Patti and Robert.

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More on The Color Purple in London

Patrick Healy wrote in the NYTimes about John Doyle's production, which I wrote a little bit about earlier this month. See below for an excerpt from Healy's article:

Mr. Doyle has built a relatively low-cost, easily movable rendition of the show that could be licensed for productions across the United States and overseas, which have so far been minimal, according to Mr. Sanders, the musical’s lead producer on Broadway.

 Mr. Sanders, who began talking to Ms. Walker about a “Color Purple” musical in 1997, never gave up on the show. Years ago he had interest from London investors about bringing over the Broadway version, but he worried that its “highly emotional American sensibility” would not appeal to British theatergoers, he said. As time went by without any international production of “The Color Purple” — embarrassing for a profitable Broadway musical — Mr. Sanders sought out David Babani, the artistic director of the Chocolate Factory, a theater esteemed for scaling down works.

Mr. Babani himself had skipped the musical on Broadway (“I was a bit snobbish in my thinking — ‘It’s not aimed at me, it’s another adaptation of a movie,’ ” he said), but Mr. Sanders persuaded him to see a non-Equity production in 2010 in Riverside, Calif., when Mr. Babani was visiting Los Angeles. Won over, Mr. Babani recruited Mr. Doyle, and Mr. Sanders began raising money to enhance the budget for the new production, including from Ms. Winfrey, who was nominated for an Oscar for her role in the movie. 

Read the rest here.

Prince Avalanche

"All of these things are like memories...and sometimes I feel like I'm digging in my own ashes."

via Tumblr

Marlon Brando and Elizabeth Taylor

via Tumblr http://frankswildlunch.tumblr.com/post/58515976309/awesomepeoplehangingouttogether-marlon-brando

Starts Thursday, September 5.

Check here for more info.

Artwork by James R. Eads. See more of his work here.

Aah, so that explains all.

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via Tumblr http://frankswildlunch.tumblr.com/post/58062127123

I went to the New Yorker online

to find a link to this cool article by Paige Williams I read in the print edition about Bill Arnett, champion of southern black vernacular artists. It's a lengthy article so there's only a link to the abstract online, but it's worth a read. The most lovely aspect of the piece is his friendship with Thortnon "Buck" Dial, an elderly artist who has made his way into big exhibits and galleries. Here's a fun quote--

Arnett calls him "Mr. Dial," and Dial calls him "Mr. Arnett," or "Arnett." They were sitting at opposite ends of the kitchen table, like chess kings, when Arnett brought up the critical response to [Dial retrospective exhibit] "Hard Truths." In December, 2011, Karen Wilkin, writing in the Wall Street Journal, listed the show as one of her favorite exhibitions of the year, along with retrospectives of de Kooning and Kandinsky. In an earlier piece, Wilkin had lauded Dial's "lack of sentimentality, his ravishing color sense, his firtuoso 'drawing' with unlikely materials, and his uncanny ability to create poetry by combining radically disparate things." 

For Arnett, the particulars of Wilkin's analysis registered less strongly than the ranking. He told Dial, "They put you in with the most famous artists that lived in the last hundred years."

 "Oh yeah?" Dial said.

"They sure did! It was a big honor. Fabulous. I mean they're naming the most important shows, and they're naming important people, all of them dead except you."  

"Yeah, I ain't dead yet," Dial said. Everybody laughed and went back to talking about diabetes and fishing."

Here's a trailer for a recent documentary about Dial.

The New Yorker Online about Arcadia at 20

Tom Stoppard's great play, Arcadia, is 20 this year. Brad Leithauser writes a nice tribute to the play on the New Yorker's website. Here's a quote--

The play presents a sly sermon on the unknowability of the past, the deceptive pathways down which offhand gestures, casual feints and jests may lead the historian decades or centuries later. No one onstage has anything like a clearheaded vision of the knotty interconnections that bind the cast together. The only ones who are seeing lucidly are those perched in the outer darkness of the audience. 

And what they’re seeing is a masterpiece.

Read the whole thing here.

Did I mention

I have a Tumblr? I've been reposting a bunch of cool pictures -- New York School, Patti Smith, and various other things I've found on other pages. I was going to have them repost over here but I'm still figuring out how to get the sizes right.

Follow me there if you like.

Your Logical Fallacy Is

Criticlasm posted this on Facebook and I enjoyed clicking through and reading them all. You can do the same here.

O'Hara reading "Ode to Joy"

D. Gilson on discovering O'Hara

I enjoyed this article at Lambda Literary the other day. Here's a brief passage--

I pull a book off the shelf, little with an electric orange cover.

 Lunch Poems, by Frank O’Hara. 

I am five years old and it is the first book of poetry I encounter. The words in exotic combinations hold innumerable possibility, though I understand neither these combinations nor these possibilities yet. I am five years old and something sparks. Mr. Williams listens as I read aloud to him what Frank O’Hara has written: “Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!” I am, unbeknownst, in love. I am, unbeknownst, learning from my forefathers an aesthetic of queerness, a lineage, a heritage, a bloodline.

Gilson goes on to talk of using O'Hara to theorize about queer utopias, which I enjoyed, as it reminded me of the poem I read earlier this year at Gay May Days, "Ode to Joy." The poem is strange and confounding and has elevated language but the more I read it, the more it seems entirely about being fabulous and living forever, which I think are great things to write a poem about.

It's a little long to print in full, but I'll quote the final lines below.

     ...or as the legends ride their heroes through the dark to found
     great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time
     which wants us to remain for cocktails in a bar and after dinner
     lets us live with it
     No more dying

Read "Ode to Joy" here.