Briefs
Reviews of Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry, My Mother Says, Invisible History: The Collected Poems of Walta Borawski, Swollening: Poems, Friedrich Nietzsche (Critical Lives), and the album Homosexual by Darren Hayes.
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Blog Posts
Getting to the Wild Side
Simon Doonan’s Transformer is a light-hearted, deeply personal, thoroughly researched examination of the social and artistic revolution in fashion and music ushered in during the 1960s and ’70s, and the role of Transformer in that revolution.
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A Classic Novel Comes to the Met
The opera The Hours brings to the stage the LGBT love lives (including their failures) of Laura Brown, Kitty, Clarissa and Sally, and Richard and Louis. Indeed it adds one same-sex relationship to the mix. A key incident in both Mrs Dalloway and in the 1990s Clarissa story involves Clarissa buying flowers for the party. In the opera, the florist, Barbara (sung beautifully by Kathleen Kim), has an extended coloratura flirtation with Clarissa as well.
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Briefs
Brief reviews of the books A Short History of Queer Women, Brother Alive, Jazzed, and Love Poems of a Gay Nerd; and the album Bronco.
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Fun with Music Theory
EVERY GOOD BOY Does Fine is an engaging memoir by MacArthur “Genius Grant” pianist Jeremy Denk. With humor and intelligence, he recounts his life story through his music lessons and his love for music.
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Stephen Sondheim: A Private Public Figure
Stephen Sondheim died in Jeff Romley’s arms on November 26, 2022. The cause was cardiovascular disease. He left us just days before the release of the film tick, tick…BOOM!, which memorializes Jonathan Larson’s deep debt to Sondheim. The aforementioned revival of Company is set to run on Broadway through the end of this year. It is far from the last revival of his many great musicals that we can anticipate as the years roll merrily along.
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Society’s Survivor
IN JANUARY, singer-songwriter Janis Ian releases what she calls her “swan song” album, The Light at the End of the Line (Rude Girl Records). With nine Grammy nominations and two wins, the singer at age seventy has nothing left to prove, but she delivers an astoundingly resonant collection, her first full album in fifteen years.
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LNX’s Acid Trip from Creation to Doom
MONTERO (Call Me By Your Name) by Lil Nas X Columbia Records LIL NAS X’s 2021 music video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” challenges traditional categories.…More
‘Only Here to Sin’
TWO ARTIFACTS of LGBT popular culture in 2021 feel like déjà vu all over again, particularly evoking the zeitgeist of the 1980s. Each in its way has been a stake through the hypocritical heart of America’s religious Right. …
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