I had two postings in preparation about moments of great joy from yesterday: one from the music that greeted me on awakening in the morning; the other from the plants in Palo Alto’s Gamble Gardens, visited yesterday morning on my first trip out in the world for many weeks.
Then fresh posting topics rolled in alarmingly, and a search for background material led me by accident to a great surprise, a link to a tape of a public lecture (a bit over an hour long) at Iowa State University on 4/11/90, 32 years ago. Title above. The subtitle: Thinking about language theoretically.
I listened transfixed as the lecturer, speaking to a general university audience, took his listeners into the wilds of modern theoretical syntax, along the way deftly advancing some ways of thinking that guided his own research. An admirable bit of teaching, I thought. With some pride, because that lecturer was, of course, an earlier incarnation of me.
Encountered recently in an interview, by writer I, of actor X, about X’s approach to their craft. The exchanges below are about punctuation, specifically in scripts; X reads other things, of course, but scripts are the central reading material of an actor’s life, the stuff they use to transform, through a collaboration with a director and other actors, into performances.
… punctuation can be a stumbling block, so they take it out. I’s note at this point:
This seems to be the master key to understanding X’s highly idiosyncratic line readings.
This is David Marchese interviewing the actor Christopher Walken in The New York Times Magazine, in print 2/13/22, p. 14.
Encountered recently in an interview, by writer I, of actor X, about X’s approach to their craft. The exchanges below are about punctuation, specifically in scripts; X reads other things, of course, but scripts are the central reading material of an actor’s life, the stuff they use to transform, through a collaboration with a director and other actors, into performances.
If you’ve read the interview, you’ll know who X is, but I’ll conceal their identity for the moment, to let their remarks on punctuation wash over you. It would be an interesting exercise to hear the views of the writers of those scripts and the directors of their performances.
… the actor, who recently popped up twice on my vintage tv, first in a 1981 episode of The Greatest American Hero and then in a 1985 episode of Cagney & Lacey — where I instantly recognized him from his recurring character Colonel Flagg on M*A*S*H, from 1973-79. I was of course interested in him as a member of what I’ve called the Acting Corps (actors who get regular work and so pop up in movies or on tv, notably or inconspicuously, in various roles; also in him as a man with a conventionally good-looking face, a leading-man style of face (rather than a character-actor face); and also in him as someone with a strong and recognizable actorial persona, which runs through a number of his performances.
A standard p.r. head shot of Winter from the 1970s/80s:
A little while back, I stumbled into watching the 2014 The Legend of Hercules for the, omigod, second time. Starring an immensely muscled Kellan Lutz as the great hero of myth, embedded in a famous stinker of a movie whose faults are at least in part linguistic. Though it does offer tons of glistening male flesh for aficionados.
From the annals of tv watching: Eddie Cahill as Tag Jones in season 7 of the sitcom Friends (and then as Det. Don Flack in CSI: New York); and Lucas Black as Special Agent Christopher LaSalle on NCIS: New Orleans. Both men are strongly physical actors with mobile expressive faces and both smile amiably a lot — they are really cute guys — and both do notable local accents: EC white working-class NYC in CSI: New York and LB white NOLA in NCIS: New Orleans. Both accents build on the actors’ native varieties — EC’s NYC and LB’s Alabamian — but with crafting (quite considerable on LB’s part) to fit their characters.
(Part One yesterday at the Aquarius Theatre, 11 to 3:30. A screening of the National Theatre Ensemble, London, production.)
Just stunning: remarkable staging, extraordinary performances, and of course the play. A poster for the NTE production:
(#1)
Nathan Lane, Andrew Garfield, Russell Tovey, Denise Gough, James McCardle
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. Part One: Millennium Approaches & Part Two: Perestroika by Tony Kushner, directed by Marianne Elliott. Original broadcasts to cinemas 20 and 27 July; Palo Alto screenings 14 and 21 August, and 20 and 27 August
From a piece in BuzzFeed yesterday, “the first images of the live-action film, The Legend of Tarzan, have been released and they are quite simply [hot hot hot]” by Kimberley Dadds:
The first official stills, featuring Alexander Skarsgård as the main man Tarzan, were released on Wednesday and they’re heavenly.
Two pieces of recent news from the L&G world: a Tony for Fun Home (on the L side), a NYT interview with the French ambassador to the US (on the G side). Bonus on the G side: a photographic tribute to David Hockney.
