Monday, August 25, 2008

Polyphony in Rimini

This summer is closing for me on some very special notes—including an F# from Palestrina’s Ego Sum Panis Vivus, a B flat from Guerrero’s Regina Caeli, a C# from Byrd’s Sacerdotes Domini-—and about a thousand others. I am off to take part in an international choral workshop run by Peter Phillips of the...
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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Manny Farber: “Garrulous animality and resentful wailing walls”

I clicked over to Mr. Wolcott’s this mourning to learn of the passing of Manny Farber, one of the last century’s great, most distinctive writers on movies.Besides the general affinity a lover of film, and fine art, feels when she encounters Farber’s work for the first time, the collection of his essays in Negative Spaces has a special, quiet space on my bookshelf: Steed brought me a copy of the Studio...
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Sunday, August 17, 2008

The Dancing Satyr Who Left the Sea

In 2008 I encountered an amazing aquatic story in a small fishing village in the southwest of Sicily called Mazara Del Vallo. In 1997 a fishing boat from Mazara found a bronze leg amidst the fish in its nets. Many odd things from the sea end up in nets, the detritus of millennia of shipwrecks. The...
              

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Mad Men: "Tears rise in the heart and gather to the eyes"

“God, I miss the fifties.” Roger Serling“I miss the blacklist.” Harry Crane“I missed not live blogging with you all last week. Thank God my Norwegian ancestors kept me from being sad about it.” M.A.PeelOkay, so I have now seen “The Benefactor,” where Roger and Harry had throw away lines waxing nostalgic...
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Monday, August 11, 2008

Our Sicilian Temenos

Persephone first crossed our path in Rome, freed as she was from the block of marble by the hands of Bernini only to be captured by Hades and forced into the underworld. When her mother, Demeter, the goddess of all fertility, goes after her, she deprives the earth of its ability to grow food. Hades...
              

Friday, August 1, 2008

Mad Men Season Two: "Flight 1"

Our thoughts take flight tonight in live blogging over at newcritics.For all of today’s hypermobility of every kind—from the ubiquitous air travel we take for granted to the iphone culture that lets us take it all with us—we are a comparatively earth-bound people. I don’t think our society’s collective...
              
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