Now Playing: April 2026

Our April 2026 edition of Now Playing features Buddhist body horror, Cyrano, and rockabilly pioneers!

Quinn Franzen

There’s no body horror like Buddhist body horror. I’m re-reading The Mirror of Zen, and there’s this one passage that opens with “Having a body is so distressing!” and then goes on to describe in repulsive detail the “fragile leather sack filled to the brim” that is the human body. The text is, of course, aiming to drive a wedge between the reader and their physical self, and it succeeds only as viscerally as its imagery. Ironically, it employs such an embodied poetic device — it forces you to feel its argument (probably in the form of nausea) right in your gut. It’s also just so metal. The passage ends “what is there to covet here?” It’s passage 68 if you find a copy and want to look it up.

C. Zhang

I’ve spent the recent days comparing translations and adaptations of Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, as I prepare to work on a creative piece that responds to this early 20th-century French play. Cyrano de Bergerac—written entirely in rhyming couplets with twelve syllables per line—tells the story of a sharp-witted, scintillating poet-soldier too afraid to confess his fierce affections to the girl he loves; it is an ode to wordplay, to wit, to poetry, to desire.

I’ve reread three versions of this play: Christopher Fry’s translation of the original Cyrano, the 2019 National Theatre Cyrano rewritten by Martin Crimp, and the 2025 RSC Cyrano rewritten by Simon Evans and Debris Stevenson. Each version pays homage to—and innovates—Rostand’s poetic rigor, adopting a range of literary modes from classic Alexandrine form to freestyle rap. These variants of Cyrano are each astounding. They’ve taken care to give each character their own meter, cadence, and rhyming pattern so that moods and fancies come alive through different styles of speaking. They explore how words could embody both armor and flesh, both artistry and clumsiness, both power and vulnerability. Language offers these characters both catastrophe and salvation; Cyrano and his companions use their poetry for vain boasts, for mischievous humiliations, and for harrowing confessions of longing. The multifaceted wonder that is Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac offers exhilarating possibilities for reinvention, for transformation, for mutation, for dance, for play, for rebirth. It demonstrates, above all, that both language and love are infinite.

Kathy Stevens

In the course of researching the life and times of rockabilly pioneer Eddie Cochran (for a novel), I came across his first ever single, “Skinny Jim”, and its B-side, “Half Loved”. How to describe “Half Loved”. Like accidentally catching your friend and mentor on the toilet. Or. Like detecting halitosis on your inspiration’s (who you kind of fancy) breath. Do you laugh it off; close the door. Do you pretend you didn’t smell it. How, you worry, will you look them in the eye, going forward. How will you love them again in the uncomplicated way you loved them before.

For context, because I know nobody’s heard of Eddie Cochran, especially in America (although Eddie was a Minnesotan): a 15-year-old Paul McCartney played Eddie’s “Twenty Flight Rock” to audition for John Lennon and The Quarrymen; Jimi Hendrix requested Eddie’s songs be played at his funeral; the Who, the Sex Pistols, Led Zeppelin, and Tom Petty have all covered him. And in 1960, the last thing Eddie did was bring rock’n’roll (and the groundwork for rock guitar) to England, via a ten-week package tour – the first of its kind.

On the last night of the tour, he was killed in a taxi cab crash en route to London Airport. He was 21. If Buddy Holly was the best songwriter of the era, and Elvis had the voice, looks, and moves; if Chuck Berry had the lyrics, and Little Richard, the charisma, then Eddie Cochran took the prize for guitarwork. Eddie’s “Something Else” is every bit as punk as the Sex Pistols’ ’79 cover. He arguably invented surf rock by accident in 1957. He taught British session musicians how to play rock music properly, and those lucky few went on to work with the most influential bands and artists of the 20th century. I suppose it was sobering to learn that a man like that could start so humbly, with a record like “Skinny Jim”/ “Half Loved”.

To understand how bad “Half Loved” is, you’ll just have to play it. Then play “Summertime Blues”, released two years to the month later.