By Myles Ludwig Your life is just a click away, just a click away: “Every breath you take/Every move you make/Every bond you break/Every step you take/I'll be watching you/Every word you say/Every single day … I’ll be watching you.” Sting was prophetic. Even Paul McCartney knew what was going on: “She came in through the bathroom window … Didn’t anybody tell her? / Didn’t … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 7-9
South Florida Jazz wraps its 2012-13 season this Saturday night with an appearance by the jazz singer Kurt Elling, who made his mark at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill while studying the philosophy of religion as a grad student during the day. A Grammy winner and a regular audience favorite, Elling has a flexible voice and style more akin to Al Jarreau than to Johnny Hartman, … [Read more...]
Strangeness dominates juried show at Boca Museum of Art
The joy of writing about art comes from the same place I imagine a curator’s joy comes from: discovering something truly interesting. I was hoping to find this among the 149 pieces encompassing the 62nd All Florida Juried Competition and Exhibition at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. The show attracted more than 1,600 submissions. What I saw was art reflecting strangeness and … [Read more...]
Sundays: The tyranny of opinion
By Myles Ludwig The another night at a casual and lively dinner party with friends and family, hot dogs and hamburgers, amid the conversations about the relative merits of TV shows, streaming or live, cable or satellite, cord or no cord, a friend turned to me and asked: What is your opinion of Bashar Assad? I was surprised to hear myself say: “I have no opinion.” It’s not … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 1-2
Art: This is the last weekend to see Legacy: The Emily Fisher Landau Collection at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. Landau is a philanthropist and a preeminent collector of postwar art in the United States and the exhibition on display at the Norton is a selection of the more than 300 paintings, sculptures, photographs and works on paper that Landau gifted to the … [Read more...]
The View From Home 49: Bad guys, Westerns, and a violent mess
Warner Home Video has waited near Father’s Day to market and release two exceptional new Blu-ray collections of gangster cinema, old and (comparatively) new. If these are the kind of gifts the studio has prepared for dads, I’d happily take a Father’s Day every month. The Ultimate Gangsters Collection: Classics ($44.98) features four titles from the ’30s and ’40s, when Warners … [Read more...]
Sundays: The only thing we can save
By Myles Ludwig Watching the Oklahoma tornado victims sifting through the debris of their lives night after night, newscast after newscast, is heartbreaking, of course. Each stick and splinter, each broken toy, each chair leg or slice of dining table, each refrigerator is a signifier of a piece of a once-treasured past now lost, a piece of heart torn away by the present. … [Read more...]
Sundays: Standing in the corner with Kafka
By Myles Ludwig I’m not surprised that Franz Kafka woke up one morning and imagined he was some kind of giant beetle. He needed someone to talk to. A writer’s life is a lonely life, particularly a writer who makes fiction or poetry. There you are with a world in your head, struggling with near impossibility of describing it perfectly, not only to yourself, but to someone … [Read more...]
‘War Horse’ remains magical, stunning theater
Broadway has long featured the creative use of puppets. Think Avenue Q, Disney’s The Lion King and even the revival of Little Shop of Horrors. But they all pale in comparison to the five-time Tony Award-winning War Horse and its expressive, full-sized equine puppets, which come to life in a stunning theatrical adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s popular children’s book. The … [Read more...]
Sundays: Big Media and the Case of the Missing W
By Myles Ludwig Since mid-April to today, Big Media has submerged us in a swamp of the sensational and salacious, holding our heads down in one hot mess after another. We can barely come up for a breath before another epic wave knocks us over again: Boston bombers; Jodi Arias; the Cleveland 3.1; the Bangladeshi building collapse (bad news for WalMart Nation); military rape; … [Read more...]