Word: livenation
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AROUND ABOUT 1966, when Prince produced and directed Cabaret, things begin to liven up. What drew him to the play, he explains, was "the parallel between the spiritual bankruptcy of Germany in the 1920s and our country in the 1960s." At the first rehearsal, Prince showed the actors a photograph of "a group of Aryan blonds in their late teens, stripped to the waist, wearing religious medals, snarling at the camera like a pack of hounds." The cast placed the picture in pre-war Germany. Actually, Prince pointed out ominously, it was a gang of toughs fighting the integration...
Mozart's Second Horn Concerto is a thematically and harmonically uninteresting work, and soloist Charles Kavaloski--principal horn with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and HRO alumnus--did nothing to liven it up. His tone and pitch were flawless, but his interpretation was deadpan and uninspired. The third movement is written as a spirited march, but Kavaloski played it like an exercise and looked as though the monotony of it all were putting him to sleep. "Iberia" is too flashy and difficult a work to do justice to at 1 a.m. It was the only truly entertaining work on the program...
Five years after the University Hall bust and student strike at Harvard, I can appreciate the need for some leading participants in those upheavals to indulge in petty mythmaking. After all, the invention of a few colorful stories about martyrs, villains and dastardly deeds can liven up the historical record. Instead of the drab truth, they present us with history as a melodrama in which good guys line up against bad guys. More than that, myths can serve a useful social purpose. They help us to justify past revolutionary struggles and to raise present radical consciousness...
Stories about a friend who could boast of having put fewer than 30 attended lectures under his belt in his entire Harvard career because he spent his daytime gambling at the race track, and his evenings getting laid. Stories about a friend who liked to liven up dead and dull cocktail parties by whipping his penis out of his unzipped trousers to dangle bare for all to see; he would then approach a professor and carry on in all dignity until the professor looked down and choken on his liquor, at which point he would unobtrusively take leave and approach...
...customarily ended campaign speeches by pulling out his pocket watch and looking at it mournfully. "This was my grandfather's watch." Pause. "He sold it to me on his deathbed." As for his contribution to the House of Commons, Freud says, unconvincingly: "It is not my ambition to liven up the debate in Parliament." But, he adds, with a look as baleful as the one he wears (and shares with a bloodhound) on a celebrated British TV commercial for dog food: "A monopolies commission ought to look into the number of bores at Westminster...