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.”