By Myles Ludwig My pal Tony Palladino passed into another dimension this week. He was – still is — my friend and mentor for some 40 years and one of America’s premier graphic designers, illustrators and adventurers in art. TP, as he called himself, grew up in Manhattan. His family spoke Italian, not English, so to communicate he taught himself a way of drawing that could … [Read more...]
In ‘Locke,’ Bluetooth proves another circle of Hell
Ever since I could get behind the wheel of a car, I’ve had an affinity for long drives. Especially long drives at night, with the glittering beacons of the closest metropolis poetically coloring blankets of highway darkness. For lovers of, to paraphrase a Modest Mouse album title, “long drives for someone with nothing to think about,” the experience of a lengthy, solo p.m. … [Read more...]
Sundays: The mother of us all
By Myles Ludwig I’m musing about motherhood. The great Momenator hovers above us all like a sacred but impenetrable meme: Mother Russia, mama grizzly, mother of all battles, mothers who eat their young, mother of dragons, Mother Teresa, tiger mom, Monica Lewinsky’s mom, the anguished mothers of the stolen Nigerian schoolgirls and, of course, the heroic American mom and her … [Read more...]
‘Gigolo’ can’t settle on a story
As the fading gigolo in Fading Gigolo, John Turturro plays a convincing enough stud — gaunt, laconic and mysterious, with a magnetism that belies both his looks and age. His character, whose real name is never mentioned, is a worldly florist with a reputable track record as a lover who is talked into the world’s oldest profession by his strange old buddy Murray (Woody Allen), a … [Read more...]
Cellist to walk Camino de Santiago on pilgrimage for Bach
One of Dane Johansen’s paternal ancestors helped oversee the transition of Alaska from czarist Russia to the United States in the late 19th century, and having grown up in Fairbanks as a sixth-generation resident of the Last Frontier, Johansen has been looking for a way to marry his love and knowledge of the outdoors with his career as a cellist. He appears to have found it: … [Read more...]
No-holds-barred Mahler 7th ends NWS season in blaze of glory
Gustav Mahler is a composer whose vast constructs encourage interpretations that allow space for Mystery to inhabit some of his symphonies’ many rooms. For Michael Tilson Thomas, the surface perplexities of Mahler’s Seventh can be likened to the jump-cut film styles of the German expressionist filmmakers Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, who would follow Mahler in the cultural space … [Read more...]
Letter From Paris: The accidental flâneuse
By Chloe Elder In 21st-century society, the onetime symbol of Paris, the flâneur, is nearly extinct. In its native city, the numbers are dangerously low. Conservation efforts have done little to protect those who remain in the wild and all attempts to breed in captivity have been futile. And awkward. The flâneur is one who strolls, wanders, and traverses the city streets … [Read more...]
Community theater: ‘Over the River’ delights at Broward Stage Door
By Dale King Joe DiPietro’s play Over the River and Through the Woods is comfort food for the soul. It’s delightfully funny, but comes with a helping of drama and a garnish of pathos. The concoction shows how the elders in a closely knit Italian-American family in New Jersey deal with a “crisis.” And, of course, a crisis could be anything that doesn’t fit into their … [Read more...]
The View From Home 60: Chabrol’s gumshoe, Risi’s road picture, a father’s vengeance, and the devil baby
The Inspector Lavardin Collection: Back in 1984, Claude Chabrol, one of the French New Wave’s darkest chroniclers of the human condition, emerged from a period of artistic infertility to introduce one of the most underrated detective protagonists of modern times. That’s when he directed his first film with Inspector Jean Lavardin, played by the French comic actor Jean Poiret, … [Read more...]
Sundays: Lost in the bewilderness
By Myles Ludwig Picture this. A giant grasping hand, a hand big enough and powerful enough to punch an IMAX Godzilla in the snout, suddenly plunges through the accumulated cumulus clouds — the Google Cloud, the Microsoft cloud, the Amazon cloud — flicks aside the jet drones of Google, Amazon and Facebook, swipes aside WhatsApp, etc., snatches ups the shattered pieces of the … [Read more...]