Sunday Morning Coming Down
Songs in Our Heart # 18 Sunday Morning Coming Down (Kris Kristofferson) (Written by Kris Kristofferson; released 1970) [We find Monday morning coming down more mournful, personally, but this song is still sidewalk poetry par excellence.]
Continue Reading →Science Fiction
Songs in Our Heart # 17 Science Fiction (The Divinyls) (Written by Chrissie Amphlett and Mark McEntee; released November 1982) [A musical Tesla coil.] Before we re-visit this great pure pop song, let’s remember Miss Temperamental herself, Chrissy Amphlett (1989) as painted by Ivan Durrant, c/ the National Portrait Gallery:
Continue Reading →Dracula
(by Bram Stoker) (1897) (Dir. Tod Browning) (1931) It was, perhaps, an unlikely brace of circumstances: odd that a 19 year old (Mary Shelley) would create one of the two most potent horror figures of our epoch – Frankenstein, and equally odd that a clerk-turned-impresario, Bram Stoker (1847-1912) would the other. Dracula evokes all the lip-smacking pleasures of pure, endogenous evil, and combines myth, misanthropy and eroticism with the false promise of immortality. The Universal film, made about 500 years after the birth of the man who inspired the book (Vlad the Impaler), is the definitive classic version, an eerie, atmospheric, surreal,…
Continue Reading →Paris – The Moveable Feast
How to take the gloss off the Eiffel Tower
June 23, 1940: Herr Hitler strolls around his shiny new toy, Paris, taking in the architectural marvels under the tutelage and guidance of those well-known art lovers, Albert Speer and Arno Breker; the former a drawer of nightmare-constructions that never took shape, thank goodness – the latter a grafter of dubious, neoclassical trash that would make Phidias and Alexandros laugh (we except Breker’s bronze bust of Wagner at Bayreuth). The Nazis represented the worst threat in memory to art. They were thieves, of course. And what they did not understand, or disliked, they simply destroyed. They spun idiotic theories and practised…
Continue Reading →Ender’s Game (by Orson Scot Card)
Make no mistake. This is a Young Adult book. It masquerades as “adult science fiction” on many a best-of list, but it is a novel for the tweens and teens. Unlike Ender – who between the ages of 6 and 11 trains day and night to save the world – this book is just too juvenile to impress grown-ups . Far be it from us at TVC to suggest that calling this a novel for adults is to misguide the reader, but let’s just say that it is a bit like promoting Harry Potter as a really really good read for grown-ups too. If you want to…
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