I not only thew my literary chance – out the window – I sent it hurtling towards the sun! I blew it
BIG TIME!
Eleven years ago a dozen published authors were witness to me setting myself on fire. But, gravity is for real, and…….I’M BACK! I am on the Faeebook of Boris Kackha, the former Editor of the New York magazine who wrote a piece about my ex – who found a old trunk in the house she just bought. It was full of postcards from Germany with swastika stamps. That trunk – has come back!
“Greg Presco: Charles has lobbed some balls across my plate with his steam motorcycle and Joyce. In my un-finished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ the last hippie of the future channels a Nazi whose love for wood-burning cars allows him to get near the hard-water German is making, and helps sabotage the plants. These A-bombs would be delivered with V2 rockets. My ex had shown my Pynchon’s books, but, I found them a hard read.”
Boris Kachka is the former books editor of the Los Angeles Times. Previously, he was an editor and writer at New York magazine for two decades. He has written profiles of authors including Joan Didion, Toni Morrison and Harper Lee; investigated turmoil at various cultural and media institutions; expanded books coverage across the publication’s many verticals; and covered film, television, theater and book publishing. He is also the author of “Hothouse,” a cultural history of the publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux; “Becoming a Veterinarian”; and “Becoming a Producer.”
I was sent to NYC to find Thomas Pynchon.
I’m working as a freelance photographer in Oslo, Norway. A couple of months ago a magazine sent me to NYC to do a feature on Pynchon. Me and the journalist had dug up what information we could and headed out to do the story and within the first hour it unfolded into something quite interesting. The article is out today and can be read here
Not sure if it’s behind a paywall for you guys, but let me know and I’ll copy the translated text!
On December 29, 2013, I posted this on the Facebook of Charles J. Shield who wrote ‘And so it goes’ the biography of Kurk Vonnegut, my idol…..
“If Lucia had her way, she would go with a Dance Drama, a tale of how a classic Anglo-Saxon novel is assimilated into the Hippie Dance Music Culture. The Grateful Dead will do Finnagan’s Wake, and, here come the Lucettes! Turn down volume on India dance and leave Love song.”
On Christmas Day, my Muse, Rena, wrote me a four page letter that she mailed on January 3rd. I opened this letter on January 9th. and wept tears of joy. I feared she might be dead. Tomorrow, the four page letter I wrote will be opened by the woman who had a profound influence on my life, and the life of my late sister, for after Christine saw a photo of the painting I did of my Muse, she took up art.
Rena studied classical ballet, jazz, modern dance, and tap. She attended the Academy of Washington Ballet, the London School of Contemporary Dance, and studied and apprenticed with Susan Alexander, former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. If Rena would accept I would like her to be the principal choreographer for ‘Love Dance’
I just posted this on Ken Babb’s Facebook. Ken has emergency heart surgery on Feb 10th. and is doing well. I mention the video above. Did any of these young people invade Ukraine in 2014 and they became disillusioned? There is a anti-war movement in Russia – and Putin has long known it. This is his target in his show of military nationalism. He is trying to save his Youth Legacy. We saw the Republicans attempt the same thing with Nixon – and Trump!
John Presco
P.S. Timing is everything! Can you see the U.S.S. Peter Defazio sailing around Taiwan with the best speakers ever made sending this Green Peace Message across the waters – and universe!
P.S.S. WTF! In that video. That’s Rod Stewart in drag on what looks like the Rock Freak Carney Show. Putin hates gays, and may be one of the reasons he invades the Ukraine – for starters. He is on a holy crusade. The He-man statue looks like he’s on steroids ready to kill queers. Wow! Music does not have all the answers. Remember the hippie in front of the library collecting signatures to legalize pot.? How political of him. Did he die in a homeless camp? The growers should make a statue of him and put him in front of the new library with clipboard, and, he’s holding out a pen. That’s the real hero of the Emerald Vallery – and not Ken ‘The Reader’……in my opinion.
Did you notice there was no music at Putin’s Country Fair. Why? How many bands at Woodstock sang a anti-war message? I dropped acid with members of the Jefferson Airplane who was very aware of the affects of the Cold War. Putin is Manson on steroids and he is threatening to nuke his enemies. I am running for Governor of Oregon. I want this Sate to fund a anti-war movement using taxes on pot. Bands will get State funding. No more insane music-politics in my valley. I want the Feds to build a destroyer and name it the U.S. Peter Defazio. It will be manned with anti-war experts who also know how to topple dictators with rock n roll and sane messages to young people. IT WORKS. We are poised to spend trillion on arms. Here is my fight with a author who could have promoted me if I had kept my Hippie Mouth – shut! Evil politics in the literary world – can go to hell. State funded books is the answer. https://rosamondpress.com/2014/01/12/lucy-in-the-sky-with-starship/
riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.
Just before Christmas I had some discussions with the author Charles J. Shields about who will write the story of the love affair between Samuel Beckett, and Lucia Joyce, the daughter of James Joyce who wrote Finnegan’s Wake.
A Flower Given to My Daughter Frail the white rose and frail are Her hands that gave Whose soul is sere and paler Than time’s wan wave.
Rosefrail and fair — yet frailest A wonder wild In gentle eyes thou veilest, My blueveined child.
Greg Presco Charles, I hope I am not stepping on any toes, here. Were you thinking of authoring Lucia Joyce’s biography. I just googled her and her father and his work. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a poet, and when I began authoring poetry (while in a trance) at twelve, my mother and aunts became alarmed because they were bid to loathe their father. I wrote this poem a year ago to a young woman who worked at Starbucks. I read it with an Irish brogue.
Greg Presco: Charles has lobbed some balls across my plate with his steam motorcycle and Joyce. In my un-finished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ the last hippie of the future channels a Nazi whose love for wood-burning cars allows him to get near the hard-water German is making, and helps sabotage the plants. These A-bombs would be delivered with V2 rockets. My ex had shown my Pynchon’s books, but, I found them a hard read.
How this man would eventually be recruited to brainstorm with the Jefferson Airplane and be hipper than his own children are among the mysteries on which Mr. Shields casts light.
It sounds to me like the author wasn’t around for/doesn’t have the imagination to see Vonnegut’s connection to baby boomers against the draft and the undeclared war in VietNam and evidently doesn’t see what PTSD does to people – I used to live near Kurt Vonnegut in the East 50s (NYC)and see him with Lilly on his shoulders mornings for coffee in a little Rockefeller Park – he was a friendly fellow who I doubt gave a hoot about his perceived “hipness” – this is a silly interview. I also doubt Jefferson Airplane gave a hoot about what Kurt Vonnegut wore to their meeting – they had read his books and recognized something valuable there!
Charles J. Shields is also author of the highly acclaimed, best-selling biography Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee. Michael Bailey/Henry Holt and Company Shields persuaded Vonnegut to let him write the book, and he spent hours talking to the Slaughterhouse-Five author during the last year of his life. He says he was surprised during their very first conversation when Vonnegut began by complaining about his parents. “For all the world, I thought I was talking to a much younger person who still had a real beef with the way he had been raised,” Shields says. But that oddly youthful outlook was what endeared Vonnegut to generations of disaffected kids.
But, you know, the irony, when you really study Kurt’s novels and when you look at the things that he said and also my interviews with him, Kurt was not really so much a radical as a reactionary. What Kurt wanted was an earlier America. He wanted an America that he remembered before World War II, an America of aunts and uncles and swimming holes and things like that. That was the world he wanted to return to. I think a seminal moment that shows the contrast between what people thought of Kurt and what he was actually like was this: Jefferson Airplane asked him if he’d like to brainstorm with them for their next album. So he went to the meeting with Jefferson Airplane wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and wingtip shoes.
SULLIVAN: I’m speaking with Charles Shields. His new book is “And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life.” It seems like that there is this disconnect that runs throughout the book about the way Kurt Vonnegut sees himself and the way the people around him saw him. SHIELDS: Yes. I think one of his nephews said that Kurt seemed a whole lot hipper than he really was. (SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER) SHIELDS: I mean, here he is being read by hippies and counterculture types and, you know, he’s still being read. I don’t mean to say that his work is time-specific, either, but it’s true. In the biography, I show a man who was a little bit surly to his kids, who was obsessed with doing his writing, who wanted to make it big and was perceived by his public as somebody who was the ideal avuncular, jocular kind of person, you know, somebody who tells it like it is and somebody who will level with you. Well, Kurt was actually rather flinty, rather irascible. He had something of a temper. But as I also point out in the book, he was a damaged person. SULLIVAN: How do you reconcile these two people? I mean, the man who wrote “God damn it, babies, you’ve got to be kind” and this other guy who had difficult relationships, sometimes was not so great to even his agents and publishers and was a little bit irascible? SHIELDS: Kurt was a disenchanted American. He believed in America. He believed in its ideals. And what he wrote in his books was a kind of an outpouring of his disenchantment. He wanted babies to enter a world where they could be treated well, and he wanted to emphasize that people should be kind to one another. So these were his priorities as a human being. But as you know, so often happens in life, he had a sort of a creative professional side and a personal side. One fed into the other. As one reviewer said recently, you know, Vonnegut couldn’t have been the kind of writer that he was unless he was this kind of person. And so I don’t see it as a complete break. I see his pain as, you know, pouring into his works in a kind of a wry, droll, unhappy way.
In 1940 Vonnegut started to study biochemistry at Cornell; his father, who funded his education, had recommend that he should study chemistry rather that the humanities. Arts were discouraged in the family. However, Vonnegut also wrote satirical anti-war articles for the student newspaper Cornell Sun. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Vonnegut volunteered in 1943 for military service. “Good! They will teach you to be neat!” his father said.
After the war Vonnegut studied anthropology at Chicago University from 1944 to 1947, but his M.A. thesis ‘Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales’ was rejected. However, in 1971 the anthropological department accepted his novel Cat’s Cradle (1963) in lieu of a thesis and Vonnegut war awarded the degree. In the book Vonnegut explores destructive rationality of Western science and the turn towards mysticism, which was just then beginning to take hold among students in the USA and Europe. In 1945 Vonnegut married a childhood friend. They had two daughters and a son, and also adopted the three children of Vonnegut’s sister, who died of cancer in 1958.
Billy lives on Earth and on the distant planet Tralfamadore, responding to events with the resignated slogan “So it goes”. Paul Kantner and Grace Slick, members of the rock band Jefferson Airplane, were great fans of the book. They invited Vonnegut in 1971 to San Francisco, but cooperation plans were dropped. “The vibrations were just awful, I wanted out as fast as possible,” Vonnegut said later.
Greg Presco I do not do drugs and spoke out against the use of LSD since 1967. I have been compared to Campbell and have studied The White Goddess by Robert Graves for years. Even though it is flawed scholarship, I love the play on symbols and words. As a theologian, I discovered what Jesus wrote in the sand, a mystery that has baffled scholars for 2 thousand years. I subscribe to the idea that words can be mind altering.
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[2] He is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the “Theatre of the Absurd”. His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
Finnegan’s Wake a Broadway Musical
Finding herself stuck between two droll and dusty bookends, two avant guard writers who expect at least one avant absurd poem form her, Lucia finds her breakout moment when she meets Antonin Artaud at the Moulin Rouge. Back at his garret they do mescaline together, in the form of Peyote buds Antonin has brought back from his trip to the States where he witnessed the Ghost Dance. Teaching her some of the moves, Lucia goes into a trance and into the future. In her vision quest she finds herself on the dance floor of the Filmore West gyrating to the Grateful Dead. The first Dead Head is born!
Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century.[2] He is considered one of the last modernists. As an inspiration to many later writers, he is also sometimes considered one of the first postmodernists. He is one of the key writers in what Martin Esslin called the “Theatre of the Absurd”. His work became increasingly minimalist in his later career.
In 1931, Artaud saw Balinese dance performed at the Paris Colonial Exposition. Although he did not fully understand the intentions and ideas behind traditional Balinese performance, it influenced many of his ideas for Theatre. Also during this year, the ‘First Manifesto for a Theatre of Cruelty’ was published in La Nouvelle Revue Française which would later appear as a chapter in The Theatre and Its Double. In 1935, Artaud’s production of his adaptation of Shelley’s The Cenci premiered. The Cenci was a commercial failure, although it employed innovative sound effects—including the first theatrical use of the electronic instrument the Ondes Martenot—and had a set designed by Balthus.
Balinese dances are a very ancient dance tradition that is a part of the religious and artistic expression among the Balinese people, native to Bali island, Indonesia. Balinese dance is dynamic, angular and intensely expressive.[1] The Balinese dancers express the story of dance-drama through the whole bodily gestures; fingers, hands and body gestures to head and eyes movements.
By about 1963, Vito, Szou, and their friend Carl Franzoni (b. 1934 in Cincinnati, Ohio), also known at the time as “Captain Fuck”, had begun going to clubs with a growing group of self-styled “freaks”, who reputedly “lived a semi-communal life and engaged in sex orgies and free-form dancing whenever they could”. According to writer Johnny Rogan, Paulekas’ “free thinking lifestyle and artistic passion inspired beatniks, aspiring existentialists and Valley girls in need of rebellion.” In 1964, Paulekas offered rehearsal space to the Byrds, and the following year the troupe of free-form dancers, with Paulekas and Franzoni, accompanied the group on their nationwide tour. Later, Arthur Lee and Love also used his premises for rehearsals.[1][2][3][4] In some clubs, Paulekas and the dancers became as big an attraction as the onstage entertainment. The troupe – including several of the young women later to become known as The GTOs, and members of the Fraternity of Man – occupied the Log Cabin in Laurel Canyon formerly occupied by Tom Mix and later by Frank Zappa. Credited as “Vito and the Hands”, Paulekas recorded a single, “Where It’s At,” which featured some of the Mothers of Invention, with producer Kim Fowley in 1966. He has been credited with first using the terms “freak” and “freak-out” to describe the scene, and with Franzoni and other members of the troupe contributed to the first album by Zappa and the Mothers, Freak Out!. He appeared in several documentaries of the period, including Mondo Hollywood (1967) and You Are What You Eat Bonhoeffer’s life as a pastor and theologian of great intellect and spirituality who lived as he preached — and his martyrdom in opposition to Nazism — exerted great influence and inspiration for Christians across broad denominations and ideologies, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement, in the United States, the anti-communist democratic movement in Eastern Europe during the Cold War and the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa.
On December 29, 2013, I posted this on the Facebook of Charles J. Shield who wrote ‘And so it goes’ the biography of Kurk Vonnegut, my idol…..
“If Lucia had her way, she would go with a Dance Drama, a tale of how a classic Anglo-Saxon novel is assimilated into the Hippie Dance Music Culture. The Grateful Dead will do Finnagan’s Wake, and, here come the Lucettes! Turn down volume on India dance and leave Love song.”
On Christmas Day, my Muse, Rena, wrote me a four page letter that she mailed on January 3rd. I opened this letter on January 9th. and wept tears of joy. I feared she might be dead. Tomorrow, the four page letter I wrote will be opened by the woman who had a profound influence on my life, and the life of my late sister, for after Christine saw a photo of the painting I did of my Muse, she took up art.
Rena studied classical ballet, jazz, modern dance, and tap. She attended the Academy of Washington Ballet, the London School of Contemporary Dance, and studied and apprenticed with Susan Alexander, former principal dancer with the Royal Ballet. If Rena would accept I would like her to be the principal choreographer for ‘Love Dance’
‘Love Dance’ was conceived while I was on the train going south to visit my daughter and grandson. I believe this was 2010. I was playing a cassette tape I had ‘The Best of Love’. All of a sudden I am a young man dancing in this musical with Rena Christensen who I learned five years earlier was a dancer and choreographer. I played this tape several times as I visualized what this tribute to Rock and Dance would look like.
This suggestion got some response that appeared to mock me. One of Charles’ friends suggested this ‘far-out’ idea be kept for the archives. When I told Marilyn about the response, and how I later found out Vonnegut met with the Jefferson Starship in 1971 to discuss incorporating Kurt’s ideas into their music project, she told me that Jeff Pasternak had given her a call, and wanted her advice. Jeff was writing a play, and his female character needed a cathartic experience. Jeff could not come up with anything. neither could Marilyn.
This was January 2. We were at the Granary where I read some of my poems, while Marilyn’s husband’s Jazz band accompanied me. The next day, Rena mailed her letter.
Marilyn’s sister co-authored ‘Fela’ that is now a hit in New York. Bryan’s song was inspired by what I said to him when he asked me for advice about the relationship he was having with Christine who had a relationship with my friend from England that resembles the movie ‘Across the Universe’. The last time I saw Rena was when we went and saw ‘Yellow Submarine’ in Lincoln Nebraska.
It appears that Vonnegut was asked to contribute to ‘Blows Against the Empire’. This Broadway Musical is writing itself. I posted the following on the 28 and 29th.
Greg Presco: Charles, I hope I am not stepping on any toes, here. Were you thinking of authoring Lucia Joyce’s biography. I just googled her and her father and his work. My grandfather, whom I never met, was a poet, and when I began authoring poetry (while in a trance) at twelve, my mother and aunts became alarmed because they were bid to loathe their father. I wrote this poem a year ago to a young woman who worked at Starbucks. I read it with an Irish brogue.
Greg Presco” Charles has lobbed some balls across my plate with his steam motorcycle and Joyce. In my un-finished novel ‘The Gideon Computer’ the last hippie of the future channels a Nazi whose love for wood-burning cars allows him to get near the hard-water German is making, and helps sabotage the plants. These A-bombs would be delivered with V2 rockets. My ex had shown my Pynchon’s books, but, I found them a hard read.
Greg Presco: Finding herself stuck between two droll and dusty bookends, two avant guard writers who expect at least one avant absurd poem from her, Lucia finds her breakout moment when she meets Antonin Artaud at the Moulin Rouge. Back at his garret they do mescaline together, in the form of Peyote buds Antonin has brought back from his trip to the States where he witnessed the Ghost Dance. Teaching her some of the moves, Lucia goes into a trance and into the future. In her vision quest she finds herself on the dance floor of the Filmore West gyrating to the Grateful Dead. The first Dead Head is born!
Originally published in France under the title ‘Les Tarahumaras’ (1947), ‘The Peyote Dance’ by Antonin Artaud describes the author’s experiences with Peyote and the Tarahumara in Mexico, in 1936. Written over twelve years and covering Artaud’s stay at a psychiatric hospital in Rodez, the book is an important work of drug literature, so far as it provides an intriguing discourse on a possible essential value in psychedelic drugs.
rtaud’s assertion is so explicit that it can be taken as a veritable declaration of principles, especially when one considers the fact that his text “On the Balinese Theater” was, of all the articles collected in The Theater and Its Double, the first to be written. The last to be written, on the other hand, was the emblematically titled “Oriental and Western Theater,” written in December 1936, shortly before Artaud’s departure for Mexico. All the other texts in The Theater and Its Double fall in between, from “Metaphysics and the Mise-en-Scène” (December 1931) and “The Alchemical Theater” (September 1932) to “The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)” (October 1932) and “Theater and the Plague” (April 1933).
Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a ceremony in Moscow on Sept. 30, 2022, to declare the annexation of four regions of Ukraine. (Grigory Sysoyev/Sputnik/pool via Reuters.)
Here is bad news, that says the world is two or three steps away from NUCLEAR WAR! This might be good news for many Christian Canidates, like Christine Drazen.
For ten years I have been making prophetic posts on The Coming Bozeman Art Festival. When I read about the controversies at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival three days ago, I had a feeling The World Is Going To End, because, Putin has a dream. He wants the whole world to speak Russian, but not the Russian spoken in Ukraine, because Satan has spoiled the Divine language of Killer Kirill, who has a Rasputin hold on the insane owner of nuclear weapons.
So, it’s Putin against Shakespeare, the Emperor of the English Language! Welcome to The Nuclear Theatre of The Most High and Dramatic!
When I received a letter from my muse, I was in big-idea-war with the author Charles L. Shields who un-friended me on facebook. Charles wrote ‘And So It Goes’ the biography of Kurt Vonnegut, my only hero. Charle’s friend, Boris Kachka, wrote an article for the New York Magazine about my ex-wife who was married to the author Thomas Pynchon. Mary Ann Tharaldsen was the sister-in-law of Christine Rosamond Benton, whose muse was my muse. To realize my muse, Rena Easton, became jealous of me moments after she first lay eyes on me, and may have helped Christine become a world famous artist in my place, is right out of a Vonnegut novel. If Kurt was alive he would be reading this blog.
Not able to contain myself after Rena challenged me to treat “Red-necks” like human beings, I put Antonin Artaud and Vincent Van Gough on a noon train to Bozeman where they are going to attend a Arts Festival at the Emerson Center for the Arts & Culture. This is right out of ‘Breakfast of Champions’ one of my favorite books because it comes close to describing my late sister’s success which high water mark came with the revelation I and my mommy oppressed the budding career of ‘The Rose of the World’ after catching her drawing in a closet when she was four years old. The famous producer, Ronald Schwary, purchased an option to produce a lousy biography of Rosamond that will be hawked at the Emerson Center.
The Spirit of Kurt begs me to pick up the long stilled pen of Kilgore Trout, and reveal the truth that Elias Rosewater is the only proven member of the Priory de Sion, thanks to Robert Grave’s ‘The White Goddess’.
One of the characters in Breakfast of Champions is a gay piano player named ‘Bunny’. Could this be my kindred, Bunny Breckenridge?
Yesterday they apprehended an escaped rapist from Bozeman Montana here in Eugene. This rapist will once again escape and head back to Bozeman so he can attend the Art & Culture Festival. Briggs is a film buff.
It is rumored that Thomas Pynchon might attend the festival, in disguise. After all, he is in Mr. Rosewater’s family tree.
Kilgore Trout is a widely published, but otherwise unsung and virtually invisible writer who, by a fluke, is invited to deliver a keynote address at a local arts festival in distant Midland City. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy businessman who owns much of Midland City, but is mentally unstable and is undergoing a gradual mental collapse. Kilgore arrives in Midland City and, by happenstance, piques the interest of Dwayne. A confused Dwayne demands a message from Kilgore, who hands over a copy of his novel. Dwayne reads the novel, which purports to be a message from the Creator of the Universe explaining that the reader – in this case Dwayne – is the only individual in the universe with free will. Everyone else is a robot. Dwayne believes the novel to be factual and immediately goes on a violent rampage, severely beating his son, his lover, and nine other people before being taken into custody. While Kilgore is walking the streets of Midland after Dwayne’s rampage the narrator of the book approaches Kilgore. The narrator tells Kilgore of his existence, and lets Kilgore be free and under his own will.
Trump and Melania did High Noon in Florida. Alas, Helen of High Noon makes her appearance, as promised. In broken English, she defends her beleaguered man who just wants to defeat the bad guys, and bring a Great Safeness to America. But, the evil press do not want Americans to feel safe. This is why they fill the airwaves with fake news that alarms the Children of God, who don’t like to be alarmed, and hate to be afraid. That’s not true! They pray for the End of Days and Armageddon, which Tiny Trump is appearing to start with his Muslim Ban. The Trumps are not Christians!
Rena is always afraid. She is………the Beating Heart of America! We Americans are more than happy to spend a million dollars protecting Melania. Beautiful women need to feel safe, more than other women. This goes for Christian Women. Grace Kelly married the Prince of Monaco and wore a real crown. Do women want beauty, money, power?
When Rena Easton said I was “Left-leaning” in her letter, I took it to mean, she (and her husband) love America more than I do. This idea is a Theme to many white people who head North, or were born there. My grandfather, Royal Rosamond, says he was born in Helena. He wrote several stories about Montana.
In her Proclamation Right-wing of the Aryan Rancher Flag of America, a hot cultural battle began. In 2014, I sent into battle two creative Frenchmen – foreigners! I wonder how Rena feels about a man accused of rape, suggesting women should apologize to the whole country (and Israel) ? What horrible things have THEY said about Israel? How many of The Squad said horrible things about Israel? Evangelicals have a vested interest in seeing the Temple rebuilt – in Israel! This is why POTUS is titled ‘Messiah’ – in Israel! Is Trump…
Olga Smirnova pictured performing in London in 2016
High Noon High Noon
The First Cowboy Ballet
by
John Presco
Copyright 2022
SYNOPSIS: A famous Russian Ballerina flees for her life to America after the Revolution. The Bolsheviks put a bounty on her head because she was the favorite of the Czar and his family. Nichola’s daughter imitated her, wanted to be like her.
She is captured by Indians while on a stagecoach going West. A Handsom young buck wants her for his wife, but, she has to perform the tribal dance ritual. She nails it – and then some! She is the founder of the Peaceful Spirit Dance that brings peace to all the Plaines tribes. She is given a war bonnet which she performs her famous ballet in when she comes to Laramie. The sheriff does not buy a word of her story. She challenges him to a Dance-off at High Noon in the middle of the street. He brings his posse of young dudes, and she brings her Hooped Maidens who throw off their hoop-skirts to expose skin-tight leotards with tutu. The older church ladies -gasp! A Gay Man in pink, scolds them, then does his Happy to be Pink dance. The bare-chested dudes wearing lamb-chaps – thrust out their chest and circle the happy hoop maidens. The Handsom Buck – now a chief – blows into town for the grand finale.
Bolshoi ballerina Olga Smirnova, an international ballet star who recently publicly denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine, has quit the famed Moscow ballet company and joined the Dutch National Ballet, the Amsterdam organization announced Wednesday.
From left: 1883 castmembers Marc Rissmann, Billy Bob Thornton, Tim McGraw, Sam Elliott and LaMonica Garrett. Yellowstone, which the prequel series is based on, saw its season 4 premiere grow to 10.5 million viewers on Paramount Network alone.
Jane Campion challenges Sam Elliott to ‘a shootout’ over ‘Power of the Dog’ feud
The actor previously roasted the director’s film, which is nominated for 12 Academy Awards
“OK, Sam, let’s meet down at the Warner Bros. lot for a shootout!” the 67-year-old joked to the outlet. “I’m bringing Doctor Strange [the Marvel character portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch, the star of her latest film] with me!”
Jan Campion challenged Sam Elliott to a movie ‘shootout’ amid their feud over ‘The Power of the Dog’. (Getty Images)
The real-life drama began when Elliott criticized the 67-year-old’s take on the Western genre during his recent appearance of Marc Maron’s “WTF” podcast.
When Elliott was asked if he had seen the film, the star replied, “You want to talk about that piece of s—?”
Elliott referenced a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times that featured a review blurb that described the film as “an evisceration of the American myth.” The film is also nominated for 12 Academy Awards.
“I thought, what the f—?” Elliott said of the adaptation from the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. “This is a guy who has done Westerns his entire life. ‘The evisceration of the American myth.’ It looked like — what are all those dancers, those guys in New York that wear bow ties and not much else? Remember them from back in the day?”
Sam Elliott didn’t hold back when it came to criticizing ‘The Power of the Dog’. (Photo by Vincent Sandoval/Getty Images)
“Oh, the Chippendales?” Maron asked.
“That’s what all these f—ing cowboys in that movie looked like,” Elliott replied. “They’re all running around in chaps and no shirts. There’s all these allusions to homosexuality throughout the f—ing movie.”
Maron replied, “Yeah, I think that’s what the movie’s about,” speaking to the fact that Cumberbatch’s character, Phil Burbank, is homosexual and has yet to come out of the closet.
It was then that Elliott fixed his crosshair on Campion, who is nominated for three Academy Awards this year.
Sam Elliott, seen here with Jane Russell, has made his mark in Westerns during his decades-long career. (Photo by NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images via Getty Images)
“[Jane Campion’s] a brilliant director, by the way,” Elliott insisted. “I love her work, previous work. But what the f— does this woman from down there, New Zealand, know about the American West? And why in the f— does she shoot this movie in New Zealand and call it Montana and say, ‘This is the way it was?’ So that f—ing rubbed me the wrong way, pal.”
“I mean, Cumberbatch never got out of his f—ing chaps,” Elliot maintained of the film. “He had two pairs of chaps — a wooly pair and a leather pair. And every f—ing time he would walk in from somewhere … he never was on a horse, maybe once — he’d walk into the f—ing house, storm up the f—ing stairs, go lay in his bed in his chaps and play his banjo. It’s like, what the f—?”
Meanwhile, Netflix appeared to have heard Elliott’s remarks, and a day after the interview was sent into the ether, the streaming giant tweeted a scene that showed Kodi Smit-McPhee’s character telling his mother, who is played by Kirsten Dunst, “He’s just a man. Only another man.”
Elliott doubled down on his sentiment by the end of the back and forth, adding, “Where’s the Western in this Western?… I took it f—ing personal, pal.”
(L-R) Jane Campion and Kirsten Dunst as they celebrate the 27th Annual Critics Choice Awards at Fairmont Century Plaza on March 13, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Michael Kovac/Getty Images for Champagne Collet & OBC Wines)
During the DGA Awards on Saturday night, Campion had a few choice letters in response to Elliott’s criticism of her film.
The director, who was asked for her response about the actor’s shocking comments, refused to hold back.
“I’m sorry, he was being a little bit of a B-I-T-C-H,” she told Variety before the ceremony. “He’s not a cowboy; he’s an actor. The West is a mythic space and there’s a lot of room on the range. I think it’s a little bit sexist.”
Campion noted that she viewed Elliott’s crude criticism as a slight against her as a female filmmaker.
“When you think about the number of amazing Westerns made in Spain by (director) Sergio Leone,” she explained to the outlet. “I consider myself a creator. I think he thinks of me as a woman or something lesser first, and I don’t appreciate that.”
Fox News’ Julius Young contributed to this report.
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