YOU
You want everything. Like those who have always been happy.
— Therese Raquin (Simone Signoret in the 1953 movie based on Emile Zola’s novel)
Archive for November, 2010
Quote of the day: YOU
November 4, 2010Photo diary: the week in people
November 3, 2010
Simon the Brit
Will and Andy at Vynl in Chelsea
Keith at MOMA
Bronx Gridlock, the champions at Gotham Girls Roller Derby's final match of the season
Suzy Hotrod, retiring star jammer for Queens of Pain (she's got guns!)
Mathew and Randall after the Cedar Lake Ballet concert at the Joyce
Culture Vulture: Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet at the Joyce
November 1, 2010I’ve been hearing about Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet for a couple of years from a friend of Andy’s who is the company’s costume manager, but I’d never seen them before. My review of their current season at the Joyce — well, one of two programs they’re performing anyway — has just been posted on CultureVulture.net.
Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet in Alexander Ekman's "Hubbub"
“The strength of the company is its athletic vigor, which showed up best in Program A’s opening piece, Jo Stromgren’s “Sunday, Again,” and not just because the dance revolved around a sort of deconstructed badminton game. The bent racquet, the net without poles, and the shuttlecocks turned out to be metaphors for what the choreographer’s program note calls “the domestic jungle of luxury problems and gender frictions.” Fortunately, the metaphor didn’t get banged on too heavily — really, the duet-heavy 35-minute piece was mainly going for the cavalier brusqueness and brutal casualness of couples who’ve been together long enough to get on each other’s nerves over the slightest pretext. Set to three Bach pieces, the dancing is fast and fierce, and the standard is set right away with a killer duet between Jason Kittelberger and Acacia Schachte full of limbless lifts and daredevil jumps.”
You can read the review in its entirety here.
In this week’s New Yorker
November 1, 2010The high points include appreciations of two artists I love, Ntozake Shange and Elvis Costello.
Like me, Hilton Als had a life-changing experience seeing for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf on Broadway in 1997, and like me he’s dubious about Tyler Perry’s movie of it that’s opening any day now, starring Janet Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg. He delivers a lovely summation of that work and a quick skim of her subsequent 30 years’ worth of writing, along with some details of her personal life that I didn’t know (a string of suicide attempts, a bipolar diagnosis) and some that I did (sadly, she had a stroke six years ago that has left her seriously disabled).
Nick Paumgarten is also a big Elvis Costello nut and spent quite a bit of time hanging out with him and delivers an intriguingly detailed mid-career check-in.
Also: Roz Chast makes her writing debut this week with not one but two prose pieces — a Talk of the Town memorial tribute to her fellow cartoonist Leo Cullum, who died recently, and a Shouts and Murmurs rant on the ickiness of the banana. On the latter subject, Steve Martin and I respectfully disagree — like me, the other Man from Waco believes that the banana is one of nature’s most ingenious packaging triumphs.
R.I.P.: Jill Johnston
November 1, 2010
Somehow I only just today learned of the death September 18 of Jill Johnston, the famously independent (cranky) lesbian feminist historian and art critic. I guess I was up at Easton Mountain and didn’t see her obituary in the New York Times. She was one of my earliest culture heroes. As a precocious queer teenager living on an Air Force base and going to high school in rural New Jersey in 1971-72, I somehow managed to get my hands on the Village Voice where I encountered her columns, which blew my budding-writer mind in several ways. She was openly and outrageously gay. She wrote about whatever she wanted to, including dance, art, and literature. She modeled herself on Gertrude Stein, a frequent reference. And she took a tremendous amount of freedom for herself as a writer, eschewing punctuation, capital letters, and paragraph breaks. Many people hated her column and thought it represented the worst kind of self-indulgent ’70s countercultural journalism. I couldn’t wait to read it. To this day, somewhere in my archive of clipping files, I still have a folder of Jill Johnston columns from those years at the Voice, including one headlined “you can’t choreograph a penis.” She published a collection of her columns called Marmalade Me, her best-known book is probably Lesbian Nation, and several other books, some of which I read (Gullibles Travels, Jasper Johns) and others I didn’t (Mother Bound). I didn’t keep up with her after a while, but she will always be in my pantheon of great writers and early influences.
another eye opens 