[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifp_SVrlurY]
Morning, readers! Short roundup today while your tireless City Paper arts staff slaves on the forthcoming 24th annual D.C. International Film Festival spread. It’s gonna be off the chain! Keep an eye out for any and all blurbs by a certain J.L. Fischer. I think that kid’s going places.
*Above, witness a dramatic little guitar solo by Prince.
*Been waiting for the Telegraph to label Henri Cartier-Bresson “a kind of salvage ethnographer”? Wait no further!
*In salacious new volume, Jad Adams reveals Gandhi was “sex mad.” Which doesn’t quite jive with some of Mahatma’s more famous pronouncements. Take the following:
It is the duty of every thoughtful Indian not to marry. In case he is helpless in regard to marriage, he should abstain from sexual intercourse with his wife.
*David Carr shows some well-deserved love to the Philadelphia Daily News, “an underdog newspaper in an underdog market with an underdog owner.”
*Of course someone’s staging a Twitter version of Romeo & Juliet. Of course they’re calling it Such Tweet Sorrow. (Points for this last, actually.) But who knew the Royal Shakespeare Company would get onboard?
*Calling Mike Rhode and Glen Weldon: Someone’s unearthed the Marvel Comics equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls! New Jack Kirby franchises, here we come.
*Now John Lennon can rest in peace: The Vatican, in an unusual, occasionally rhapsodic bit of prose, has publicly forgiven the Beatles for the whole sex, drugs, rock & roll, “bigger than Jesus” thing. Via the Guardian:
On the front page of the L’Osservatore Romano, the paper admits that the band once “said they were bigger than Jesus and put out mysterious messages, that were possibly even Satanic”, but also asks: “what would pop music have been like without the Beatles?”
So I guess if praising a 40-year-old band doesn’t distract the public from the buggering of altar boys, what’s the Pope’s next move? Canonize Prince?