Posts Tagged ‘Catwoman’
“Each lovely Grace by certain Marks he taught /And ev’ry Step in lasting Volumes wrote”*
The late seventeenth century gave rise to a powerful innovation in Western European social and theatrical dance, the art of dance notation. The new representational technology ofdance notation provided a means to broadcast fashionable dances emerging from the French court as well as new compositions from dancing masters operating in London and elsewhere. In the first three decades of the eighteenth century, dance notation quickly reached faddish heights, with published dance manuals in high demand among upper levels of English society. One publication from the era, Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing Explained by Reading and Figures, provides a window onto the descriptive tool of dance notation, its function in society, and its eventual decline. While providing a previously unimagined communicational technology, the completeness and specificity of the dominant form of dance notationultimately spelled its demise…
The fascinating story (with more nifty illustrations and diagrams) of a 1735 attempt to capture the ineffable: “From the Page to the Floor:Baroque Dance Notation and Kellom Tomlinson’s The Art of Dancing Explained.” [TotH to Ben Evans]
* Soame Jenyns in his 1729 poem “The Art of Dancing” (in part an ode to Kellom Tomlinson’s work)
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As we capture choreography, we might recall that it was on this date in 2005 that Halle Berry accepted the Razzie as Worst Actress for her role in Catwoman. Holding the Razzie in one hand and her Oscar (for Monster’s Ball) in the other, she gave a parody of her emotional Oscar acceptance speech, beginning “First of all I want to thank Warner Bros. Thank you for putting me in a piece of s***, god-awful movie!”
Watch her acceptance speech here.
“If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television”*…
One day in the mid-1970s, my mother received an offer she couldn’t refuse. She’d been contacted at random by a now-defunct television rating service (not Nielsen, which still records the nation’s tastes): Would our household like to participate in a socially important project?
Justice and fairness were my mother’s favorite concepts; freebies, her ultimate weakness. That meant yes, we did want to participate. The rating service promised that our viewing habits would help shape the national television landscape. Presuming our superiority was a habit my mother had long indulged, and she believed we could lead the way for the nation—by providing an example of responsible viewership and even saving some underdog programs with our attention. Having married an underdog, and being in the process of mothering several, she decided that covert boosterism of one show or another within our general viewing patterns would provide moral satisfaction and a sound contribution.
But her motives were not entirely noble…
You’ll laugh; you’ll cry… but mostly you’ll laugh: How to be the top-rated television-viewing family in America– “Our Imaginary Brother Only Watches PBS.”
* Umberto Eco
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As we game the ratings, we might recall that it was on this date in 1954 that The Miss America Pageant was televised for the first time. The winner, Lee Meriwether, went, immediately after passing on her tiara, to The Today Show (as a “Today Girl”). She subsequently appeared on TV series ranging from Leave It To Beaver and Dr. Kildare to The Fugitive and Barnaby Jones. She also appeared in a number of films, probably most notably as the replacement for Julie Newmar as “Catwoman” in the 1966 Batman movie spun off of the successful TV series of the time.
Trading one tiara for another…
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