Weekend Culture Report
I'm getting ready to leave for Saint Paul in a couple of hours with MrsBaliHai to see Madame Butterfly. Hopefully, it'll be as fine as the last two performances we've seen at the Ordway, Rigoletto and Die Fliegende Holländer. After the show, we'll stop at Moscow on the Hill, for a bowl of borscht, some black bread, and a shot of vodka or two.
On the printed-word front, a friend loaned me the Cintra Wilson book, Colors Insulting to Nature. The book's premise deals with how bad inspirational films like Ice Castles and Fame create ruinous false expectations of success in the life of a young girl and her pushy stage mother. It's a fun read, like one of Wilson's columns in Salon extended out a couple hundred pages. She employs some strange literary devices, such as stopping the narrative dead in its tracks to address the reader directly...sort of like breaking the 4th wall in film, but it hasn't been too disconcerting, yet.
Finally, I picked up the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus on DVD. I've seen bits and pieces of this concert film pop up in other movies, like The Kids Are Alright, so I was expecting performances on a par with The Who's take-no-prisoners rendition of "A Quick One", but I was mostly disappointed. Sure, it was great to see Marianne Faithfull as a young, beautiful ingenue again, but that didn't make up for the pain of listening to Yoko Ono screech atonally into a microphone for 10 minutes, or the lackadaisical performance of the Stones themselves.
This was Brian Jones' last recorded performance, and his puffy eyes, stumbling gait, and slurred speech, give an air of impending doom to the proceedings. A not-yet mummified Keith Richards and the rest of the band look bored and uninterested. It's clearly Jagger's show, and he spends most of his time preening and thrusting his crotch into the cameras rather than injecting any real urgency into songs like Jumpin' Jack Flash and Sympathy For the Devil. To his credit, Jagger apparently realized that his performance was crap, and withheld this film from general release until now. Guess he got hard-up for cash.