Theater, Movies, Art and Literature

http://www.pangloss.com/seidel/Shaker/ Auto-generate Shakespearean insults. Thou mangled tardy-gaited bladder! Thou unmuzzled clapper-clawed jolt-head! Thou cockered dread-bolted moldwarp!

For real! https://m.fanfiction.net/s/6794663/1/Bouncing-Through-the-Garden

El Greco in New York review: as good as it gets outside Spain Compelling and strangely modern, the Mets 400th anniversary show demonstrates that El Greco saw painting as more than just a craft. It was a philosophical, intellectual and religious undertaking http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/nov/09/el-greco-in-new-york-review-as-good-as-it-gets-outside-spain

Purity Of Essence...!

Beautiful tumblr of images from medieval books: http://erikkwakkel.tumblr.com Medieval book historian at Leiden University, The Netherlands. I post images from medieval books. More eye candy on Twitter (@erik_kwakkel) and longer blogs on medievalbooks.nl. I found this from a CNN.com piece highlighting the delightful informal doodles often unrelated to the formal text: http://www.cnn.com/2014/11/03/world/medieval-doodles/?cid=homepage-ob-gc&iref=obnetwork

The Lovecraft Engine Being a generator of descriptions most foul and corrupt... Horror author and all round great guy H.P.Lovecraft has often been accused of going a bit overboard in the terrifying description department. Click the button below to receive a randomly generated Lovecraftian description and make up your own mind. CTHULHU FHTAGN Click ye Button to begin... 409 Adjectives, 151 Nouns! Any actual Lovecraft quote, or indeed anything that even remotely sounds like a Lovecraft quote produced by this thing is probably coincidental http://www.wyrmworld.com/interactive/lovecraft/lovecraft.html

Seen about half of these. Decent choices! Some eye candy in the article. The 13 Most Homoerotic Horror Movies Of All Time: Happy Halloween http://m.newnownext.com/gay-horror-movies-homoerotic-halloween/10/2014/?xrs=synd_facebook_logo

Bit fey, but a good effort. Poetry Brothel puts the bawd in bard A party where you pay to have verse read to you in a bordello-style setting is packing in the punters. Are poetry and sex work really comparable? http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/28/poetry-brothel-putting-bawd-in-bard

One of my all-time favorite flicks. Still amazing & uproarious that Roger Ebert wrote the screenplay. BVD on DVD The Kelly Affair (Marcia McBroom, Dolly Read and Cynthia Myers) perform at a midwestern school prom before becoming The Carrie Nations in BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment's two-disc set of Russ Meyer's cult classic BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS is one of those rare cases where an offbeat film is given all the love and indulgence even the most ardent fan could muster, proving once and for all that the film's place in history is now assured. Last night, I watched BVD (as it's known by cultists) no less than three tim…

...awarded the prestigious Polar music prize this past August: http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/aug/26/chuck-berry-wins-polar-music-prize Seeing him perform one night back in 1981, in a small venue in New Haven called the Agora Ballroom, remains the best live pop music performance I've ever experienced. (Made a huge Billy Idol concert at Wolf Trap that a friend dragged me to soon afterward look positively silly by comparison.)

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/16/cubism-met-review-lauder-picasso-braque

Not exactly art but theatre maybe. Interesting anyway. The picture that proves why iconic photograph of workers eating their lunch on Rockefeller beam was all a publicity stunt Shot of 11 workers eating and smoking 69 floors up was staged for promotion of the nearly finished building By Sara Malm Published: 07:29 EST, 20 September 2012 | Updated: 05:43 EST, 21 September 2012 dailymail.co.uk It is one of the most iconic photographs of all time but as it celebrates its 80th anniversary it has emerged that ‘Lunch atop a Skyscraper’ may not have been as impromptu as previously thought. Archivists say the shot showing 11 construction workers enjoying their break on a …

http://www.bartleby.com/ ...great online trove of books now out of copyright: reference, verse, fiction, nonfiction. The Reference section for example contains the full texts of: Quotations Bartlett, John. 1919. Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. Including over 11,000 quotations, the first new edition of John Bartlett’s corpus to be published after his death in 1905 keeps most of his original work intact. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917. These 41,480 selections divided into 1,500 categories include thousands of authors and an entire volume’s-worth of Shakespeare. Dictionary of Quotations. 1899. These 28,732 selections feature non-English language …

Uproarious. http://www.parodies.org.uk/shakespeare-beerbohm.htm Above site contains only Act I of the 5-act piece. Still scouring for the rest online. First encountered it in this great parody anthology: http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0918222303?pc_redir=1410520693&robot_redir=1

So now there is a dinner-theatre show (of a sort) in London, and traveling apparently, where you the audience sit down to dinner and the whole restaurant setting is in fact the stage for a Fawlty Towers-inspired performance of controlled mayhem around you. http://faultytowers.net/ Hard to tell from this if it would be irritating, or huge fun!

Coast to coast with John Waters: an extract from Carsick 'The van takes off and everybody starts smoking joints.' An edited highlight from John Waters' account of hitchhiking across America http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/oct/12/carsick-extract-john-waters-hitchikes-across-america

She's autistic. The paintings shown in the article are truly something. http://www.cnn.com/2014/10/09/world/the-extraordinary-art-of-autistic-five-year-old-monet/?cid=homepage-ob-gc&iref=obnetwork

Why Do People in New Orleans Talk That Way? The origins of the accent. By Jesse Sheidlower If you've been listening to coverage of Katrina's devastation on the radio, you've no doubt heard the distinctive New Orleans accents of victims, officials, and rescue workers alike. Some of them speak with a familiar, Southern drawl; others sound almost like they're from Brooklyn. Why do people in New Orleans talk that way? New Orleans has long been one of the most diverse cities in the country, and it has a correspondingly rich level of linguistic diversity. Founded by the French in the early 18th century, the city was ruled by Spain from 1763 to 1803; in the 1760s, the …

Just came across this cute SF/horror/camp (redundant! ) film blog: http://krelllabs.blogspot.com/ Sample content, on 2 flicks I adore... Surcease of Sorrow We trundled ourselves up to St. Louis on Sunday to attend the Vincentennial showing of The Raven and The Abominable Dr. Phibes. In truth, this would not have been my choice (the Laura/Dragonwyck double tonight would be more to my liking), but it's what fit our schedule and, well, it's an event that we wanted to support. Plus, I had never seen any of the Corman Poe films on the big screen, and feel poorer for it. The Raven came after the initial flurry of films when Corman was beginning to burn out on Poe. The di…

Professor Stephen Hawking credited as guest vocalist on new Pink Floyd album ...On the song Keep Talking, Hawking's computerised voice begins by saying: "For millions of years, mankind lived just like the animals. Then something happened which unleashed the power of our imagination."... http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-09/stephen-hawking-returns-as-vocalist-on-new-pink-floyd-album/5800286 For RA1: I think this is the coolest thing since Hawking's cameo on Star Trek: The Next Generation in a holo deck poker game convened by Data that also included Einstein and Newton. To say nothing of his guest starring on The Simpsons!

http://www.dailywritingtips.com/the-yiddish-handbook-40-words-you-should-know/ As a goy I found two or three new words here and some nice shadings in several of the definitions. Currently suffering as my Yiddish phrase book is buried in a box somewhere in the basement.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4933/the-art-of-fiction-no-13-dorothy-parker

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6017/the-art-of-comics-no-1-r-crumb

OK, not really overtly gay-themed, but anyway. Coming across this bit of dialog on IMDB Quotes reminds me -- time to watch this one yet again! Jean Brodie: [after Miss Mackay has read a supposedly incriminating letter, written by Sandy and Jenny] There's very little for me to say, Miss Mackay in the face of your extraordinary prejudice and hostility. Miss Mackay: Miss Brodie, I am not asking you to say anything. I am asking... demanding... that you put your signature, your own signature, on a letter of resignation which I have prepared for you. Jean Brodie: I will not resign. Miss Mackay: If you will not resign, you will force me to dismiss you. Jean Brodie: I will n…

http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=XKRj-T4l-e8