kenjari | Reading

I dreamed of taking a transcontinental train with as little difficulty as traveling to D.C., which I am not convinced has been the state of American rail for decades. Otherwise since my sleep has gone principally to hell again, I feel burnt and friable and past my last fingernail of whatever I am supposed to be doing. On the one hand we are a communal species; on the other I would like to feel I had any right to exist beyond what other people require of me.

I am relieved to see that the enraging article I read last night about the deep-sixing of Yiddish at Brandeis has since been amended to a reduced but not eradicated schedule, but it would have been best to leave the program undisturbed to begin with. The golem reference is apropos.

My formative Joan D. Vinge was Psion (1982/2007), which even in its bowdlerized YA version may have been my introductory super-corporatized dystopia, but I had recent occasion to recommend her Heaven Chronicles (1991), which I got off my parents' shelves in high school and whose first novella especially has retained its importance over the years, of holding on to the true things—like one another—even in the face of an apparently guaranteed dead-end future, the immutably cold equations of its chamber space opera which differ not all that much from the hot ones of our planetside reality show. Not Pyrrhically or ironically, it chimed with other stories I had grown up hearing.

Jamaica Run (1953) is an inexplicably lackadaisical film for such sensational components as sunken treasure, inheritance murder, and a deteriorated sugar plantation climactically burning down on Caribbean Gothic schedule, but it did cheer me that Wendell Corey was unerringly cast as my obvious favorite character, the heroine's ne'er-do-well brother whose landed airs don't cover his bar tab and whose intentions toward the ingenue of a newly discovered heir may be self-surprised sincere romance or just hunting his own former fortune, swanning around afternoons in a dressing gown and getting away with most of the screenplay's sarcasm: "What is this, open house for disagreeable people?"

I cannot yet produce photographic evidence, but the robin's eggs in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen have hatched into open-mouthed nestlings. A dozen infant caterpillars are tunneling busily through the milkweed.

Current Music: The Kooks, "Four Leaf Clover"

troisoiseaux

Continued my nostalgic re-reads of formative 2000s YA with A Brief History of Montmaray by Michelle Cooper, a novel about the impoverished, eccentric royal family of a very small island - think Gibraltar, but legally independent, mostly abandoned, and on the other side of Spain? - in the years before WWII, in the form of the diary of 16-year-old princess Sophia FitzOsborne. (I only realized years after originally reading this how much it owes to Dodie Smith's I Capture The Castle, which I've still never actually read.) This holds up delightfully, although it feels almost embarrassingly self-indulgent, in terms of realizing how precisely it's calibrated to appeal to a certain type of teenage girl and how precisely I was part of that target audience, which might be best described as "former American Girl and Dear America girlies." (And, I suspect, Samantha girlies in particular?) Like, it's just sooo.... she's an orphan living in a crumbling castle (with secret tunnels, a slightly unhinged housekeeper, and possibly ghosts) on an isolated island! She feels herself the too-ordinary middle child among her more talented/charming/outrageous/etc. siblings and cousins, but she's our protagonist, of course she has hidden depths! Plot threads include Sophie's crush on slightly older family friend Simon,* whether to move to London to be Presented Into Society as her aunt insists,** and the looming specter of real-world 1930s geopolitics— the boiling-pot build-up to, you know, WWII - a reference to the fascist sympathies of the British upper class in one of Sophie's brother's letters here, a piece of news there - is chilling, but things get dramatic very quickly when two lost German "historians" (or so they claim) wash ashore.

( Footnotes (100% spoilers) )

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It was helpful of Adrian Tchaikovsky's Elder Race (2021) to include a dedication to its inspiration of Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" (1967), since I would otherwise have guessed Le Guin's "Semley's Necklace" (1964)/Rocannon's World (1966) as its jumping-off point of anthropological science fiction through the split lens of heroic fantasy. As far as I can tell, my ur-text for that kind of double-visioned narrative was Phyllis Gotlieb's A Judgment of Dragons (1980), some of whose characters understand that they have been sucked down a time vortex into the late nineteenth century where a dangerously bored trickster of an enigmatically ancient species is amusing himself in the Pale of Settlement and some of whom just understand that Ashmedai has come to town. I got a kind of reversal early, too, from Jane Yolen's Sister Light, Sister Dark (1988) and White Jenna (1989), whose modern historian is doomed to fail in his earnest reconstructions because in his rationality he misses that the magic was real. Tchaikovsky gets a lot of mileage for his disjoint perspectives out of Clarke's Law, but just as much out of an explanation of clinical depression or the definition of a demon beyond all philosophy, and from any angle I am a sucker for the Doppler drift of stories with time. The convergence of genre protocols is nicely timed. Occasional Peter S. Beagle vibes almost certainly generated by the reader, not the text. Pleasantly, the book actually is novella-proportioned rather than a compacted novel, but now I have the problem of accepting that if the author had wanted to set any further stories in this attractively open-ended world, at his rate of prolificacy they would already have turned up. On that note, I appreciated hearing that Murderbot (2025–) has been renewed.

Current Music: Michigander, "Giving Up"

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Last night's eight hours of sleep were more disrupted and fragmentary than the previous, but my brain wasn't wrong that in life Kenneth Colley was only a little taller than me and a year or so younger when he first sparked a fandom for Admiral Piett.

I read later into the night than planned because I had just discovered Irene Clyde's Beatrice the Sixteenth (1909), which would fall unobjectionably toward the easterly end of the Ruritanian romance were it not that the proud and ancient society into which Dr. Mary Hatherley awakens after a kick in the head from her camel while crossing the Arabian Desert has zero distinction of gender in either language or social roles to the point that the longer the narrator spends among the elegantly civilized yet decidedly un-English environment of Armeria, the more she adopts the female pronoun as the default for all of its inhabitants regardless of how she read them to begin with. Plotwise, the novel is concerned primarily with the court intrigue building eventually to war between the the preferentially peaceful Armeria and the most patriarchally aggressive of its neighbors, but the narrator's acculturation to an agendered life whose equivalent of marriage is contracted regardless of biological sex and whose children are all adopted rather than reproduced puts it more in the lineage of Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X (1960) or Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) even without the sfnal reveal that Mêrê, as she comes to accept the local translation of her name, has not merely stumbled upon some Haggard-esque lost world but actually been jolted onto an alternate plane of history, explaining the classical substrate of Armerian that allows her to communicate even if it bewilders her to hear that the words kyné and anra are used as interchangeably as persona and the universal term for a spouse is the equally gender-free conjux. If it is a utopia, it is an ambiguous one: it may shock the reader as much as Mêrê that the otherwise egalitarian Armeria has never abolished the institution of slavery as practiced since their classical antiquity. Then again, her Victorian sensibilities may be even more offended by the Armerian indifference to heredity, especially when it forces her to accept that her dashing, principled, irresistibly attractive Ilex is genetically what her colonial instincts would disdain as a barbarian. Children are not even named after their parents, but after the week of their adoption—Star, Eagle, Fuchsia, Stag. For the record, despite Mêrê's observation that the Armerian language contains no grammatical indications of the masculine, it is far from textually clear that its citizens should therefore all be assumed to be AFAB. "Sex is an accident" was one of the mottoes of Urania (1916–40), the privately circulated, assertively non-binary, super-queer journal of gender studies co-founded and co-edited by the author of Beatrice the Sixteenth, who was born and conducted an entire career in international law under the name of Thomas Baty. I knew nothing about this rabbit hole of queer literature and history and am delighted to see it will get a boost from MIT Press' Radium Age. In the meantime, it makes another useful reminder that everything is older than I think.

As a person with a demonstrable inclination toward movies featuring science, aviation, and Michael Redgrave, while finally watching The Dam Busters (1955) I kept exclaiming things like "If you want the most beautiful black-and-white clouds, call Erwin Hillier!" We appreciated the content warning for historically accurate language. I was right that the real-life footage had been obscured for official secrets reasons. The skies did look phenomenal.

Current Music: Haim, "Down to Be Wrong"

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Probably because it has been weeks since I slept more than a couple of hours a night and months since I had what would be medically termed a good night's sleep, I spent at least ten hours last night unconscious enough to dream and it was amazing. Under ideal circumstances I would devote my afternoon to reading on the front steps until the thunderstorms arrive. Under the resentful circumstances of realism I have already devoted considerable of my afternoon to phone calls with doctors and will need to enact capitalism while I have the concentration for it. I may still try to take a walk. I have a sort of pressure headache of movies I managed to watch before I ran completely out of time and would like to talk about even in shallow and unsatisfactory ways. I heard Kaleo's "Way Down We Go" (2015) on WERS and am delighted that the video was shot in the dormant volcano Þríhnúkagígur. I will associate it with earthquake-bound Loki. My brain thought it should dream about nonexistent Alan Garner and what I very much doubt will be the second season of Murderbot (2025–).

[edit] Taking a walk informed me that the sidewalk of the street at the bottom of our street has been spray-painted with a swastika, visible efforts to scrub it out notwithstanding. The sentiment is far from shocking, but the placement is rather literally close to home.

Current Music: Kaleo, "Way Down We Go"

troisoiseaux

Currently reading Days of the Dead by Barbara Hambly, one of her Benjamin January historical mysteries, usually set in 1830s New Orleans, although this one sees newlyweds January and Rose take a busman's honeymoon to Mexico to rescue their friend Hannibal Sefton, who has been accused of murder. Enjoying this! It's very Gothic: the mad patriarch ruling over his isolated hacienda with an iron fist, where pretty much everyone else is on their way to madness if not already there; the picturesque ruins in the form of Aztec pyramids; and of course, People Getting Real Weird With Religion. So far, this book's historical cameo has been General Santa Anna, who I did not connect with the sea shanty "Santiana" until a reference to his nickname as "Napoleon of the West"; I've also noticed that Hambly has an apparent running joke with herself of slipping in the names of minor characters from Les Mis (e.g., Combeferre's Livery in Die Upon A Kiss) and assumed the French chef named Guillenormand was one of those, although the spelling differs slightly— and as this Guillenormand is a "heretic Revolutionist" who fled France upon the Bourbons' return to power, I doubt Hugo's Gillenormand would acknowledge any relation.

I'm approximately three-quarters through Dune and things have gotten really weird. (Jessica + the Water of Life ritual????) Also, oddly, this audiobook keeps slipping back and forth between using a full cast of different voice actors for the different characters and having a single narrator Doing Voices for all the characters, which has a very odd effect when it changes from scene to scene and the main narrator has a completely different way of reading, e.g., Count Fenring's verbal tic than the other, specific voice actor does. It has also introduced more of a soundscape, including (in a move so cliche it was accidentally funny) ambiguously exotic flute music when Paul's Fremen love interest ~~Zendaya~~ Chani was introduced. So far my favorite chapter/scene has been when Frank Herbert used one character's death to be like "AND IN THIS ESSAY I WILL—" about ecology, via that guy's dying hallucinations of his dead father.

sovay

In the appendices of Alzina Stone Dale's 1984 edition of Dorothy L. Sayers and Muriel St. Clare Byrne's Busman's Honeymoon (1936), reproduced for the first time from a handwritten sheet by Sayers with an additional scribble from Byrne, I have found perhaps the greatest production note I have read in a playscript in my life:

Warning

The murder contrivance in Act III Scene 2 will not work properly unless it is sufficiently weighted. It is therefore GENUINELY DEADLY.

Producers are earnestly requested to see that the beam, chain & attachments & the clearance above the head of the actor playing CRUTCHLEY are thoroughly tested at every performance immediately before the beginning of the Scene, in order to avoid a POSSIBLY FATAL ACCIDENT.

How is it that in this our era of infinite meta when See How They Run (2022) was a real film that came out in theaters and not someone's especially clever Yuletide treat no Sayers fan has ever worked this note into a fictional production of Busman's Honeymoon where the blasphemed aspidistra exacted a worse revenge than corroded soot? I don't want to write it, I'm just amazed no one's taken advantage of it. I wouldn't mind knowing either if the 1988 revival with Edward Petherbridge and Emily Richards found a way of reproducing the effect without risking their Crutchley, since Byrne's "Note to Producers" describes the stage trick in technical detail down to the supplier of the globes for the lamp and she still agreed with Sayers—she wanted the warning inserted before the relevant scene in the acting edition—that it could wreck an actor if not set up with belt-and-braces care. Otherwise I am most entertained so far that according to Dale, while the collaboration between the two women was much more mutual than an author and her beta-reader, Byrne characteristically put in the stage business and directions which it seems Sayers was less inclined to write than dialogue. This same edition includes Sayers' solo-penned and previously unpublished Love All (1941) and testifies to the further treasury of the Malden Public Library, whose poetry section when we were directed to it turned out to be a miscellany of anthologies, plays, and biographies shading into what used to be shelved as world literature. I have three more Christies for my mother, another unfamiliar Elizabeth Goudge, another unfamiliar Elleston Trevor, some nonfiction on an angle of women's war work and the Battle of the Atlantic that I actually know nothing about, and the summer play of Christopher Fry's seasonal quartet. I am running on about a fifth of a neuron at this point, but

rushthatspeaks bought me ice cream.

Current Music: Frank Turner, "Recovery"

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From an apparent radiant in Arcturus, which made it either a straggler of the Boötids or just passing through, just as

spatch and I were getting up from our summer-hazed star-watching under the three-quarter moon, we saw a slow fireball of a meteor streak south and westward. All we had seen until then were the familiar blinks of planes and what we less happily took for satellites crawling steadily across the body of Ursa Major. We lay on the granite blocks that were installed six or seven years ago in commemoration of the eighteenth-century farm that became first a field of victory gardens and then the public park where I would spend my childhood sledding in winter and setting off model rockets in summer. The jeweled string of the Boston skyline has built itself considerably up since then. I used to dream of finding a meteorite in a field. It seemed statistically not impossible.

Current Music: Of Monsters and Men, "Empire"

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I screamed in dismay in the middle of the night because I had just seen the news that Kenneth Colley died.

I saw him in roles beyond the megafamous one, of course, and he was everything from inevitable to excellent in them, but it happens that last week

spatch and I took the excuse of a genuinely fun fact to rewatch Return of the Jedi (1983) and at home on my own couch I cheered his typically controlled and almost imperceptibly nervy appearance aboard the Executor, which by the actor's own account was exactly how he had gotten this assignment stationed off the sanctuary moon of Endor in the first place, the only Imperial officer to reprise his role by popular demand. In hindsight of more ground-level explorations of the Empire like Rogue One (2016) and Andor (2022–25), Admiral Piett looks like the parent and original of their careerists and idealists, all too human in their sunk cost loyalties to a regime to which they are interchangeably disposable, but just the slight shock-stillness of his face as he swallows his promotion from frying pan to fire would have kept an audience rooting for him against their own moral alignment so long as they had ever once held a job. It didn't hurt that he never looked like he'd gotten a good night's sleep in his life, not even when he was younger and turning up as randomly as an ill-fated Teddy-boy trickster on The Avengers (1961–69) or one of the lights of the impeccably awful am-dram Hammer send-up that is the best scene in The Blood Beast Terror (1968). Years before I saw the film it came from, a still of him and his haunted face in I Hired a Contract Killer (1990)—smoking in bed, stretched out all in black on the white sheets like a catafalque—crossbred with a nightmare of mine into a poem. Out of sincere curiosity, I'll take a time machine ticket for his 1979 Benedick for the RSC.

He played Hitler for Ken Russell and Jesus for the Pythons: I am not in danger of having nothing to watch for his memory, as ever it's just the memory that's the kicker. No actor or artist or writer of importance to me has yet turned out to be immortal, but I resent the interference of COVID-19 in this one. In the haphazard way that I collected character actors, he would have been one of the earlier, almost certainly tapping in his glass-darkly fashion into my longstanding soft spot for harried functionaries of all flavors even when actual bureaucracy has done its best for most of my life to kill me. I am glad he was still in the world the last time I saw him. A friend no longer on LJ/DW already wrote him the best eulogy.

Current Music: Slumber Party, "Soldier"

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On the normality front, our street is full of cracks and bangs and whooshes from fireworks set off around the neighborhood, none so far combustibly. Otherwise I spent this Fourth of July with my husbands and my parents and eleven leaves of milkweed on which the monarch seen fluttering around the yard this afternoon had left her progeny. My hair still smells like grill smoke. Due to the size of one of the hamburgers, I folded it over into a double-decker with cheese and avocado and chipotle mayo and regret nothing about the hipster Dagwood sandwich. A quantity of peach pie and strawberries and cream were highlights of the dessert after a walk into the Great Meadows where the black water had risen under the boardwalk and the water lilies were growing in profusion from the last, droughtier time we had passed that way. I do not know the species of bird that has built a nest in the rhododendron beside the summer kitchen, but the three eggs in it are dye-blue.

On the non-normality front, I meant it about the spite: watching my country stripped for parts for the cruelty of it, half remixed atrocities, half sprint into dystopia, however complicated the American definition has always been, right now it still means my family of queers and rootless cosmopolitans and as most of the holidays we observe assert, we are still here. It's peculiar. I was not raised to think of my nationality as an important part of myself so much as an accident of history, much like the chain of immigrations and migrations that led to my birth in Boston. I was raised to carry home with me, not locate it in geography. I've been asked my whole life where I really come from. This administration in both its nameless rounds has managed to make me territorial about my country beyond the mechanisms of its democracy whose guardrails turned out to be such movable goalposts. It enrages me to be expected not to care that I have seen the pendulum swing like a wrecking ball in my lifetime, as if the trajectory were so inevitable that it absolves the avarice to do harm or the cowardice to prevent it. It is nothing to do with statues. The door to the stranger is supposed to be open.

The wet meadows of the Great Meadows are peatlands. They were cut for fuel in the nineteenth century, the surrealism of fossil fuels: twelve thousand years after the glaciers, ashes in a night. The color of their smoke filled the air sixteen years ago when some of the dryer acres burned. If you ask me, there's room for bog bodies.

Current Music: Japanese Breakfast, "Picture Window"

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Because Hanscom hasn't held an air show in years, I have no idea what the hell passed over my parents' yard behind the unrelieved overcast except that it sounded like a heavy bomber, but not a modern one: an air-shaking piston-engined roar like who ordered the Flying Fortress, which were not to my knowledge even tested at the base. It suggested lost psychogeography and worried me.

Japanese Breakfast's "Picture Window" (2025) came around again on WERS as I was driving this afternoon. The line about ghosts and home keeps resonating beyond the pedal steel guitar.

I see we will be celebrating the Fourth of July out of spite this year. So go other holidays. Af tselokhes, John.

Current Music: The Dropkick Murphys, "Who'll Stand with Us?"

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I was so transfixed by the Bittersweets' "Hurtin' Kind" (1967) that I sat in the car in front of my house listening until it was done. The 1965 original is solid, stoner-flavored garage rock with its keyboard stomp and harmonica wail, but the all-female cover has that guitar line like a Shepard tone, the ghostly descant in the vocals, the singer's voice falling off at the end of every verse: it sounds like an out-of-body experience of heartbreak. The outro comes on like a prelude to Patti Smith.

If I had a nickel for every time I heard two songs about mental unwellness within the same couple of hours, actually I'd be swimming in nickels, but I appreciated the contrast of the slow-rolling dread-flashover of Doechii's "Anxiety" (2025) with Marmozets' "Major System Error" (2017) just crashing in at gale force panic attack. Hat-tip to

rushthatspeaks for the former. I must say that I am missing my extinct music blogs much less now that I spend so much time in the car with college radio on.

"Who'll Stand with Us?" (2025) is the most Billy Bragg-like song I have heard from the Dropkick Murphys and a little horrifically timely.

Non-musically, I think I might explode. The curse tablets are not cutting it.

Current Music: Marmozets, "Major System Error"

troisoiseaux

Continued my nostalgic re-reads of 2000s middle-grade/YA novels with I'd Tell You I Love You But Then I'd Have To Kill You by Ally Carter, the first book in the Gallagher Girls series, set at an all-girls boarding school for TEEN SPIES. As you can imagine, this was my jam in middle school! However, my primary emotion on re-reading this book as an adult was second-hand embarrassment, since main character Cammie (a superspy nepo baby, whose mom is the headmistress of the Gallagher Academy for Exceptional Young Women and whose dad died tragically on a top-secret mission) mostly puts the lessons learned in her Covert Operations class - that one man's trash is another's treasure trove of the first guy's secrets, how to build and maintain a cover story, etc. - to practical, if ill-advised, use by... stalking some cute normie boy and then sneaking out to go on dates with him. (I know, I know, this is a YA novel, but COMPLETE waste of an elite spy education, if you ask me.) The climactic sequence where Cammie and friends take their CoveOps practical final - a heist! - was fun, though.

$radiantfracture: (Orion)$

radiantfracture

Of all the things to be grieving right now, this is a weird personal parasocial one. You have been warned.

( Jeremy Greer )

§rf§

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Rabbit, rabbit! I had to go for my annual physical this afternoon, but I stopped by Porter Square Books afterward to collect a book for my mother and look what was part of their summer sea-display:

I had wanted to write about so many queer films for June, but the month disappeared. Fortunately before we ran out of the formal observance of Pride,

rushthatspeaks and I made it to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Querelle (1982) at the Coolidge. It was adapted from the 1947 novel by Jean Genet, but I have never seen anything onscreen that more resembled the novels of Chip Delany. Meant in sincere compliment, it is one of the sweatiest films I have ever seen. It looks like it smells like a porno theater. Its antihero is straight out of Tom of Finland with his sailor's tight, tight white trousers and muscular cleavage revealed by the barest excuse for an A-shirt, his boyish, chiseled, louche face under his insolently cocked bachi in the sullen, enticing haze that never varies from the sodium-smoke of just after sunset or just before dawn, a perpetual cruising hour. The sea-wall of its fantasized Brest is studded with stone phalli, anatomically complete with slit and balls. All graffiti in town is dicks. The chanteuse of the dive bar sings Wilde like Dietrich, but some of the construction workers with their buff hard hats are playing video games while the naval lieutenant who pines for Querelle records his poetically criminal obsessions into a portable tape recorder. The bare-chested, leather-vested cop at the bar actually is a cop outside of it, where he looks just as fetishistic in his fedora and black leather trenchcoat. Every interaction between men looks like a negotiation or a seduction whether it is one or not, although on some level it always is, regardless of the no-homo excuses manufactured to allow their bodies to meet. Constantly, metaphysically, literally, this movie fucks. Its hothouse, bathhouse sexuality must have come in just under the cutting wire of AIDS. I have no idea what it would offer a viewer with no sexual or aesthetic interest in men except its philosophy, although as my husband notes the philosophy is actually quite good, deconstructing its hard masc signifiers as much as it gets off on them, dissolving in and out of the words and ultimately the life of Genet; the theatricality of its interlocked sets and swelteringly flamboyant lighting would look entirely natural on the stage. It quotes Plutarch and stages a hand job that without a glimpse of cock would have caused mass apoplexies in the Breen office. (Send it back in time, please.) It was my introduction to Fassbinder and if I had seen it as an adolescent, I imagine it would have had much the same effect as Tanith Lee. It was introduced by the series programmer wearing leather in its honor and a T-shirt for Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1963). It made a superb date movie.

Current Music: Les Cowboys Fringants, "Marine marchande"

troisoiseaux

Following a conversation with

sovay about formative mermaid media, spent the evening re-reading The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler - a 2003 middle-grade novel about a girl who discovers she can turn into a mermaid - to see how it holds up as a recommendation for a young reader 20+ years (oof) later. Emily's mermaid adventures include but are not limited to befriending another tweenage mermaid, exploring a sunken ship, and discovering that her long-lost father is a merman and sneaking into the underwater prison (!) where he's been languishing for the past 12 years (!!) for breaking the law against fraternization with humans (!!!). (Also, that her mom's memory of their relationship was wiped (!!!!) and their family friend the creepy lighthouse keeper has been an agent for the anti-human-fraternization king of the merfolk the whole time. (!!!!!)) So, yeah, the plot is kind of bananas, but it's charming and, most importantly, the descriptions of how cool it would be to swim in the ocean as a mermaid and explore kelp forests and sunken ships, etc., are great. Verdict: it holds up! I don't think I'd noticed as a kid how many of the throwaway minor (human) characters had punny or otherwise nautical names like "Sandra Castle" and "Mrs. Brig"; I definitely had never realized that the author is British and therefore the book presumably takes place in England rather than, like, Florida (as I'd pictured as a kid) or Maine (as I imagined it this time).

Made some progress in the Dune audiobook over the weekend; I'm through Book One (of Three). Unfortunately, so far Book Two has mostly involved Paul being rude about his mom not being able to follow along with whatever Space Jesus logic-connections-as-revelation thing he has going on, which I'm finding less interesting than the Space Medici politics and backstabbing of the first third.

sovay

As I hollered after the inapposite license plate of the SUV that had blown through the crosswalk without even thinking about stopping while we were in it, "Psalm 23? With that driving?" I am informed by

spatch that the driver who actually had stopped for us like a normal person let out one of those whoaaa sounds as at a game of the dozens, which was extremely good recompense for almost being run over by an SUV whose Lord may have been a shepherd, but obviously not a crossing guard.

(The rest of this weekend has been different temperatures of garbage; I take my victories where I can. We were in West Medford to eat tamales on the bleachers of Playstead Park.)

Current Music: The Heavy Heavy, "Feel"

troisoiseaux

I managed to swing a last-minute day trip to NYC to see Dead Outlaw yesterday after it was suddenly announced (last weekend) that the show was closing early (this weekend), making this the second time in six months I've caught one of the last performances of an unfairly short-lived folk-rock musical at the Longacre Theater that's more or less based off of a real event involving weird things happening to a corpse. (The other was Swept Away; seriously, is the Longacre cursed or something?!) (ETA: ...apparently yes??)

Dead Outlaw is based on the weirder-than-fiction true story of Elmer McCurdy, a train robber killed in a 1911 shootout whose preserved corpse ended up being displayed as part of various carnival sideshows and movie sets throughout the 1920s-40s, until eventually rediscovered in the funhouse of a California amusement park in the 1970s. (Yes, really.) The musical spends approximately equal time on McCurdy's life - a childhood unmoored by a family revelation, a teenage descent into hooliganism and attempt to restart out west, a near-engagement to a nice girl until he self-sabotages, a short and wildly unsuccessful career as an outlaw - and afterlife, which the musical fills with sort of one-song vignettes: the Oklahoma coroner and subsequent series of carnies who displayed McCurdy's body to make a quick buck; the Cherokee runner Andy Payne, who won the 1928 Trans-America Footrace at which McCurdy was displayed as part of the sideshow (only a tenuous connection, but such a cool story I see why they included it); the daughter of a movie director who purchased McCurdy as a film prop, who treats him as a sort of confidant; the 1970s Los Angeles County coroner with a star-studded "client" list.

This show slapped unbelievably hard, as the kids say. I loved the format! There was a live band on stage, and the band's frontman narrated McCurdy's life story (and posthumous adventures) while the action/narrative scenes played out around and occasionally on top of the main set piece, a sort of movable, patio-style stage where the band played; a friend who saw the show before I did described it as "feeling like you were watching a podcast." Some - most? - of the characters' songs are staged... diegetically, as it were, but sometimes they'd join the band "on stage"(-within-a-stage) and take over the frontman's microphone, such as Elmer McCurdy's rock-star-tantrum crash-out ("Killed A Man in Maine", which the narrator informed us afterwards is probably not even true), or more poignantly, as McCurdy's girlfriend's song ("A Stranger") shifts from the in-story action/conversation - identifying his body - to imagining the future they could have had together when she steps up to the microphone alongside the band. Other than Andrew Durand as Elmer McCurdy - whose athleticism in the first half of the show and ability to remain disconcertingly corpse-still in the second half were equally impressive - everyone in the cast played a bunch of different characters; even the narrator doubled as the outlaw who recruited McCurdy, thinking that he was an explosives expert. (He was not.) The music was actually not as consistently folk-rock as I had expected from the couple of songs I'd heard beforehand— particularly in the second half, with its rotating cast of one-off characters, the styles ranged from more typical Broadway numbers to barbershop quartet vibes (the carnival promoters who buy McCurdy's body off the first coroner, claiming to be his brothers) to nightclub-crooner jazz (the LA coroner). It was also SO clever and SO funny— the set-up and payoff of the humor was just brilliant. (In particular, utilizing the under-tapped comedic power of letting the audience stew for a bit: at one point, the narrator is like "and then Elmer was stuck in a closet for 20 years", followed by a solid minute or two of just... a completely dark stage except for a spotlight on Andrew Durand's motionless face, the audience stifling giggles like elementary schoolers told to behave at an assembly.) Very glad I saw this!!

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kenjari

July 2025

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Base style: Blanket by sforzinda
Theme: Autumn Clouds by dancing_serpent

Page generated Jul. 13th, 2025 08:20 am

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sovay - Paperback novelette still open and the door is closed
troisoiseaux - A Brief History of Montmaray - Michelle Cooper
sovay - If life is what we make it, then why's it always breaking?
sovay - But I lost my heart and the future's gone with it
sovay - 'Cause they will run you down, down to the dark
troisoiseaux - Recent reading
sovay - Cider and some kind of smelling salts
sovay - Comes a river running wild that will create an empire for you
sovay - I'm a mercenary soldier and we all look the same
sovay - All of my ghosts are my home
sovay - Through crime and crusade, our labor it's been stolen
sovay - You think one plus seven seven seven makes two
troisoiseaux - Reading Wednesday
radiantfracture - Jeremy Greer
sovay - J'm'installe sur le rivage pour te voir mon gros gars t'éloigner vers le large
troisoiseaux - Recent reading
sovay - I don't change, I don't even notice the scene
troisoiseaux - Theater review: Dead Outlaw

gletschergenossen

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