Playing “Come on Eileen” on piano; Reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; the War on Theater.

I’m All Lost in…

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#28

1) Widely considered a hokey song—maybe Generation X’s equivalent of the Baby Boomers’ (Bye-bye Miss) American Pie, Dexys Midnight Runners’ Come on Eileen, originally a smart piece of pop from the soul side of the U.K.’s New Wave epoch, has been reduced over the years to a singalong cliché.

However, hearing it on the car radio a few years ago corrected the record for me. (I heard it while driving in suburban D.C., which was perfect because that’s where I grew up and originally heard the song as a kid.) At first I was simply besotted with nostalgia (the song came out when I was 15), but soon enough, the crafty songwriting captivated me.

It also struck me that it might be the perfect song to play on piano. This was back in 2021 when, frustrated with my slow progress learning keyboard, I committed myself to figuring out a song a month as a way to force the issue. Come on Eileen, with its steady, pulsing bass line and it’s shifting, bouncy melody lines, seemed like it would push my beginner’s skills while also being doable, thanks to its pop clarity.

If you’re at all interested: I did write a 10,000-word essay about my 2021 piano set where I expatiate about Come on Eileen and its position as the neo-soul manifesto of the anti-Thatcher early 1980s.

This week, worried that two-and-a-half years later, I had forgotten Come on Eileen, I set out to see if could still play this sweet song. After a day of tentatively feeling my way through, starting with the memorable sequence of lovely chords in the catchy intro, I locked it down again. I’ve been lovingly frolicking away at it ever since, all week, first thing when I walk into my apartment.

I must say, the concoction of A/B/F# triplets that modulate the song from the chorus back to the verse (D major back to C major) defines early ‘80s New Wave phrasing. I’ve made that line—repeated as an addicting loop—into an extended grand finale.

On a separate musical adventure from this week: I’ve been thinking a lot about the Aeolian mode, which gave us the signature mid-1960s garage rock riff; think (I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone. My obsession over this teenaged electric guitar progression found its way into a poem I’m working on right now:

I hope Leonard Bernstein’s older daughter said to her condescending dad:/ This is clever music, better than yours, nearly as good as Ravi Shankar’s.

2) After reading Teju Cole’s Every Day is for the Thief (and his Open City) and also Damlare Kuku’s Nearly All the Men in Lagos are Mad, my search for the great Lagos novel continues.

Both my longtime friend Dallas, a bookworm and high school English professor, and the young autodidact barista at the coffee shop on my block (who reports she read it in high school) recommended Americanah by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’m now 150 pages into this near-600-page book.

It’s a page-turner so far as the main character, Nigerian ex-pat Princeton college student, Ifemelu, settles in to a salon to get her hair braided (a train ride away in immigrant-friendly, working class Trenton) and passes her time in the chair daydreaming back on her life story.

So far, her coming-of-age story is defined by her mom’s spooky religious fervor (a vision appearing on a stove burner tells her to change churches because her current priest attends “nightly demonic meetings under the sea”), her father’s disappointments and failures, her besty aunt’s friendly chaos, her first romantic love (she calls her boyfriend, “Ceiling” because the first time she lets him take off her bra and they have a heated make out session, she told him, “my eyes were open, but I did not see the ceiling…”), and most of all her attentiveness to class and caste. Having to get her hair braided in Trenton—”It was unreasonable to expect a braiding salon in Princeton—the few black locals she had seen were so light-skinned and lank-haired she could not imagine them wearing braids—and yet as she was waiting at Princeton Junction station for the train, on an afternoon ablaze with heat, she wondered why there was no place where she could braid her hair…”—establishes Ifemelu’s, and the novel’s class conscious narrative right away.

Adichie is a patient, earnest writer who can make you feel the dust storms and the air conditioning, make you smell the vanilla baking in the oven in her boyfriend’s mom’s fancy kitchen (while “her own mother did not bake, their oven housed cockroaches”), and revel along with the ingenuous high school boys: “After Kayode came back from a trip to Switzerland with his parents, Emenike had bent down to caress Kayode’s shoes saying ‘I want to touch them because they have touched snow.’”

It’s a gentle story so far, but with foreboding currents stirring below the surface:

There was something different about her. Ifemelu had noticed it right away at the airport, her roughly braided hair, her ears bereft of earrings, her quick casual hug, as if it had been weeks rather than years since they had last seen each other.

“I’m supposed to be with my books now,” Aunty Uju said, eyes focused on the road. “You know my exam is coming.”

Ifemelu had not known that there was yet another exam; she had thought Aunty Uju was waiting for a result. But she said, “Yes, I know.”

Their silence was full of stones. Ifemelu felt like apologizing, although she was not quite sure what she would be apologizing for. Perhaps Aunty Uju regretted her presence, now that she was here, in Aunty Uju’s wheezing car.

Aunty Uju’s cell phone rang. “Yes, this is Uju.” She pronounced it you-joo instead of oo-joo.

“Is that how you pronounce your name now?" Ifemelu asked afterwards.

“It’s what they call me.”

3) With all the ominous news this week (the police versus the anti-Israel campus protests, the billions of dollars pouring into AI, the naked antisemitism, and Trump looming despite his current 34-felony-count hush money/falsifying records/campaign finance criminal trial), the article that actually distills our apparent and inexorable descent into brute fascism was an essay in Saturday’s New York Times called “What Began as a War on Theater Won’t End There.”

Documenting several instances of recent censorship, here’s the news-driven lead:

Productions of plays in America’s high schools have been increasingly under attack. In 2023, Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” was rejected in Tennessee (since it deals with adultery); “August: Osage County,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Tracy Letts, was canceled in Iowa after rehearsals had begun (the community was deemed not ready for it); and in Kansas, students were not even allowed to study, let alone stage, “The Laramie Project,” a play by Moisés Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project about the murder of a gay student, Matthew Shepard.

It should come as no surprise, then, that in the Educational Theater Association’s most recent survey, 85 percent of American theater teachers expressed concern about censorship. Even Shakespeare is at risk: In Florida, new laws led to the restriction of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to grades 10 through 12 and “Romeo and Juliet” could not be taught in full to avoid falling afoul of legislation targeting “sexual conduct.”

The essay, written by Columbia Shakespeare professor James Shapiro, positions this current press of censorship in the context of the right’s historic aversion to theater and arts.

First, Shapiro’s history lesson recounts the populist success of the Federal Theater Project (funded by Congress as part of F.D.R.’s Works Progress Administration legislation in the mid-1930s). Up through 1939, with an enthusiastic reception, the project brought theater to the masses. Most notably, the program staged a version of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here in 18 U.S. cities, ultimately playing to 370,000 people. Lewis’ novel depicts the rise of a fascist U.S. president, Berzelius “Buzz” Windrup; I told you this essay was on point.

Shapiro goes on to detail Congress’ reactionary backlash to the Federal Theater Project. A nascent version of the House Un-American Activities Committee, smelling a communist agenda, shut the program down.

The program’s popularity contributed to its undoing. Many of those in Congress who had voted to fund the Federal Theater became frightened by its reach and impact, its interracial casting, its challenge to the status quo — frightened, too, perhaps, by the prospect of Americans across racial, economic and political divides sitting cheek by jowl in packed playhouses.

Three years after the creation of the Federal Theater, Congress authorized the establishment of what would become the House Un-American Activities Committee, chaired by Martin Dies of Texas. It was to supposed to spend seven months investigating the rise of Nazism, fascism and communism in America and submit a report. The ambitious Mr. Dies, desperate to have his committee’s life extended, instead focused much of his attention on a more vulnerable target: the Federal Theater, accusing it of disseminating offensive and communistic and therefore un-American values. In the course of waging and winning this battle, he assembled a right-wing playbook so pervasive that it now seems timeless. He succeeded wildly: All Federal Theater productions were abruptly terminated in 1939

Shapiro concludes by turning this history into a parable about today’s repressive right, arguing that HUAC and McCarthy-era paranoia begat Trumpism.

It’s hard to disagree with his conclusion, particularly as a former high school theater kid who blossomed in the drama set. I played the rebellious deacon in my high school’s production of Mass Appeal —I wore a Greenpeace t-shirt as my costume. This was around the same time Come on Eileen was on the pop charts.