Word: orpheus
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...reason is a longstanding infatuation that has recently overtaken my waking hours. Just as Orpheus' lyre drew the beasts and the rocks to him, so have the plangent cries of the pedal steel guitar attracted a hundred-odd aficionados of the instrument to this the 27th annual convention of the Pedal Steel Guitar Association. There will be performances by steelers from all over the country and Canada, a seminar (my main reason for coming) and a jam session featuring three of the leading exponents of the instrument. There will also be hardware, strings, instructional materials, hard-to-find...
Green seemed to catch on, answering lyrically with light and effortless swinging solos on the keys. Brown also dug in, and came up with his signature deep, growling bass. The trio breezed through standards like "Black Orpheus," "Sweet Georgia Brown" and "Blues For Junior" while throwing in sly references to other obscure tunes...
...fact, it was a challenge just to find an English show in London for the first summer season of the millennium. England's former colonists, the Americans and the Irish, seem to be filling all the West End theaters. Two separate Tennessee Williams plays, Orpheus Descending and Baby Doll, made their homes in London for the summer, as did David Mamet's Speed the Plow, a three-hander trying to capitalize on that other London-based, three-actor, world-wide phenomenon, Art (an import from Paris, mind you). Even the self-proclaimed (actually, government-proclaimed) flagship of the English theatrical...
...cultural conception of the afterlife, heavily laced with therapy-speak and a certain bias toward the living. Today's deceased don't rattle chains or sit on clouds strumming harps. They work out issues, as in the ghostly psychoanalysis of Sixth Sense or Edward's Oprah-meets-Orpheus sessions. They meddle, like the counsel-giving mothers on Providence and Soul Food. They have one primary job: thinking about us. In the best seller Life on the Other Side by TV psychic Sylvia Browne (a talk-show and pay-per-view fixture), spirits monitor the living from an afterworld where there...
...does not infuse enough of this music into his language and text. Ormus' songs lie flat on the page, and Rushdie's descriptions of VTO's music often leave more questions than answers. Rushdie also fails to deliver completely on his promise to present a rock version of Orpheus and Eurydice. Though he invokes the myth to great effect at the beginning of the novel, the theme is ultimately neglected. Perhaps Rushdie stretched himself too much by venturing into the world of rock, a realm he seems to know a bit about through association, but that just...