“Reads that speak to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning teens have traveled light years since John Donovan’s ‘I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip’ led the way in 1969…. Still, until now few LGBT titles became blockbusters. That changed with two boys named Will Grayson and a very large, very GLEE-ful linebacker named Tiny.”
Tag: 06.24.10
Why Do We Think Of The Tempest As A Farewell Play?
“When Prospero gives up the ‘art’ of magic and says he’ll ‘retire me to my Milan, where every third thought shall be my grave’ in the final scene … generations of critics have imagined Shakespeare similarly tottering off to Stratford-upon-Avon to putter in the garden. But not everyone is as soft-headed.”
What’s This? New Yorkers Are Self-Promotional?
The citywide piano project “Play Me, I’m Yours” “is intended as an exploration of mass creativity and shared public space,” but “[m]usicians are piggybacking on the project to promote themselves and their music. They’ve planned marathon performance routes, … worked their way into TV news footage and mustered their own video teams.” Oh: And they’re busking.
A Siamese Dialogue With Nijinsky
“One hundred years ago, Vaslav Nijinsky performed [Fokine’s] Danse Siamoise with the Ballets Russes at the Paris Opera. … Little is known of the original choreography for the Danse Siamoise, but, using old photographs and paintings, the Thai choreographer and dancer Pichet Klunchun has now created Nijinsky Siam, a 55-minute stage ‘dialogue’ with Nijinsky, where Mr. Klunchun explores the Russian dancer’s understanding of Thai classical dance and responds to it.”
Let’s Stop Pretending To Kill A Mockingbird Is Great Literature
Allen Barra: “One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in To Kill a Mockingbird; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad.”
Misunderstanding The Bauhaus
“Few developments central to the history of art have been so misrepresented or misunderstood as the brief, brave, glorious, doomed life of the Bauhaus–the epochally influential German art, architecture, crafts, and design school that was founded in Goethe’s sleepy hometown of Weimar in 1919.”