The Bluestocking, vol 109: The First Great Microwave Play
Happy Friday!
I've just finished my second week at the Atlantic, which is currently based in a co-working space, aka Nathan Barley's spiritual home. There was a notice this week that "Jar and Fern" would be running a terrarium workshop in the communal space at lunchtime; there are dogs everywhere; last Friday was vegan "plate a plant" day. I'm really excited for what next week will bring. Ukelele lessons? Free moustache wax samples? Unicycling demonstrations?
Yesterday I went to the Royal Court to see seven methods of killing kylie jenner, a two-hander about social media storms. I had a few quibbles about the dramaturgy (and am probably 27% too old, white and Radio 4 for it) but it make me think about how new technologies gradually get incorporated into art. First there's the gimmick phase, where a reference is dropped in for LOLs. This can last an unfortunately long time, as I discovered when I went to see an update of Jude The Obscure at the Hampstead theatre earlier this year and everyone else fell about laughing at an Oxford don asking another character, "Do you VAPE?" in the manner of Edith Evans.
The second phase is more interesting: when technological natives start bringing the grammar of new developments into their work without it being a big deal. Alex Garland's The Beach was the first novel I can remember where people played videogames not for effect, but because . . . people play games! Patrick Marber's Closer did the same with internet chatrooms. Hollyoaks and Sherlock brought texting culture to television. Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends perfectly captured the falling cadence and bathos you can achieve in WhatsApp or Gchat. Until now, though, I haven't seen anyone really capture social media in a way that seems integrated rather than self-referential. (You know, the cultural equivalent of "here comes the science bit, concentrate".)
That's always a more interesting phase because it stops the tech being boiled down to one thing: internet is full of pervs, social media makes us narcissists, whatsapp makes teenagers illiterate. It just becomes part of the artistic palette. I've recently read a play which creates the feeling of a Twitterstorm without the form of one. That feels more interesting that someone coming on to shout "VERA! YOU'RE TRENDING!"
Anyway, I'm thinking of writing about this but the horror of theatre is that there's so bloody much of it that someone always pops up to go: um, how could you not reference [Edinburgh fringe production from three years ago]? Still, if there are other examples of artistic works that were the first ones to really "get" a new technology, I'd love to hear about it. What was the first great play where a major plot point relied on a microwave?
Helen
Faking it: Are you really you?
Occasionally Faking It had a contestant who spent the whole month in foot-shuffling self-consciousness. One episode tasked a prim lawyer with becoming a garage MC and he never got over how unlike him it was to rap.
Alex wasn’t like that. Things got very real when he went for his first kickboxing lesson. All Tony’s male fighters were so much bigger than Alex that Tony’s girlfriend, Berenice, climbs in the ring with him. When she literally shoved him off the mat he made no effort to hide the fact that he is curled up and wheezing. He was not trying to be anything other than what he was: a young man who’d been hit in the face and who needed to get a lot better, quickly.
So he had his head shaved. He started walking with more bounce in his knees. He stayed in character around the clock and filmed his video diaries in an east London accent.
“Why did you commit so much?” I ask him, trying to find something that might explain his change of mind. Maybe he was secretly trying to shed his old identity all along.
It's crazy - when I saw this story trailed with "Alex from Faking It changed his whole life after being on the show", I was instantly interested. That programme was 19 years ago, but I can still remember how transformative it was for this posh (and it turned out, gay) guy to be accepted by these Hard Men of Bouncerdom. It was oddly touching, too.
Jill Lepore: The Lingering Of Loss
She’d found out she had leukemia right about when I started trying to get pregnant. Her cells divided. My cells divided. Our selves divided. I’d taken her to the E.R., that very first night, when she felt woozy, really woozy, scary woozy, but, even as she lay in a bed beneath a blanket made of paper, shrinking, she’d ended up engaging the doctor on call in a midnight analysis of the comparative narrative strategies of Quentin Tarantino and Spike Lee, and wondered whether they knew some of the same people in Tenafly, New Jersey; did he have cousins there? I was with her through terrifying treatments, each new unavailing misery. And she was with me through ultrasounds and feeling the baby’s first kicks, each new impossible joy. She wrote to her doctors in August of 1998, when I was in my first trimester, and she was considering an experimental bone-marrow transplant, “How is ‘success’ defined? Is it simply living through the procedure?”
She lived through it. But living through it was not the definition of success. When she was sure she could not survive, when her doctors had given up, she decided to refuse to die until my baby came; she would wait to meet him, and only then would she let go. She wanted to wave to him on some kind of existential highway, driving in opposite lanes. It was like a game of chicken. Due date, death date—it gave a whole new meaning to the word “deadline.”
This is just beautiful. Regular readers will know of my love of The Heavens, and this piece captured some of the same emotions about grief, and the way that a lost one ebbs away from you, then returns occasionally in an unexpected pulse. A face, a noise, a line of writing. Grief is not a linear process.
(Don't do drugs)
Taking the premise of Yesterday seriously
There is only one band that vanishes in this Fabs-free universe, supplying one of the film’s biggest laughs, but all this means is that Curtis and Boyle have made the fundamental flaw in their premise transparent for the sake of a joke. Clearly the butterfly effect is another thing that has disappeared from Jack’s post-coma timeline. “A world without The Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse,” says one character, in a film where a world without The Beatles is almost exactly the same.
What if the Beatles never existed?
How Trump survived the Access Hollywood tapes
Their ticket had been a shotgun marriage, one of convenience more than love. Yet Trump had grown unusually fond of Pence. There was a sincerity to his running mate that he thought rare and endearing. Certainly, Trump found Pence a bit alien: the way he was always praying; the way he referred to his wife, Karen, as “Mother”; and the way the couple was constantly holding hands. (“Look at them!” Trump would tease. “They’re so in love!”) But he appreciated the earnestness with which Pence seemed to believe, as so few in the party did, that Trump was a decent person. Trump had worked hard to earn that faith. On the night of the October 4 vice presidential debate, he even left a voice mail for Pence letting him know that he would be saying a prayer for him.
Speaking in Ohio just after the Access Hollywood bombshell dropped, Pence had initially dismissed the news as just another media hatchet job. Yet soon after, he called Trump from the road, checking in as he did daily, sounding upset. He advised Trump to offer a sincere apology. That was the last anyone had heard from the VP nominee. Pence had gone back to Indiana and bunkered down, cutting himself off from the outside world, praying with his wife about what to do next and telling his advisers that he wasn’t sure he could continue with the campaign.
To the extent Trump felt regret, it was over disappointing the Pences.
“Oh boy,” he said Friday afternoon after hanging up with his running mate. “Mother is not going to like this.”
MOTHER. MOOOOOOOOOTHER.
(This gif has made me miss Stephen)
Quick links:
"One of the things that always struck me psychologically about Buffy and about The Sopranos was that if you were watching The Sopranos, it was as though you were watching it next to a middle-aged man, even if you yourself were a teenage girl." Emily Nussbaum and Matt Zoller Seitz on television criticism.
I found this piece on Sam Shepard - not a playwright I know much about - really insightful.
"What happened to the Democrat blogosphere?" Wow, I had forgotten about the Daily Kos. Reading this, I think the simple answer is "social media happened", because pretty much the same collapse happened in Britain despite very different political conditions.
Until next time . . .