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file770_feedscalziwhatever_feedIt’s a short and sweet oldy but a goody this time out, from Buddy Holly. Why this one? Why not? It’s been covered by just about everyone, from James Taylor to Erasure, and I really like the song, and I had free time this weekend, so here we are. If you like it, fabulous, if you don’t, well, it’s two minutes long, it’ll be over quickly enough.
And for those of you who have somehow never heard the original, here you go:
— JS
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In The Black Utopians (2024), Aaron Robertson writes that, “[t]he apparent persistence of abysmal realities for black people, and the certainty that there exists much more besides, is the soil from which black utopianism emerges. This tradition has encouraged black people to decide for ourselves how our inner resources can best be used to transform the outer world. It is an unceasing orientation toward the possibilities inherent in black social life.” For this and other reasons, it’s Afrofuturism’s time in the sun (Black skin gleaming with Vaseline), and Ytasha L. Womack is its prophet.
Womack was instrumental in expanding our understanding of Afrofuturism as the author of the defining, pioneering, and groundbreaking Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (2013), in which she described Afrofuturism as “an intersection of imagination, technology, the future and liberation.” The term “Afrofuturism” itself was coined by Mark Dery in the 1990s, and it has come to represent more than a genre but a worldview, a complete philosophy of aesthetic approach, scientific principles, and cultural themes. Womack’s own view of Afrofuturism is thus:
Afrofuturism is an exploration of outer space, the symbolic great beyond that hovers beyond the mental, emotional, and physical boundaries placed upon us. It is also an exploration of inner space, our subconscious, our dreams, and aspirations. I define Afrofuturism as a way of looking at futures or alternate realities through [an] African/African Diasporic or Black cultural lens.
In The Afrofuturist Evolution, Womack is writing to creatives who operate within the framework of this worldview. In her words, the book explores “Afrofuturism as cultural space/time relations, vision, dance, rhythm, and story as present pathways to reveal futures thinking and being,” and offers “road maps for using Afrofuturist creative approaches to craft new works, new futures, new visions; to challenge conventions; and to rethink (remix) identity.” Womack touches on how African/Afrodiasporic concepts of time and space are completely unlike, for example, Western ones, and that therefore the worldview of African and Afro-descendant peoples is necessarily quite distinct from, in particular, Western worldviews (though she notes that there is nothing to be gained from binary comparisons, as there are a multitude of ways of knowing).
Based on this perspective, Afrofuturism is not just an “artistic aesthetic” but also “a practice and a method.” So, this book is about fostering a change of outlook towards a holistic framework in approaches to Black creativity. Womack begins at the start by examining “self-narratives,” or the stories we tell ourselves about how we came to be. The Afrofuturist Evolution is the exploration of meaning-making, followed by the application of what one finds. It reads as quite mystical, framing as it does a whole way of looking at the universe, a cosmology—a way of thinking, and a way of life. A great deal of ground is covered, from traditional religions and spiritual practices to inherited trauma passed down through generations; Cyborg theory; Afrofuturist emblems and symbols which Womack calls avatars—like Sankofa, the Ankh, the Mothership, the (Afro-) Pick, the Afro, the Black (Power) Fist, crossroads, and more; and even encouragement to engage with rural locations when considering Black futurity. Sankofa in particular is important in Akan culture in considering ways to move towards a future, so Womack also considers the place of history. She says, with respect to lost African American histories, that “[there’s] a peace to be found in the scant data, histories, and guesswork we quilt.”
There is, of course, a discussion of the foremost Afrofuturist musician and philosopher, Sun Ra, and a larger discourse on the importance of music in African, Afrodiasporic, and Afrofuturist exploration and expression. Womack explores jazz, techno, house, amapiano, kwassa, hip-hop, and other genres. There’s an especially telling quote in the book from Edward Bland’s 1959 film The Cry of Jazz:
Denied a future, the joyous celebration of the present is the Negro’s answer to America’s ceaseless attempts to obliterate it. Jazz is a musical expression of the Negro’s eternal re-creation of the present.
Other Afrofuturist expressions that Womack investigates, in a lot of or somewhat less detail, are fashion and style, visual art, food (have you heard of Bronze, the first Afrofuturist restaurant?), dance, and literature—because another thing Afrofuturism can be is imaginative play in expression. I love what Womack has to say about why AI could never have created it. It’s worth quoting the passage at length:
The challenge with imagination is that we tend to drum up references that already exist, plucking them from our memory bank, much like the AI generative art programs that try to duplicate human creativity.
I once spent days on an AI art generating program prompted by words and descriptions, attempting to generate an image of a Black woman on a snowy future planet where she was actually dressed in clothing that resembled winter wear. No combination of African woman, Black woman, African princess, Black cyberpunk winter princess, and fur coat could generate anything other than a really attractive brown skinned woman in a fur, open neck halter top with her six-pack midriff exposed. At best, she’s decked in a short capelet covering her shoulders, one that matches her bustier. While these AI generated images were intriguing, it was clear that the AI was sourcing Black women from video games, comic books, or fashionable models in warmer climates. Despite the centuries of Black women who’ve lived in snowy climates (hello Detroit, London, and Chicagoland), this AI generator couldn’t project any of these images into a future snowtopia that didn’t resemble a frozen Dubai. The available reference points wouldn’t allow them to go any further.
We can always take in another set of data and reference points to override bias, being intentional to do so. However, if we’re not careful, we can allow the images and sensations we take in from media or our lives to dictate not just what we can imagine, but also what we deem possible. Such images, coupled with beliefs, can also become barriers to understanding our environment, the cultures we’re in the midst of, or other ways of life.
Ultimately, Afrofuturism is an existential search for a Black utopia (an extensive topic on its own). The Afrofuturist Evolution is a further exploration of Afrofuturistic theory, an expansive review of Afrofuturistic production, and a handbook for how to apply Afrofuturist thinking in artistic and creative practice.
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From speculative worlds to specified words, Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction utilizes essays and anthology to weave together an array of genre labels into a coherent fabric of African and African American authored works. With a unique and inclusive approach as to what constitutes “afro,” as well as to the manner in which such inclusion enhances the possibilities and authenticity of futurism, this curated collection highlights the collective lived experiences of its authors while recognizing the individual voices found within the genre. Featuring award-winning authors like Suyi Okungbowa, Cheryl S. Ntumy, and Dilman Dila, Eugen Bacon offers this collection as a way to dispel the concept of the afro-fiction monolith—and reveal the multifaceted gem that is afro-centered speculative fiction.
The anthology is premised on the notion of reconsideration and reclassification of the terms and genre labels that are popularly applied to the fiction works of African and African American authors. Interrogated throughout the anthology is the definition and distinction between “Afrofuturism” and “Africanfuturism.” Several contributors, including Bacon herself, highlight that “Afrofuturism,” while foundational, was a term coined by Mark Dery (a white writer) and arose primarily from a Western Black speculative fiction context. Nigerian American author Nnedi Okorafor further offered bibliophiles and academics the term “Africanfuturism,” which was given to emphasize the influence of religion, spirituality, culture, and language of the African continent in fiction. As evidenced in this volume’s title, Bacon prefers and provides a well-reasoned academic argument in support of Suyi Okungbowa’s chosen nomenclature of “afro-centered futurism.” Throughout the anthology, Bacon seeks to expand and re-center the conversation, positing “afro-centered futurisms” as a more expansive and authentic framework that directly incorporates African lived experiences and diverse cultural specificities from the continent itself. This approach allows for a critical distinction that includes the multitude of voices from both the African continent and the descendants of the African diaspora.
At its heart, the anthology is composed of eleven author-based chapters. Each highlighted author is paired with a scholarly inquiry and creative reflection by Bacon. The resulting effect is a work with broader basis and greater accessibility, providing rigorous and thoughtful analysis for academics in a presentation that remains inviting to a more general audience. This unique textual partnership works to ensure an approachable academic discussion that stays grounded in the ideas of the futurisms held among Afro-descendant authors.
Though the structure of the anthology rests on its ability to present each chapter as a conversation, this does not mean that the conversation lacks conflict and internal struggle. One example of this cognitive dissonance is evident in Okungbowa’s critique of Marvel’s wildly successful Black Panther movie (2018). While the film is critically and publicly praised for its organic and respectful incorporation of African and African American cultural symbols and touchstones, Okungbowa cites that the character of the Black Panther was the product of two white comic book creators—the beloved Stan Lee (Excelsior!) and Jack Kirby. Because of this, the influence of the Western lens is inseparable from the narrative, much like the impact of colonialism on native and diasporic literature. There is a question around precisely how much “afro” exists in this “afro-centered” futurism film.
A companion to this query is the anthology’s throughline revolving around the notion of “sitting with grief.” Explored in the chapter on “Black Futurisms vs Systems of Domination,” Shingai Njeri Kagunda articulates the impossibility of constructing “afro-futures” without acknowledging and ultimately dealing with the messy scars of colonial violence and its legacy of systemic injustice. Bacon and Kagunda argue that only through facing this truth can authors create worlds and futures that are not only authentic but also make ever more possible the lifting of generational trauma’s weight. Bacon describes this realization in craft as “subversive activism.”
No discussion of afro-centered literature would be complete without consideration of the liminal spaces of the diasporic identity. Woven through many of the anthology’s essays, the importance of autoethnographic authenticity in afro-futurism becomes a secondary mantra of the text. Bacon, as well as many of the authors featured in the book, argue that naming works, and applying labels to them, with the intent to create hardline delineations is decidedly a Western philosophy. This is the ideology that attempts to lock “Blackness” into a monolith. This anthology presents a counterargument, emphasizing the reality of a complex continent of people and their diasporic children. In Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction, “blackness” is not a monolith; it’s a multiplicity.
Bacon also uses this curated collection to address issues and concerns around worldbuilding and constructed languages. Noting that many speculative fiction authors create at least pieces of language within their works, Bacon and Stephen Embleton emphasize the necessity of those languages being rooted in the linguistic culture of the world it inhabits. While an ill-chosen word may pull the reader out of the narrative or date the material, linguistically connected words or phrases—or those that illustrate truisms—come weighted with assumed wisdom that adds another layer of reality to the narrative. Successful language incorporation can be modeled on the existing linguistic tradition of the author, lending not only guidance but also an unmistakable infusion of authenticity.
It should be noted, however, that contention exists around some of the authors highlighted in the collection. The perceived difficulty with some contributors—like Stephen Embleton, Xan van Rooyen, and Nerine Dorman—is that the authors are white and may not serve the interests of a discussion of afro-centered futurisms. However, as Bacon argues in the introduction of the anthology, the label of afro-centered futurisms is not designed to be exclusive but rather offer an inclusive cohort of related lived experiences and cultures not rooted in skin color but in geographic location. The inclusion of these white South African authors, then, demonstrates Bacon’s intent to unify authors of the African continent and of African descent through their shared geo-cultural and historical influences. Viewed in this way, to separate white South African authors from the rest of the continent would be incompatible with truly “afro-centered” futurism works.
Afro-Centered Futurisms in Our Speculative Fiction is a welcome introduction to viewing the broad scope of Black speculative fiction through the lens of a unique kind of unifying diversity. It highlights the connection between creator and culture: Eugen Bacon and the anthology’s contributing authors have curated a collection that is appealing to academic and casual readers alike, yet still provides an intellectually rigorous analysis coupled with some hard truths. The deeply earnest conversations within the text challenge readers to think critically about the origins and trajectories of afro-centered futurism. This book offers itself as a tool for exploring identity, confronting historical injustices, and imagining radical futures, all of which grow as branches from the deeply rooted tree of African and African diasporic histories and heritages.
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Every once in a while, I encounter the writing of an author who is not only brilliant, but who is working on a whole different mental and temporal level. This is a perfect description of Rasheedah Phillips, whose new book Dismantling the Master’s Clock is all at once a theoretical Afrofuturist powerhouse, a love-letter to Black community, and an empowering call for all people to reevaluate the ways that Western perceptions of time and race have created systemic harm for Black communities. Continuing the work of Afrofuturist theorists like Sheree Renée Thomas and Kodwo Eshun, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Afrofuturism, quantum time, and critical race theory.
Phillips, a “queer housing advocate, lawyer, [… p]arent, interdisciplinary artist, and co-creator of the art duo Black Quantum Futurism,” combines her research skills and creative viewpoint in this work. Her title, “Dismantling the Master’s Clock,” is a reference to Audre Lorde’s essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” By referring to this seminal Black theoretical essay, she signals that her work will challenge readers to dismantle what they think they know about time and to acknowledge the ways that Western, linear notions of time have dominated scientific and social discourses to the detriment of Black, African, and other Indigenous ways of knowing.
Phillips draws from her experiences as an artist-in-residence at the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, and interviews she conducted during her time there. She draws on physicists’ theories of charge-parity-time symmetry (CPT) and connects these to notions of “Colored People Time.” The latter is a common stereotype of Black peoples as lazy, and in the juxtaposition Phillips argues that modern physics, considered by contemporary society to be cutting-edge science, challenges Western notions of linear time in ways that call to mind teachings of time that have been part of Black and African cultures for centuries.
Phillips states the major premise of the book in the first chapter, “CPT Symmetry and Violations”:
by decolonizing time—by breaking free of the master’s clock that has been instrumental in sustaining systems of oppression—we can forge new pathways for liberation that are attuned to the realities, histories, and futures of Black communities. The act of reclaiming both time and the nature of reality itself is a profound step toward manifesting temporalities where Black experiences and knowledges are centered (p. 23, emphasis in original).
Phillips sets the stage for her argument in Chapter One by introducing readers to foundational theories of temporal mechanics and their interpretations by Western scientists like Isaac Newton, philosophers like Socrates and Aristotle, and the books of the Bible. Phillips argues that these perceptions of time have led to Western understandings of time as linear and progressive, a view which is “entangled with the legacy of colonialism and of the Eurocentric worldview that has been instrumental in shaping the ‘empirical’ science that often bolsters racist and colonialist narratives of progress and development” (p. 36). She notes that such views were also imposed on Indigenous peoples by Western colonizers and slaveowners, who stressed making the “best” use of time through hard work and efficiency.
Phillips emphasizes by contrast that alternate physics theories like CPT, which challenge notions of time as linear and irreversible, have the potential to open new avenues of thinking about time and race: “By taking seriously the notion that time could be nonlinear and multidirectional, we open possibilities for alternative frameworks in understanding history, progress, and human interaction” (p. 35). Phillips takes on this work herself by pointing out the ways in which narratives of time have been purposely dominated by one cultural viewpoint to the detriment of cultures that hold space for more fluid or cyclical views of time. She demonstrates that imposing a forced view of time, and linking this view to “progress,” strips Black communities of “the agency to define their own temporal experiences and realities” (p. 51).
Chapter Two, “Bending the Arrow of Time,” moves into an explanation of time as expressed in Black and African cultures. Phillips explains the goal of this chapter as “elevating Black temporalities […] These modalities are not just alternative temporal frameworks but rich, relational space-times where Black people engage with the universe in ways that diverge markedly from dominant Western narratives” (p. 55). Through examples of Black and African knowledge systems—such as Swahili concepts of Zamani and Sasa, the West African spiritual concept of Ifa, the Malian notion of Bamana, Akan perspectives of kra (the soul), mogya (blood), and sunsum (spirit), the Bantu language term “ubuntu,” and the “time-binding” Griot—Phillips highlights the diversity of thinking in African cultural views of time and explains the ways that such views parallel cultural practices and rituals linked to community building.
Shifting to US Black cultural views of time, Phillips uses examples of “hairstory”—the time-value given to Black hair maintenance and the family and community building that results from shared hair experiences—and Afrofuturist depictions of dark space phenomenon, a concept embodied by musician Sun Ra in Space Is the Place (1974) and continued by author Sheree Renée Thomas in her seminal Afrofuturist Dark Matter anthologies (2000, 2004), as well as Phillips’s own work with her Black Quantum Futurism art duo. This chapter gives a multidimensional view of African and Black temporalities, which offers an important addition to Afrofuturist and scientific thinking that resists describing African and Afrodiasporic knowledge in reductive ways.
This cultural complexity is also present in Chapter Three, “CPT Symmetry and Violations of Black Space Time,” which takes on the concept of “Colored People’s Time” and explains the ways this term has been used both within and outside of Black communities to uphold the idea that Black peoples are incapable of or unwilling to conform to Western societal expectations of punctuality. Phillips notes:
The disparaging rhetoric of CP Time, with its insensitivity toward non-Western cultural values of time, has deep historical roots and can be traced back to the legacy of colonialism, white supremacy, and slavery in the United States. To comprehend the extent of the stereotype’s racist ramifications, we must understand the historical backdrop against which the dominant culture’s emphasis on ‘being on time’ was imposed upon marginalized communities (p. 93).
Using examples ranging from Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) to J. L. King’s CP Time: Why Some People Are Always Late (2007), Phillips demonstrates how the negative connotations of CP Time—and through them, of Black peoples and their communities—have been maintained for centuries. She juxtaposes this negative rhetoric with positive descriptions of Black temporality, such as Zora Neale Hurston’s “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1934) and civil rights slogans like “The Time Is Now,” to show how Black culture has historically fought for the right to their own temporal freedoms, often linked to societal freedoms specifically withheld from Black communities. Throughout this rich explanation, Phillips weaves the story of Black clockmakers Benjamin Banneker and Peter Hill, craftsmen whose contributions to early US clockmaking efforts have gone relatively undocumented, to provide further historical context. These examples, brought together, show the critical importance for Black communities to “not only reclaim their time but to redefine it, creating spaces where time bends to cultural rhythms, historical reckonings, and futuristic aspirations uniquely our own” (p.138).
How time is claimed is also considered in Chapter Four, “Time Zone Protocols,” in which Phillips describes the history of the International Meridian Conference (1884) and Daylight Savings Time in order to demonstrate how Eurocentric powers were able to leverage these efforts to establish the Greenwich meridian, essentially placing London as “the temporal center of the world” (p. 141). This temporal shift created a time system in the US and several other countries that is inherently harmful for all people, but for Black people in particular. She offsets this history with a productive description of her efforts in 2020 to create Time Zone Protocols, an artistic and creative research project which resulted in the Prime Meridian Unconference, where participants “embraced temporal abundance, empowering a departure from traditional systems of time management” (p. 142).
Chapter Five, “Race Against Space Time: Centering Black Temporalities for Liberated Housing Futures” and Chapter Six, “Waiting, Wading, Weighting Time,” then both focus on the temporal injustices faced by Black communities. Through descriptions of the ways in which the US legal system employs time against poor, majority Black, and brown communities—which include the use of multiple mandatory legal appointments to maintain housing rights and the use of quick eviction processes that privilege landlord rights over tenant needs—Phillips argues that housing and gentrification efforts harm Black communities by treating them as temporary inhabitants of a space rather than working towards building long-term, affordable communities. In Chapter Six, Phillips compares the historical experience of African Americans to the ebb and flow of water:
What does it mean to be emancipated, pulled through the portal and out of slavery, only to be pulled back in by indentured servitude, or redlining, or forced sterilization, or police murder, while giving birth, or while sleeping, or while playing, or while protesting, or while …
The collective experience of Black people, caught in the ebb and flow of progress and setback, suggests that perhaps liberation cannot be measured in terms of “when.” The notion of “when” presupposes a linear progression toward a definitive endpoint, a concept that seems increasingly inadequate in capturing the complex reality of Black liberation (p. 285, ellipsis in original).
Although the image of Black liberation freed from a linear model of progress is significant and thought-provoking, Phillips is never one to end a chapter with pure theory. Chapter Six ends with an image of Phillips and Camae Ayewa engaging in a 2022 performance piece for Black Quantum Futurism in Kassel, Germany; the performance utilized a series of circular stages that moved with the current of the Fulda river as the performers used incantations and sounds to “[transcend] the limitations of the present moment” (p. 285).
Through her performance art, Phillips is able to provide examples of how authors and artists can utilize their craft to create temporal disruptions that connect past, present, and future to help Black communities envision new temporal orders. In Chapter Seven, “Project: Time Capsule,” she uses the example of the time capsule—a device that she notes is frequently used in Western culture to reinforce a linear time model focused on progress—to demonstrate how these time-keeping devices rarely contain narratives of Black communities. She argues that, by looking to quantum physics and its treatment of particles like electrons and photons as “exist[ing] in states of probability rather than certainty” (p. 291), Black communities can use the idea of “quantum time capsules” wielded by “Temporal Disruptors” to restore histories and futures that have been lost or negatively impacted by colonialism and enslavement (p. 295). Phillips also includes accounts of time capsules found in monuments to Frederick Douglass and KKK member Zebulon Baird Vance to showcase how the disruption of these monuments allowed communities to “hack linear time” and reveal further information about a past typically considered to be static and unchangeable. Phillips also addresses alternative time capsules like the Queen Lane and Queen Village potter’s fields in Philadelphia to educate readers about the ways in which Black lives were both erased and encapsulated in these burial sites often redeveloped into housing or public spaces, a further erasure of Blackness that can sometimes be rectified through recovery efforts backed by community support.
Dismantling the Master’s Clock does not include a typical conclusion. Instead, Phillips leaves readers with a cosmogram, a “two dimensional representation of a dynamic and multidimensional framework” (p. 328). This image is a further reminder that the facts and ideas presented in this text are not designed to be read in any specific order. As in quantum physics, Phillips reminds us that sometimes we need to move backwards to move forwards, and sometimes we need to look into the future to clearly see the past and present. By honoring the wisdom of non-linear cultural thinking, Phillips argues that Black communities can discover ways to become temporal disruptors, whether by reclaiming stolen time, refusing to acknowledge linear narratives of “progress” as the only viable reality, or through artistic and community efforts that restore lost or stolen history. The practical examples Phillips provides transcend pure Afrofuturist theory, ensuring that Dismantling the Master’s Clock is all at once a significant cultural achievement and a blueprint for lasting temporal change.
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It’s rare for a book to start with calling a baby ugly. Yet on the first page of J.D. Beresford’s 1911 novel The Hampdenshire Wonder, our narrator is joined in his railway compartment:
I looked up when the woman entered my compartment, though I did not notice the name of the station. I caught sight of the baby she was carrying, and turned back to my book. I thought the child was a freak, an abnormality; and such things disgust me.
This baby is the titular Hampdenshire Wonder. His “abnormality” takes the form of an enlarged head and an uncanny stare, and we soon learn that he is possessed of an unearthly intelligence.
Reissued by the MIT Press as part of its Radium Age series of early twentieth-century science fiction reprints, The Hampdenshire Wonder is billed as “one of the genre’s first treatments of superhuman intelligence.” This being a novel about superintelligence from 1911, there is no shortage of crankery; eugenics, craniology, and a cheerfully vicious snobbery are all present and accounted for. Yet for all its nastiness, there is a sublimated emotional throughline that makes the book a compelling addition to the steadily expanding list of Radium Age titles.
In his introduction to this new edition, Ted Chiang states that “it remains a mystery as to why quite so many pages are spent on cricket.” This is a polite way of saying that to a modern, non-sporting reader, the opening stretches of the book can feel a bit dull. But the Hampdenshire Wonder, also known as Victor Stott, is the son of Ginger Stott, a superlative cricketer, and fully thirty-one of the first forty-three pages are spent on the narrator’s “Notes for a Biography of Ginger Stott.” I confess to finding the long descriptions of bowling techniques and run counts hard going, but things are enlivened when Ginger sustains a career-ending injury. He then resolves to sire a son so that he can “[l]earn ’im to bowl from his cradle; before ’e’s got ’abits,” and who can pick up where his father left off.
This desire to conceive a son without habits, however, ends up going rather too well. Young Victor, as previously described, is born with an enlarged head and a disregard for social niceties. This drives Ginger to abandon the family, leaving Victor to be raised by his mother, Ellen Mary, and to educate himself in the library of Challis, the local landlord. Ted Chiang points out that Ellen Mary is a surprisingly marginal figure in the story, writing that “she is praised for her intelligence, but given very few lines of dialogue. The unintellectual Ginger, by contrast, gets plenty.” He goes on to say that The Hampdenshire Wonder “is actually a work of horror SF, a cautionary tale about the dangers of knowing too much.”
He’s right that the plot eventually turns on whether the Wonder is too intelligent for this ignorant world. (Unsurprisingly to readers of the tradition the novel helped spawn, poor Victor doesn’t make it out of the book alive). He’s also right that Ellen Mary has little to do beyond tending to the boy’s needs and instigating the search for his body towards the end. But what seems to me to be missing from Chiang’s analysis is the real horror at the heart of the book: The Hampdenshire Wonder is a story driven by parental neglect.
The narrator is blasé about Ginger’s desertion, writing that “[i]t is not for us to judge whether his attainments were more or less noble than the attainments of his son.” But the plot’s essentials are damning. Ginger Stott is a frustrated athlete and ex-celebrity who fathers a child to continue his legacy, only to walk away when the child doesn’t turn out the way he wants. Ginger’s childishness comically emerges when Victor begins sitting in his favourite chair:
“Look ’ere! Get out!” he said. “That’s my chair!” The child very deliberately withdrew his attention from infinity and regarded the dogged face and set jaw of his father. Stott returned the stare for the fraction of a second, and then his eyes wavered and dropped, but he maintained his resolution.
[…]
There was a tense, strained silence. Then Stott began to breathe heavily. He lifted his long arms for a moment and raised his eyes, he even made a tentative step towards the usurped chair.
The child sat calm, motionless; his eyes were fixed upon his father's face with a sublime, unalterable confidence.
Stott’s arms fell to his sides again, he shuffled his feet. One more effort he made, a sudden, vicious jerk, as though he would do the thing quickly and be finished with it; then he shivered, his resolution broke, and he shambled evasively to the door.
Ginger is absent for most of the back half of the book, and it’s hard to imagine the story playing out as it does without his desertion. While delightful and eye-catching as ever, the artist Seth’s cover for this Radium Age edition is deceptive, featuring as it does a well-dressed and conforming mother, father, and child. Far from the story of a pair of proud middle-class parents to an inhuman prodigy, The Hampdenshire Wonder is about a family torn apart by a juvenile man’s disappointment and neglect. We learn at the book’s end that Ellen Mary has died “in the County Asylum.” We get Ginger Stott’s final appearance a sentence later, as the narrator tells us, “I hear that her husband attended the funeral.”
This is another worthy reprint from the Radium Age team. Reading The Hampdenshire Wonder in a United States co-ruled by a neglectful father with his own fantasies about superhuman intelligence, I was struck by its quiet yet vivid strain of horror.
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I’m watching a video about industrialized sugar beet production. These beets aren’t destined for dinner plates. They will instead be pulverized into sugar. A piler severs the beets’ leaves and stems, leaving them in green rows on the ground for a man-driven machine that rolls across the farm. It sucks the beets up, gathers them in the trunk, and churns them out into massive heaps. The beets don’t look like the cute bulbs or even the bloody red slices I expect. Rather, these beets could be mistaken for pointy potatoes. Harvesting a monocrop, I think, looks like tedious work. This is the scene that Margie Sarsfield returns to repeatedly in her debut novel Beta Vulgaris.
We join Elise, the novel’s protagonist, as she and her boyfriend Tom drive from Brooklyn to Minnesota during the Obama-Romney campaign season. They are scheduled to work the night shift in the North Star State for two weeks, harvesting sugar beets. Elise has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and $135 left in her bank account. The fortnight of shifts, she hopes, will pay off her credit card debt and float a month’s worth of rent. But this is a novel about Millennials in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and nothing goes quite as planned. As the work begins to strain Elise—her credit card company won’t stop calling her and is Tom eyeing one of their coworkers?—the beets begin to call to her. And soon her coworkers begin to disappear, one-by-one and then two-by-two.
When the couple first arrives at their campsite—home for the next two weeks—they befriend a group of misfits. Most are newbies working the harvest like Elise and Tom. Among their coworkers is Cee, to whom Elise is immediately attracted. Elise’s diverging romantic feelings are only one of her myriad anxieties, which percolate from the novel’s beginning. As much as Beta Vulgaris is a novel about class, it is also about the idiosyncratic anxieties—social, climate, body image—that are exacerbated by a lack of stability. When Elise begins to hear a voice from the beet pile which commands her to return the dirt, these anxieties reach a breaking point. Despite being largely set on a farm in a town called Eldritch, Beta Vulgaris is more a work of psychological horror than anything else. And it is light on the horror.
Dinging a book on the merits of its marketing may be considered unfair, though it is nearly as significant to a reader’s experience as the prose. In this case, I was drawn to a blurb from LitHub’s McKayla Coyle, who termed Beta Vulgaris “vegetable gothic.” My heart strummed! I don’t know what belongs to the canon of vegetable gothic except surely Bunnicula (1979-2006), but, as a Midwestern scholar of the Gothic, nothing appeals to me more. The marketing copy upholds this description: Elise notices “strange things,” receives “threatening phone calls,” gets a “mysterious rash,” and hears “ominous voices from the beet pile” that are also described as having the quality of a “siren song.” This combined with Tom’s disappearance, noted in the copy, indicates that something sinister will be uncovered. I was to be disappointed. Without giving too much away, readers of Strange Horizons should know that Beta Vulgaris might not fulfill your expectations of a horror novel.
But marketing is not solely at fault for Beta Vulgaris’s underperformance. True, the novel begins promisingly with a great hook. Sinister beets? Say no more. And some of Sarsfield’s details are off the charts: A Big Boy statue with blue glowing eyes is a distinctive and genuinely creepy image; Elise’s eating disorder often manifests as imagining foods as grotesque alternatives, like tater tots that have the “mouthfeel of cockroaches” (p. 213); working the piler has a disturbingly erotic quality. Most of all, however, Sarsfield creates a character in Elise who is infuriatingly familiar and not terribly likable but still empathetic—at least, for some of the novel.
Suffering under repetition, however, Beta Vulgaris ultimately takes the air out of its own potential. Sarsfield doesn’t appropriately balance enough compelling action with Elise’s tailspin, which becomes monotonous rather than climactic. At the risk of sounding callous, it is also at times simply annoying. Often, the trouble is not with the content so much as with Sarsfield’s repetitive prose. In a moment that is typical of Elise’s inner monologue, Tom waves her over to where he and Cee sit together:
As though Elise needed an invitation to sit down with her own fucking boyfriend at their own fucking campsite. Did Elise hate Cee, actually? It was unfair that Cee got to be everything Elise had ever wanted to be. No, Cee was an orphan. Elise was the lucky one. Elise’s problems were her own fault. (p. 123)
Later, considering her coworker, Elise wonders, “Were they friends, though? Were they, really? Did Eric pity her? Did Eric hate her? Was Elise angry, or was she having a panic attack?” (p. 210). Shortly after, Elise feels that she “hated everything she saw out there [at the camp]” (p. 210). Much of the narrative follows this pattern in which self-defeat and second-guessing are on the heels of almost any interaction Elise has.
While many audiences have a healthy appetite for unlikable, or “unhinged,” women (which has its own extensive GoodReads shelf), Elise emerges only as kind of a dud, a bummer to hang out with. Her main action, in fact, is avoidance. As her troubles increase, she fantasizes about “packing up and leaving, starting fresh someplace where no one’s current perception of Elise could be tainted by things her previous selves had said or done” (p. 126). This passage endears the reader to Elise; who among us hasn’t wanted to start over? It’s a seductive thought. The trouble is that she never does. Nor does she do much else. Again and again, Elise refuses to act. I believe that Sarsfield is adept enough as a writer to intend this characterization and that she intends for it to say something about the dire straits many working-class Americans find themselves in. Unlike some of the characters with generational wealth, Elise has few options. It nevertheless results in question-riddled paragraphs and too few answers, a problem Beta Vulgaris exhibits, too, on a structural level.
Indeed, the novel fumbles seriously halfway through. Although things technically do happen in the second half of the novel (people go missing, after all), these moments have little force and the emphasis is instead on Elise’s malaise. The sinister details that are so enticing early in the novel stagnate as it becomes increasingly clear that Beta Vulgaris wants to be a character study embroiled in a strange plot, but that its two tracks fail to satisfyingly cohere.
As the world may soon topple into a global recession, a novel about those left behind during the last American financial crisis seems particularly potent. Beta Vulgaris, however, is a sluggish read with a largely passive protagonist. Perhaps passivity is the point but at times reading it was as tedious as watching beets being beaten into sugar.
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Midway through Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Service Model, the robot Uncharles and his companion, the Wonk, are trying to escape from the Central Library Archive, whose robot librarians—they have learned—intend to copy Uncharles’s data and then destroy his corporeal form. The duo succeed in their flight when Uncharles traps the librarians in an irresolvable paradox, demonstrating that their self-professed goals of preserving only one copy of every piece of data ever produced—or to be produced—is logically impossible to perform. The algorithms cannot handle the contradiction. Some of the librarians break down. Others commit a kind of robot seppuku. Uncharles and the Wonk make good their escape.
The incident calls to mind Isaac Asimov’s famous short story “Liar!” (1941). There, too, a dangerous robot is foiled from completing its designs—and indeed, triggered into self-destruction—when it is trapped in a contradiction, within which either course of action open to it will entail a breaking of the First Law of Robotics. Two and a half decades later, Star Trek would use a similar device in “I, Mudd” (1967), with Captain Kirk explicitly deploying the liar’s paradox against a hostile android. It is difficult to imagine that Service Model— a particularly genre-aware work, dotted with inter-textual references to past classics—is not intentionally engaging in a call-back here.
Yet, it is not a simple tribute act. Before Uncharles succeeds, the Wonk attempts to construct logical paradoxes of their own (including the liar’s paradox) in order to stop the robot librarians, and is stymied when the bibliotecharies, themselves aware of the game that is being played, reason right through these attempts. One can almost hear the librarians think: “we too have read ‘Liar!’ and watched ‘I, Mudd,’ we know what you’re up to.” Ultimately, despite their best efforts, they fail when confronted with a more sophisticated, more powerful logical contradiction than the straightforward paradoxes of either. These are call-backs, yes, but also buildings-upon, a signal that eighty-five years have passed since this idea was first explored in science fiction.
It is this sense of retro-renewal (the phrase is my own invention) that runs through the 2025 Arthur C. Clarke Award shortlist. Two of the six novels (Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock and Annie Bot) are explicitly robot novels. Three out of the remaining four (Extremophile, Private Rites, and The Ministry of Time) are novels about, or set around, the collapse and the end of the world as we know it. And then there is Service Model, which is both a robot novel and set around the collapse and the end of the world as we know it. The 2025 shortlist thus features novels that have, as their premise, two of the oldest preoccupations of the genre, the robot and the apocalypse (and even, one could say, the robot apocalypse!).
There is a retro feel to all this—not just in the choice of the premise, but in some of the more specific themes that run through these novels. Consider, first, the three robot novels on the shortlist. Service Model and Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock deal with that hoariest of questions: Can a robot seek—and find—meaning, autonomous of their programming? In Service Model, Uncharles is a robot valet who finds, one morning, that he has murdered his master with a razor—and with no knowledge of why he did it. The rest of the novel chronicles Uncharles’s attempt to find meaning through finding another human being to serve, while his companion, the Wonk, tries to persuade him that there is more to life than just that. As the two journey into the world, it becomes increasingly clear that something has broken down irreversibly, and that not just Uncharles, but all kinds of robots, are searching for purpose. “I too crave meaning” says a haulage unit to Uncharles (p. 204), unable to recollect who has set its route and why. At the novel’s climax, the question of meaning assumes existential dimensions (for a similar analysis, see the Ancillary Review of Books’ review of the novel).
In Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock, a novel that aspires to the aesthetics of The Great Gatsby (1925) and the genre preoccupations of Asimov, the actress Lulabelle Rock commissions thirteen successive “portraits” or robot doubles of herself (one may perhaps think of them as the “beta” simulations in an Alastair Reynolds novel), each to live a life that she herself does not have the time—or inclination—to inhabit herself. By the thirteenth portrait—who is also the narrator of the novel—Lulabelle has ostensibly tired of the whole gag, and Portrait No. 13 is thus specifically created to murder all the other portraits. As she notes half wistfully, half angrily, “I could have been an artist in another life. Or a housewife, or a socialite, or a hermit, or a winged tiger in a dream. I could have been anything, or nothing, but Lulabelle created me to kill” (pp. 150-1).
Killing comes naturally to Portrait No. 13 in the beginning—and in turn, her victims do not resist—but it becomes progressively more difficult, and is complicated in the middle when she falls in love. As with Service Model, Thirteen Ways to Kill Lulabelle Rock explores the possibility of autonomy, of finding meaning—of free will, even—within the constraints of explicit, external programming. While this is indeed retro in some respects, one could argue that the ongoing debates around artificial intelligence have lent a fresh salience to this question. These novels thus serve both as throwbacks and also as attempts to address a question that is old but has also taken a renewed form.
Out of the three robot novels, it is Annie Bot that perhaps tackles the most overdetermined of issues. As William Shaw recently noted in a detailed article, the “artificial woman”—the fantasy of the “AI girlfriend”—has been one of the most enduring obsessions of American science fiction. Shaw observes “how the artificial woman has gone from being an intriguing novelty, to a collective fantasy, to a saleable commodity, to at last, perhaps, a being with her own thoughts and desires,” locating Annie Bot at the end point of this trajectory. Annie—the titular “AI girlfriend” of the novel—is an “autodidact”; that is, she can process and respond to the sexual and emotional desires of her owner, Doug, who wants her to be “attentive, kind, curious, sexy, a better listener, eager to learn, respectful” (p 76). Of course, the autonomy that comes with the autodidact programming is limited, and—most starkly—revocable. When Annie does not respond in quite the way that Doug wants, he is not above weaponizing this revocability as a form of discipline and control.
As Shaw notes, Doug and Annie are throwbacks to any number of male and female protagonists in the “AI girlfriend” sub-genre of science fiction. That is, the novel is “retro.” The difference, though, perhaps lies in this: In 2025, the fantasy of the “AI girlfriend” is still very real, but considerations of consent and autonomy in sexual and intimate relationships can no longer be treated as irrelevant. Doug is a product of his own time (a near-future close to our own present), and in that sense, there is an internal tension that runs throughout his conduct in the novel. He wants control. That’s why he has an “AI girlfriend” to start with, whom he specifies must physically resemble his ex-wife in certain ways (with a rather crucial alteration: His ex-wife is black; Annie is not). But there is a part of him that is ashamed to admit that that is what he wants, and to exercise “direct domination” over Annie in order to have it. This tension is, ultimately, unresolvable, and culminates in the novel’s ending which—again—is rather different from the “AI girlfriend” novels that have preceded it. That is, the novel undertakes “renewal.”
Let us now turn to retro-renewal of a second kind: at world’s end. The most clearly realised global breakdown is depicted in Extremophile. In the world of Extremophile, readers will recognise echoes of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Wind-Up Girl (2009). The climate catastrophe is here: “Bangladesh got wiped off the map last year for the tenth time in a decade, Eastern Europe is about fifteen different wars, Northern Europe has gone all isolationist” (p. 26). Governments have begun to crumble, leaving space for all kinds of lurid black markets (in particular, underground markets of genetic engineering and modifications, run by bio-hackers). Seeing the utter failure of law and policy, groups have begun to take matters into their own hands, from sabotage to assassination: direct action for those sympathetic, “eco-terrorism” for those antagonistic.
The novel’s protagonists—who play in a London rock band by night, and engage in a bit of bio-hacking of their own by day—are approached by the most notorious of these underground groups, with an enigmatic, yet simple, mission: “kill the Ghost, steal the flower, save the world” (p. 54). What follows could tick off checkboxes of cinematic genre set-pieces: a heist, a chase, a shoot-out, a comrade’s life threatened, and a dénouement involving graphic revenge. These are all tried and tested genre devices, as is the apocalyptic setting (“retro”), but at the same time an underlying focus of the novel remains the possibility of using the techniques of bio-hacking to reverse—or at least mitigate—the climate catastrophe (“renewal”). One may think of this as akin to modern fantasies of terraforming or shielding the sun, and to its credit Extremophile maintains a healthy dose of narrative scepticism towards this solution. The fact that this is a foundational premise of the story at all, however, makes Extremophile very much also a novel of retro-renewal.
The end of the world plays a more subdued, even backstage, role in the last two novels on the shortlist, Private Rites and The Ministry of Time. Indeed, Private Rites is that one novel we get every year on the Clarke Award shortlist whose connections to genre might be thought of as somewhat tenuous. The England of Private Rites lies drowning underneath incessant rain (it’s never fully revealed what the cause of this is). The landscape (seascape) has been fundamentally re-altered, and the things people did back in the day when the land was still dry are now caught between memory and nostalgia. This altered “world’s end,” though, is not at the forefront of the novel. The flood limits and sets constraints upon what the story’s protagonists can do, but the story itself is not primarily about the flood or about the world it has shaped, but about human relationships.
These are, in particular, the relationships between the three daughters of a recently deceased family patriarch, who designed much of the post-apocalyptic architecture of London, and the people within their orbits. Private Rites has been pitched and marketed as a queer retelling of King Lear in a drowned world, which would perhaps make it the most “retro” out of all the shortlist! But in the manner of contemporary retellings, the tone and idiom of the novel is entirely contemporary. It is, ultimately, a story of distorted “private” relationships, in which the distortion is conditioned by (but not necessarily a condition of) an apocalyptic, flooded world.
One novel in which connections to genre are certainly not tenuous is The Ministry of Time, which gives us a time-travel romance wrapped up in a classic, old-style time-travel paradox. A time-travel device has been discovered. The British government—acting through the Ministry of Time—decides to travel back and rescue six people (known as “the expats”), each from a moment in history where they would certainly have died otherwise: a bubonic plague, the French Revolution, the doomed Franklin polar expedition, World War I, and so on. These people are brought back to the present as part of a limited, contained experiment, where, for one year, they live in the exclusive company of a “bridge” individual, as they are acclimatised to the present.
Graham Gore, a commander of the Franklin expedition, comes to live with the novel’s unnamed narrator, who has been assigned by the Ministry as his minder or “bridge.” As the two fall into a daily pattern of explanation, acclimatisation, missteps, and corrections, they slowly soften into intimacy and then something more. All the while, the long shadow of the “experiment,” and all the things that the bridges and the expats are not being told, hangs over them—until, at last, it explodes into a spectacular act of violence, changing everything (including their relationship). As a part of the novel’s dénouement, it is also revealed that, within a few centuries of the novel’s near-future setting, the climate catastrophe has destroyed much of the world. The relevation comes in lines strikingly similar to Extremophile: “South America’s mostly gone, except Brazil and its satellites. Half of Britain’s underwater. Europe dropped bombs on any ships in the Mediterranean coming from North Africa” (p. 311).
In many ways, The Ministry of Time belongs to the tradition of the classic time travel and apocalypse novel. The debates around the possibility (or not) of changing history through time travel, and of changing the future, will be familiar to readers—although The Ministry of Time does manage to bring in some fresh insights to bear on the question. The time paradox at the end in particular is strongly reminiscent of one of the first and most canonical of time travel stories, Robert A. Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps” (1941). But apart from this, The Ministry of Time utilises the device of time travel to engage with some very contemporary questions around exile, homecoming, and othering. The novel’s narrator is a biracial British-Cambodian, her mother a “refugee” from the Pol Pot regime. Her experiences—and struggles to fit in—inform her own role in the “experiment” (with crucial consequences for the ending), but more than that, the novel draws deft parallels between the manner in which Graham Gore is “out of place” (from 1847 to the present day), and how the narrator is out of place (in terms of her race and upbringing). There is only one point at which the connections are made explicit, which proves all the more powerful for that rarity: “In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique,” the narrator notes to herself. “But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. I’d seen it happen around my own life” (p. 271). The Ministry of Time is thus both a classic time travel and apocalypse novel (checkmark for “retro”), but also a novel about race relations in modern Britain (checkmark for “renewal”).
Other than this unifying thread, the novels on the Clarke shortlist have other strands of overlap. Both Service Model and The Ministry of Time approach the question of history and the past, albeit from opposite directions. In Service Model, the Central Library Archive is on a Hari Seldon-esque project of “preserving knowledge” in a world that is breaking apart, so that one day it can be of use again. Only, for the Archive’s librarians, “knowledge” means—and only means—data (dates, facts, accounts, documentation). “You can’t just break the world down into disarticulated facts,” Wonk protests in response (p. 235), invoking an E. H. Carr-style argument about the necessity of interpretation for facts to even make sense—but to no avail. On the other hand, in The Ministry of Time, Adela, the head of the “experiment,” mocks the traditional time paradox of going back to the past to change “history”: “History is not a series of causes and effects which may be changed like switching trains on a track,” she explains, “it is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening” (p .92). The task of the eponymous Ministry of Time, as she articulates even more clearly later, is to ensure that it remains in power in all timelines, so that “history happened the way we said it did.”
Many of the novels on the shortlist have an underlying critique of capitalism. This is most obvious in Extremophile, where we are explicitly told that corporations have locked up research into carbon-capturing plants, so that nobody can access it with a view to mitigating the climate catastrophe. The critique is, however, more subtly made in The Ministry of Time and in Service Model. In The Ministry of Time, it turns out that, for one prominent wing of the government, the expats are of interest only to the extent that they serve utilitarian goals (such as, for example, their ability to “vanish” before various types of identity-detecting software, which can turn them into good field soldiers). In Service Model, the collapse of the world is at least partially caused by the complete outsourcing of work to robots while retaining capitalist social relations, with the result that the reserve army of labour under capitalism is no longer just a reserve: “What if, even as you replace everyone with robots that are cheaper and quicker and less likely to join a union or complain about working conditions, you also continue to insist that individual value is tied to production, and everyone who’s idle is a parasite scrounging off the state?” (p. 350).
Finally, to a somewhat uncommon degree, many of the novels on the shortlist use the vehicle of speculation to comment on distinctly non-speculative elements of our present reality. Private Rites is, of course, the most obvious example of this (see, also, this Guardian review that finds personal redemption its underlying theme). To a lesser extent, this is true of The Ministry of Time as well—where, as I have noted above, the time travel story enfolds a biting analysis of race relations (for a similar take, see the review of the book in Locus). I think that this is also true of Annie Bot. While at one level, Annie Bot can be read as a classic robot/AI girlfriend novel, at another level it is a novel about the male gaze. Doug embodies a very familiar male fantasy: that of exercising control beneath a façade of autonomy and a mutually constituted relationship. The novel is an exploration of how he enacts that fantasy upon a robot whom he, quite literally, owns; but Doug’s behaviour is utterly familiar, and is a blueprint for any number of abusive relationships in which a woman has been placed in a condition of economic, physical, or emotional dependency vis-à-vis a man (in an interview, the author, Sierra Greer, herself refers to the novel as an “allegory”). The difference is that Annie’s will is literally subject to Doug’s control, when he chooses to exercise it; but the writing of the novel makes it feel like this is more a difference in degree than anything more fundamental.
The 2025 Clarke Awards shortlist, then, revisits some of science fiction’s oldest themes, with works that have—and often themselves identify—a clear line of ancestry. But at the same time, it is a shortlist that frames those themes in the grammar and the idiom of the present: new-ish wine in old-ish bottles, in other words—or to repeat a phrase, retro-renewal.
file770_feedfile770_feedscalziwhatever_feedAnd we have a lot to think about.
— JS
file770_feedfile770_feedplaidder_tumblr_feedPLAIDDER: Hi, Conn. Thanks for coming to the meeting.
CONN: This is a meeting? I thought we were going to–
PLAIDDER: Yeah, I’m sorry, I didn’t make it clear in the summons. We’re not doing an episode. I just wanted to tell you in person.
CONN: If it’s about the new Marshlands with the alligators, I’ve already–
PLAIDDER: It is about that, kind of. I mean…this is hard to do, Conn, but I’m canceling the show.
CONN: What? Why?
PLAIDDER: Well you know how you’re the avatar of the part of me that believes in the American experiment and tries to take the optimistic view of the future of democracy here?
CONN: Don’t tell me that part of you is dead.
PLAIDDER: WELL IT’S DYING.
CONN: Because these gleachinai are being obnoxious in public about their new reality show?
PLAIDDER: That, and Congress just voted to give ICE all the money it needs to turn this whole country into a concentration camp.
CONN: You’re not cheered up even slightly by the general strike?
PLAIDDER: What are you talking about? This country–
CONN: This country will never be able to pull off a general strike. I know. But. You remember how, during the government shutdown, the flight attendants and the air traffic controllers started not showing up to work after they hadn’t been paid for a while?
PLAIDDER: Yes, but–
CONN: So that wasn’t a General Strike in the sense of being national, organized, and all-inclusive. But as I believe I said at the time: the shutdown pushed ordinary people, on their own, to resist the government–not by marching or protesting but by refusing to cooperate with it.
PLAIDDER: That has nothing to do with them building a concentration camp in the middle of the Florida Everglades.
CONN: But it does.
PLAIDDER: All right, this is your last chance. Explain the connection.
CONN: So, in your world, when you want to put on a show for a certain group of people, you put it on the Ethernet–
PLAIDDER: Internet, but whatever–
CONN:–because that’s the fastest way to get it to your audience. And what people just keep forgetting, and this will never make sense to me, is that when you put your show out there, other people are going to watch it who are not part of the audience you’re playing to.
PLAIDDER: And?
CONN: So all of this…what do they call it…performative cruelty. The masked raids, the disappearing, the sending of people to notoriously vile prisons in faraway countries, and now this new Marshlands…I mean is there a reason why you put our detention center in the marshlands 20 years ago? Were you anticipating this?
PLAIDDER: I definitely did not anticipate that enough people in power in this country would think it was a great idea to build what is essentially a cartoon villain’s lair in the middle of a swamp in Florida.
CONN: There isn’t something special about…swamps?
PLAIDDER: Well I mean that probably does explain it. The whole swamp thing. I guess I put the Cretid prison camp in the marshes because I figured that would be a place where there was nothing already built, where that land was already being treated as waste, and where it would be easy to prevent people from getting into it or out of it. But you were saying.
CONN: And this is all for their audience, the people they hope will be buying this “merch” and enjoying their show. But of course other people are watching this show, including the people who are afraid of being sent to this place.
PLAIDDER: Well isn’t that part of the point? Intimidation and terror?
CONN: Yes. But remember, your Buttercup and his minions are idiots. So they think that by intimidating and terrorizing people, they will convince them to “self-deport.” Instead, it’s just convincing them that that their first priority, now and as long as this crowd is in charge, is to stay out of ICE’s clutches. And since ICE has started showing up at people’s workplaces, people are naturally not showing up to work.
PLAIDDER: Yes, I know there have been a few stories about that…
CONN: So sure. It’d probably be impossible to organize an effective general strike. But these gleachinai are stumbling into one all on their own. It would have taken a while for the actual arrests to register, in terms of the number of people showing up to work. But because these people can’t stop themselves from piling on the horrors, they’ve already convinced people that they’re better off not showing up to work. Which is a thing that is very HARD to convince Americans of.
PLAIDDER: How does that help? I mean the people who are too scared to come to work are miserable and broke. The people who employ them are miserable and eventually going to be broke. Those of us who like to eat, you know, produce, or who would like to buy a newly constructed home maybe, are miserable and broke.
CONN: So what are the two issues everyone is most concerned about in your country? Grocery prices and the housing market. And look how fast this administration is making both things worse.
PLAIDDER: This is optimism?
CONN: This is how you get to widespread noncompliance. You make things so bad that people feel like they have nothing to lose by refusing to cooperate. Which is the first step in the trip out of here.
PLAIDDER: Nope.
CONN: What do you mean?
PLAIDDER: I mean I understand your logic but…I don’t see a way out of this. I really don’t. I look into the future and I just see horror after horror after horror.
CONN: And yet I’m still here talking to you.
PLAIDDER: And yet you are.
CONN: For the last time?
….
PLAIDDER: We’ll see.
CONN: OK.
PLAIDDER: I mean I can’t have you going all Tiny Chef on me.
CONN: One day at a time, friend. Remember how stupid all of these people are. There’s always a price to be paid for that.
PLAIDDER: If only they were the only ones paying it.
plaidder_tumblr_feedAO3: We will be down for two hours for scheduled maintenance in a couple days. Just wanted to warn you.
ME: Ok, fine.
AO3: We’re just reminding you because in the past sometimes people get upset but really, it’s scheduled maintenance, everything is still there, you just won’t be able to access it for two hours. It’s only two hours. We planned this. It will be OK.
ME: I don’t know what you’re reassuring me for. I’m a rational adult. I have object permanence.
AO3: Are you sure? Here’s another reminder.
ME: Jesus, AO3, I got the message. Leave me alone. I’m fine here. I’ve got work to do.
AO3: All right then. Here goes. Scheduled maintenance starting…
[AO3: goes offline
ME: checks AO3, gets error message]
ME: WHERE IS IT WHERE IS MY FIC WHERE HAS IT GONE WHY CAN’T I SEE IT
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Bookshop.org | Amazon UK | Waterstones | WH Smith
Today, for the first time, the Aud trilogy (The Blue Place, Stay, Always) will be published in the UK. It only took 27 years. I know I’m not even remotely an impartial observer but these books kick ass. I love them with a crazy love. And I would dearly like UK readers to go buy a copy—and then tell me what you think.
Do you know any other queer noir/not-noir novels 1 praised by Dennis Lehane, Val McDermid, Dorothy Allison, Lee Child, Manda Scott, Francis Spufford, Laurie King, Ivy Pochoda, Robert Crais, Alex Gray, Elizabeth Hand, James Sallis, and more? No? Then maybe you should go find out what brings together such disparate writers in their love.
You can buy now or borrow from your local library. Enjoy!
Bookshop.org | Amazon UK | Waterstones | WH Smith
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We do so love the big blue marble we call home, don’t we? But what if humans had another home, and what if it was our red and dusty space neighbor? Author E.L. Starling poses this question in the Big Idea for newest novel, Bound By Stars, thinking up possibilities about the future that are certainly dystopian, but also realistic. Follow along on a journey through the stars, and try to keep afloat as the (space)ship goes down.
E. L. STARLING:
My family rewatches Interstellar together every year, which sometimes (read: always) devolves into a heated debate about complex theories, space time, and whether “they” really were aliens or just an unfathomable combination of future human technology and a natural anomaly splicing through the multiverse. (Probably the aliens, right?)
In spring of 2022, as the credits rolled, my oldest veered off our usual set of topics and brought up a certain billionaire’s desire to terraform Mars. We all responded with eye rolls and a version of the same sentiment, “How about putting that effort into combating climate change on this planet where we already have oxygen, water, and atmosphere?”
Plus, if I’m being completely honest, even if Mars was a viable option for everyone, you can still leave me here. Reading in a car going 25 mph flips my stomach inside out. And, the vastness of the unknown is a fear I would rather not face.
But, what would that be like? What if the wealthy abandoned Earth to create a utopia 140 million miles away and left the rest of the world’s population behind? Would they really leave Earth for good? Terraforming is a long game. They would still need resources. Would they use Earth like their new planet’s remote farm and factory? There was so much to consider.
This discussion sparked an idea. Two worlds. Separated by space and socioeconomic classes.
As my family members scattered, I was building the dystopia in my mind: After the Earth is ravaged by climate change, the population decimated, and society reshaped, the wealthy still control the resources, but they’ve drilled for water, built infrastructure, and established a safe haven in luxurious habitat cities on Mars.
The dynamics of the world set up the perfect main characters: two people from different classes and different planets. And what if they were teenagers in this world— still required to manage school, bullies, love, homework, and their impending futures? What if I upped the stakes further and put them on a doomed starliner between their two worlds? There was The Big Idea: YA Titanic-in-space.
Enter Jupiter Dalloway and Weslie Fleet. Jupiter is from Mars. Born at the top of society. The heir to a multi-trillion-dollar company. Unsatisfied with his predetermined future. Weslie’s from Earth. Hardened by a life of struggle and injustice. Full of confidence and armed with the attitude to call out Jupiter’s alarming privilege. Both of them seventeen, on the tailend of adolescence. Two people who learn to appreciate and celebrate each other’s differences despite the backdrop of a complex and oppressive world.
Choosing to write Bound by Stars as a YA novel was a conscious endeavor for me. At that age, you’re near adulthood, but still not fully in control of your own life. There are people who dictate the basics of your day to day, but you’re the one expected to make decisions about your future. High school graduation, college, the rest of your life is just around the bend in the road ahead. You’re shaped by every heartbreak, moment of triumph, cruel word, and act of kindness. And all the emotions inside you are bigger, stronger, more passionate. The future feels open. Possible. Big. Scary.
I love celebrating this multitude for joy, hope, injustice, and even sadness. In my opinion, this is great insight into why we often throw teenager characters into dystopian stories. While sometimes labeled as “overly emotional” or “out of control,” that “too much-ness” of adolescence is human emotion at its absolute fullest capacity. I can’t help but respect someone who can experience heartbreak like a life-ending blow and still care about their friends, show up for band practice, sing their heart out in a theater production, and write that 5-page essay due at the end of the week.
And on top of it all—today’s youth are growing up with a true fear of climate change and developing an understanding of the dangers of unfettered capitalism in real time, while being asked “What do you want to do with your life after high school?”
Of course, the compelling lightbulb of “Titanic-in-space” was fun and romantic: a chance to create parallels to an epic love story in a high-stake situation. But there was a level deeper. Underneath the outrageous opulence of the ship headed for Mars, sharp banter between characters from different worlds, slow-burn romance, and an action-packed, “there aren’t enough lifeboats (or escape pods in this case)” climax, Bound by Stars is a story about relatable, young characters navigating life in bleak future landscape. After all, dystopian novels can reflect the complexities of existing in this stage of life, while—hopefully—offering a bit of hope and inspiration.
Bound By Stars: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop
file770_feedfile770_feedscalziwhatever_feedWhilst I was perusing the produce section at Kroger last week, I came across a watermelon. Not just any watermelon, though. Private Selection’s “Black Diamond” watermelons. I figured since y’all seemed to enjoy my orange review, you might want the skinny on this here watermelon, as well:
Unlike the Sugar Gem oranges, this watermelon was sweeter than a regular ol’ watermelon. Not only that, but the label boasts a rich, red flesh. I thought it may have been all talk, but lo and behold it was indeed very red! I bought this one for six dollars, which is pretty much the exact same cost as a regular watermelon, and it’s roughly the same size, so I’d say you should go ahead and buy this one over the regular ones if you are someone who prefers a juicier, sweeter watermelon.
I served this watermelon to my parents, both of whom do not particularly care for watermelon, and they made a point of telling me how good this particular watermelon was and ended up eating a good bit of it when normally they probably wouldn’t have opted for any watermelon at all.
With the 4th approaching this weekend, I assume many of y’all will want to pick up a watermelon, and I think if your Kroger has these ones lying around you should give it a try! I’ve been meaning to buy another one because it’s the perfect refreshing snack during this recent heat wave.
It’s nice to try something new and actually have a good experience with it. Those Sugar Gem oranges may have been a bust, but this Black Diamond Watermelon is definitely a winner in my book.
Do you like watermelon? If you don’t, would you be willing to give this one a try based on my parents’ reaction to it? Do you have fun plans for the 4th? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
nicola_griffith_feedThere are certain people in the world who are so uncaring of others’ needs and feelings that they are untroubled by conscience—they have no conscience. These are the people who as children pulled the wings off flies for fun, just because they could. These are people who, when they have power, kill other people.
Here today, by ‘people’ I am referring specifically to the current US administration. There are literally dozens of decisions the Trump administration and its minions in Congress have made that will kill people at home and abroad. Remember that: dozens.1 I’m going to mention just two as examples, one foreign, one domestic.
According to the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan agency, the OBBB (‘one big beautiful bill’) package just passed by the Senate and now back with the House would increase the federal deficit by $3.4 trillion over the next 10 years. 11.8 million Americans will lose their health insurance in the next decade due to the bill’s changes to Medicaid and the ACA, while more than half Americans will pay fewer taxes.
According to the Yale Budget Lab, after taking into account tax and social safety net changes, the poorest 20% of U.S. households will lose an average of 2.9% of their real income. The real income of the next 20% of households would remain flat. The top 60% of households (those earning over about $36,500 a year) will all benefit—but those in the top 20% (earning over about $120,500) will benefit massively—and just look at how much the top 5% (earning >$265,000) will gain.
At those low incomes, nearly 3% can mean the difference between survival and not: the old, the frail, the ill, the disabled will die—most especially the old, fail, ill and disabled people of colour. Can you spell ‘eugenics’?
Then add in the ballooning deficit, and what they will mean in terms of the value of the dollar and the ability of the US to borrow, and things get virulently worse, very quickly. In the short term, many people in the US will die; in the long term, many many people will die.
Again, I’m going to talk about just one decision (of so many, so very many): the shuttering of USAID. I just looked at a new paper in The Lancet: 2
Higher levels of USAID funding—primarily directed toward LMICs, particularly African countries—were associated with a 15% reduction in age-standardised all-cause mortality (risk ratio [RR] 0·85, 95% CI 0·78–0·93) and a 32% reduction in under-five mortality (RR 0·68, 0·57–0·80). This finding indicates that 91 839 663 (95% CI 85 690 135–98 291 626) all-age deaths, including 30 391 980 (26 023 132–35 482 636) in children younger than 5 years, were prevented by USAID funding over the 21-year study period. USAID funding was associated with a 65% reduction (RR 0·35, 0·29-0·42) in mortality from HIV/AIDS (representing 25·5 million deaths), 51% (RR 0·49, 0·39–0·61) from malaria (8·0 million deaths), and 50% (RR 0·50, 0·40–0·62) from neglected tropical diseases (8·9 million deaths). Significant decreases were also observed in mortality from tuberculosis, nutritional deficiencies, diarrhoeal diseases, lower respiratory infections, and maternal and perinatal conditions. Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14 051 750 (uncertainty interval 8 475 990–19 662 191) additional all-age deaths, including 4 537 157 (3 124 796–5 910 791) in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.
Which boils down to
Do not try to appeal to the administration or Congress’s better natures. They don’t have one. They understand power. The power we have is our voice and our vote. Use it. Thinks of the tens of millions of people—real people, with real lives—who are dying now and will die in the future because people like us gave those wing-pullers power. Take their power away. Please.
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It’s for sale on Audible worldwide for two weeks, starting today; I’m not sure about other platforms. But I hope so, because I loved doing the narration and I’m proud of it, and the more people who get to listen to it the happier I’ll be. And that’s a great price!
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Hop on board for author Matthew Kressel’s newest ride through the galaxy, Space Trucker Jess. In this Big Idea as he takes you through not only his writing process for this particular story, but on a journey through a high-concept sci-fi world viewed through the eyes of a teenage girl.
MATTHEW KRESSEL:
I was a feral kid. Both my parents worked full-time jobs, and I’d come home to an empty house. I had no supervision. I went off with friends and we, ahem, did things. Stupid things. Really fucking stupid things. And when I look back on those days I’m like, How the hell did I make it out alive?
But that freedom was glorious. You could do whatever you wanted. Go anywhere. You had the feeling that anything could happen. And it often did. The good and the bad.
That’s the kind of feeling I hope to evoke in Space Trucker Jess. The joy and spontaneity of discovery. In my childhood, we got into trouble all around the neighborhood. In my novel, Jess gets into hijinx across the galaxy.
Like Jess herself, I began the book with a simple premise: Screw the “rules.”
In my past stories and novels, I labored over every paragraph, sentence, word, and punctuation mark until I’d wound myself into a Gordian knot a million words long. In Jess, I felt the need to loosen the bridles, to let my idea run wild, like that feral kid who got into trouble around the neighborhood. What emerged was Jess, a take-no-shit foul-mouthed kick-ass teenaged girl who’s smart as hell, caring and empathetic, who solves problems not with violence but with brains and determination. Though too often for her own good, Jess’s curiosity gets her into trouble. Big trouble.
Think Natasha Lyonne narrating 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There’s lots of high-concept SF, and, yeah, Space Trucker Jess has all the tropes: starships and FTL travel, alien gods, missing planets, galactic secrets. But I wanted to tell the story a different way. Not from an omniscient or a dry and distant third person, but from deep in the point of view of a sensitive and expressive girl who’s journeyed across the Milk and back a thousand times and who knows more about starships than most people know their own nose.
And so you get high philosophy and fart jokes. Orthodox religion and irreverent sacrilege. Weird inscrutable aliens and deadbeat dads. All told from a foul-mouthed over-confident, wicked-smart and sometimes willfully naive girl who just wants, at the end of the day, to be left the hell alone.
Space Trucker Jess is also about identity. I wrote a good chunk of the book during the first Covid lockdowns. Cut off from friends and family, from work and all the many inter-personal relationships I took for granted, I felt my sense of self drifting. Without those external interactions reflecting my identity back to me, I didn’t know who I was anymore. It was very disconcerting.
A lot of that experience makes its way into the book. Jess’s worldview expands enormously throughout the novel, sometimes suddenly and violently, and she is forced to reckon with a new sense of self and a greater awareness.
Also, Space Trucker Jess is about family. Jess loves her deadbeat dad, and she and him have been grifting their way across the galaxy for years. But she knows he’s an asshole, he knows he’s an asshole, but she just can’t let him go. The relationship is, from the start, highly dysfunctional. Jess just wants stability, away from him. But getting away is harder than it sounds. Without getting too personal, I had a lot of turbulence in my childhood home, and I wanted to explore the contrasts between the family we’re born with and the family we choose, and how those dynamics can alter the course of our entire lives, for better or worse.
So if you want to go on a fun adventure alongside a bad-ass genius girl head-firsting her way through the galaxy who’s just looking for some peace in an uncaring universe, while encountering alien gods, missing planets, galactic secrets, and more, well then, Space Trucker Jess might just be your ride.
Space Trucker Jess: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
file770_feedfile770_feedfile770_feedscalziwhatever_feedHave you ever had one of those places you want to go to, but never get around to checking out, and suddenly a year has passed and you’ve still never been? That’s how it was for me and Grist, a restaurant in downtown Dayton that I had heard about from so many people and had been meaning to get out to for literal months. Well, I finally made it happen, and I’m so glad I did.
Bryant and I were going out to dinner, and I asked him what kind of food he wanted. He picked Italian, which, in my opinion, is the hardest cuisine to get around this area. At least, good Italian, that is. There’s always Fazoli’s, and TripAdvisor has the audacity to label Marion’s Pizza as the number one Italian spot in the area, so pickings are slim for Italian ’round these parts. But I wanted something nicer than Spaghetti Warehouse.
Eventually my searching led me to Grist, which was labeled as Italian, and looked pretty dang amazing from the photos provided. Plus, I’d heard from numerous Daytonians in the past that they liked Grist, and I trust my sources. So, I made us a reservation for that evening, excited to try somewhere new.
Located on Fifth Street, it’s just down the street from the Oregon District, and close to the Dayton Convention Center. There’s a parking garage right across the street from it, and some street parking, too.
Upon walking in, the first thing I noticed was how bright and open it is. The large wall of windows let in so much natural light, and you immediately get to see all the baked goods in their glass display case.
I immediately loved the decor and vibe in Grist. It was like sort of rustic but nice at the same time. Like fancy Italian farmhouse vibes? It was really cute.
And there was even a selection of wine for purchase:
I didn’t get a shot of their other indoor dining area or their little patio, but it does have a super cute patio.
Grist has casual service, so you can either place your order at the counter or order at your table using your phone, and they bring the food out to your table. I chose to use my phone because there was a pretty steady flow of people ordering to-go stuff from the register.
Here’s what they were offering on their dinner menu:
It’s basically a law that you have to try a restaurant’s bread. The bread a restaurant offers is a window into all the rest of their food, and also into their soul. So we split the half loaf of rosemary and parmesan focaccia:
Bryant and I both loved the focaccia, and there was more than enough for both of us. The outside was just a little bit crispy and the bread inside was soft and chewy. It wasn’t overwhelmingly herbaceous, and was definitely worth the six dollars in my opinion. The only acceptable reason to not try this bread if you visit is if you’re gluten intolerant.
We also shared the house-made meatballs:
I can’t say I’m like, a huge meatball fan. I don’t really eat them that often and they’re not something I crave regularly or think about all that much. However, these meatballs were really yummy! I was impressed that there were five of them, and they were quite sizeable. I think the portion size is honestly pretty good. They definitely tasted like they were made fresh in-house, and had just the right amount of sauce on them. I would be more than happy to have a meatball marinara sub made with these meatballs.
And our final appetizer was the mushroom pate:
First off, I love how toasty the ciabatta was, it’s like the perfect shade for toast. The mushroom pate was packed to the brim with mushroomy, umami flavor. Total flavor bomb, and a little goes a long way. The pickled shallots added a wild contrast, and there was a lot of interesting textures. It was seriously delish.
To accompany the starters, I decided to try their sweet wine flight, which came with three wines for fourteen dollars:
I can’t remember what the red one was, but the two whites are a Riesling and a sparkling Moscato. I did not care for the red at all, in my opinion it wasn’t even remotely sweet, but I generally prefer white anyway so maybe it just wasn’t my cup of tea (or wine, I suppose). Normally I like Rieslings but this one was kind of a miss for me, too. The Moscato was the bomb dot com though. I loved the bubbles and the sweetness level was perfect. It was so smooth and delish, I ended up polishing that one off but didn’t really drink the other two.
Choosing an entree was pretty dang tough, but Bryant ended up picking the Cacio e Pepe Orecchiette:
I absolutely loved the presentation of this dish, and I’m a huge risotto fan, but I honestly didn’t care for this dish. It just really didn’t taste like much to me, but then again I only had one bite and Bryant said he really liked it, so maybe it was a me issue. I’m glad he enjoyed it!
I opted for the Sweet Corn Agnolotti:
I actually wasn’t sure what type of pasta agnolotti was, but it’s basically just a stuffed pasta, kind of like a ravioli. These little dudes were stuffed with a delicious, creamy filling that I totally burned the frick frack out of my tongue on. They had a great corn flavor, you could definitely tell it was sweet corn. I noticed on the menu it also said it had black truffle in it but I actually didn’t notice any truffle flavor at all, so that’s kind of odd. I really enjoyed my entree, and I think next time I’d like to try the squid ink pasta since I still have yet to try squid ink.
Of course, we had to save room for dessert, and you can’t eat an Italian dinner without ending it with tiramisu:
Funny enough, Bryant’s favorite dessert is tiramisu, so he definitely wasn’t gonna pass this up. He was kind enough to let me try a bite, and I feel confident saying it’s a pretty good tiramisu! It was creamy and rich, and honestly didn’t have any sort of alcohol-y boozy type flavor. No complaints, solid tiramisu.
I went with the apricot and passionfruit tart with pepita crust:
Oh my DAYS! This bloody thing was loaded with flavor. Holy cannoli this thing literally punched my tastebuds into next week! The passionfruit flavor is absolutely bonkers on this sucker. Don’t get me wrong, it was delicious. It was sweet and tart and the crust was awesome and the meringue on top was fantastic and wow. Seriously wow. It took me three separate tries to eat this after I took it home, because I would take one bite and be like, okay that’s plenty for now. But don’t misunderstand me, it is very good!
Before leaving, I simply had to get one of their incredible looking cookies to take home, and I picked the white chocolate pineapple one:
This cookie was dense, chewy, perfectly sweet with pieces of pineapple throughout, and the flaky sea salt on top really was the cherry on top, or I guess it was the flaky sea salt on top (I know, it’s not a funny joke). Definitely pick up a cookie on your way out, you won’t regret it!
Grist is open Tuesday-Saturday for lunch and dinner, with a break in between the two. You can make reservations for dinner but not for lunch, and you can order online for lunch but not for dinner. While I was there I learned that Grist also hosts cooking classes on Sundays, so that’s neat! I’d love to check one out sometime.
All in all, Grist was a great experience. Though we didn’t have waiters and whatnot, the service we got from the people at the counter and from the chefs that brought our plates out was extremely friendly, and also the food came out really quickly. We both really loved the food and the vibes, and I also like the prices. I definitely want to come back and try pretty much everything I didn’t get to this first time around.
Have you tried Grist before? Which dish looks the best to you? Do you have any recommendations for nice Italian places in Dayton? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day! And be sure to follow Grist on Instagram.
-AMS
file770_feedfile770_feedplaidder_tumblr_feedSorry, finally getting around to this. It was a busy weekend.
So the short story is we loved it. It is hugely entertaining, and I think it works well for both hardcore Gilbert & Sullivan nuts and people who have never had the pleasure. On the surface it seems weird that there should be an American following for Gilbert & Sullivan at all, given how self-consciously British they all are, and how much annotation is sometimes required for basic cultural transference to be possible. The one thing that I think explains it is that G&S were very very good at one thing: being extremely silly without being stupid, mean* (*exception to be discussed below) or tedious. This production preserves that quality, even though it makes a lot of other changes, presumably in order to appeal more strongly to modern American audiences.
So that's the short story. The longer story is behind this cut tag, and it will discuss:
So to be clear, we chose to see Pirates! because as soon as I said to PJ, "Hey, they're doing some kind of remix of Pirates of Penzance with Jinkx Monsoon as Ruth," he underwent a small explosion of enthusiasm. Though we don't watch RuPaul's Drag Race, PJ as a trans teenager is familiar with Jinkx Monsoon and PJ did also greatly enjoy Jinkx Monsoon's appearance as Maestro in the Doctor Who episode "The Devil's Chord." PJ was further excited to find out that the Pirate King would be played by Ramin Karimloo, who has had a long career on Broadway and is one of the more beloved of the 21st century Phantoms (as in ALW's Phantom of the Opera). This didn't mean much to me because I am really not a fan of Phantom of the Opera, but I was glad PJ had a further delight to look forward to.
So, briefly (as I so often say, lyingly, before I summarize something), The Pirates of Penzance in its original form is a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta about a young lad named Frederick who has grown up largely on a pirate ship and is now approaching the end of his 21st year. Big changes are coming, because Frederick's apprenticeship will soon be over, and he is about to leave the profession and turn law-abiding citizen. See, Frederick always does his duty; and just as it was his duty to loot and pillage when he was a pirate's apprentice, it will be his duty to thwart and arrest pirates once he's no longer apprenticed. Frederick's former nursemaid Ruth, whose fault it is that he got apprenticed as a pirate in the first place, has also been along for the ride on the pirate ship and is now engaged to Frederick, who since joining the pirates has literally never seen another woman and therefore believes Ruth's claims about her youth and beauty. Well, once ashore, Frederick catches sight of the female chorus, excuse me, the daughters of Major-General Stanley, and is undeceived. Repudating Ruth, he immediately falls in love with Stanley's daughter Mabel.
Just as Frederick is about to help lead the local constabulary to defeat the pirates, the Pirate King and Ruth show up and tell him they've found a loophole. The articles of his apprenticeship indicate that he's bound until his twenty-first birthday, not his twenty-first year. Frederick was born on February 29 in a leap year, which means he has only one birthday every four years. Technically, his time won't be up until he's 84. Devastated but determined to do his duty, Frederick says a tearful farewell to Mabel and returns to the Dark Side. Ultimately, the craven constables are no match for the pirates; but just as they are about to be defeated, the sergeant hits upon the idea of charging the pirates to yield "in Queen Victoria's name." The pirates are so affected by this appeal to their patriotism that they give up and allow themselves to be arrested--until Ruth points out that these pirates are all actually "noblemen who have gone wrong," after which Major-General Stanley pardons them all. The conflict is resolved, Frederick marries Mabel, the male chorus of pirates marries the female chorus of Stanley daughters, and all is well.
So. Pirates! The Penzance Musical is set "in a theater in New Orleans." The metatheatrical conceit is important to the show's aesthetic (the set design is intentionally 2-dimensional and eye-catchingly unconvincing) and also makes room for some charming little metatheatrical moments within the show. Talking to the audience is a G&S performance tradition; this show just makes it a little more obvious. It is explained, in a very funny little pre-curtain speech delivered by "W. S. Gilbert" himself (actually David Hyde Pierce of Frasier fame, who also plays Major-General Stanley), that Gilbert & Sullivan have decided to revise the show so they can incorporate some of the exciting things they've discovered about American musical and theatrical idioms. So, Gilbert explains to us, the play is now set in New Orleans, and words and music have been revised to reflect that.
Musically, for most people, that change is going to be a win. Unless you are an absolute diehart purist who wants everything to sound exactly like your old D'Oyly Carte recordings, you cannot but be charmed by some of the changes. I especially appreciate the fact that Mabel is no longer a coloratura soprano. Lowering the range and going jazzier in the orchestration gives Mabel's music a new warmth and depth which to me made her richer and more interesting. In general the musical ensemble is less like a symphony orchestra and more like a band. This was true for the 1980s version I saw with Ronstadt and Kline, but I think this production made that shift much more successfully. The 1980s version basically tried to sound like 80s pop music, and I got very tired of the electric guitars and the synthesizers. This version seems to be trying to engage in a more thoughtful way with New Orleans's extremely rich musical history, so there's a lot of jazz and folk styles worked in. Again, to me this was an improvement, especially when it came to the Stanley daughters. The fact that Stanley has about a dozen daughters all more or less the same age is explained in the original in a throwaway line about the daughters all being "wards in chancery" (i.e., not his biological children). In this production the daughters occasionally point out that they were "born all over the world," but that Major-General Stanley decided to raise them all in New Orleans because of its diversity and because of America being the land of opportunity. So this Major-General would appear to have had a lot of girls in a lot of ports, more or less simultaneously.
Anyway, it was interesting to me that the main romance is preserved more or less intact (apart from a running gag about how hot Mabel is for Frederick and how fast she's moving on him). "Modern Major-General" is unchanged except for the joke about rhyming "strategy" (again, to my mind, an improvement on the original). All of the biggest changes involve the pirates and Ruth...and the ending.
Ruth is an example of a G&S stock character that Mrs. P and I call The Heinous Alto. She is an older woman with a lower voice who is in love with the much younger hero, who is horrified by her interest in him. Her sexual desires are presented as ludicrous and terrifying. it's a foregone conclusion that this older woman can't possibly be attractive, to the hero or to anyone else, and she is often given a song in which she is forced to acknowledge her own ugliness (my least favorite is "Silvered is the raven hair" from Patience). Once spurned by the hero, she often becomes his antagonist, teaming up with whoever's on the other side of the conflict. The Oedipal overtones of this setup are particularly pronounced in Pirates, given that Ruth was Frederick's nurse.
So, this sounds pretty misogynistic, and it is. The thing is though: the heinous alto is also often the best role in the show. Precisely because she's disqualified from being the ingenue, she's often funnier, crazier, more assertive, and dare I say it sexier than the romantic heroine. This is certainly true for Ruth, who loves being a pirate; as disappointed as she says she is about Frederick, she seems quite happy being the Pirate King's right hand man. She's usually armed, and she takes the lead role in plotting to steal Frederick back. It's easy to see why Jinkx Monsoon, as one of the trailblazing trans performers on Broadway (Chicago's own Alexandra Billings, who we saw as Madame Morrible in Wicked a few years ago, being another), would be attracted to this part. It's also easy to see how, as a trans performer, you might not want some of the things that come with it, including the whole preying-on-the-youth thing and the obligatory song about how unlike a young and attractive woman you really are.
So there are two important changes that this show makes to Ruth's role. First, they cut almost all of the song in which Frederick repudiates Ruth ("O false one, you have deceived me"), during which he points out how "plain and old" she is, and accuses her of "[playing] upon my innocence." Cutting this not only skips the mockery of the aging female body but also saves Ruth from having to beg Frederick to stay with her ("Master, Master, do not leave me"). So with that out of the way, there's more room for the good stuff about Ruth. This is also the song that establishes Ruth's actual age--47--and therefore the 26 year age gap. In the film I linked to above (which is based on the 1980s Broadway production) Angela Lansbury is playing Ruth much older than that, with a gray wig and a granny bun. Monsoon's Ruth may be older or younger than 47; but she's not playing old. However old this Ruth actually is, she's vital, active, passionate, and in on every joke about her own character.
The other thing they've done is imported an aria from another G&S operetta so Ruth can have a solo. This is something the 1980s Broadway production of Pirates did--for Mabel. (In that show, Ronstadt sang "Sorry her lot" from HMS Pinafore). Giving Ruth a solo officially marks her as the 'real' heroine (Monsoon gets top billing in this production, whereas you would never know till you saw the program who's playing Mabel). It's especially interesting that the song they borrowed is "Alone and yet alive" from The Mikado. This is sung by Katisha, one of the truly great Heinous Altos and a character whose rage at being spurned becomes positively homicidal. So this is another way of strengthening Monsoon's Ruth. But also. The main thrust of the lyrics is: I wish that you really could die of a broken heart, but in fact we women are a lot sturdier than that, so instead we're stuck having to survive this emotional devastation. There's an ambivalence built into it: on the one hand, I am tough enough to survive this so go me; on the other hand, survival can be fucking exhausting. When it's sung by a trans woman in the year of our lord 2025, for me at least, that ambivalence really resonates. Yeah, I will survive this latest bullshit as I have already survived worse. But while surviving, I'm going to cry about how fucking hard it is--and you will listen to me do it and feel it with me and it will not invalidate my strength.
So Jinkx Monsoon's performance, and the changes made to her role by the producers, really transform Ruth and really bond the audience with her, and that change arguably has a bigger impact than the change of setting. I personally enjoyed this change, because I am the parent of a trans child with ambitions in musical theater and I felt like it was good for PJ to see that at least in this one instance, Monsoon's presence was strong enough to bend the conventions around her. Like it really mattered to me to see this production not just making space for Jinkx Monsoon's Ruth but actively supporting and augmenting her take on the character.
But probably the most dramatic change to the original libretto is in the last 5 minutes and it has nothing to do with Ruth. The move to the American setting completely nukes the original resolution, which relies on tongue-in-cheek appeals to Victorian patriotism. Because here in America we have no noblemen and also, what, NO KINGS (or queens). So instead of the appeal to Queen Victoria, there's an appeal to "liberty" (the chorale "Hail Poetry" is rewritten as "Hail Liberty"). I don't know exactly how the show gets there because I will say that I don't think they mixed the sound right and I often had trouble understanding the words, especially when they'd been altered. This leads to someone pointing out that one thing all the warring parties have in common is that we're all from somewhere else. After some discussion of how we are a nation of immigrants (I mean not in so many words but that's clearly the subtext), the show ends with everyone singing a song from HMS Pinafore which was originally called "He Is An Englishman," and has now been completely rewritten as "We're All From Somewhere Else."
My ambivalence about this is not because it's not a logical or 'realistic' ending. The original resolution is equally nonsensical, and that's what people come to G&S for: nonsense. In fact I really appreicate the attempt to replicate the very specifically G&S brand of nonsense that closes Pirates, in which it's clear that the real reason everyone decides to stop fighting and get along is that it's time for the show to be over. The thing that's depressing about it is that producing this highly unrealistic moment of union around the idea of immigration as fundamentally American unavoidably engages the scariest and darkest part of what this country is going through right now. The audience applauds the sentiment, but it's not just a reflex action, the way the original pirates react to Queen Victoria's name. It becomes a statement. And there's something sad, for me, about that. It's sad that this needs affirming. It's sad that even as the audience affirms it I can only hear how violently and ruthlessly our government is denying it.
Anyway. More than you were probably asking for about this show; but before I go, point number three, generosity as part of the spirit of live theater.
In general, I am just really grateful to everyone who goes out there and leaves it all on the floor eight times a week. And my gratitude includes everyone from the marquee names to the smallest of ensemble roles. This trip, though, I had a lot of time to observe something that is not normally part of my theatergoing experience: the stage door line.
PJ always wants autographs. So after nearly every show we saw on this trip, PJ lined up outside the stage door and waited. We just watched from someplace nearby. Eventually, some of the performers emerge, in their street clothes, and go down the line giving people autographs. I watched this from pretty close up after Cabaret, and...I mean this production made a very queer show even queerer than it has to be, and there were a lot of young queer people in that stage door line, and they were just overwhelmed at getting to see the performers, even the non-famous ones. Including, of course, PJ, who was thrilled to get signatures from a lot of the Kit Kat dancers as well as Eva Noblezada.
The signature line is a lot. After working from whenever call is to whenever the show ends, the actors doing the signature line (not all of them do, and I don't know whether this reflects what's in people's individual contracts or not) then walk this gauntlet, smiling through their exhaustion, talking to a hundred or so total strangers, many of whom are in an advanced state of verklemptness. I hope they find it rewarding, but it seems to me like the rewards would probably diminish after the show's been running for a while. But these actors respond to their fans as if this performance, their performance, was as unique and special to the actors as it was to the fans; and I just appreciate the joy that this little moment of connection brings to PJ.
The signature line at Cabaret is tightly controlled, like everything else about that production. For a show that really tries to replicate that Berlin cabaret amosphere, they have a LOT of staff working crowd control. I have never seen people approach the intermission ladies' room line with this amount of ruthless military efficiency. By contrast, the stage door line at Pirates! is barely organized. For a long time I wasn't really sure this was even the right line. But anyway, PJ got in it and then Mrs. P and I went across the street to watch.
Naturally we turned our phones on again--having turned them off before the show--and immediately learned that Trump had bombed three nuclear sites in Iran.
This would have been terrible news on any night. Coming on the heels of watching this show with this cast, there was extra awfulness. I have not mentioned yet Ramin Karimloo's performance, which was amazing. He's an incredibly charismatic, charming, forceful, sexy, and very athletic Pirate King, performing feats of strength while singing his heart out. He made the whole "orphan" thing--the pirates never harm orphans, because they're all orphans themselves, and so everyone they capture claims to be an orphan, and the pirates always believe them--his own by engaging in the most elaborate and hilarious reactions every time the subject came up, at one point actually swallowing his sword in frustration. I didn't love some of the rewriting they did for his character, especially the retooled "O better far to live and die;" but all was forgiven when they did "With catlike tread, upon our prey we steal." The combat sequences were very impressive and very funny, and all in all Karimloo's zest for this part was just delightful. At the end of the show, the cast goes into the aisles tossing everyone Mardi Gras beads, for which everyone goes crazy. Karimloo is the only one who tosses them up into the balcony--probably because he's the only one with the guns to get them up there--and he looks like he's really enjoying it. Anyway.
Ramin Karimloo was born in Tehran and grew up in Canada; he's also worked a lot in London. And on the night our Asshole in Chief bombed Iran, after singing a happy song about how what makes this country great is how all Americans are from all over the world, he came out and walked the signature line and took a selfie with PJ.
Jinkx Monsoon came out afterward, with two security people following her. And like...I wish you could see PJ's face as Jinkx Monsoon came over to sign his program. I can, because Mrs. P took a photo at that moment. It was just...really, literally, worth the price of admission. For PJ and for us.
And this is what I mean about generosity. With all the stories about Patti LuPone's bad diva behavior floating around, I feel like it's important to say: she's in trouble for all that because it's not actually the norm. Most performers want things to be good for the other performers; most performers want it to be good for the spectator too. At a time when the tech industry is trying to direct us away from each other and into our screens, most perfomers put themselves through the agony of human connection, on a scale and at an intensity that most of us will fortunately never be called to imitate, night after night after night, and whatever money they make doing that, by God they've earned it.
Anyway. Long answer to a short question, but there it is. We loved it; it was a very funny and very poignant experience; I truly hate the particular historical context in which this particular performance happened; I am really grateful to all of these actors for giving PJ happiness.
Somehow I forgot to mention that Pirates! also imports a number from a different G&S musical for David Hyde Pierce's Major-General Stanley. Iolanthe, a show I've seen and enjoyed but about which could not tell you literally anything about the plot at this point, includes one of the best-beloved pattersongs in the G&S repertoire, "Love unrequited robs me of my rest," or as it is called in the Pirates! program, "The Nightmare Song." It's a rapid-fire description, in rhyming verse, of a nightmare which just jumps from one surreal, awkward, uncomfortable, bizarre situation to another. It works just as well for Major-General Stanley, who is out in the family graveyard in the middle of the night because of his remorse at having lied to the Pirate King about being an orphan, as it does for the judge in Iolanthe who's up with unrequited-love-induced indigestion. Unfortunately for the adapters it incorporates a lot of English place names because it's funny how hard they are to rhyme, so there was some editing done on the lyrics; but it's still a tour de force and it's still cool to watch David Hyde Pierce, who looks kind of frail but is incredibly sharp, nail it.
plaidder_tumblr_feedSorry, finally getting around to this. It was a busy weekend.
So the short story is we loved it. It is hugely entertaining, and I think it works well for both hardcore Gilbert & Sullivan nuts and people who have never had the pleasure. On the surface it seems weird that there should be an American following for Gilbert & Sullivan at all, given how self-consciously British they all are, and how much annotation is sometimes required for basic cultural transference to be possible. The one thing that I think explains it is that G&S were very very good at one thing: being extremely silly without being stupid, mean* (*exception to be discussed below) or tedious. This production preserves that quality, even though it makes a lot of other changes, presumably in order to appeal more strongly to modern American audiences.
So that's the short story. The longer story is behind this cut tag, and it will discuss:
So to be clear, we chose to see Pirates! because as soon as I said to PJ, "Hey, they're doing some kind of remix of Pirates of Penzance with Jinkx Monsoon as Ruth," he underwent a small explosion of enthusiasm. Though we don't watch RuPaul's Drag Race, PJ as a trans teenager is familiar with Jinkx Monsoon and PJ did also greatly enjoy Jinkx Monsoon's appearance as Maestro in the Doctor Who episode "The Devil's Chord." PJ was further excited to find out that the Pirate King would be played by Ramin Karimloo, who has had a long career on Broadway and is one of the more beloved of the 21st century Phantoms (as in ALW's Phantom of the Opera). This didn't mean much to me because I am really not a fan of Phantom of the Opera, but I was glad PJ had a further delight to look forward to.
So, briefly (as I so often say, lyingly, before I summarize something), The Pirates of Penzance in its original form is a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta about a young lad named Frederick who has grown up largely on a pirate ship and is now approaching the end of his 21st year. Big changes are coming, because Frederick's apprenticeship will soon be over, and he is about to leave the profession and turn law-abiding citizen. See, Frederick always does his duty; and just as it was his duty to loot and pillage when he was a pirate's apprentice, it will be his duty to thwart and arrest pirates once he's no longer apprenticed. Frederick's former nursemaid Ruth, whose fault it is that he got apprenticed as a pirate in the first place, has also been along for the ride on the pirate ship and is now engaged to Frederick, who since joining the pirates has literally never seen another woman and therefore believes Ruth's claims about her youth and beauty. Well, once ashore, Frederick catches sight of the female chorus, excuse me, the daughters of Major-General Stanley, and is undeceived. Repudating Ruth, he immediately falls in love with Stanley's daughter Mabel.
Just as Frederick is about to help lead the local constabulary to defeat the pirates, the Pirate King and Ruth show up and tell him they've found a loophole. The articles of his apprenticeship indicate that he's bound until his twenty-first birthday, not his twenty-first year. Frederick was born on February 29 in a leap year, which means he has only one birthday every four years. Technically, his time won't be up until he's 84. Devastated but determined to do his duty, Frederick says a tearful farewell to Mabel and returns to the Dark Side. Ultimately, the craven constables are no match for the pirates; but just as they are about to be defeated, the sergeant hits upon the idea of charging the pirates to yield "in Queen Victoria's name." The pirates are so affected by this appeal to their patriotism that they give up and allow themselves to be arrested--until Ruth points out that these pirates are all actually "noblemen who have gone wrong," after which Major-General Stanley pardons them all. The conflict is resolved, Frederick marries Mabel, the male chorus of pirates marries the female chorus of Stanley daughters, and all is well.
So. Pirates! The Penzance Musical is set "in a theater in New Orleans." The metatheatrical conceit is important to the show's aesthetic (the set design is intentionally 2-dimensional and eye-catchingly unconvincing) and also makes room for some charming little metatheatrical moments within the show. Talking to the audience is a G&S performance tradition; this show just makes it a little more obvious. It is explained, in a very funny little pre-curtain speech delivered by "W. S. Gilbert" himself (actually David Hyde Pierce of Frasier fame, who also plays Major-General Stanley), that Gilbert & Sullivan have decided to revise the show so they can incorporate some of the exciting things they've discovered about American musical and theatrical idioms. So, Gilbert explains to us, the play is now set in New Orleans, and words and music have been revised to reflect that.
Musically, for most people, that change is going to be a win. Unless you are an absolute diehart purist who wants everything to sound exactly like your old D'Oyly Carte recordings, you cannot but be charmed by some of the changes. I especially appreciate the fact that Mabel is no longer a coloratura soprano. Lowering the range and going jazzier in the orchestration gives Mabel's music a new warmth and depth which to me made her richer and more interesting. In general the musical ensemble is less like a symphony orchestra and more like a band. This was true for the 1980s version I saw with Ronstadt and Kline, but I think this production made that shift much more successfully. The 1980s version basically tried to sound like 80s pop music, and I got very tired of the electric guitars and the synthesizers. This version seems to be trying to engage in a more thoughtful way with New Orleans's extremely rich musical history, so there's a lot of jazz and folk styles worked in. Again, to me this was an improvement, especially when it came to the Stanley daughters. The fact that Stanley has about a dozen daughters all more or less the same age is explained in the original in a throwaway line about the daughters all being "wards in chancery" (i.e., not his biological children). In this production the daughters occasionally point out that they were "born all over the world," but that Major-General Stanley decided to raise them all in New Orleans because of its diversity and because of America being the land of opportunity. So this Major-General would appear to have had a lot of girls in a lot of ports, more or less simultaneously.
Anyway, it was interesting to me that the main romance is preserved more or less intact (apart from a running gag about how hot Mabel is for Frederick and how fast she's moving on him). "Modern Major-General" is unchanged except for the joke about rhyming "strategy" (again, to my mind, an improvement on the original). All of the biggest changes involve the pirates and Ruth...and the ending.
Ruth is an example of a G&S stock character that Mrs. P and I call The Heinous Alto. She is an older woman with a lower voice who is in love with the much younger hero, who is horrified by her interest in him. Her sexual desires are presented as ludicrous and terrifying. it's a foregone conclusion that this older woman can't possibly be attractive, to the hero or to anyone else, and she is often given a song in which she is forced to acknowledge her own ugliness (my least favorite is "Silvered is the raven hair" from Patience). Once spurned by the hero, she often becomes his antagonist, teaming up with whoever's on the other side of the conflict. The Oedipal overtones of this setup are particularly pronounced in Pirates, given that Ruth was Frederick's nurse.
So, this sounds pretty misogynistic, and it is. The thing is though: the heinous alto is also often the best role in the show. Precisely because she's disqualified from being the ingenue, she's often funnier, crazier, more assertive, and dare I say it sexier than the romantic heroine. This is certainly true for Ruth, who loves being a pirate; as disappointed as she says she is about Frederick, she seems quite happy being the Pirate King's right hand man. She's usually armed, and she takes the lead role in plotting to steal Frederick back. It's easy to see why Jinkx Monsoon, as one of the trailblazing trans performers on Broadway (Chicago's own Alexandra Billings, who we saw as Madame Morrible in Wicked a few years ago, being another), would be attracted to this part. It's also easy to see how, as a trans performer, you might not want some of the things that come with it, including the whole preying-on-the-youth thing and the obligatory song about how unlike a young and attractive woman you really are.
So there are two important changes that this show makes to Ruth's role. First, they cut almost all of the song in which Frederick repudiates Ruth ("O false one, you have deceived me"), during which he points out how "plain and old" she is, and accuses her of "[playing] upon my innocence." Cutting this not only skips the mockery of the aging female body but also saves Ruth from having to beg Frederick to stay with her ("Master, Master, do not leave me"). So with that out of the way, there's more room for the good stuff about Ruth. This is also the song that establishes Ruth's actual age--47--and therefore the 26 year age gap. In the film I linked to above (which is based on the 1980s Broadway production) Angela Lansbury is playing Ruth much older than that, with a gray wig and a granny bun. Monsoon's Ruth may be older or younger than 47; but she's not playing old. However old this Ruth actually is, she's vital, active, passionate, and in on every joke about her own character.
The other thing they've done is imported an aria from another G&S operetta so Ruth can have a solo. This is something the 1980s Broadway production of Pirates did--for Mabel. (In that show, Ronstadt sang "Sorry her lot" from HMS Pinafore). Giving Ruth a solo officially marks her as the 'real' heroine (Monsoon gets top billing in this production, whereas you would never know till you saw the program who's playing Mabel). It's especially interesting that the song they borrowed is "Alone and yet alive" from The Mikado. This is sung by Katisha, one of the truly great Heinous Altos and a character whose rage at being spurned becomes positively homicidal. So this is another way of strengthening Monsoon's Ruth. But also. The main thrust of the lyrics is: I wish that you really could die of a broken heart, but in fact we women are a lot sturdier than that, so instead we're stuck having to survive this emotional devastation. There's an ambivalence built into it: on the one hand, I am tough enough to survive this so go me; on the other hand, survival can be fucking exhausting. When it's sung by a trans woman in the year of our lord 2025, for me at least, that ambivalence really resonates. Yeah, I will survive this latest bullshit as I have already survived worse. But while surviving, I'm going to cry about how fucking hard it is--and you will listen to me do it and feel it with me and it will not invalidate my strength.
So Jinkx Monsoon's performance, and the changes made to her role by the producers, really transform Ruth and really bond the audience with her, and that change arguably has a bigger impact than the change of setting. I personally enjoyed this change, because I am the parent of a trans child with ambitions in musical theater and I felt like it was good for PJ to see that at least in this one instance, Monsoon's presence was strong enough to bend the conventions around her. Like it really mattered to me to see this production not just making space for Jinkx Monsoon's Ruth but actively supporting and augmenting her take on the character.
But probably the most dramatic change to the original libretto is in the last 5 minutes and it has nothing to do with Ruth. The move to the American setting completely nukes the original resolution, which relies on tongue-in-cheek appeals to Victorian patriotism. Because here in America we have no noblemen and also, what, NO KINGS (or queens). So instead of the appeal to Queen Victoria, there's an appeal to "liberty" (the chorale "Hail Poetry" is rewritten as "Hail Liberty"). I don't know exactly how the show gets there because I will say that I don't think they mixed the sound right and I often had trouble understanding the words, especially when they'd been altered. This leads to someone pointing out that one thing all the warring parties have in common is that we're all from somewhere else. After some discussion of how we are a nation of immigrants (I mean not in so many words but that's clearly the subtext), the show ends with everyone singing a song from HMS Pinafore which was originally called "He Is An Englishman," and has now been completely rewritten as "We're All From Somewhere Else."
My ambivalence about this is not because it's not a logical or 'realistic' ending. The original resolution is equally nonsensical, and that's what people come to G&S for: nonsense. In fact I really appreicate the attempt to replicate the very specifically G&S brand of nonsense that closes Pirates, in which it's clear that the real reason everyone decides to stop fighting and get along is that it's time for the show to be over. The thing that's depressing about it is that producing this highly unrealistic moment of union around the idea of immigration as fundamentally American unavoidably engages the scariest and darkest part of what this country is going through right now. The audience applauds the sentiment, but it's not just a reflex action, the way the original pirates react to Queen Victoria's name. It becomes a statement. And there's something sad, for me, about that. It's sad that this needs affirming. It's sad that even as the audience affirms it I can only hear how violently and ruthlessly our government is denying it.
Anyway. More than you were probably asking for about this show; but before I go, point number three, generosity as part of the spirit of live theater.
In general, I am just really grateful to everyone who goes out there and leaves it all on the floor eight times a week. And my gratitude includes everyone from the marquee names to the smallest of ensemble roles. This trip, though, I had a lot of time to observe something that is not normally part of my theatergoing experience: the stage door line.
PJ always wants autographs. So after nearly every show we saw on this trip, PJ lined up outside the stage door and waited. We just watched from someplace nearby. Eventually, some of the performers emerge, in their street clothes, and go down the line giving people autographs. I watched this from pretty close up after Cabaret, and...I mean this production made a very queer show even queerer than it has to be, and there were a lot of young queer people in that stage door line, and they were just overwhelmed at getting to see the performers, even the non-famous ones. Including, of course, PJ, who was thrilled to get signatures from a lot of the Kit Kat dancers as well as Eva Noblezada.
The signature line is a lot. After working from whenever call is to whenever the show ends, the actors doing the signature line (not all of them do, and I don't know whether this reflects what's in people's individual contracts or not) then walk this gauntlet, smiling through their exhaustion, talking to a hundred or so total strangers, many of whom are in an advanced state of verklemptness. I hope they find it rewarding, but it seems to me like the rewards would probably diminish after the show's been running for a while. But these actors respond to their fans as if this performance, their performance, was as unique and special to the actors as it was to the fans; and I just appreciate the joy that this little moment of connection brings to PJ.
The signature line at Cabaret is tightly controlled, like everything else about that production. For a show that really tries to replicate that Berlin cabaret amosphere, they have a LOT of staff working crowd control. I have never seen people approach the intermission ladies' room line with this amount of ruthless military efficiency. By contrast, the stage door line at Pirates! is barely organized. For a long time I wasn't really sure this was even the right line. But anyway, PJ got in it and then Mrs. P and I went across the street to watch.
Naturally we turned our phones on again--having turned them off before the show--and immediately learned that Trump had bombed three nuclear sites in Iran.
This would have been terrible news on any night. Coming on the heels of watching this show with this cast, there was extra awfulness. I have not mentioned yet Ramin Karimloo's performance, which was amazing. He's an incredibly charismatic, charming, forceful, sexy, and very athletic Pirate King, performing feats of strength while singing his heart out. He made the whole "orphan" thing--the pirates never harm orphans, because they're all orphans themselves, and so everyone they capture claims to be an orphan, and the pirates always believe them--his own by engaging in the most elaborate and hilarious reactions every time the subject came up, at one point actually swallowing his sword in frustration. I didn't love some of the rewriting they did for his character, especially the retooled "O better far to live and die;" but all was forgiven when they did "With catlike tread, upon our prey we steal." The combat sequences were very impressive and very funny, and all in all Karimloo's zest for this part was just delightful. At the end of the show, the cast goes into the aisles tossing everyone Mardi Gras beads, for which everyone goes crazy. Karimloo is the only one who tosses them up into the balcony--probably because he's the only one with the guns to get them up there--and he looks like he's really enjoying it. Anyway.
Ramin Karimloo was born in Tehran and grew up in Canada; he's also worked a lot in London. And on the night our Asshole in Chief bombed Iran, after singing a happy song about how what makes this country great is how all Americans are from all over the world, he came out and walked the signature line and took a selfie with PJ.
Jinkx Monsoon came out afterward, with two security people following her. And like...I wish you could see PJ's face as Jinkx Monsoon came over to sign his program. I can, because Mrs. P took a photo at that moment. It was just...really, literally, worth the price of admission. For PJ and for us.
And this is what I mean about generosity. With all the stories about Patti LuPone's bad diva behavior floating around, I feel like it's important to say: she's in trouble for all that because it's not actually the norm. Most performers want things to be good for the other performers; most performers want it to be good for the spectator too. At a time when the tech industry is trying to direct us away from each other and into our screens, most perfomers put themselves through the agony of human connection, on a scale and at an intensity that most of us will fortunately never be called to imitate, night after night after night, and whatever money they make doing that, by God they've earned it.
Anyway. Long answer to a short question, but there it is. We loved it; it was a very funny and very poignant experience; I truly hate the particular historical context in which this particular performance happened; I am really grateful to all of these actors for giving PJ happiness.
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July 4 is most of a week away, so I was not anticipating that outside my hotel window last night would be a full-fledged professional fireworks display. But it turns out the hotel I was at, was next door to a Masonic Temple compound, and I guess they had some premature patriotic fervor. Inasmuch as I got a free fireworks show I didn’t even need to leave my hotel room for (and it ended early enough that I didn’t lose any sleep over it), I suppose I can’t complain.
Back at home now. Not anticipating a fireworks display tonight. We’ll see if that prediction holds.
— JS
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Very different from the last View From a Hotel Window I posted, seeing that one was from Venice, Italy. This one is greener, though. And has a parking lot! Very few of those in Venice, I have to say.
Why am I here? Because of the Big Ohio Book Con, where Tochi Onyebuchi and I are in conversation tomorrow at 12:30, followed by us both signing books. If you are in the vicinity of Medina, OH tomorrow, come down and see us (the book festival is also happening today! Right now! As I write this!). If you’re not in the vicinity of Medina, Ohio today or tomorrow, well, try to have a good time anyway.
— JS
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branchandroot
