The high points include appreciations of two artists I love, Ntozake Shange and Elvis Costello.
Like me, Hilton Als had a life-changing experience seeing for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway in 1997, and like me he’s dubious about Tyler Perry’s movie of it that’s opening any day now, starring Janet Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg. He delivers a lovely summation of that work and a quick skim of her subsequent 30 years’ worth of writing, along with some details of her personal life that I didn’t know (a string of suicide attempts, a bipolar diagnosis) and some that I did (sadly, she had a stroke six years ago that has left her seriously disabled).
Nick Paumgarten is also a big Elvis Costello nut and spent quite a bit of time hanging out with him and delivers an intriguingly detailed mid-career check-in.
Also: Roz Chast makes her writing debut this week with not one but two prose pieces — a Talk of the Town memorial tribute to her fellow cartoonist Leo Cullum, who died recently, and a Shouts and Murmurs rant on the ickiness of the banana. On the latter subject, Steve Martin and I respectfully disagree — like me, the other Man from Waco believes that the banana is one of nature’s most ingenious packaging triumphs.
another eye opens 