|
7808. Ms. No - 8/15/2005 5:25:08 PM I picked up the new Coldplay album this weekend after having avoided it. Silly I know, but I've been very resistent to this band for some odd reason and when I finally picked up the first album after similarly holding out I think I listened to it continuously for about a week straight. I'll still put it in the player for a road trip and let it cycle through two or three times and now I'm pretty convinced that the new album will get the same treatment from me.
I think perhaps some of it is the hype around them and some of it is my perception of Martin himself, but I enjoy the music so I'll just have to toss any pretentious music principals I might have pretended to and listen to what I like regardless.
Hell, I still love Styx and god knows that earns me some scornful looks. ;->
7809. Ms. No - 8/15/2005 5:29:57 PM I also picked up the latest Hot Hot Heat album which I haven't yet listened to. I've been hearing them in various out of the way places for a few years now but they're finally getting some major radio play. I'd never bought any of their previous albums out of sheer laziness.
They're definitely an 80's influenced band. When I first heard them I thought of Duran Duran but their latest hit is more Ray Davies/Kinks inspired and I've heard various other influences in them in the few times I've managed to catch them in radio play the last couple years.
7810. Ms. No - 8/15/2005 5:32:04 PM The third purchase was to replace an album I'd lost somewhere along the way --- Peter Murphy Love Hysteria.
I've been trying to get a copy of this on CD for years and either couldn't find it or mistook which album it was and passed it by. Oddly enough I may not even like it anymore, I just have fond memories of really liking it when I first owned it. We'll see how it holds up after 15 years of absence.
7811. Macnas - 8/16/2005 9:13:05 AM Hmm Coldplay, they have some growers, do doubt. I have to say I don't like the latest song "Fix You", but doubtless the rest of the album will have some good stuff.
Hot Hot Heat. I've yet to hear of them, but they sound interesting.
Pete Murphy eh? his solo stuff is just to sparse for my taste, his more recent stuff in anycase. I cannot remember listening to his first album, so it might be better. 7812. Ms. No - 8/17/2005 5:09:17 PM Yeah, Fix You is not my favorite cut on the album and Speed of Sound is too similar to their last megahit, but White Shadows is great and the album as a whole gives me a good vibe with a couple of stand-outs that I don't know the names of since I've been listening mainly in my car where I can't read the liner notes.
Murphy's stuff did get really sparse when he went solo, but he also had some more pop-friendly tunes. Love Hysteria's got All Night Long and Indigo Eyes which both got a lot of radio play. Dragnet Drag are Blind Sublime are solid but some of the other tunes can get tedious. It's hard for me to overlook the melodrama of some of his lyrics when they're all I can hear except for a vague drum kit in the back and some mystic bell-ringing.
None of his solo stuff touches Telegram Sam or The Passion of Lovers and his ballads have gotten kind of sappy. My Last Two Weeks doesn't compare to Crowds or All We Ever Wanted Was Everything, but he still gets me with some of his tunes and I'm a sucker for his voice.
7813. Macnas - 8/18/2005 9:08:11 AM Ms.No, have you heard of Gavin Friday? You might like him. 7814. judithathome - 8/26/2005 4:19:03 AM This appeared in my paper today. Welcome to the American Taliban:
Audiences are staging protests
By ANDREW MARTON
STAR-TELEGRAM SENIOR ARTS WRITER
The play was called The Kiss at City Hall and, at least in the mind of one Circle Theatre patron, its unsparing look at abortion was just too much to stand. So she did just that: stood up in the middle of the production and clomped out.
"But she first stopped in front of the stage," says Circle executive director Rose Pearson, recalling the incident two years ago. "And said to one of the principal actors, 'Young man, you should be ashamed of yourself.' "
An extreme reaction, perhaps, but emblematic nonetheless. Over the last five years, with more and more local theaters -- from Fort Worth's Stage West and Circle Theatre to Dallas'Theatre Three and the Plano Repertory Theatre -- brashly portraying nudity, violence and "adult themes," some audience members are voicing their unequivocal displeasure and dismay.
Fort Worth's Stage West had a scene of full-frontal nudity in its recent staging of The Coming World, and there is a healthy dose of salty language in its current presentation, Port Authority, which finishes its run Sunday.
At last year's Plano Repertory Theatre production of Shakespeare's R&J (based on Romeo and Juliet), several audience members stormed out after a kiss between two men. And last year, Dallas Theater Center's production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Topdog/Underdog sparked numerous walkouts during several of its scenes heavy with adult language and sexual content. Meanwhile, Theatre Three's January 2004 musical production of The Wild Party, with its staged orgy, unleashed a tidal wave of e-mails and phone calls.
One audience member actually called the director a "spawn of Satan" in an angry e-mail, says Kimberly Richard, the theater's director of publications and communications.
In an e-mail to the Star-Telegram, Mary Ann and Ray Scheel aired some of their discomfort with Stage West's Port Authority.
"There isn't any real reason to be so blunt either in word or action," they wrote. "I believe that it is just as harmful for adults to continually hear this in plays, TV or films as it is for children. It does damage to us mentally whether we are conscious of it or not, and this in turn [a]ffects our relationship with our spouses and offspring . . ."
Stage West's producing director, Jerry Russell, who directs Port Authority, is often the target of either audience adulation or outright rejection of his theater's grittier work.
"In Port Authority, a young man uses the language of young people today, talking openly about sexual things, and certain parts of that really bother some in the audience," says Russell, 69. "The protests we get reflect the much sharper divide right now along moral lines in the country as a whole."
Circle Theatre's Pearson says theatergoers are much more blunt these days about expressing their scalding displeasure with material they deem offensive. "They don't mind disturbing the performance and just leaving in the middle -- it's all about immediate gratification in making their complaint," says Pearson.
Anticipating these more barbed reactions, local theaters are warning their audiences with greater clarity -- through a movie-rating-like system, plus a barrage of brochures, postcards, e-mails and recorded box-office messages -- about every element of a production, from foul language to smoking on stage.
"We all now have an obligation to let people know what they are in for," says Terry Martin, producing artistic director of WaterTower Theatre in Addison, whose May 2006 production of Take Me Out will be publicized as containing "locker-room nudity."
While some theaters are concluding that their audiences desire a stronger mix of lighter fare with some more jarring social drama -- Fort Worth's Circle Theatre's next two productions are the decidedly sudsy Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie and Guys on Ice, a musical about ice fishermen -- other theaters understand that controversial subject matter can produce controversy -- and boffo box office.
Kitchen Dog Theater, which will present Bug in September, with its 20 minutes of male and female nudity, certainly recognizes this. Its production of The Dead Monkey, which featured darkly comic adult situations, incited audience outcries but also became one of the theater's biggest sellers.
"Oh, yeah," agrees Richard Hamburger, artistic director of Dallas Theater Center. "From our Topdog/Underdog to Big Love, Six Degrees of Separation and Angels in America, pretty much all of our shows that have been controversial, and moved from the arts pages to the news pages, have all ended up doing one thing: selling more tickets."
7815. judithathome - 8/26/2005 4:20:33 AM It does damage to us mentally whether we are conscious of it or not, and this in turn [a]ffects our relationship with our spouses and offspring .
Then stay home and avail yourself of Reader's Digest. 7816. Ulgine Barrows - 8/26/2005 8:04:25 AM Ms. No 7808, I am avoiding Coldplay because I'm smart enough not to be media victim, heh. It just seemed to be hyped too much, as you pointed out. I might buy it later.
I'd shoot you a scornful Styx look, but I really like their early stuff, so I won't. Death to Mr. Roboto, however. I hate that song. Bunch of juvie punks sneering at their Depression-era parents' hard work. Nothing like Styx's earlier work; that they came out with the roboto song after they were 'stars' is no surprise. They just got caught in a different machine than their parents did.
One of the first rock concerts I went to was when Styx released Equinox. After Grand Illusion, we parted ways.
I have a 1975 Bad Company concert t-shirt, too, and I melt every time I hear those first strains of
"Johnny was a school boy
When he heard his first Beatles song"
I cut that t-shirt up real fancy in the flashdance days. Hmm. Wonder what it'd fetch on ebay.
I really like the new Liz Phair "Everything to Me".... her fans have been disappointed in her, too. Said she didn't live up to "Exile in Guyville." And her response was, she was moving on to other things, to paraphrase.
Perhaps Styx will redeem themselves with me. They just turned psycho when they made it big, it seemed. 7817. Macnas - 8/29/2005 9:46:26 AM Styx were never popular here in the old world, the odd tune would chart now and then, much like Toto and Speedwagon.
I did hear enough of a tune by one of the Styx band members to detest it forever. Desert Moon it was, an awful radio friendly thing, truely dire in all respects. 7818. Magoseph - 8/29/2005 1:57:05 PM John G. Roberts Jr. could have easily ignored the letter from E. F. W. Wildermuth that came across his desk in December 1982. The correspondent, an octogenarian lawyer from New York, made an obscure procedural point about the Senate's jurisdiction based on his interpretation of the 17th Amendment; it was not the sort of question that would typically require serious attention from the White House counsel's office, where Mr. Roberts worked at the time.
The Grammarian 7819. Macnas - 8/30/2005 1:47:00 PM For Billie Holiday fans, some music.
7820. Macnas - 9/5/2005 4:31:23 PM Turners "The Fighting Temeraire" has been voted the greatest painting on display in England.
Good choice, it's on my picture wall already. 7821. Magoseph - 9/6/2005 10:34:15 AM Nick Spitzer on New Orleans' Cultural History 7822. jexster - 9/6/2005 5:32:00 PM Don't know him...I moved from NO to DC in 1973 7823. Ms. No - 9/6/2005 9:52:11 PM Juditha,
Back in the 70's in Spartanburg it was the done thing to show up to the local production of Hair in order to storm out in a dither after the nude scene......which everyone knew was coming.
If people don't want to be offended then they ought to just stay the fuck home with their Precious Memories statuettes and Church approved reading.
Honestly, the very idea that your personal offense meter is more important than my enjoyment of live theater is beyond absurd. I paid my money to see this, I'm enjoying it. If you need to masturbate your ego by causing a scene do it on your own dime.
I think people should be fined and penalized for disturbing live performance.
"You're not grown-up enough to watch live theater. Sorry, there's a $50 fine for disrupting the production and you're now barred from attendance." 7824. Ms. No - 9/6/2005 9:52:36 PM Mac,
No, I haven't heard of him. I'll keep an ear out. 7825. Ms. No - 9/6/2005 10:14:59 PM Ulgine,
The problem was that Dennis DeYoung lost his freakin' mind. The Roboto album killed the band. They hated the album, they hated the concert and they hated DeYoung when it was all said and done.
Tommy Shaw left the band, John Panozzo died, JY and DeYoung both went solo and DeYoung gave us Desert Moon (gag!) . Then they got back together to do a greatest hits album and a re-recording of Lady. They did a reunion tour, hit big and decided they still didn't like DeYoung. So they replaced him as lead singer and went on tour without him. Then Chuck went public with his HIV status and he left the band mostly ---but played some of their live dates. They settled their lineup cut two albums and apparently have an album of covers out right now that kicks ass.
Best Thing, Blue Collar Man, Snowblind, Suite Madame Blue, Crystal Ball....those are the songs I love, but I can still sing along to every word of every album since Tommy Shaw joined the band up through Kilroy. I'm such a geek. 7826. Ms. No - 9/6/2005 10:22:06 PM Oh, hey! Ulgine, if you like the older stuff best (and who doesn't) the Complete Wooden Nickel Recordings came out earlier this year. It's a double album CD with 35 re-mastered cuts for $20. Good deal! 7827. Macnas - 9/8/2005 7:06:46 PM I am now listening to Linton Kwesi Johnson, Independent Intavenshan.
Thank you.
|
