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From Ralph Richardson to Alan Cox in ‘Cornelius’

May 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
BRITSOFFBROADWAY

Any actor taking on what the savvy, longtime drama critic of The Guardian calls "a monumental leading role" expressly written for the great Ralph Richardson, is either crazy or brave -- possibly both. Which partly explains why the role hadn't been done in more than 70 years until Alan Cox brought it back to life in London last September. And now he is about to do it again Off Broadway in New York. To judge from the London reviews -- raves across the board -- the actor is both brave and sane. More than that in J.B. Priestly's wrongly … [Read more...]

05/24/13 3:11 PM | filed under: News, Theater |

Orwell Was a Genius at Fiction Right From the Start

May 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Orwell's house in Katha, Myanmar. [Photo: Aung Shine Oo for The New York Times]

Jane Perlez reminds us in this morning's New York Times of George Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days. Orwell is best known for his later novels, of course, the dystopian 1984 and the allegorical Animal Farm, which are remembered less for their impact as fiction than for their prescient warnings about the reality of a totalitarian future. But Burmese Days, published in 1934 and one of the most memorable novels I've ever read, shows that the guy was a genius at literary fiction from the very beginning. I emphasize literary. Although Perlez … [Read more...]

05/24/13 11:16 AM | filed under: Uncategorized |

Ernest Hemingway, Heathcote Williams, and So Forth

May 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
One of the 96 plaques of Library Walk designed by Greenwich Village sculptor Gregg Lefevre.

And then I sent a photo of the Ernest Hemingway plaque in the series ... Which drew this reply ... Serving as further testament to what has been lost, or as the poet noted with his reply, "Pace Hemingway." … [Read more...]

05/22/13 8:04 PM | filed under: Art, Literature |

A Difference Between the 16th Century and the 21st

May 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
One of the 96 plaques of Library Walk designed by Greenwich Village sculptor Gregg Lefevre.

When I sent Heathcote Williams a photo of the Francis Bacon plaque in the Library Walk series ... He replied with an ironic poem, like so ... ... which illustrates a difference between the 16th century and the 21st, doncha think? … [Read more...]

05/22/13 7:46 PM | filed under: Art, Literature |

From Laugharne Boathouse to Library Walk

May 22, 2013 by Leave a Comment
A bronze plaque from 'Library Walk' in midtown Manhattan [designed by Gregg Lefevre, 1998]

On my way to work I sometimes take a street in midtown Manhattan where an unsung marvel known as "Library Walk" celebrates the world's great books and writers. For the length of two city blocks I'm distracted by bronze reliefs in granite plaques set into the sidewalk. They are beautiful to look at and inspiring to read. This one, for instance, memorializes Dylan Thomas: Although they're unsung, I'm hardly the first to notice the 96 plaques that line 41st Street between Park and Fifth Avenues. See Clyde Haberman's story in The New York … [Read more...]

05/22/13 4:56 PM | filed under: Art, Literature |

Richard Feynman’s ‘Ode to a Flower’

May 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment
feynman's flower

The Guardian posted a tribute to a bongo-playing physicist the other day, with the subhed "Flowers, music, strip clubs...Richard Feynman's scientific curiosity knew no bounds." Linked to a cute cartoon video based on a 1981 BBC documentary, it gives a sense of the man as a fabulous paradox. Which is perfectly illustrated in the video by Feynman's gravelly voiceover. Speaking with a heavy New Yawk accent that tells us he's a streetwise city boy through and through, the Nobel laureate extolls "the wonders of science contained within a simple … [Read more...]

05/20/13 1:41 PM | filed under: Media |

Can a Royal Party Boy Really Change His Stripes?

May 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

So how do you, in the words of Heathcote Williams, "turn a plutocratic oaf into a lovable national treasure instead of a casually racist and unthinking parasite"? With difficulty. Unless you can get the press behind you and send Prince Harry on an American tour. Trouble is, during Harry's former deployment in Afghanistan, as Williams points out in the video posted by "Stop the War Coalition," the so-called warrior prince slaughtered 34 Afghanis in a remote control air attack and was "then thought to have boasted of it" at a London night … [Read more...]

05/17/13 2:56 PM | filed under: Media, political culture |

Unbuttoned: Samuel Beckett Meets William Osborne

May 16, 2013 by 3 Comments
Samuel Beckett

I knew my friend Bill Osborne and Samuel Beckett had met and spoken about Osborne's musical settings of Beckett's plays. But I had never heard the details. Now at last the full story! By William Osborne I spent seven years doing nothing else but setting the works of Beckett to music. At the end in 1987, I gathered up all the scores and some recordings of them I had, and dropped them into the mail box of his Paris apartment. I knew he was a recluse and a bit of a misanthrope. I figured I would never hear from him and just forgot about it. … [Read more...]

05/16/13 9:53 AM | filed under: Art, Literature, Media, Music |

An Absurd Debate About the Last Word

May 14, 2013 by 5 Comments
'Writers at Work' [From Gerard Bellaart's 'Superimpositions' series]

Following up on the previous blogpost, Gerard Bellaart sent a superimposition of several lines on Beckett's short dramatic monologue "Not I." Bellaart also sent an excerpt from Michael Maier's paper, "GEISTERTRIO: Beethoven's Music in Samuel Beckett's 'Ghost Trio.'" To which, Bellaart says: "The debate as to whether music has the last word is rather like looking for reasons to believe in the absurd." … [Read more...]

05/14/13 10:57 AM | filed under: Art, Literature |

An Epitaph for Our Golden Era

May 11, 2013 by 2 Comments

'Oh, this is a happy day. This will have been another happy day. After all. So far ..." … [Read more...]

05/11/13 1:43 PM | filed under: Art, Literature |

Menu-Size Art: Quicker Than You Can Say Fast Food

May 3, 2013 by Leave a Comment
CR-cover

Cold Turkey Press has just put together a beautiful portfolio of menu-size collages by Norman O. Mustill dating from 1975, when Mustill sent them to Carl Weissner, who wanted to illustrate his German translation of Harold Norse's Beat Hotel with Mustill's artwork. Phew ... got that? Weissner didn't receive the collages in time to make the publisher's deadline because Mustill was delayed by work on another project. So Weissner put the collages in a drawer. Nobody saw them for the next 37 years except, it turns out, for three that were published … [Read more...]

05/3/13 4:05 PM | filed under: Art |

‘Sacred Elephant’ Is Coming to New York’s La MaMa

April 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment
'Sacred Elephant' by Heathcote Williams [Naxos]. Read, unabridged, by the author.

I haven't seen much theater lately, for reasons I may already have mentioned -- so much is dull dull dull -- but the dramatization of Heathcote Williams's epic poem, "Sacred Elephant," has got my attention as nothing has in years. The show, not yet officially announced, is coming in September to La MaMa's First Floor Theatre on Manhattan's Lower East Side. It is to star Jeremy Crutchley, reprising an acclaimed solo performance, which originated last year in Cape Town, South Africa. "Sacred Elephant" is the second of four epic poems that … [Read more...]

04/29/13 1:02 PM | filed under: Art, Literature, Media, News, political culture |

‘Gossip Column’ Cut-Up by Rooney & Beiles

April 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment
'GOSSIP COLUMN' a cut-up by Annie Rooney and Sinclair Beiles

Found in a drawer 44 years later. Still funny, too. And maybe you'll recognize the references. Click the photos if you don't know who they are. I almost forgot Dick Rover. … [Read more...]

04/12/13 4:02 PM | filed under: Literature, Media |

Topor Nails It: Drone Attack Avant la Lettre

April 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment
From 'Panic Drawings' by Topor

And for further edification, there's "A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood" about the "origins of the C.I.A.'s drone war in Pakistan" by Mark Mazzetti and "Targeted Killing Comes to Define War on Terror," about the policy of the "drone campaign" by Scott Shane. They're part of a continuing NY Times series. Mazzetti's latest tells "how a single spy helped turn Pakistan against the United States." … [Read more...]

04/10/13 11:10 AM | filed under: Art, political culture |

Death of a Mensch, Roger Ebert, R.I.P.

April 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Once Upon a Time at the Chicago Sun-Times

Rick Kogan has written a fine obituary, "A film critic with the soul of a poet," with a beautiful lede: It was reviewing movies that made Roger Ebert as famous and wealthy as many of the stars who felt the sting or caress of his pen or were the recipients of his televised thumbs-up or thumbs-down judgments. But in words and in life he displayed the soul of a poet whose passions and interests extended far beyond the darkened theaters where he spent so much of his professional life. Kogan, at the Chicago Tribune for many years now, used … [Read more...]

04/5/13 11:39 AM | filed under: Media, Movies |

‘Taking the Piss’ That May Pass for Shakespeare

April 4, 2013 by 1 Comment
'Nubbing' by Heathcote Williams [Cold Turkey Press, 2013] folio front cover

I spent more than a decade reviewing theater for a major metro daily and I'd never heard the term "nubbing (or taking the piss)." Hmmph. Heathcote Williams shows how it's done in a sweet folio about to be published by Gerard Bellaart's Cold Turkey Press. As my good friend N.O. Mustill says via email, "me nostrils flare, aquiver at the delicious line: 'Lest wind-filled sprites bequim the air.'" Sometimes an actor will find himself on stage Having forgotten what he’s meant to say. He’s dried completely; his prompter’s in the … [Read more...]

04/4/13 10:52 AM | filed under: Literature |

N.O. Mustill’s ‘Critic’ Lowers the Boom, Whimsically

March 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment
© 1971 by Norman O. Mustill

If I said I put him in a class with the great collagists dating back through the 20th century (like Hausmann, Heartfield, or Höch) -- which I do -- he'd laugh at the presumption. But anyone who has seen Flypaper, his book of demonic collages in black and white, or the huge collages in blazing color that hang on the walls of his desert lair, would know what I'm saying. Not many have seen his work because he refused to play the art game. He has shunned publicity and guards his privacy to an extreme. You certainly won't find much about him on the … [Read more...]

03/29/13 1:13 PM | filed under: Art |

‘Peter Bayliss and the Breatharians’

March 22, 2013 by 1 Comment
Peter Bayliss

The obituary in The Telegraph, in 2002, said: "He wanted no memorial, but his near-lunatic appetite for life will be impossible to forget." The poet Heathcote Williams certainly remembers Peter Bayliss. He remembers, too, "the Bayliss Mischief" that "might still be working / From beyond the grave." Here given their due are the vaunted philanthropic celebrities of our time (Karl Marx aside), memorialized for their various hypocrisies: Bill Gates, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Mother Theresa, Lady Gaga, Bob Geldof, not to mention the … [Read more...]

03/22/13 10:09 AM | filed under: Literature, Media, political culture |

Iraq Invasion Time Capsule: March Madness Redux

March 19, 2013 by Leave a Comment

This is the week to remember the "The Ides of March, 2003." Can't let it pass without recalling what I posted at the time on MSNBC.com, links included. (Miracle of miracles, many still work). Looking back, I see the posts are very tame. I tried not to be, but I knew I could go only so far. Most of the stuff did not sit well with certain company-minded bosses to whom I reported. I was never asked to take a particular point of view, but I was called on the carpet for the viewpoint I took. They wanted me to stick strictly to entertainment … [Read more...]

03/19/13 10:30 AM | filed under: Media, political culture |

Kid Congo & The Pink Monkeybirds: ‘Conjure Man’

March 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

I think of it as "Four Notes and the Dreamachine." … [Read more...]

03/18/13 12:29 PM | filed under: Art, Media, Music |
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