One More For the Road
(Frank Sinatra, December 12, 1915 – May 14, 1998) Francis Albert Sinatra, of Hoboken, New Jersey, is 100 today. Fly him (who created the American songbook) to the moon! His presentation of torch songs was stoic but sad. (Imagine a gambler whose girlfriend – Ava Gardner, say – has walked out on him). He’d come on and spill his heart over the stage, then pick himself up and get back in the race, as if to say ‘That’s life – rise above it.’ For example, at “The Sands”, with Count Basie on piano, he has a full-to-bursting room silent and rapt with a drunk…
Continue Reading →Tannhäuser
The naughty knight with Venus (Otto Knille, 1873)
(Richard Wagner) (1845) (Met, December 2015) An old-fashioned, rollicking and surprise-free production, beautifully sung and shockingly acted (Johan Botha can’t even manage to convincingly strum the symbolic lyre) with James Levine leading the orchestra (James Jorden in The Observer rudely suggesting that he “flapped his baton like a wounded bird”). Terrific early Wagner, with a stark and invariably crass look at a medieval gallant’s perennial struggle twixt sacred and profane love – the orgasmic overture leading on to the writhing, wriggling Venusberg – replete with smudged borders between high church and low conduct, and a fairly unsatisfying denouement. Leaves on a staff? …
Continue Reading →A Million Windows
Photo of the author c/- the Sydney Morning Herald
(by Gerald Murnane) Murnane’s writing is the literary equivalent of a performance by the dance troupe Jailolo. As the dancers creep across a stage via barely discernable, repetitive, miniscule movements, so Murnane inches and tics his way from nowhere to somewhere word by word. His is a philisophy of obscurantism, distance and apprehension. “I recalled just now an earlier undertaking of mine to explain in the previous paragraph why this is not a self-referential work of fiction. The discerning reader should have found the promised explanation in the paragraph as it stands. For the sake of the undiscerning reader I shall repeat the simple fact…
Continue Reading →Mein Kampf is Back
(photo by Heinrich Hoffmann, 1927)
Hitler’s 1927 double-volume book of hate is back. Out of copyright, the feeling is that it should be out there, to stand as an example of the dangers of messianic self-belief [as H.R. Trevor-Roper put it], excessive unification movements (e.g. the pan German movement and lebensraum to the east) and racial purity (and vilification). William Shirer noted “it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there was still time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe. For whatever other accusations…
Continue Reading →An Evening with Oprah
Oprah (photo by Alan Light)
Oprah Winfrey, Adelaide Entertainment Centre, 4 December 2015 (reviewed by Lynette Pugh) Advertised as ‘An Evening with Oprah’, there should have been no doubt that it would be all about Oprah, but in anticipating the evening I kept thinking ‘Oh God’ I hope she tones the narcissism down for the Australian setting – or she will face walk outs and tut tuts from the Adelaide crowd. I need not have worried! She had the delivery down pat, with the balance of celebrity, egoism and humble authenticity, exactly right. I was totally engaged for the whole 2 hours, with her story…
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