: requiring or calling for much ; demanding
Did I call the Heat victory and point spread or what?
Julia starts her last week of class today. Her mom comes to visit us in a couple days; I wonder what Linda will think of Statesboro?
A Soul Track for today?
Marlena Shaw's "California Soul," a sunny song written by Ashford & Simpson that was covered in 1969 by Shaw for her second album The Spice of Life. Shaw was born in New York City in 1942 and was a jazz, soul, and pop singer for Cadet, Blue Note, and Verve Records. The song was first covered by The Fifth Dimension, then Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Shaw's version, heard over the final fade-out of The Lincoln Lawyer, is marvelously jazzy. Other Ashford & Simpson compositions include "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," "Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MMflNf-ocg
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Julia and I, as mentioned, went and saw Neil Simon's Fools, which got me wanting to get back to reading plays, something I have long enjoyed. Here are 30 Plays Everyone Should Read:
- Medea, Euripides
- Antigone, Sophocles
- Macbeth, William Shakespeare
- Hamlet, William Shakespeare
- The Misanthrope, Moliere
- The Beggar's Opera, John Gay
- The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
- Waiting For Godot, Samuel Beckett
- Mother Courage and Her Children, Bertolt Brecht
- The Cherry Orchard, Anton Chekhov
- The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams
- A Doll's House, Henrik Ibsen
- Hedda Gabler, Henrik Ibsen
- Long Day's Journey Into Night, Eugene O'Neill
- Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O'Neill
- Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller
- Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
- No Exit, Jean-Paul Sartre
- Miss Julie, August Strindberg
- Man and Superman, George Bernard Shaw
- The Homecoming, Harold Pinter
- The Mousetrap, Agatha Christie
- Our Town, Thornton Wilder
- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, Tom Stoppard
- Cloud Nine, Caryl Churchill
- Fences, August Wilson
- True West, Sam Shepard
- Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet
- M Butterfly, David Henry Hwang
- Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire
Okay, and because I want to get back into reading plays, especially more modern ones, here are 30 Plays I Want to Read within the next year or two (many of which have been made into movies):
- Lost in Yonkers, Neil Simon (1991)
- Rumors, Neil Simon (1988)
- Private Lives, Noel Coward (1941)
- The Deep Blue Sea, Terrence Rattigan (1952)
- Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris (2010)
- Ruined, Lynn Nottage (2009)
- Topdog/Underdog, Suzi Lori-Parks (2001)
- Proof, David Auburn (2000)
- The Iceman Cometh, Eugene O'Neill (1939)
- The Young Man From Atlanta, Horton Foote (1994)
- The Weir, Conor McPherson (1997)
- Talley's Folley, Lanford Wilson (1979)
- Picnic, William Inge (1952)
- Arcadia, Tom Stoppard (1994)
- King Lear, William Shakespeare (1603-6)
- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Edward Albee (1966)
- Master Harold... and the Boys, Athol Fugard (1982)
- Dinner with Friends, Donald Marguiles (2000)
- Noises Off!, Michael Frayn (1982)
- A Perfect Ganesh, Terrence McNally (1982)
- The Lower Depths, Maxim Gorky (1901-2)
- A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry (1959)
- A Free Man of Color, John Guare (2011)
- Look Back in Anger, John Osborne (1956)
- The Bald Soprano, Eugene Ionesco (1940)
- The Time of Your Life, William Saroyan (1939)
- Grown Ups, Jules Feiffer (1981)
- Painting Churches, Tina Howe (1976)
- Doubt, John Patrick Shanley (2005)
- All My Sons, Arthur Miller (1947)
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Monday means an Author Profile, so let's get to it!
Arnaldur Indridason
Born: Reykjavik, Iceland, 1951
Career: Indridason is one of the bestselling novelists of Nordic crime fiction; he is arguably the most popular Icelandic novelist at work. He was the son of a writer and worked a variety of jobs before becoming a full-time novelist: screenwriter, journalist, film critic (Hitchcock was his favorite filmmaker). He graduated from the University of Iceland with a degree in History. He lives in Reykjavik, where most of his work is set, with his wife and three children. His books have been translated into over twenty languages; in America, in our post-Stieg Larsson craze for anything darkly European and mysterious, he is catching on but not as fast as he deserves.
Although he has written other thrillers, he is best known for his Reykjavik thrillers featuring police detective Erlendur, who has a troubled relationship with his addict daughter and ex-wife, who investigates murders in a dark, always cold, politically changing Iceland, full of social unrest, in which crimes and bad blood carry down through the generations, where an entire country has been rapidly modernized over the course of half a century.
Indriadson's books are bleak but terse, never overlong or wordy - crisply involving mysteries. Dark, dark, dark, dark. sometimes bleakly funny. He doesn't write for a worldwide audience, he has said, but for Icelanders. His influences are Icelandic classics and the Swedish writing duo of Sjowall-Wahloo.
Noted Books: 2000's Jar City (made into a popular Icelandic film) kicked off the Erlendur series: it's a riveting tale about an old man found dead in his apartment, possibly the result of heinous acts of violence he carried out long ago. In the fourth book in the series, The Draining Lake (2009), a murder leads Erlendur back into the Cold War period. Also an award-winning novel, 2010's blistering Hypothermia finds Erlendur investigating a seance gone wrong, an occasion that causes him to remember his own brother's disappearance long ago.
Why You Should Read Him: Well, he's very good. His plots are involving without being overly complicated. His depiction of modern Iceland - unfriendly, lonely, messy, disconnected, scary - draws you in, as do the characters, who are interesting each time out. His writing style is tough and to the point, and he keeps you turning the pages.
Books I Would Recommend: Jar City (****) was very, very good. Silence of the Grave (***), the second entry in the series, was an addictive take on long-ago violence intruding on the present; 2007's Voices (***) was probably my least well-liked book in the series so far but it was still good - a mystery involving a dead Santa Claus in a hotel around Christmas; to me, Hypothermia (*****) is his masterwork, a book that you initially greet with skepticism (a seance?) but whose power and allure just grows and grows. It haunted me and stayed with me for days.
Books I Want to Read: 2005's The Draining Lake and the upcoming Outrage (October, 2012).
I can't find any website for the author.
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DRUM ROLL PLEASE...
A while back, I posted 200 Must-See Performances of the last 40 years. Thinking about it now, I think I left a lot out; it didn't feel quite complete. So I am proud to give it another go...
The 500 Greatest Performances in the History of English-Language Film...
It is what it says it is.
This will be a slow, yearlong unveiling. These are performances that cover the entire span of cinema, the only stipulation being that no actor or actress can appear more than four times on the list; I think that's fair. No foreign films either. I won't "rank" the performances (#489, #213, etc.) until I get to the top 100. I hope you enjoy.
Geoffrey Rush
as Lionel Logue in The King's Speech (2010)
As the warm, benevolent, unorthodox Australian speech therapist who cures Colin Firth's King George VI, Rush is every bit as good as his co-star. He's strange and warm, disciplined and jovial, and he plays beautifully off of Firth. A terrific movie which gives a good showcase to an actor who can do just about anything (Shine's mentally fractured David Helfgott and the Marquis de Sade in Quills among his more memorable parts), The King's Speech gets most of its humor and heart from Rush, who convinces us with ease that he's a fine father, a fine therapist, a loyal friend, and a bit of a rascal.
Images courtesy of:
http://www.babelio.com/users/AVT_Arnaldur-Indridason_6394.jpeg
http://www.spinetinglermag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/7896271.jpg
http://www.texasartsproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/clybournepark.jpg
http://myiconcolchester.com/wp-content/gallery/shirts-music-soul/marlena-shaw-california-soul.jpg
http://0.tqn.com/d/movies/1/0/R/M/W/kings-speech-pic-geoffrey-rush.jpg
Information:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/jun/17/featuresreviews.guardianreview11
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