quotes at random, no. 27

Still more clippings, of reviews:

o  Michael Bolton's opera CD: The result sound just like - well, Michael Bolton singing Italian opera arias in the shower. Too bad Norman Bates wasn't there to cut things short.  <> Trying to save the ailing classical-record business by pushing this kind of trifle is like trying to revive a failing economy by printing counterfeit money.

o  "The Commissar Vanishes": This double response - horror at atrocity, amused contempt for stupidity and Dickensian rascality - is appropriate.

o  Robert Fagle's translation of "The Odyssey": 'Man of twists and turns' preserves the multiple suggestiveness of polutropos, and it manages to sound like a special phrase... without being self-conscious or eccentric.

o  "The Real Thing": Particularly good is Stephen Dillane as Henry.

o  Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: On the cheap, Gehry picked up load of this pricey "strategic" metal (titanium) when the Russians started dumping their stockpiles.

o  Vermeer show: He made it seem as if time had nearly stopped in these pictures,.. (he gave those moments) an almost mystical gravity. <> The tiny but essential alterations he made in the scale of objects and placement of shadows, wich enhance the sense of structural rigor.

o  Lotto show: a link between the exaggerated graces of Botticelli...  <> "Annunciation" is funny and reverent, gawky and vernacular and dreamlike, all at the same time.

o  "Titanic" is the "Gone With the Wind" of its generation.

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