Martin Schneider writes:
Look to this space every Wednesday for my thoughts on politics and/or events. Early 2011 is a relatively unengaging time for a diehard Democrat, what with the White House occupied by one of our own and recent Republican victories, but that will change in the near future. So I’ll be writing more about events for the time being, I suspect.
By events I mainly mean plays, author events, rock concerts, and standup comedy gigs.
January has been busy. I saw an absolutely spectacular production of Craig Wright’s play Mistakes Were Made at the Barrow Street Theater. The flabbergastingly good Michael Shannon, familiar from Revolutionary Road and Boardwalk Empire and a longtime favorite of mine, gives one of the greatest stage performances I’ve ever seen. He plays a theater producer trying to pull together a big Broadway production about the French Revolution entirely on the phone, as he berates, flatters, etc. a couple of big-name actors, the playwright, an agent or two, and a few others into getting what he wants. He laughs, he cries, he breaks down. It’s not the freshest premise for a play, but the writing is rich and pungent, as is Shannon’s utterly impressive performance (nearly solo, and mostly into a phone). It’s playing for one more month, so I urge you to see it if you can. (The night I was there, Ethan Coen was seated in front of me. He seemed to enjoy it.)
I’m also a huge Daniel Kitson fan, and I was very happy to see him twice last week, once at the UCB Theater’s outstanding standup showcase Whiplash (every Monday night at 11pm, free), and once in his one-man show The Interminable Suicide Of Gregory Church at St. Ann’s Warehouse. I see a great deal of standup comedy, but Kitson remains entirely sui generis. He’s a scruffy chap from Yorkshire with perhaps the widest onstage vocabulary I’ve ever witnessed, he has an occasional stutter, and it all adds up to a tremendously charming package. Gregory Church is a delightful flight of fancy in which Kitson (or “Kitson”) stumbles upon 30,000 letters by a man he doesn’t know, and pieces together what he can about the man’s life. As terrific as that was (it’s closing very soon), I prefer Kitson in the tiny black box of the UCBT, in which he is likelier to extemporize, letting his dazzling wit flow even more. (John Leguizamo was in attendance that night, but he didn’t sit near me. Don’t know what he thought of it.)
I received a modest amount of renown in December for my writeups of a certain event at 92nd Street Y, and I’ll be back again for two events very soon. More on that as they happen.
Monthly Archives: January 2011
Comic Sans Is Good, Caps Lock Is Bad, Judd Apatow Continues to Make Progress
Emily Gordon writes:
A sausage chain of inky links:
Friend Laura Miller wrote about this at (on? for? I tried all three, and this has been driving me crazy for years, but I’m going to stick with “at,” I guess) Salon: Hideous fonts may boost reading comprehension.
At Slate, Jon Lackman asks the overdue question, “Why do Tea Partiers uppercase so many of their nouns?” Is it anyone else’s observation, especially those, like me, who have taught college English, that a lot of Americans capitalize a lot of nouns? I wonder if English is using the people who do this as a psychic medium to contact its former incarnations. Lackman alludes to this: “In the century prior to 1765, nouns were generally capitalized. (The reason for this is now obscure; Benjamin Franklin hypothesized that earlier writers ‘imitated our Mother Tongue, the German.’)”
Leila Cohan-Miccio wrote this at Splitsider, the site in the invincible trio of already extremely funny sites that’s specifically about the field/world/pathology of comedy: “In Defense of Judd Apatow’s Female Characters,” which reminds me of the rousing debate about contemporary “romantic” comedies we titled Are We Doomed, David Denby? But since I posted that in 2007, I found that repeated exposure to Seth Rogen eventually begat a fondness for Seth Rogen, which surprises me as much as anyone. I saw and liked Zack and Miri Make a Porno (I have cable now). He seems so happy to be engaged, and so humble about it. I saw him on the Today (or similar) show riding an exercise bicycle, gamely and humbly. I suddenly want him to be in more movies. And marriage will do a lot for him–maybe even make him all sensitive to the issue of trying to make better female characters, as Judd Apatow honestly is. I like a man who can admit he’s learning, and listens to the ladies.
Speaking of The Hairpin, which is referenced in one of the links above, I can’t say enough about Bonnie Downing’s column Outdated Beauty Advice, which is as timeless as, and is a visually rich and devastatingly deadpan complement to, the classic-internet classic (and, later, Broadway show, which I trust is also in Downing’s future) Miss Abigail’s Time Warp Advice. But it’s so late. I will return to this subject. TK. Just read every entry on both of these sites, laugh yourself thin, and follow 100% the advice therein at your own risk.
Two Oh One One Yippee-ki-yay
My lord there are a lot of alternate spellings for that expression. Happy 2011 to you! We look forward to doing new things here in this space this year and continuing the evolution of our (Chicago-forged!) site design, while remaining the proud obsessives we’ve been–that is, in this public and sporadically prolific way–for six years (!) now. It’s freeing to no longer be New Yorker-centric, but that also means there’s a lot of world out there to cover. We’re going to keep chasing down our particular elusive favorites, quantumly. We believe in blogging. And we’re thankful you’re still here. Tell us what you like, and we’ll listen! We’re open to all the thoughts that are fit to think. –Emily Gordon
[Image credit.]