https://www.cityofsmoke.com New York in History and Anecdote Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:06:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.2 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/5070 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/5070#comments Thu, 21 May 2009 00:33:49 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=5070 It's a big relief to me that the television season has drawn to a close---particularly that there will be no new episodes of House to miss. I'd been having a terrible time since the show moved to Monday nights. I guess I'm not television conscious that early in the week]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/5070/feed 5 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/4217 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/4217#comments Mon, 20 Apr 2009 15:56:02 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/4217 I’ve read several Google pages' worth of commentaries on Susan Boyle, the middle-aged Scottish woman whose April 11 performance of a song from  Les Miserables on the U.K. version of "American Idol," "Britain's Got Talent," millions of people have watched on YouTube. So far, though, I've yet to encounter an article, essay, or blog post that touches on the aspect of the phenomenon that I found most fascinating and moving.]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/4217/feed 9 https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/3658 Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:21:49 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=3658 I picked up a copy of Yasmina Reza's Life (x) 3 a couple of days after seeing the play at Circle in the Square and was flabbergasted to discover that the opening scene between John Turturro and Helen Hunt is actually funny.]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1519 Mon, 16 Feb 2009 18:23:15 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1519 Ifound myself checking up on the parts of a horse the other day. It was after the Daily News had carried an AP story about some new prehistoric art found in the Perigueux region of France—engravings thought to predate the Lascaux cave paintings by 10,000 years. It was a burial]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1538 Sat, 14 Feb 2009 16:55:16 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1538 Next Tuesday, as part of a weekly movie series at Symphony Space, John Huston's 1956 film version of Moby Dick will be shown in a double bill with John Ford's The Searchers. The date is November 21, and I keep wondering whether Isaiah Sheffer, the artistic director of Symphony Space, knew when he made up the program that he was scheduling Moby Dick for the 180th anniversary of the incident that probably inspired it, give or take a few hours: the sinking of a Nantucket whaler by an enraged sperm whale]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1551 Thu, 12 Feb 2009 14:51:49 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1551 For Pete's sake, why all the fuss about the Baz Luhrmann La Boheme? You'd think that no one had ever thought of updating classical opera before, or casting "realistically" trim and youthful romantic leads. The production, currently at the Broadway Theater, which brings the action forward to the 1950s, opened earlier this month to reviews that ranged from the rhapsodic to the studiously excited. Only Michael Feingold in the Village Voice had the taste and good sense ]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1450 Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:30:44 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1450 Arecent encounter with the first half-hour or so of Jane Eyre, The Musical put me in mind of the 1857 murder of Dr. Harvey Burdell. (The connection won't immediately be apparent.) A friend with a professional interest in seeing the show had asked me along, and since she'd paid for the tickets and wanted to leave, we did--well before the act break--driven out by the inexorable staccato of the leading lady's enunciation. The show had not been exceptionally or unexpectedly appalling, but it made you realize that it's possible to get anything produced on Broadway these days, provided it has a child in it. Absolutely anything. People are desperate to get their offspring out of the house, and anything with a kid in it is considered family fare. This re-emergence of the child as live attraction may be a by-product of the current baby boom. But it has its roots, I think, in the Burdell affair and its aftermath. ]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/1400 Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:38:10 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=1400 Icame straight home from The Dazzle, Richard Greenberg's three-character play about the Collyer Brothers (at the Gramercy Theater through May 12) and threw out all the plastic shopping bags that had been mounting up in the pantry closet. Then I went at the piles of newspapers waiting to be gone]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/414 Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:20:44 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=414 In the 1999 film adaptation of An Ideal Husband that recently came out on video, there's a scene in which Lord Goring, the play's hero, attends the opening of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest. All London seems to have turned out for the occasion, which ends with Wilde]]> https://www.cityofsmoke.com/archives/4723 Tue, 22 Jul 2003 20:15:00 +0000 http://www.cityofsmoke.com/?p=4723 What a piece of work is I Am My Own Wife, Doug Wright's one-hander about the German collector and transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. And what a piece of work was its subject, who survived Nazism and Communism---two of the most repressive (and repressively anti-gay) regimes in modern history---and managed to keep faith with her chosen lifestyle while vastly improving her standard of living. Between 1942 and her death last year, von Mahlsdorf---born Lothar Berfelde---amassed a small fortune's worth of late-19th-century furniture and bric-a-brac, parlaying it into a private museum collection that she housed in the twenty-three-room, 18th-century manor house near East Berlin that she lived in for almost thirty years. There she ran a clandestine gay nightclub in the basement and with the fall of the Berlin Wall became a heroine of the newly resurgent gay community. Ultimately, she received the Order of Merit in recognition of her efforts and achievements in the field of furniture preservation.]]>