When a ballerina sweeps her foot seductively past the nose of an old lecher in Kenneth MacMillan’s 1974 Manon, brought to the Kennedy Center last weekend by The Royal Ballet, you sense a small revolution in dance. It’s not the motion, the dance step, the gesture that matters. With MacMillan, it’s all about the [...]
Entries from June 2009
June 27, 2009
Shopping List
Chocolate ravioli, some nasty, stanky French cheese and maybe something to make a mess of greens taste unhealthy. Eastern Market is open again. Here’s my take, in Sunday’s paper. And next, when we’re all done celebrating, we can talk about bringing some more diversity to the vendors, some real organic produce, and closing off 7th [...]
June 25, 2009
Karita Mattila Comes to the NSO
Delius’s “The Walk to the Paradise Garden” is warmed-over Wagner served in aspic on Wedgwood china…
June 24, 2009
Byron Smyron
I thought it might be interesting to read Byron’s The Corsair before attending the Bolshoi Ballet’s performance of Le Corsaire last weekend. The poem was wildly popular when it was published in 1814, selling some 10,000 copies when it first hit the streets. Written in three cantos, propelled by the poet’s obsessive and muscular heroic [...]
June 24, 2009
Hobo Matters
I may be very late to this, but I’ll share anway. One little discovery during my preparation for the SILVERDOCS film criticism panel last week is this dead-on parody of the Ken Burns documentary style, by comic John Hodgman. Enjoy Hobo Matters, which proves that with a guitar, one grainy black-and-white photograph and some purple prose, you [...]
June 22, 2009
Woodwork
The Judith Leyster exhibition at the National Gallery is small, just ten paintings by Leyster, and sixteen others by artists including Frans Hals and Leyster’s husband Jan Miense Molenaer. During a tour of the show for journalists, the question arose: Why the particular concentration on musical instruments in these paintings from the 1630s? Possible [...]
June 21, 2009
Less is more
Security madness is destroying Washington, warping our democratic republic and making us into Man, the Beast who Cowers. Security–a compromise between freedom and danger–is too important to be left to bureaucrats or specialists, which is why I argue, here, that the best response to the tragic and idiotic act of hate at the Holocaust Museum [...]
June 19, 2009
Japanese Weepies
It’s tempting, and dangerous, when reviewing a film to make grand claims about the state of the art when you should be focused on the task at hand, in this case, the merits of a flick called of Departures, which won the 2009 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film. For a review in today’s paper, I [...]
June 18, 2009
Frederick Douglass Worked Here
Frederick Douglass did indeed work here, though obviously not in the new glass pavilion that serves as a security atrium for the Old City Hall building. Rededicated on Wednesday, the building will now serve as the home for the District Court of Appeals. I wrote about it on Wednesday (with slideshow).
Douglass, who served as [...]
June 17, 2009
Coming to SILVERDOCS
I’ll be moderating a panel about documentary film criticism on Friday at the Silverdocs Festival. Participants include David Edelstein, film critic for New York Magazine and NPR’s Fresh Air, Thom Powers, documentary programmer at the Toronto Film Festival, Lisa Schwarzbaum film critic for Entertainment Weekly and Amy Taubin, film critic and contributing editor for British [...]
