The last week of DIA Beacon’s Jack Whitten exhibition. My review from last year below:
Vito Acconci: how ever more relevant you can become after your decades and death.
Obi-Wan Jerry: Now all of you - get to work, finish the damn thing, show up, have courage, and make an enemy of envy and you will be just fine. Anyway, you are totally useless to society if you quit being an artist.
Frederick Kiesler, now we're walkin' here!
Meow! ©Andrew Lucre 2023
Experts Discuss NOVA's Series The Planets
Like we like segues here, more a Godard ‘jump cut cat’ am I. Was all set to watch Scenic Railway Journeys on PBS as the heavens opened with incessant rain on a New new Yorkish Sunday afternoon and suddenly unscheduled: Great Performances, the March premiere of The Met Opera’s Lohengrin. Sounded like a fare minded upgrade from my scenic railway.
So why should any be interested in Wagner’s 4hour journey nowadays? To sit in an opera theater hearing this music pour into you not over a rare experience. Wagner needs to keep moving in both senses -like his acolyte Bruckner-and I’ve heard dawdling in my time, Furtwängler the only conductor ever ever forgiven for slow tempi. Yannick Nézet-Séguin seems the ‘IT’ conductor guy. I was ‘Karioke’ conducting along and never got annoyed [euphemism]! Hardly fashionable stuff, the discerning Met audience went absolutely wild at the curtain calls. The critics were OK musically, less so the Girard production. No boos heard though.
Oh the segue! Well, my cat and I, sounding like Royalty what’s wrong with…writers not being paid enough, so Ms. KITTY can’t be actually with us because…umm. She’s a writer too. Did I get something righty? Oh yes, ‘we’ thought a spaceman was appearing before Elsa. All quite ‘trippy’ and David Bowie in a very unusual way. The interval interviews confirmed we weren’t German ‘pot-heads’: an outsider “landing by Enterprise”-Piotr Beczała (Mr. Lohengrin). The ‘battle scene’ sure beat the kids’ sparkly lightsabers of director Kornél Mundruczó for Bavarian Staatsoper [some ideas were good…]. Why why would Richard Wagner spend so much time and effort writing this is the question? Certainly not to be on the C19th classical equivalent of Instagram!
The Actor’s Strike [13min in]
British Airways bans another cello
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
An archive holding works by writers purged in the 1930s also hosted Victoria Amelina, lost to a Russian strike this summer
Paintings were considered too welcoming at Kent centre for lone children arriving in UK
Still trying to make sense of the world? This sounds like a good Summer read: carpenter Mark Ellison’s Building. Without the money train there was and never will be jobs for the artisans. Is that a Gordian Knot?
Ms. KITTY has been popping up in music scores all over the world since the writers’ strike and transmogrified. Why, only yesterday she was in Wozzeck in Aix conducted by Simon Rattle. Surely that’s not schadenfreude Simons!
KITTY’s ’on repeat’: Loretta Lynn. Wasn’t dirty, everybody went out and bought it.
[addition- Sinéad O’Connor just died [July 26]. Rarely if ever do I add/change a post once signed off. But Sinéad must also inhabit here not rest for her bravery. Forever will. She was her. She was troubled. She was brilliant. She was searching. She was growing. She was, in her own words "not boring". In this era of ever growing conservatism we need more Sinéads not less. One cannot deny her force for change. Renewal. Questioning.]
Maybe, after all, some beauty left in the world.
