As of mid-afternoon Friday, the activities of “About Last Night” will be temporarily centralized. Our Girl in Chicago is en route for a three-day visit to see the Teachout Museum and other cultural goodies. She’ll be doing a bit of blogging from here, and–brace yourself–her secret identity will be revealed to Supermaud in a ritual ceremony from which some participants may not return.
Me, I’ll be hacking away all weekend at the you-know-what, just like always, though I plan to pry myself away from the iBook long enough to take OGIC to a couple of cool performances. You’ll hear about it all in good time.
For now, here are some links to whisk you into the weekend:
– This one’s spreading across the Web like kudzu, with (alas) good reason. From L.A. Observed:
Here’s why reporters want newspaper corrections to make clear that an editor is at fault for an error introduced to their copy. Last week, the L.A. Times’ Mark Swed filed a review of the opera “Die Frau Ohne Schatten” at the Music Center. He wrote that the Richard Strauss epic is “an incomparably glorious and goofy pro-life paean…” But when it ran in the paper, pro-life had been changed to anti-abortion.
Swed was reportedly mortified, since the opera is not remotely about abortion….
There’s more–and believe it or not, it gets worse. Read the whole thing here.
In case you were wondering why I blog–and why the blogosphere is rapidly becoming a major center of serious arts writing–there’s your answer.
– Says Reflections in D Minor:
I was fascinated with Bolero for a short time when I was just beginning to explore classical music but it quickly became boring and then seriously annoying. Now it is one of the few pieces of classical music that I truly hate….
Actually, Bolero is kind of cool, at least in theory. But I had to play the bass part in a college performance–the same two notes, over and over again, for about six weeks, or maybe ten–and since then I’ve been unable to listen to it.
– Courtesy of Cinetrix, a chunk of Alistair Macaulay’s recent Times Literary Supplement piece about Fred and Ginger:
It’s dismaying to see how often, even when a ballet is being broadcast live, camerawork chops up the dancing. Fred and Ginger, by contrast, really do dance several of their duets in a single take, some of them almost three minutes in length. In the annals of cinema, these takes should stand beside the finest feats of D.W. Griffith, Ernst Lubitsch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles….
Is that perhaps coming it a bit high? Um…no.