“Skating has reached the point where [the Will Ferrell comedy] Blades of Glory seems less like satire and more like cinéma vérité. Lilac vinyl jumpsuits, sheer tops, off-the-shoulder necklines, corsets, tassels, feathers and fur are all the rage. And then there are the women.” Says the famously flamboyant Johnny Weir, “Too much is never enough.”
Tag: 01.17.10
The Play Peter Brook Took Fifty Years To Finish
Eleven and Twelve ” is based on the memoir of an obscure Malian Muslim mystic, Tierno Bokar, a leader who put an end to a bloody religious war by conceding that his opponents were right.” It can be seen as a meditation on fundamentalism or colonialism, but “perhaps it is most powerful as a parable on the sacrifice that tolerance demands, as Bokar is eventually ostracised by his own people.”
The (Over-)Professionalization Of The Professoriat
“The academic department has become a guild, and, like any self-regulating bureaucracy, its errand is to replicate itself. … [The] result is that the university literature department is not especially well suited to the business of producing either interesting literary criticism or interesting literary critics. What it does well, of course, is produce good literature professors.”
Why Aren’t Black Writers’ Works Made Into Movies?
Where are the many “promising films to be made from hundreds of years of black writing,” whether plays or novels or short stories? “[O]utside a movie theater, the black experience is rich and complicated and diverse. Inside, at this point, it feels like [Tyler] Perry or nothing else.”
Late ABT Wardrobe Mistress Dishes Some Dirt
“When [Gelsey Kirkland] finally left the company it was a great relief for me. No one else came close to giving me so much grief,” May Ishimoto wrote in a memoir. And that time Nureyev threw his costume out the window and into the Chicago River? It was just the boots …
Where Famous Writers Breathed Their Last (And Their First)
“[W]hen it comes to rating literary residences, poignancy counts. … Also visit worthy are writers’ residences that suggest industry and diligence, with extra points for hints of scrabbling and penury.” But authors’ birthplaces? Why should anyone care?
Is There Any Such Thing As “Women’s” Art?
The effect of offering a sampler of the work of 200 women is to diminish the achievement of all of them. By lumping the major with the minor, and by showing only minor works of major figures, elles@centrepompidou managed to convince too many visitors to the exhibition that there was such a thing as women’s art and that women artists were going nowhere. Wrong, on both counts.
Avatar Rules The Golden Globes
“The sci-fi blockbuster – the most expensive movie ever made and on track to become the highest-grossing film ever made – won the Golden Globe tonight for best dramatic film and best director for James Cameron.” Meryl Streep won her seventh Globe, a record, for her incarnation of Julia Child in Julie and Julia.
‘The Complexity And Creepiness Of Giacometti By Way Of Wes Craven’
“‘As others take in vagrant cats,’ the critic Max Kozloff once wrote, ‘Ida Applebroog’s pictures keep home for family alarms and little butcheries’. It “seems to delight her no end” that much of her work “cannot be reproduced legibly in a family newspaper, and, in fact, takes a little delicacy even to describe in such a newspaper.”
Satirists Take Aim At Jihadist Extremism
“Have you heard the one about the Muslim who wakes up one day to discover he is a Jew? Some of Britain’s best-known comedy writers risk causing offence by lampooning radical Islam on the big screen.”