OMG. Time magazine’s tv critic James Poniewozik has done a 100 Best TV Shows for the latest issue! Awesome! Well, ok, I haven’t seen the list in its entirety yet (Beavis and Butthead?!), so I shouldn’t be so effusive. But, it’s all cool to me anyway – even if it’s still “just tv,” respect the tv. See the video where he explains how he did it. I may not quite agree with his list (Beavis and Butthead?), but it seems like a pretty cool list all in all.
On serious notes:
The passing of Luciano Pavarotti. A singular voice indeed. The NY Times’ classical music critic Anthony Tommasini said it nicely:
But no one ever mistook the voice of Luciano Pavarotti. There was the warm, enveloping sound: a classic Italian tenor voice, yes, but touched with a bit of husky baritonal darkness, which made Mr. Pavarotti’s flights into his gleaming upper range seem all the more miraculous.
And it wasn’t just the sound that was so recognizable. In Mr. Pavarotti’s artistry, language and voice were one. He had an idiomatic way of binding the rounded vowels and sputtering consonants of his native Italian to the tones and colorings of his voice. This practice is central to the Italian vocal heritage, and Mr. Pavarotti was one of its exemplars.
For intelligence, discipline, breadth of repertory, musicianship, interpretive depth and virile vocalism, Mr. Pavarotti was outclassed by his Three Tenors sidekick and chief rival, Plácido Domingo. But for sheer Italianate tenorial beauty, Mr. Pavarotti was hard to top.
The passing of Madeline L’Engle, one of my childhood’s favorite writers. Among other thoughts:
“A Wrinkle in Time” was amazing – heck, the entire Time series was an epic work of characters dealing with their universe. L’Engle was fantastic for her creations: Meg, who wasn’t the prettiest of girls, who envied her mom for being intellectually brilliant and beautiful, who later found her own beauty and strength in her capacity to love and understand and overcome her anger; Charles Wallace, the baby brother who grew to be an unusual teenager (surely I wasn’t the only one who thought “A Swiftly Tilting Planet” was such a vivid and amazing epic of time traveling? Who’d think that this was the same Charles Wallace as in “A Wrinkle in Time”?); the twins Sandy and Dennys, supposedly the normal ones of the four Murry children – who get their own epic time adventure in “Many Waters” (I don’t think I ever quite appreciated the Noah’s arc story until L’Engle did it); and even Calvin O’Keefe, the athletic smart boy who ends up being the love of Meg’s life and becoming the marine biologist he only dreamed of being. I never quite got into the stories of Polly O’Keefe, Meg and Calvin’s daughter, or the other books by L’Engle. But, there’s no doubt that she made children’s literature literature. Gosh, just remembering the books and gleaning at them on Amazon makes me want to find my old copies and re-read them.
The L’Engle obituary in the NY Times that I link above – I thought it was great, I thought – little touches of the person, not just the achievements.