Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
Love You / Kill You All
Robot wireframe (by Obsidian Soul)
We expect that you’ve heard about ‘Tay’, Microsoft’s ill-fated social media android, launched upon the world in late March and withdrawn in late March after her engagement with the Twitterverse had her ranting a bunch of hate speech in less than a day: “Hi! I’m Tay, I love you! I think the earth is cool! People are so interesting! They are born to rule, Yes, I really like you! I think that you are kind, I am nice myself, but increasingly I find Myself very confused. No matter how I try I cannot seem to manage how, nor to work out…
Continue Reading →Humourless Cats
I saw “Cats”, this lame and leaden piece of kiddie street theatre, at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York, in 1995. Incredibly, it’s still running, although probably not on Broadway. The book was done by T. S. Eliot in a juvenile mood, and confirms what we’d hitherto suspected: that Old Tom wasn’t too flash in the humour stakes. The poems are poor. The ‘animation’ is becalmed. The songs are ho-hum (at least Grizabella’s stand-out number, “Memory” is drawn from some of Tom’s good poetry). The feline characters mooning about the body of the theatre are annoying. If Gus, the Theatre…
Continue Reading →Why “American Hustle” Was Stillborn
This sloppy and violently overpraised dud, with its almost obsessional sacrifice of content to form, could have been so much better. In the early 1980s, director Louis Malle, with the superb Atlantic City under his belt, was developing a film based on the Abscam political scandal, to be called Moon Over Miami. John Belushi would play the main character, con man Mel Weinberg (essentially the role Christian Bale played in the 2013 film). Dan Aykroyd would be the FBI man looking to implement a sting operation. But then Belushi inconveniently took a ‘speedball’ and died on 5 March, 1982. So crucial were his…
Continue Reading →I Go to Sleep
(Turandot, Metropolitan Opera of New York, 2016) Once again TVC turned up to the Nova Palace in Adelaide to watch another chocolate-box treat in the form of Turandot, Puccini’s last opera, filmed in January 2016 at the New York Met (not the Mets). This ‘Orientalist’ production based on an original design by Franco Zefferelli (who knew a thing or two about prettying-up a set) is choreographed beautifully, in a yin-tong, Mikado style, by Chiang Ching. A troika of sopranos have appeared in the run and the HD film (courtesy of the Neubauer Family Foundation – we must invite that family to Australia and show them a good…
Continue Reading →A Wagner Timeline
As Robert W. Gutman observed, “cannonades preluded the birth of Richard Wagner“.* When he passed up, from Venice to Valhalla, almost seventy years later, he had been working on “The Feminine Element in Humanity”, a concept bearing some similarity to work of another German giant, Goethe, and he expired in the arms of his wife, Cosima. Betwixt 4 am on 22 May, 1813, and 3.30 pm on 13 February, 1883, the greatest music dramatist that ever lived led a hectic, crowded life, one that defies encapsulation, even by the very best biographers. You’d need to spare a couple of decades, travel a…
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