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A sweet distraction from a depressing GOP primary.
Archive for the ‘Arts reviews’ Category
January 10th, 2012
Category: Arts reviews, Literature
Because Christopher Hitchens’ oeuvre is both enormous in size and uneven in quality, it’s a challenge to sort his finest writing out from the bits that are merely barstool rants or contrarianism for its own sake (Like other people, I was always suspicious that when Hitchens was ripping into Mother Theresa or some other cultural [...]
January 10th, 2012
Rolling Stone has a list titled “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. Not “…of the specific time and style of music my little world encompasses,” and “…where great means “even I sort of understand it, it’s got a good beat, nice to dance to”: greatest of all time. It is the kind of list [...]
December 24th, 2011
An essay on moral and painterly perspective, round a great paintind by Piero della Francesca
April 10th, 2011
Category: Arts reviews
The tributes to Hollywood legend Sindey Lumet are focusing mainly on “Twelve Angry Men”, “the Verdict” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” all worthy pieces of cinema (“Serpico” is less so, in my opinion). He deserves credit for at least two other things. First, he largely rescued Sean Connery from Bondage by casting him in meaty dramatic [...]
March 31st, 2011
Danny Holt performed five numbers at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technology last night. Holt is a formidable performer who, in this incarnation, plays a piano while also surrounded by, and greatly engaged with, a bunch of stuff to hit with sticks and hammers. Having learned to play all this percussion and the [...]
March 9th, 2011
Category: Arts reviews, Humor
Despite dreadful notices, repeated delays and a series of actors either being strung up over the audience or dropped upon the audience onto the stage or into the orchestra pit (ht: Swift Loris), “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” is raking in over a million dollars a week. This calls to mind the apocryphal military officer’s [...]
November 29th, 2010
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Arts reviews, Music, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Framing, Sports, Technology and Society, Uncategorized
Alex Ross noted a couple months ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s new $16m Ring cycle was beginning . Is this a good use of resources in tough times? he asks. He makes a good try at arguing that Wagner, at least, is opera for everyone (Wagner’s views on the relationship of art to society were [...]
