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I’m a memoirist; in my mind’s eye the past is a series of boxes filled with people, events and places that time recasts over and over. Depending on shifts of perspective and mood, the land of what-used-to-be can emerge in ways that can baffle, annoy or overwhelm. In Cincinnati, the city of my birth, my…
Continue readingAn extraordinary artist whose uneven output as a director nonetheless yielded some gems. Thrice nominated for Oscars (the screenplays of Great Expectations and Brief Encounter, special effects for One of Our Aircraft is Missing). From The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to The Poseidon Adventure, few directors could match him for sheer craft or versatility….
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Muse and lover of the late Allen Ginsburg, and a poet of note. Here’s something from 1957… My Bed is Covered Yellow My bed is covered yellow – Oh Sun, I sit on you Oh golden field I lay on you Oh money I dream of you More, More, cried the bed – talk to…
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Strange or ironic, that on the day the Tony Award nominations are announced, a lovely obit for Lynn Redgrave appears in the New York Times. Sad that there’s been a run on Redgrave deaths (her brother Colin died earlier this year; her niece Natasha succumbed after a skiing accident in the spring of 2009). She…
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sisters by Lucille Clifton me and you be sisters. we be the same. me and you coming from the same place. me and you be greasing our legs touching up our edges. me and you be scared of rats be stepping on roaches. me and you come running high down purdy street one time…
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Death shrouds Tom Ford’s adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man. Its protagonist, George Falconer, is a rarity in fiction, and on film: a gay middle-aged academic who hides his grief under an air of poised inscrutability. He’s an Englishman in a southern California city who’s wrapping up the last day of his…
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Safire receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from the last Bush…the Sunday magazine of the NYT will feel empty without the man who kept us grammatically honest. RIP.
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Passion. Desire. The ad copy for the current production of Desire Under the Elms is the kind of sexy teaser producers hope will put bodies in seats. No way would they tout the especial skills of Eugene O’Neill, an American playwright for the ages. But it’s his story up there, and while it’s by no…
Continue readingSunday April 5 is your last chance to catch Martha Clarke’s The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Minetta Lane Theatre. From its hypnotic opening promenade, as actors enact the evolution of beasts into humans, to its climatic high-flying ascent into a Dantéan hell, this artful interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting (a recreation of a…
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