In Wes Anderson’s latest film, Asteroid City, the writer-director manages the unlikely feat of producing a vision that is simultaneously pre- and post-apocalyptic. In an Eisenhower-era Los-Alamos-meets-Area-51-meets-proto-Las-Vegas desert outpost the threat of nuclear annihilation literally…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
There is “town vomit” on the streets of Elsinore (Helsingor in Danish), a mere cobblestone’s throw from Hamlet’s castle. Depending on your temperament the stench might evoke either a medieval morosity or a renaissance joie…
Leader of the Republican revolt against suspension of the debt ceiling just passed in the House of Representatives, Rep. Chip Roy of Texas is a self-professed man of faith. One does not have to scratch…
After the first installment of my planned two-part tribute to Harry Belafonte, who died a month ago at the age of 96, two weeks of nonsense intervened. First came the coronation of Charles III—the pomp…
The Eurovision Song Contest has long burst the geographically borders seemingly staked out by its name. Yet the international spectacle hardly makes a blip on America’s collective consciousness or its screens. Other countries even farther…
Not only the living were listening in Westminster Abbey last Saturday. The dead heard the music too. Among the legion of once famous, wealthy, and powerful entombed there, none was bigger of girth and of…
Arrayed behind the twenty-one-year-old Harry Belafonte on the night of his unlikely debut as a singer in January of 1949 was a quartet of modern music greats: Al Haig on piano, Max Roach on drums,…
In an April 4th ceremony in the vast and bleak plaza in front of NATO’s $1 billion, 250 square meter Brussels headquarters conducted in the presence of Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and U. S. Secretary…
In the movie business typecasting can be as much of a curse for composers as for actors. Marco Beltrami made his name in Hollywood with his score for Wes Craven’s satirical slasher movie Scream back…