“I know it’s happening under the brilliant Michael Grandage, I know he won award-nominations as a young thesp, I know he’s a decent age for the part – but still my heart thuds instinctively to the floor. … Hamlet can be many things – sardonic or guileless, fey or brutish, heart-rending or clownish, emotionally transparent or impossibly remote – and in the best performances he (sometimes she) succeeds in being all of those things at once. One thing Hamlet can’t be, though, is mediocre.”
Tag: 09.11.07
Cultural Baggage Holds Ailey Company Back
“In theory, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is a mixed-race, multicultural dance company. In practice, much of its core repertory trades in a style of black and Latin stereotypes that are old-fashioned and restrictive.”
Pining For Lee Miller, Erotic Object
“I don’t think I’ve ever made this complaint before but The Art of Lee Miller, a centenary celebration of one of the most famous women in surrealist art that is about to open at the V&A, would be better if it included more nude images of the artist.” The exhibition of Miller’s photography “would be a better, less prissy experience if it were more ready to acknowledge that Miller’s body was what made her central to modern art in the age of Picasso, Cocteau and Man Ray.”
Does Less Work + More Slacking = Greater Creativity?
“Goofing off is not a waste of time — well, not always. Exhibit A: Albert Einstein. He was a world-class loafer. In 1905, he was working as a clerk at a Swiss patent office, spending a lot of time spacing out. A ‘respectable federal ink pisser’ is how Einstein described himself. Yet it was at work, daydreaming one day, watching a builder on a nearby rooftop, that he experienced ‘the happiest thought of my life’ — a thought that soon blossomed into his ‘special theory of relativity.'”
Queens Restaurants Host Thriving Bootleg Trade
“Queens prosecutors thought they needed specially trained sniffer dogs to root out stashes of pirated DVDs. All they really needed was an appetite. Inside many restaurants along Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, roving vendors descending on diners offering pirated movies are becoming a common sight. Their wares range from films rated G through XXX, as well as compact discs of Mexican, Colombian and Caribbean musical stars.”
In Museum’s Galleries, A Bombardment Of 9/11 Images
“It isn’t memory that is the issue. It is commemoration. Memory, at least right now, is readily summoned. Commemoration is something else altogether. The new exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, for example, is not a commemoration. ‘Here Is New York: Remembering 9/11,’ which opens today, is exclusively about memory….”
Trumbo Documentary Eyes Red-Scare Era’s Complexity
“Sixty years after a Congressional panel grilled 10 uncooperative writers, directors and producers about their supposed Communist connections, Hollywood still quarrels over the heroes and villains of its Red Scare. … But on Monday night in Toronto, one of the era’s acknowledged heroes, the jailed and blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, was expected to deliver some posthumous words that might finally put to rest the hunt for good guys and bad. The admonition occurs in the first few minutes of ‘Trumbo,’ a documentary….”
UK’s Arts Momentum Threatened By Funding Review
“We applauded, but also looked with envy, when the PM announced an additional £100m for sport in schools recently, because we knew that an equivalent sum to encourage new talent in the arts would yield extraordinary returns. We have seen 10 years of spectacular achievement by artists and writers and steady progress in making their work available to new audiences. It would be tragic if all this were to be threatened, even squandered, for want of the modest sum that it would take to maintain the real value of current support for culture and the arts.”