High drama and petty jerks

I can't figure out how to do the caron and the macron and many of those pesky diacritics, so I'll just dispense with them and simply say that Leos Janacek's Jenufa kicked major Moravian ass at the Met yesterday. It's hard to beat this tale of tortured love and infanticide in intensity, but when you have Karita Mattila and Anja Silja in the leads, well, the three hours fly by particularly fast. (Not sure about those boulders, but at least the staging wasn't intrusively bad.) Forget the two intermissions: Do it nonstop! Watching and listening in awe, I thought that this was a prime example of human achievement, like sending someone to the moon or inventing a vaccine.

The return to New York reality was so much harder then, and the sight of all the well-heeled Met patrons callously ignoring a freezing homeless woman panhandling by the exit was nauseating.

To all of you rushing to your cabs and limos without pausing to give someone in need a few bucks: Fuck you, assholes!

To all of you who thought she made for a downer end to a wonderful, wonderful evening at the opera and wasn't Karita's upper register tremendous: I'll suspend my disbelief of this grab-bag of superstitions known as religion long enough to tell you to roast in hell.

The genius of Chic

Chic is one of my favorite bands of all times, so thanks to Disco Delivery for posting excerpts from a Radio 2 show about the production of two of their hits, "Good Times" and "Le Freak." Having access to the many tracks that make up the songs, hosts Richard Allinson and Steve Levine go on to isolate and analyze each element. "The overall sound on this single is as close to the perfect pop single as you can get," Allinson says about "Good Times." He could not be more right. Absolutely imperative listening for anybody with more than a passing interest in pop music.

Cat in my lap

It was with a mix of excitment and terror that I was pulled into Meow Meow's self-described "Kamikaze Kabaret" Saturday at Joe's Pub. When the Australian songstress—whose breathless act leaves the audience completely exhausted—started a song in French, she called out for a translator and I was volunteered by my so-called friends. Next thing I knew, Ms. Meow was sitting in my lap. It's not every day someone with the classic figure of a Cyd Charisse showgirl asks me to translate something or other about loins. As if this wasn't distracting enough, I could not figure out which song she was singing two inches from my flustered cheek; while I had easily identified earlier performances of Gainsbourg's "Comic Strip" and Richard Anthony's "Itsy Bitsy Petit Bikini," that one stumped me. Daniel Isengart later revealed it was by Barbara. Ha-HA! My least favorite of the classic French chanteuses.

All this to say that Meow Meow—who had already stolen the show at Weimer New York the previous week—should not be missed next time she's in town, whatever town that is. She is more punk rock than your average emo goon, and drags cabaret kicking and screaming into the 21st century.

Prepare for boarding

Quick, you only have until Sunday to see the fantabulous Wickets! The show, part of HERE's Culturemart festival, is labeled a work-in-progress, but it's a lot more polished than many supposedly finished productions—some of them on Broadway—I've had the misfortune to see over the years.

The artistic team of Jenny Rogers and Clove Galilee (both in Trick Saddle) transposed Maria Irene Fornes' 1977 play Fefu and Her Friends, which takes place in a New England house in 1935, to a transatlantic flight in the early 1970s.

All right, this is where it gets totally genius: They reconfigured the theater so it looks like you're inside the plane. The audience sits in three sections and the cast is impeccably dressed and coiffed (note that the hair is now three times the size it was in the photo) like period stewardesses—and these women are most definitely stewardesses, not flight attendants. They greet you at the door with boarding passes doubling as programs, navigate trolleys down the aisles, and offer you warm nuts and vintage copies of Life magazine. They're so in character that when I leaned back from my first-class seat to see what was going on in business, one of the passing stews whispered "Knees and elbows, knees and elbows" without breaking her glide. When the captain turns out to be Peggy Shaw, in a fun little cameo, you're not even surprised anymore.

But Wickets wouldn't amount to more than an elaborate stunt—and a godsend to fans of both Flying High and Angie Dickinson in her prime, like, oh I don't know, me—if the new concept didn't work so well with Fornes' play. The text itself is beautiful and its surrealism gives it flexibility when it comes to the setting, while the ensemble cast superbly rises to the challenge; if you spend way too much time at the theater, as I do, you'll know this is a rare combination indeed. The production also embraces the play's unabashedly feminist themes without Nth-wave irony but with plenty of slinky humor. Also it's often, um, hot.

Have I mentioned that Wickets costs only $15, and you don't have to take off your shoes?

What good is sitting alone in your room?

Latest quickie in Time Out New York: a review of the new Fujiya & Miyagi album. And look! A song from it!
MP3 Fujiya & Miyagi "Ankle Injuries" from Transparent Things (2007)

And now to the fun stuff, meaning the ka-razy Weimar New York show last Friday at Joe's Pub. Curated by Earl Dax (and previewed by my colleague Adam Feldman in TONY), Weimar New York is a diabolically entertaining revue that purports to revive the politically aware and subversively decadent spirit that once infused the cabaret scene during the Weimar Republic. Or did it? It's hard not to suspect that said scene is now largely idealized, but who cares when the new version is so wild?

The inspired organizing principle behing Weimar New York is that it packs a lot of acts into a couple of hours but they only do one number, two at most, so if things hit a lull, you know it won't last. How to describe the atmosphere? For me Penny Arcade nailed it when she exclaimed "I feel like I'm back in 1993!" Perhaps it was the heady sight of half-naked downtowners cavorting around a tiny stage. Perhaps it was a Belgian chantoosie wailing Brrrrrrrel next to a burlesque queen being molested by a severed hand next to a freakazoid (I say this with great admiration) flashing his anal piercing to the crowd. Perhaps it was Justin Bond singing Patti Smith. And perhaps it was that friggin' Penny Arcade was there! I guess that's what comes "from too much pills and liquor."

Next to that, Trisha Brown at the Kasser in Montclair over the weekend was quite sedate, but at the same time it was heady to see Brown herself get onstage at the end of I love my robots. If a 70-year-old woman choreographically engaging with robots (ie remote-controlled cardboard tubes on casters) isn't aggro in our age of youth obsession, I don't know what is.

Two of the three pieces used music by Laurie Anderson, and I was reminded of how well her work suits dance. It actually made me listen to bits from United States again—no matter how good Anderson sounded at the Kasser, there's still no way I could sit through anything she's released in the past ten years.

Li'l writers in li'l countries

Finally got around to reading Milan Kundera's essay "Die Weltliteratur—How We Read One Other" in The New Yorker. I'm no big fan of Kundera's, but he makes some food-for-thought points, particularly in the way he delineates "two kinds of provincialism: that of large nations and that of small ones." This leads to writers and audiences to deal with literature in different ways. "The small nation incalculates in its writer the conviction that he belongs to that place alone. To set his gaze beyond the boundary of the homeland, to join his colleagues in the supranational territory of art, is considered pretentious, disdainful of its own people. And, since the small nations are often in situations where their survival is at stake, they can easily present this attitude as morally justified."

Now, replace "small nation" with "minority." What Kundera writes pretty much describes what's at stakes for, say, gay or African-American scribblers in the US, and explains both why some gay or African-American writers refuse to be labeled such, and why others embrace a role closer to adovation.

It also illustrates what to me is a toxic, creativity-stifling attitude from some critics and readers, who expect writers to offer "positive role models" and represent for their peers. Kundera writes: "A nation's possessiveness toward its artists works as a small-context terrorism that reduces the entire meaning of a work to the role it plays in its homeland" Just read a popular website such as afterellen.com—where every show, movie or album is judged by simplistic criteria such as "But does it make lesbians look good?"—to see that small-context terrorism in action. All right, so deriding a pop-culture website for its critical acumen is easy, but this applies to more highbrow reviewers as well, and it places on writers/artists who are not straight white men (these guys never have to justify anything—just ask people as different as Jay McInerney, Cormac McCarthy or Stephen King) a whole different burden of expectations.

Unrelated: Kundera goes on to remind us that Gombrowicz once wrote a text titled "Against Poets," in which he reacted "to the view of poetry as the untouchable goddess of Western modernism." Yay, someone taking a stand against poetry!

Art for sale

This story started picking up steam early December, and it shows no sign of letting up. Basically, the old-guard French museum establishment is up in arms because the Louvre is the latest in a small group of French museums (including the Pompidou Center opening a branch in Shanghai) to spread out abroad. It has signed an agreement to license its name and loan items from its collection to a new museum in Abu Dhabi. The use of the "Louvre" name itself will cost 400 million euros, according the the contract that was leaked to Le Monde; other museums should eventually strike similar deals, and it all could bring $800–$1 billion to French museums.

Curators and art figures have been signing petitions and raising a ruckus, claiming France is "selling its soul" and art cannot be treated as crassly as wine or those cute little Vuitton
bags Abu Dhabi residents also buy by the truckload.

While one can legitimately question the specific choice of an authoritarian, clanic emirate for a Louvre outpost, it bugs the hell out of me to see those defenders of the artistic patrimoine dump on the exportation of French museum brand names in general.

What crock!

So it's great to endlessly whine about US-led globalization and how it stifles French culture, but when we have a chance to actually take advantage of globalization—and, it seems to me, in a manner that makes cultural and financial sense—everybody's screaming bloody murder. How stuck-up, reactionary and downright foolish can the French art elite get?

In praise of Jean-Claude Vannier

Philippe Garrel's latest movie, Regular Lovers, opens in New York this week. One thing immediately caught my eye in the opening credits: music by Jean-Claude Vannier. Alas, the soundtrack is a very sparse piano one, quite far from Vannier's signature 101 strings. Still, a good pretext to post a few samples by this most brilliant of composers-arrangers.

For many, Vannier is known only as the man who did the luxuriant arrangements (which Beck shamelessly plagia…er, borrowed from on a Sea Change track) on Serge Gainsbourg's 1971 concept album Histoire de Melody Nelson. Vannier's profile was raised in the US and the UK with last year's CD reissue of his own 1972 album L'enfant assassin des mouches. Vannier and a starry cast of guest singers performed both Melody Nelson and L'enfant live at the Barbican in October ’06. Over the years he's also released solo albums; you can find some MP3s at the excellent Filles Sourires site.

But I love him best when he works with pop singers, and in a few glorious years in the late ’60s–early ’70s, he produced/arranged/cowrote with the best of them. Vannier could do it all, but his forte was decadent strings that suggested vaguely illicit pleasures and veiled menace. My personal favorite is the venomous "Chanson de Slogan," written by Gainsbourg for Pierre Grimblat's 1969 movie Slogan; it's a baroque exploration of decadent aesthetics that epitomizes the incredibly fruitful Vannier/Gainsbourg collaboration.
MP3 Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin "Chanson de Slogan"

It made sense that Vannier would also work on the albums Gainsbourg wrote for Jane Birkin in the 1970s. The trio's collaboration was most effective on her first solo effort, 1973's Di Doo Dah, from which these two tracks are taken.
MP3 Jane Birkin "C'est la vie qui veut ça"
MP3 Jane Birkin "Leur plaisir sans moi"

Another superb Gainsbourg track, this time from the 1967 TV musical Anna; the song was recorded by both Marianne Faithfull and Anna Karina. Just check out that fantastic bass line.
MP3 Anna Karina "Hier ou Demain"
Watch Marianne sing "Hier ou Demain" in Anna

More Gainsbourg with an instrumental from his soundtrack for the 1970 Pierre Granier-Deferre thriller La Horse. Banjo and harpsichord? Sure, why not!
MP3 Serge Gainsbourg "La Horse"

Françoise Hardy, another 1960s icon, didn't work that much with Vannier, which is too bad because her breathy vocals combined well with his arrangements. The strings whirl on "L'amour en privé" reminds me of that on David McWilliams' "The Days of Pearly Spencer" (produced in 1967 by Mike Leander).
MP3 Françoise Hardy "Dame Souris Trotte" from Soleil (1970)
MP3 Françoise Hardy "L'amour en privé" from Message Personnel (1973, written by Gainsbourg for the movie Projection Privée)

Vannier cowrote and produced the first song on Brigitte Fontaine's most pop album as well.
MP3 Brigitte Fontaine "Il pleut" from Brigitte Fontaine est… (1968)

Vannier also collaborated with one of the great French singer/songwriter/pop stars—and certified eccentrics—of the 1960s and 1970s, Michel Polnareff. This song has one of the greatest chorus buildups in the history of pop music.
MP3 Michel Polnareff "Dans la maison vide" a single from—when else?—1969

Robert Bresson, ascetic genius, sublimizing horndog

Very interesting interview with actress/author Anne Wiazemsky on the France Inter radio show "La Bande à Bonnaud," on the occasion of her new book, Jeune Fille. Wiazemsky's name will be familiar to cinephiles—she was in Godard's La Chinoise and Weekend, as well as in Pasolini's Teorema and Porcile. She's been writing novels for a while now, with some success, and her latest is a largely autobiographical one about the making of her first movie, Bresson's Au Hasard Balthazar—yes, the allegory with the donkey—in 1966. Quite a way to start off a film career.

The interview is priceless about Bresson's working methods. Wiazemsky (who has a wonderful radio presence) speaks about working with him when she was 17-18. When they first met, she was totally into commercial cinema, reading about stars in pop magazines, and she wasn't familiar with his work. For her audition, Bresson made Wiazemsky read lines from his own first movie, the 1943 nun flick Les Anges du peché. Her grandfather, Catholic writer and Nobel Prize–winner François Mauriac, authorized her to work with Bresson, with the warning that the director was on the odd side.

The first thing Bresson did on the shoot was to order Wiazemsky to live in the same house—she had to go through his bedroom to reach hers, and they shared a bathroom. She could talk only to him, had to have all her meals with him; she was completely separated from the rest of the crew (which nicknamed her "the little captive"). But Wiazemsky also recalls that the captive was complicit, and that she enjoyed submitting to the older man's authority and knowledge. She is really insightful about the love Bresson had for his actresses, including her, a love he sublimated in his movies. Funnier are anecdotes about Bresson going nuts about the donkey, which he apparently tried to direct exactly like the human actors. Walter Green, Wiazemsky's costar, was so shaken by the experience that he gave up acting and became a dentist; he also went on to marry 1970s star Marlène Jobert and sire…Eva Green.

The year after the movie came out, Wiazemsky married Godard. (How's that for a transition?) When Bresson learned about it, he called her and told he she was nuts to marry Godard, who was too old for her; Godard got furious that a director he admired so much would meddle in his private life. The show then played a clip of Godard calling Bresson both a great inquisitor and a humanist, adding that people who go to the movies once a year should make that movie one by Bresson, since a Bresson movie is the world.

Non-Viennese froth

In the NY Times, Anne Midgette writes about an upcoming operetta series in New York. Since it takes places at the Austrian Cultural Forum, it obviously focuses on the Viennese strain, which, as Midgette makes clear in her intro, somehow has become one of only two styles of operetta for many Americans (the other being Gilbert & Sullivan): "The term [operetta] mostly conjures up visions of ostrich feathers and rhinestones; Central European duchies with ornate military uniforms; pretty melodies crooned by bright-eyed ingénues." Jeez, and you wonder why people think it's irremediably corny.

But wait a minute! Operetta's not all Viennoiseries. Not only did France contribute a little Alsatian dude called Offenbach, but operetta remained a viable artistic and commercial form there way into the 1950s. (Francophones can check out this thorough, instructive site on French musical theater.) On a trip to Paris last year, for instance, I caught a charming revival of Toi C'est Moi, composed by the Cuban exile Moïse Simons in 1934, with loony lyrics by (mostly) Albert Willemetz. The show was a frothy mix of Parisian humor and the Latin rhythms Simons incorporated into his score, and I think it could seduce Broadway fans here. The yummy Susan Graham actually covered Toi C'est Moi's "C'est ça la vie, c'est ça l'amour" and "Vagabonde" on her 2002 CD dedicated to French operetta, but here's the show's comic highlight in a 1933 recording by Pauline Carton and the mononamed Koval. Now forgotten, Carton once was one of the most popular character actresses of French stage and film (think Marjorie Main).

MP3 Pauline Carton "Sous les palétuviers"

The style is tricky to bring back to life though: For every brilliant staging of Offenbach by Laurent Pelly, you get a failure like Alain Resnais' stultifying 2003 film adaptation of Maurice Yvain's 1925 Pas sur la bouche. (I'd love to have seen last year's Châtelet revival of Francis Lopez's catchy Le chanteur de Mexico—which upped the kitsch factor by starring Rossy de Palma and boasting a flamboyant poster by Pierre et Gilles.)

Our most outspoken advocates in town are Jean-Philippe Clarac and Olivier Deloeil, artistic directors of L'Opéra Français de New York; they know how good French operetta can be—their enlightening six-part TV doc about it in 2002 is required viewing for anybody with an interest in the popular music of the 19th and 20th centuries—and last November put together a program titled "Les folies de l'opérette" that included Yvain next to Offenbach. (The company's music director, Yves Abel, is no operetta slouch either, since he worked on Graham's CD, among other accomplishments.) Let's hope these guys help raise the consciousness level so we can start seeing more French operetta in New York—including some Offenbach other than Tales of Hoffman, please. I'm totally convinced that Offenbach shows such as La Belle Hélène, Orphée aux Enfers and La Périchole could draw New Yorkers, and possibly start off a classical fashion similar to baroque.

It's…different

Or so said a man sitting behind me during intermission at the Met yesterday evening. But Tan Dun's The First Emperor isn't that different from the Met's usual fare: It may be green tea–ginger to the usual strawberry-vanilla twist, but it's still ice cream. It sprinkles Western opera with some Chinese fairy dust, but the core of the piece is in a familiar form, down to the outlandish plot points of a crippled woman regaining the use of her legs after sex and a man biting out his own tongue. (Not to say that these types of development are typically Western, but that they'll be familiar to a Western audience.)

My esteemed colleague Steve Smith has praised The First Emperor's instrumental interludes and I completely agree with him. Most of the arias are uncommonly dull (notable exception: the seduction scene between Elizabeth Futral and Paul Groves), while the music leading in and out of them is often fantastic, especially the rolling clouds of ominousness. In other words: Tan Dun writes great soundtrack cues. No wonder much of the music reminded me of Japanese soundtracks of the 1950s and 1960s.

Zhang Yimou's grandiose staging would also be familiar to Met goers accustomed to mammoth scales, and I found it visually pleasing but also rather static. Of course a 140-strong choir will look good on stage; it's the universal rule of mass attraction: more is more. But if you just plop people down there, chances are the audience's eyes—and mind—will wander. Compare and contrast with Anthony Minghella's take on Madama Butterfly, which was aesthetically somptuous and had a real sense of dynamic movement.

Speaking of mass: I threw a real hissyfit when Fox cut both school-band routines during the Ohio State-Florida halftime on Wednesday. I had endured the stupidest sport of all for way too long just to see those bands and then Fox went to commercial! In America the opera and marching bands are the main refuges for those of us in love with the use of bodies on a large scale. Gigantic human tapestries…now that's something the old communist countries knew how to do.

Bollywood sur Seine

Just as the Met is finally starting to catch up, a Euro house moves up the ante: Apparently Bollywood director Sanjay Leela Bhansali has signed on to direct a French opera at the Châtelet in Paris. We'll probably crash back down to earth when reality comes knocking (no news as to what the opera will be, or even if it's already written—scary considering the piece is scheduled for 2008) but on paper this strikes me as a stroke of genius. Bollywood and opera share a taste for extravagant situations and hyper-heightened sentiments, so the jump isn't as drastic as it looks. And Bollywood directors tend to know how to move crowds—which is good, since Bhansali has said that the show will involve a huge cast. Exciting times we live in.

Hate in a cold climate

Let's take a break from the wild cabaret stylings of Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches (which I saw for a third time on Saturday night) in order to focus on a particularly unholy week: The old-school black metallers in Dark Funeral and the fierce proggy Vikings of Enslaved land at BB King's for a Scandi double whammy on Wednesday 10, while Northsix shows that America can throw a mighty punch as well by hosting a seriously scary evening of domestic brutality that includes Southern Lord signees Lair of the Minotaur and cultish BM band Krieg on Saturday, January 13.

To get in the mood, here's a selection of MP3s by some favorite underground extremists, harvested from various European fields. Think of it as Travel + Leisure for the maleficent set.

I find extreme metal makes for invigorating listening, which some may find odd considering it's a genre dedicated to nihilism and eeeevil. But the sheer intensity and ultra-dense texture of these sonic tapestries is unparalleled; the listening experience is very tactile. And I realize I may torpedo whatever cred I have left by writing this, but this stuff also works great at the gym. The crazy-fast BPMs would get anybody going on the treadmill, and the looks from people next to you hearing the primitive shrieks bleeding through the earphones? Priceless.

England's Anaal Nathrakh pretty much laid down the rules for the necro subgenre on its debut, The Codex Necro. The duo plays some of the most stomach-churningly violent music I've ever heard, and its latest, Eschaton, shows no sign of slack. I reviewed it for TONY a few weeks ago, and here's a taste:
MP3 Anaal Nathrakh "The Necrogeddon" from Eschaton (2006)

France, where metal and hard rock had always faltered, has recently emerged as a rather fertile ground for mysterious—even by BM's standards—combos that take black metal in unpredictable, often experimental directions, making the Scandis sound like the nerd squad in a John Hughes comedy. Hailing from the darken lands of Normandy and Burgundy, as well as the hellhole known as Paris, I give you Malcuidant, Arkhon Infaustus and Blut aus Nord.
MP3 Malcuidant "…et la complainte se tut…" from L'Hymne de la Ghilde (2005)
MP3 Arkhon Infaustus "Epsilon: Saturn Motion Theology" from Perdition Insanabilis (2004)
MP3 Blut aus Nord "The Howling of God" from The Work Which Transforms God (2003)

The aforementioned Enslaved is only the top of the Viking metal iceberg (so to speak). Good thing that the field's crowded, too, because frankly you can never have enough albums hatched in forges by burly men claiming to be inspired by valkyries and ice-covered paganism. Speaking of ice, deaths in extreme metal are known to be pretty dramatic: Musicians die of exposure, or they fall from a bridge and break their neck on a frozen river—which at least isn't as bad as allegedly eating your dead bandmate's brain.

Tyr comes from the Feroe Islands and offers a melodic, almost dreamy, folk-inspired version of the Viking genre; the production values are relatively high as well, which seems to be a folk-metal trademark (think of Estonia's Metsatöll or the grandiose Finntroll). On the other hand, take Graveland, hailing from the well-known Viking province of, er Poland, with a big grain of salt. The band aims for the majestic with no small success but it's a really good thing we can't understand what they sing about—in interviews leader Darken espouses the kind of stupefyingly dumb theories sadly common in a certain black-metal fringe, eg Burzum et al., and among such Neofolk and industrial outfits as Death in June and Der Blutharsch. The power of the music is hard to deny; the politics stink to high heaven.
MP3 Tyr "Olavur Riddararos" from Eric the Red (2003)
MP3 Graveland "Prayer for My Ancestors" from Fire Chariot of Destruction (2005)

Similar ethical issues emerge with the Ukraine's Drudkh, though its take on Slavic pride is a lot more literate—the lyrics to The Swan Road are influenced by the work of 19th-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko.
MP3 Drudkh "Eternal Sun" from Lebedynyy Shlyakh: The Swan Road (2005)

Finally, a short trip across the Mediterranean to Israel and Tangorodrim—hey, if Israel can compete in the Eurovision Song Contest, I can include it in a post about European extreme metal. The band's latest is on Southern Lord, ensuring easy access in the US at least.
MP3 Tangorodrim "Bestial Scent" from Unholy and Unlimited (2006)

And speaking of the US, Americans aren't well known for BM (or Viking metal for that matter) but there are exceptions, and they tend to be one-man bands like Xasthur, Leviathan and my favorite of all, rehtaF ruO. Hailing, I believe, from Florida, [edit: as it turns out, San Antonio, TX] rehtaF ruO has made a demo CD and one proper album, Boiled in Goat Blood, a monument of paradigmatic bedroom metal. The entire thing is terrifying, a mess of lo-fi hisses, buzzes and inhuman screams, but this track has got to be the worst of all.
MP3 rehtaF ruO "Child Sacrifice" from Boiled in Goat Blood (2000)

Enjoy!

Crap on toast

For some unfathomable reason, there seems to be some kind of buzz around Marcus Sakey and his debut novel, The Blade Itself. First a positive blurb and an interview in PW, now a fairly encouraging review from Janet Maslin in the Times. I know, I know—Maslin's taste is incomprehensible. But how could even she get hoodwinked by such a pathetic thriller? Actually, the word "thriller" should come in quotation marks whenever used in conjunction with The Blade Itself, a book in which each plot turn is so clumsily phoned in that any reader with half a brain will be able to skip a few pages and not miss a thing.

As for style, every other sentence drips with the kind of affected toughness that contaminates the worst noirs. Sakey has obviously read his elders and betters, but he hasn't absorbed what it is that makes them good—moral ambiguity—and only regurgitates chunks of ultra-pasteurized clichés; it boggles the mind that he could be mentioned in the same breath as James Ellroy or even the overrated Dennis Lehane (has anybody praising him actually read his preposterous Shutter Island, from 2003?).

But perhaps it's Sakey's reading of his peers that's the problem. As he says on his website, "Mostly I read crime and lit-fic, but every now and then you gotta branch out" (this in regard to Philip Pullman's wonderful The Golden Compass). Well duh! No wonder Sakey's novel feels so limited: It draws not from life or fiction in general, but from a narrow sliver of fiction. As Gordon Ramsay would put it: Oh for fuck sake!

Wild horses couldn't keep me away

Went back for a second helping of Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches yesterday. A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how this is one of the most exciting shows of the year. That assessment was confirmed yesterday: Kritzer is it. January 6 is your last chance to catch her before she leaves for the out-of-town tryout of Legally Blonde. Go, go, go!

The saddest thing is that the Sheila and I were among only a handful of women at Joe's Pub yesterday. I can't even remember the last time I was in such an overwhelmingly male environment. Being surrounded by men isn't the sad thing, of course; no, what's sad is that women just don't seem to get into this kind of shows, even though it's hard to think of a more "empowering" (ahem) spectacle that Leslie Kritzer bringing down the house through pipes of steel and sheer star wattage. Ages ago I wrote a piece for The Village Voice about the lone condition of the show tune–loving lesbian. Things have not changed one bit, and I'll just say once again how much it pains me that lesbians still flock to the worst guitar-strummed, clichéd modes of female expression while ignoring the deliciously subversive wonders of the musical-theater world.

Upcoming Marvel

Just got an announcement that Elizabeth Marvel will participate in Classic Stage Company's reading series, the First Look Festival. This year it's dedicated to Chekhov, and Marvel will be one of the actors reading Three Sisters on February 12. Engrave this on your calendar, as any appearances by this most charismatic of performers must not be missed. Her Hedda Gabler (pictured) and her Blanche Dubois, both under the direction of Ivo Van Hove at New York Theater Workshop, are among the greatest performances of the past decade, and she manages to wring haunting moments from the most undercooked plays, like Terrorism or Dark Matters. I actually make it a point to see everything she does, and so should you.

Oh yeah, the rest of the First Look lineup ain't too shabby either: Kathleen Chalfant in The Cherry Orchard (January 22); Dianne Wiest, John Mahoney and Michael Stuhlbarg in The Seagull (January 29); Peter Dinklage in Uncle Vanya (February 5). This is why we live in New York, folks.

Weekend update

What's with that trend of bands playing one of their albums live from top to bottom? My thoughts on the phenomenon in today's New York Times.

The Christmas break has just flown by and thanks to a nasty case of flu I didn't accomplish a single of my goals—go to MoMA, see movies at noon, walk over the Brooklyn Bridge to Chinatown, play Halo while eating delicious Indian sweets from Jackson Heights.

When I was five or six, I got my tonsils taken out in Paris. As soon as I was out of the operating room, my mother, never one to miss an opportunity to see some art, took me to the ballet at the Paris Opera (I'm pretty sure it was Coppelia). Alas, I got sick at intermission and we had to leave; on the way out, I left a trail of crimson-red (I'd been fed strawberry sorbet to soothe my throat) vomit all over the marble staircase. It took me 35 years to be so sick that I'd have to leave a show, which is what happened at yesterday's Ballet Trockadero de Monte Carlo matinee. Right in the middle of Pas de Quatre, I was overwhelmed by a coughing fit worthy of Marguerite Gautier, aka Camille, aka Violetta Valéry; the only option was to leave. So ended my one and only outing in this lost week. What a waste of free time.

Speaking of free time, and perhaps too much of it, Sufjan Stevens has released a box set collecting his Christmas songs over the years. I find Stevens interesting mostly in the context of his relationship with Daniel Smith, the brain behind Danielson; it's touched upon in JL Aronson's new doc on Danielson (which I reviewed for TONY). If Aronson had had more guts, he'd have centered the entire film on the All About Eve connection between Stevens and Smith, and used it to show how the more banal talent gets less recognition than the pricklier one.

20/20 hindsight

Yep, there was quite a bit of good theater in New York this year, and here's what I liked, listed in chronological order:

1. Red Light Winter, by and directed by Adam Rapp, at the Barrow Street Theater. Rapp is moving beyond shock tactics and into craft.

2. BLACKland, devised by Krétakör and directed by Árpád Schilling, at Montclair U's Kasser Theater. A political revue created and interpreted by a super-physical Hungarian troupe. The Kasser is quickly becoming one of the area's most daring venues. But the one thing that depresses me every time I go there is the dearth of students in the audience, especially considering they get free tickets. I guess those cretins would rather be at some sports event.

3. The Wooster Group's revival of its take on O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte at St. Ann's Warehouse. Fucking A! This is theater!

4. Measure for Pleasure, by David Grimm and directed by Peter DuBois at the Public Theater. The year's smartest, warmest, most generous comedy. And the most unfairly neglected.

5. The History Boys, by Alan Bennett and directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Broadhurst Theater. Enough has been said about the merits of Alan Bennett's play. But why American directors can't put together anything as kinetic as what Hytner does here is a mystery to me.

6. The Drowsy Chaperone. Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison's score is delicious pastiche of the old Gershwin/Wodehouse musicals of the 1920s. The show is an oddly intimate experience at the cavernous Marquis Theater.

7. Spring Awakening. I missed the Broadway version but on the Atlantic's small stage Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's ode to burgeoning teen sexuality was pretty darn cool. And it showed the horrible, embarrassing High Fidelity that rock & roll is a state of mind, not a few hasty references and a couple of dudes in band T-shirts.

8. Eraritjaritjaka. Heiner Goebbels hardly ever disappoints and this year's entry, part of the Lincoln Center Festival, was gripping, using technology in a thrilling way. The Met should get him to direct an opera.

9. Mother Courage and Her Children. Edge-of-your-seat spectacle from the two merrymakers known as…Bertolt Brecht and Tony Kushner?

10. Mary Poppins. Some say it's too long or clumsy or overblown—I don't care. I'm sure the ungainly sight of my jaw hanging fairly low in amazed delight was a turn-off for my neighbors at the New Amsterdam but yeah, I loved it. This is exactly what an all-ages show should be.

But the best thing about going to the theater may well be watching actors at work. Here are my all-stars:

• Julie White in The Little Dog Laughed—but the Off Broadway version, which I found less shrill.

• Kate Valk in The Emperor Jones. The best actor in New York. Only Elizabeth Marvel comes close.

• Christine Ebersole in Grey Gardens. Yeah yeah yeah…but she really is that good.

• Michael Stuhlbarg and Euan Morton in Measure for Pleasure. Stuhlbarg is acknowledged as a great by now, but Morton is turning into a real asset to the New York stage. He was rather cool in Brundibar as well.

• Sherie Rene Scott in Landscape of the Body. She can sing, she can act, she can slink. Old-school sass and an underrated performer.

• Nellie McKay in Threepenny Opera. Watching that show, I could not figure out what the hell McKay was doing. Then I realized she was doing the part filtered through an old Hollywood idea of an ingenue done by someone who can't act. Not sure it worked at the moment, but several months later it sticks in my mind and remains the only thing worth saving from that wretched production.

• Ian McDiarmid in Faith Healer. The play was a snooze (and Cherry Jones was uncharacteristically awful) until McDiarmid came in at the beginning of the second act, with his ratty orange hair and fantastic timing.

• Judy Greer in Show People. Watching the quirky Greer was taking a master class in reactive acting: Even when she wasn't speaking, Greer was in the scene—without mugging to draw attention to herself. It's a fine line, and one she walked beautifully.

• Felicia Finley in The Wedding Singer. A couple of quick in-and-out numbers were enough for Finley to bring down the house. It was fun to watch someone chew the scenery with such gleeful vulgarity.

• Nina Hellman and Jeremy Shamos in Trouble in Paradise. Subtle comedic chemistry from these undersung stalwarts of the Downtown stage.

• Sherry Vine in Carrie. Whaaaaa…???

The year's visuals belonged to the opera, though: Joyce DiDonato going mad in Hercules at BAM; Viviva Genaux and Elizabeth Futral in super-sexy Handelian closeness in Semele at City Center; Madama Butterfly's gorgeous death at the Met. (Note to potential employers of Julie Taymor, however: Stick a fork in her, she's done.)

Post-apocalypto

I've always been fascinated by novels and films taking place in a post-apocalyptic world. Give me a small group of survivors trying to make it in a dramatically altered landscape, and I'm happy. I'm not talking about movies depicting the catastrophe itself (ie Deep Impact or The Day After Tomorrow) but about the ones specifically dealing with the aftermath—the nuclear winter of our discontent.

Entries in the well-stocked post-apocalyptic genre include novels like Stephen King's The Stand, Nevil Shute's On the Beach, Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Michel Houellebecq's The Possibility of an Island, even Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, and quite a few films: Ray Milland's Panic in Year Zero!, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later…, Michael Anderson's Logan's Run, Boris Sagal's The Omega Man, Lynne Littman's still-striking Testament (which shows just how much of an emotional punch you can pack with a budget of approximately $12).

On two completely different planes from each other, we can add Cormac McCarthy's The Road and the CBS drama Jericho to the shelf. Neither is hot-off-the-press new, but I'm just getting to them so fine, I'm late.

I'd never been able to finish a Cormac McCarthy book until The Road. His prose felt too affected for my taste—goth for boys—but The Road's stark minimalism actually allows the flights of poetry to support the book rather than choke it. The plot is simple: A man and his son travel through a blighted, ash-covered landscape where nothing grows anymore. They encounter some of the post-apocalyptic staples, like cannibalism and a hidden stash of food, but mostly McCarthy zeroes in on primal emotions and describes incredibly well the abyss the characters face on a daily basis.

Like The Day After, Jericho takes place in Kansas—shorthand, obviously, for all-American. I've only seen the pilot so far but the show looks decent, even though there's a surfeit of hugging. (Hugging has got to be the single most overused—and irritating—gesture in American movies and TV shows. It's a skin-deep show of support that signifies a lot and means nothing.) Jericho follows the Lost formula pretty closely in terms of the group of people it throws in together, down to a hunky-but-broodily-sensitive male lead. What the show lacks so far is that sense of existential dread that permeates the best post-apocalyptic fiction (I'd even include Bergman's Shame in that bunch), as illustrated by the fact that the creators couldn't even bring themselves to let the little girl die on the crashed school bus. Oh well, I'll take Jericho, even if it turns out to be more like Dawson's Irradiated Creek.

Next: Arctic expeditions run amok!

Will it snow in July?

Will it rain toads? Is this a sign of the impending Apocalypse? In the middle of the latest issue of Vice there's quite a 1-2-3 punch: an excerpt from a text (unpublished novel titled Velvet? unclear) by Andrea Dworkin sandwiched between short stories by Chuck Palahniuk and Neil LaBute. Ka-POW! I mean, I never thought I'd see these names in such close proximity, and in Vice, of all places. And the Dworkin story, nominally about hitting a dog, is the most surprising of the bunch (I did enjoy the other two as well, but their authors deliver exactly what you'd expect from them).

Actually when I first noticed that there was a piece by Dworkin in the fiction issue of Vice, my first thought was that one of the mag's smart asses had written a parody. But the story, "I'm Half Dead" isn't what anybody would consider a "typical" Dworkin screed so it had to be real.

More depressing is the LaBute piece, "Slave to the Office," which somehow aims to make you feel faint pangs of pity for an office bully halfway between asshole and pathetic. Boy has LaBute painted himself into a corner at this point. He has such ease as a stylist, but for what? Cheap effects in the service of devious targets. Still, I keep going back to his stories and plays. It must be nostalgie de la boue.

Palahniuk, at least, achieves a certain 21st-century Freaks-ishness in "Mister Elegant." The take on ideas of normalcy and physical appearance may be only Twilight Zone–deep, but I found the piece's black humor rather effective. It somehow reminded me a bit of what I like in Judy Budnitz's stories. Her work is less anchored in a certain type of hyper-reality, but she also captures the grotesqueries of life.

So there you go: Vice's fiction issue. It's free, pick it up.