BIG APPLE PORTRAITS, PART 5

We come finally to "Greenwich Village" in Bill Osborne's video impressions of New York. It's a festival of storefronts and street corners, monuments and sex boutiques, mannequins and, most of all, lovely architectural facades -- in all a sweet commentary set to Ravel's playful "Chants populaires: no 1, Chanson espagnole."

Put on your headphones, click the photo or the title, give the video time to load, and enjoy. As before, the music is performed by Catherine Robbin (mezzo soprano) and André Laplante (piano), with Nora Shulman (flute); Camille Watts (flute); Joaquin Valdepeñas (clarinet); David Bourque (clarinet); Mark Skzainetsky (violin); Mi Hyon Kim (violin); Steven Dann (viola); Thomas Wiebe (cello). It's recorded by the CBC Records/Musica Viva label on the CD "Ravel: Mélodies" (Cat. #: MVCD1128).

If you prefer the videos sequentially more or less as Osborne intended, instead of backwards (per the usual top-down chronological order of posting), just click here from top to bottom:

Part 1: "Times Square at Night."
Part 2: "Chrysler Building."
Part 3: "Inwood."
Part 4: "Ghost Reflections on Fifth Avenue."
Part 5: "Greenwich Village."

There are still more videos to see, if you like. Osborne has posted a half-dozen others on his Website besides these. Less complete perhaps, they might be considered outtakes. One, "Subway Stalgmite," strikes me as an apt 45-second commentary on the subway's decrepit infrastructure. Straight Up's staff of thousands suggests it be used as a public service spot by consumer advocates protesting fare hikes. It doesn't whine. It doesn't carp. It makes its case with an entertaining tra-la-la.

April 28, 2005 11:41 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on April 28, 2005 11:41 AM.

BIG APPLE PORTRAITS, PART 4 was the previous entry in this blog.

CATCHING COMMAS, CATCHY RHYMES is the next entry in this blog.

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