A couple of days ago I listened again to act 1 of Solti’s 1968 Der Rosenkavalier, and the extraordinarily beautiful singing of Regine Crespin as the Marschallin.
Today on youtube I watched Crespin step–and I do mean step–through the rauccous nonchalance of of “C’est Vrai,” on French TV from around the same time, replete with custom-tailored lyrics and chorus boys waving fans.
Great to have a specialty that you make your own–also great to be able to do it all!
Cold vector limbo in the south, droughts in California that threaten water supply, flooding in England. . .
The deniers may be clinically rational, but nonetheless they are not in their right minds.
The Atlanta Ballet honors its artistic director emeritus at their annual Ballet Ball February 22 at Atlanta’s St. Regis.
And at Ballet Review, we do some honoring of our own: my interview with Barnett is among the enticements of the new, Winter 2013-14 issue.
Brian Beutler at Salon analyzes the big-megaphone media’s overwhelmingly distorted coverage of the CBO’s report on the way that Obamacare will free people from wage slavery in the pursuit of health care coverage.
Remember when I wrote about the 1916 flick The Dancer’s Peril for City Arts? That silent let then-Broadway star Alice Brady do her best to make us believe she was a ballerina. And it also gave a lot of screen time to dancer/choreographer/ballet master Alexis Kosloff.
Alexis and his brother Theodore were Russian emigres who became for a time indispensable to American popular entertainment. (Was amused, when I re-read Karsavina’s Theatre Street, to read about her crush on Theodore, who transferred to Petersburg’s Imperial ballet academy from its Moscow counterpart.)
Well, on March 15 at the Egyptian theater in Los Angeles, Debra Levine will give a talk on “Theodore Kosloff & Cecil B. DeMille Meet Madam Satan.” Then you’ll get to enjoy a screening of that self-same cinematic oddity directed by DeMille, in which Theodore stars in his own choreography.
Later this year, Levine’s essay of the same name will be published by the Institute of Modern Russian Culture at University of Southern California in its journal Experiment.
Dinner with Laura Jacobs last night.
Almost out of the blue, she mentioned the 1932 movie Faithless and how moving Tallulah was in it. When I wrote Tallulah! I had to do almost a wholesale act of interpretative revisionism re: Bankhead’s spate of films in 1931-32, given how slightingly as well as superficially they’d been treated by critics after her death in 1968.
I agreed that she was moving in Faithless, and the movie itself is one of the frankest depictions of why and how women turn to prostitution. (She starts out rich and then suffers a long slide downward.)
I didn’t know that TCM had just shown it, and that Laura and her husband James Wolcott had seen it. Jim had tweeted this:
“If you want to see what an America w/o a safety net (the conservative wet dream) looks like, FAITHLESS (1932) will fill you in. #TCM.”
in The Guardian, Suzanne Goldenberg writes about Pete Seeger’s environmental activism.
January 31-February 4, the Film Society of Lincoln Center presents its annual Dance on Camera Festival. There’s a great deal to see, and a wide-open as well as wide-screen take on the subject.
Laura Jacobs reviews in The Wall Street Journal Judith Mackrell’s Flappers, just published stateside after a success in Britain. Both Jacobs, and it seems from her review, Mackrell and her book, have something important to say about that epochal generation of post-WWI women in the arts.
Cutting SNAP benefits is not only sadistic, it’s bad economic policy. Katie Wright at Think Progress details the ways these benefits do indeed benefit our society as a whole, including generating $9 in economic stimulation for every $5 in benefit payment.
