My Mayor is kicking ass

I hate Hamnet

Well it was kind of inevitable - I hate most plays, and although Hamnet is a movie, it purports to be about Shakespeare and his biggest banger of a play, Hamlet.

Now I love Hamlet, especially Derek Jacobi's Hamlet - but I like any version that plays up the humor in the "me thinks I see my father, Horatio" scene. After Hamlet says that line, Horatio says: "Where, my lord?" and looks around frantically because it so happens he just came directly from seeing the ghost of Hamlet's father, and then Jacobi, as Hamlet with just the tiniest bit of impatience in his voice responds: "in my minds eye."

You can watch the whole thing for free here! But with commercials, alas.

But HamNET - oh dear god so freaking PORTENTOUS!

If there's one thing I hate about a play or movie, it's portentousness.

The "I see my father" bit comes at minute 20, not counting the accursed commercials. Here's what Jacobi looks like as he's saying "In my mind's eye."

Even in the middle of a capital-T tragedy, Shakespeare gets some humor in. Shakespeare was not portentous, which is why he is great, and Hamnet is not.

To my great relief I see I'm not the only one who feels that way. There are some great reviews out there, including ones that use the word "portentous." Let's enjoy.

Peter Keogh in Artsfuse:

Zhao conveys this exposition through tasteful images, an evocative if occasionally overdone score, and just a hint of the heavy emoting to come. In the first of the requisite agonized birth scenes, the director shows some restraint, as Agnes flees the oppressiveness of Will’s parental home to a favorite spot in the woods, a great tree with a dark opening where, as her crimson gown contrasts with the mossy green of the surroundings, she huddles to give birth. This image — the opening in a tree leading into blackness  — will recur throughout the film, matched later by a doorway in the fake forest scenery at Will’s London theater that passes through illusion into the void.

That subtlety gives way to hamminess, mawkishness, and absurdity, a shameless effort to exploit the universal experiences of frustration, rage at iniquity, and grief. Mescal starts it off, chewing the scenery as a drunken Will agonizes in a candle-lit attic attempting to write his masterpieces. Agnes sees his need to escape the tyranny of his father, the strictures of a growing family, and the oppressiveness of a future as a glovemaker. She orders him to go off to seek his fortune in London.

Then it’s Buckley’s turn. Once again she gives birth, indulging in its agonies but with enough strength left over to endure a flashback to the death scene of her own mother. This time she gives birth to twins, but one, the girl, is stillborn! Everyone weeps! But no, Agnes coaxes her back to life! Tears of relief! But later, the plague strikes the 11-year-old bonded pair, first Judith, then Hamnet, who offers his life in return for hers to the specter of Death. He kicks the bucket entwined with his surviving sister — just before the errant father can rush home from touring with his company — giving Mescal the opportunity to indulge in the grief orgy with an added twist of guilt.

These performances bring to mind Hamlet’s thespian advice to the players:

O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. 

 

I suspect Hamlet would not have approved of the acting in Hamnet.

Amen.

Oh Jesus, there is so much screaming in this movie. I like the review by Adam Nayman in "The New Republic" because it gives a shout-out to the far superior movie "Shakespeare in Love" even if Nayman and Harold Bloom (ugh) are a little snobby about it:

Sadly, Will isn’t shown eating breakfast, as per O’Farrell, or drowning his sorrows in a bar with Christopher Marlowe as he did in Shakespeare in Love, the upper-middlebrow crowd-pleaser to which Zhao’s exercise in Elizabethan fan fiction plays as a melodramatic companion piece. Shakespeare in Love was a featherweight romantic fantasy, and a skillful one; no less than Harold Bloom conceded its merits as a neatly brocaded time waster. “I mustn’t snipe,” he told Newsweek in 1999 after watching the film on VHS, “because this is a charming movie. It does capture ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ And that I think is the glory of it.”

Charm is not on the docket in Hamnet, although it does have similar aspirations to award-season glory. Coming off the blockbuster debacle of Marvel’s Eternals—a suboptimal follow-up to the gritty, independently produced best picture winner Nomadland—Zhao has returned with serious intentions. Hamnet is a swing for the fences and, as such, determinedly lugubrious from beginning to end: a litany of furrowed brows and primal screams, awash in blood and sweat and other precious bodily fluids.

Oh man, he is not kidding about the primal screams. Thankfully I did not see it in the theater and could turn my computer audio down whenever someone started screaming again.

Unlike Hamnet, I actually did tear up at the end of "Shakespeare in Love" because it packs an actual dramatic punch, in spite of its humor and charm. And it was at least as popular as Hamnet, demonstrating that you can please people and still make a good movie about Shakespeare.

 Patrick Sprouli in the Independent:

Having sat through it twice, it’s clear to me that Hamnet is not a film made up of intelligent choices. From the epigraph – explaining that Hamnet and Hamlet are functionally the same name – to the finale scored to Max Richter’s Volvo advert-friendly “On the Nature of Daylight,” Hamnet is a blunt spade designed to whack you over the head until you weep from the pain. It has been marketed as a film that burrows down to a primal, base feeling – an effective way of writing off its crude creative decisions. It dramatises Shakespeare and his wife’s response to their son’s sudden death from the plague, and it has one mission statement that it knows you cannot find fault with: the death of a child is a universal tragedy. If you take issue with Hamnet creatively then you are, of course, a cold-blooded cynic who doesn’t possess enough love in their heart.

Even better, the review explains why the movie is so far from anything to do with the works of William Shakespeare:

Hamnet’s wink-wink allusions to Shakespeare’s work appear to make sense when you realise that Zhao actually started her career penning fan fiction. It would be easy, then, to consider Hamnet a work of fan fiction, but Zhao is – by her own admission – not a fan of Shakespeare. She has spoken about how, as a Chinese-born filmmaker, she wasn’t raised with Shakespeare as a cultural standard-bearer and that she relied on O’Farrell and Mescal to navigate the text. But the plot of Hamlet cannot, like tracing paper, be cleanly laid over the life of William Shakespeare. Hamlet himself is the vengeful, arrogant Prince of Denmark, not a frightened little boy. There is a specific reason why O’Farrell maintained minimal reference to the play in her novel and focused almost entirely on Agnes’s internal maelstrom of emotions. Hamnet doesn’t actually make sense if you know even the tiniest thing about Hamlet.

Thank you for that.

And here's Fiona Mountford in The I Paper:

Thus, Hamnet, about Shakespeare’s family life, the death of his eponymous young son and the staging of his – as well as the world’s – most famous play should have been a dream come true for a cinephile theatre critic like me. So keen were my friend Deb (a long-time admirer of Maggie O’Farrell’s source novel) and I to see the film that we went on the very first afternoon of its release last week. Reader, I hated it, and so did Deb, finding it unforgivably overwrought and portentous...

Exactly. Portentous! 

The Globe was a famously rumbustious place, and yet in this film, a reverential silence cloaks the audience from the very first line (and let’s not forget that Hamlet’s unedited running time is more than four hours). They are, Zhao is at great pains to tell us, utterly bewitched by the magnificence of Shakespeare’s words; I confidently predict that theatre sceptics who watch this will have all their worst assumptions confirmed for ever more.

Agnes alone, of course, understands the real life rooting and connections behind the play, so I’d have been more than happy for Buckley to be visibly transfixed and to hold out her hand to the young actor playing Hamlet during his Act Five death scene. But the whole audience doing this? Come on. After four hours, a good percentage of them would have been less rapturous and more desperate for a pee. Idolising – embalming, even – theatre like this does no one any good.

Hamnet fails tragically, comically, pastorially and historically. 

I feel about Hamnet fans the same as I feel about fans of "Love Actually" - they are so insensitive and unperceptive that they need to be bashed in the face with ham-fisted hysterics to feel anything.

Murderbot is almost here!

The next book in the Murderbot series is almost here!

And it sounds good - I was especially happy to see that a bad guy character with some humanizing tendencies is back:

Murderbot encounters another unexpected obstacle: Supervisor Leonide, a higher-up in the Corporation Rim, who convinces the reluctant robot to help her family, sending it on a long and dangerous quest to rescue five more humans. 

I cannot wait.

Summer is here

Well Sprinter never had a chance, the weather leapt from Arctic levels of cold two weeks ago to 77 degrees today. Completely bonkers.

I took advantage of the weather to finally explore my new neighborhood, although it isn't completely new since I used to work nearby. 

I visited some of my old haunts today including the glacial erratic. Back in the day, in 2014 to be exact, this ancient rock, resting immovable in the middle of a side street got no respect. There were parking lots for nearby businesses all around and people even used the rock itself for parking - I took a picture myself back then, which you can see here.

These days the entire block is a park dedicated to the rock, with tables and benches and several lively cafes nearby. Although I will say, the little park is fairly neglected, I saw a lot of garbage strewn here and there including some on the rock itself. Somebody needs to start a volunteer club to take care of the park. It deserves at least some of the care given to Central Park, which has teams of volunteers working to keep clean seven days a week.

Not far away from the rock - I don't think anybody has given it a name - is a cafe called The Local, where I used to go and hang out during the work day, so I stopped in to check it out. It's still pretty much as I remember it.

I wonder if the French are still crazy about Long Island City - that was apparently a thing back in 2017. My own theory was that they liked it because the movie Julia and Julie - the Julia was "the French Chef" Julia Child - is set there. I did hear a couple of guys speaking French in a different cafe the other day, so I wouldn't be surprised. 

The Julie in the movie had a blog, back in the early days of blogging. Now it's a thing of the past. Except for some of us.

Oh no I just missed Mamdani!

I'm a big fan of the restaurant Chez Ma Tante in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, so I was there on Sunday. 

Only to find out that I missed Mamdani, who was also there that night!

We went for an early dinner so probably left before he got there. Oh well, I'm glad that even though he lives in Gracie Mansion now, on the Upper East Side, he hasn't forgotten us here in the "commie corridor."

RIP Bud Cort

Bud Cort is dead. He made it to 77. His much older co-star in Harold and Maude, Ruth Gordon, made it to 88.

I've mentioned Harold and Maude on this blog a few times over the years. I first saw it in my teens and it had an impact on me. I was glad the NYTimes chose the image of Cort, as Harold Chasen, the morning after spending the night with Maude, as he is blowing bubbles. The implication is that Harold lost his virginity and the shot makes that obvious.

I realize the film's director Hal Ashby deserves a lot of the credit for the shots and the vividness and pacing of the film, and Ruth Gordon was the prefect casting choice, but the New York Times notes that Cort added his own personal touch to the film:

Mr. Cort was 21 when he played the part of Harold with wry confidence; many of his most memorable moments, like a fourth-wall-breaking smile into the camera, were his idea.

This is what they're talking about. 

I can't be the only one who thinks that young Bud Cort looks like Cole Escola.

Cort didn't have the most spectacular career, but thanks to Harold and Maude, he is immortal.

Take on me hot take

Back in the day I was among those who turned up our noses at electronic-heavy pop music which we often called, idiotically, "art-fag music."

But now I can't stop listening to Norwegian synth-pop band a-ha's big 1984 hit "Take on Me." 

I came across it in one of those Apple Music collections, probably "music of the 80s" and for the first time really noticed the singer's vocal range. 

As it says in the Wiki page for "Take on Me"

Harket demonstrates a vocal range of over two and a half octaves.[14] He sings the lowest pitch in the song, A2 (the tonic), at the beginning of the chorus, on the first syllable of the phrase "Take On Me".[14] As the chorus progresses, Harket's voice hits ever higher notes, reaching a falsetto[12][16][17] and hitting the song's highest note, E5, (the dominant) at the end.[14] Rolling Stone has thus noted the song as "having one of the hardest-to-sing choruses in pop history".

It really is something. 

And then I discovered that the band Walk Off the Earth did a cover. 

I've blogged about that band, way back in 2012 because I was very impressed by their video of "Somebody That I Used to Know" which is also a cover. It's the first video on this blog post.

Anyway the vocals on Walk Off the Earth's cover of "Take On Me" are not quite as swooping and exciting, but they are impressive, and the almost nil electronica would have made even dumb 23-year-old me happy.

The orchid is fine

I had to hire a separate mover to move my plants, since I was afraid if I used a regular mover for my plants, they could end up sitting in an ice cold truck for hours.

So I had to get a Task Rabbit guy with a heated van to move the plants. And my orchid and all the other plants survived very well.

But orchid is definitely outgrowing its pot - time to repot this spring.

Good-bye Roosevelt Island

I found shelter on Roosevelt Island, within the first year of Covid, after I left the Upper West Side. It's a quiet place, part retirement community and part college campus - a lot of people living in my building were associated with Cornell University which has an actual college campus on the south end of the Island. 

And I really loved my apartment, with its spectacular view. And I enjoyed living in the middle of the East River, and could walk around the entire island in two hours, more or less.

I could only afford to live in that apartment because rents were in the basement thanks to Covid - but once Covid was over, landlords all over New York started making up for lost rent, plus extra. My rent went up by $1300 in the five years I lived there, and finally, in spite of annual raises, I was priced right out.

I'm sure this rent-hike mania on the part of the haves is what made so many have-nots vote for Mamdani. That was certainly one reason I voted for him, although just the fact that he wasn't: a former governor and sexual assaulter who was chummy with Trump; a corrupt  mayor who was chummy with Trump; or a crazy cat man were enough reasons to vote for him.

So now I'm over here living in the Commie Corridor. My apartment view is not spectacular, although at least I can see the Empire State Building from my street.

Welcome back flower

The orchid is in bloom again.

When last I talked about the orchid, I thought it might bloom all the way into autumn, but that didn't happen. It took a break from mid-September until early January.

And now it's back, baby.

A love story in 43 songs: was John queer for Paul?

Last spring, I got Ian Leslie's "John and Paul a Love Story in Songs" and read it right away. 

There was quite a bit to talk about after that first pass, but I've listened to the audiobook version several times since then, as well as watching or listening to a bunch of podcasts with Leslie, and I have more thoughts about the book now.

First, it's a love story in 43 songs, which I put together as an Apple Music playlist, and made available here. It's 2 hours and 24 minutes long.

Although Leslie doesn't only talk about the 43 songs named as chapter titles. I especially liked his discussion of I Know (I Know) from Lennon's "Mind Games." See below for more.

It's a very good book, since Leslie takes a new approach to Beatleography with the focus on the John/Paul partnership. His thesis is that John and Paul had a romantic, but not sexual, relationship, although Leslie does speculate, with some evidence, that Lennon was a bit on the bi-side. It's a very interesting idea, although I felt he stretched it a little, occasionally.

Leslie takes this idea the furthest in the chapter "Look at Me" and it gets pretty sexy:

John said that no one ever hurt him the way Paul hurt him. McCartney was nonplussed at John's anger towards him in the late 60s and early 70s, which seemed to go beyond the normal frustrations of co-working or the annoyances of friends. Even Yoko was baffled by John's animus towards Paul. She speculated to Phillip Norman (Beatles and Lennon biographer) that John might have contemplated an affair with Paul and that Paul rejected him. "I knew there was something going on here," she said. "From his point of view, not from Paul's. And he was so angry at Paul, I couldn't help wondering what it was really about." 

Yoko kept an audio diary in 1968, on the 4th of June, a month after her romantic relationship with John began, she said to her tape recorder: "I'm sure that if Paul had been a woman or something, he would have been a great threat, because there's something definitely very strong between John and Paul." 

There is little doubt that John was predominantly heterosexual, but as we've seen, he was also curious about same sex desire. 

"I think he had a desire to have sex with men, but I think he was too inhibited," Yoko said in 2015, before modifying herself. "No, not inhibited, he said, 'I don't mind if there's an incredibly attractive guy. It's very difficult, they would have to be not just physically attractive, but mentally very advanced too, and you can't find people like that.'" 

It is at least possible that in early 1968, John felt he had found someone like that. Perhaps John was queer in a modern sense, fluid in his preferences, and more so than Paul. He seemed to dream of an all consuming relationship that wrapped music and sex and love into one. Whether or not this is so, what matters is that John felt rejected and abandoned by Paul after Rishikesh. The wounding probably took place inside his head, but that of course doesn't make the pain any less real. In fact, knowing that it was inside his head may have made it worse. 

Everyone who watches "Get Back" is struck by the intensity with which Lennon and McCartney hold each other's gaze as they play through endless versions of Two of Us. The two friends spent an unusual amount of their lives looking into each other's eyes... 

...John had known Paul planned to leave Rishikesh before him, but even so, he didn't like people leaving. As 1968 went on, he began the painful process of accepting that the one person he regarded as an equal, the one he saw as his best friend and creative soul mate, didn't see him in quite the same way. When John wasn't being looked at by Paul, he didn't know who he was supposed to be.

McCartney has always been adamant that if Lennon had any gay tendencies he would have known about it, but Leslie seems to think that McCartney often failed to pick up on emotional signals from Lennon. Certainly Yoko's testimony is pretty compelling. And the lyrics of "Look at Me" which is on Lennon's "Plastic Ono Band" are pretty suggestive when considered in light of Leslie's discussion, and knowing that Lennon wrote "Look at Me" in India, before he got involved with Yoko in a big way:

Look at me
Oh please look at me, my love
Here I am
Oh my love
Who am I?
Nobody knows but me
Nobody knows but me
Who am I?
Nobody else can see
Just you and me
Who are we?
Oh my love

He argues that several of the John songs mentioned in the book are about Paul. I have my doubts about some of his claims, but I think he really nails it with Lennon's "I Know (I Know.)" I must have heard this song for the first time, long ago, because I had the vinyl version of the Mind Games album once upon a time, but I wasn't impressed by most of Mind Games except for Bring on the Lucie (Freda People).

But Leslie makes the case that I Know (I Know) is about Paul, and listening to the song now, he is surely right. Here are the lyrics:

The years have passed so quickly

One thing I've understood

I am only learning

To tell the trees from wood

I know what's coming down

And I know where it's coming from

And I know and I'm sorry, yes I am

But I never could speak my mind

And I know just how you feel

And I know now what I have done

And I know, and I'm guilty, yes I am

But I never could read your mind

I know what I was missing

But now my eyes can see

I put myself in your place

As you did for me

Today, I love you more than yesterday

Right now, I love you more right now

I know what's coming down

I can feel where it's coming from

And I know it's getting better all the time

As we share in each other's mind

Today, I love you more than yesterday

Right now, I love you more right now

Ooh, no more crying

Ooh, no more crying

Ooh, no more crying

Ooh, no more crying

• The song starts out sounding just like "I've Got a Feeling" which was one of the last songs that Lennon and McCartney worked on equally. Lennon has quoted the titles of Beatles songs several times, most flagrantly in "Glass Onion" and in the infamous "How Do You Sleep," released two years before Mind Games, which was an attack on Paul. It's certain that Lennon knew exactly what the opening to "I Know (I Know)" sounds like.

• Lennon mentions "yesterday" which was one of the McCartney song titles he also used in "How Do You Sleep." You can see McCartney performing Yesterday on stage in the video on my December 3, 2025 post. Lennon was absolutely obsessed with writing a song better than Yesterday, which, although attributed to Lennon/McCartney was written entirely by Paul.

• He also mentions "it's getting better all the time," in case anybody missed the Yesterday reference.

• The line about put myself in your place as you did for me - in his book, Leslie points out how often McCartney had to defend Lennon from the results of his own poor choices.

• I think the "no more crying" line is significant. Leslie shares Mal Evan's testimonial of how McCartney responded when Lennon announced he was leaving the Beatles: 

...the 20th of September, Klein convened John Paul and Ringo (George was visiting his mother) at Apple to sign the deals he had negotiated with EMI and capital. The date of this meeting is a little uncertain. It could have been the 16th of September, McCartney's diary entry for that day reads in block capitals THE END. The deals guaranteed the band an increased royalty rate while committing them to make two albums and three singles a year until 1976. 

It's unclear how realistic each of The Beatles themselves regarded this commitment as being. After the signing, the three Beatles discussed the future of the group. Paul floated his idea of playing small venues and John, well, Paul has described the moment vividly enough: "John looked at me in the eye and said, well I think you're daft. I wasn't going to tell you till we signed the capital deal, but I'm leaving the group." 

A year later, Lennon recalled it like this: "Paul just kept mithering on about what we were going to do. So in the end I just said "I think you're daft, I want to divorce."  

...in 1975, Mal Evans recalled the meeting and its immediate aftermath."That was really, truly a heartbreaking experience. I drove Paul home and we got to Paul's house and he spent the next hour in the house crying his eyes out."

It seems very likely that Evans had told this recollection to Lennon by the time Lennon was making "Mindgames" during his time in Los Angeles, since Evans was in LA with him.

In addition to the focus on the Lennon-McCartney relationship, "A love story..." has quite a few excellent essays on lots of their songs. I will be discussing those later.

But now, to wrap up all this McLennon shipping, I found this video extremely amusing -  the host of this podcast, Carly, is very entertaining, and it's pretty wild to hear the Beatles described by someone from Generation Alpha - or whatever generation she's from, I really can't be bothered to keep track of those generation categories.

Carly gets a few things wrong: she claims they fired Pete Best because he was handsome and that's why they got Ringo - because he was not. In fact, their producer George Martin thought Best was a shit drummer, when they began their recording career, and that's why they got Ringo, who was not only a better drummer, but they felt a more personal rapport with him. 

Carly says they played in Berlin - it was Hamburg. 

She says the John/Paul trip to Paris was in June for Paul's 21st birthday - it was in October, for John's 21st birthday. 

She guesses that the Chunnel existed in the 1960s.

Her description of the "rude mechanicals" scene from "A Midsummer's Night's Dream" which the Beatles performed was: "...a play on Pyramus and Thisbe...  I believe it's like a Greek tragedy that Romeo and Juliet are based off of..." 

She claims that Patty Boyd told George that the Maharishi was hitting on women, but it was actually Alexis Mardas (aka "Magic Alex") who told George and John.

She mentions Lennon's play, FOUR IN HAND, which is about masturbation and is included in the at-the-time scandalous "Oh! Calcutta!" which I actually didn't really know much about. Thanks to the Internet I was quickly able to find the play. It's not bad at all, although the Wikipedia article claims that the "first draft" was written by Lennon, so who knows how much is was changed by others in however many drafts it took to finish.

I like that Carly defends McCartney's 1970s band Wings, and also that she rightfully excoriates "Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time" which is one of the worst examples of what a music critic once called McCartney's "rooty-toot persona." 

Although now I cannot think of that song without laughing, thanks to comedian Ryan George.