Panic set in not for the obvious reasons: the blinding white stone of the Capitol dome, ramparts and columns resembling nothing so much as Albert Speer’s Hall of the People after a full-on peroxide scrub…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Every time Russell Crowe appeared on screen in Tom Hooper’s new film of Les Misérables all I could think was: Thank God The Gladiator wasn’t a musical. Imagine if Crowe’s lean, mean, fighting machine Maximus…
An armchair psychologist might say it could only be a December baby born in the Great Depression who could have devised a song so devastatingly critical of the contradictions between consumerist Christmas and Christian charity…
Last year during the crux of pre-Christmas consumption, I ventured into the greatest musical basement east of the Village Vanguard: the classical CD section of Dussman’s Cultural Department Store in the heart of Berlin. One…
While the greatest musical dynasties ruled over vast empires of the imagination, their geographic domains were small. The Couperins held the organist post at the church of St. Gervais in Paris for nearly two hundred…
The American electoral system is a difficult thing to explain to Europeans with a long tradition of proportional representation. My first two-year stretch spent living in Berlin between 2003 and 2005 coincided with the endless…
The Romney “Believe in America” bus may have been on the road right until the end, but in the last weeks of the campaign it was clear from the laughable musical forces gathered under the…
Born October 19th, 1862 Auguste Lumière—the elder of the two brothers, who later became the world’s first filmmakers—would have celebrated his 150th birthday last week. If one defines the cinema as the projecting of a…