[THEATRE] As the German playwright Bertholt Brecht said, “First comes the feeding, then the morality.” Bread and Puppet began in the 1960s with a communal breaking of bread followed by dramatic skits with politically radical over and undertones, often personified in the troupe’s choice of costumes and puppets themselves. A self-contained communism of sorts, B&P touches down next Tuesday, May 23 inside Buffalo State College’s Donald Savage Building.
Happy Mothers Day to all of you mothers out there, and to all of you that have mothers!
Among other things, for me, birds have a link to Mothers Day in that the celebration always falls during spring migration season. I have spent countless Mother Days with my spouse looking at birds, almost always with our two now grown children. For instance yesterday we went to Presque Isle Park in Erie Pa to experience the wonderful spring warbler mgration. We cherish these kinds of family trips. After almost 40 years our relationships remain intact, so thats a good thing.
Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, a documentary about the great urban theorist and activist Jane Jacobs, opens with a quotation from her seminal 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
Henry Street no longer exists. As with several others, Henry Street was wiped off the map by the Waterfront Urban Renewal Project in 1963. Seen here in 1958, Henry Street was one of the rights-of-way that led from the Terrace to the Erie Canal. In the distance are St. Joseph’s Cathedral & Rectory and the elevated approach to the Buffalo Skyway, completed a few years earlier in 1955. The back of a Simon Pure beer billboard is visible in the center.
Oh, how Jackie Kennedy would probably hate Guy Ritchie’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword. There are, to be sure, ample aesthetic and other grounds to disdain Ritchie’s hopped-up, hit-‘em-where-it-hurts take on the old Arthurian legends, but President Kennedy’s widow had a special affinity for the stories. She manipulated them to promote a symbolic elevation of her assassinated husband’s violently abbreviated administration. That is, she importantly borrowed from Camelot, Lerner and Lowe’s popular musical-theater adaptation of T. H.