“He’s appeared in Ealing dramas, a James Bond movie and played a wily dictator in Sidney Pollack’s The Interpreter. But if [Earl] Cameron never quite achieved leading-man status, that was hardly his fault – there were other factors at play. … In hindsight, perhaps, he peaked too early. He broke the mould on his very first film. Shot in 1951, Basil Dearden’s thriller Pool of London cast him as Johnny, a young sailor who battles racists at the docks and romances a white girl beside Greenwich Observatory.”
Tag: 08.08.17
‘Imagine If Antonin Artaud, William S. Burroughs And David Lynch Decided To Open An Industrial Nightclub’
That’s what the lead singer says about David T. Little’s next opera, Artaud in the Black Lodge (yes, it’s a Twin Peaks reference), whose first part is getting a concert premiere in Los Angeles. (By the way, David Lynch has, in fact, opened a nightclub.)
Surveying The State Of Russian Theatre At The Country’s National Performing Arts Festival/Competition
“That fearlessness on the part of Russian theatre artists has led to an increase in audiences, including that most coveted of demographics: the under-40 set. One had only to look at the audience at Gogol Center, where I saw Kafka on a Saturday night.” Diep Tran visits the Golden Mask Festival, where Russia’s top companies present their best work of the season over two months, at the end of which a jury awards a Russian national equivalent of the Tonys or Oliviers.
Why ‘Krapp’s Last Tape’ Still Leaves Us (Ahem) Reeling
“Albert Finney sobbed like an animal, Harold Pinter ramped up the terror and John Hurt even resembled Beckett himself.” Why do actors and viewers keep coming back to the play – even, as Michael Billington writes, “someone like myself, who is not a fully paid-up member of the Beckett club”? Well, Billington says, “it is partly because of its perfect alliance of form and content.”
The Rise And Fall Of The Louise Blouin Art Media Empire – Former Top Editor Of Artinfo Tells The Tale
Ben Davis: “How many people out there still care about the implosion of the Blouin organization as we know it and its hail-mary mutation into an e-commerce hub? Not that many, it seems. And no one has done more than Louise Blouin herself when it comes to transforming her once formidable enterprise into a punch line. To measure the magnitude of her fall from grace, maybe it’s worth going back 10 years. Then, Louise Blouin – at the time, still Louise Blouin MacBain – was the toast of the art world, a fearsome new contender whose media ambitions were set to shake things up.”
Surprise Choice For New President Of Motion Picture Academy
“In a meeting on Tuesday evening at the academy’s Beverly Hills headquarters, the group’s 54-member board of governors, including such Hollywood luminaries as Tom Hanks, Whoopi Goldberg, Kathleen Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, elected [cinematographer John] Bailey to succeed outgoing President Cheryl Boone Isaacs, who served four consecutive yearlong terms and steered the organization through one of the most transformative and sometimes turbulent periods in its long history.”
Another Public Sculpture Criticized For Mucking With Native American Culture (And This One’s In A Rather Odd Spot)
This past spring, Sam Durant’s Scaffold at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis drew enough criticism that the piece was disassembled entirely. (At least they held off on burning it.) This month, the dispute is over Del Geist’s Bowfort Towers, a piece, meant to pay tribute to Blackfoot culture, that the city of Calgary has sited at an interchange on the Trans-Canada Highway.
An Urban Dance Form That Uses The Body As Both Percussion Instrument And Movement Medium
Gia Kourlas writes about step – ” a percussive-movement tradition that uses the entire body as well as the voice and is popular in African-American fraternities and sororities” – and a new documentary about The Lethal Ladies, the girls’ step team at a Baltimore high school.
Book Piracy In Russia Is Even Worse Than Anyone Thought
The Russian government (which you’d think might not want to publicize this) estimates that between a quarter and a third of all books on the market in the country are pirated. (The problem is virtually nil with print books, though; it’s all in the e-book sector.) Even more worrisome is what one survey found about Russians’ beliefs regarding pirated content.
What The Design Of National Parliament Assemblies Says About Countries
“What they found is that all the plans adhere to one of five basic setups: benches opposing each other in two sets of lines; a semicircle; a horseshoe; a circle; or a classroom-like layout, where politicians are rigidly oriented to face the front of a room. While many European national parliaments have opted for the semicircular layout — indicative of a “consensus-seeking” room, XML says — it’s mostly authoritarian countries that have adopted the classroom setup, from Cuba to China to North Korea.”