Song of a Reformed Headhunter

July 13, Sun Arrived late at Parliament View Apartments, along Albert Embarkment. Danced at Fire, in Vauxhall. July 14, Mon Walked round Westminster and Soho. Watched Billy Eliot the Musical at Victoria Palace Theatre. Drank at Comptons.  July 15, Tue Spent afternoon with Anna and James at Hyde Park. Had dinner with Mary and Derek in Soho. Drank at Comptons and G-A-Y.  July 16, Wed Walked along South Bank. Visited Tate Modern: Bacon and Picasso room; Pollock's Summertime . Watched stand-up comedy at Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Drank at Barcode Vauxhall. July 17, Thu Watched King Lear at Shakespeare's Globe. Dinner at the Box. Drank at Rupert Street and 79 CXR.  July 18, Fri Visited the British Museum: the Parthenon Marbles. Danced at G-A-Y.  July 19, Sat Visited Sir John Soanes Museum: Hogarth's Election and The Rake's Progress . Visited National Gallery: Cezanne's Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses);  Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres;  and Velazquez's The Rokeby Ve...

Studio 54, where the Roundabout Theater Company is now presenting the Stephen Sondheim musical, has quite a history . It was an opera house, a live dinner theater, a radio and TV stage, a wildly fashionable discotheque, before Roundabout bought it in 2003 for a permanent home for musicals. I loved the dark green and gold detailing on the doors and lobby, the Venus and Cupid moldings, and the faded chandeliers. The theater's faded elegance was in sharp and productive contrast with this high-tech revival of Sunday in the Park with George . Seurat's painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte was not only projected onto the white walls and doors on stage, it came alive in animation, blurring the line between life and art, the blurring a theme of the musical. The director Sam Buntrock worked as an animation director on numerous commercial and corporate projects, besides creating animation for BBC and HBO. The great moment in the animation came for me right at the en...

(Image from MoMA website) Saw the drawings of the pontillist at MoMa the Sunday before last. I like the drawings much better than the paintings. Drawn with conte crayon on Michellet paper, the drawings are velvety, as a friend puts it. They are certainly softer, more tender, than the stiff and isolated figures in the big iconic paintings such as A Sunday on La Grande Jatte . One drawing, of a boy in the artist's studio, shows such a gentle, vulnerable back shoulder of the boy that it almost made me weep. The drawing was a study for another big painting called Bathing at Asniers . In that painting, the boy has been transformed by so-called rational, scientific technique into a minor figure in the frieze of land and water.