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Meryl Streep’s performance in ‘Doubt’ is so layered and played out in full scenes ala the period in American filmmaking that the film happens to be set in. Rarities on both counts. Lucky this year that there is another performance that is just as compelling with some of the same qualities- Frank Langella’s scathingly human portrait of Richard Nixon in Ron Howard’s film version of ‘Frost/Nixon.’ Langella, who created the role on stage last year, reprises it with Shakespearean tragicomedia, intact on film. With any luck these two actors will consider teaming up in, say, a much needed new American version of ‘MacBeth.’

potd by Jan Carroll
Sphvanx for the memories

LOTD overheard

“He proposed and gave her the ring and when she opened the box said without pause ‘this is princess cut, I have to have square.’

note to Miss Dubois

Cold staring over a sliver a moon tonight is Venus masquerading as the biggest star.

Bloggerdrill:

From NYT’s political writer Bob Herbert’s column today.

“When Mr. Bush officially takes his leave in three weeks (in reality, he checked out long ago), most Americans will be content to sigh good riddance. I disagree. I don’t think he should be allowed to slip quietly out of town. There should be a great hue and cry — a loud, collective angry howl, demonstrations with signs and bullhorns and fiery speeches — over the damage he’s done to this country.”

I second that with a revisit to my Dec. 2006 article ‘Beyond Bush’

I remember how much our generation hated Nixon and that hate galvanized the issues into real action, not just mud-slinging. But to many, Nixon’s bigger crimes and misdemeanors was his mishandling of an immoral war and his sacrifice of American soldiers in abstruse concept of ’peace with honor’ in Vietnam. Nixon’s war lies were stifled by the Watergate flood. I say this as a gay liberal pacifist (for lack of a better political label) who disagrees with the President on just about everything.

After he got in, Bush made it clear that any pro-gay stance by his administration was off the table. It was very difficult for me not to despise the President after he courted the gay vote in 2000, then endorsed the rabid anti-homosexual agenda for the next 6 years. And there is no forgetting the vitriolic attitudes his administration held against opponents of the war in viciously questioning their patriotism.

winter Sphvynx

POTD by Jan Carroll

From
Jeffyfish Ball

Platinum ice dome
Matches my hair
Absorbed the sun that
Hex spotted the rolling
Veil, the corps
fanning at dusk,
Exposing and hiding
Their fleshua, descending
Cracking
Picked up whales’ sonar
(same old slabs loitering
Since forever)
Trolling for our iniquities
Flying in unlikely
Formations and mistaken
For our escorts
the pink
Fairy crabs trying
To radiate their
delusion
When they blithely
Signal the
Beginning of this dance
Vesci enshrouds her
Topaz veins,
just to take the floor
That expanse
waves
conclave
Domed plumes,
she trips ova
Her lilac cape aswirl
Exposing a cancerous spine
Brilliant against
The ice basilica
Her mercury scrim
Ballone on the tendril
of the satin phallus
and the laughing hymen

from Madrigal

Clive: Whilst that he make only a lonely heart.
Ian: A heart that waits not to be so alone.
Clive: But that he liveth in anothers’ exile.
Ian: That it is so willed by others.
Clive: When others disgrace my heart’s meaning.
Ian: Thou in thy holy company.
Clive: Don’t dare consider it mine.
Ian: Who has but last considered it?
Clive: One that is true to thy heart.

from Madrigal

Clive: Whilst that he make only a lonely heart.
Ian: A heart that waits not to be so alone.
Clive: But that he liveth in anothers’ exile.
Ian: That it is so willed by others.
Clive: When others disgrace my heart’s meaning.
Ian: Thou in thy holy company.
Clive: Don’t dare consider it mine.
Ian: Who has but last considered it?
Clive: One that is true to thy heart.

Purrr Eartha

Eartha Kitt has died at age 81.

Last year, I was lucky enough to get to interview Ms. Kitt for Edge Magazine. She may have played a campy Catwoman on Batman but over six decades she had nine real lives on stage, recordings, film and tv. She most endured as an indelible and influential cabaret and jazz singer.

Ms. Kitt never forgot her legions of fans in the GLBT community. In fact, she told me “I owe a lot to the gay world. When I got into trouble with the government, the gay world they kept my name alive . They kept imitating me, and bought my records… so I’m very grateful for that.“ Like a lot of gay men, her purr was on my hard drive before I had a computer.

Here is part of our interview from May 2007, a week before she appeared at an arts fundraiser at The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia.

A growly contralto came through my phone in May of 2007. “Yes?” This is Lew.. “Yes?….” Can I call you Eartha……..“yesss“ Forget Eartha, I was turning to stone by that devastating voice. Ms. Kitt had agreed to a phone interview with me a week before her last performance in Philadelphia. Will there be any way to journalistically capture a conversation with Eartha Kitt? Impossible from the start because it is a completely unique live experience. But that voice is so well known that everyone who has heard it and can hear it purring in their mind at will.

For me I can still summon the image of Eartha singing ‘Santa Baby,’ looking naked except for a white fox stole she held in front of her. Eartha surrounded by mirrors, every inch of her percolating as she sing the sumptuous ‘C’est Si Bon.’ Eartha telling Nat King Cole that he should play his own music in the movie ‘St. Louis Blues.’ And later, in Philadelphia, Eartha at Equus, singing in the day singing her campy disco hit. And further back. Eartha as Catwoman! Only Ms. Kitt could make everybody fall in love with her with the line ‘I want to be evil, I want to spit nails.”

Come On-A My House

“I’m sitting out here on a balcony and a veranda that looks over the Saugatuck. I have to be where water is, I have to live where I can see the water.” Kitt said quietly. Such a concrete image, Eartha on a balcony. There were so many that were swirling in my head as I was trying not to fawn.

Kitt is celebrating her 80th birthday this year and will be performing at a gala arts event honoring Pennsylvania Mayor Ed Rendell at the Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia May 17, then she will be appearing at Carnegie Hall and with various symphony orchestras.

She returns to the famed Carlyle Room in New York this fall, her current CD Kitt was in ‘Nine, the Musical’ on Broadway “those women were absolutely fabulous. I just finished in ‘Skin of our teeth’ and which will probably be fixed to go to Broadway with it.” A whole new generation know her through her characterizations in Disney movies.

“Now I’m going to be with the symphony in Ottawa, I’m leaving in a couple of hours. My program is varied from doing legitimate theater or it can be cut down or enlarged. What is this place that I’m coming to now?” she asked.

For her return to the Carlyle she will not be performing only her standards. “ Some of those things I’ve done there before, that what‘s on Live At The Carlyle. We’re always working on new songs, not what they are writing these days because I think those songs are not very meaningful. The business is so so so commercial for money…..I think it’s lost it’s salsa, as we say in Spanish, the soul.