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Stockhausen Challenged By Description
I have been reading the University of California Press anthology of articles from Source, which I plan to review on my Examiner.com national site. In the first issue I found a transcription of a conversation in which one of the participants was Karlheinz...
Is History Really a ‘Tonic of Tragedy?’
I just finished reading Simon Schama’s attack on Downton Abbey. This apparently first appeared in The New Statesman and then migrated to Newsweek, from which it was picked up by The Daily Beast, which is where I read it. Schama has a way with words...
Television Trumps Cinema Again At the Golden Globes
Once again curiosity got the better of me when it came to reviewing the results of the Golden Globes. However, while last year my curiosity was directed at Melissa Leo, this year there really was not anything in the movies category that drew my attention....
Parties to the Farce?
The London Telegraph, which is, for the record, a Conservative-leaning newspaper, ran a rather interesting take on The Iron Lady this morning. It was a piece by Arts Correspondent Roya Nikkhah in which she documented the opinions of several of the...
The Dramatic Category of a Margaret Thatcher Biography
There is a telling sentence near the beginning of Martin Filler’s NYRblog post about Meryl Streep’s performance of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady that is likely to frame the attitude of those of us who still enjoy the study of history. After...
Getting Out of the Shadow of History
Recently, while reading Milan Kundera’s extended essay, The Curtain (in Linda Asher’s translation from the French), I came across the following remark: The novelist’s ambition is not to do something better than his predecessors but to see what...
Life Imitates Art (ironically)
Of the many amusements I encountered while reading Gabriel García Márquez’ The Autumn of the Patriarch, the funniest was the bit about how the protagonist (who is a rotting corpse for the duration of the novel) had opened a retirement community...
Confusing Amazon
Amazon.com has turned out to be a rather valuable resource when I am doing my writing for Examiner.com. When I am reviewing a recording, it is one of the easiest places for me to find its release date; and, since an image of the album cover is often...
