unexpected and breathtaking. As wild and far-flung as the book seems upon a first read, there's a wicked coherence in its structure that should leave any reader moved by its final pages.
I Still Dream About You
by Fannie Flagg
Subtle, this book ain't. Rather than let any mystery of character or plot accumulate throughout the book, Flagg stops the proceedings immediately to insert flashbacks that explain everything that happened in the previous chapter. In a novel that hinges on a girl-detective-style discovery of a literal skeleton in a closet, it's like reading a Nancy Drew mystery written for those with the shortest of short-term attention spans.
As for the decades-old mystery at the center of I Still Dream About You—it's tangential, unfocused, and largely unintegrated with the rest of the story. Nobody solves it; it scarcely matters that they don't. Flagg's done better in the past.
Still. Flagg's primary virtues as a writer are an abundance of effortless charm, and the ability to fashion stories around communities of nice, polite people with nice, polite intentions . . . and to make characters that could be homogenous seem quite real. As whisper-thin as the plot might be here, its cast is engaging. Flagg has an unparalleled ability to immerse readers into her fictional communities, and make them wish they resided within the pages of her gentle Southern comedies.
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)
by Mindy Kaling
A quick warning about an otherwise good book: the last third of The Office writer Kaling's memoir is a scattershot, hit-or-miss affair. With short essays like "Why Do Men Put on Their Shoes So Slowly?" and "In Defense of Chest Hair", which graze their topics no more deeply than the titles suggest, Kaling almost sounds like she's half-heartedly trying out for the late and perpetually cranky Andy Rooney's vacated gig on 60 Minutes.
It's a shame, because the first two-thirds of Kaling's effort is an engaging memoir chronicling a thoroughly conventional upbringing and an unlikely rise to notoriety and television scripting fame. Her circuitous route to her career is both affable and a fun read—which makes it all the more disappointing that once she reaches the heights at NBC, the rest of the book sputters out when it has nowhere to go.
It seems unfairly reductive that the memoir will inevitably undergo comparisons with her same-network compatriot Tiny Fey's Bossypants. I found Kaling's effort the more charming of the two, and the less labored.
Little Dorritt
By Charles Dickens
Little Dorrit's opening chapters begin with long stretches of dialogue in which the speakers remain nameless and unintroduced. Yet it's a book obsessed with names—characters obsessed with keeping their names out of the mud, characters with false names, or infamous names, with exalted names that lead dozens of the book's protagonists to financial ruin. Tattycorum, a young woman in the book, runs away from home primarily because of the awful name her benefactors have given her. The titular character prefers a mawkish nickname given her by a complete stranger to the name of Amy, given her by a failure of a father.
There are parts of the novel that bog down—I had great difficulty getting through any of the lengthy chapters about the Barnacles and the Circumlocution Office. For every Barnacle (and there are plenty) there's a delightfully-comic Flora, or a heartbreaking young John Chivery or sweet-natured Maggy to balance it out. And by the time everything comes crashing quite literally down at the end, it's almost impossible not to marvel at the complexity and satisfactory conclusion of Dickens' creation.
11/22/63
by Stephen King
A disclosure: I haven't read a Stephen King novel since high school, when Cujo came out and I thought it was lousy. That said, King managed to push enough buttons with the premise of his latest novel—Time travel! Someone attempting to prevent the Kennedy assassination! A secret wormhole in Maine that travels to the Mad Men era!—that I was intrigued enough to give it a look.
I confess that there were parts of 11/22/63 that I enjoyed. The mini-novella that forms the book's first third, in Derry, is tense and atmospheric. The romance that overwhelms the latter half of the work is sweet; its resolution is unexpectedly touching.
But that's really about it. The book's set-up is bafflingly underdone—so much so that it makes the protagonist seem a little more dim-witted than King intends. The hero has no personal obsession with preventing Oswald from killing JFK in Dallas. He merely undertakes the task, with remarkably little persuasion required, because some guy he barely knows who owns a restaurant where he occasionally eats, tells him it'd be an awesome idea. Nor is it really explained why the Kennedy assassination is the lynchpin of the modern era that so desperately needs to be undone. Why not the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or Watergate? Why not 9/11? Intriguing as the premise might be, it's laid out so arbitrarily, and given such an easy out if the time-traveling thing doesn't work, that it's difficult to care much.
King's pacing can be terribly off, too. The scenes involving Lee Harvey Oswald grind the book to a halt, and sometimes read like the determined regurgitations of an author who did a lot of research, dammit, and who intends to use every last bit. An episode of coma-cum-amnesia right before the climax was so transparently a ploy to zip through a few months straight to the confrontation in the Texas School Book Depository, that I felt a little embarrassed for the author for stooping to use it.
There's some excitement here, and some sweet moments, but there were also more points in which picking up 11/22/63 felt like a chore than a pleasure. And I still think Cujo was pretty lousy, too.
Charles Dickens: A Life
by Claire Tomalin
Brisk, thorough, and wisely free of ephemera, Tomalin's biography of Dickens manages to be informative without either lionizing the author, or ignoring his greater domestic lapses and faults.
The Brontë Myth
by Lucasta Miller
Miller's book isn't a biography—all the Brontes are dead and buried by the end of chapter two. Instead, it's an examination of the ways in which a manufactured and tweaked familial biography has informed and, at times, overshadowed the literary accomplishments of the three Bronte sisters.
Miller chronicles how, after the shocked and repulsed reaction of their contemporaries to the collected pseudonymous works of Acton, Currer, and Ellis Bell, Charlotte Bronte immediately began fabricating a public image designed to thwart her critics. Her own ability to present herself as a modest paragon of humble womanhood, haunted by a remote upbringing, was amplified further by Elizabeth Gaskell's posthumous biography, which largely disregarded fact in favor of myth-building. By the late nineteenth century, the Bronte cult was so captivated by a romantic (and largely inaccurate) picture of the Bronte's upbringing, that any sober consideration of their actual works seemed beside the point.
It was a myth that, in more modern times, Miller shows to have been transformed by changing tastes and the needs of popular culture. Twentieth-century reinterpretations of it sexed it up, used it as a mirror for its own theoretical lenses, and even thrust what they perceived as dowdy Charlotte into the background in favor of neglected and modern-spirited Emily. It would seem that to every era, the story of the Bronte family becomes what it needs to become—regardless of what it actually was.
Given her focus on myth-building and on sorting out the facts of the Brontes' upbringing from the fictions that have since accumulated, it seems churlish to wish for more of a consideration of the novels than Miller makes in this volume. But to decry previous generations for the same neglect she exhibits herself, by and large, seems to undo a tiny bit of the good work she's done here in this engrossing volume of social and literary history.
Changes (The Collegium Chronicles, #3)
by Mercedes Lackey
I find insulting the suggestion that Lackey's latest Valdemar entry is more suitable for young adults.
Insulting to the YA audience, that is. They're better than the weaksauce plotting here, and the book's bland characters. Nor would they tolerate the protagonist's spoken dialect—an apostrophe-laden mess that makes Mark Twain's use of dialect in Huckleberry Finn look positively light-handed, and which had me praying for chapters at a time that the protagonist would be gagged, rendered mute, or would sleep so that I wouldn't have to read it. And any generation raised on Harry Potter would see through Kirball as the blatant Quidditch rip-off it is.
I rather enjoyed the first two books in Lackey's return to Valdemar. It's a shame that the third not only progresses the series not an inch, but makes absolutely no sense at all .
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective
by Kate Summerscale
The Road Hill murder case, in which three-year-old Saville Kent was abducted and killed under mysterious circumstances in the dead of night, in his family's remote yet overcrowded home, so scandalized Victorian England that the fascination surrounding it continued for years. During that time, the incident laid the foundations for not only the Victorian novel of sensation, but a more enduring literary form: the British detective novel.
Many of the literary tropes we take for granted in the genre arise from the detectives investigating the case--particularly the Mr. Whicher of the title. The Road Hill case had it all: a senseless murder with no apparent motives, a thorough search for evidence (the first appearance of the word 'clueless' in the English language stems from the case), the 'hunch' of the detective, the suspicion of innocents, ruthless courtroom drama, and even a murderer's confession. Throughout her thorough narrative of the events of the Road Hill case and its outcome, Summerscale carefully delineates how the murder and its investigation sparked the literary imaginations of Braddon, Dickens, Collins, and an entire generation of novelists who capitalized upon the case's notoriety.
Yet Summerscale's own surprising twist of how she imagined the night of the murder, and the years following, to take place appear as something as an afterthought. It's supported on the page not by any evidence collected at the time, but more by the authors and novels that came well after the murder. It's not at all unreasonable to trace these novels as arising from the Road Hill events; to suggest an almost sentimental solution to the crime based on a reading of nascent literary archetypes is a little silly.
I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan
by Alan Partridge
A-hah! Finally, Norwich's most inescapable talk show host has released a biography that shines a light on one of one of history's most underrated and misunderstood broadcasters. (1) True—his notoriety rests almost entirely on the fact that during the last minutes of the last show of his BBC2 series, Knowing Me, Knowing You, With Alan Partridge (2), he shot and killed one of his guests. After that bombshell (3), what the BBC overlooked, as Alan Partridge points out in his scathing exposé, is that in none of the previous five episodes, no one got shot at all. (4)
The fictional Alan Partridge was one of the UK's most infamous and funny forerunners in the Comedy of Discomfort epitomized later by the original version of The Office. He's also one of its most long-lived, having survived a roller-coaster career that hit rock-bottom during a debilitating Toblerone dependency, and soared to heights attainable only by judicious use of a sturdy stepladder. Peppered with the wry humor that made his radio and television outings so successful, I, Partridge is a must-read for fans of Alan, though it might be incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with his several series.
Do not skip Partridge’s footnotes, which are as amusing as the text itself.
(1) Himself, if that wasn't clear.
(2) Also known as KMKYWAP, as Alan pointed out to a guest who immediately told him that his name was an anagram of 'Anal Prat Dirge.' Ungrateful lot, those guests.
(3) Not literally.
(4) Insulted, yes. But shot, no.
Patti LuPone: A Memoir
by Patti LuPone
It's tough for anyone not actively sharing a stage with the diminutive star to determine whether Patti LuPone is as difficult to work with as her reputation would have it. Too often, 'difficult' is a label applied not only to entitled divas of both genders, but also to artists who dare to protest when wrongly abused by directors or producers and their sometimes shady money-making tactics.
After reading LuPone's memoir, however, it's tough to want to side with anyone other than the woman who originated the American Evita. Though she's capable of throwing tantrums with the best of them, LuPone is disarmingly candid about her own shortcomings, including her temper and her seeming inability to tell composers and directors to send offers to her agent, rather than asking her commit to new projects before it's wise. She's earthy: she calls still-living actors 'assholes,' and bluntly says things of other professionals such as, "He sucked." She's frank about her heartbreak over the much-publicized feud with Andrew Lloyd Webber over being denied the American debut of Sunset Boulevard, and her cold detente with Glenn Close, who supplanted her. Underlying the barbs is LuPone's wry sense of humor, though, in addition to a remarkable grasp of the drive and discipline needed to maintain a career as a working actor—much less the stuff of legend.
LuPone's frank memoir is a quick and fun read that crackles with gossip and an insider's view of the Broadway and London stages. Even if LuPone is a bit of a diva . . . well, it's still awfully tempting to cheer her on.
The Magicians
by Lev Grossman
I know that saying The Magicians is like the bastard love child of the Harry Potter books and Donna Tartt's The Secret History would compel a certain subset of my friends to rush out and read it, if they haven't already. So let me amend that slightly by emphasizing that this grown-up fantasy novel about youths matriculating through a school of magic is indeed very much like those—if all the youths were from Slytherin.
Grossman's cast is largely overprivileged and seemingly determined to squander their advantages on alcohol, whoring, and dissipation; his hero is moody and unsympathetic, and largely unable to grasp or appreciate the wonders to which he's miraculously made privy. I'm usually the last to insist that a protagonist be entirely appealing, but even my patience was tried.
And yet The Magicians has a richness of detail and texture that makes it a compelling read, despite the mopey and largely stiff cast. Its land of magic is not only believable, but has the alluring scent of the many classic worlds, from Narnia to Hogwarts, from which it derives.
The Magician King
by Lev Grossman
The big attraction to many—including myself—of Grossman's first novel in this series, The Magicians, was the fussy pedagogical narrative involving the protagonist's matriculation at Brakebills, an institute for the magically talented. There's precious little of the imaginary Brakebills in The Magician King, and yet oddly, the sequel manages to be more confident, and more lyrical, without the expected and much-trodden literary tropes of tales of school days.
I originally had little affection Quentin, the protagonist in The Magicians. I found him and his set of friends too moody, too overprivileged, too emo. That Grossman allows Quentin to ripen here, as he makes adult decisions about which quests are for him, and which to be left unapproached, is remarkable. There's a grace to his maturation that's both unexpected and breathtaking. As wild and far-flung as the book seems upon a first read, there's a wicked coherence in its structure that should leave any reader moved by its final pages.
I Still Dream About You
by Fannie Flagg
Subtle, this book ain't. Rather than let any mystery of character or plot accumulate throughout the book, Flagg stops the proceedings immediately to insert flashbacks that explain everything that happened in the previous chapter. In a novel that hinges on a girl-detective-style discovery of a literal skeleton in a closet, it's like reading a Nancy Drew mystery written for those with the shortest of short-term attention spans.
As for the decades-old mystery at the center of I Still Dream About You—it's tangential, unfocused, and largely unintegrated with the rest of the story. Nobody solves it; it scarcely matters that they don't. Flagg's done better in the past.
Still. Flagg's primary virtues as a writer are an abundance of effortless charm, and the ability to fashion stories around communities of nice, polite people with nice, polite intentions . . . and to make characters that could be homogenous seem quite real. As whisper-thin as the plot might be here, its cast is engaging. Flagg has an unparalleled ability to immerse readers into her fictional communities, and make them wish they resided within the pages of her gentle Southern comedies.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Patti & Mandy
My parents were of a certain generation that grew up loving musical theater. They were also of a certain generation that adored the folk music revival of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, but only half of their musical influence stuck. I grew up with the cast albums of My Fair Lady and Hello, Dolly! and their LP grooves seem permanently pressed into my brain. Because they taught history, my parents were special fans of 1776, another musical I know from top to bottom, though I can't especially claim to enjoy it. My father bought the original concept recording of Jesus Christ Superstar when it came out, while my mom was more of a Hair fan.
The only musical which they both agreed they couldn't stomach was West Side Story. Apparently they both heard a little too much of it during their teen years.
The first musical recording for which I paid money from my own allowance—the first musical that was ‘mine’—was Evita. In my teen years I’d been bitten by the community theater bug. In those archaic, quaint pre-internet days, however, there really wasn’t much of way for a kid stuck in a tiny southern town to remain au courant with the Broadway scene. The best I could do was to pore over the theater-related books that appeared on the shelves of the Richmond Public Library, and dream. I ran across Evita first in The Best Plays of 1979-1980, I think it was, part of a series that gave synopses and occasional passages of dialogue from a dozen of the previous year’s best plays and musical, sprinkled liberally with photos and Al Hirschfeld line drawings.
I loved those books. I’d pore over every detail they contained, memorizing the cast lists, counting the Ninas, wondering what in the hell the songs might sound like from the musicals. The Evita photos intrigued me especially. Mandy Patinkin struck me as angry and handsome as Che, and Patti Lupone looked like a steely flint with a blond wig as Eva Peron. Then it kind of struck me, the third or fourth time I checked the book out of the library, that I could probably find out what the score actually sounded like if I bought a copy. So I made a special Saturday bus trip out to Peaches Records one day—a special excursion indeed, because a trip to Peaches was exotic and something I anticipated as highly as I might a trip to Disney World—and plunked down the cash for the double-LP American premiere recording of Evita. I couldn’t wait to get home to look at it, so on the bus ride home I ripped off the shrink wrap and started devouring the lyrics.
I really loved that show. I listened to it so many times in my youth that I could sing the whole thing, from start to finish, every part.
To this day you can drop the needle anywhere on any one of those four grooves (and yes, I know no one listens to LPs any more, but indulge me) and after about two notes I’ll pick up singing “I don’t really think I need the reasons why I won’t succeed—I haven’t started! Let’s get this show on the road, let’s make it obvious Peron is off and rolling!” Someone will introduce someone else to me with Vance, this is Mark Schaumberg, and my brain will irreverently (and irrelevantly) supply, “Who has the distinction of being the first man to be of use! To EVA DUARRRRRTE!” I will hear a strain of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” and my arms will involuntarily lift into the air. It’s that automatic.
Which is why I was kind of insistent that Craig and I go to see An Evening with Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin, a couple of weeks ago. We’d seen Patti Lupone in concert twice before, but I found the opportunity to see the two together way too irresistible.
And it was a good concert—an evening in which the pair of them occupied a stage containing only a pair of chairs and a bunch of multi-colored ghost lights, performing the heck out of a bunch of songs that appeal to them. There are extended segments from South Pacific and Merrily We Roll Along and Carousel. If the notion of the pair pretending to be Rodgers and Hammerstein youths a good forty years their junior is a little jarring at first, their acting chops really make the songs stick. Sure, Carousel was a bit of a downer on which to end the show, but the pair were comfortable together and sounded great.
Our seats were in the third row, close enough to be spat upon by both singers (but especially Patti). During the intermission, a rotund couple decided to abandon their balcony seating and take up the two empty seats in front of us. The pair wouldn’t shut up. They both had heavy, almost foreign Joisey accents, like they were auditioning to be Baby Snooki’s parents in the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon adaptation of Jersey Shore.
I could tell there was going to be trouble when, at the beginning of Lupone’s second-act opener from Gypsy, the singer made her way to our end of the stage, then turned to walk the opposite direction and the woman in front of me yelled out, “No! COME BACK, PATTI!” (Patti was wise enough to beat a hasty retreat.) But then, during “Rose’s Turn,” the woman decided she would sing along and fling out her arms at emotional high points. I personally was hoping that Lupone would get offended, because I read her autobiography and know she calls several people assholes in print, and therefore I was pretty sure that when it came down to someone stealing the spotlight, Patti would cut a bitch.
Instead, the women sitting next to her told her to shut up. “Ex-kuh-yooz me?” asked the woman, loudly.
“Shut up,” repeated the women.
“Ex-KUH-YOOZ ME?!” repeated Mrs. Snooki, huffing and puffing as if she’d never heard of anyone being asked not to sing along with one of the biggest divas of Broadway legend . . . or also with his companion on the stage, Patti Lupone.
Sadly, Patti did not come over and spear the woman through the head with her size three stiletto. After the second round of ex-kuh-yoozing, she shut up and remained icily silent through the rest of the show.
We did see her again outside, after the show. For some mysterious reason, Craig and our friend Jim wanted to hang around the stage door afterward and wait for the pair to emerge. The Joiseyites came out screaming “Patti! Patti!” and planted themselves directly in front of the door until they were moved to the side by security. When Patti came out, they started wailing so loudly that the tiny Lupone at first made a beeline in their direction, saw their stalkerish fervor, and then immediately caromed in the opposite direction to sign autographs, before disappearing into an enormous black SUV.
“Oh my god, what a freak,” commented a cute Asian-American girl who’d been trying to get her poster autographed. She told us that she’d been sitting in the second balcony during the show and that she’d seen the woman trying to sing along with Patti at the start of the first act. Then she commiserated with us when we told her the woman had been sitting immediately in front of us.
I still say Patti should cut a bitch.
The only musical which they both agreed they couldn't stomach was West Side Story. Apparently they both heard a little too much of it during their teen years.
The first musical recording for which I paid money from my own allowance—the first musical that was ‘mine’—was Evita. In my teen years I’d been bitten by the community theater bug. In those archaic, quaint pre-internet days, however, there really wasn’t much of way for a kid stuck in a tiny southern town to remain au courant with the Broadway scene. The best I could do was to pore over the theater-related books that appeared on the shelves of the Richmond Public Library, and dream. I ran across Evita first in The Best Plays of 1979-1980, I think it was, part of a series that gave synopses and occasional passages of dialogue from a dozen of the previous year’s best plays and musical, sprinkled liberally with photos and Al Hirschfeld line drawings.
I loved those books. I’d pore over every detail they contained, memorizing the cast lists, counting the Ninas, wondering what in the hell the songs might sound like from the musicals. The Evita photos intrigued me especially. Mandy Patinkin struck me as angry and handsome as Che, and Patti Lupone looked like a steely flint with a blond wig as Eva Peron. Then it kind of struck me, the third or fourth time I checked the book out of the library, that I could probably find out what the score actually sounded like if I bought a copy. So I made a special Saturday bus trip out to Peaches Records one day—a special excursion indeed, because a trip to Peaches was exotic and something I anticipated as highly as I might a trip to Disney World—and plunked down the cash for the double-LP American premiere recording of Evita. I couldn’t wait to get home to look at it, so on the bus ride home I ripped off the shrink wrap and started devouring the lyrics.
I really loved that show. I listened to it so many times in my youth that I could sing the whole thing, from start to finish, every part.
To this day you can drop the needle anywhere on any one of those four grooves (and yes, I know no one listens to LPs any more, but indulge me) and after about two notes I’ll pick up singing “I don’t really think I need the reasons why I won’t succeed—I haven’t started! Let’s get this show on the road, let’s make it obvious Peron is off and rolling!” Someone will introduce someone else to me with Vance, this is Mark Schaumberg, and my brain will irreverently (and irrelevantly) supply, “Who has the distinction of being the first man to be of use! To EVA DUARRRRRTE!” I will hear a strain of “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” and my arms will involuntarily lift into the air. It’s that automatic.
Which is why I was kind of insistent that Craig and I go to see An Evening with Patti Lupone and Mandy Patinkin, a couple of weeks ago. We’d seen Patti Lupone in concert twice before, but I found the opportunity to see the two together way too irresistible.
And it was a good concert—an evening in which the pair of them occupied a stage containing only a pair of chairs and a bunch of multi-colored ghost lights, performing the heck out of a bunch of songs that appeal to them. There are extended segments from South Pacific and Merrily We Roll Along and Carousel. If the notion of the pair pretending to be Rodgers and Hammerstein youths a good forty years their junior is a little jarring at first, their acting chops really make the songs stick. Sure, Carousel was a bit of a downer on which to end the show, but the pair were comfortable together and sounded great.
Our seats were in the third row, close enough to be spat upon by both singers (but especially Patti). During the intermission, a rotund couple decided to abandon their balcony seating and take up the two empty seats in front of us. The pair wouldn’t shut up. They both had heavy, almost foreign Joisey accents, like they were auditioning to be Baby Snooki’s parents in the Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon adaptation of Jersey Shore.
I could tell there was going to be trouble when, at the beginning of Lupone’s second-act opener from Gypsy, the singer made her way to our end of the stage, then turned to walk the opposite direction and the woman in front of me yelled out, “No! COME BACK, PATTI!” (Patti was wise enough to beat a hasty retreat.) But then, during “Rose’s Turn,” the woman decided she would sing along and fling out her arms at emotional high points. I personally was hoping that Lupone would get offended, because I read her autobiography and know she calls several people assholes in print, and therefore I was pretty sure that when it came down to someone stealing the spotlight, Patti would cut a bitch.
Instead, the women sitting next to her told her to shut up. “Ex-kuh-yooz me?” asked the woman, loudly.
“Shut up,” repeated the women.
“Ex-KUH-YOOZ ME?!” repeated Mrs. Snooki, huffing and puffing as if she’d never heard of anyone being asked not to sing along with one of the biggest divas of Broadway legend . . . or also with his companion on the stage, Patti Lupone.
Sadly, Patti did not come over and spear the woman through the head with her size three stiletto. After the second round of ex-kuh-yoozing, she shut up and remained icily silent through the rest of the show.
We did see her again outside, after the show. For some mysterious reason, Craig and our friend Jim wanted to hang around the stage door afterward and wait for the pair to emerge. The Joiseyites came out screaming “Patti! Patti!” and planted themselves directly in front of the door until they were moved to the side by security. When Patti came out, they started wailing so loudly that the tiny Lupone at first made a beeline in their direction, saw their stalkerish fervor, and then immediately caromed in the opposite direction to sign autographs, before disappearing into an enormous black SUV.
“Oh my god, what a freak,” commented a cute Asian-American girl who’d been trying to get her poster autographed. She told us that she’d been sitting in the second balcony during the show and that she’d seen the woman trying to sing along with Patti at the start of the first act. Then she commiserated with us when we told her the woman had been sitting immediately in front of us.
I still say Patti should cut a bitch.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
The Nutmeg State
Everyone asks me how I like Connecticut. Especially people who actually live in Connecticut, who apparently have some kind of vested interest. “How do you like Connecticut?” they ask.
I reply, “It’s pretty.”
And every single time, the person who’s asked me the question will look at me with a kind of sideways, stank-face expression of abject horror, as if they suspect me of slandering their state with some kind of backhanded compliment.
Actually, it’s as if they have heard of the incident after a terrible choral concert through which I and a bunch of friends once sat with our hands over our eardrums to prevent the discord from piercing our eardrums and making them gush blood. When our mutual acquaintance who was part of the concert came out to greet us after the merciful conclusion of the double-encore, everyone else suddenly pretended that they hadn’t been rolling their eyes and whining during the musical carnage, or that they hadn’t rushed during intermission to the bar next door to slug down shots to get them through the second half. The air was full of totally insincere Oh, what a fantastic concerts! and I’ve never enjoyed myself mores!, until the acquaintance turned to me with raised eyebrows and an air of expectation.
“You know,” I told him with great enthusiasm. “That is really a nice shirt you’re wearing!”
Yes. It’s as if Connecticut looks at me askance because I’ve told it that it has a really nice shirt.
I don’t mean the compliment as anything other than what it is, however. Connecticut is pretty. Flowers stay in bloom for an obscenely long time, as if they’ve forgotten that they’re supposed to be seasonal and have packed their bags to come visit and stay a good long while. I can’t walk twenty feet without stumbling over a picturesque brook that doesn’t have the common decency not to burble. The trees grow high and wide and broad, and in the late autumn they all shed their brilliant, jewel-colored leaves in one grand choreographed flourish, over the passing of a single night. Heck, it’s it’s January right now and the grass is still a vivid emerald green.
Everything in Connecticut is just so pretty. I can travel down the road through the quaint, adorable New England town center of Old Greenwich—with its town clock, old-fashioned storefronts, and an overall village charm that’s only missing a friendly Dalmatian in the doorway of the teeny-tiny fire station—and come out a mile later on the beach. Everything there is quiet and calm and serene where the soft sands lie in pillow-like ripples, or else it’s unspoiled and beautiful where the winter reeds blow between the rocky western coast. And then there’s the Emerald City of Manhattan on the horizon, a mere twenty miles away, glittering over the sound like a jewel.
I can drive in any direction and encounter majestic outcroppings of rock, or beautiful rivers dotted with pleasure crafts, or vast forests, or rolling, endless farmland. The people of Connecticut curl their lips at the mention of Bridgeport, its most disreputable and least picturesque city. But you know, I lived for twenty-five years in Detroit, and Bridgeport, you don’t scare me. I can say for certain that most citizens of the neighborhoods within the Detroit city limits would look at Bridgeport, with its intact houses and roads and the sun glittering seductively on the water, and think it an urban oasis.
There’s stuff I don’t like about Connecticut, to be certain. There’s only one major artery through the entire state, and it runs east to west and if it’s jammed from an accident or just congested, you’re doomed to sit in your car for three hours. You’re also pretty much condemned to a painfully slow trip if you want to travel anywhere from north to south, as you’re pretty much restricted to doing it along tiny little one-lane roads, usually behind a UPS truck that blocks the road as it stops every three houses to make a delivery.
I don’t like the fact that it’s tough to visit a big box store of any sort. There just aren’t that many, and they’re inconvenient and far between. In Michigan, or in Virginia, or in any of the other places I’ve visited, I could pick any of the five Targets within a five-mile radius of the house, drive there on a speedy freeway, park quickly in the lot, grab cat sand and shampoo, and get home within a half-hour. Visiting a Target here involves navigating through downtown Stamford, parking (and paying for the privilege) in a multi-story deck, taking an elevator to Target, and then wrestling my purchases back to the deck before trying to get out of the downtown area.
Either that, or I can drive to the only other Target in the area, in White Plains—a city I believe was described in The Inferno as part of the lowest circle of hell, in which all the streets are one-way and heading north.
Then there’s the Connecticut shrug, which everyone will gladly perform if you suggest that the state is missing something, like a good Thai restaurant, a place to buy cheesecake, or a karaoke bar. “Oh, you can get that in the city,” they’ll say, doing the shrug and jerking their head in the direction of Manhattan. My first few months here, I heard the phrase so often that I declared You Can Get That In The City should be officially made the state motto, Latinized, and sewn onto the Connecticut flag.
But when it comes to other things, Connecticut is tops. Need a hot pretzel shop, like a Wetzel’s Pretzels or a Auntie Annies? You’re in luck, because the Connecticut malls have cleared out establishments like Banana Republic and Gap and Macy’s in order that every mall can be all pretzel shops, all the time, from one end to the other!
And do you need the ability to hop out of your car and pee over the railing on I-95? Maybe you’re too shy to do so in lesser states like New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but man, Connecticut’s got you covered. Whip it out and whiz away! No one cares that you’re only three feet from the traffic, or that there are actual rest stops down the road or a McDonald’s at the next exit with an indoor facility. Not in Connecticut, baby! Just let that urine fly!
And prettiness. Connecticut is really, really pretty.
Maybe it’d just have been better if I’d stopped there.
I reply, “It’s pretty.”
And every single time, the person who’s asked me the question will look at me with a kind of sideways, stank-face expression of abject horror, as if they suspect me of slandering their state with some kind of backhanded compliment.
Actually, it’s as if they have heard of the incident after a terrible choral concert through which I and a bunch of friends once sat with our hands over our eardrums to prevent the discord from piercing our eardrums and making them gush blood. When our mutual acquaintance who was part of the concert came out to greet us after the merciful conclusion of the double-encore, everyone else suddenly pretended that they hadn’t been rolling their eyes and whining during the musical carnage, or that they hadn’t rushed during intermission to the bar next door to slug down shots to get them through the second half. The air was full of totally insincere Oh, what a fantastic concerts! and I’ve never enjoyed myself mores!, until the acquaintance turned to me with raised eyebrows and an air of expectation.
“You know,” I told him with great enthusiasm. “That is really a nice shirt you’re wearing!”
Yes. It’s as if Connecticut looks at me askance because I’ve told it that it has a really nice shirt.
I don’t mean the compliment as anything other than what it is, however. Connecticut is pretty. Flowers stay in bloom for an obscenely long time, as if they’ve forgotten that they’re supposed to be seasonal and have packed their bags to come visit and stay a good long while. I can’t walk twenty feet without stumbling over a picturesque brook that doesn’t have the common decency not to burble. The trees grow high and wide and broad, and in the late autumn they all shed their brilliant, jewel-colored leaves in one grand choreographed flourish, over the passing of a single night. Heck, it’s it’s January right now and the grass is still a vivid emerald green.
Everything in Connecticut is just so pretty. I can travel down the road through the quaint, adorable New England town center of Old Greenwich—with its town clock, old-fashioned storefronts, and an overall village charm that’s only missing a friendly Dalmatian in the doorway of the teeny-tiny fire station—and come out a mile later on the beach. Everything there is quiet and calm and serene where the soft sands lie in pillow-like ripples, or else it’s unspoiled and beautiful where the winter reeds blow between the rocky western coast. And then there’s the Emerald City of Manhattan on the horizon, a mere twenty miles away, glittering over the sound like a jewel.
I can drive in any direction and encounter majestic outcroppings of rock, or beautiful rivers dotted with pleasure crafts, or vast forests, or rolling, endless farmland. The people of Connecticut curl their lips at the mention of Bridgeport, its most disreputable and least picturesque city. But you know, I lived for twenty-five years in Detroit, and Bridgeport, you don’t scare me. I can say for certain that most citizens of the neighborhoods within the Detroit city limits would look at Bridgeport, with its intact houses and roads and the sun glittering seductively on the water, and think it an urban oasis.
There’s stuff I don’t like about Connecticut, to be certain. There’s only one major artery through the entire state, and it runs east to west and if it’s jammed from an accident or just congested, you’re doomed to sit in your car for three hours. You’re also pretty much condemned to a painfully slow trip if you want to travel anywhere from north to south, as you’re pretty much restricted to doing it along tiny little one-lane roads, usually behind a UPS truck that blocks the road as it stops every three houses to make a delivery.
I don’t like the fact that it’s tough to visit a big box store of any sort. There just aren’t that many, and they’re inconvenient and far between. In Michigan, or in Virginia, or in any of the other places I’ve visited, I could pick any of the five Targets within a five-mile radius of the house, drive there on a speedy freeway, park quickly in the lot, grab cat sand and shampoo, and get home within a half-hour. Visiting a Target here involves navigating through downtown Stamford, parking (and paying for the privilege) in a multi-story deck, taking an elevator to Target, and then wrestling my purchases back to the deck before trying to get out of the downtown area.
Either that, or I can drive to the only other Target in the area, in White Plains—a city I believe was described in The Inferno as part of the lowest circle of hell, in which all the streets are one-way and heading north.
Then there’s the Connecticut shrug, which everyone will gladly perform if you suggest that the state is missing something, like a good Thai restaurant, a place to buy cheesecake, or a karaoke bar. “Oh, you can get that in the city,” they’ll say, doing the shrug and jerking their head in the direction of Manhattan. My first few months here, I heard the phrase so often that I declared You Can Get That In The City should be officially made the state motto, Latinized, and sewn onto the Connecticut flag.
But when it comes to other things, Connecticut is tops. Need a hot pretzel shop, like a Wetzel’s Pretzels or a Auntie Annies? You’re in luck, because the Connecticut malls have cleared out establishments like Banana Republic and Gap and Macy’s in order that every mall can be all pretzel shops, all the time, from one end to the other!
And do you need the ability to hop out of your car and pee over the railing on I-95? Maybe you’re too shy to do so in lesser states like New Jersey or Pennsylvania, but man, Connecticut’s got you covered. Whip it out and whiz away! No one cares that you’re only three feet from the traffic, or that there are actual rest stops down the road or a McDonald’s at the next exit with an indoor facility. Not in Connecticut, baby! Just let that urine fly!
And prettiness. Connecticut is really, really pretty.
Maybe it’d just have been better if I’d stopped there.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Color Snapshots
I love taking photographs. I have absolutely no training or formal education in photography. I'm not particularly good at it. But that doesn't stop me.
Actually, whenever someone shows me his fancy SLR camera and begins talking about exposures and f-stops and shutter speeds, my eyes start to glaze over. All I know is that I like taking photographs, that I take hundreds of them a month, that I take most of them with my phone and am fairly happy to keep doing so, and that Instagram is the most absorbing application ever invented. (Seriously. Add me, y'all.)
I was looking over my photos from 2011 last night and noticed something that should have been fairly obvious, if I'd been paying attention—but which really didn't seem apparent until I saw nearly a year's worth of thumbnails lined up in neat rows. All my photos from the early party of year are pretty typical shots of things that caught my fancy, or of my cats, or in the springtime, of all the floral life springing up in abundance in my old Michigan home. Nice, colorful stuff.
Then we get to June, when I moved. And suddenly I've got nothing but black-and-white studies of my new surroundings. Not just black-and-white photos. Moody black-and-white photos, with dark shadowy edges encroaching into the frame like special visual effects of doom left over from some Stephen King miniseries.
I have dozens and dozens of photographs of my local beach—pictures taken during the sunniest, greenest, warmest time of year, that look like the kind of thing Sylvia Plath would've clutched to her bosom as she stuck her head in the oven. They're the kind of photographs you might find in a newspaper with a byline reading The suicide victim, presumed deceased, was last spotted wading into the waters of this local beach during a dangerous high tide. Onlookers say his bathing suit may have been weighted with rocks. Or they simply should be wrapped in a note fashioned of cut-out letters that read, deer detectives, I burried the bodies here. hah! hah! hah! the fairfield killer.
No, really. I'm not exaggerating. I look at those photos now and I'm thinking, I took these in the summer? When it was nice? Double-tee-eff?
It's actually fairly funny how bleak this last summer looks, through my lens. I totally get it, though. On a day-to-day basis I might've been thinking, "Oh, I like these monochromatic studies. They're clean and simple." But throughout the entire summer I was really on a mindset of, "I don't want to be here. I don't like this place. It's never going to be anything to me."
If you look at my scrapbook of photos for the year, though, something happens right around the end of October. Suddenly my black-and-white photographs start to fade away—they don't vanish completely, mind you—but they're replaced by eye-popping, cornea-bleeding blasts of color. I'm not exaggerating that it could cause the unsuspecting scroller a serious case of visual whiplash. If you were to compare the photographs of the same subject, five months apart, I'd venture to say you wouldn't recognize them.
What happened recently to effect the change? It's tough to say. I think the actual realization came that this is my life now, and that I can't really pretend it isn't, when I was in the city recently. I was sitting at the Central Park Reservoir, one evening. I'd had a very long and leisurely and enjoyable day investigating a geeky board games store, and taking myself out to a solo lunch, and spending the afternoon at the museum. I had dinner and an evening with a new friend yet to come. I was standing there with a hot beverage in one hand and my phone in the other, snapping photos of the water and the sunset and admiring the colors while joggers huffed and panted and kicked up gravel with their running shoes behind me.
And suddenly it struck me: This doesn't have to be a special day. You could have a lot of future days this good.
It wasn't that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of her house into Technicolor. No, it wasn't that blatant or sudden. It was just at that moment I realized I'd been stumbling around for months like someone whose eyes have been badly sun-bleached, and that slowly, very slowly for weeks, I'd been seeing colors again.
So here's to the scarlets and lemon yellows, so vivid one could warm his hands over them. Here's the eye-popping greens and blues and indigos, the crimsons and oranges. Here's to the blacks and whites and thousands of shades of grays between, too. I could use them all in my life.
Actually, whenever someone shows me his fancy SLR camera and begins talking about exposures and f-stops and shutter speeds, my eyes start to glaze over. All I know is that I like taking photographs, that I take hundreds of them a month, that I take most of them with my phone and am fairly happy to keep doing so, and that Instagram is the most absorbing application ever invented. (Seriously. Add me, y'all.)
I was looking over my photos from 2011 last night and noticed something that should have been fairly obvious, if I'd been paying attention—but which really didn't seem apparent until I saw nearly a year's worth of thumbnails lined up in neat rows. All my photos from the early party of year are pretty typical shots of things that caught my fancy, or of my cats, or in the springtime, of all the floral life springing up in abundance in my old Michigan home. Nice, colorful stuff.
Then we get to June, when I moved. And suddenly I've got nothing but black-and-white studies of my new surroundings. Not just black-and-white photos. Moody black-and-white photos, with dark shadowy edges encroaching into the frame like special visual effects of doom left over from some Stephen King miniseries.
I have dozens and dozens of photographs of my local beach—pictures taken during the sunniest, greenest, warmest time of year, that look like the kind of thing Sylvia Plath would've clutched to her bosom as she stuck her head in the oven. They're the kind of photographs you might find in a newspaper with a byline reading The suicide victim, presumed deceased, was last spotted wading into the waters of this local beach during a dangerous high tide. Onlookers say his bathing suit may have been weighted with rocks. Or they simply should be wrapped in a note fashioned of cut-out letters that read, deer detectives, I burried the bodies here. hah! hah! hah! the fairfield killer.
No, really. I'm not exaggerating. I look at those photos now and I'm thinking, I took these in the summer? When it was nice? Double-tee-eff?
It's actually fairly funny how bleak this last summer looks, through my lens. I totally get it, though. On a day-to-day basis I might've been thinking, "Oh, I like these monochromatic studies. They're clean and simple." But throughout the entire summer I was really on a mindset of, "I don't want to be here. I don't like this place. It's never going to be anything to me."
If you look at my scrapbook of photos for the year, though, something happens right around the end of October. Suddenly my black-and-white photographs start to fade away—they don't vanish completely, mind you—but they're replaced by eye-popping, cornea-bleeding blasts of color. I'm not exaggerating that it could cause the unsuspecting scroller a serious case of visual whiplash. If you were to compare the photographs of the same subject, five months apart, I'd venture to say you wouldn't recognize them.
What happened recently to effect the change? It's tough to say. I think the actual realization came that this is my life now, and that I can't really pretend it isn't, when I was in the city recently. I was sitting at the Central Park Reservoir, one evening. I'd had a very long and leisurely and enjoyable day investigating a geeky board games store, and taking myself out to a solo lunch, and spending the afternoon at the museum. I had dinner and an evening with a new friend yet to come. I was standing there with a hot beverage in one hand and my phone in the other, snapping photos of the water and the sunset and admiring the colors while joggers huffed and panted and kicked up gravel with their running shoes behind me.
And suddenly it struck me: This doesn't have to be a special day. You could have a lot of future days this good.
It wasn't that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of her house into Technicolor. No, it wasn't that blatant or sudden. It was just at that moment I realized I'd been stumbling around for months like someone whose eyes have been badly sun-bleached, and that slowly, very slowly for weeks, I'd been seeing colors again.
So here's to the scarlets and lemon yellows, so vivid one could warm his hands over them. Here's the eye-popping greens and blues and indigos, the crimsons and oranges. Here's to the blacks and whites and thousands of shades of grays between, too. I could use them all in my life.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)