“In a world where fans and the remaining performers are almost invariably in their 60s and 70s, or older, … whether because of an absence of charismatic individual stars, musical shortcomings or the way it has been relegated to Happy Days nostalgia, doo-wop has been marginalized as tacky music stuck in time.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Lesbian Pentecostal
“When Jeanette Winterson was a child – a redheaded scrap of a thing, as fierce and self-willed as Jane Eyre but readier with her fists – she … was adopted, raised by evangelical Pentecostals in a working-class town in northern England in the 1960s and ’70s. … To the dismay of her mother, Winterson turned out to be brilliant, literary, defiant and gay.”
Tales Of Ferocious Literary Heirs
The passing of Dmitri Nabokov last week inspires Laura Miller to recall the zeal (if that’s the right word) with which he and some of his more notorious counterparts – Stephen Joyce, Ted and Olwyn Hughes (the widower and sister-in-law of Sylvia Plath), Sonia Orwell – defended their territory.
Playing The Buddha Onstage
Reaching 40 with too much money and too much booze, Evan Brenner went through a midlife crisis not unlike that of Siddhartha Gautama himself. After poring through the Buddhist sutras and finding a “whirlwind” story of the prince’s life buried under all the religious teaching, Brenner decided to incarnate (as it were) Siddhartha in a solo theater piece.
Syracuse’s Library-In-A-Phone-Booth
“Mother Earth, as she prefers to be called, is the steward of the Syracuse’s first Little Free Library, which opened early this month in an abandoned telephone box near a bus stop and grocery store on Gifford Street. The Little Free Library credo is ‘take a book, leave a book.’ That’s pretty much the only rule.”
Barcelona’s Liceu Opera House Reverses Decision To Close For Two Months
Following widespread concern from opera lovers and threats of a strike from employees, the Gran Teatre del Liceu has concluded an agreement with its staff’s labor unions that (says management) will allow the house to resume virtually all of the programming that had been cancelled due to a shortage of funds.
Drama Critics Should Not Write Plays, Says Drama Critic
Lyn Gardner: “I tend to think that, while 30 years of sitting in the dark watching other people’s plays has taught me a great deal, one of the things it hasn’t taught me is how to write a good play. Writing reviews and recognising [sic] a great (or even promising) play are entirely different things, and I think it’s best to leave the latter to the professionals.”
In Today’s Art Scene, Sculpture Rocks
“It’s the most exciting area of the art world right now for collectors and viewers alike, and there’s a simple reason for that. … It’s a really experimental age for sculpture,’ partly because of digital imaging, the addition of sound, and other innovations that offer new opportunities to be creative in three dimensions.”
A Mini-Sistema For Dance In Colombia
La Compañía del Cuerpo de Indias is something like a dance equivalent of Venezuela’s Simon Bolívar Symphony Orchestra – a professional troupe drawn from El Colegio del Cuerpo, which “draws many of its students from Cartagena’s most impoverished districts. Many come from a shantytown called Nelson Mandela, home to many families displaced by years of violence that pulverised Colombia in the 1980s and 90s.”
Cinema’s Problem With Old People
“Once marginalised and therefore cut down in screen-time, older characters have had to be stereotyped, with often unbecoming results. There have been a good few kindly old grandmas, but more often the elderly have been shown as [string of nineteen unflattering adjectives]. However, with the coming of our own millennium, cinema determined to do better. It was now in pursuit of the increasingly valuable grey dollar.”