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Criticals – Ennis Smith

Criticals

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Criticals, Dance, Film, Music, My back pages

Crazy Rhythms in a Night of Love

November 29, 2020

Last night I enhaled the glorious mise en scene of Steve McQueen’s Lover’s Rock, one of the five short films that comprise his Small Axe series (Amazon Prime). All that polyester! Sweaty dancers and swigs of beer redolent of high school parties in the basements of classmate’s houses! It’s the power of film, and its…

Criticals, Deep Songs, Writings

Becoming an Actor Taught Me How to Write

December 28, 2019

When I was a 10 year-old boy soprano, a choirmaster proclaimed, “Music is a picture painted on a background of silence.” It was an abstraction that stuck, as first lessons of craft tend to do. Others I’ve heard: Show, don’t tellA cliché is a cliché because it’s trueAlways hold something backAvoid passivity in your attackThe music…

Art, Criticals, Deep Songs, Gay, Literature, Museums/Galleries

Man on Fire

August 18, 2018

I was finishing a late-aborning BA when a professor introduced me to the works of David Wojnarowicz. No doubt she fathomed that he could be a model for the writing I was attempting—autobiography of a frank, sexual nature that also had very much to do with loss and the times in which I came of…

Art, Criticals, Museums/Galleries

Heavenly Rests

March 30, 2016

Want to know what it’s like to live inside a dream? The installation art of Do Ho Suh provides a lovely metaphor for the ways we carry our notions of home and hearth, and how a place, or even a country, imprints until it becomes part of us. Suh recreates these totems most strikingly in…

Criticals, Film, Gay, History, Short Cuts, Theater

Oscar Bait!

January 2, 2015

It isn’t true for every child that grows up in a large family, but it was true for me: I wanted to be seen. There I was, a middle child (one of ten) convinced of his invisibility, and fighting like hell to rectify the injustice. From where I sat, recognition came either by way of…

Criticals, Current Affairs, Gay, My back pages, New York, Short Cuts, Theater

In the theater, giving sorrow words

March 29, 2014

We go to the theater to renew our ties to the world. Sometimes we’re reminded of things, lives, people we used to know, or feelings we’ve tucked away long ago. When it’s working, a play can unearth those buried treasures, though the effect isn’t always pleasant. At a recent performance of Mothers and Sons, a…

Criticals, Current Affairs, Film, Short Cuts

More Oscar Bait!

February 10, 2013

Silver Linings Playbook (David O. Russell, director). Two zanies meet cute, overcome a boatload of wacky complications to find love. The setup sounds like a plot spun from the delicious mind of a Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks. Russell, returning to the brand of comedy he minted in such films as Spanking the Monkey…

Criticals, Current Affairs, Dance, Music, Short Cuts, Theater

Accent on Youth

August 20, 2012

As summer creeps to a close, I thank the stars for the Shins: look beneath the mind-bending time signatures of this pop group and you’ll find a neo-folk style that straddles eras as well as genres. Its easy evocation of coltish youth suits Trey McIntyre’s choreography for the Shins-titled Oh, Inverted World, part of the…

Art, Short Cuts, Sketches, Writing, Writings

Dig Two Graves

March 14, 2012

The sound of the wind was strong. It was that, and what felt like sudden warmth that made Christina sit up, then shield her eyes from the sharp light. She’d fallen asleep in the field. How long had it been—an hour? Minutes? She yawned. The inhalation rephrased the moment, reminded her why she’d come back…

Art, Criticals, Current Affairs, Gay, History, Museums/Galleries, Photography, Short Cuts

The Friends of Frank

January 28, 2012

On recent sleepless nights I’ve been haunted by an image of a person I’ve come to know well. The man has the face of a pugilist; tall and long-limbed, he stands with his hands behind his head wearing nothing but a pair of boots and a taunting, defiant stare. This portrait of Frank O’Hara, by…