‘Adventures In Dementia is a collaboration between the ex-Auters frontman Luke Haines and artist Scott King which tells the fictionalised story of Skrewdriver’s lead singer crashing his car into the back of Mark E Smith’s caravan – with actors playing both parts, and is being performed as part of King’s Festival Of Stuff on July…
Category: opera
Friday’s Forgotten Books: Between the Angels and the Apes
Not so much “forgotten” as — what? Aborted? Headed off at the pass? The initial news was wonderful: Alan Moore writing an opera on John Dee with Gorillaz! What’s not to love? It sounded like a match made in an alchemical lab somewhere with the potential of turning into gold. There was just one problem:…
Review: Terry Gilliam’s The Damnation of Faust
I had a lot of trepidation about the ENO production of Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust; not because Gilliam hadn’t done opera before, which seemed to put some people off—after all what better to do with an over-sized imagination than put it to use in the heightened spectacle of opera?—but because of the trailer and…
Publication: Heofen rece swealg
My essay about the Grendel opera, “Heofen rece swealg: Neomedievalism and Spectacle in Grendel: Transcendence of the Great Big Bad” appears in the latest issue of This Year’s Work in Medievalism. This was the paper I gave at the conference in London, Ontario in October 2007, where Terry Jones of the Pythons was the keynote…
Publications
I always forget about so many of the things I’ve written until I have something jog my memory. This week my faulty memory was jogged by reminders about revisions. I had completely forgotten about one of the essays (yeah, that’s just how absent-minded I am) and that I was supposed to be revising it. Hee…
The Doctor will be In
Thanks to Crispinus, I just found out that Jonathan Miller is going to be at Skidmore next month. Whoo hoo! He’s like a rock star of British comedy, theatre and performance. I remember being riveted to the tv every time he was on Dick Cavett back in the 70s and 80s. Of course, the fact…
K. A. Laity 