Dance Review: Adrienne Truscott’s “genesis, no!” @ DTW There are gaps in Adrienne Truscott’s “genesis, no!,” which had a reprise mounting last week at Dance Theater Workshop, having first run at P.S. 122 last spring. The work, a kind of anthropological rumination on human culture, uses theatricality to isolate activities from their real-world, analogous contexts, [...]
Pyongyang Interrupted: Part II
So, once they let all 400 Americans into their country, the largest contingent of U.S. citizens to grace their land since the end of the U.S. invasion some fifty years ago, what did the North Koreans get to hear? First, the orchestra played both the North Korean national anthem and ours. I love to hear [...]
Pyongyang Interrupted: Part I
If you opted out of the 4am live internet stream of The New York Philharmonic’s performance in Pyonyang, and waited until 8PM last night for Channel 13’s broadcast of the performance, then you paid the price of having to sit through ABC’s virtual propaganda machine. Now, before you get all pissed off at me, I’m [...]
Miss Me Much
A lovely friend sent us in this desperate comment, lamenting the recent lull in content on C.C. Well, all we can say is, we go through these periods every now and then. The only thing we can do is bear down, and breathe through it. In the mean time, if you don’t think you can [...]
“My Bad”
Thanks to Steve Smith for pointing us to Leon Fleisher’s letter in The Washington Post. Fleisher received a Kennedy Center Award in 2007, the acceptance of which seemed to include mandatory attendance at a White House reception with George W. Bush. Basically, Fleisher is like, I oppose Bush’s policies, but I decided to accept the [...]
PDR: Public Display of Response
The comment sent in by “Rabble” in response to our review of Joanna Newsom: It’s always funny to me when some 30-something year old who once considered himself cool, realizes he’s behind the game. Rather seek to understand a musician or an “indie” music scene from which he has become out of touch, he chooses [...]
Ways and Means: What You See Is Not The Same As How You See It
Ways and Means: A five-part meditation on writing about the arts What You See Is Not The Same As How You See It If you’ve ever read one of Deborah Jowitt’s reviews in The Village Voice, then you’ll have a pretty good idea about the style of arts criticism that I’m calling non-evaluative. You know, [...]
Newsom: We’ve Come Around
So, it’s taken us a week to get over being over the hype surrounding Joanna Newsom’s concert at BAM. But we’re over it. And now…we’re into it. No, for realz. What y’all might not understand is that C.C. has a genetic “anti-hype” condition, that is, we are biologically incapable of liking anything that has been [...]
Ways and Means: The O.C. (Original Critic)
Ways and Means: A five-part meditation on writing about the arts The O.C. (Original Critic) As I have mentioned, I wrote (mostly) classical music criticism (there’s one review I wrote of the late Ray Charles) for The Orange County Register, the second largest newspaper in Southern California. So it is not as if…suddenly last summer…I [...]
Ways and Means: Criticizing The Critics
Ways and Means: A five-part meditation on writing about the arts Criticizing The Critics This is the most fun, obviously. Not to give him too much credit, but it was Alastair Macaualay’s first piece on Merce Cunningham that riled me up enough to write a full rebuttal. The helplessness one feels when reading a piece [...]
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