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Wild Things, Paper Girls, Carla Power, Beyoncé and More Delights...

Aug 1

Dear Wags,

It’s the season when the Wag-in-Chief repairs to the country, where life is accompanied by the grasshopper’s whir, the osprey’s cry, and the lap of brackish water against the wild shore. So, yeah, it’s pretty. But if you are acquainted with rural life, you know bucolia is served with a heaping side of insect. That being the case, it hardly shocked us to learn our rustic hideaway had lately been afflicted by a plague of flies; one cannot do time in the sticks and not swat at the little marauders. But what had attracted a buzzy horde to an otherwise pin-neat corner of the dacha?

You needn’t be an entomologist to know that flies simply won’t show up to a party if it isn’t catered. Unless a stray ham sandwich is lying around, there’s a good chance something less appetizing is decomposing nearby. Investigation proved the swarm was coming from beneath the house—a sentence best consigned to horror films. (If Wag were to write a scary movie, we’d call it Crawl Space.) Hub of pestilence uncovered, the exterminator was summoned. A baby-faced recruit spelunked in, and came back with a haunted, post-Tet Offensive look. He brought with him the remains of two mice and news that a large coyote had expired beneath the guest suite.

A coyote corpse demands swift removal, but such extractions are not in the Terminix playbook. Nor was it in ours. There are many aspects of rustic life namby-pamby urbanites should embrace. Crawling into a dank tomb to fetch a decomposing carcass, likely accessorized with a seething larvae colony, is a bridge too far. What to do? The call went out, and a fellow styled The Critter Gitter was recommended. This is not yet the title of a reality show, but an individual who makes his living removing wild creatures from places they do not belong.

The necessary man was a pioneer sort, possessed of an ermine physique, which is good for wiggling into crannies where critters wedge. He was accompanied by his assistant, Sancho Panza* (*not his real name). After coolly surveying the property, into Hades he plunged, entrenching tool in hand, like the hero of Journey to the Center of the Earth. Returned to the surface realm, he outlined the facts of the case in businesslike fashion (his line isn't for sentimentalists). A mound that had once been coyote disintegrated on contact. Without benefit of an elegiac poetry reading, these remains were briskly shoveled into a garbage bag and dumped into the bed of his pickup. Three alleged black widow spiders (they are very rare in these parts) and a nest of “baby gnats” were also eradicated in the operation. Sancho Panza, who drives the truck and avoids the hairy stuff, was impressed. The gitter blithely volunteered that this was a piece of varmint cake compared to past run-ins with venomous, biting things in tight spots. Given his experience of locales one should avoid, he declared the crawl space otherwise commodious, a Michelin star joint. The question of how one judges gnat maturity hung in the humid air, unasked.

With the precision of a forensic investigator, the gitter pinpointed the coyote’s expiration to last February, because “they stop smelling after six months.” A latch on the crawl space entry had not been quite secure, which allowed the canine burglar to nudge it open. Unfortunately, the door shut behind the animal, trapping it inside. This may require a trigger warning, but apparently there were frantic scratch marks on the inside of the door. Or, the critter gitter knows how to embellish a yarn.

You may not like coyotes, but it takes a hard heart to wish a horror out of the Curse of Tutankhamen on one. The thought of a creature being buried alive under our cozy beds sent shudders down the spines of the visiting gentry. If only we had been around to to liberate the wretch! (At least the mouse skeletons indicated the condemned had been afforded a last meal.) The gitter was having none of the soft stuff. In his view, coyotes are a nuisance, though their tails apparently fetch a $50 bounty when dropped off at the county court house. Considering that he not only removed the body but liquidated three (allegedly) venomous arachnids and untold thousands of gnat babies, a coyote tail seemed like a sensible tip. The portal to Subterranea was sealed.

We are not strangers to coyotes. In Los Angeles, we have seen them strolling down the street at dusk. In the Bronx, we spied an especially mangy one stalking the leafy grounds of a high priced day school. Any suburbanite knows they have traded the lonely prairie for just about anywhere. Confined to the West in pre-Columbian times, they are now found in every state except Hawaii. The pitiless civilization we’ve made, inimical to so many wild creatures, suits them to a tee.

The critter gitter, who travels the Eastern seaboard snaring beasts, or at least handling their last rites, wouldn’t romanticize this situation. But for us the notion that something primeval haunts the edges of the built-up world, sometimes even making it under the floorboards, is beguiling. Even now, we live amid the critters, who are only rarely in need of being git. Wild things do persist, and that is magic. Marvel in the jungle that hides just beyond your door, but do keep it latched.

Yours Ever,

Series

Reservation Dogs (FX). Wag Sterlin Harjo’s funny/sad story of wayward teens coming of age on an Oklahoma reservation was one of the best new shows of the past year, even if Emmy nominators ignored it. This time out, Elora, Bear, Cheese, and Willie (Devery Jacobs, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Lane Factor, and Paulina Alexis) are coping with the suicide of their friend Daniel (Dalton Cramer), which may be part of an ancient curse. Sweet, but still spiced with the irreverence of producer and Wag Supremo Taika Waititi.

The Resort (Peacock). Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper, two of the best people we know, need a vacation. Off they go to paradise, where things are not at all serene. Poolside, they uncover the story of another nice young couple (Skyler Gisondo and Nina Bloomgarden) who may have met a sticky end.

Doc Series

All or Nothing: Arsenal (Amazon Prime). Mikel Arteta is not Ted Lasso. The very intense Spaniard is fighting like hell to turn things around for the storied Islington football club, and he’s not deploying hugs and homilies to do it (more yelling, less references to Meg Ryan). Lots of drama, and some soccer, with club captain Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and players Emile Smith-Rowe, Bukayo Saka and Aaron Ramsdale, among others.

With Pippa and Huck

Paper Girls (Amazon Prime). A motley group of ‘80s middle schoolers, trapped in a Midwestern town, find themselves encountering stranger things. Oh, we know what you’re thinking, but Paper Girls is way better than that! It’s a ripping time travel adventure, starring very engaging kids (Erin Tieng, Mac Coyle, Tiffany Quilkin, and Fina Strazza) who travel from 1988 to the future, where they meet Wag Ali Wong, among other worthies, and do battle with time lords or something. Plus, the Bangles are on the soundtrack. So, awesome.

Not Okay (Hulu). Zoey Deutch is an aspiring journalist, trapped in a crummy Bushwick apartment, who realizes she can attain the social media stardom she craves by photo-shopping herself into photos from Paris. When the city is hit by a terrorist attack, she gains the viral celebrity she craves — and a lot more than she bargained for. Put-down-your-phone comedy from Wag Quinn Shephard. — Cher Horowitz

Necessary Nonfiction

Why do people become militants? It’s a very timely question with no easy answers. Long before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Wag Carla Power —always sharp, fearless, and empathetic— was asking it. The globetrotting reporter wanted to know what drew young people to ISIS and other terrorist groups, but also, what could be done to redeem them. Home, Land, Security, coming soon in paperback, is filled with stories of people finding ways to salvage lives lost to violent extremism, from a former neo-Nazi who rehabs white supremacists to a judge who has found new ways to repair the lives of terrorism suspects. A brilliant, hopeful book—that tells us on every page it’s never too late.

Stories

Banana Yoshimoto not only has the world’s most brilliant name, she was once a very bright young thing, taking the literary world by storm with her 1993 novel Kitchen. Time has past, and she returns to us with Dead-End Memories, a more ruminative set of tales featuring five women recovering from painful reversals and fumbling toward healing. Her heroines struggle with grief and loneliness, finding, in elegant moments, the beauty of just getting through it. Sometimes, the flash of youth is just that. Yoshimoto burns on brightly. —Lucy Abramson

Wag has droll takes on the Booker Prize 2022 Longlist, but depressingly few kindred spirits to share them with. Thank goodness for Smarty Hrishikesh Hirway. The inventor of Song Exploder, which features artists discussing their greatest work, just launched a spin-off about books on the same podcast feed. Even better, it stars Wag Suprema Susan Orlean. Guest authors Min Jin Lee, Celeste Ng, Michael Cunningham, George Saunders, and Miranda Machado, all dissect their very good books. Plus, you won’t get eye strain.— Leonard Woolf

There’s no summer like a Beyoncé Summer. When did we realize she was brilliant? Maybe it was back when she rhymed minute with … minute in Irreplaceable. She breaks every pop song rule, and it’s a recipe for joy. PURE/HONEY has so much going on—switches in tempo, everything but the instrumental kitchen sink—that it sounds like 12 songs in one. Who else can get away with that? Nobody. Check my technique, says B. And it’s a wonder to behold.

My hands are shaking, palms are sweating/Thinking 'bout the state of the world/When we're riding all together/I'm a different kind of girl. Maggie Rogers, pride of Easton, Maryland, turns a plaintive folk tune into a crashing Rock ballad in Different Kind of World. She’s the singer that world needs. — Sissy Knox

The world economy teeters on the brink of calamity (again). What to do besides wring your hands? Watch Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936). one of the great Depression comedies. Capra almost didn’t make the picture — he was pushing to direct Lost Horizon, but scheduling conflicts held up the project. Reluctantly, he adapted Deeds (from a short story, Opera Hat, by Clarence Budington Kelland) instead. The story concerns Longfellow Deeds, a simple tuba player from Mandrake Falls, Vermont, who comes into a great fortune, moves to New York City, and uses his riches to aid the poor. That upsets plutocrats who want to control the millions, and they try to get him declared mentally incompetent. Jean Arthur wasn’t the first choice to play the flinty reporter who falls for Deeds —the part was supposed to be Carole Lombard’s. Capra won a 1937 Best Director Oscar for the film, which has inspired endless imitators. It also may have given birth to word doodle — as in an idle sketch— which was not in common use until Deeds popularized it!(August 2, TCM).—Babe Bennett

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