ANDREW’s Weird Wednesday Movie
“Hello ‘home worthy’, I’m DJ Stray Cat welcome to my home in the West Bank.” ‘Mary’ the dog’s twitched her ears…
'Still alive' - graduate Asmaa's texts to BBC from the ruins of Gaza
“It does like a very large hole in the ceilings but we left it. Sort of James Turrell karma. Rome Pantheon. Spiritual, yo.”
-DJ Stray Cat [exclusively on The Creature Channel]
Jordan Petersen and Piers Morgan. Fascinating. Fascinating: hard to disagree with a word.
Thinking of the Paris Olympics. Breaking top of my ‘catch-up binge’ list when the autumn sun goes down 5-6. Just riding the NYC subway blows the mind with these kids! So the highest accolade ever?! Then got to thinkin’ ‘bout opera. Is that not a sport? Audiences are ruthless. Ever were. Still. I remember seeing Pavarotti [La Scala] was it Verdi’s Don Carlos when critics weren’t that favorable. I heard Pavarotti. Enough said. Opera aficionados are spoilt when every great production is now in their living room. One’s spoilt if ever to experience live.
Does opera matter anymore? Most opera houses survived Covid lockdown, only just. And do film directors make better opera directors than those only of the stage? Not clearly. Patrice Chéreau a ‘god’ of theater/opera direction made interesting forays into film. Visconti, people forget, began introducing post-war Italians to the great American dramatists- Arthur Miller et al. Director Kornél Mundruczó [Tosca-Bayerische Staatsoper], dramatizing a Pasolini/ 70s Italy: “it’s bizarre [opera] in every way but that’s what makes us human” Verdi’s problematic La Forza del Destino, Met Opera re-staged first in 40 years. Film director Mariusz Treliński’s, what was so plot problematic? Seconds into the famous overture maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin riveting attention. Never letting up. Talk about stiff competition!!
In a world seeming sinking more and more into senselessness, opera makes sense all over again. Verdi was real. The people layered straw on the streets so for silent respect at his death.
Despite Years of Protests, Harvard University to Keep Sackler Name
"Committee members instead suggested that the university contextualize Arthur’s life, legacy, and the Sackler family controversy through texts installed in prominent locations and online so that those who interact with either space “will be allowed to form their own judgments about Arthur Sackler and the naming.”
Thorny, problematic, some would say downright distasteful. His achievements notwithstanding, should, for example, John Foster Dulles’ name be removed from the airports, schools and libraries given his blatant racism in the White House? Segregation was sanctioned and policed in 50s/60s America. The American Diplomat
NICK CAVE: Wild God/ Faith, Hope and Carnage
Wings of Desire- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
Romanticism hasn't died yet! NORAH JONES
Tiny spaces. Billie and Finneas in their bedroom and the music hasn’t changed. Elton John at The Troubadour. Taylor Swift. Fake it till you make it just ain’t never been true of music. Impossible. No one begrudges stadium success. But everyone smells a fake. Liberace never a fake in music. Now a strange, frustrating world ever more so technologically. Authenticity will win out. At least enough for a battle. When was/should music ever be thus?
Civil War propels perhaps to a conclusion sense easy. It doesn’t prepare a road for sudden horror. An opera, its four protagonist war journalist aria and duet of why we were ever there. Brechtian in how on earth can one be remotely poetic in horrific times? There have been countless docs of war reporters, simply involving with slaughter impossible. Document and report. There’s a wistful, dare-devil glamour in Civil War unsettling for some: Joel and Jessie share a smile of ‘what we signed up for’.
In all honesty, Alex Garland didn’t quite achieve what he seems avowedly to do. Onscreen still what’s remarkable. Disturbing. Not a nod to something else or other. Defiant act of hope, understanding and as Cailee Spaeny states in the DVD doc of Garland’s work “Love in the middle of it”.
“We are tearing ourselves apart and we need to stop”-Alex Garland
Having grown up with Alain Delon's contribution to the greatest European cinema, sad airing his complicated and disappointing personal life. His right-wing French politics. Attention déjà! Does it detract from cinematic legacy? No more than so many other sad tales.
Everyone is different, have different reasons for their choices. Worth remembering in an upcoming American election as frustrating as that may be. Alain Delon no different. Some dogs do die when their owners are no more, though his Loubo does have familiar faces around.
Homesick Dog Journeys 240 Miles Back To Original Owner
Dog makes 57-mile journey to old home
NOVA is such a great series. Feel good only in that you’re being fed facts all the time. Feast or famine nowadays. Dogs have noses 100,000 times more sensitive than humans. Maybe someone should reprogram Sat Nav Siri with a sense of smell! Faites attention!
Tell the truth and make it rhyme. A poignant pre-Presidential election line. KITTY still convinced Stephen Schwartz betrayed felinity with no cat on a broomstick. Maybe Elphaba had an allergy. Another 15min the Broadway stage does not need. [p.s. The Cat Who Never W’Oz became a huge Off-Broadway creature hit]. How wrong were we all!
There was once a lovely, frightened girl. She lived alone, except for a nameless cat.
Why does fashion matter? Ask that question of a girlfriend or boyfriend date quite possibly never another. Dialectic finally encountering attraction? Wish.
Sleeping Beauties closes at The Met Museum Sept 2. Long virtual queues-lots else there and elsewhere exploring Upper East and beyond in between. It’s a beautiful labyrinth curatorship. You can even smell the costume textiles through tubes, or as one fashionista in front of me observed and declined: I don’t want to ruin the experience. Too much? Overhead projections. Maybe. But don’t knock the Met Museum Costume Institute for tryin’! Not sure it’s quite weird enough for J.G. Ballard fans but where do you start?
Maybe that says more about me than…
All watched The Handmaid’s Tale? Never lived the life. Some.
The seldom seen early work of Stuart Davis.
