John Everett Branch Jr.'s Blog, page 10
July 3, 2016
Tour de France, Tour de France: A recollection and two images
When I was a teenager, I liked bicycles, and I often visited a bicycle shop that was only a couple of blocks from where I lived. I don’t know quite what I did there. Presumably it was the same thing I did in the college bookstore that was also near me, or the camera store a little farther down, or the antique-weapons shop just beyond: I looked at what was there and adjusted yet again my sense of how many things were in the world, what they did, how they worked, who used them and for what—and...
June 26, 2016
Is it real, or is it HBO? Thoughts on the battle for Winterfell in Game of Thrones
A shot from the battle for Winterfell on Game of Thrones (photo courtesy HBO)
American football was once described as a cross between chess and medieval warfare. Given that we can now easily acquaint ourselves with the sport of football if, by some quirk, we don’t grow up knowing what it is, we might instead wonder what medieval warfare was like. The answer is now simple: it was like the battle for Winterfell in Game of Thrones Season Six, Episode Nine, which was presented last Sunday. (The e...
June 12, 2016
Something in the air tonight: a new atlas shows us light pollution
Imagine a space traveler arriving on our planet after a voyage of some years. She lands during the daytime, near the United Nations in New York City, and when she steps from her ship she has to shield her eyes. She has been away from her sun, from any sun, for so long that she’s unaccustomed to daylight; space is dark, though dotted with a billion points of light. Soon she’s ushered indoors to meet a long succession of diplomats and functionaries. Sometime that evening, she steps outside agai...
June 7, 2016
What athletes have in common with actors
In a books column on the sports business in the May 16, 2016, New Yorker, Louis Menand mentioned this:
The entire industry rests on the labor of athletes. The number of athletes is actually quite small, but, as a class, they are not getting that much of the money. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 13,700 people make their living playing spectator sports in the United States (compared with, for example, sixty-nine thousand people who are actors). The median annual wage for athl...
June 4, 2016
More British theater is heading for American cinema screens
Today’s Economist Espresso gives a brief nod to the live streaming of theatrical productions with an announcement that the Almeida Theatre, in London, will transmit a production of Richard III to cinemas in July. You can find the post here, and information from the Almeida here.
Espresso may be correct in asserting that the Metropolitan Opera pioneered this kind of “event cinema” in 2006, but it neglects to report (because Espresso items are always brief) that London’s National Theatre joined...
May 31, 2016
Jolted by Ibsen, stunned by Strindberg: two marriage portraits at TFANA
Maggie Lacey (as Nora) and John Douglas Thompson (as Thorwald) in A Doll’s House, presented by Theatre for a New Audience at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (photo by Gerry Goodstein)
Battle has been joined at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn. In a smashing double production now being presented by Theatre for a New Audience, it’s not only Nora versus Thorwald in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. It’s also the Captain versus Laura in Strindberg’s The Father, one play versus the other, one vie...
May 28, 2016
If you have nothing better to do—or even if you do—stream these two films while you can
If you’re the kind of person who cares about exactly what is and isn’t available on Netflix at any given time, you’re probably not reading my blog, because I’m not the kind of blogger who writes about such things. But for a moment, I’m going to adopt the persona. I just stumbled across a list of movies and TV shows that can now be streamed from Netflix but that will soon be withdrawn, and two of the films are worth a nod. Both will become unavailable on June 1.
Darkman (1990): Anyone who thin...
May 22, 2016
What the devil? Hadestown is long on music but short on drama and good sense
The 2010 album version of Hadestown
Hadestown is a new musical tracing some very old stories—namely those of Orpheus and Eurydice along with Persephone and Hades—and I know just who might like it. A friend of mine lived in New Orleans for a few years while teaching English there, and he had a passion for that place where a shot of alcohol is never far away, cemeteries thrust the dead up into plain view, and the living are always likely to burst into music or sway into a simple dance. Hadestow...
