Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Convent Island


We are thankful
for our room at El Convento (click) and for the lush island of
Puerto Rico. History rich, elegant, flowered San Juan (click) has given us shelter and seafood and island spice.


Luguillo Beach

photo by Jameson


It was splendid being away from the mainland, recalling the Democrats' victory
earlier in the month, and taking joy in the sun and sea breezes on the wide, arching, soft-sand beaches, or hiking in the fresh air of the rainforest, El Yunque (click). Life should always be so exhilerating.


More photos from our visit (click)
.

Our nights were filled with the sound of coquis:


coqui perched in a Canarion flower Puerto Rico

photo courtesy of wildhorizons.com


This coqui, perched in a Canario flower, gives you a good idea of how small the coquis really are. Photo by Thomas Wiewandt. His website of Nature Photography will open in a new window, close new window to return here.

Website dedicated to coquís.

The Coquí is a small 'singing' tree tree frog found nowhere else in the world. They sing Puerto Rico's lullaby and probably influenced her music.. The frog population in the rain-forest is one of the densest frog populations in the world. There are 14 species of the tiny Coqui, the 'song' is the mating call and starts every afternoon, increasing in volumn with rainfall.

Back to the El Yunque Rainforest Page of ElYunque.com




Happy Peeping! (click to listen)

Jameson




Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Shortbus Revisited

On seeing Shortbus a second time, I have to say
"Love is lovlier, the second time around."

The way I see it, this film, a true mindfuck-- in the best possible way-- should become our next Rocky Horror Picture Show.

We should all see it attired as our fave character and have orgiastic sex orgies similar to those on the screen.

Seriously, the only way to approach such a pioneering film is with the legs of the mind wide open, ready to receive the film's deep thrust. The viewer can quibble and find little faults with the plot, like looking for moles on a lover. Or he/she can just lie back and take it in all the way. After that first penetration, go back for a replay. The psyche's second orgasm is even more fulfilling.

You want some pics? Go to the first entry below (click).


Warm Embraces...

Jameson




Monday, November 20, 2006

Botero Does Prison

Remember the Boteros on Park Avenue-- those happy, fat figures? Botero has now turned his genius to more serious matters: All four of these articles are stunning.

Visual Arts

Artist Botero Turns to Abu Ghraib in New Paintings

Abu Ghraib 67, 2005. Oil on canvas Courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery
Abu Ghraib 66, 2005. Oil on canvas Courtesy of the Marlborough Gallery

More Images from the Exhibit

Weekend Edition Saturday, November 11, 2006 · Fernando Botero's portraits and sculptures of happy rotund people have delighted millions. But the Colombian painter and sculptor's latest exhibition takes on the subject of Abu Ghraib. After reading news reports of American abuses at the Iraq prison, Botero produced works unlike anything he has done before.
A collection of some 50 paintings and drawings at the Marlborough Gallery in New York depicts prisoners as they are beaten, sexually abused, blindfolded, hooded, bound with ropes, attacked by dogs and forced to wear women's underwear.
After he read Seymour Hersh's account of the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib in The New Yorker, Botero found himself obsessed.
"I was... in shock like everyone else in the world was, the more I read about it," Botero says. "Somehow I was more and more upset with the situation."
For 14 months, Botero worked exclusively on drawings and paintings related to Abu Ghraib. He created about 100 works, some of them large paintings, as well many drawings. About half of the total collection is at the Marlborough Gallery.
Botero says he did not use any of the famous photos of Abu Ghraib for inspiration, but relied only on the texts of news articles.
"Some people think that this is more dramatic than the photos, and perhaps it is true," Botero says. "Because, when you paint, everything that is not necessary, you let out. You go to the essence of... the subject."
Botero hopes his paintings will find a permanent home in a museum in the United States. He has kept ownership of all the paintings. None of them is for sale. In the meantime, the show is at the Marlborough through Nov. 18, then travels to Italy and Spain.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6470129


and a review from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/arts/design/15chan.html

and from the Nation by Arthur Danto:

http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20061127&s=danto

And from Donald Kuspit:

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/kuspit10-26-06.asp



Get out of Jail.

Jameson


Sunday, November 19, 2006

Kitty

Here's to life. What better toast? It's not what happens to you, it's the attitude you take to events that determines who you are. Kitty Carlisle Hart, at 96, was a tribute to just the right attitude. She had us all in laughter and in tears, just singing along to Kurt Weil and Cole Porter at the intimate 14th st. Playhouse last night.
With Starr at our side, Dar and I had a perfect evening. And this morning's brunch with Joce, fresh from her birthday in the landscapes of the Southwest, completed the ambiance.




Kitty Carlisle Hart
from the PBS site: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/broadway/stars/hart_k.html (click)



Here's the AJC's nice rendition of Kitty's visit:

Oldest gal in showbiz remains a class act


The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 11/18/06

PREVIEW

Kitty Carlisle Hart: "Here's to Life"

With pianist David Lewis. 8 tonight. 5 p.m. Sunday. $35-$100. 14th Street Playhouse, 173 14th St. N.E., Midtown. 404-733-5000, woodruffcenter.org.

The weather called for heavy flooding with a slight chance of pneumonia, followed by a cold blast. But Kitty Carlisle Hart —- the Manhattan social butterfly, arts advocate, quiz-show pioneer, Metropolitan Opera diva, Marx Brothers co-star and famous playwright's widow —- was not about to wilt.

Tuesday night, it was caviar at Restaurant Eugene in Buckhead. Wednesday morning, she braved the rain in pearls and a dazzling peach suit for a round of interviews —- with a two-hour lunch sandwiched in between. And Thursday night, "at the mere age of 96," she gave the first of four Atlanta performances —- getting a standing ovation before she could warble a note from her Broadway songbook or reveal a single tidbit about her illustrious circle of dearly departed friends: George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Bing Crosby, Richard Rodgers and numerous others.

While her own career may have been relatively minor, Hart was intimately acquainted with most of the leading lights of American musical theater.

If you are under 40, you may have no idea who Kitty Carlisle Hart is. But if you grew up in the '50s, '60s and '70s, you will remember her as the ever-curious panelist on TV's "To Tell the Truth," an early game show featuring a roster of wits who looked as if they were dressed for a night of dancing at El Morocco.

As America became a place of ranch houses, station wagons and backyard barbecues, this New York smart set was the last vestige of a vanishing, glamorous age. Appearing with the likes of Johnny Carson, Dick Van Dyke and Peggy Cass, Hart was celebrated for her effervescent wit, endless wardrobe and million-dollar smile. "TV's touch of class," as a quip from the video montage that introduces her show puts it.

Though the former Ziegfeld Follies dancer looks a little frail when she arrives Tuesday at WAGA-TV, everything changes the minute she perches on the recording studio couch.

"Now you have been on TV before," her producer, Joe Spotts, says, arranging a dais of pillows for her to sit on. "You know what to do." Sure enough, as the cameras roll, Hart's rouged cheeks glow, her lips put on a smile to make Carol Channing envious, and the so-called "oldest gal in showbiz" is suddenly on —- tossing off bons mots about the glittering diamond necklace she wears during her performances.

"My mother told me she got it from the king of Bulgaria," Hart says, "and I believed it for 40 years. What nonsense!"

"Kitty is just Kitty all the time," Spotts says later. "Camera-ready, every minute."

But life hasn't always been a parade for Hart, who lives in a Park Avenue apartment decorated with paintings by friends like Noel Coward, Marc Chagall and Harpo Marx, and is known to greet visitors wearing a bright-red kimono.

Born Catherine Conn in New Orleans in 1910, Hart lost her physician father when she was 10; he died in the typhoid epidemic. Soon, her ambitious, social-climbing mother pushed her onto the stage. She led a swank life as the wife of theater luminary Moss Hart, but the playwright died of a heart attack in 1961, leaving her to raise their two children alone.

Along the way, this granddaughter of a Confederate soldier who survived the battle of the Monitor and the Merrimack has battled anti-Semitism —- from her own mother, even. And as chairman of the New York State Arts Council from 1976-1996, she had to defend controversial exhibits by Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano. Spotts rescued her from performing on the cruise-ship circuit.

"My mother wanted me to marry a rich nobleman —- and failing that, an impoverished baron," Hart says, nibbling a lunch of salad, soup, ginger ale and just a few bites of creme brulee at Buckhead's Bones. Though her European education never made her a princess, she ended up courting theater royalty —- demurring a proposal from Gershwin but accepting one from Hart after a 10-year courtship.

As she talks, Hart chuckles heartily and throws her hands in the air to emphasize a remark. Her mother always wanted them to pass for Gentiles, Hart says. (Once, when a taxi driver asked if her daughter was Jewish, her mother replied: "She may be, but I'm not!") She changed her name to Kitty while attending school in Switzerland; she found the name Carlisle in the Manhattan telephone directory.

During her concert, Hart leans on the piano and only occasionally forgets a lyric. Her voice is weathered, but she looks remarkably fit.

Sprinkling the night with anecdotes from the golden age of Broadway and TV, she recalls once being scolded by composer Kern for changing key during "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes." She remembers crooner Crosby having to stand on a platform during filming of a duet in 1934's "She Loves Me Not" to reach her height. She lifts her skirt to reveal the legs that made her performance in vaudeville impresario Flo Ziegfeld's late-1920s "Rio Rita" so memorable, and she recalls Gershwin as a man who "needed constant approval.

"Women adored him, and he returned the compliment —- I should know," she says with a wink.

After Carlisle made the Marx Brothers' "A Night at the Opera" with screenwriter George S. Kaufman in 1935, he introduced her to two Broadway scribes who were in Hollywood shopping for actresses. The pair turned out to be Cole Porter and Moss Hart, and their musical was "Jubilee" ("It Was Just One of Those Things").

"I didn't get the job , but many years later, I got the man," Hart tells her audience. Before the marriage, Kaufman and Hart wrote two of the most successful comedies of their time: "You Can't Take It With You," which won the Pulitzer Prize of 1937, and "The Man Who Came to Dinner."

These days, Hart says she feels like Dickens' Miss Havisham in her enormous New York apartment.

"It's half a city block, and it was just fine when I had two children and two servants. ... However, I'm not going to move, because that kills people. I'm going to be taken out feet first."

(By the way, gentlemen, if you are thinking of asking Hart out, get in line. She has plenty of beaus already. "I have one who is 103, sharp as a tack. ... And I have one who is younger than I am. He's only 90. And he takes me to dinner and to the opera and to concerts. He's very nice.")

At the moment, Hart shows no signs of slowing down.

After sold-out shows in Palm Springs, San Francisco and St. Louis, Hart's latest comeback —- and the revival of "To Tell the Truth" episodes on the Game Show Network —- have made her a kind of aging hipster. On New Year's Eve, she will play a Portland, Ore., gig with the trendy pop group Pink Martini. And, Spotts says, "I do have an option for her to appear in 2010 at the age of 100."

http://www.ajc.com/living/content/printedition/2006/11/18/lvkitty1118a.html



Bon Voyage... Jameson

Monday, November 13, 2006

New Day

Read Frank Rich's excellent editorial on the election:

2006: The Year of the ‘Macaca’

By FRANK RICH




Backyard Maple
photo by Jameson

Thanksgiving approaches with all sorts of changes...


Next week, San Juan




Happy Trails

Jameson





Wednesday, November 08, 2006

Burns and Allen

Republican Senators Burns and Allen will lose in Montana and Virginia, thereby turning the Senate, and the entire Congress, over to the Democrats. We won. Happy Days are here again.

Thursday, November 02, 2006

Winds of Change

What good news. Nancy Pelosi is going to be the next Speaker of the House of Reps.

And New Jersey is the latest state to affirm gay rights, albeit with the reservation that same sex couples deserve equal rights whatever they are called.

That is fine with me.

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Frankly, my dears, I don't give a damn what it's called. Civil Union is fine. I shall have a civil, and we can making being civils what we want. Why not have an alternative relationship just so long as it has the same rights and privileges as marriage does.

Letter to the AJC: Mon. Oct. 30:

To suit everyone, call it 'civil unions'

The ruling of the New Jersey Supreme Court that gay couples deserve the same rights as heterosexual couples reveals how difficult it is to give up old prejudices ("N.J. court backs gay rights," News, Oct. 26).

The word "marriage" is too politically charged and filled with religious meaning to be applied equally. So use another word; call gay relationships civil unions. It's the solution Vermont came up with six years ago. If that makes heterosexuals more secure and happy, that is fine with me. I'll call my husband my civil partner, or invent some new word. The rights are what matter, whether hospital visiting rights, joint taxes, inheritance, or Social Security rights.

Legal recognition of my 16-year union is far more important to me than calling my relationship marriage. A rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet.

JACK MILLER, Atlanta


The election approaches. I don't fool myself that the Democrats have the answers. I just know that they do not bow quite as low to the oil companies, the drug companies, the insurance industry, and the religious zealots as the Repubs.
The Dems may just help end the carnage in Iraq, as well.


This past week we were in Albuquerque. (click)

This week is GISA in Dillard. In November we fly to San Juan and in December, San Francisco for X-mas- New Years.


Dar will tour Ancient Egypt (click for the tour) in January, 2007. Here's hope for a better year, then.

Happy Trails.

Jameson