I saw Godzilla (in Imax and in 3D), but I’m not going to write about it right now except to say, pretty freaking awesome.
Godzilla: 2000 is one of the Toho films from the ‘Millenium Period.’ There is some human tension between those who want to study Godzilla and those who want to kill him (and perhaps harness his near indestructible to… I don’t know, grow new spleens or an army of super soldiers – I can’t remember which). Whatever.
A alien flying saucer on the bottom of the ocean rises, floats over Tokyo and transforms into a monster. The monster steals some of Godzilla’s Wolverine-like healing abilities, but that doesn’t really help when the big guy unleashes his atomic breath. End of alien monster. Godzilla has saved the earth, right? Right, but he hasn’t saved Tokyo. Godzilla is force of nature and does not answer to our individual needs (including our need not to be destroyed). The movie ends with Godzilla rampaging through Tokyo. He is king of the monsters and the defender of earth from aliens (a recurring theme in the Toho movies of the last fifteen years or so), but is different from defending humanity. A force of nature, he defends nature, but, like nature, is pretty indifferent to us.
Spoiler alert: to some extent, that is the vision of Godzilla we see in the most recent movie (minus the aliens).
British Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy closed out the 2013-2014 poetry season at the Folger Shakespeare Library.
A witty and warm reader, her style expressed her love of doing poetry readings and her love of the role of poetry ambassador.
I purchased (and asked her to sign) a collection of love poems entitled Rapture. They’re not really just love poems, but chronicle a love affair. Many poems are in correspondence with the sonnet and other traditional forms, with hints of rhyme, without every actually tipping into formalism. It makes for a nice combination of the contemporary, while still referencing the traditional. In fact, she made a great, off hand remark about the sonnet being so ideal for love poems and that being why so many of them are sonnet-like. The sonnet, she declared, is the “little black dress of poetry.”
We saw Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona performed by the Fiasco Theater at the Folger Shakespeare Library a few weeks ago. They used a minimum of actors, with everyone performing double duty. If I recall correctly, five actors – three men and two women – filled all the roles, with small costume additions and subtractions giving notice of the characters. They even played some live music on stage! However, I would be lying if I didn’t say that one more performer might have improved things.
There were a lot of young people. I think they were in high school. Now that I’m older, I actually cringe a bit when I see young folks at Shakespeare. It’s the prude in me, because until you see it on stage, you forget how many penis jokes Shakespeare includes in his comedies. Actually, I’m pretty sure that this one even had a joke about the a toothless woman having an advantage in terms of performing oral sex vis-à-vis her toothier rivals.
The ending is also problematic, because one of the leading ladies gets her total douchebag man. It’s not as bad as All’s Well That Ends Well, where even the king implies that maybe the heroine should have chosen to kick her chosen wretch to the curb, but it’s hard not to think that at least of the two couples who end Gentlemen will not have a particularly strong marriage.
It’s true. But they’re crispy and usually wrapped about some kind of meat. Sometimes meat on stick. Like corndogs, only with a crispy waffle folded around it, instead of fried corn meal.
No.
Not it was not.
This article says otherwise, but it’s a bit of a weak cup of tea (though, in the author’s defense, he’s not given much of a word count to make his case).
No one is asking a writer who submitting an article to the American Conservative to make a fierce case for the Marxian tinged politics of Andre Breton, but it’s more than a little disingenuous the way that surrealism has been dismissed artistically.
He starts by taking a very narrow view of surrealism. So narrow, that it is entirely limited to those who lived entirely by the strictures of Breton. By that definition, the following individuals were not surrealist: Salvador Dali, Rene Char, and the later works (after, say Capital of Pain) of Paul Eluard. This is a very narrow view of the surrealist practice.
And his use of American artists from the mid-century as an example of the… inadequacy?… of surrealism is irritating. I expect artists to appropriate and oedipally reject their predecessors, but that’s not a sign of their predecessors failure. By that metric, the impressionists were a failure because Matisse and Picasso weren’t painting in the style of Monet, but appropriating portions of his style and rejecting others. That’s not failure; that’s life.
the coffee philosopher 