Posts From Author: george washington
Manhattan Follies: Amor Towles’s Rules of Civility
“It is a lovely oddity of human nature,” observes our heroine, Katey Kontent, “that a person is more inclined to interrupt two people in conversation than one person alone with a book, even if it is a foolish romance.” Commuting readers of Amor Towles’s debut novel, Rules of Civility, will certainly find themselves grateful for this lovely oddity as they immerse themselves in Katey’s world. The story, which concerns the good and not-so-good decisions made by Katey and her friends over the course of a single year (1938), is told from the perspective of her older self. Her memory is stirred by “Many Are Called”, an exhibition of photos Walker Evans surreptitiously took of regular Americans on the subway during the 1930s. In it, she sees two photos of a man she had known briefly very well, Tinker Grey, but had fallen out of touch with. The photos take her right back to the last day of 1937, when she and her friend Eve Ross first set eyes on Tinker… The Rules of Civility are the hundred and ten precepts a young George Washington jotted down in a writing exercise as a schoolboy in Virginia (see the full list here). […]
Read MoreBloody Brilliant Michael Friedman
Michael Friedman is the composer and lyricist behind an astonishing range of theatrical output over the last fifteen years. He wrote his first musical for The Civilians, a downtown theatre group he helped co-found in 2001. Canard, Canard, Goose? was also The Civilians’ first show, taking as its subject alleged geese abuse on the set of the Hollywood movie Fly Away Home. The Civilians’ method of working is a little like verbatim theatre in that the shows are based on interviews with real people. What’s different is that the final product is a heightened version of what emerged from those interviews, as you can probably tell from the sublimely silly Canard (the plot of which effectively disintegrates when the Civilians team realises that the movie wasn’t in fact shot in the hamlet where it was set but in Ontario). You can hear the whole show in this podcast recording of the 10th anniversary concert performance at Joe’s Pub. Canard set the offbeat tone for an eclectic career. Friedman went on to write the music for a series of shows, some with The Civilians, some not, including In the Bubble, based on the John Travolta movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble; the children’s show Katie Couric’s The Brand […]
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