Posts Tagged ‘musical’
“Every day is Halloween, isn’t it? For some of us.”*…
Tomorrow’s the big day– by some counts, the second biggest holiday of the year. The National Retail Federation’s annual Halloween survey of more than 7,900 consumers found 72% plan to celebrate the holiday with 67% of those planning to hand out candy. We’ll an average of $103.63 (about $4.62 less than last year’s record of $108.24), the survey found. In total, Halloween spending is expected to reach $11.6 billion, with candy sales at an estimated $3.5 billion.
Axios on how those sugary purchases are allocated…
Chocolate is America’s favorite Halloween candy, with Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups once again the top choice in an overwhelming majority of states, according to data from Instacart.
The big picture: The chocolate peanut butter candy was the top-selling candy in 40 states based on Instacart grocery sales last year. Chocolate was a key ingredient in eight of the top 10 candies.
After Reese’s, regular M&M’s were the next most popular candy andthe favorite in northwestern and midwestern states like Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota. Peanut M&M’s were the most purchased Halloween candy in Hawaii, Idaho and Utah, Instacart found.
… Reese’s is also the reigning king of Easter candy, with its eggs ranked as the top purchased candy and cups the No. 3 candy, based on 2023 Instacart data.
Candy corn was the most-searched candy in 34 states between Sept. 3 and Oct. 3, according to Google Trends. Candy corn accounts for 84% of all searches around Halloween candy, according to Captify search data shared with Axios…
– source
The estimable Ernie Smith weighs in on the mawkish mock maize as part of a meditation on Butterfingers…
… In the process of my research into the fragility of Butterfinger bars, I ran across an interesting fact about trying to recreate Butterfingers in your own kitchen that I didn’t think fit into the above narrative, but is worth diving into separately. Simply put, one of the most popular ways to make homemade Butterfingers involves using candy corn. It apparently does a good job of recreating the flavor of a Butterfinger, if not the exact texture.
The nice thing about candy corn, in the context of this recipe, is that it includes most of the main ingredients of the toffee part of butterfingers. That makes it possible to greatly simplify the recipe for people who want to make Butterfingers at home. (Plus, the orange-and-yellow parts of candy corn make for a decent food-coloring match to the innards of Nestlé-era Butterfingers, even if the cornflakes, key to the texture, aren’t part of the recipe.)
Now, finding out that candy corn can be used as a key ingredient in a Butterfinger recipe is sort of like finding out that your favorite dessert is made of candle wax. (Fun fact: Despite its generic-seeming nature, it’s mostly sold by a single manufacturer, Brach’s.)
But there’s a method to the madness.
See, when broken down, candy corn is made of fondant and confectioner’s glaze. Another way of putting it: A piece of candy corn is essentially the candy form of the chalky icing used on wedding cakes, which is then covered in waxy insect secretions. Awesome.
Find that last part kind of gross? Well, you should stop eating Milk Duds, Whoppers, Raisinets, and jelly beans, because they all use it. You’ve been eating food-grade shellac all your life and didn’t even know it.
So, let’s spend a minute talking about shellac: The fact that so many candies use this is actually a significant problem for the globalization of candy. In India, for example, it’s likely to leave out entire classes of consumers, as shellac isn’t considered vegetarian. Periodically, as noted in this 2009 Scientific American piece, we’ve looked for alternatives to confectioner’s glaze, but given that it remains a surprisingly large industry to this day—a recent Business Insider video put the sector’s value at $167 million. (Ironically, shellac was discovered in India, and remains the largest manufacturer of the material.)
If you’re OK with all that, making your own Butterfingers at home is apparently way easier if you use melted candy corns as a base. Just note that shellac isn’t usually part of the ingredient list..
– source
Apposite: “Stephen Follows on the horror movie boom.”
* Tim Burton
###
As we dish out the delights, we might recall that it was on this date in 2003 that a thousand Halloween costumes were inspired– Wicked premiered on Broadway. A musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman, it is a loose adaptation of the 1995 Gregory Maguire novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which in turn is based on L. Frank Baum‘s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and its 1939 film adaptation.
The show was nominated for ten Tony Awards in 2004, including Best Musical, Book, Orchestrations, Original Score, Choreography, Costume Design, Lighting Design, Scenic Design, with two nominations for Best Actress – for Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. Menzel won the Best Actress award, and the show also won the Award for Best Scenic Design and Best Costume Design (notably losing Best Book, Original Score and ultimately Best Musical to Avenue Q). The same year, the show also won 6 Drama Desk Awards out of 11 nominations, including Outstanding Musical, Book, Director, and Costume Design.
“Speed is carrying us along, but we have yet to master it”*…
A call to contemplate the potential negative effects of internet technology along with its promise…
Conversations about technology tend to be dominated by an optimistic faith in technological progress, and headlines about new technologies tend to be peppered with deterministic language assuring readers of all the wonderful things these nascent technologies “will” do once they arrive. There is endless encouragement to think about all of the exciting benefits to be enjoyed if everything goes right, but significantly less attention is usually paid to the ways things might go spectacularly wrong.
In the estimation of philosopher Paul Virilio, the refusal to seriously contemplate the chance of failure can have calamitous effects. As he evocatively put it in 1997’s Open Sky, “Unless we are deliberately forgetting the invention of the shipwreck in the invention of the ship or the rail accident in the advent of the train, we need to examine the hidden face of new technologies, before that face reveals itself in spite of us.” Virilio’s formulation is a reminder that along with new technologies come new types of dangerous technological failures. It may seem obvious today that there had never been a car crash before the car was invented, but what future wrecks are being overlooked today amidst the excited chatter about AI, the metaverse, and all things crypto?
Virilio’s attention to accidents is a provocation to look at technology differently. To foreground the dangers instead of the benefits, and to see ourselves as the potential victims instead of as the smiling beneficiaries. As he put it in Pure War, first published in 1983, “Every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident.” Thus, the challenge becomes looking for the “accident” behind the technophilic light show — and what’s more, to find it before the wreckage starts to pile up.
Undoubtedly, this is not the most enjoyable way to look at technology. It is far more fun to envision yourself enjoying the perfect meal prepared for you by your AI butler than to imagine yourself caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare after the AI system denies your loan application. Nevertheless, if Virilio was right to observe that “the invention of the highway was the invention of 300 cars colliding in five minutes,” it would be wise to start thinking seriously about the crashes that await us as we accelerate down the information superhighway…
The work of Paul Virilio urges us to ask: What future disasters inhere in today’s technologies? “Inventing the Shipwreck” from Zachary Loeb (@libshipwreck) in @_reallifemag. Eminently worth reading in full.
For a look at those who don’t just brush aside Virilio’s caution, but actively embrace speed and the chaos that it can cause:
Accelerationism holds that the modern, Western democratic state is so mired in corruption and ineptitude that true patriots should instigate a violent insurrection to hasten its destruction to allow a new, white-dominated order to emerge. Indeed, some of the foremost exponents of accelerationism today were at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. They included: the Oath Keepers, whose grab-bag ideology states that “paranoid anti-federalism envision[s] a restoration of ‘self-government’ and ‘natural rights’;” QAnon adherents, who remain convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and that former President Donald Trump was thwarted from saving the world from a Satan-worshipping pedophilia ring run by Democrats, Jews, and other agents of the deep state; and, of course, Trump’s own die-hard “Stop the Steal” minions, who, against all reason and legal proof, seek to restore the former president to office.
The objective of accelerationism is to foment divisiveness and polarization that will induce the collapse of the existing order and spark a second civil war…
Read the full piece: “A Year After January 6, Is Accelerationism the New Terrorist Threat?“
* Paul Virilio
###
As we practice prudence, we might recall that it was on this date in 1854 that Anthony Fass, a Philadelphia piano maker, was awarded the first U.S. patent (#11062) for an accordion. (An older patent existed in Europe, issued in Vienna in 1829 to Cyrill Demian.)
“Music helps set a romantic mood. Imagine her surprise when you say, ‘We don’t need a stereo – I have an accordion’.” – Martin Mull
“A gentleman is someone who can play the accordion, but doesn’t.” – Tom Waits
“I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s the not knowing that makes it interesting”*…
Koyaanisqatsi is a 1983 wordless documentary primarily made up of slow motion and time-lapse footage. If you haven’t seen it, you can watch the trailer here.
I wondered how easy it would be to make an internet version using random Giphy ‘gifs’ which have been tagged as slow motion or time-lapse, playing them along with the Philip Glass soundtrack…
Rico Monkeon has built a “random Koyaanisquatsi generator.”
* Philip Glass
###
As we commune with the cosmic, we might send dandy birthday greetings to Sir Noël Peirce Coward; he was born on this date in 1899. A playwright, composer, director, actor, and singer, he wrote more than 50 plays from his teens onwards. Many of his works, such as Hay Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter and Blithe Spirit, have remained in the regular theater repertoire. He composed hundreds of songs, in addition to well over a dozen musical theater works (including the operetta Bitter Sweet and comic revues), screenplays, poetry, several volumes of short stories, the novel Pomp and Circumstance, and a three-volume autobiography. Coward’s stage and film acting and directing career spanned six decades, during which he starred in many of his own works.
For all that, he may be best remembered for his persona, for his wit, flamboyance– and for what Time magazine called “a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise.”
“Dying is easy, comedy is hard”*…
Neighbors. Dir. Edward F. Cline/Buster Keaton. Perf. Buster Keaton, Virginia Fox, Joe Keaton. Metro Pictures, 1920.
As he migrated from vaudeville stage to movie set, [Buster] Keaton realised the comedy itself did not need changing, though the opportunities afforded by the camera could extend the world in which the spatial interplay he had developed since childhood took place.
“…the greatest thing to me about picturemaking was the way it automatically did away with the physical limitations of the theatre. On the stage, even one as immense as the New York Hippodrome stage, one could only show so much. The camera had no such limitations. The whole world was its stage. If you wanted cities, deserts, the Atlantic Ocean, Persia, or the Rocky Mountains for your scenery and background, you merely took your camera to them.”
Keaton’s comedy derives largely from the positioning —and constant, unexpected repositioning— of his body in space, and in architectural space particularly. Unlike other slapstick performers who relished in the close-up and detailed attention to the protagonist, Keaton frequently directed the camera to film with a wide far-shot that could contain the whole of a building’s facade or urban span within the frame. Proud of always carrying out his own (often extremely dangerous) stunts, this enabled him to show the audience that his actions were performed in real-time —and real-place— rather than simply being tricks of the camera or editing process. It also allowed him to visually explore the many ways in which his body could engage with the urban form…
An appreciation of that greatest of all silent comedians: “Buster Keaton: Anarchitect.”
* variously attributed to actors Edmund Keane, Edmund Gwynn, and Peter O’Toole
###
As we take the fall, we might send delighted birthday greetings to Stanley Donen; he was born on this date in 1924. A Broadway dancer (who befriended a young Gene Kelly), Donen followed Kelly to Hollywood as choreographer, then a director– of such classics as On the Town (1949) and Singin’ in the Rain (1952), both of which starred Kelly who co-directed. Donen’s other films include Royal Wedding (1951), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Funny Face (1957), Indiscreet (1958), and Charade (1963). Credited (with his rival, Vincent Minelli) with having transitioned Hollywood musical films from realistic backstage dramas (a la Busby Berkeley) to a more integrated art form in which the songs were a natural continuation of the story, Donen is highly regarded by film historians.
One might note a kinship between Keeton’s astounding physical relationship to his surroundings and that of Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Fred Astaire in Donen’s films…
“Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.”*…
Steve Young, who obsessively collects LPs of industrial musicals, at first found them “unintentionally hilarious,” but in addition to absurdity they often contain the sincere and authentic spark of creative imagination.
From the title alone, it’s obvious that “Bathtubs Over Broadway,” a new documentary by Dava Whisenant… will be a delight. Its subject is the industrial musical—plays produced by corporations for their employees to enjoy at nationwide or regional sales meetings and conventions. Steve Young, who was, for more than twenty years, a writer for David Letterman, became obsessed, in the mid-nineties, with these shows—in particular, with LPs of them, which were pressed solely to be distributed to employees as souvenirs. The ostensible subject of “Bathtubs Over Broadway” is the amusement value of these exotic, eccentric by-products of show business, whose kitschy pleasures include celebrations of automobiles, dog food, and disposable blood-absorbing liners for the operating room, in a number that rhymes “hysterectomy” and “appendectomy.” But the overarching and underlying question that the film poses is nothing less than: What is art? And, for that matter, is the conventional definition of good art too narrow to account for the merits of such works as these?…
Many classic works of art are, in effect, commercials, from Pindar’s epinician, or victory, odes to Bach’s church cantatas. For that matter, plays and movies aren’t immune from propagandistic values, whether imposed on the artists or shared by them. It’s a mark of mediocrity, on the part of an artist or, for that matter, of a critic, to judge works by their ostensible subjects rather than by their approach to them…
Richard Brody on the new documentary Bathtubs Over Broadway (it opens in some cities today), and on the aesthetic questions that it raises: “Can a musical sponsored by a toilet manufacturer be a work of art?”
* Pablo Picasso
###
As we know art when we see it, we might recall that it was on this date in 1566 that Ralph Roister Doister was first publicly performed at Eton (or so some scholars argue; the exact date is not universally agreed); it was published the following year. Written in 1552 (again, scholars believe) by London schoolmaster Nicholas Udall, it was probably performed earlier by his own students.
In any case, scholars agree that Ralph Roister Doister was the first comedy (as opposed to “work with comedic elements”) to be written in the English language.
Illustration in English Plays, by Henry Morley, Cassell’s Library of English Literature, 1891. Caption says from a sketch by Hans Holbein the Younger in Desiderius Erasmus’s Moriae Encomium (The Praise of Folly) (1515/16).
You must be logged in to post a comment.