cultural commentary from the desk of Don Shewey
our hosts, Morgan and Mike
the view of the Jersey City skyline at sunset from their living room
Mike and Andy are glee-club chums from Cornell...
...as is Joel
Anne and Tony live in Mike and Morgan's neighborhood
Anne's cool shoes are by Donny Miller
we looked at Mike's cool pictures of lightning on his laptop
My review of Ivo van Hove’s production of The Little Foxes at New York Theater Workshop has just been posted on CultureVulture.net.
“Van Hove dispenses with Hellman’s stage directions and intermissions. Instead, he highlights certain images and emotions to call attention to key elements in the play rather than keeping them smoothly embedded in the text. For instance, there’s a tiny table front and center that serves as a kind of altar, and objects of reverence are ceremonially placed there: for Act I, a bottle of whiskey; Act II, Horace’s pillbox; Act III, a bank safety deposit box. And the physical interactions escalate to extreme violence – men punch women in the stomach and slam them against the walls, the women pummel them and pull their hair, people roll around on the floor alternately cat-fighting and caressing, as if they were in a dance by Pina Bausch. And when the stakes get high, the characters scream at each other like little kids throwing tantrums. It’s not pretty, but it’s primal.”
You can read the entire review online here.
…actually, before the moment passes and the new issue arrives in my mailbox, I want to mention a couple of noteworthy pieces in LAST week’s issue.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote a thoughtful essay about the difference between social activism and social networking, contrasting the world of Facebook/Twitter with civil rights actions in the 1960s, like the day when four college students in Greensboro, NC, sat down at a segregated Woolworth’s counter and asked to be served. To me, the piece was a good reminder that online networking is useful for disseminating information and staying in contact with friends and acquaintances, but when it comes to Getting Things Done, there’s no substitute for community action that you do with other people in the same room.
Music critic Alex Ross did an excellent piece about one of my all-time culture heroes, John Cage (above), on the occasion of the publication of Kenneth Silverman’s biography, Begin Again. Here’s a story I’d never heard before: after years of living on the edge of poverty, “by the end of the fifties, Cage’s financial situation had imiproved, though not because of his music. After moving to Stony Point [NY], he began collecting mushrooms during walks in the woods. Within a few years, he had mastered the mushroom literature and co-founded the new York Mycological Society. He supplied mushrooms to various elite restaurants, including the Four Seasons. In 1959, while working at the R.A. I. Studio of Music Phonology, a pioneering electronic-music studio, in Milan, he was invited on a game show called ‘Lascia o Raddopppia?’ — a ‘Twenty-One’-style program in which contestants were asked questions on a subject of their choice. Each week, Cage answered, with deadly accuracy, increasingly obscure questions about mushrooms. On his final appearance, he was asked to list ‘the twenty-four kinds of white-spore mushrooms listed in Atkinson.’ (Silverman supplies a transcript of this historic moment.) Cage named them all, in alphabetical order, and won eight thousand dollars. He used part of the money to purchase a VW bus for the [Merce] Cunningham company.”
My wall calendar these days is BUTT magazine‘s 2010 week-at-a-time photo calendar, with fetching pictures printed on the magazine’s signature pink newsprint. I was sorry to see last week go by, because it means I’m no longer gazing at the lovely Ian. Plus, I love seeing portraits of people with mundane objects in the background, like wall sockets.
SILENCE
One of the greatest blessings that the United States could receive in the near future would be to have her industries halted, her business discontinued, her people speechless, a great pause in her world of affairs created…We should be hushed and silent, and we should have the opportunity to learn what other people think.
— John Cage in 1928
another eye opens 