Maurice Jarre, mort à Los Angeles des suites d'un cancer à l'âge de 84 ans dans la nuit de samedi à dimanche, est l'auteur de nombreuses musiques mythiques de films, parmi lesquels Docteur Jivago, Lawrence d'Arabie et Paris brûle-t-il ?.

metroscape

The hail line slashed through Philly yesterday just before 7pm in a magnificent display of colliding weather fronts. The clouds seemed to be battling for turf and it was all over in a loud few minutes. People were dashing for cover, their umbrellas merely sight gags. I was running late, so I got to watch instead of getting soaked before heading out to Verizon Hall. Walking along Delancey off 18th in the buildings ravine, the low hanging clouds parted on stratospheric whited plumes with slashing shafts of light worthy of Cecil B deMille depicting Calvary. The Mendelssohn Club crowd was not to be deterred from hearing a premiere by composer Jennifer Higdon and Verdi's Requiem, even though they were ringing themselves out in the lobby. I love fierce weather.

lotday late

“Come on, we talk about budgets like they’re real.” Cookie Roberts putting it all in perspective when she is allowed to get a word in edgewise on This Week with George Stephanopolis.

Abigail Mentzer (PABdancer), Jeffrey Gribler (former principal PABdancer, current ballet master), me, Phil Colucci(former PABdancer & current med student)


Even a block of empty seats couldn’t dampen the spirit on the Forrest Theatre stage or in the audience as the dancers of the Pennsylvania Ballet. Directing for the second year, Jonathan Stiles, kept it fast moving and sleek. The mood seemed to address the recession with a show featuring minimal production design, great lighting and a choreographic thread of down-sized style and mucho communal spirit.

and then there were Brian Sanders comic interludes for some mondo bizarro.

This time Sanders reaching into the bowels of vaudeville for perhaps the crassest and most hilarious moment in SU&D history providing cosmic comic relief- let’s see how to put it, with his own laughing gas- during a classical pas de deux scored to Bach and titled 'Air on the G String.' Then to completely outdo himself hoisting the glorious Abigail Mentzer, supported her with a working third leg aparatus bringing a new meaning to the word en pointe. The man is unhinged, and fortunate for Abigail’s arabesque can still work his erector set.

Classical world

Dutoit’s esprit

Charles Dutoit, current chief conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, such an authoritative and relaxed presence that he brushes past any perception of organizational turmoil. He also catches the mood of the audience yearning for spring with a crowd pleasing program of Ravel, Stravinsky and Prokofiev, that met with a completely rapturous reception. He might not have fab maestro hair, but he has dancey, port de bra and like a great dancer seems like he is moving the musical air.

And the audience was immediately moved at the esprit and clarity of Ravel‘s ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin,’ in this performance, the players going for more than a pristine tableau. The vistas are so beautiful in ‘Tombeau’ that it is already a beatified tone poem. The orchestra builds its looming angularity and propulsion, with a swirling sense of discovery. This work illustrates many of the subtle strengths Dutoit brings to this Orchestra.

bloglog

I'm back. Computer woes. tech poltergeist on my laptop. I was writing a review of the new Fred Astaire bio and wanted to watch a bit of Flying Down to Rio which I had on disc and the screen just went blank. On Fred & Ginger!!! Contemplating the risk of months of journal entries lost and a revision of a play draft if I don't get it back. I'm lacerating myself with guilt for not doing daily backups. I'm writing 'I will backup' 500 times on the side of my building. Have to rewrite the book review and don't even remember reading the book, so I'm really screwed today. Merde!

d.entr

3.28.79

Driving on Rt. 322 in my Dodge hearing news of the evacuation of the area around Three Mile Island.

Could be a blur of memory but I'm recalling an incredibly sci-fi sunset and thinking that the inevitabile nuclear disaster was happening. For baby boomers, it loomed over us our whole lives after being terrified of 'the bomb'.

3.28.09

Headed for the 17th annual Shut Up & Dance benefit for MANNA and flashing back to the very first one, a modest event at the old burlesque house, The Troc, literally sliding there with Jack and Liz Jordan in the middle of a January ice storm. I found out later that all the pipes froze in the theater that night, no makeup and no heat, and the dancers were freezing on that delapidated stage where so many legends were born.

lotd & wordswordswords

Sarah Palin, former journalism student, impugning the media at a Republican function for not sticking to the -Who-what-when-where-why- style of journalism she learned.

"And there was that media slant this go round," she said. "And unless things change, the GOP had really better can stand together, 'cause we got that on the battlefield also. I call it like I see it and like I lived it on the campaign trail. Not complaining, but dealing with reality."

The woman never disappoints. I guess she missed that class on clause symmetry, scrambled metaphors and run-on sentences.

metroscape

Some of the dancers of the Pennsylvania Ballet getting ready for the 17th Shut Up & Dance benefit for MANNA performed Saturday night at the Forrest Theater for one night only. The benefit features original choreography by the dancers themselves.

Right Before I met Vincent

or the unBeat

Right before I met Vincent
in 1959
the year Billie Holiday died

whose last performanceI attended and
whose lifeand death hangs me out still.
I lean against the outward cry mourning
the death of jazz singing
Pissed off and absurd we of
the New York group staged a reading.
I hate readings, but that is just me, a bad sport.

Actually, I caved in to friends

JK was there and
gCorso,

and Allen, of course, WB (who invited

me) They were with me on

that stage back to front 7:30Read read read

7:40 what is that line in All About Eve

about there being a 'MacBethish air.'7:45, my body, my flask.

JK was drunk and so was Greg,
and in a sex Malanga stupor,
diagonally Allen

was the voice of compassionate sobriety

dumpy as he is0000000000he presided over

an academic brawl

some even took it as live-action poetry

more like a pissing match

Well un the invitation

of loving each others work

we took off our dukes and

found out that we hated each other

after all. I was called faggot

repeatedly, so was Allen

who lives for stuff like that.

Hardly a put down, he was penciling

in the holes in Howl

Oh, those Beats

They really can be crashing bores

not to mention act like a bunch of whores

Kerouac yells to me

"You're ruining American

Poetry O'Hara"

and I yell back

"That's more than you ever did for it."

So John, I'm not going to Frisco

I'm staying here

It's going to be a bubonic summer

To say that
I hate everybody almost

as much as I hate myself would

be too dramaqueeny.

And
then John said fuck off you dramaqueeny

just as I started lying about my age,

then I met Vincent

Vincent met me.

Anyway,We left.

potd by Jan Carroll

'bunches o'fungus'

Sun Photo

Aerial time
unlapsed
between frames
eyes blink
out the buried memory
of sun during
ugly days on earth
so to flip
past unreconciliation
like cards in a nickelodeon
stopped on a sun spot
of childhood accepting it
as a brother dependable
and owned
craven and blanched
separated from the real
scheme of time
a weapon against fear
Since then the blur
of facts.

A cauterizing enshroudment
A majestic tyrant
A natural query
A witness
to unlikely romanticism
gold bleeds into
scarred pewter sky
aubergine streaks through clouds
of mercury
orchestrated blue
vectors of halcyon consumed
but not lost
Cold beauty perpetually
veiled and exposed
Forever altered and immoveable
The gods live in the godless
ignobly assigned to craven dreams
whose sharp shadows drive
the intimacies of the
lurking cycle of birth, crawl and death.

Sometimes the eyes
closed on the disc
fading to afterburn.

potn by Jan Carroll

'PINKS'

dancing at the semi annual fung gala

dance physics

lotd

I can't write lines like this.

"You may be a martyr, but you still expect to be treated like a queen."
Me slinging it back to Bill at L2.

Lives of the composers

No money? forget it and go baroque on Bach's birthday today


from 'I thought of the universe'

poses answers for an infinited universe
cabasons unsymetrical
I didn't see Bach as a musical garden
as the mind might suggest
My mind does flourish in the ear
but my soul is not there for rest.

potd by Jan Carroll & Lew

It might as well be spring

lotd

"I wasn't negotiating with myself." Senator Chris Dobb caught
in his own thicket of silver cross hairs doing the A.I.G. shuffle.

potd by Jan Carroll

Spring Preview

lotd2

"This has the hallmark (and bulletholes) of a Mafia trial."

Not the last tango in Philly

Not sold out but a fun, involved crowd last night for Michael Nunn & William Trevitt aka Ballet Boyz -George Piper Dancers, late of the Royal Ballet, in their return engagement to the Annenberg Center, already logging their dance videologue, show in a hilarious snippet, of motoring in town, showing them singing along in the car to town to a Mummers Song about Philly life. The levity was in stark contrast to three of the four pieces of the chamber concert. The pair is are joined on this tour by contemporary dancer Tim Morris and the luminous Oxana Panchencho, the 3rd Boyz, upstaging. The Boyz themselves were in rumpled tuxes for an authentic Buenos Ares male tango, and from their footwork and stares, it wasn't merely tango for export.

LOTD

The first of potentially many.

President Obama in a spontaneous press conference.

" It doesn't matter when I knew about the bonuses. It's my responsibility to fix it."

diary entry 12:17am

Sad news about Natashia Richardson and shocking, even brutal reporting because she is a celebrity. If there is any area where the media can and should show discretion is not to speculate about someone's medical condition. Of course, I'm pissing in the wind thinking the shark tanks of media will consider that this woman's family could be hearing this gossip about the fate of their loved one. Get sick of pathetic lack of ethics.

At the very least they can not use phrasology as 'brain dead' and 'vegatative states.' The first is a clinical determination that should only be reported as news by a medical official. The second is no less a ignorant slang about someone in acute trauma. If one must comment at all, they might consider non-responsive.

bloglog

pedals for petals

Got my bike back finally after three repairs in a row in two weeks, so I'm not going to miss the buds starting to peek. Course its always fun to hang out at Bike Therapy especially with the newest crew member, Lola, a gorgeous pit mix, who checked me out and cuddled up, loved my gloves and had me on my knees.

When cam' ye over, bold Erin-go-bragh?"

Or Irish Forever. Shillelaghs and shamrocks, bagpipes and Riverdance, it's St. Patrick's Day and I'm loving my inner Irish. In leiu of the luck of the Irish, let's live in the love of the greenest of green. And Danny Boy, you can still make me cry.

Was Stalin an evil stepsister?

Fri. at the ballet

Who couldn’t fall in love with PA Ballet’s Cinderella again as danced by Martha Chamberlain. Fueled by the Prokofiev score, finely played by ballet orchestra, Martha gave Cinderella a fleetness to dance outside the tyranny of those evil stepsisters that brought to mind Prokofiev's subversion of the Soviet Composer's union.

Even with some arm tangles in choreographer Ben Stevenson’s partnering, Martha and her prince Sergio Torrado had fab chemistry. Who possibly could upstage this pair? Why the evil stepsisters of course, danced in horrible drag by Jonathan Stiles and James Ihde. They milked every pratfall and mugged like 3 stooge rejects. It was low brow travesti and top drawer fun.

potd by Jan Carroll

Nasty business that, I'd rather talk to Katie in the country

AIG is paying out 160 m. in bonuses to executives reports the NYTs "A.I.G., nearly 80 percent of which is now owned by the government, defended its bonuses, arguing that they were promised last year before the crisis and cannot be legally canceled."

There would be only one prompt response to this- Cannot be legally canceled? Are you fucking kidding me.

bloglog

note to self- find out when this disastrously unlucky weekend last occurred. Yesterday was Friday the 13 (for the second month in a row) and tomorrow is the Ides of March. Zounds!

lotd

Catch phrase from the Madoff conviction-

"False profits"


Talking about Wall Street to Derek & Bill at L2-

"The Stock market was its own pimp, whore and john." I said, suddenly grasping current economics.

Stars...

..never fade. Jane Fonda returns to Broadway after a 46 year absence in Moisés Kaufman's '33 Variations.' Her character is dealing with terminal illness and here leaning on Zach Grenier who plays Beethoven.

metroscape

After a rash of flat tires on my beater bike, I gave up getting patches and dropped off at bike therapy. Took the R2 to the Pennsylvania Ballet studios in East Falls and the city skyline receded in this gorgeous hues as waves of pewter clouds rolled in.

At the studios the dancers of PAB were coming off rehearsing Cinderella for six hours opening this week for a ten day run and not flagging as they launched into creating the new choreoegraphy for their annual Shut Up & Dance benefit for MANNA at the end of the month.

stage

At Wajdi Mouawad's 'Scorched' last night at the Wilma Theater and still realing from the play's humanity and the brutality. This is the first full production in the US and when I tried to compliment Blanka Zizka for her commitment and courage in producing political plays she wasn't having it. "Much harder to have had to live through these actual events." she deftly observed. Mouawad born in 1968 in Lebanon, fled during the civil war there, with his family to France and eventually to Quebec.

'Scorched' is part of a trilogy of plays has been translated in a dozen languages. It has the epic scope of Greek tragedy, poetic description and solioquy to tell the story of war torn countries and lives. Its apolitical statement about our compulsions toward violence is vital theater.

potd by Jan Carroll

'Branch Deco'

metroscape

Spring preview today on the streets of Philadelphia. Everybody was out in the wrong clothes, because the weather shift was so sudden and because no one has the money to buy. But the mindset is depressionista, not fashionista and the cafes on Rittenhouse looked more European than noveau riche. Everybody was moving slower and smiling more. Maybe this season it will be style for real style and not dollar for fake dollar.

bloglog

It's just so perfect that intellectual eunich Ken Starr, the attorney who chased Bill Clinton's DNA around the White House, would be arguing against the repeal of Prop 8 in front of the California Supreme Court. Currently a professor at Pepperdine, his legal arguments about 'restoring' traditional marriage couldn't be more mincing. I'm sure those from the 'Family Research Council' are relieved that the sanctity of straight marriage will be protected from those gay couples who have the affrontary to be in love.

Straight SF mayor Gavin Newsom, who put in place the first writ of s-s couples to be legal in his city, again put himself on the front line politically to fight for GLBT rights. We love this man!

The court signaled that they are going to probably uphold the voice of the people, 52% for the ban on same-sex marriage, 48% against. But, also signaled they will let stand as legal the 18,000 s-s couples who were wed before the vote. So what are they really saying? It strikes as a legal game and certainly upholds institutionalized homophobia. So the antigay agenda folk will probably win this round, I'm sure their marriages are so much more secure now.

potd by Jan Carroll

'Moonbud'

AVA does spaghetti western

There’s nothing quite like a gun slinging soprano and Zulimar Lopez Hernandez’s Norina can handle high Cs and High Noon as cool as Clint. She can work a prairie skirt, holstered corset or opera gown. She certainly knows how to handle 'Don Pasquale' the dusty dude who thinks he can control her. The domestic mayhem is just some of the delights in this hilarious wild west production of Donizetti's DP, transported from an Italian estate to a western saloon. Here she is scheming with her brother Doc Malatesta, who adds extra sauce to the roulade.

the real runway

Buff elegance. Simplicity. Natural sophistication. Style and substance.

Only the flabby minded, jealous, and snarky would have anything negative to say about the First Lady's official portrait.

bloggerdriller

Lede Zeppelin

A few posts back, I let off some steam about that blowhard Rush Limbaugh and referred to him as a sonic Zeppelin. Checking in on Arianna Huffington's column tonight, she wrote it this way:

"In truth, Rush is just a massive shiny object that distracts our attention from the real intellectual force behind the Republican Party, Karl Rove. He demonstrated on This Week why he is the real danger in the wounded-but-still-destructive GOP. There he was, calmly, lucidly, and shamelessly trying to eviscerate Obama's proposals to get us out of the economic mess -- without ever once acknowledging that he was one of the prime architects of the mess."

Arianna tells the political truth like no one else.

metroscape

The nor'easter snowbands made the city look magical tonight and onstage at Verizon Hall divine Portuguese singer Mariza again exhaultant in the poetic musicality of fado. Mariza, the voice, the artistry and guitarra acustica just enters the body.

Floated home with the snowflakes and Mariza's music dancing in my head. Was scheduled in vain to get some work done, but not before a walk through the park when the snow really started to pick up in time for March 1, coming in like a lion. But a calming beast with big, silvery crystals dressing the park. I remembered Al Kooper's great song 'Sometime in Winter' and Bach's Orchestral Suite no. 1. Time to walk home, time for tea and homework.

Politic..tic..tic

The tic goes again to sonic zeppelin Rush Limbaugh, the keynote speaker at the Republican confab over the weekend. He may have been able to do his slimy schtick to a captive audience, but the Minority whip, and the sane members of the GOP are finally starting to be vocal about Limbaugh's venomous 'I want Obama to fail' posture.