Archive for October 2012
Nice Work If You Can Get It..who knew it was about love?
By sheer magical intervention I got row B seats for the above Gershwin boys musical. I was expecting more recycled tourist pablum… what could I have been thinking of? This beautifully directed show by Kathleen Marshall, induced better feelings than I have had in a year. The perfect antidote to global misery, a prohibition comedy, with a few updates for our even more insane time. Matthew Broderick is a dream, sweet, with a lovely voice and a perfect everyman persona. Sometimes I didn’t quite get his cartoonish vocal expressions..they seemed broader than his co-star’sKelly O’Hara’s more straight on performance, but he’s a real charmer who makes me want to dance again. Kelly (South Pacific) has a super clean voice and the rest of the cast are stars in this show too: Judy Kaye doing a stuffy biddy who gets released from her emotional girdle, Matt McGrath as lifetime gin runner,Robyn Hurder as the chorus girl who wants to be queen, Jennifer Laura Thompson, as a clumsy Isadora Duncan who Matthew must marry. In the show I saw, a stand-in for one of the hoods, Michael X. Martin, whose hang dog face with shades of Norton was irresistable.But enough for the live talent which also includes the great Estelle Parsons… the Gershwins wrote love songs that are still so psychologically in step that I wonder if they were channelling.I’ve always thought Someone To Watch Over Me was my theme song, although, But Not For Me seems more like it. Delishious has fun rhyme play and I’ve Got a Crush on You is sublime. But the big surprise is that I never realized that the word work in the title refers to love and how it ameliorates lots of life’s other problems… if you can get it. I got it. At least for an afternoon.
Barney’s blasted for playing with form…come on now!
As a petite woman who dreams of having legs that go up to my eyeballs next life time, I understand how the average female hates to be pitted against the likes of a Kate Moss… but the reaction that Barney‘s new Disney window display is provoking is absurd… the positive body image action group strikes me, excuse the reference to a competitor.. as.looney tunes. The conceit of taking classic figures like Mickey and Daisy Duck and putting them in designer fashion is just that… a whimsical conceit meant to curl the lips upward, not into the scowl it seems to be making in the plus size modelling industry. These are cartoon characters… of course, designer fashion looks special on a Zoe Saldana body, but the point of the window is just to take …oops, now a British reference, the mickey out on the whole thing… fashion and cartoon icons..stretched literally to ridiculous lengths… fashion is fun and absurd at the same time… designers can be absurdly serious…how hard it must have been to get their permission to dress cartoon characters in the first place…Did these people never see Fantasia, where forms are mutated like an acid trip. It’s all for art.
I have a Minnie Mouse doll and I’m going to dress her in Zak Posen… I’m sure she’ll look lovely at 8 inches high..the shoes give her another half an inch! Frankly, her womanly hips would work beautifully in a vintage Chanel I was saving for SnowWhite.
Come on guys..we got through the last debate… it’s a holiday window, not health care …ooops, I know, young girls are going to diet excessively to look like one of these stretched out characters… really? I don’t think so.
greg smith.. was that all there is?
Ok, I haven’t read the book, don’t know him personally or barely medially, but Sixty Minute’s interview with ex- Goldman Sachser Greg Smith, was just too swift to soak in the real story. Ok, couched between Medical Marijuana and ET-maker, Spielberg, it hardly stood a chance to get sexy attention.. After segment one, I was too busy thinking of whether I should move to Denver and open up a med headshop to really capture Smith’s story… but being someone who ridiculously took it upon herself to try and figure out the Abacus villains by way of a little laptop (http://www.zerohedge.com/article/big-trouble-little-goldmans-vpn-firewall-or-nyts-editorial-department) I thought I should hear the ideas of this maverick who quit the money tree on his own volition. He was asked whether he quit when he didn’t get a raise..like it’s impossible to do something for purely edthical reasons, especially when you’ve chosen the financial world for 12 years as your home base. Good question… but fair? Aren’t whistle blowers usually people who are somewhere for a long time and then hear or discover a fact that sends them reeling into new consciousness? Can’t that have been the case with Smith? The excuse that a Goldman Sachs’er gave for muppetizing their clients was weak and because the banks have had so much to do with the financial stress of this country, it would have behooved them to ask longer, deeper, questions…I understand finance so little that I can barely write an intelligent blog, but I’d like to know if others felt the same way… did Greg Smith actually get to tell his truth in his book or was the power of the company too great? We may never know.
Graham Chapman speaks out
A Liar’s Autobiography , is a strangely wonderful film adventure – a dolby 3d animated auto- biography of a dead man. According to the credits, no medium was used, only the good sense of Month Python’s Graham Chapman who recorded his voice two years before his early death at forty-eight.
Chapman, alcoholic and gay, straddled life’s highway, sometimes having his way with the world through his comic genius, and at other points, burdened with alcoholism and zealous sexual activity. As one person said upon leaving the theatre, “I’ve never heard so many versions of Sit On My Face before, referring to a musical extravaganza of this sexually liberating tune.
The film uses fourteen different animation groups to tell Graham’s story, from early childhood, through Eton, Cambridge and his success as a Python. The fantastic array of animation is aided by the real life voices of Michael Palin, Terry Jones, John Cleese and Terry Gillian all creating a breathing testament to this man’s life. Cameron Diaz also does a goofy Austrian Freud voice.
Bill Jones, Jeff Simpson and Ben Timlett direct and know their subject well. It’s a wonderful homage to the one Python whose career did not extend past being with the group. It’s often funny and quite adult and I particularly liked the Scarborough segment. Towards the end, the storyline seemed a bit dense, but perhaps that’s how his life was at the end. Still, it’s a magical mystery tour which does honor to his memory.
notjustaboutsex 