... for Cecilia Bartoli, I simply must share this parody of her stage countenance so lovingly, campily performed by the quite gifted "Kimchilia Bartoli", the Korean-American counter-tenor Kangmin Justin Kim. He does "Agitata da due venti" in pure Cecilia style, a wonder to watch and hear, which brought a smile to my face throughout and ended by letting the sun come out today!
"Nureyev was expecting Elizabeth Taylor at his performance at the MET as his guest, and we had reason to believe she might try to cause a scene. It seems that he had gone to her play the night before, as her guest, but he arrived late. Quite late. Halfway through the second act. Since his seat was in the front row, he created a bit of a stir when he entered. Practically stopped the show! She had to restart her monologue. Needless to say, Liz Taylor wasn't too pleased. So there was concern that she might try the same stunt at the MET. I arranged a seat for her on the Parterre, where she could enter late without being seen. Also, I didn't want a fight with her either, and that's the only place latecomers are allowed to take their seats during the performance. The private boxes, you know..."
"Yeah, I know. Go on."
"Sorry, I didn't mean to explain the obvious. Anyway, I thought all was settled and relaxed. Sure enough, she arrived late, about thirty minutes late. She seemed a little disappointed that this caused no problem and looked around the lobby forlornly. No one was there to see her. She couldn't do her scene. And she was ready for one. She was playing Elizabeth Taylor: her famous purple mascara, bright red dress short enough to show off her knees, and an escort or two in tow. But she went on to her seat to watch the ballet."
"So what? That's nothing unusual. What's the big deal?"
"That was only the prologue. Then came the main act, during the first intermission. Finally, there were people around. The lobby was packed. Of course she could have remained in the Parterre's private lobby, where there's everything she or anybody could ever need. Except one thing: her public. So, she came bouncing out into the main lobby, and headed straight for the main entrance, looking for downstage center, obviously. Already I could hear the wave of whispers surging through the crowd: 'There's Elizabeth Taylor. Look, Elizabeth Taylor.' She glowed with glee. She had been noticed."
"Is that all? Every actor wants to be noticed. Or did she cause a hassle somehow?"
"You'll soon hear. Of course, she had passed countless members of the staff before reaching the entrance, but she strode straight up to one of the ticket-takers and asked him a question. Nothing ever flusters Nick, but whatever she said made him turn as red as her dress. The commotion among the spectators around him grew to a roar. He pointed out his superior, and she marched over to him. The same reaction, and even more commotion. On to his superior she pranced. I watched intently, because I would be the next, the final arbiter, if Michael couldn't handle her problem. Well, he couldn't, but he had sense enough to escort Miss Taylor over to me. The crowd was buzzing by now. Michael opened his mouth to explain the situation, but Miss Taylor launched into an oration in her newly acquired Southern drawl.
"'Hi, sweetie. Ain't you cute? I was wonderin'. I hope maybe you can help me. You see, I have to pee.'
"I'm sure my mouth must have fallen open, though she didn't seem to mind at all. Now I could understand the words whispered all around me in the crowd: 'Elizabeth Taylor has to pee. Elizabeth Taylor has to pee.'
"'You see, sweetie,' she continued, 'the thing is, I have to pee, and every time I pee in a public room, it causes such a hubbub. People sort of stand there and listen, like. So I have to pee, and I was wonderin' if there was some place private I could go to pee. Maybe you could take me?'
"To calm down the scene as quickly as possible, I gave Michael the keys and told him to take her to the bathroom in the executive office area. I also suggested that he then take her from there directly back to the Parterre, the back way. It worked.
"'Thanks, cutie,' she called back to me, as she followed Michael with a big grin on her face."
"What a hubbub!"
"Oh, but there's more. There's the epilogue."
"Great!"
"After the performance, she went backstage with Nureyev for some photos. I was there, too, of course, doing my duty. When she passed me to leave, she turned back and said, 'Sweetie, thanks for helping me pee. Listen here, do you ever get a night off?... Good, here's two tickets to my show next week. And if you have to pee, you tell them I said you could use my room. See you soon, honey. Tata!'"
He pulled the tickets out of his pocket. But Little Foxes had a hard time topping this night's show.
[excerpt from The Unspoken, by Richard Gardner, all rights reserved]
... so consider no longer falling asleep in front of a flat-screen tv and buying and reading a paper instead, such as Charlie Hebdo:
L'appel démocratique de Charlie Hebdo 15-02-11
(We who have democracy and freedom of expression should not let it slip through our fingers as others are struggling to attain these privileges. Decommercialize your life, if possible, by reading and watching NO advertisements, not even the one sadly not deletable at the beginning of this video -- switch to MUTE till it's over.)
In hommage to Pier Paolo Pasolini, his last televised interview, from October 31, 1975
Let's give the good news first. The House has voted to REPEAL the DADT regulation for the US military. Now it is time for the Senate also to acknowledge that you can defend your country whoever you may happen to prefer as a sex partner!
House votes again to end 'don't ask, don't tell'
By Ed O'Keefe Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, December 15, 2010; 11:16 PM
House lawmakers on Wednesday again approved a bill to repeal the "don't ask, don't tell" law, delivering renewed momentum to the years-long campaign to end the ban on gays in the military ahead of a possible Senate vote next week.
by Charles Savage, The New York Times, Dec. 15,2010Since WikiLeaks began making public large caches of classified United States government documents this year, Justice Department officials have been struggling to come up with a way to charge Mr. Assange with a crime. Among other things, they have studied several statutes that criminalize the dissemination of restricted information under certain circumstances, including the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.But while prosecutors have used such laws to go after leakers and hackers, they have never successfully prosecuted recipients of leaked information for passing it on to others — an activity that can fall under the First Amendment’s strong protections of speech and press freedoms.
The Washington Post
Local arts activists led a protest march from the Transformer art space at 14th and P streets NW to the National Portrait Gallery, where officials recently removed a work of video art depicting Christ with ants crawling over him after complaints from a Catholic organization and members of Congress.
As a result of testing some ebook readers for a journalist friend who is to do a feature on them and needed some guinea pigs to interview about their experience with these slick devices, I have begun to wonder how they will yellow, why they don't have pleasant smells dependent on the country of their publication, why Mark Twain looks exactly like William Shakespeare, and why the pads don't respond to fingers that have been outside in the real autumn world.
I suppose I am simply glad to be paper bound, still write with ink myself in a paper notebook when it truly matters, enjoy the different weights sizes feels scents typefaces of that fabulous innovation called BOOK.
And can truly recommend this video assessment of that invention, in Spanish with English subtitles, but intuitively comprehensible, genial and ingenious. Take the time to watch, enjoy ...
... and now go read a book!
Flemming Rose, announcing the publication of his 499-page book Tyranny of Silence on the publication of the 12 Mohammed caricatures in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten yesterday, quite pertinently, poignantly, and accurately expressed what the whole business is about: "Words should be answered with words. That's all we have in a democracy, and if we give that up, we will be locked in a tyranny of silence."
Danish book republishes Prophet Muhammad cartoons
Perhaps reading the account of what happened after the paper published the political cartoons would help remind us what freedom of expression and thought is all about and help us to get more people to use words and art and refrain from employing weapons and violence!
Banned and/or Challenged Books from the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, by JD Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
1984, by George Orwell
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Native Son, by Richard Wright
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Women in Love, by DH Lawrence
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
Source: American Library Association; follow the link to see how recent some of these moves are and how alarming the reasons given.
-- Charles BaudelaireLES BIJOUX
de Charles Baudelaire
La très-chère était nue, et, connaissant mon coeur,
Elle n'avait gardé que ses bijoux sonores,
Dont le riche attirail lui donnait l'air vainqueur
Qu'ont dans leurs jours heureux les esclaves des Mores.
Quand il jette en dansant son bruit vif et moqueur,
Ce monde rayonnant de métal et de pierre
Me ravit en extase, et j'aime avec fureur
Les choses où le son se mêle à la lumière.
Elle était donc couchée et se laissait aimer,
Et du haut du divan elle souriait d'aise
A mon amour profond et doux comme la mer,
Qui vers elle montait comme vers sa falaise.
Les yeux fixés sur moi, comme un tigre dompté,
D'un air vague et rêveur elle essayait des poses,
Et la candeur unie à la lubricité
Donnait un charme neuf à ses métamorphoses.
Et son bras et sa jambe, et sa cuisse et ses reins,
Polis comme de l'huile, onduleux comme un cygne,
Passaient devant mes yeux clairvoyants et sereins;
Et son ventre et ses seins, ces grappes de ma vigne,
S'avançaient, plus câlins que les anges du mal,
Pour troubler le repos où mon âme était mise,
Et pour la déranger du rocher de cristal
Où, calme et solitaire, elle s'était assise.
Je croyais voir unis par un nouveau dessin
Les hanches de l'Antiope au buste d'un imberbe,
Tant sa taille faisait ressortir son bassin !
Sur ce teint fauve et brun le fard était superbe !
— Et la lampe s'étant résignée à mourir,
Comme le foyer seul illuminait la chambre,
Chaque fois qu'il poussait un flamboyant soupir,
Il inondait de sang cette peau couleur d'ambre.
To accompany whatever you're reading and/or writing at the moment, your thoughts, your love, your yearning...
...is all REAL literature.
Childlike, childish, the writer experiences fright, wonder, enthusiasm, must share that, whatever the threat of punishment he may face for daring to express such extreme emotion! And transgression may seem evil, dangerous, is forbidden, is necessary for art.
And this link appears to be accessible in Europe, too! (With thanks to DarthR!)
One of the memories connected with the World Trade Center in my own mind which make it always tower high into the sky... 1974...
Entretien entre Yann Moix et Philippe Sollers - La Règle du Jeu
The above link leads to the four-part video documentation of the interview on the site La Règle du Jeu.
La Règle du Jeu vous propose un entretien exclusif entre Yann Moix et Philippe Sollers à propos du cinéma. Le premier, écrivain réalisateur. Le second, écrivain ô combien amoureux de la littérature, de la beauté, des arts… et néanmoins réfractaire au cinéma. Mais est-ce si sûr ? Et en ce cas, pour quelles raisons ? La guerre du goût doit-elle (devrait-elle ?) passer nécessairement, par celle du verbe contre l’image ?
Objet d’un dialogue étonnant.
With thanks to Rachel's Joey and greetings to her and to you all with glee as art frames music:
70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.
