ANDREW’s Weird Wednesday video- Halloween edition
Victor Borge and Dudley Moore alive and well, not sure about the other poor devils!
John Malkovich in The Music Critic [NYC Beacon Theater Oct 28, reasonably priced seats still available]
I’ve heard of being prepared for Carnegie Hall but this…as Richter once said to Michelangeli ‘have you tried just playing the piano low down and dirty ma chère’. Or was that Olivier to Dustin Hoffman. Reminds me of Green Book- you'll work it out.
More world tragedy, yesterday from a mass shooting in Maine making 566 thusfar in America this year. More mass shootings than days. Stating those facts and moving on isn't ignoring them. The Maine shooter spent 2weeks in a mental health facility but did he get the help obviously/desperately needed? Are voices in our head meaningful or meaningless? Mainstream therapy has for the most part always maintained the latter resorting to medication as the solution.
Maine: Embrace the Cold has a story of hope within, WMARI to move us all a little forward.
Addiction is a multitudinous strange thing. Everyone’s different, every story. Is ‘playing the game’, spending and succeeding in New York an addiction? On whose terms is the board? Oft not your own. And ultimately what is success? Some folk just hanker the thrill of swimming with sharks and dolphins. Who are we to judge! Record a TikTok in your bedroom and, Billie Eilish and Finneas and: so many über-talented by 21-year-olds that felines who thought they could swim with two-legs are in mid-feline crisis nowadays! Can’t speak for the canines. [hearing Chicago…yikes..]
Could all be saving a platypus instead.
[imagined outtake from unnamed Tiny Shoulders cat interviewee:]
Gertrude Abercrombie, The Stroll, 1943 ©Smithsonian American Art Museum
It is heartbreaking hearing the West East Divan Orchestra playing Beethoven's Grosse fuge -the word's original meaning in light of the Israeli war.
What brings solace in this world? So so many extraordinary people always researching, teaching, exploring throughout the decades and centuries. So so many unsung. Does ‘acting’ ever live up to this thus portraying/inhabiting ordinary life? That strange alchemy sometimes on stage and on film. Does witnessing Isabelle Huppert on stage in The Glass Menagerie compare to a NASA discovery? One primal the other clearly scientific. Something deep within wonders. Questions.
We no longer see the world with all its mediocracies.
Has Elon Musk been reading Nietzsche or thinking how much money he could make from WALL-E’s Axiom?:
We labor at our daily work more ardently and thoughtlessly than is necessary to sustain our life because it is even more necessary not to have leisure to stop and think. Haste is universal because everyone is in flight from himself.
Ilana Harris-Babou Needy Machines
DIANA LÓPEZ 101dianas: Autos, Captures & Scrolls
If you are at all interested in the ‘art world’ or rather ‘art market’ then BBC’s Fake or Fortune still is unsurpassed in yet another season [most past eps on YouTube]. No US network ‘bling’ here, no moody music nor moody exciting fanfares. Simply Agatha Christie sleuthing, pun intended:) Art ‘provenance’ foundations don’t come off well. Nor should they, fiercely protecting their reputations over curiosity. What art was ever made without…Arshile Gorky case in point where provenance isn’t ever the issue. Fact. One of Gorky’s initial canvases that propelled him into the art world was painted over by him, hidden until…The series deters collectors with fainter hearts for failure yet inspires those with adventure. And inspires those flea market finds. Using one’s eyes often costs so little.
KITTY sings of her friend Farouk who used to visit every Thanksgiving.
Should be an X Tweet but Welsh opera tenor Ryland Davies just passed away and is deserving of real words. Lovely, lovely man to work with. Humble isn't a word I like particularly but for Ryland so true. A word that'd never cross his mind, too busy just getting on with the job at his finest. Must’ve be the Welsh in him.
Je m’en allais chantant, helas!
Sous tes grands bois chante ra-t-il encore,
Ivo von Hove strikes again with this May’s Met Opera Don Giovanni. Glorious pin-point singing/acting from a not-necessarily known cast. Wondered whether this spare staging was what the young young Visconti envisioned when mounting Arthur Miller et al post-war Italy? Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. The Leopard restored finally in all its immaculate detail. Baroque meets dust’s finality. Audiences and directors simply not ever brave enough til now for Ivo von Hove? Well, a linage of Strehler and Chéreau not so immediately apparant.
Speaking of the Welsh not the Dutch of course, always was there a Dylan Thomas American lecture where he postulated: if every hermaphrodite were a schizophrene which half would you choose? Totally plastered, nonetheless, food for thought. So with all the tragedies of the world, yes hello Shakespeare, we couldn’t quite get the Sonnet together for this month. Maybe Xmas. Is that why Elon Musk…? Angels now fear to pentameter…
Have dealt earthquake tests on this website FYI! brethren [May need to pay for that insight;)] Still standing, at least in my head. Unless, maybe, I stand….never second guess what’s ahead.
Maybe just leave this space open few more weeks ‘fore closing the time continuum.
What did I say about great songs always working in new context...
11,000 Palestinian civilians have been killed in the last five weeks.
But in the end I said, ‘It’s terribly serious, of course, but I think more people die of heartbreak than of radiation.
