Forced fun
Fran Magazine: Issue #159
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Spongebob big guy pants okay
Extracurriculars
Last Sunday, I schlepped up to the Upper West Side to see a matinee performance of the New York Philharmonic. They played Stravinsky’s Petrushka, a piece I actually wrote about more than two years ago for this very publication, and for The Awl a number of years before that.
I played Petrushka in college, so it looms large in my memory because that was an extremely stressful time in my life. When I saw the NYPhil perform this piece back in 2023, I felt, perhaps, that it was time to put my memories of Petrushka to bed. The piece is never quite as interesting or dynamic as I want it to be, and when I listen to it being performed live, I’m mostly reminded of how endlessly complicated it can be to play. The parts loop over each other at variable intervals, the whole thing possessed by a sense of unrepentant chaos. Petrushka is a ballet about a mischievous puppet named Petrushka — he dies at the end.1 I hadn’t thought about Petrushka much until I saw The Phoenician Scheme earlier this year and discovered that much of that film’s soundtrack is taken from this very ballet.
Important:
We need to juice these numbers!!!
More remarkable than Petrushka, however, was the rest of the program which featured a Caroline Mallonnee premiere called Lakeside Game which is literally about frolicking on Lake Michigan (Fran childhood mentioned) and a violin concerto by Wynton Marsalis deeply inspired by — ready for it — jazz. It’s fun, I realized, walking out into the sunset at Lincoln Center, to see an orchestra program that consists of pieces mostly from within the last 100 years or so.
The violin concerto, composed for and performed by Marsalis’s wife, alternates between raucous jazz and meandering melodies; I would say about 50% of it really “works” but when it’s working, it works really well. I was struck by the fourth movement of the piece, which is a hootenanny.
If you listen, you’ll hear stomps and claps. There’s whistle in other movements. I really had a laugh watching the members of the orchestra stomp and clap in rhythm, if only because these actions ought to feel spirited and free, but when written into sheet music, there’s an inevitable robotic quality to the action. Yes, they are “in tempo,” but at the cost of looking very uncomfortable, if not focused on making sure their clapping is as precise as their bowing might otherwise be. I’m sure the orchestra was having fun, but in order to make the piece good, they were all taking it about as seriously as possible.
A few weeks back, my old section leader from marching band found a high quality video that had been uploaded of the halftime show we did my junior year. With hindsight, this was definitely best marching band show I was ever a part of — a program so dynamic, creative, funny, and musically complex without being alienating. Often, halftime shows had some kind of elemental theme (my freshman year it was water) or a gimmicky gambit (a rival school put up “Cop Land” which did a fictional cops and robbers thing set to the music of Aaron Copland… imagine if they did a marching band version of the 1997 movie, though…). Our junior year program was titled Marching Metamorphosis, and the theme was the literal transformation of the march as a form. Kooky! I rewatched the show after getting home from a party and I was struck by a similar moment of forced fun.
Real Franheads, however, know that I cannot snap my fingers — I’ve never been able to snap my fingers — and this moment of forced fun was also an act of deception.
At the movies
Since I last wrote, I have seen four new releases, only two of which are actually out in theaters. The two that you can go see right now are Edgar Wright’s The Running Man and Jon M. (“Mediocre”) Chu’s Wicked: For Good. Yes, that is me on Instagram Reels talking to Edgar Wright. Have I actually watched this video? No — just as I cannot bear to witness myself experiencing forced fun as a teenager, I am consumed by strange and bizarre shame watching myself on video. But I did have an actual good time making this with Wright, which might contribute to part of the embarrassment — engaging with that which looms positively in my mind. (Imagine what it’s like for me to go thru the wedding photos…) I liked The Running Man just fine — way more than Last Night in Soho — and it was nowhere near the sensory insult that Wicked: For Good was. Wicked: For Good — more like, Wicked……. For Not Good!!! The back half of this musical has always been plagued by issues, namely the show’s source material being weird and bad, but that’s never been more apparent than this movie that somehow feels way longer than the interminable first one.
The two movies I saw that I have no intention of saying much about at present time are Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet and Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme. I have an interview with Max Richter coming out later this week, with regards to the first film, and can report back that Joe Alwynheads are going to come out of this one relatively disappointed (he has nothing to do but stand in the background). Just as I have come to believe that if a flight occurs during a mealtime they should feed you a meal on the flight, I think that if a screening of a film takes place during typical “dinner times,” there should be an offer of free popcorn, if not a free water bottle, because at 7pm I start to get tired and pissed off. This thought consumed much of my viewing of Marty Supreme this week, where I found myself getting increasingly hungry and thirsty over the film’s 150-minute runtime. “How was Marty?” people keep texting. My thoughts are incoherent; I was very hungry. I’m eager to see the movie again. My actual main thought about Marty Supreme at present time is that it is surprisingly in conversation with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You — the Bronstein effect — and if you haven’t seen Legs yet, I do recommend it.
Books
I have finished three books in the past month: Patricia Gaffney’s To Love and to Cherish, Julie Soto’s Not Another Love Song, and Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan. I am partway through a reread of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and first-time reads of Maud Ventura’s My Husband (a very funny book to read right after getting married… I hope this doesn’t happen to me) and Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Grow (I hope this doesn’t happen to me x10000000). We are going on vacation this week in lieu of having to go home or cook for the holiday, and I am bringing along two 831 Stories I haven’t read yet and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
There is one month of the year left, but the best new book I read this year was Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowds and the best old book I read this year was Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. Wait — also Lonesome Dove, but that feels like 500 years ago now.
Hades 2
I beat Chronos — yay.
The theater
I have seen a number of plays and musicals lately, though the one that has consumed our home the most is the current Chess revival, which we both hated. There is perhaps a whole Substack post to be written about what goes wrong with the Chess revival, but it is a failure in terms of book and staging. Actors innocent — kind of — but the more videos I see of Aaron Tveit doing “One Night in Bangkok,” the more I feel that the spirit of Glee lives in on a certain kind of heterosexual man who does musical theater. Where’s Matthew Morrison when he’s actually needed. I am somewhat equally fascinated by the dramatic failure of Anne Washburn’s The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire. I am a huge, huge fan of her play Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play — one of the great, weird, bad times of the century so far. The Burning Cauldron of Fiery Fire goes wrong in every possible instance, I felt: too many themes, too many characters, not enough actual drama, an overwrought play-within-a-play, images for images’ sake, no coherent point of view. It kept teetering on the edge of meaning and then frantically withdrawing. I’ve not been more frustrated, albeit somewhat compelled, in some time.
The good: Ragtime, which is up at Lincoln Center, is quite remarkable. That show is a mess, kind of by definition, but the music is truly awe-inspiring, and Joshua Henry is a marvel to watch. Jewish Plot, which came and went, was a remarkable time: the first piece of Jewish art in a minute that does not equivocate or waffle on strained identity but instead runs headfirst into a brick wall. I was actually thinking a lot about Jewish Plot during Marty Supreme, as I think both are about the sublimation of the Jewish self for the pleasing of non-Jewish audience members. Bat Boy was cute; I saw Heathers earlier this year which felt like a more successful version of what Bat Boy is doing tonally/musically, but both are welcome and funny and dark. I was completely baffled and enrapt by Prince Faggot, a play totally at odds with itself, both purporting to be about one thing and negating that thing in equal measure. Surrounding a story imagining that Prince George is the first significant gay royal (Ivar from The Traitors erasure…) is active conversation around whether or not someone of that much privilege could or would do anything for “community.” What is royalty — is it from God, or something else? The fourth-wall breaking mechanisms where the show continues to comment on itself was reminiscent of the new arbiter in Chess who pops up after every number to be like, “uh… so… yeah”: maybe instead of everyone doing screens this year (though there are screens in both Chess and Prince Faggot), everyone is going to talk to the audience to explain why we are doing what we’re doing. (Jewish Plot, in fact, has this too, but as a kind of mean-spirited joke on its fictional lead.) I’d rather the narrative of the show explain why we are doing what we’re doing step outside to justify itself. Again: the forced fun will do the work, if you can sell it.
Time to play thirty minutes of Hades 2 and move on with my day. What are you watching, reading, listening to? I hope I can save you money by telling you not to see Chess on Broadway. Is another good show going to come out in the next few months? Please — my crops, etc. I kind of want to go see Blue Moon again in theaters. Feel free to share instances of forced fun from your past or present.
(suddenly getting serious 50 minutes into a Fran Magazine): on November 16, 2025, my friend, Petrushka, died. he fucking died.
The “forced fun” thing is so complicated and interesting! I think often doing something masterfully, which requires taking it seriously, can be incredibly fun, but then not if you take it too seriously. Doing something hard well is deeply satisfying, but ideally there’s still some lightness / playfulness involved. I don’t know this is all so vague and equivocal that maybe I’m not really saying something. But for instance, I’m a graduate student and I find giving or hearing a really good conference paper to be so exhilarating—your brain buzzes with new ideas—but obviously that’s not a lot of people’s idea of “fun” and the fact that I think it is would be seen as deeply suspicious by many. Anyway, it’s such a nice feeling as an audience member when you sense that the people you’re watching are having a good time—I don’t know if that’s the same thing as fun though.
I’m sure you’re familiar with Reformed Rakes, but their Gaffney episodes, like all their episodes, are great!
P.S. Fran, are you going to write more about Peter Hujar’s Day here or elsewhere? Watching Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall dance = top-tier unforced fun
i like the way this is formatted with the bolded words - like poetry