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The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society as Performance Piece

I’ve been listening to the magnificent album The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society a lot recently, sometimes as much as a few times a week. I have come to regard it as sort of a performance piece — like a short play for the ears that I can enjoy wherever I am whether through the magnificent cigarette pack sized iPod or, more properly, spinning thirty three and a third revolutions per minute. It is a brilliant thirty-nine minutes performance although it usually feels longer than that, particularly when you think about the words being sung.

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Giving Up On Gossip Girl

After a really disappointing fourth season opener, my wife and I have decided that we are just going to give up and stop spending 45 (or so) minutes every week watching Gossip Girl. For the first year or two we were fans but a line has to be drawn — enough is enough.

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Excoriating Naturalism and Realism

There is nothing worse in the Art World than Realism and Naturalism.  What good is an original painting that — “looks just like the photograph!” — when the duty of the Artist is to transform reality and bend understanding in new, and perhaps, unwanted and unheralded directions?  No talent is needed for mimicry or absolute imitation.

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Once is Always Enough

One time is plenty.  A single experience can last a lifetime.  Once is always enough! 

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The Stench of Death at Ford's Theatre

There is something crass and congenitally wrong with continuing to produce live performances at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. President Lincoln was shot in the back of the head there by John Wilkes Booth in 1865.  Why do Americans totemize the gory deaths of our leaders?  The limousine President Kennedy was assassinated in is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

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Sport in Live Performance

Today’s modern sporting events reflect the most seductive part of live performance:  Creating Dramatic Tension — and the buildup to the annual Super Bowl celebration is one of the finest examples of spectacle in performance wrapped in football pads and held tight with crossed fingers.  The countdown clocks on NFL.com today directly inherit, and reflect, the innate sense of doom and pending explosion that so many modern dramas lack on the live stage.

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Miep Gies Saved Anne Frank

Miep Gies died Monday night.  She was 100-years-old, and while we will miss her spirit, we must not weep for her.  Miep’s life life was filled with good deeds and her legacy in the arc of human suffering is evergreen and must never be forgotten; she was one of those rare, grand, people, who live a proper and righteous life.  Without Miep Gies, we would not have Anne Frank.

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