Beginning of the month, on 4/2/10: I saw a roving “Hamlet” at the World Financial Center (going on from 4/1/10 to 4/18/10) – great stuff! Presented by the New York Classical Theatre.
(for anyone interested, Columbia University’s own King’s Crown Shakespeare Troupe is going to do a roving “Measure for Measure” on campus, April 29-May 1, 2010 – free and fun, if you’re going to be up at Morningside Hts; got to put in a plug for Alma Mater).
And, in other areas of the arts: I did get to see the “The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” – quite a movie (here’s the link to what I think is the official movie site). Graphic on the sex, rape, and violence – but quite a movie. Plus, gets the point very much across that Sweden is not just the land of Ikea and happy sunny people.
Plus, back in March (March 19, 2010, to be exact), I had enjoyed the Victorian photo-collage exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage” was great stuff – small, intimate, but vivid. As noted in the art review in the NY Times by Roberta Smith, it’s remarkable about what the women in the 19th Century did, influenced by their society and their culture – making art out of little photographs and other media; taking into consideration their views of the domestic sphere, humor, and popular culture for that time (Lewis Carroll’s weird stuff of the Alice adventures came from somewhere; Charles Darwin did have an impact; the British Royalty was no small stuff). Smith notes:
“Playing With Pictures” refreshes your appreciation of the essential fuzziness of art history and of the collective, even osmotic nature of invention. It suggests that women’s art history (a phrase I’m not entirely comfortable with, but never mind) is still only just beginning to be examined and understood. [….] In all fairness, “Playing With Pictures” includes the work of one man and also a French woman, but in the main it demonstrates how upper-class English women — some of whom knew one another — introduced cutout photographs into the albums of watercolors, sketches and writing that had long been an approved female leisure activity.
The NY Times’ website included a slideshow as a sample. Really enjoyable. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art until May 9, 2010.
So, in this edition of “Sunday Routine” in the NY Times, Moby doesn’t quite go into what he does on a Sunday. But, he sounds cool anyway, talking about tea and pancakes and stuff. Meanwhile, Vanessa Williams (who was on the touching series finale of “Ugly Betty” – the whole cast being sweet and moving forward) talked about her Sunday, doing brunch and her Sunday matinee on Broadway (Sondheim, of course). WNBC’s Gabe Pressman – still working in his 80’s, even if on blog format – talking about he takes it easy on Sundays.
I watched the second half of the “Ugly Betty” series finale, and remembered how I liked the show and the characters’ good humor (before the more pointless storylines got in the way). I liked that they left the ending open – that at the least, Betty moved on to a more exciting future, while letting us wonder if she and Daniel really did hit it off (as more than just friends).
Have to catch this week’s episode of “Lost” – but otherwise, all lost by how crazy this last season has been. Television Without Pity did a nifty little feature about a universe where “Lost” never happens and the cast has to do other projects. Basically, Terry O’Quinn got to continue his pre-Lost career of character roles, Matthew Fox somehow lands some other hit, and Ian Somerholder still gets on that Vampire diaries show. Oh well.
Plus, because it’s April, usually something weird happens at a college campus (usually a protest) – so this seems like something different at Alma Mater: a silent sit-in of Low Library (an administrative building, not a real library, besides housing old archives), to reclaim space, for a mere 30 minutes:
The students were part of what organizers called a sound-installation flash mob. The idea of the event, entitled “Everything Listens,” was to reclaim the library as a space of contemplation.
“We’re trying to reawaken Low because it has been dead as a library for 75 years,” one of the organizers, Jess K. Smith, said shortly beforehand. “We’re going to make the trek backwards with books in hand.”
For 30 minutes, the dozens of students read their books and listened to the downloaded composition.
Then, one and two at a time, they rose to their feet and slowly left the building.
Weird. And, strangely cool to me, for some reason.
The news about Conan O’Brien going to TBS in the fall – well, I wish Conan the best of luck, even if my reaction was: TBS? Then again, the analysis (such as by tv critic Alan Sepinwall) was quite correct – FOX would have had a hard time getting affiliates on board, when they are making better money with Seinfeld and Simpsons reruns (well, that’s the case in NYC area FOX anyway).
So, this will have to be as the arts post for the time being. More in the next post, covering other topics.
