5-Arts

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Friday, March 27, 2015 — 5

INTO THE WOODS
From Page 1

STYLE COLUMN

Let’s get it trending
W

hether we admit to 
it or not, one day 
we will look back 

on 2015, with its lobs, smokey 
eyes and high-waisted every-
thing, and 
think, “Dear 
god, why?” 
This type 
of shame-
ridden regret 
has already 
perme-
ated through 
most of us 
in one form 
or another. 
When I 
think back to my childhood, 
flared, patched denim and all, 
I wonder why I ever thought 
anything I wore was cool. Then I 
remind myself that I was in fact, 
a child, and that’s reason enough 
to justify my sartorial missteps. 

What surprises me the most 

is that I can also think back 
to much more recent years, to 
trends that still hold some level 
of relevance, and roll my eyes 
and think “that looks so dated.” 
(see: long, wavy hair with a 
center part à la 2012 Kim Kar-
dashian.) People are already dis-
cussing the looming exit of the 
skinny jean, an idea that I want 
to reject now, but will probably 
succumb to within months. Lest 
I forget how I scoffed at the idea 
of skinny jeans years ago, think-
ing that pants which served 
no other purpose than to cut 
off your circulation altogether 

would never catch on. I was 
obviously a little off-base — she 
types, unable to feel her legs at 
all.

This all begs the question*, 

why bother with trends if we’re 
only going to look back on them 
in horror/embarrassment? For 
one, we could start by not look-
ing back on them in horror/
embarrassment. Would I wear a 
bubble shirt, the itchy, one-size-
fits-all top that reached its peak 
around the same time “Lizzie 
McGuire” did, in 2015? No, 
because I’m not an insane per-
son. But I do hold a lot of respect 
for eight-year-old Erika, who 
pestered her way into one after 
months of eyeing it in a Limited 
Too catalogue. It itched so good 
— until nine-year-old Erika sub-
consciously dubbed it passé.

All of us have fallen prey to 

trends. Whenever I stumble 
upon pictures from the ’90s of 
my style-ignorant father I con-
sistently find myself thinking, “It 
takes one bold color to somehow 
combine the subtlety of a pastel 
and the abrasiveness of neon.” 
There’s no way he cared about 
clothes enough to think that he 
was making some original or 
progressive statement with what 
he was wearing. I can almost 
guarantee that he saw it on a 
rack with dozens of others and 
thought, “I need a shirt and this 
seems normal enough.” And by 
the standards then, it probably 
was. We look back, and we laugh, 
and we ask ourselves how we 

possibly could have worn that, 
but that’s what life is, adjusting 
to change like some sort of vesti-
ary Stockholm syndrome. It only 
took a few months of being sur-
rounded by skinny jeans for me 
to throw up my hands and say, “I 
guess this is what’s covering my 
butt for the next 10 years.”

Whether we find ourselves 

to be fashion visionaries or 
claim to be a person who only 
buys clothes when they abso-
lutely need to, none of us can 
escape the feeling of trend 
regret, but that’s exactly why 
we should embrace our current 
options. If you want to model 
your wardrobe after fall 2015 
Givenchy, facial piercings and 
all, now’s the time. Or if you’d 
rather dig through piles of 
vintage to discover your ideal 
baby-doll dress, have at it. 
Trends are a fleeting pipeline 
to genuinely enjoying fashion 
and being able to discover and 
experiment with style. There 
will always be the potential of 
minute embarrassment years 
down the road — but if you’re 
going to regret something, 
it might as well have been 
inspired by Riccardo Tisci. 

*I’ve recently been informed 

that this is the wrong use of 
“begs the question” but I’m 22 
years old, and frankly, it’s too 
late to be telling me these things.

Harwood is taking fashion cues 

from Lizzie McGuire. To show your 

support, email erikacat@umich.edu.

ERIKA 
HARWOOD

BOOK REVIEW

By KARL WILLIAMS

Daily Arts Writer

In a notorious essay on Joseph 

O’Neill and Tom McCarthy for 
the New York Review of Books, 
Zadie 
Smith 

outlines 
two 

divergent 
roads for the 
novel: lyrical 
realism 
and 

the 
avant-

garde. 
Most 

fiction 
falls 

under 
the 

category 
of 

lyrical realism; it is the legacy 
of Gustave Flaubert, a mimetic 
attempt to represent life with 
a focus on detail and the 
consciousness 
of 
characters. 

The avant-garde pushes against 
lyrical realism and, instead, 
tries to find new forms and 
modalities for writing fiction. 

Smith eulogizes the coming 

death of lyrical realism, in the 
mode of which O’Neill’s novel 
“Netherland” is written, and 
prophesies the renaissance of a 
new avant-garde written in the 
mode of McCarthy’s first novel 
“Remainder,” a novel that offers 
“a glimpse of an alternate road 
down which the novel might, 
with difficulty, travel forward.” 

Since 
the 
publication 
of 

Smith’s essay, McCarthy, for 
better or worse, has been seen 
as a torchbearer for the avant-
garde, blazing the way for a new 
form of novelistic expression 
after the apparent death of 
postmodernism. 
McCarthy’s 

newest novel, “Satin Island,” 
bears testament to his ability 
and place as a writer of the 
avant-garde. If you’re looking 
for a page-turner, go somewhere 
else. For McCarthy’s narrator 
sums it up: “Events! If you want 
those, you’d best stop reading 
now.”

The narrator of McCarthy’s 

novel is U, an anthropologist 
turned corporate ethnographer 
who 
idolizes 
Claude 
Levi-

Strauss and who has been 
assigned to write “The Great 
Report” 
at 
an 
enigmatic 

corporation 
known 
as 
the 

“Company.” 

At the beginning of the novel, 

he announces himself, “Call 
me U.” ironically evoking the 
opening of Herman Melville’s 
“Moby Dick,” “Call me Ishmael” 
Whereas, when Ishmael says 
this, it is an act of self-assertion, 

U uses this utterance as an act of 
self elision; U is a deliberate pun 
on “you” along with the prefix 
u- (as in Utopia), and he is, 
therefore, both everyman and 
no man. McCarthy’s narrator is 
an impressively passive figure, 
one of those corporate men 
whose sobriety and vacancy 
allows him to fit seamlessly into 
the miasma of corporate life. 

The prose McCarthy deploys 

evinces 
U’s 
inauthenticity: 

It is often blank, cold and 
expressionless, written more 
like a memo than a novel. 
However, the expressive power 
of McCarthy’s prose comes 
from its ironic formalization of 
corporate jargon. 

But 
inauthenticity 
is 
U’s 

greatest characteristic. He is 
no Huck Finn or Augie March. 
U’s interest in the murder of 
an 
English 
parachuter 
and 

similar incidents across the 
world leads him to remark that 
it is “an originally unoriginal 
event 
becoming 
even 
more 

unoriginal, and hence even 
more fascinating.” Within this 
paradox lies the brilliance of U’s 
character. He is compelling for 
how boring he is. He is like every 
man in fiction: He has memories, 
impressions, 
reflections. 
He 

walks. He thinks. He has sex. 
But McCarthy, in a beautifully 
Beckettian move, removes the 
veneer of individuation from 
these characteristics, creating 
a character remarkable for the 
absence of personality.

The Great Report sounds a lot 

like the epic modernist project 
most notable in the work of 
Joyce, Pound and Eliot: an 
attempt to capture all of culture 
within a single text. However, U 
comes to two conclusions: that 
this report is either unwritable 
or it has already been written. 
He fears that the Great Report 
has been written, not by a 
single author or even some 
Pynchonian syndicate, but “by 
a neutral and indifferent binary 
system that had given rise to 
itself, moved by itself and would 
perpetuate itself.” This is post-
digital fear of being subsumed 
into a totality wherein he 
lacks the control to act or 
interpret that motivates him 
to re-conceptualize both the 
Koob-Sassen Project and the 
company and to begin a search 
for a new kind of meaning.

At the Company, U works on 

the Koob-Sassen Project, the 

nature of which he is not legally 
allowed to disclose. However, 
he does not seem to know what 
this project constitutes or even 
his own role in it. All he does 
know is that there isn’t “a single 
area of your daily life that it 
hasn’t, in some way or another, 
touched 
on, 
penetrated, 

changed.” 

In this project McCarthy 

captures the ubiquitous and 
invisible effect of corporations: 
they are so prominent as to be 
unnoticeable. Furthermore, in a 
comic passage, he elucidates the 
ability of corporate capitalism to 
take the critiques raised against 
it and absorb them for its own 
purposes. Think of Che Guevara 
T-shirts or the Rolling Stones 
songs played on car commercials. 
Working for Levi’s, U takes the 
concepts fold and rip from the 
French 
Leftist 
philosophers 

Deleuze and Badiou and, taking 
out “all the revolutionary shit,” 
reframes them to sell jeans. As 
U notes, “The machine could 
swallow anything.”

The title of the novel comes 

from a dream U has. Satin 
Island (Staten Island without 
the first “t”) appears to him in 
a rather baroque dream of the 
detritus of civilization; it is “an 
excrescence, a protuberance, a 
lump: an island.” He imagines it 
as “the other place, the feeder, 
filterer, overflow-manager, the 
dirty, secreted-away appendix 
without which the other body-
proper couldn’t function.” The 
byproduct of civilization, its 
effluvia, is what signifies it; 
it is the very sign that gives it 
meaning.

“Satin Island” is a strange 

and exciting book. McCarthy’s 
novel is one of the rare avant-
garde novels that doesn’t fall 
into the trap of incoherence. 
A new path for the novel is 
certainly not yet visible, but the 
more McCarthy continues to 
write, the more illuminated this 
road will become.

‘Satin Island’ follows 
postmodern lit

Satin 
Island

Tom McCarthy

Alfred A. Knopf

February 17, 2015
Rare avant-
garde that 

doesn’t fall into 

incoherence.

STYLE NOTEBOOK
Men’s calves and legs 
are not to be seen

By ANDREW MCCLURE

Daily Arts Writer

Dudes, out with the shorts. 

I wish I could spin this as my 
own, but I hold too much respect 
for Fran Lebowitz, the sardonic 
author and commenter who, as 
her 1993 Paris Review interview 
put it, “disapproves of virtually 
everything.” This week ELLE 
interviewed her and, per usual, 
she said something inspired and 
funny and realized: Men in shorts 
are disgusting. It gets better when 
she says she’d rather “see some-
one coming toward me with a 
hand grenade” than sit next to 
shorted men “on the subway in 
the summer.” Even though Leb-
owitz is cooler than I ever was 
when I peaked socially back in 
the late 90’s, and her voice has 
a lower register, and her opin-
ions are sharper and leaner than 
things that are at once sharp and 
lean, I agree with every boner in 
my body: Shorts are vile.

First, the anatomical. Calves 

are, in the main, gross to look at. 
It’s the one body part that is never 
just right by any measurable func-
tion. Faces have the “golden ratio” 
and penises have rulers. Calves 
are invariably too skinny or too 
fat or too unshapely or too shape-
ly. Even when they are close to 
“nice,” you can thank some bulg-
ing purple vein or a moon-sized 
mole to fuck it all up. Rats! Try 
again! To be sure, calves are nasty 
and unflattering and exposing 
yours makes you look like a GSI 
who doesn’t know what year it is.

Second, the, er, anatomical, 

again. Legs are, in the main, on 
dudes, gross to look at. This bit 
for the the homies who thought 
they could justify shorts by skip-
ping my first point since they 
like their thighs and wear four-
inch inseams. The only thing 
more exposed leg flesh does to 
you is expose more of your veins 
and moles. So unless “veins and 
moles” falls under your mating 

market’s 
searched-for 
buzz-

words, light your shorts on fire or 
give them to someone who hasn’t 
had braces yet. He’ll rock ‘em 
better than you and wear a Pull-
Up underneath. 

Spring is here and that means 

snapbacks, sun, Sperry’s and 
style bloggers saying, “Spring is 
here and that means…” ad nau-
seam. I understand the utility of 
a tee when it’s hot AF outside, 
I really do. Nobody has ever 
proven to me that moist weather 
demands veins and moles and 
calves. Throw on some slacks 
and roll those cuffs like they 
do in Esquire. There’s a reason 
that publication remains impor-
tant: good writing, captivating 
interviews, sound advice and no 
calves.

Because syntax was never my 

thing, here are other articles 
to avoid this season: socks that 
people can see, flip-flops, tanks, 
frayed belts, unironic graphic 
tees and serial commas.

COURTESY OF MUSKET

This picture was taken moments before Ellen danced through the aisles.

– as they chase after their wish-
es until, eventually, the wishes 
are granted, we break for inter-
mission and return to find our 
heroes facing what happens 
after “happily ever after.”

“I really believe this is a fan-

tastic show with a fantastic 
book, beautiful music, glorious 
lyrics that I really think are 
some of the best lyrics in musi-
cal theater,” Quinn said. “I truly 
am of the belief that ‘Moments 
in the Woods’ is one of the best 
songs ever written for musical 
theater, one of the most specific 
and intense songs.”

Director 
(and 
choreogra-

pher) Quinn explained that, 
long before the curtain opens 
tonight, he and his cast tackled 
these songs and stories like they 
would any other musical, essen-
tially blinding themselves from 
previous performances for the 
sake of original interpretations 
and clean character develop-
ment.

“The way we’ve kind of 

approached this is not that 
there’s a specific concept that 
we’re going with, or a certain 
style or a certain time period, 
but simply that I have gotten the 
script as if it’s a new musical,” 
Quinn said. “I basically have, 
from the beginning, encouraged 
the actors, ‘Don’t watch the 
movie, don’t watch the musical, 
don’t watch that PBS documen-
tary on it ... Instead, find out 
what’s actually in the text.”

From there, the cast of 23 – 

chosen from an audition pool 
of about 300 – developed their 
characters through table reads, 
experimentation and exercis-
es. One exercise, in particular, 
focused on breaking free from 
restrictive blocking and explor-
ing new corners of their charac-
ters’ psyches.

“We took all the props and 

put them in the center of the 
room, and we said, ‘OK, now 
today, we’re gonna do the show, 
but I want you to throw away 
all the blocking you’ve known,” 
Quinn said. “And I just want 
you to do the story in the round 
now, and it will force you out of 
blocking, it will force you out of 
choreography, and it will force 
you to just tell the actual story 
that’s being told.’”

The 
result, 
according 
to 

Quinn, has been an unpredict-
able, vibrant rehearsal pro-
cess and unexpected works of 
striking originality. Over time, 
through six-a-week rehearsals, 
this originality was fostered by 
the cast’s chemistry with one 
another – both off and on the 
stage.

“It’s been really also fun to 

watch people like Sam (Yabrow), 
who’s playing Jack, work with 
the actor who’s playing Milky 
White because they literally had 
never met on the first day, and 
now when you look at them on 
stage, I mean, I at least see them 
as best friends from childhood,” 
Quinn said. “And whether or not 
Paul (Mayer) and Sam actually 
feel that way about each other, 
the relationship that they’ve 

created is really just beautiful.”

And yet, it’s not just the 

actors’ chemistry, comedy and 
approach that define MUS-
KET’s 2015 winter show. Like 
the musical he directs, Quinn is 
striving to subvert the old sto-
ries, to dig deep into the solid, 
impenetrable stone of Sond-
heim and find something new, 
something to hold in front the 
audience and say, “Look at this! 
Have you ever seen anything 
like this?!”

Quinn’s process began with 

the Narrator.

“The one big realization I 

had, and what I guess you could 
say my concept or my key for 
this show – I like to call it the 
‘Key to the Show’ – has been 
the Narrator (played by Mack-
enzie Orr),” Quinn said. “Every 
single thing that happens in this 
show is because of the Narrator 
... Everything that the charac-
ters are saying is coming as well 
from the Narrator, which then 
implied to me that everything 
that is happening on this stage 
is coming from the Narrator’s 
psyche.”

“Well, how’d you incorporate 

that realization into the show?” 
I asked (like a good journalist).

Quinn opened his mouth, but 

hesitated. A sound, the begin-
nings of an answer, escaped 
from the back of his throat 
before he stopped himself and 
said he’d rather not divulge any-
thing, that this show has a few 
“secrets” that are too good to 
give away just yet. Yet.

“The Narrator functions in a 

much more present, powerful 
and in-your-face way than the 
traditional Narrator of ‘Into the 
Woods’ would,” Quinn said.

Post-interview and off-the-

record, Quinn divulged those 
secrets. I had shivers – the kind 
that start at the base of your 
spine and work their way into 
your brain like an electric cur-

rent. It’s so simple, I thought. So 
brilliantly simple. And yet, like 
nothing you’ve ever seen.

As I packed up, Quinn told 

me how he sat in his room last 
semester, with tears in his eyes, 
asking himself again and again, 
“What the hell am I gonna do 
with the Narrator?” until, final-
ly, it hit him. He picked up the 
phone, called his producer Ryan 
and said, “Hey this may never 
work, but I wanna throw this at 
you.”

Since last May, Quinn has been 

working on this show, shaping a 
production that would eventually 
involve over 200 students, from 
creative teams to cast to crew to 
orchestra to assistants to the mar-
keting team and so on, all with a 
single, unshakeable, unwavering 
drive to reshape what has been 
sculpted over countless times.

“A million actors have played 

the Witch, a million actors have 
played the Baker’s Wife, a million 
actors have played Jack – but no 
one has done it like these actors. 
No one has given these interpre-
tations,” Quinn said.

From proposal to late night 

phone calls to production meet-
ings to tech week, Quinn, his 
crew, his entire cast, have dedi-
cated themselves to telling a 
story worth telling and offering 
something more, something real 
and significant. Where the crazi-
ness isn’t just craziness anymore.

“I would call Ryan (the pro-

ducer) almost every week being 
like, ‘I have this new crazy 
idea!’ and then the crazy ideas 
became a little less crazy in 
January when we had auditions 
and then they became a little less 
crazy when I was going through 
design concept meetings and 
they became a little less crazy as 
I was rehearsing it with the cast 
and now those ideas aren’t crazy 
anymore. Those ideas are real-
ity and those are ideas that are 
physically built and manufac-
tured and created.”

At the Power Center, this 

weekend, for only three per-
formances, audiences can see 
something crazy. A twist. A 
subversion. A real change. Like 
“Into the Woods,” MUSKET has 
taken an old story, unraveled its 
fabric and sewn something new, 
something that’s never been 
seen before, at least not out-
side of a director’s imagination. 
Until now.

“It’s so simple, 
and yet, like 

nothing you’ve 

ever seen.”

