Category

Music

Film, Music, My back pages, Vespers

Dory Previn, Lyricist, 1925-2012

  All ten year-old tragedians need a soundtrack.  Mine was the Theme from Valley of the Dolls, that heartbreaking ballad from the film that starred Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate and Patty Duke.  I had no idea that the song was meant to underscore the film heroine’s descent into pill addiction (I thought Parkins, Tate and…

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Film, Gay, Literature, Music, Vespers

Ken Russell, Film Director 1927-2011

The Music Lovers.  Women in Love.  The Devils.  The Boyfriend.  Tommy.  Altered States.  Could anyone combine the prurient and the literary, the highbrow and low rent more effectively than Ken Russell?  His best films actually look better now than when they were made; the worst (Lizstomania, Gothic, The Lair of the White Worm) remain loopy…

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Criticals, Dance, Gay, Music, Short Cuts, Theater

Of Reliquaries and Retrospects

The mournful qualities of fall—all those dying leaves whose color mimics that of dried blood—complement the inaugural season at New York LiveArts, the still-young merger between Dance Theater Workshop and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Dance Company.  With evergreen works by Jones and John Kelly being remounted, how intriguing that so far the theater unfolding in the…

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