Food culture is our culture. This Saturday's national papers here in Britain are stuffed full of food - Nigella's on the cover of one of the magazines, recipe supplements tumbled out of a couple of others, and god (or Bacchus) alone knows what Sunday's papers will bring. There was news from America this week that the lawyers who sued and won millions in damages against Big Tobacco ten years ago … [Read more...]
Archives for 2012
Jim Fixed It – Celebrity Culture Rules
The current scandal in Britain is about how a dead paedophiliac appears to have been protected and event abetted in his crimes by his employer. The trouble is that the employer in question was the second most revered institution (after the monarchy) in the country, the BBC. The nature of the complaint against the BBC is not clear, except that it failed to follow up and transmit "Newsnight's" … [Read more...]
Confessions of a soap addict
I am an EastEnders addict. Anybody reading this who doesn't have access to BBC television will probably be at a loss to understand this reference to the long-running TV soap opera, which takes place in "Albert Square," a fictional postal address in London's East End. I, like millions of other middle-class Brits (though I'm only half Brit, and that by dint of passport only, not birth), go slumming … [Read more...]
Tempest a wonderful shipwreck production
The Tempest is a play for which it is possible to feel real affection. In this it is, of course, unlike the tragedies: you can't imagine having warm, happy, cheerful or loving feelings about Macbeth, Hamlet or Othello. (There was a famous American Yiddish theatre production of King Lear - the moral of it being, "You bring them up, feed them, clothe them; then look what they do to you in your old … [Read more...]
Melville and Gay Marriage
If there had only been gay marriage in Melville's day, none of it would have happened. David Alden's production of Billy Budd at the English National Opera has received very good reviews from many of my opera critic colleagues. Paul Steinberg's set and Constance Hoffman's costumes send mixed messages about the location and period of the drama, but seem to be trying to place the action in the … [Read more...]
Morons on TV: the BBC and the Jubilee
Besides the nasty weather we've had during and since the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations, a storm is brewing about the BBC's coverage of the events, from the flotilla of 1,000 boats to the big lunch and pop concert at Buckingham Palace, to the last day's service at St Paul's, the carriage procession and balcony appearance after them. At the … [Read more...]
The fit news the NY Times did not print
Here's my contribution to the Jubilee. In the summer or early autumn of 1986 I was commissioned by the NY Times - Magazine, I think I remember - to write a piece on the queen and her then prime minister, who was Margaret Thatcher. There had been some trivial business about the two of them wearing the same dress, and this led to a piece in the (British) Sunday Times saying there was some tension … [Read more...]
Should the Press preview the play?
Last night I saw the final, reduced-price "preview" of the new London production of Neil Simon's "The Sunshine Boys." It opens tonight, and in my review, to be published tomorrow, I express the hope that the play will improve when the run starts for real. Almost exactly the same thing happened at the end of February, when critics were allowed in early to see a revival of Alan Ayckbourn's … [Read more...]
Extinguish the Olympic flame!
The front page of the London paper for April 28 (London has only one paper, the Evening Standard; the rest are national papers) had a huge headline saying that Occupy, the group that formerly targeted St Paul's, has moved on to the Olympics. (Oddly enough, the only other stories I've seen about this were a follow-up the next day in the Standard, and one story in the Independent. I don't know … [Read more...]
Pilgrimage to the British Museum? Don’t Bother.
Sydney Smirke's (1797-1877) design for the Round Reading Room of the British Museum made it one of the architectural landmarks of the world. Readers' tickets have been held by Marx, Lenin (who used the name Jacob Richter on his library card), Bram Stoker (of "Dracula" notoriety) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - and me.Since the British Library split and moved away in 1973, the glorious space has been … [Read more...]