This issue we're quote heavy - speak your mind and mind your speech!
CIRCUS A handbill from an early circus guaranteed the following "pantomines and ballets of action, rope dancing, acrobatics, trick riding, pony races, displays of swordsmanship, fireworks and Chinese shadows."
CULINARY CLASSIC: Local barbecue fav. Sonny Bryan's was selected as one of 8 regional restaurants to win the 10th annual, James Beard Foundation Awards for Culinary Excellence. It's give to locally owned and operated restaurants renowned for their quality. We salute (DMN)
ARCHITECTURE: Even bad old buildings - ridiculous agglomerations of conflicting styles and dust-collecting cornucopias of miscellaneous frills - started to be missed when they were knocked down and replaced by pleasure - denying slabs ... So it's high time new buildings started to go up that had some kick to them. Architecture is the most public and inescapable of all the arts: It affects the mood of everyone on a daily basis, chiefly in insidious and subliminal ways, and there is no question that a street of faceless high - rises makes those who regularly have to travel along it feel dead inside. - Luc Sante (Conde Nast Traveller)
FASHION: A handful of super models can get $40 -$50 thousand for 5 or 6 hours of work on the runway, but the big money is in endorsements - Claudia Schiffer earned $9 mill that way. Part of the cost of clothes comes from limiting the field of models that wear them. When you see more new faces, you'll also see clothes more realistically priced. (Parade Magazine)
GEM FROM THE PEN This time Margaret Putnam on dancing (from DMN) "...Lar Lubovitch's "Waiting for the Sunrise', a bit of fluff dipped in acid, with 50's bubbly energy treated with the slightest hint of mockery." Now that's dancin' - or is it a new breakfast cereal?
Mini-QUIZ In the film , Sunset Boulevard, the old silent screen star Nora Desmond is going from batty to senile. How old is she? Answer later.
St. Nicholas - 1873 - 1943. One of their most notable editors was Mary Mapes Dodge, author of Hans Brinker, who managed to fill its pages with some of the worlds greatest writers of the time. She stated that a successful children's magazine "Must not be a milk and water variety of the periodical for adults. In fact, it needs to be stronger, truer, bolder, more uncompromising than the other, its cheer must be the cheer of the bird-song, it must mean freshness and heartiness, life and joy... (and) no sermonizing, no wearisome spinning out of facts."
FIRST INTERNET FILM: The 1st film made for the internet stars British comedian, John Cleese, is 32 minutes long and called "quantum oject.. ... Also for Wallace & Grommit fans, Nick Park's claymation movie, Chicken Run is opening at the end of June.
ELECTRONIC MEDIA: Martin Heidegger, in a 1950s essay called The Thing expressed concern over the way in which the electronic broadcasting of words and images alters our fundamental relationship, that is our distance from events and things. "What is this uniformity in which everything is neither far nor near - is, as it were, without distance? Everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness."
ART EXHIBIT: Forbidden Gallery's (of Forbidden Books & Video fame) newest show Pinned -Down is a take off on girly mag pin-ups. A great show 100% free of conceptual art. Our Camp Champ of the Month.
IS MELODY BACK? "What the music world needs is a new neo-romanticism. People are beginning to write "tone poems" (music that invoke or portray scenes in the real world and nature), sonatas, symphonies, dance pieces, string quartets, and the like ... The people who do this often have some crossover from musical theater, jazz, or the like" Peter (Ten Page News) ... Hunk says check Musea's MP3's for just such music, and Art S Revolutionary says, " The only thing rock & roll does today is play golf and watch CBS shows."
Min-QUIZ ANSWER: Joe says, "Norma you're a woman of 50, now grow up. There's nothing tragic about being 50, not unless you try to be 25!"
HYPERCULTURE: "We live in a hyperculture. A culture moving too fast for its own human good. We are governed by the power of now, the power of an insistent present, uncompromising and uncompromised by any other dimension of time. It is the now of swift and unfeeling electrons. In such a society, few things last or were ever meant to last. Instead, we are surrounded by flux. In such an environment, there are no grounds for passionate commitment for there is nothing permanent to be committed to. Rare is a sense of obligation to one another, or a sense of obligation to anything that lies beyond the transitory self. - Stephen Bertman, Professor of Classics, U. of Windsor Ontario.