Word: orpheus
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...must have seemed like a good idea at the onset: Why not retell the mythic story of Orpheus and Eurydice, this time casting the principals as international pop/rock stars? Ergo Salman Rushdie's sixth novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Henry Holt; 575 pages; $27.50), which recounts the fabulous lives and careers of the singer-composer Ormus Cama and his beloved co-vocalist Vina Apsara, as remembered by their mutual friend, the news photographer Umeed ("Rai") Merchant. His opening sentence foretells Vina's death--she was swallowed up by an earthquake in Mexico in 1989--and Rai presents himself...
...plex watching The Matrix. Carrie-Anne Moss kicks some 'droid butt, makes a streetwide leap from one building top to the next, then crash lands through a small window. "The bitch is bad," one of the guys opines. "Go, girl!" Then Laurence Fishburne shows up as Morpheus--a morphing Orpheus, a black White Rabbit, an R.-and-B. Obi-Wan Kenobe, a big bad John the Baptist, a Gandalf who grooves; every wise guide from literature, religion, movies and comix. Though he's in a dark room in the dead of night, and as if he needed to be more...
...search--the quest--informs Greek myths ("We have Orpheus and Morpheus in the film," says Larry) as well as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "It's a story about consciousness," says Larry, "a child's perception of an adult's world. The Matrix is about the birth and evolution of consciousness. It starts off crazy, then things start to make sense." It can also be read as a variant on Gibson's Neuromancer, the 1986 cyberpunk classic about a computer cowboy on the run. "It'd be near impossible to make a movie out of that," says Larry. "We knew...
Oddly enough, Gluck maintains a cool, stony voice throughout--despite her pluralistic embraces. She recalls antiquity, speaking through Aeneas, Eurydice and Orpheus in various poems, yet her usage encloses the most tragic scenes in a modern living room. She retells: "In the end, Dido/summoned her ladies in waiting/that they might see/the harsh destiny inscribed for her by the fates." The phrase "In the end" dooms the stanza to almost blase speech, which is almost bucked by the phrase "that they might," until the stanza ends with the prepositional pile-up "inscribed for her by the fates." Flat language and idioms...
...years back the innocuous if slightly disturbing cable TV network made classical music headlines when it began to accompany its scrolling local weather reports with recordings of young violin virtuoso Gil Shaham and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra performing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Sales for the CD and for classical music in general skyrocketed, and Shaham rose to megastar status on the tide of his impeccable, resonant, almost glowing violin playing. At that time, however, Shaham was already a well-respected figure in the music world, having debuted at the age of 10 with the Jerusalem Symphony, attended Juilliard after graduating...