In Which We Wonder If There Are Any Blogger Cats

Jellicles Can and Jellicles Do

by TYLER COATES

When I was in fourth grade my teacher had us watch some sort of educational video that I assume was about saying no to drugs, which is the kind of troubling situation in which most nine-year-olds in rural Virginia find themselves. I remember one important thing from the movie: I'm always supposed to say no, because if I don't I will most certainly jeopardize my chances of performing in the school talent show, which is the conflict the film's heroine was struggling with. In the end, of course, she made the right choice, and the video ended with her giving a rousing rendition of "Memory," the essential song from Andrew Lloyd Webber's smash musical Cats.

I remember watching that scene and thinking, "This song is beautiful! What is it?!" One of my classmates, who already had the genetic predisposition of becoming someone's fag hag, was the only one who knew what it was, and she was the person who introduced me to the glory of Cats.

A few weeks later I bought the double-cassette soundtrack and made my mother play it on the car stereo on the way home. I was floored. It was amazing! I listened to the tapes over and over again. I danced around my room pretending I was Mr. Mistofelees. I tangoed with stuffed animals to "The Rum Tum Tugger". I belted my own version of "Memory," surely blowing Betty Buckley's Tony-award winning performance out of the water. My obsession with Cats culminated in my mother buying orchestra-section tickets to the Richmond-stop on the national tour. It was every pre-pubescent gay boy's dream: to be fifteen feet below a group of adult men and women clad in spandex and yak fur prancing around and singing on stage for two and a half hours.

As an adult my fascination with Cats has morphed from being baffled by the actual performances to being amazed that the show actually exists. Seriously: why would anyone enjoy a musical in which adults dress in cat costumes and dance to bizarre choreographed routines that are supposed to represent how cats would dance if they could dance like people (but really look like what humans dressed as cats would dance like if they thought cats could dance like humans)? More so, how did this play become a smash hit and stay that way for eighteen years? I decided that I really had to see it as an adult, and when I announced that I was absolutely going to see a performance of the show in Chicago, my friend Bethany volunteered to go with me.

I bought tickets - the cheapest! - on the morning of the show, which of course meant that we had the worst possible seats in the Cadillac Palace: the very back row of the upper balcony, and to the right. I was concerned since Bethany had never seen the show, nor had she heard any of the songs except for "Memory," which is the only song that isn't absolutely batshit insane. I then realized that sitting very far from the stage might be a good thing, as someone seeing Cats for the first time at twenty four (and, you know, it being 2009 and not 1982, when the show opened on Broadway) would probably be terrified. Especially if she was drunk, which she was: I had suggested we slam multiple martinis before the show.

I was shocked how full the house was for a Tuesday night performance of Cats, and I wondered how many people were like Bethany and seeing it for the first time. (I did notice that most of the audience had drinks in hand when the house lights came down.) I also speculated how many of our peers would be as sober as we were by the end of the opening number, "Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats," which serves as an introduction to the kinds of cats. There are practical cats, dramatical cats! Romantical cats! Political cats! Oratorical cats! Cynical cats! There are even rabbinical cats! And they are all Jellicle cats, which is a term that the cats promise to explain, but never do. I mean, they're cats, and I suppose what one takes away from Cats is that they can do and say whatever the fuck they want. And you had better CHEER for them.

Toward the end of the first song, Bethany turned and gave me a confused and exasperated look, and I knew that my prediction that she would hate me within fifteen minutes of the overture had indeed come true.

While watching the incredibly sobering first act, I thought about the actors as they impersonated cats impersonating tap-dancing rats and cockroaches. Bless their hearts! These were most likely musical theater nerds who worked very hard for their dreams, which probably did not involve paying their dues as Munkustrap and Bombalurina in a national tour of Cats. The saddest part about Cats is that it's entirely an ensemble piece: no one stands out in any way. Even if you're lucky enough to get the part of, say, Old Deuteronomy, Grizabella, or Rum Tum Tugger, you're still an anonymous actor covered in pancake make-up and fur, and no one pays you much mind other than the middle-aged women who publish their self-aware and self-deprecating Cats fan fiction on the Internet (because even hard-core Cats fan understand how sad depressing their interests are).

Bethany, who had fallen asleep at the beginning of the second song, regained consciousness during the long dance sequence that ends the first act. "What is going on?!" she whispered. I told her that she'd be asking me that question had she not fallen asleep twenty minutes into the show. There's very little plot to Cats: it's mostly a revue of narrative songs, each one describing a specific cat (this is what happens when you try to string together a book of obscure T.S. Eliot poems into a musical). The only over-arcing storyline is this: all of the cats in London get together once a year for the Jellicle Ball, which turns into a celebration featuring song and dance and, naturally, an opera starring the cats.

The opera, which is a post-modern wink probably lost on the middle-American audience who most likely don't appreciate the references to Puccini that would certainly incite the more academic Cats fans to cream their pants, is called "Growltiger's Last Stand," which is about a pirate cat who is captured and killed by Siamese cats. It is at this point in the show where the audience gets to experience the casual racism: how do you think the Siamese cats are portrayed on stage? It's The King and I-level racism, or, as my friend suggested, "Defcon Flower Drum Song" (but at least they changed Eliot's original line that called the Siamese "chinks"!). It's also overly-long and confusing, which I guess ads to the meta-madness of Cats in general: there's a bizarre and confusing musical starring cats within a musical about cats. It's a taco wrapped in a burrito wrapped in a pizza covered in fur, and it won't stop doing somersaults.

To make a long story about a long musical about cats short: the play ends with Grizabella the Glamour Cat belting "Memory", which receives the only applause of the night. Then Grizabella rides on a floating tire up to the Heavyside Layer, which is some sort of cat heaven, to be reborn. I suppose cats have eight chances to do this? I'm not sure, because it's never really explained, nor are we given a reason why Grizabella gets to do it, because all of the other cats hate her until she sings "Memory" and they feel sorry for her. Isn't that how it always goes? Old Deuteronomy sings a song about how "cats are very much like you" at the end of the show, which was a theme I happened to pick up on already when I watched two cat burglar cats rob a house and then a railroad cat drive a train. But that's the Andrew Lloyd Webber way: he gives you a theater piece with fairly obvious themes, and then he follows that with an explanation of those themes. It's a very high school senior approach to art.

What I learned from re-watching Cats, however, is that some things you liked as a pre-teen don't age very well, no matter how many t-shirts featuring the words, "Now and Forever!" were on sale at the merchandise table (next to DVDs priced at forty-five dollars a pop, which makes me confused about how the economy works). And to use an analogy that is probably oft-repeated and obvious (and therefore COMPLETELY APPLICABLE): Cats is like your childhood pet. Eventually, she's too old and frail to go on, and you've got to put her down. And sorry, honey: she's not going to Cat Heaven in a tire.

Tyler Coates is the senior contributor to This Recording. He tumbls here.

Songs about cats that are not from Cats:

"Phenominal Cat" - The Kinks (mp3)

"The Lovecats" - The Cure (mp3)

"Plea From A Cat Named Virtue" - The Weakerthans (mp3)

In Which Our New Poetry Column Soothes and Delights

Poems Newly Appeared: Relevant Ravines

How do you excerpt from a 1,000 page manuscript that contains no complete sentences? The answer, if you are Kenneth Goldsmith, editor of the series Publishing the Unpublishable, is you don’t. The work in question is Human / Nature by Stephen Ratcliffe, and Goldsmith has generously made it available online, in its entirety and free of charge, as a PDF (1.2 MB) and as an MP3 (12 hours).

But you do—you do excerpt—if you are the editors of Bomb, a quarterly magazine. In the world of paper, ink, advertisers, and readerships, there is a dreary sort of economy at play that evidently allows only four poems of Human / Nature to appear at one time. Those selected for the current issue of First Proof, Bomb’s literary supplement, are “6.23”, “6.24”, “6.26”, and “6.27”. The images in these poems line up against sparse punctuation, presenting themselves with a sureness and clarity that is almost analytical, but without judgment, as in “6.24”:

                                                                 man in maroon

     sweatshirt walking across room in dark, man on couch

     noting “she was snoring so loud I couldn’t take it”

                                                                             woman

     on phone recalling hospice on Long Island Sound, the average

     length of stay a day and a half

The simple, unresolved flow of these dependent clauses carries the reader along and compels him to turn the page, or at least press “page down”.

But, just as the mortal overtones begin to mount, the sequence is interrupted and we are sent directly to “6.26”. What happens in “6.25”? And why did the editors feel the need expunge it? For this, you will need to browser over to the unabridged PDF, scroll down a little (p. 252), and search in “6.25” for the offending lines, which it seems were likely either “Arafat claiming, ‘Sharon cannot forget his defeat in front / of me in 1982,’” or  “orange disk of sun behind blue- / grey haze”.

* * *

The mysterious disappearance of Craig Arnold, last seen walking along the edge of a Japanese volcano, continues to be deeply felt in the poetry community. Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, includes a reminiscence in the October issue describing how energetic a reader Arnold was, while adding the thoughtful observation that he was “the only poet I have known personally—the only good poet, I should say—who seemed completely at ease with being a poet.”

One is also left to assume that “Meditation on a Grapefruit,” included in this issue, is also the last poem by Arnold that will appear in Poetry. Beginning as a piece of descriptive whimsy (“To come to the kitchen / and peel a little basketball”), and presented with the careful joy of domestic routine that is perhaps the calling card of mainstream American poetry, the piece ends with a simple, destabilizing couplet, “a little emptiness” that is

     every year harder to live within

     every year harder to live without

When a talented poet dies early, it is difficult not to read his work without squinting your eyes and seeing something entirely unintended.

* * *

For a healthy load of verse in a more experimental style, look to the journal The Agriculture Reader, but look only once a year. The third installment of this “arts annual” has just appeared, being harvest time, and that is all for this turn of the seasons.

And it must have been some effort to bring together: cleverly illustrated, expertly laid out, and with a table of contents that includes many compelling writers, difficult to categorize but somehow easily suited to each other: Christian Hawkey, Noelle Kocot, Eileen Myles, Tony Towle, Matthew Zapruder, among others.

Difficult to categorize—but one wonders if Jerome Sala, in his poem “The Stoners” is facing down that difficulty. It is tempting to interpret this poem in all kinds of ways—a poem that features “Stone Age hipsters” who

                                                     likewise said “no”

     to the tool-loving utilitarians who pounded their age into shape—

     creating rocky igloo prisons they called “the hearth” in grunt language—

     preferring instead to huddle in ravines of irrelevance.

To purchase The Agriculture Reader, No. 3, go here. To submit to The Agriculture Reader, No. 4, email here, but note this challenge from the editors: “We don’t generally take unsolicited submissions, but that doesn’t mean we won’t.”

—T.K.         

Beginning today, T.K. will offer a weekly commentary on some poems currently available in journals. Contact at poemsnewlyappeared@gmail.com.

In Which The Coen Brothers Return As Serious Men

A Goy Walks into a Dentist’s Office

by JACOB SUGARMAN

Since the 1984 release of their neo-Western, Blood Simple, the Coen brothers have made a career of ironic detachment and outright snark. Even their finest films are marked by an irksome air of superiority towards their characters, viewers and mankind in general. As David Denby observes in his New Yorker feature, “Killing Joke,” the Coens are “masters of chaos, but one still has the feeling that, out there on the road from nowhere to nowhere, they are rooting for it rather than against it. Their latest, A Serious Man, is hardly a Whitmanesque celebration of human potential, but it constitutes their funniest and most affecting offering since the stoner classic, The Big Lebowski.

The film centers on helpless schlemiel, Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor at an anonymous, mid-western university whose life has spiraled out of control. His wife is leaving him for Sy Abelman, an unctuous windbag that looks like a Hebrew yeti; his son, Danny, smokes too much pot and busts Larry’s chops when the TV reception of F-Troop is fuzzy; his daughter, like so many pubescent Jewesses, compulsively washes her hair and pleads for a nose job; and last but not least, his deadbeat brother spends his days lying around the house with a suction devise to aspirate a cyst on his neck. If life with the Jewish Adams family wasn’t miserable enough, Larry’s being blackmailed by a dimwitted student and his tenure application has been jeopardized by several anonymous letters that characterize him as a man of poor moral fiber. In short, he’s fercockt.

Like The Book of Job, A Serious Man follows its protagonist’s quest for wisdom from his friends and colleagues—or in the case of Larry, a cadre of nitwit rabbis. Each offers advice more mystifying than the last, the most memorable of which belongs to Rabbi Nachtner, played with aplomb by George Wyner. Nachtner spins a yarn that owes more to the fiction of Woody Allen than the Torah or the Old Testament.

The story goes something like this: a Jewish dentist named Sussman is giving a check-up to a man described only as “the Goy” when he discovers several Hebrew letters carved into the back of his lower teeth. Together, they spell out the phrase, “help me.” Is this a sign from Hashem that the dentist must offer his aid to this man, or perhaps all men in need? The discovery shakes Sussman to his core and he begins rifling through his patient records for further messages. After a few weeks of anxious hand-wringing, however, he abandons his pursuit for the day-to-day routine of dentistry and domestic life. So much for burning bushes.

What does this have to do with Larry’s tenure application and his impending divorce? Not a damn thing and therein lies the metaphysical weight of A Serious Man; life is a tale of Jewish dentists and goyish teeth, signifying nothing. No sooner does their protagonist’s luck start to change then the Coens, presiding over the narrative like their own vengeful Yahweh, hit the viewer over the head with a chair like The Ultimate Warrior in a WWF Battle Royale. Either we're alone in the universe, subject to the cruelties of the absurd, or we’re at the mercy of a sadistic God who will punish us despite our best efforts to pay our taxes, feed the goldfish and do our homework--to behave like serious men. Hashem, if he does exist, is the town bully chasing Danny down for a $20 debt. As the film’s final scene reveals, he always collects.

However grim a vision of the universe its filmmakers present, A Serious Man is levied by the pitch-perfect performances of its lead players and the Coens’ irreverent humor. Danny’s stoned-out torah reading easily vaults the Star Wars theme-party in Deconstructing Harry as the greatest bar-mitzvah sequence in film history.

These films are so arch and stylized that they can grow distracting when they feature movie stars like Brad Pitt or Catherine Zeta-Jones. With a cast of unknowns and semi-recognizable character actors, the viewer doesn’t have to peel through too many layers of disbelief. Most importantly, the film represents its directors' first venture into their personal history and religious ancestry. Raised on the Great Plains by Minnesotan academics, Joel and Ethan were little Gopniks once too, lighting up and fighting their sister for access to the bathroom. Coen Brothers’ characters always verge on caricature, but there’s an undercurrent of affection in their depiction of these chosen misfits that’s so often lacking in their other movies. A Serious Man cements the Coens’ place in the continuum of great Jewish auteurs and offers proof positive that even Hashem affords the occasional mitzvah.

Jacob Sugarman is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Manhattan. He last wrote in these pages about Michael Jackson.

"Before You Leave" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)

"Between the Daylight And The Dark" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)

"Can't Find the Way" - Mary Gauthier (mp3)