Joan Rivers' Comeback

The subtitle of a new documentary about a year in the life of Joan Rivers, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, embodies so many meanings in four words. First and foremost, it refers to Joan Rivers' personality. She is seen as a comedic icon with a penchant for the un-PC. Example: "The only child I could ever like is Helen Keller because she doesn't talk." Back in the 1970's, she openly made jokes about abortions, referring to them as "appendectomies." She is even unabashed at calling her own daughter "a stupid cunt" for refusing a $400,000 Playboy gig.

Second, there's the meaner interpretation of Joan Rivers as the work of plastic surgeons. She is notorious for having face lifts up the wahzoo. Her Comedy Central Celebrity Roast appearance resulted in a barrage of jokes along the lines of "Joan Rivers has had so many facelifts, that she has to sneeze out her clit." Sigh. But this documentary allows Rivers to defend herself on the topic of plastic surgery, and she has several good points. To Rivers, plastic surgery is a progressive thing for women, giving us an opportunity to purchase something we weren't born with. Beauty--or the lack thereof--has been a constant theme in Rivers' life, and a source of many of her jokes. "My mother told me that looks aren't everything." Beat. "She told me this often."

Finally--and most importantly--Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work is about Joan Rivers doing whatever she can to find a piece of work. At 75 (now 77), Rivers is as energetic and eager as ever. The source of her passion is less a desire for money as a desire to matter. Through interviews with her manager, Billy Sammeth, we learn that Rivers's long-running private joke is "let me get my sunglasses" before she opens her datebook so as not to be blinded by the pages of inkless white. So this year in the life of Joan Rivers is really a year in the life of Rivers making her career matter. The journey begins with a a new play, Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress. Since Rivers's Broadway debut, Fun City, bombed she had been reluctant to open a new show in New York. This time, she takes the play first to Edinburgh and then to London to test the waters. Though the audience feels bad for Rivers when she only receives weak critical reception, Rivers is able to put this immediately behind her to do her next big thing, appear on celebrity Apprentice.

At the same time, money still plays a role in Rivers' life. Rivers lives "as Marie Antoinette would have lived had she had money," in an ornately decorated Manhattan penthouse. She claims she has to work to support this lifestyle. In addition, she has many staff, including a housekeeper, a manager, an agent, and two assistants. These each come with children whose private school tuition Rivers has also kindly taken up. As such, we Rivers finds herself doing gigs in the middle of nowhere Wisconsin, boarding a plane to LA, sleeping for three hours, and waking up again in Minneapolis. Though her lifestyle might be garish, and her personality garrulous, there is something commendable about Joan Rivers' work ethic. At film's end, I found myself rooting for her in her goal of exceeding the longevity of Don Rickles' and Phyllis Diller's careers.

Mrs. Warren's Profession Brings a Satisfying End to Shakespeare Theatre's season

George Bernard Shaw's play, Mrs. Warren's Profession, has gotten a lot of action lately. I first learned about it when it was at Princeton's McCarter Theatre in the 2008-2009 season. Next year, it's playing at Roundabout Theatre in New York. Meanwhile, it's being staged at the Shakespeare Theatre as its final production of the season.

Mrs. Warren's current popularity might stem from its salacious history. It was officially banned by the Lord Chamberlain in 1893, when it was written, and wasn't performed until 1902. A public staging in New York City was put to a stop by the police. Perhaps producers hang on to this bad ass image when they market new productions of Mrs. Warren as "controversial." The tagline for Shakespeare Theatre's current show boasts, "There are no secrets better kept than the secrets that everybody guesses." But in an age of Jersey Shore and Sex and the City 2, Mrs. Warren's Profession is not the place for lewdness.

Instead, this play should be seen for its careful, deep exploration of perennially interesting themes: a woman's place, class, and the bond between mother and daughter. Without a single utterance of the word "prostitution," the play centers on this, Mrs. Warren's profession. Mrs. Warren (Elizabeth Ashley) is returning to her home in the England countryside after long trips abroad. Her daughter, Vivie, is also residing there, studying law after graduating Cambridge with extremely high marks in mathematics. Vivie embodies the 1890's "New Woman," one who is educated and wants to work for a living. However, Vivie also has a very rigid sense of morality and "way of life." She thinks people should work hard to get what they want. Basically, Vivie would be a Ayn Rand follower is she lived 100 years later. Naturally, Vivie is appalled when she learns that her mother was once a prostitute in her youth. But the two reconcile when Mrs. Warren (in a great performance by Ashley), asks Vivie exactly what choices did she have as a young woman in the 1860s: the lead factory for 9 shillings a week, or much more money in her chosen profession?

However, Vivie's respect for her mother quickly fades when she finds out that Mrs. Warren is still a madame. Most devastating of all is Vivie's realization that all of her own money comes from this kind of business. She is just as culpable for prostitution as are the barons who pay for these services. But while Vivie tries to work out her indignation, we wonder if she really has a right to be indignant. Mrs. Warren's business partner, an aristocrat, asks Vivie which is worse: his brother's investment in a factory that employs 600 poorly paid girls, or his investment in a brothel that helps girls actually earn a living for themselves?

Though Mrs. Warren is entirely relevant, parts of it do feel a bit dated--or, at least--foreign. A minor character, Mr. Praed, is never entirely accounted for. How does he know Mrs. Warren? I suppose the audience is just supposed to accept him as one of those house guests that so often dot the landscape of Merchant-Ivory films, but he remains a random plot-advancing device throughout the play. It's also more difficult for American audiences to empathize with the dilemma of forgiving one's own mother for partaking in a low-class pursuit or never speaking to her again. But it's ultimately Vivie's choice to forgive or not to forgive that makes Mrs. Warren's Profession a memorable play.

Tinkers Explores the Predominance of Family in Ourselves

It's not often that a novel gets into one's dreams. When one does, it's usually due to some super gory, explicit detail covering Hannibal Lecter's latest kill, or the misery of a post-apocalyptic world where people must eat babies to survive.

Tinkers, Paul Harding's 2009 Putlizer Prize winning novel, is neither gory, nor apocalyptic. However, it is about death. "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died," the novel opens. The next 190 pages of this taut story chronicles Crosby's flashbacks of his childhood, of his clock fixing tinkering, and especially of his father. Tinkers pervaded my dreams, not because of any scary content, but because of its beautiful descriptions of Crosby's flashbacks. He hallucinates that the walls are caving in around him, that the ceiling is falling in. Finally, the sky and the stars also collapse on top of him. Harding evokes all this with an incredible control of language, conveying the sense that he's actually seen what this looks like first hand:

"The very blue of the sky followed, draining from the heights into that cluttered concrete socket. Next fell the stars, tinkling about him like the ornaments of heaven shaken loose. Finally, the black vastation itself came untacked and draped over the entire heap, covering George's confused obliteration."

Harding's gorgeous sentences keeps the image in one's mind and haunts one's dreams.

Intertwined with George Crosby's thinkings is the story of his father, Howard Crosby, as a salesman in the 1920's. We learn that Howard is an epileptic. Harding's descriptions of Howard's do-it-yourselfness (he pulls a homeless man's tooth) during his travels and his epileptic episodes parallels George Crosby's tinkering and death-bed hallucinations. Readers wonder just how similar sons are to their fathers, whether or not by choice.

Indeed, much of Tinkers' power lies in what it omits. The only suspense comes from wondering if anything strange will happen to George Crosby on his death-bed. Though a new plot line creeps up three quarters into the book when we find out why Howard Crosby leaves his family when George is ten, the compression of the next seventy years into the last forty pages is much more profound than the actual details of the events.

Harding shows simply how quickly a lifetime goes by. As George dies, "He remembered all of the time that stood between himself as a boy of twelve and himself as a middle-aged husband and father contracting to zero." Harding encapsulates an entire life without showing us who George is as a husband, as a father, or as a grandfather. It's up to us to fill in the gaps based on the structure that Harding has provided us; based only on George's interactions as a boy with Howard, and George's propensities for clock-fixing in old age. By only providing these limited details, Harding proposes that maybe one's roots are all that matters.

All good music acts seem to come to DC at once. Hence the fortnight in March/April when DC greeted Spoon, Shearwater, Woods, Real Estate, The xx, Yeasayer, and Vampire Weekend. Though the month of June can't top that, it got off to a good start with appearances by The National at DAR Constitution Hall on June 6, and Broken Bells at the 9:30 Club on June 7.

The first time I saw The National, it was at the smaller Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City. The audience communed with the band as Matt Berninger told one story of heartbreak after another. His longing, apathy, and embarrassment--"I want to hurry home to you/put on a slow, dumb show for you"--became our longing, apathy, and embarrassment. Since Berninger's only instrument is his baritone voice, he sort of mashes the fists of his hands together to keep beat. This motion, coupled with his tendency to close his eyes, gives off an air of true anguish.

Turns out, this experience of communing with The National carries over to even seated, larger venues known for their poor acoustics, such as the Constitution Hall. First, the Antlers opened with anguished renditions of a few songs from their album, Hospice, which tracks a young girl's progression with cancer. The Antlers sounded more angry than melancholy as their music bounced off the Hall's walls. They did end their set with a spectacular version of "Two." "And no one paid attention to you when you stopped eating. 'Eighty-seven pounds and this all bears repeating," they sang their final lyrics and segued into several minutes of impassioned riffs.

After a short intermission, The National took the stage with "Runaway," a number from their new album, High Violet. Similar to their previous works, High Violet explores intimacies gone awry, and the sadness of middle-American male life. Berninger's deep voice and profound lyrics probably saves the band from being labeled emo. The band followed "Runaway" with "Mistaken for Strangers" - one of their biggest hits from Boxer. It's easy to see why. The lyrics are accessible, yet coy:

"You have to do it running but you do everything that they ask you to
cause you don’t mind seeing yourself in a picture
as long as you look faraway, as long as you look removed"

The music also engages, with a hearty blend of strong beats and horns. The set basically continued in this pattern: new song, followed by one or two old favorites, followed by new song, for the entire set. A set of at least 22(!) songs. Towards the end of the show, Matt Berninger jumped off the stage and marched into the crowds singing "Abel," enabling physical communing. Just when I thought he couldn't top that, he climbed into the boxes of the venue during the encore to "Mr. November," a DC appropriate song about politicians.

After the spectacular show, I had twenty-four hours to wind down until Monday night's Broken Bells gig at the 9:30 Club. Broken Bells has been criticized as "a great-in-theory but mediocre-in-execution collaboration between Danger Mouse and the Shins' James Mercer." Mediocre in creativity, maybe, but not in enjoyment factor. Though it's hard to tell the songs apart when listening to their eponymous first album straight through, one can't help but tap their feet along. The album is aurally interesting when compared to other albums; just not internally when comparing songs to each other. True to their name, they sprinkle their songs with bells at random moments.

The entire concert experience last night was very light and summery. The Morning Benders, a Californian band with a very west coast sound kicked the night off. They were chatty, asking the audience to yell out our choice between "Loose Change" and "Hand Me Downs." We chose "Hand Me Downs." They closed with an intimate version of "Excuses," where Chris Chu, the singer, took his mike off its stand and literally crooned at us to the lush.

"And I made an excuse
You found another way to tell the truth
I put no one else above us
We'll still be best friends when it all turns to dust."

I felt like I was in the 50's.

I missed Broken Bells' opening song, but I'm pretty sure they played through their entire album. Since that's only a forty minute record, the band supplemented it with some terrific, totally non-hipster covers. They played "Crimson and Clover" and "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" among others. Though Danger Mouse did not look happy to be there, the rest of the band rocked. All their songs were set to a projected background of images that made it look like the band was playing to a background of a film of their concert. Craaaazzyyy.

Sex and the City 2: Not as Bad as the First

Maryam and I saw Sex and the City 2 on opening day, Friday, as part of our reunions ritual. After the epic fail that was Sex and the City: The Movie, our expectations were low. After all, the first movie used a ridiculous plot to advance no real ideas but the idea that all women can get what they want simply by being selfish. Though it tried to empower women by allowing Samantha to dump Smith at the end with an "I love you, but I love me more," the desired effect was canceled out by the pure absurdity of the plot. These characters were no longer empathetic single ladies trying to navigate a city full of jerks, but privileged women who complained despite having everything they thought they wanted, including men who doted on them. The only realistic problems in the first movie was Miranda's: what to do when a husband cheats, but only once. However, it was resolved with little exploration and an unrealistic meeting on the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead, the film focused most of its attention on Carrie's struggle to find herself after getting dumped by Big at the altar. Though it was clear to the audience that Carrie's overindulgent demands is at fault, she never fully redeems herself.

For the most part, Sex and the City 2 stays away from melodrama or serious messaging. Indeed, this sequel's lack of seriousness actually makes it fun, especially for fans of the TV series. Early on, Samantha claims that she's tired of the recession and wants to go to some place "rich." The film delivers on this by showing blinding scenes of luxury without regard to reality. But that's ok because it knows that its viewers are watching this to seek escape, and not be reminded of their less luxurious lives. And so the movie opens with Stanford and Anthony's gay wedding at an indulgent Connecticut cottage. There's white everywhere, from the men's chorus to the swans. Out of no where, Liza Minnelli appears to officiate the wedding and do a Single Ladies dance number. Meaningful? No. But fabulous? Yes.

Next, the girls travel to Abu Dhabi on an all-expenses paid trip provided by a prince who may hire Samantha for PR purposes. This is the Abu Dhabi of Conde Nast Traveler, not National Geographic. The ladies' stay comes replete with four butlers and four private sedans. We later find out that this is what $22,000 a night buys.

In true SATC fashion, Carrie can't go two minutes without making a groaner and Samantha can't go that long without making a reference to sex. When Charlotte suggests that there should be a law against hot nannies, Carrie shoots back, "Yes - the Jude Law." When the girls encounter a hot Australian out in the desert, Samantha muses, "Lawrence of my labia!" But we expect these things and smile or roll our eyes with the characters when they happen.

As for themes, and messages, there are some, and they are much more believable than those addressed by the first film. Sex and the City 2 simultaneously looks at what makes a good marriage, and women's freedom in the Middle East. It pulls off the first better than the second. Carrie starts to question her marriage (duh!) when Big suggests they maintain multiple apartments so they can take 2 days apart from each other a week. Rather than seeing this as a sign of her wealth, Carrie sees it as a sign of doom to come. Luckily, the girls get to go to Abu Dhabi to try to work on their problems. Naturally, Carrie runs into ex-fiance Aidan, which more literally tests her marriage. At the same time, Abu Dhabi tests the girls' respect for other cultures. While Miranda tries, Samantha basically fails by flaunting her sexuality in public until she gets arrested. It's hard to know what to make of Samantha's arrest. Is it a lesson that we should respect other cultures, or a lesson that America is so much better because one wouldn't get arrested here?

In any case, the lessons and themes are not why one sees Sex and the City 2. It's for the decadence, the familiarity with old characters, and even the obvious puns.