newcritics

“You and my dad, you two ran North Jersey.”
“Hmph. That’s nice.”
Gandolfini is at his hulking, ominous best in the penultimate scene of the series finale, when Tony goes to see Junior in the state facility. He’s trying to see to things—to make sure Junior’s stash goes where it “should,” to Bobby’s children (and [...]

The television has recently been awash with the Ocean’s series, from the network premiere of Ocean’s 12 on CBS, to the 1960 Ocean’s 11 on AMC, and the 2001 on TBS, all leading up to June 8’s release of Ocean’s 13, which happens to be right between the last two Sopranos episodes.
This recent [...]

All the attention to the end of The Sopranos may seem extreme, or ridiculous, or both. But I like to think of it as an updating of the crowds who waited on the dock in Victorian New York to get the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop.
I bet our Victorian antecedents [...]

The Tristan Project at Avery Fisher Hall on May 2 was a triumph of creative vision and the top professionalism of deeply talented artists. Elements one always seeks in live performance of any kind that are too often disappointing.
A concert setting of opera has elegance and purity, with the orchestra onstage and the singers in [...]

The news this week out of Baghdad is relentlessly grim. The NY Times reports that a suicide bomber killed 10 people, following the 171 who died in the capital in the deadliest day since the American-led security plan for the city took effect two months ago.
Amid the smoke and the pain and the horror, [...]

The Family came to town last night for their annual press preview at Radio City (which I did not attend) and for a more intimate thematic gathering at the small museum where I toil.
As the series itself is facing its final hour (or final eight episode hours) we gathered together “whacked” Sopranos—those actors whose character [...]

“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible. This I did.”
So wrote T.E.Lawrence [...]

“In the real dark night of the soul, it is always 3 o’clock in the morning, day after day,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in his 1936 book The Crack-Up.
It’s a poignant, sad, personal expression of his own mental state, when at 39 he comes to realize that somewhere along the line he has [...]

Valentine’s Day summons up memories for me of the time Steed and I spent with the BVS (British Venusian Society) a while back.
It also calls to mind some of the great poetry of the ages.
I always thought Matthew Arnold had the best all round take on love in that exquisite last stanza of Dover Beach. [...]

How’s that for counter-programming to SB XLI ? Before the current spotlight fades on Hardy, I wanted to note his poetry. Like Robert Graves, his first love was his poems, not the novels that paid the bills.
I don’t remember when I first read Hardy’s “Convergence of the Twain—Lines on the loss the Titanic,” [...]

There is a new biography of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin that has been well reviewed. I like when new work comes out on a classic writer because it turns a million eyeballs to that name, if just for the length of reading a review. It jogs our collective memory of dusty parts of [...]

It’s been quite the day for the Scots: January 25 is Rabbie Burns’s birthday. St. Andrew’s Societies all over the world have been serving haggis in his honor. Steed and I had a Scottish adventure once - it was a great excuse to see him in a kilt.
I don’t know much about Robert Burns, beyond [...]