This morning at my usual haunt, I watched as a bearded 20-something — T-shirt and pot-belly — sloshed and sloshed and sloshed his coffee on the condiment counter, stirring it like he absolutely, positively didn’t give a shit. “Dude!” I said, thinking I might snap him out of whatever born-in-a-barn reverie had laid hold of him, but he […]
All I remember about Ken Russel’s 1983 production of Madama Butterfly is the atomic blast that put the button on Butterfly’s death. He flashed a bank of stage lights, hitherto unseen, directly at the audience, and in the seconds it took our eyes to readjust, turn-of-the-century Nagasaki was transformed into a floor-to-fly-space blaze of corporate logos – Toyota, Honda, Mitsubishi, Sony – as if the explosion had blown […]
