Podcasts about zeffirelli

Burton/Taylor, Zeffirelli and Shakespeare

Olivia Hussey, whose spirited portrayal of Juliet when she was just a teenager herself became iconic for generations of people watching the 1968 film adaptation of Shakespeare's play, died on December 27, 2024. In 2019, we were lucky enough to record an interview with Hussey. To honor her life and work, we're bringing it to you again. Olivia Hussey was just fifteen when Franco Zeffirelli cast her in Romeo and Juliet. When the film was released in October 1968, it catapulted her and Leonard Whiting, the young actor playing Romeo, to global stardom. For many Shakespeare lovers, Zeffirelli's film is still the definitive film adaptation of the play. Fifty years after the movie's release, Hussey's memoir, The Girl on the Balcony: Olivia Hussey Finds Life After Romeo and Juliet, told the story of the actress's life before, during, and after Romeo and Juliet. We talked with Hussey and asked her how she felt about Shakespeare before making the movie (“very boring”), filming the balcony scene (“I'd bump my teeth into his chin”), the endless press tour, and whether she'd do it all again. Barbara Bogaev interviews Olivia Hussey. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Originally published on January 22, 2019, and rebroadcast on January 13, 2025 © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Speak Again, Bright Angel,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the Associate Producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer; updated by Paola García Acuña. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Paul Luke at VoiceTrax West in Studio City, California.

Tyler and I spoke about view quakes from fiction, Proust, Bleak House, the uses of fiction for economists, the problems with historical fiction, about about drama in interviews, which classics are less read, why Jane Austen is so interesting today, Patrick Collison, Lord of the Rings… but mostly we talked about Shakespeare. We talked about Shakespeare as a thinker, how Romeo doesn't love Juliet, Girard, the development of individualism, the importance and interest of the seventeenth century, Trump and Shakespeare's fools, why Julius Cesar is over rated, the most under rated Shakespeare play, prejudice in The Merchant of Venice, Shakespeare as an economic thinker. We covered a lot of ground and it was interesting for me throughout. Here are some excerpts. Full transcript below.Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.And.Henry Let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.Transcript (prepared by AI)Henry Today, I am talking to Tyler Cowen, the economist, blogger, columnist, and author. Tyler works at George Mason University. He writes Marginal Revolution. He is a columnist at Bloomberg, and he has written books like In Praise of Commercial Culture and The Age of the Infovore. We are going to talk about literature and Shakespeare. Tyler, welcome.Tyler Good to chat with you, Henry.Henry So have you ever had a view quake from reading fiction?Tyler Reading fiction has an impact on you that accumulates over time. It's not the same as reading economics or philosophy, where there's a single, discrete idea that changes how you view the world. So I think reading the great classics in its entirety has been a view quake for me. But it's not that you wake up one morning and say, oh, I turned to page 74 in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, and now I realize that, dot, dot, dot. That's a yes and a no for an answer.Henry So you've never read Bleak House and thought, actually, I do see things slightly differently about Victorian London or the history of the –?Tyler Well, that's not a view quake. Certainly, that happens all the time, right? Slightly differently how you see Victorian London. But your overall vision of the world, maybe fiction is one of the three or four most important inputs. And again, I think it's more about the entirety of it and the diversity of perspectives. I think reading Proust maybe had the single biggest impact on me of any single work of fiction if I had to select one. And then when I was younger, science fiction had a quite significant impact on me. But I don't think it was the fictional side of science fiction that mattered, if that makes sense to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was the models embodied in the stories, like, oh, the three laws of robotics. Well, I thought, well, what should those laws be like? I thought about that a good deal. So that would be another part of the qualified answer.Henry And what was it with Proust? The idea that people only care about what other people think or sexuality or consciousness?Tyler The richness of the internal life, the importance of both expectation and memory, the evanescence of actual events, a sense of humor.Henry It showed you just how significant these things are.Tyler And how deeply they can be felt and expressed. That's right. And there were specific pages early on in Swan's Way where it just hit me. So that's what I would say. Bleak House, I don't think, changed my views at all. It's one of my three or four favorite novels. I think it's one of the great, great, greats, as you have written yourself. But the notion that, well, the law is highly complex and reality is murky and there are all these deep mysteries, that all felt very familiar to me. And I had already read some number of newer sort of pseudo-Victorian novels that maybe do those themes in a more superficial way, but they introduce those themes to you. So you read Bleak House and you just say, well, I've imbibed this already, but here's the much better version of it.Henry One of the things I got from Bleak House, which it took me a couple of reads to get to, was how comfortable Dickens was with being quite a rational critic of the legal system and quite a credulous believer in spontaneous combustion and other things.Tyler Did Dickens actually believe in spontaneous combustion or is that a plot device? Like Gene Roddenberry doesn't actually believe in the transporter or didn't, as far as weHenry know. No, I think he believed. Yeah. Yeah. He defends it in the preface. Yeah.Tyler So it's not so confusing that there's not going to be a single behavioral model that captures deviations from rationality. So you end up thinking you ought to travel more, you ought to take in a lot of diverse different sources about our human beings behave, including from sociology, from anthropology. That makes it harder to be an economist, I would say it scatters your attention. You probably end up with a richer understanding of reality, but I'm not sure it's good for your research. It's probably bad for it.Henry It's not a good career move.Tyler It's not good for focus, but focus maybe can be a bit overrated.Henry Why are you more interested in fiction than other sort of people of a broadly rational disposition?Tyler Well, I might challenge the view that I'm of a broadly rational disposition. It's possible that all humans are roughly equally irrational, madmen aside, but if you mean the rationality community as one finds it in San Francisco, I think they're very mono in their approach to reasoning and that tends to limit the interests of many of them, not all, in fiction and travel. People are regional thinkers and in that region, San Francisco, there is incredible talent. It's maybe the most talented place in the world, but there's not the same kind of diversity of talents that you would find in London or New York and that somehow spreads to the broader ethos and it doesn't get people interested in fiction or for that matter, the visual arts very much.Henry But even in London, if I meet someone who's an economist or has an economics degree or whatever, the odds that they've read Bleak House or something are just so small.Tyler Bleak House is not that well read anymore, but I think an economist in London is likely to be much more well read than an economist in the Bay Area. That would be my prediction. You would know better than I would.Henry How important has imaginative literature been to you relative to other significant writers like philosophers or theoretical economists or something?Tyler Well, I'm not sure what you mean by imaginative literature. I think when I was 17, I read Olaf Stapleton, a great British author and Hegelian philosopher, and he was the first and first man and star maker, and that had a significant impact on me. Just how many visions you could put into a single book and have at least most of them cohere and make sense and inspire. That's one of the most imaginative works I've ever read, but people mean different things by that term.Henry How objectively can we talk about art?Tyler I think that becomes a discussion about words rather than about art. I would say I believe in the objective when it comes to aesthetics, but simply because we have no real choice not to. People actually, to some extent, trust their aesthetic judgments, so why not admit that you do and then fight about them? Trying to interject some form of extreme relativism, I think it's just playing a game. It's not really useful. Now, is art truly objective in the final metaphysical sense, in the final theory of the universe? I'm not sure that question has an answer or is even well-formulated, but I would just say let's just be objectivists when it comes to art. Why not?Henry What is wrong with historical fiction?Tyler Most of it bores me. For instance, I don't love Hilary Mantel and many very intelligent people think it's wonderful. I would just rather read the history. It feels like an in-between thing to me. It's not quite history. It's not quite fiction. I don't like biopics either when I go to the cinema. Yeah, I think you can build your own combination of extremes from history and fiction and get something better.Henry You don't have any historical fiction that you like, Penelope Fitzgerald, Tolstoy?Tyler Any is a strong word. I don't consider Tolstoy historical fiction. There's a historical element in it, as there is with say Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate or actually Dickens for that matter, but it's not driven by the history. I think it's driven by the characters and the story. Grossman comes somewhat closer to being historical fiction, but even there, I wouldn't say that it is.Henry It was written so close to the events though, right?Tyler Sure. It's about how people deal with things and what humanity means in extreme circumstances and the situations. I mean, while they're more than just a trapping, I never feel one is plodding through what happened in the Battle of Stalingrad when I read Grossman, say.Henry Yeah. Are there diminishing returns to reading fiction or what are the diminishing returns?Tyler It depends what you're doing in life. There's diminishing returns to most things in the sense that what you imbibe from your teen years through, say, your 30s will have a bigger impact on you than most of what you do later. I think that's very, very hard to avoid, unless you're an extreme late bloomer, to borrow a concept from you. As you get older, rereading gets better, I would say much better. You learn there are more things you want to read and you fill in the nooks and crannies of your understanding. That's highly rewarding in a way where what you read when you were 23 could not have been. I'm okay with that bargain. I wouldn't say it's diminishing returns. I would say it's altering returns. I think also when you're in very strange historical periods, reading fiction is more valuable. During the Obama years, it felt to me that reading fiction was somewhat less interesting. During what you might call the Trump years, and many other strange things are going on with AI, people trying to strive for immortality, reading fiction is much more valuable because it's more limited what nonfiction can tell you or teach you. I think right now we're in a time where the returns to reading more fiction are rapidly rising in a good way. I'm not saying it's good for the world, but it's good for reading fiction.Henry Do you cluster read your fiction?Tyler Sometimes, but not in general. If I'm cluster reading my fiction, it might be because I'm cluster reading my nonfiction and the fiction is an accompaniment to that. Say, Soviet Russia, I did some reading when I was prepping for Stephen Kotkin and for Russ Roberts and Vasili Grossman, but I don't, when it comes to fiction per se, cluster read it. No, I don't think you need to.Henry You're not going to do like, I'm reading Bleak House, so I'll do three other 1852 novels or three other Dickens novels or something like that.Tyler I don't do it, but I suspect it's counterproductive. The other Dickens novels will bore you more and they'll seem worse, is my intuition. I think the question is how you sequence works of very, very high quality. Say you just finished Bleak House, what do you pick up next? It should be a work of nonfiction, but I think you've got to wait a while or maybe something quite different, sort of in a way not different, like a detective story or something that won't challenge what has been cemented into your mind from Bleak House.Henry Has there been a decline of reading the classics?Tyler What I observe is a big superstar effect. I think a few authors, such as Jane Austen and Shakespeare, are more popular. I'm not completely sure they're more read, but they're more focal and more vivid. There are more adaptations of them. Maybe people ask GPT about them more. Really quite a few other works are much less read than would have been the case, say as recently as the 1970s or 1980s. My guess is, on the whole, the great works of fiction are much less read, but a few of them achieve this oversized reputation.Henry Why do you think that is?Tyler Attention is more scarce, perhaps, and social clustering effects are stronger through the internet. That would just be a guess.Henry It's not that we're all much more Jane Austen than we used to be?Tyler No, if anything, the contrary. Maybe because we're less Jane Austen, it's more interesting, because in, say, a Jane Austen novel, there will be sources of romantic tension not available to us through contemporary TV shows. The question, why don't they just sleep together, well, there's a potential answer in a Jane Austen story. In the Israeli TV show, Srugim, which is about modern Orthodox Jews, there's also an answer, but in most Hollywood TV, there's no answer. They're just going to sleep together, and it can become very boring quite rapidly.Henry Here's a reader question. Why is the market for classics so good, but nobody reads them? I think what they're saying is a lot of people aren't actually reading Shakespeare, but they still agree he's the best, so how can that be?Tyler A lot of that is just social conformity bias, but I see more and more people, and I mean intellectuals here, challenging the quality of Shakespeare. On the internet, every possible opinion will be expressed, is one way to put it. I think the market for classics is highly efficient in the following sense, that if you asked, say, GPT or Claude, which are the most important classics to read, that literally everything listed would be a great book. You could have it select 500 works, and every one of them would really be very good and interesting. If you look at Harold Bloom's list at the back of the Western canon, I think really just about every one of those is quite worthwhile, and that we got to that point is, to me, one of the great achievements of the contemporary world, and it's somewhat under-praised, because you go back in earlier points of time, and I think it's much less efficient, the market for criticism, if you would call it that.Henry Someone was WhatsAppping me the other day that GPT's list of 50 best English poets was just awful, and I said, well, you're using GPT4, o1 gives you the right list.Tyler Yeah, and o1 Pro may give you a slightly better list yet, or maybe the prompt has to be better, but it's interesting to me how many people, they love to attack literary criticism as the greatest of all villains, oh, they're all frustrated writers, they're all post-modernists, they're all extreme left-wingers. All those things might even be true to some extent, but the system as a whole, I would say completely has delivered, and especially people on the political and intellectual right, they often don't realize that. Just any work you want to read, if you put in a wee bit of time and go to a shelf of a good academic library, you can read fantastic criticism of it that will make your understanding of the work much better.Henry I used to believe, when I was young, I did sort of believe that the whole thing, oh, the Western canon's dying and everyone's given up on it, and I'm just so amazed now that the opposite has happened. It's very, very strong.Tyler I'm not sure how strong it is. I agree its force in discourse is strong, so something like, well, how often is it mentioned in my group chats? That's strongly rising, and that delights me, but that's a little different from it being strong, and I'm not sure how strong it is.Henry In an interview about your book Talent, you said this, “just get people talking about drama. I feel you learn a lot. It's not something they can prepare for. They can't really fake it. If they don't understand the topic, you can just switch to something else.”Tyler Yeah, that's great advice. You see how they think about how people relate to each other. It doesn't have to be fiction. I ask people a lot about Star Wars, Star Trek, whatever it is they might know that I have some familiarity with. Who makes the best decisions in Star Wars? Who gives the best advice? Yoda, Obi-Wan, Luke, Darth Vader, the Emperor?Henry It's a tough question.Tyler Yeah, yeah.Henry I don't know Star Wars, so I couldn't even answer that.Tyler You understand that you can't fake it. You can't prepare for it. It does show how the person thinks about advice and also drama.Henry Right. Now, you're a Shakespeare fan.Tyler Well, fan is maybe an understatement. He's better. He deserves better than fans.Henry How much of time, how much of your life have you spent reading and watching this work?Tyler I would say most of the plays from, say, like 1598 or 99 and after, I've read four to five times on average, some a bit more, some like maybe only three times. There's quite a few I've only read once and didn't like. Those typically are the earlier ones. When it comes to watching Shakespeare, I have to confess, I don't and can't understand it, so I'm really not able to watch it either on the stage or in a movie and profit from it. I think I partially have an auditory processing disorder that if I hear Shakespeare, you know, say at Folger in DC, I just literally cannot understand the words. It's like listening to Estonian, so I've gone some number of times. I cannot enjoy what you would call classic Shakespeare movies like Kenneth Branagh, Henry V, which gets great reviews, intelligent people love it. It doesn't click for me at all. I can't understand what's going on. The amount of time I've put into listening to it, watching it is very low and it will stay low. The only Shakespeare movies I like are the weird ones like Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight or Baz Luhrmann's Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. I think they're fantastic, but they're not obsessed with reciting the text.Henry So, you're reading with notes and you're piecing it together as you go.Tyler I feel the versions in my head are better than anything I see on the screen also, so that's another reason. I just think they're to be read. I fully understand that's not how Shakespeare seemed to view them, but that's a way in which we readers, in a funny way, can improve on Shakespeare's time.Henry No, I agree with you. The thing I get the most pushback about with Shakespeare is when I say that he was a great thinker.Tyler He's maybe the best thinker.Henry Right. But tell us what you mean by that.Tyler I don't feel I can articulate it. It's a bit like when o3 Pro gives you an answer so good you don't quite appreciate it yourself. Shakespeare is like o7 Pro or something. But the best of the plays seem to communicate the entirety of human existence in a way that I feel I can barely comprehend and I find in very, very little else. Even looking at other very great works such as Bleak House, I don't find it. Not all of the plays. There's very, very good plays that don't do that. Just say Macbeth and Othello. I don't feel do that at all. Not a complaint, but something like Hamlet or King Lear or Tempest or some of the comedies. It's just somehow all laid out there and all inside it at the same time. I don't know any other way of putting it.Henry A lot of people think that Shakespeare is overrated. We only read him because it's a status game. We've internalized these snobbish values. We see this stated a lot. What's your response to these people?Tyler Well, I feel sorry for them. But look, there's plenty of things I can't understand. I just told you if I go to see the plays, I'm completely lost. I know the fault is mine, so to speak. I don't blame Shakespeare or the production, at least not necessarily. Those are people who are in a similar position, but somehow don't have enough metarationality to realize the fault is on them. I think that's sad. But there's other great stuff they can do and probably they're doing it. That's fine.Henry Should everyone read Shakespeare at school?Tyler If you say everyone, I resist. But it certainly should be in the curriculum. But the real question is who can teach it? But yeah, it's better than not doing it. When I was in high school, we did Taming of the Shrew, which I actually don't like very much, and it put me off a bit. We did Macbeth, which is a much better play. But in a way, it's easy to teach. Macbeth, to me, is like a perfect two-minute punk rock song. It does something. It delivers. But it's not the Shakespeare that puts everything on the table, and the plot is easy to follow. You can imagine even a mediocre teacher leading students through it. It's to me still a little underwhelming if that's what we teach them. Then finally, my last year, we did Hamlet, and I'm like, whoa, okay, now I get it. Probably we do it wrong in a lot of cases, would be my guess. What's wrong with the Taming of the Shrew? It's a lot of yelling and screaming and ordinary. To me, it's not that witty. There's different views, like is it offensive to women, offensive to men? That's not my main worry. But those questions, I feel, also don't help the play, and I just don't think Shakespeare was fully mature when he wrote it. What was the year on that? Do you know offhand?Henry It's very early.Tyler It's very early. Very early, yeah. So if you look at the other plays that surround it, they're also not as top works. So why should we expect that one to be?Henry What can arts funding learn from the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatres?Tyler Current arts funding? I don't think that much. I think the situation right now is so different, and what we should do so depends on the country, the state, the province, the region. Elizabethan times do show that market support at art can be truly wonderful. We have plenty of that today. But if you're just, say, appointed to be chair of the NEA and you've got to make decisions, I'm not sure how knowing about Elizabethan theatre would help you in any direct way.Henry What do you think of the idea that the long history of arts funding is a move away from a small group, an individual patronage where taste was very important, towards a kind of institutional patronage, which became much more bureaucratic? And so one reason why we keep arguing about arts funding now is that a lot of it exhibits bad taste because the committee has to sort of agree on various things. And if we could reallocate somewhat towards individual patronage, we'd do better.Tyler I would agree with the latter two-thirds of that. How you describe earlier arts funding I think is more complicated than what you said. A lot of it is just people doing things voluntarily at zero pecuniary cost, like singing songs, songs around the campfire, or hymns in church, rather than it being part of a patronage model. But I think it's way overly bureaucratized. The early National Endowment for the Arts in the 1960s just let smart people make decisions with a minimum of fuss. And of course we should go back to that. Of course we won't. We send half the money to the state's arts agencies, which can be mediocre or just interested in economic development and a new arts center, as opposed to actually stimulating creativity per se. More over time is spent on staff. There are all these pressures from Congress, things you can't fund. It's just become far less effective, even though it spends somewhat more money. So that's a problem in many, many countries.Henry What Shakespeare critics do you like reading?Tyler For all his flaws, I still think Harold Bloom is worthwhile. I know he's gotten worse and worse as a critic and as a Shakespeare critic. Especially if you're younger, you need to put aside the Harold Bloom you might think you know and just go to some earlier Bloom. Those short little books he edited, where for a given Shakespeare play he'll collect maybe a dozen essays and write eight or ten pages at the front, those are wonderful. But Bradley, William Hazlitt, the two Goddard volumes, older works, I think are excellent. But again, if you just go, if you can, to a university library, go to the part on the shelf where there's criticism on a particular play and just pull down five to ten titles and don't even select for them and just bring those home. I think you'll learn a lot.Henry So you don't like The Invention of the Human by Bloom?Tyler Its peaks are very good, but there's a lot in it that's embarrassing. I definitely recommend it, but you need to recommend it with the caveat that a lot of it is over the top or bad. It doesn't bother me. But if someone professional or academic tells me they're totally put off by the book, I don't try to talk them out of that impression. I just figure they're a bit hopelessly stuck on judging works by their worst qualities.Henry In 2018, you wrote this, “Shakespeare, by the way, is Girard's most important precursor. Also throw in the New Testament, Hobbes, Tocqueville, and maybe Montaigne.” Tell us what you mean by that.Tyler That was pretty good for me to have written that. Well, in Shakespeare, you have rivalrous behavior. You have mimetic desire. You have the importance of twinning. There's ritual sacrifice in so many of the plays, including the political ones. Girard's title, Violence and the Sacred, also comes from Shakespeare. As you well know, the best Gerard book, Theater of Envy, is fully about Shakespeare. All of Girard is drenched with Shakespeare.Henry I actually only find Girard persuasive on Shakespeare. The further I get away from that, the more I'm like, this is super overstated. I just don't think this is how humans ... I think this is too mono-explanation of humans. When I read the Shakespeare book, I think, wow, I never understood Midsummer Night's Dream until I read Girard.Tyler I think it's a bit like Harold Bloom. There's plenty in Girard you can point to as over the top. I think also for understanding Christianity, he has something quite unique and special and mostly correct. Then on other topics, it's anthropologically very questionable, but still quite stimulating. I would defend it on that basis, as I would Harold Girard.Henry No, I like Gerard, but I feel like the Shakespeare book gets less attention than the others.Tyler That's right. It's the best one and it's also the soundest one. It's the truly essential one.Henry How important was Shakespeare in the development of individualism?Tyler Probably not at all, is my sense. Others know more about the history than I do, but if I think of 17th century England, where some strands of individualist thought come from, well, part of it is coming from the French Huguenots and not from Shakespeare. A lot of it is coming from the Bible and not from Shakespeare. The levelers, John Locke, some of that is coming from English common law and not from Shakespeare. Then there's the ancient world. I don't quite see a strong connection to Shakespeare, but I'd love it if you could talk me into one.Henry My feeling is that the 1570s are the time when diaries begin to become personal records rather than professional records. What you get is a kind of Puritan self-examination. They'll write down, I said this, I did this, and then in the margin they'll put, come back and look at this and make sure you don't do this again. This new process of overhearing yourself is a central part of what Shakespeare's doing in his drawing. I think this is the thing that Bloom gets right, is that as you go through the plays in order, you see the very strong development of the idea that a stock character or someone who's drawing on a tradition of stock characters will suddenly say, oh, I just heard myself say that I'm a villain. Am I a villain? I'm sort of a villain. Maybe I'm not a villain. He develops this great art of self-referential self-development. I think that's one of the reasons why Shakespeare became so important to being a well-educated English person, is that you couldn't really get that in imaginative literature.Tyler I agree with all that, but I'm not sure the 17th century would have been all that different without Shakespeare, in literary terms, yes, but it seemed to me the currents of individualism were well underway. Other forces sweeping down from Europe, from the further north, competition across nations requiring individualism as a way of getting more wealth, the beginnings of economic thought which became individualistic and gave people a different kind of individualistic way of viewing the world. It seems so over-determined. Causally, I wouldn't ascribe much of a role to Shakespeare, but I agree with every sentence you said and what you said.Henry Sure, but you don't think the role of imaginative literature is somehow a fundamental transmission mechanism for all of this?Tyler Well, the Bible, I think, was quite fundamental as literature, not just as theology. So I would claim that, but keep in mind the publication and folio history of Shakespeare, which you probably know better than I do, it's not always well-known at every point in time by everyone.Henry I think it's always well-known by the English.Tyler I don't know, but I don't think it's dominant in the way that, say, Pilgrim's Progress was dominant for a long time.Henry Sure, sure, sure. And you wouldn't then, what would you say about later on, that modern European liberalism is basically the culture of novel reading and that we live in a society that's shaped by that? Do you have the same thing, like it's not causal?Tyler I don't know. That's a tricky question. The true 19th century novel I think of as somewhat historicist, often nationalist, slightly collectivist, certainly not Marxist, but in some ways illiberal. And so many of the truly great novel writers were not so liberal. And the real liberal novels, like Mancini's The Betrothed, which I quite enjoy, but it's somewhat of a slight work, right? And it might be a slight work because it is happy and liberal and open-minded. There's something about the greatest of creators, they tend to be pessimistic or a bit nasty or there's some John Lennon in them, there's Jonathan Swift, Swift, it's complicated. In some ways he's illiberal, but he's considered a Tory and in many ways he's quite an extreme reactionary. And the great age of the novel I don't think of is so closely tied to liberalism.Henry One of the arguments that gets made is like, you only end up with modern European liberalism through a culture where people are just spending a lot of time reading novels and imagining what it is like to be someone else, seeing from multiple different perspectives. And therefore it's less about what is the quote unquote message of the story and more about the habitual practice of thinking pluralistically.Tyler I think I would be much more inclined to ascribe that to reading newspapers and pamphlets than novels. I think of novels as modestly reactionary in their net impact, at least in the 19th century. I think another case in point, not just Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, one of the great novelists, had bad politics, right, was through Germany in the first world war. So if you look at the very greatest novels, there's something a bit problematic about many of their creators. They're not Nazis, they're not Stalinists, but they're not where I'm at either.Henry Now in 2017, a lot of people were complaining about Donald Trump as Julius Caesar and there was some farce about a production, I think it was put on in New York or DC maybe. And you said, no, no, no, he's not Caesar. He's more like a Shakespearean fool because he's the truth teller. What do you think of that view now?Tyler That was a Bloomberg column I wrote, I think in 2017. And I think that's held up quite well. So there's many criticisms of Trump that he's some kind of fascist. I don't think those have held up very well. He is a remarkable orator, coiner of phrase, coiner of insults, teller of truths, combined with a lot of nonsense and just nonsense talk, like the Covfefe tweet or whatever it was. And there's something tragic about Trump that he may well fail even by his own standards. He has a phenomenal sense of humor. I think people have realized that more and more. The fact that his popularity has persisted has forced a lot of people to reexamine just Trump as an individual and to see what a truly unique talent he is, whether you like him as your president or not. And that, I think, is all Shakespearean.Henry Some of the people around Trump now, they're trying to do DOGE and deregulation and other things. Are there Shakespearean lessons that they should be bearing in mind? Should we send them to see the Henriad before they get started?Tyler Send them to read the Henriad before they get started. The complicated nature of power: that the king never has the power that he needs to claim he does is quite significant. The ways in which power cannot be delegated, Shakespeare is extremely wise on. And yes, the DOGE people absolutely need to learn those lessons.Henry The other thing I'd take from the Henriad is time moves way quicker than anyone thinks it does. Even the people who are trying to move quite quickly in the play, they get taken over very rapidly by just changing-Tyler Yes. Once things start, it's like, oh my goodness, they just keep on running and no one's really in control. And that's a Shakespearean point as well.Henry Yeah. Here's another quote from the Bloomberg column, “given Shakespeare's brilliance in dramatizing the irrational, one of my biggest fears is that Shakespeare is indeed still a thinker for our times.” Has that come more true in recent years?Tyler I think more true. So from my point of view, the world is getting weirder in some very good ways and in some very bad ways. The arbitrary exercise of power has become more thinkable. You see this from Putin. We may see it from China. In the Middle East, it's happened as well. So the notion also that rulers can be their own worst enemies or human beings can be their own worst enemies. I think we see more when the world is volatile than when the world is stable, almost definitionally.Henry You once said Julius Caesar was an overrated play. Tell us why.Tyler You know, I read it again after I wrote that and it went up in my eyes. But I suppose I still think it's a bit overrated by people who love it. It's one of these mono plays like Macbeth or Othello. It does one thing very, very well. I think the mystical elements in it I had underappreciated on earlier readings and the complexity of the characters I had underappreciated. So I feel I was a little harsh on it. But I just wouldn't put it in the underrated category. Julius Caesar is such a well-known historical figure. It's so easy for that play to become focal. And Brutus and, you know, the stabbing, the betrayal, it's a little too easy for it to become famous. And I guess that's why I think within the world of Shakespeare fans, it still might be a little overrated.Henry It's written at a similar time to Hamlet and Twelfth Night, and I think it gets caught up in the idea that this was a great pivotal moment for Shakespeare. But actually I agree, over the years I've come to think it's really just not the equal of the other plays it's surrounded by.Tyler Yeah, that's still my view. Absolutely. Not the equal of those two, certainly.Henry What is the most underrated play?Tyler I'm not sure how they're all rated. So I used to think Winter's Tale, clearly. But I've heard so many people say it's the most underrated, including you, I think. I don't know if I can believe that anymore. So I think I have to go with The Henriad, because to me that's the greatest thing Shakespeare ever did. And I don't think it's commonly recognized as such. I mean, Hamlet or King Lear would typically be nominated. And those are top, top, top, top. But I'll still go with The Henriad.Henry You are saying Henriad above Hamlet, above Lear, above Twelfth Night.Tyler Maybe it's not fair because you have multiple plays, right? What if, you know, there were three Hamlets? Maybe that would be better. But still, if I have to pick, no one of The Henriad comes close to Hamlet. But if you can consider it as a whole in the evolution of the story, for me it's a clear winner. And it's what I've learned the most from. And a problem with Hamlet, not Shakespeare's fault, but Hamlet became so popular you hear lesser versions of themes and ideas from Hamlet your whole life. It's a bit like seeing Mondrian on the shopping bag. That does not happen, really, with The Henriad. So that has hurt Hamlet, but without meaning it's, you know, a lesser play. King Lear, you have less of that. It's so bleak and tragic. It's harder to put on the shopping bag, so to speak. In that sense, King Lear has held up a bit better than Hamlet has.Henry Why do you admire The Winter's Tale so much? What do you like about it?Tyler There's some mysterious sense of beauty in it that even in other Shakespearean plays I don't feel. And a sense of miracle and wonder, also betrayal and how that is mixed in with the miracle and wonder. Somehow he makes it work. It's quite an unlikely play. And the jealousy and the charge of infidelity I take much more seriously than other readers of the play do. I don't think you can say there's a Straussian reading where she clearly fooled around on the king. But he's not just crazy, either. And there are plenty of hints that something might have happened. It's still probably better to infer it didn't happen. But it's a more ambiguous play than it is typically read as.Henry Yes, someone said to me, ask if he thinks Hermione has an affair. And you're saying maybe.Tyler Again, in a prediction market, I'll bet no, but we're supposed to wonder. We're not supposed to just think the king is crazy.Henry I know you don't like to see it, but my view is that because we believe in this sudden jealousy theory, it's often not staged very well. And that's one reason why it's less popular than it ought to be.Tyler I've only seen it once. I suspect that was true. I saw it, in fact, last year. And the second half of the play was just awful. The first half, you could question. But it was a painful experience. It was just offensively stupid. One of the great regrets of my life is I did not drive up to New York City to see Bergman present his version of Winter's Tale in Swedish. And I'm quite sure that would have been magnificent and that he would have understood it very deeply and very well. That was just stupid of me. This was, I think, in the early 90s. I forget exactly when.Henry I think that's right. And there's a theater library where if you want to go and sit in the archive, you can see it.Tyler I will do that at some point. Part of my worry is I don't believe their promise. I know you can read that promise on the internet, but when you actually try to find the person who can track it down for you and give you access, I have my doubts. If I knew I could do it, I would have done it by now.Henry I'll give you the email because I think I actually found that person. Does Romeo actually love Juliet?Tyler Of course not. It's a play about perversion and obsession and family obligation and rebellion. And there's no love between the two at all. And if you read it with that in mind, once you see that, you can't unsee it. So that's an underrated play. People think, oh, star-crossed teen romance, tragic ending, boo-hoo. That's a terrible reading. It's just a superficial work of art if that's what you think it is.Henry I agree with you, but there are eminent Shakespeare professors who take that opinion.Tyler Well maybe we're smarter than they are. Maybe we know more about other things. You shouldn't let yourself be intimidated by critics. They're highly useful. We shouldn't trash them. We shouldn't think they're all crummy left-wing post-modernists. But at the end of the day, I don't think you should defer to them that much either.Henry Sure. So you're saying Juliet doesn't love Romeo?Tyler Neither loves the other.Henry Okay. Because my reading is that Romeo has a very strong death drive or dark side or whatever.Tyler That's the strong motive in the play is the death drive, yeah.Henry And what that means is that it's not his tragedy, it's her tragedy. She actually is an innocent young girl. Okay, maybe she doesn't love him, it's a crush or it's whatever, but she actually is swept up in the idea of this handsome stranger. She can get out of her family. She's super rebellious. There's that wonderful scene where she plays all sweetness and light to her nurse and then she says, I'm just lying to you all and I'm going to get out of here. Whereas he actually is, he doesn't have any romantic feeling for her. He's really quite a sinister guy.Tyler Those are good points. I fully agree. I still would interpret that as she not loving him, but I think those are all good insights.Henry You've never seen it staged in this way? You've never seen any one?Tyler The best staging is that Baz Luhrmann movie I mentioned, which has an intense set of references to Haitian voodoo in Romeo and Juliet when you watch the movie. The death drive is quite clear. That's the best staging I know of, but I've never seen it on the stage ever. I've seen the Zeffirelli movie, I think another film instance of it, but no, it's the Haitian voodoo version that I like.Henry He makes it seem like they love each other, right?Tyler In a teenage way. I don't feel that he gets it right, but I feel he creates a convincing universe through which the play usefully can be viewed.Henry The Mercutio death, I think, is never going to be better than in that film. What do you like about Antonin Cleopatra?Tyler It's been a long time since I've read that. What a strong character she is. The sway people can exercise over each other. The lines are very good. It's not a top Shakespeare favorite of mine, but again, if anyone else had done it, you would just say this is one of the greatest plays ever, and it is.Henry I think it's going to be much more of a play for our times because many people in the Trump administration are going to have that. They're torn between Rome and Egypt, as it were, and the personal conflicts are going to start getting serious for them, if you like.Tyler There's no better writer or thinker on personal conflict than Shakespeare, right?Henry Yes. Now, you do like Measure for Measure, but you're less keen on All's Well That Ends Well. Is that right?Tyler I love Measure for Measure. To me, it's still somewhat underrated. I think it's risen in status. All's Well That Ends Well, I suspect you need to be good at listening to Shakespeare, which as I've already said, I'm not. It's probably much better than I realize it is for that reason. I'm not sure on the printed page it works all that well.Henry Yeah. That's right. I think it's one of the most important plays. Why? Because I think there are two or three basic factors about Shakespeare's drama, which is like the story could often branch off in different directions. You often get the sense that he could swerve into a different genre. The point Samuel Johnson made about whenever someone's running off to the tavern, someone else is being buried, right? And a lot of the time he comes again and again to the same types of situations, the same types of characters, the same types of family set up. And he ends the plays in different ways and he makes it fall out differently. And I think Helena is very representative of a lot of these facets. Everyone thinks she's dead, but she's not dead. Sometimes it looks like it's going badly for her when actually it's going well. No one in the play ever really has an honest insight into her motives. And there comes a point, I think, when just the overall message of Shakespeare's work collectively is things go very wrong very quickly. And if you can get to some sort of happy ending, you should take it. You should be pragmatic and say, OK, this isn't the perfect marriage. This isn't the perfect king. But you know what? We could be in a civil war. Everyone could be dead. All's well that ends well. That's good advice. Let's take it.Tyler I should reread it. Number one in my reread pile right now is Richard II, which I haven't read in a long time. And there's a new biography out about Richard II. And I'm going to read the play and the biography more or less in conjunction. And there's a filming of Richard II that I probably won't enjoy, but I'll try. And I'm just going to do that all together, probably sometime over this break. But I'll have all's well that ends well is next on my reread list. You should always have a Shakespeare to reread list, right?Henry Always. Oh, of course. Is Shakespeare a good economic thinker?Tyler Well, he's a great thinker. I would say he's better than a good economic thinker. He understands the motive of money, but it's never just the motive of money. And Shakespeare lowers the status of economic thinking, I would say, overall, in a good way. He's better than us.Henry What are your thoughts on The Merchant of Venice?Tyler Quite underrated. People have trouble with it because it is very plausibly anti-Semitic. And everyone has to preface any praise they give it with some kind of disavowal or whatever. The way I read the play, which could be wrong, but it's actually more anti-anti-Semitic than it is anti-Semitic. So the real cruel mean people are those who torment the Jew. I'm not saying Shakespeare was not in some ways prejudiced against Jews and maybe other groups, but actually reading it properly should make people more tolerant, not because they're reacting against Shakespeare's anti-Semitism, but because the proper message of the play understood at a deeper level is toleration.Henry You teach a law and literature class, I think.Tyler Well, I did for 20 years, but I don't anymore.Henry Did you teach Merchant of Venice?Tyler I taught it two or three times, yes.Henry How did your students react to it?Tyler Whenever I taught them Shakespeare, which was actually not that much, they always liked it, but they didn't love it. And there's some version of Shakespeare you see on the screen when it's a decent but not great filmed adaptation where there's the mechanics of the plot and you're held in suspense and then there's an ending. And I found many of them read Shakespeare in those terms and they quite enjoyed it, but somehow they didn't get it. And I think that was true for Merchant of Venice as well. I didn't feel people got hung up on the anti-Semitism point. They could put that aside and just treat it as a play, but still I didn't feel that people got it.Henry Should we read Shakespeare in translation?Tyler Well, many people have to. I've read some of the Schlegel translations. I think they're amazing. My wife, Natasha, who grew up in the Soviet Union, tells me there are very good Russian language translations, which I certainly believe her. The Schlegels are different works. They're more German romantic, as you might expect, but that's fine, especially if you know the original. My guess is there are some other very good translations. So in that qualified way, the translations, a few of them can be quite valuable. I worry that at some point we'll all need to read it in some sort of translation, as Chaucer is mostly already true for Chaucer. You probably don't have to read Chaucer in translation, but I do.Henry I feel like I shouldn't read it in translation, I think.Tyler But you do, right? Or you don't?Henry No, I read the original. I make myself do the original.Tyler I just can't understand the original well enough.Henry But I put the time in when I was young, and I think you retain a sense of it. Do you think, though, if we read, let's say we read Shakespeare in a modern English version, how much are we getting?Tyler It'll be terrible. It'll be a negative. It will poison your brain. So this, to me, will be highly unfortunate. Better to learn German and read the Schlegel than to read someone turning Shakespeare into current English. The only people who could do it maybe would be like the Trinidadians, who still have a marvelous English, and it would be a completely different work. But at least it might be something you could be proud of.Henry I'd like to read some of that. That would be quite an exciting project.Tyler Maybe it's been done. I don't know. But just an Americanized Hollywood version, like, no, that's just a negative. It's destructive.Henry Now, you're very interested in the 17th century, which I think is when we first get steady economic growth, East India Company, England is settling in America.Tyler Political parties. Some notion of the rule of law. A certain theory of property rights. Very explicit individualism. Social contract theories. You get Hobbes, Isaac Newton, calculus. We could go on. Some people would say, well, Westphalia, you get the modern nation state. That to me is a vaguer date to pin that on. But again, it's a claim you can make of a phenomenal century. People aren't that interested in it anymore, I think.Henry How does Shakespeare fit into this picture?Tyler Well, if you think of the years, if you think of the best ones, they start, like what, 1598, 1599. And then by 1600, they're almost all just wonderful. He's a herald. I don't think he's that causal. But he's a sign, the first totally clear sign that all the pieces have fallen into place. And we know the 17th century gave us our greatest thinker. And in terms of birth, not composition, it gave us our greatest composer, Bach.Henry So we can't have Shakespeare without all of this economic and philosophic and political activity. He's sort of, those things are necessary conditions for what he's doing.Tyler He needed the 16th century, and there's some very good recent books on how important the 16th century was for the 17th century. So I think more and more, as I read more, I'll come to see the roots of the 17th and the 16th century. And Shakespeare is reflecting that by bridging the two.Henry What are the recent books that you recommend about the 16th century?Tyler Oh, I forget the title, but there's this book about Elizabethan England, came out maybe three or four years ago, written by a woman. And it just talks about markets and commerce and creativity, surging during that time. In a way, obvious points, but she put them together better than anyone else had. And there's this other new German book about the 16th century. It's in my best of the year list that I put up on Marginal Revolution, and I forget the exact title, but I've been reading that slowly. And that's very good. So I expect to make further intellectual moves in that direction.Henry Was Shakespeare anti-woke?Tyler I don't know what that means in his context. He certainly understands the real truths are deeper, but to pin the word anti on him is to make him smaller. And like Harold Bloom, I will refuse to do that.Henry You don't see some sense in which ... A lot of people have compared wokeness to the Reformation, right? I mean, it's a kind of weak comparison.Tyler Yes, but only some strands of it. You wouldn't say Luther was woke, right?Henry But you don't see some way in which Shakespeare is, not in an anti way, in a complicated way, but like a reaction against some of these forces in the way that Swift would be a reaction against certain forces in his time.Tyler Well I'm not even sure what Shakespeare's religion was. Some people claim he was Catholic. To me that's plausible, but I don't know of any clear evidence. He does not strike me as very religious. He might be a lapsed Catholic if I had to say. I think he simply was always concerned with trying to view and present things in a deeper manner and there were so many forces he could have been reacting against with that one. I don't know exactly what it was in the England of his time that specifically he was reacting against. If someone says, oh, it was the strand of Protestant thought, I would say fine, it might have been that. A la Peter Thiel, couldn't you say it's over determined and name 47 other different things as well?Henry Now, if you were talking to rationalists, effective altruists, people from Silicon Valley, all these kinds of groups, would you say to them, you should read Shakespeare, you should read fiction, or would you just say, you're doing great, don't worry that you're missing out on this?Tyler Well, I'm a little reluctant to just tell people you should do X. I think what I've tried to do is to be an example of doing X and hope that example is somewhat contagious. Other people are contagious on me, as for instance, you have been. That's what I like to do. Now, it's a question, if someone needs a particular contagion, does that mean it's high marginal value or does it mean, in some sense, they're immue from the bug and you can't actually get them interested? It can go either way. Am I glad that Peter Singer has specialized in being Peter Singer, even though I disagree with much of it? I would say yes. Peter had his own homecoming. As far as I know, it was not Shakespearean, but when he wrote that book about the history of Vienna and his own family background, that was in a sense Peter doing his version of turning Shakespearean. It was a good book and it deepened his thought, but at the end of the day, I also see he's still Peter Singer, so I don't know. I think the Shakespearean perspective itself militates a bit against telling people they should read Shakespeare.Henry Sure. Patrick Collison today has tweeted about, I think, 10 of the great novels that he read this year. It's a big, long tweet with all of his novels.Tyler Yeah, it's wonderful.Henry Yeah, it's great. At the end, he basically says the reason to read them is just that they're great. Appreciation of excellence is a good thing for its own sake. You're not going to wrench a utilitarian benefit out of this stuff. Is that basically your view?Tyler I fully agree with that, but he might slightly be underrating the utilitarian benefits. If you read a particular thing, whatever it is, it's a good way of matching with other people who will deepen you. If it's Shakespeare, or if it's science fiction, or if it's economics, I think there's this big practical benefit from the better matching. I think, actually, Patrick himself, over time in his life, he will have a different set of friends, somewhat, because he wrote that post, and that will be good.Henry There's a utilitarian benefit that we both love Bleak House, therefore we can talk about it. This just opens up a lot of conversation and things for us that we wouldn't otherwise get.Tyler We're better friends, and we're more inclined to chat with each other, do this podcast, because we share that. That's clearly true in our case. I could name hundreds of similar cases, myself, people I know. That's important. So much of life is a matching problem, which includes matching to books, but also, most importantly, matching to people.Henry You're what? You're going to get better matching with better books, because Bleak House is such a great book. You're going to get better opportunities for matching.Tyler Of course, you'll understand other books better. There's something circular in that. I get it. A lot of value is circular, and the circle is how you cash in, not leaving the circle, so that's fine.Henry You don't think there's a ... I mean, some of the utilitarian benefits that are claimed like it gives you empathy, it improves your EQ or whatever, I think this is all complete rubbish.Tyler I'd love to see the RCTs, but in the prediction markets, I'll bet no. But again, I have an open mind. If someone had evidence, they could sway me, but I doubt it. I don't see it.Henry But I do think literature is underrated as a way of thinking.Tyler Yes, absolutely, especially by people we are likely to know.Henry Right. And that is quite a utilitarian benefit, right? If you can get yourself into that mindset, that is directly useful.Tyler I agree. The kind of career I've had, which is too complicated to describe for those of you who don't know it, but I feel I could not have had it without having read a lot of fiction.Henry Right. And I think that would be true for a lot of people, even if they don't recognize it directly in their own lives, right?Tyler Yes. In Silicon Valley, you see this huge influence of Lord of the Rings. Yes. And that's real, I think. It's not feigned, and that's also a great book.Henry One of the best of the 20th century, no doubt.Tyler Absolutely. And the impact it has had on people still has. It's an example of some classics get extremely elevated, like Shakespeare, Austen, and also Tolkien. It's one of them that just keeps on rising.Henry Ayn Rand is quite influential.Tyler Increasingly so. And that has held up better than I ever would have thought. Depends on the book. It's complicated, but yes, you have to say, held up better than one ever would have thought.Henry Are you going to go and do a reread?Tyler I don't think I can. I feel the newspaper is my reread of Atlas Shrugged, that suffices.Henry Is GPT good at Shakespeare, or LLMs generally?Tyler They're very useful for fiction, I've found. It was fantastic for reading Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate. I have never used them for Shakespeare, not once. That's an interesting challenge, because it's an earlier English. There's a depth in Shakespeare that might exceed current models. I'd love to see a project at some point in time to train AI for Shakespeare the way some people are doing it for Math Olympiads. But finding the human graders would be tough, though not impossible. You should be one of them. I would love that. I hope some philanthropist makes that happen.Henry Agreed. We're here, and we're ready.Tyler Yes, very ready.Henry What do you think about Shakespeare's women?Tyler The best women in all of fiction. They're marvelous, and they're attractive, and they're petulant, and they're romantic, and they're difficult, and they're stubborn, or whatever you want, it's in there. Just phenomenal. It's a way in which Shakespeare, again, I don't want to say anti-woke, but he just gives you a much deeper, better vision than the wokes would give you. Each one is such a distinctive voice. Yeah, fantastic. In a funny way, he embodies a lot of woke insights. The ways in which gender becomes malleable in different parts of stories is very advanced for his time.Henry It's believable also. The thing that puzzles me, so believable. What puzzles me is he's so polyphonic, and he represents that way of thinking so well, but I get the sense that John Stuart Mill, who wrote the Bentham essay and everything, just wasn't that interested in Shakespeare relative to the other things he was reading.Tyler He did write a little bit on Shakespeare, didn't he? But not much. But it wasn't wonderful. It was fine, but not like the Bentham Coleridge.Henry I think I've seen it in letters where he's like, oh, Shakespeare, pretty good. This, to me, is a really weird gap in the history of literature.Tyler But this does get to my point, where I don't think Shakespeare was that important for liberalism or individualism. The people who were obsessed with Shakespeare, as you know, were the German romantics, with variants, but were mostly illiberal or non-liberal. That also, to me, makes sense.Henry That's a good point. That's a good challenge. My last question is, you do a lot of talent spotting and talent assessing. How do you think about Shakespeare's career?Tyler I feel he is someone I would not have spotted very well. I feel bad about that. We don't know that much about him. As you well know, people still question if Shakespeare was Shakespeare. That's not my view. I'm pretty orthodox on the matter. But what the signs would have been in those early plays that he would have, say, by so far have exceeded Marlowe or even equaled Marlowe, I definitely feel I would have had a Zoom call with him and said, well, send me a draft, and read the early work, and concluded he would be like second-tier Marlowe, and maybe given him a grant for networking reasons, totally missed the boat. That's how I assess, how I would have assessed Shakespeare at the time, and that's humbling.Henry Would you have been good at assessing other writers of any period? Do you think there are other times when you would have?Tyler If I had met young Thomas Mann, I think there's a much greater chance I would have been thrilled. If I had met young Johann Sebastian Bach, I think there's a strong chance I would have been thrilled. Now, music is different. It's like chess. You can excel at quite a young age. But there's something about the development of Shakespeare where I think it is hard to see where it's headed early on. And it's the other question, how would I have perceived Shakespeare's work ethic? There's different ways you could interpret the biography here. But the biography of Bach, or like McCartney, clearly just obsessed with work ethic. You could not have missed it if you met young Bach, I strongly suspect. But Shakespeare, it's not clear to me you would see the work ethic early on or even later on.Henry No, no. I agree with that, actually.Tyler Same with Goethe. If I met early Goethe, my guess is I would have felt, well, here's the next Klopstock, which is fine, worthy of a grand. But Goethe was far more than that. And he always had these unfinished works. And you would, oh, come on, you're going to finish this one. Like you'd see Werther. OK, you made a big splash. But is your second novel just going to bomb? I think those would have been my hesitations. But I definitely would have funded Goethe as the next Klopstock, but been totally wrong and off base.Henry Right. And I think the thing I took away from the A.N. Wilson biography, which you also enjoyed recently, was I was amazed just how much time Goethe didn't spend working. Like I knew he wasn't always working, but there was so much wasted time in his life.Tyler Yes, but I do wonder with that or any biography, and I don't mean this as a criticism of Wilson, I think we know much less than we think we do about earlier times in general. So he could have been doing things that don't turn up in any paperwork. Sure, sure, sure. So I'm not sure how lazy he was, but I would just say, unlike Bach or say Paul McCartney, it's not evident that he was the world's hardest worker.Henry And Mozart, would you have? How do you feel about Mozart's early career?Tyler Well, Mozart is so exceptional, so young, it's just very easy to spot. I don't I don't even think there's a puzzle there unless you're blind. Now, I don't love Mozart before, I don't know, like the K-330s maybe, but still as a player, even just as a lower quality composer, I think you would bet the house on Mozart at any age where you could have met him and talked to him.Henry So you think K-100s, you can see the beginnings of the great symphonies, the great concertos?Tyler Well, I would just apply the Cowen test at how young in age was this person trying at all? And that would just dominate and I wouldn't worry too much about how good it was. And if I heard Piano Concerto No. 9, which is before K-330, I'm pretty sure that's phenomenal. But even if I hadn't heard that, it's like this guy's trying. He's going to be on this amazing curve. Bet the house on Mozart. It's a no-brainer. If you don't do that, you just shouldn't be doing talent at all. He's an easy case. He's one of the easiest cases you can think of.Henry Tyler Cowen, this was great. Thank you very much.Tyler Thank you very much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

pWotD Episode 2797: Olivia Hussey Welcome to Popular Wiki of the Day, spotlighting Wikipedia's most visited pages, giving you a peek into what the world is curious about today.With 577,151 views on Saturday, 28 December 2024 our article of the day is Olivia Hussey.Olivia Hussey (née Osuna; 17 April 1951 – 27 December 2024) was a British actress. Her awards included a Golden Globe Award and a David di Donatello Award. The daughter of Argentine tango singer Osvaldo Ribó, Hussey was born in Buenos Aires but spent most of her early life in her mother's native England. She aspired to become an actress at a young age and studied drama for five years at Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London.Hussey began acting professionally as an adolescent. She appeared in a 1966 London production of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, opposite Vanessa Redgrave; this led to her being scouted for the role of Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. Hussey received widespread acclaim and international recognition for her performance. In 1974, she appeared as the lead character Jess Bradford in the cult slasher film Black Christmas. This and her roles in the horror productions Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990) and Stephen King's It (1990) earned her the label of scream queen.Hussey reunited with Zeffirelli in the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth (1977) as Mary and appeared as Rosalie Otterbourne in John Guillermin's Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile (1978). She appeared in several international productions throughout the 1980s, including the Japanese production Virus (1980) and the Australian dystopian action film Turkey Shoot (1982). She also worked as a voice actress, providing voice roles in Star Wars video games including Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (1998), Star Wars: Force Commander (2000), and Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011).This recording reflects the Wikipedia text as of 02:03 UTC on Sunday, 29 December 2024.For the full current version of the article, see Olivia Hussey on Wikipedia.This podcast uses content from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.Visit our archives at wikioftheday.com and subscribe to stay updated on new episodes.Follow us on Mastodon at @wikioftheday@masto.ai.Also check out Curmudgeon's Corner, a current events podcast.Until next time, I'm neural Kevin.

Marco Bardini"Il cinema medievaloide"1965 - 1976Edizioni ETSwww.edizioniets.itFesta del libro antico e medievale di Saluzzo (Cuneo)Sabato 26 ottobre 2024Marco Bardini"Il cinema medievaloide"Lezione dedicata che si concentra sulla commedia cinematografica in costume che tra il 1965 e il 1976, rifacendosi alla novellistica del XIV-XVI secolo, ottenendo successo popolare, ma non di critica, considerato un filone a vocazione trash.Il volume narra vita morte e miracoli (soprattutto al botteghino) di quella commedia cinematografica in costume che tra il 1965 e il 1976, rifacendosi principalmente alla novellistica del XIV-XVI secolo, ottenne uno straordinario successo popolare. Ma non di critica. Fu un filone polimorfo e onnivoro, a vocazione trash, che ebbe la spavalderia di mettere in competizione accreditati registi come Lattuada, Scola e Monicelli, e onesti artigiani di lungo corso come Festa Campanile, Amendola e Corbucci; fuoriclasse instabilmente talentuosi del cinema bis come Aristide Massaccesi, Antonio Margheriti e Mariano Laurenti, e malestrosi travèt della celluloide come Luigi Batzella, Enrico Bomba e Marino Girolami (per citarne alcuni). A non dire delle schegge impazzite. Nella faccenda, inoltre, finirono coinvolti intellettuali come Pasolini (con l'intera sua Trilogia della vita) e lo scrittore Luigi Malerba; nonché gente di teatro come Zeffirelli, Garinei & Giovannini, Gianfranco De Bosio. Nomi illustri o spregevoli che vollero trascinare in platea le vecchie storie di Machiavelli e Boccaccio, di Ruzante e Aretino, assieme a quelle di Bandello, Masuccio, Bibbiena, Sacchetti, Vasari e tanti altri. Con in più un'eccentrica considerazione per Le mille e una notte, Chaucer e il Kamasutra, il marchese de Sade, Cenerentola e Balzac. A un certo punto si volle denominare tutto ciò “decamerotico”, più nel male che nel bene. Col senno di poi, è suggerito qui di ribattezzarlo “cinema medievaloide”.Marco Bardini insegna Letteratura Italiana Contemporanea all'Università di Pisa. Con ETS ha già pubblicato Elsa Morante e il cinema (2014) e Boccaccio pop. Usi, riusi e abusi del Decameron nella contemporaneità (2020).IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarewww.ilpostodelleparole.itDiventa un supporter di questo podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/il-posto-delle-parole--1487855/support.

O quadro Clássicos CBN desta semana, com o Maestro Helder Trefzger, volta às trilhas de filmes. Dessa vez, teremos uma seleção de filmes italianos que fizeram grande sucesso, de diretores consagrados como Fellini, Zeffirelli e Visconti, dentre outros. Ouça a conversa completa!

Zeffirelli does Verdi

Matthew 5:3 “God blesses those who are poor and realise their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.” Robert Powell acted the part of Jesus in Franco Zeffirelli's film Jesus of Nazareth. He claims that his life was changed by the experience and recalls the day when he was filming the Sermon on the Mount. Powell had no time for Christianity but, as he preached the sermon as an actor, he said that he was so affected by its beauty that he began to cry. The tears were not in the script, but Zeffirelli wisely kept them in the movie. It is easy to see why he was so affected by these words because they take us to the heart of what it means to be alive. They stand before us as a challenge and encouragement as we seek to understand what it means to live the Christian life. Today's verse is the first of the so-called Beatitudes. Before we start looking at them we need to be clear what Jesus meant by the ‘kingdom of heaven', which was an expression he often used. The kingdom of heaven comes wherever God is allowed to be in control so, amazingly, it can happen in our lives today. This is why Jesus encouraged us to pray for his kingdom to come here on earth as it is in heaven. The kingdom of heaven gives us a preview of what heaven itself will be like; it is, by definition, life at its very best. Jesus declared that the people who possess this wonderful kingdom of heaven are those who are spiritually poor. The word used here for ‘poor' in the original Greek language speaks of absolute poverty or destitution. Jesus was saying that the way into the kingdom of heaven is to understand that, spiritually, you've got nothing to offer apart from empty hands. We need to come to Jesus in absolute weakness, recognising that we are totally dependent upon him. The moment arrogance and self-confidence creeps in, we spoil everything. From first to last we are dependent on our loving and gracious heavenly Father. Question Where have you seen the kingdom of heaven come on earth? Prayer Lord God, help me depend totally upon you so that in my life your kingdom will come here on earth as it is in heaven. Amen

Ve Florencii na náměstí Santa Firenze člověka překvapí velkolepé muzeum Franca Zeffirelliho. Nikdo, kdo v roce 1968 viděl jeho zfilmovanou tragédii Romeo a Julie, na ten zážitek nezapomněl. Zeffirelli se odvážil obsadit do rolí titulní dvojice herce toho věku, jaký postavám přisoudil Sheakespeare.

Ve Florencii na náměstí Santa Firenze člověka překvapí velkolepé muzeum Franca Zeffirelliho. Nikdo, kdo v roce 1968 viděl jeho zfilmovanou tragédii Romeo a Julie, na ten zážitek nezapomněl. Zeffirelli se odvážil obsadit do rolí titulní dvojice herce toho věku, jaký postavám přisoudil Sheakespeare.Všechny díly podcastu Ranní úvaha můžete pohodlně poslouchat v mobilní aplikaci mujRozhlas pro Android a iOS nebo na webu mujRozhlas.cz.

Recently, I chatted with author Sophia Lambton about her book, "The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography". If you are a fan of Callas, which I am, this book offers you a deep dive into her life, born from extensive research, debunking popular theories and offering an authentic portrayal. Twelve years in the making "The Callas Imprint" reaps never-before-seen correspondence and archival documents worldwide—closing in on the self-contradictions of Callas, her attitudes and habits with empathic scrutiny. It swivels readers through the singer's on- and offstage scenes and flux of fears and dreams... the double life of all performers. Please enjoy!To order on Amazon, visit.Maria Callas sings Puccini: Tosca - 'Vissi d'Arte' at Covent Garden 1964  c/o Warner Classics[Maria Callas' final appearance on the operatic stage was in Tosca ​at Covent Garden's 1965 Royal Gala. ​​​For many opera lovers, Maria Callas and Tosca's Vissi d'Arte ​are inseparable. "I lived for art; I lived for love" became La Divina's cri de coeur, ​​​​her swansong, the perfect expression of her own triumphs and tragedies. This unrivaled recording is from that legendary Zeffirelli production in  1964 and is one of just many jewels in the Maria Callas Live edition.] __________________________________________________________________About Steven, HostSteven is a Canadian composer & actor living in Toronto. Through his music, he creates a range of works, with an emphasis on the short-form genre—his muse being to offer the listener both the darker and more satiric shades of human existence. If you're interested, please check out his music website for more. Member of the Canadian League Of Composers.__________________________________________________________________You can FOLLOW ME on Instagram.

Pier Silvio Allarga L'Impero: La Svolta Di Villa Grande!L'impero iniziato da Silvio Berlusconi continuerà in grande anche grazie a suo figlio, Pier Silvio. Infatti c'è una svolta importante nel caso di Villa Grande. Ecco che cosa succede!#breakingnews #ultimenotizie #notiziedelgiorno #notizie #cronaca #piersilvioberlusconi #svolta #villagrande #zeffirelli #silvioberlusconi #impero

One of the most quotable and iconic of British films, born out of writer/director Bruce Robinson's personal experiences and shepherded to the big screen by George Harrison and his Handmade Films company. 'Withnail & I' is a beloved comedy but in this episode I talk as much about its forlorn, end-of-an-era wistful heart as I do the incredibly quotable lines. Particularly I was interested to learn of Bruce's formative me-too experience on the set of Zeffirelli's 'Romeo & Juliet' and how that informed the character of Monty. But Monty is more than a monster or a would-be abuser; his portrayal on the page and in the flesh by the brilliant Richard Griffiths is layered and sympathetic and very much informed by the realities for gay people in Britain in the 1960's. In Monty we have a great analogy for the film; at first glance laughable, uproarious, a characture and character...but just beneath that is writing and performing of great complexity and nuance. This is what we'll celebrate in this episode all about the brilliant, the ever-fresh and continuingly fascinating 'Withnail & I'. LINKS: A 1999 documentary about Bruce Robinson. Bruce's excellent 2020 'Withnail & I' Watchalong Commentary for Esquire. The incredible live version of 'Whiter Shade of Pale' played by King Curtis and his band at the Fillmore West in 1971. Here's a bizarro artifact from the 60's: Bruce Robinson starring in a coffee ad aimed at tripping hippies looking to come down/go up/not sure really how coffee and acid is a great combo but there you have the 60's! Bruce Robinson in Zeffirelli's 'Romeo & Juliet' as Benvolio 'Smoking In Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson' on Amazon Toby Benjamin's excellent book about the making of 'Withnail and I' is essential for any fan of the film. The inspiration for Withnail, Vivian MacKerrell.

Youtube with closed captions! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMB3lNMd2Q8 Leo's website http://leozagami.com/Leo Lyon Zagami is a writer and researcher and the son of Dr. Elio Zagami (1939- 2010), known Jungian analyst, writer, and co- founder of GAPA (Independent Group of Analytical Psychology, of which he was president). His grandfather was Senator Leopoldo Zagami, a Sicilian politician who was also a known historian and author, who married into the aristocratic family of the Marquis de Gregorio. Leo's mother, Jessica Lyon Young, is a member of the family of the Queen Mother of England. Her father, Henry Lyon Young was also a writer. Felicity Mason, her mother, Leo's maternal grandmother, helped Leo in developing his talents from a young age. Felicity was an old time collaborator and friend of avant-garde eccentrics such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She was also known under the pseudonym Anne Cumming, which made her famous in the 80's as a controversial novelist, after working for many years in the cinema business with prestigious figures such as Fellini and Zeffirelli. Zagami, who is known for a brilliant career as Leo Young in the media and music industry as a Record Producer, became quickly popular on the web in 2006, because of his direct involvement in the New World Order and Secret Societies known to the majority of us as the “Illuminati.” TruthStream infoYour support is greatly appreciated! Here is our Patreon https://www.patreon.com/m/TruthStreamDonate to the show STRIPE link: https://buy.stripe.com/eVa3do8Yq13n2XKbIIRumble https://rumble.com/c/TruthStreamBitchute https://www.bitchute.com/channel/1vwxcAx0oTNk/Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/273DmGmQmcYfQQEj0QiBue?si=sFLa0rIMT9aPY3nIvE4k-w&dd=1Instagram https://www.instagram.com/truthstreamshow/Twitter https://twitter.com/TruthStreamSh0wTruth Social https://truthsocial.com/@truthstreamTik Tok https://tiktok.com/@truthstreamshowTelegram https://t.me/TruthStreamJoeScottWebsite https://joerosaticollective.comMusic https://joerosati.bandcamp.com/Youtube / https://www.youtube.com/@TruthStreamWithJoeandScott Health Products we share and have chatted about on the show. www.wavwatch.com discount code TRUTHSTREAM100https://rumble.com/v2zhxbg-wavwatch.com-with-linda-balmer-olsen-save-100-discount-code.html Quantum Health and P2 Probioticshttps://rumble.com/v2kxcrk-quick-update-heather-holmes-breakthrough-blood-clot-dissolver-blood-health-.html Purium info: for incredible nutrition etc go to www.ishoppurium.com and type in truthstream for discount code.interview with Ian https://rumble.com/v2bywnu-ian-farrar-health-and-wellness-expert-remove-glyphosate-elevate-your-health.html Glutathione productNeumi https://neumi.com/truthstream Glutathione is the body's master antioxidant that impacts nearly every function in your body. It detoxifies your body's cells and it also recycles itself to increase the effectiveness of other antioxidants (Vitamins C, D, etc). Holy Hydrogen Discount code https://holyhydrogen.com/TRUTHSTREAM

Welcome to the Instant Trivia podcast episode 851, where we ask the best trivia on the Internet. Round 1. Category: also a bar drink 1: Flathead or Phillips head. a screwdriver. 2: With so much brainpower on stage today, this "Living Dead" movie monster wouldn't know where to start. a zombie. 3: It was last call for this Scottish outlaw on Dec. 28, 1734. Rob Roy. 4: Take a flying leap and name this type of reconnaissance plane or insect of the family Acrididae. a grasshopper. 5: G'day! This wooden weapon can also be a scheme that does injury to its originator. a boomerang. Round 2. Category: they all played hamlet 1: Fans from around the world sped to Winnipeg to see this "Speed" star play Hamlet there in 1995. Keanu Reeves. 2: He's only 9 years younger than Glenn Close, but he called her Mom in Zeffirelli's 1990 version. Mel Gibson. 3: The role of Obi-Wan Kenobi was light-years away when he played Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1938. Sir Alec Guinness. 4: This star of "A Fish Called Wanda" not only starred in but directed a 1990 production of "Hamlet". Kevin Kline. 5: He played Hamlet at the New York Shakespeare Festival before he hammed it up as Mike Hammer:. Stacy Keach. Round 3. Category: tv bars and restaurants 1: On this sitcom Duff Beer is on tap at Moe's Tavern where the clientele is always "animated". "The Simpsons". 2: Head north, far north, to visit The Brick, this show's restaurant. "Northern Exposure". 3: On this sitcom you could have seen Jay Thomas take a few "Potts" shots in the Blue Shamrock. "Love And War". 4: On this sitcom you may find the Crane brothers having coffee at Cafe Nervosa. "Frasier". 5: The Lunch Box in Lanford, Ill. is one of this sitcom's settings. "Roseanne". Round 4. Category: classic movies 1: It's the first rule of Fight Club. you do not talk about Fight Club. 2: Crime film that features Gene Hackman as Buck Barrow. Bonnie and Clyde. 3: Charlie Chaplin befriends a millionaire and falls in love with a blind girl in this 1931 film. City Lights. 4: Film in which De Niro as Travis Bickle asks, "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me?". Taxi Driver. 5: In it, reporter Rosalind Russell tells Cary Grant, "I wouldn't cover the burning of Rome for you if they were just lighting it up". His Girl Friday. Round 5. Category: what a year! 1: Dewaele won the Tour de France, Coco Chanel was the toast of Paris and Sacre Bleu!, the market crashed in this year. 1929. 2: The Titanic set off on maiden voyage. 1912. 3: In this year, Teddy became president, Eddie became king and Nicky became father of Anastasia. 1901. 4: Rosa Parks sat down for freedom. 1955. 5: (Hi, I'm Tyler Christopher of General Hospital.) In this year, ABC gave "G.H." a shot on TV, "He's So Fine" shot up to No. 1 and JFK visited the Berlin Wall. 1963. Thanks for listening! Come back tomorrow for more exciting trivia! Special thanks to https://blog.feedspot.com/trivia_podcasts/

Oggi rimediamo alla carenza di cinema americano classico in podcast: confrontiamo i The Champ di King Vidor (1931) e Franco Zeffirelli (1979) Partecipanti:Marco GrifòPaolo Torino Il nostro canale Telegram per rimanere sempre aggiornati e comunicare direttamente con noi: https://t.me/SalottoMonogatari Anchor: https://anchor.fm/salotto-monogatari Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2QtzE9ur6O1qE3XbuqOix0?si=mAN-0CahRl27M5QyxLg4cw Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/it/podcast/salotto-monogatari/id1503331981 Google Podcasts: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNmM1ZjZiNC9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== Logo creato da: Massimo Valenti Sigla e post-produzione a cura di: Alessandro Valenti / Simone Malaspina Per il jingle della sigla si ringraziano: Alessandro Corti e Gianluca Nardo

If you want to see the effect of a sinister energy on a society, look no further than Hollywood. From the music of decades past to the movies that dominate screens now, brain-washing and total control have always been the mission, and its contagion effect has spread across the world from politics to ordinary people.   How did this sinister mission begin? What does it mean for anyone who wants out of this wicked reality?   In this episode, return guest and author of “Confessions of an Illuminati”, Leo Zagami shares the not-so-subtle links between Hollywood, mind control and the military industrial complex.   Three Things We Learned  -How psychedelics are used for evilWhen it comes to the mind-control of the Hollywood elite, are they unknowing, unwitting pawns or willing participants?  -The evil of NetflixCan we really trust what streaming services are putting out right now, or is something nefarious behind the content?  - How to protect yourself from mind control by way of entertainmentWhy do we have to consume popular content with a whole lot of caution?   Guest Bio   Leo Lyon Zagami is a writer and researcher and the son of Dr. Elio Zagami (1939- 2010), known Jungian analyst, writer, and co- founder of GAPA (Independent Group of Analytical Psychology, of which he was president). His grandfather was Senator Leopoldo Zagami, a Sicilian politician who was also a known historian and author, who married into the aristocratic family of the Marquis de Gregorio.   Leo's mother, Jessica Lyon Young, is a member of the family of the Queen Mother of England. Her father, Henry Lyon Young was also a writer. Felicity Mason, her mother, Leo's maternal grandmother, helped Leo in developing his talents from a young age. Felicity was an old-time collaborator and friend of avant-garde eccentrics such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She was also known under the pseudonym Anne Cumming, which made her famous in the 80's as a controversial novelist, after working for many years in the cinema business with prestigious figures such as Fellini and Zeffirelli.   Zagami, who is known for a brilliant career as Leo Young in the media and music industry as a Record Producer, became quickly popular on the web in 2006, because of his direct involvement in the New World Order and Secret Societies known to the majority of us as the “Illuminati.”   His blog rose quickly and gained attention from people such as David Icke, for its accurate fully documented ground- breaking inside information. Between 2009 and 2013 Zagami began publishing books in Europe and Japan based on a variety of subjects that range from the history of secret societies and the Vatican to geopolitical matters concerning the New World Order. In 2013, he collaborated with known Italian journalists, Ferruccio Pinotti and Giacomo Galeazzi, in drafting a chapter for their Italian Best Seller “Vaticano Massone,” which was released in May 2013, dedicated to the secretive world of Vatican Freemasonry. Zagami has collaborated in the past with a series of articles and scoops for Infowars and was the protagonist of a highly successful documentary made by Alex Jones in Rome, called “Demonic Possession of The Vatican Exposed.” Leo also was the one to reveal to the world on Infowars the Gay Vatican Drug/Orgy in the summer of 2017, that forced the mainstream media to later cover the story. After publishing many books in Italy and Japan with great success, he reached his English-speaking public, thanks to a book deal made with San Francisco's CCC Publishing, that made Leo's translated works available in the English language. However, Leo's latest books, Confessions Volume 4, volume 5, volume 6.66, and volume 7 published by the newly established publishing house Cursum Perficio, were written entirely in English and not translated from Italian. Leo travels around the world giving conferences and has recently relocated with his wife to California after suffering political persecution for his work in Italy.   For more information, visit https://www.leozagami.com.  https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Illuminati-Occult-Populist-Reject/dp/B09S6W9DSX  

Robert Powell is one of our best-known actors, with a career that began in the late sixties and exploded into almost instant fame; since then, there have been some fifty films, including “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and “The Italian Job”, numerous theatre roles, and television appearances which have included six years on Holby City. For many people, though, he will always be Gustav Mahler thanks to Ken Russell's 1973 biopic; for some, he became a memorable representation of Jesus Christ, thanks to his starring role in Zeffirelli's six-hour epic. Robert Powell begins by choosing Mahler's famous Adagietto from the Fifth Symphony. He listened to Mahler non-stop when rehearsing for the role, but was still surprised by some of the eccentric things Ken Russell asked him to do: he will never forget floating for hours in a freezing lake. He talks about the impact of early fame, conjuring up the excitement of the King's Road in the “swinging sixties”, and meeting his wife, Babs, who danced with Pan's People. And he tells the story of how, when he was playing Jesus, he delivered the Sermon on the Mount and “something really extraordinary happened”. These days he is a devoted grandfather, making up for the time he couldn't spend with his family when he was away filming. Other music choices include Stravinsky, Bach, Janacek, and his hero Bob Dylan. A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3 Produced by Elizabeth Burke

Alle 21 del 6 ottobre 1924 Ines Viviani Donarelli annuncia l'inizio delle trasmissioni della radio pubblica italiana, la URI (poi EIAR e quindi RAI). Alla vigilia del primo centenario, Massimo Emanuelli, docente e speaker radiofonico ripercorre la storia dell'emittente nazionale nell'opera in due volumi "L'avventurosa storia della Radio pubblica italiana. Dall'Araldo Telefonico a RadioRai cent'anni di radio" (Gammarò, 1254 p., € 59,00). RECENSIONI "Lotto Romanino Moretto Ceruti - Maestri della pittura a Brescia e Bergamo" (Silvana Editoriale, 168 pp., € 30,00) "Senza posa - Lorenzo Lotto tra Venezia Bergamo e le Marche" di Stefano Zuffi (Enrico Damiani, 160 pp. ill., € 16,00) "Rivelazione di Lorenzo Lotto" di Anna Banti (Abscondita, 80 pp., € 23,00) "Zeffirelli, gli anni alla Scala" (Edizioni del Teatro Alla Scala, € 10,00) "Autobiografia" di Franco Zeffirelli (Bur, 428 pp. ill., € 16,00) "Umberto Boccioni - Vita di un sovversivo" di Rachele Ferrario (Mondadori, 410 pp. ill., € 24,00) IL CONFETTINO "Baci, abbracci e altri gesti nei quadri della Pinacoteca di Brera" di Marta Sironi, illustr. di Guido Scarabattolo (Topipittori, 32 pp. ill., € 14,00)

Leo Zagami discusses his latest book on the entertainment industry's goal to exert profound influence and control on the masses in order to change society for dark and occult purposes. He also describes Hollywood's ties to the Military-Industrial-Complex, the British Royal Family, freemasonry, Aleister Crowley, and other groups. He discusses heresy in Catholicism and heretical Sabbatean Jewish Frankism and talks about his experience in the music industry and the heavy influence of secret societies and satanism. AI and the metaverse are making their way into music and film to promote transhumanism.  Watch On BitChute / Brighteon / Rokfin / Rumble Geopolitics & Empire · Leo Zagami: Hollywood, the Military-Industrial-Complex, the Occult, & The Great Reset #342 *Support Geopolitics & Empire! Become a Member https://geopoliticsandempire.substack.comDonate https://geopoliticsandempire.com/donationsConsult https://geopoliticsandempire.com/consultation **Visit Our Affiliates & Sponsors! Above Phone https://abovephone.com/?above=geopoliticseasyDNS (use code GEOPOLITICS for 15% off!) https://easydns.comEscape The Technocracy course (15% discount using link) https://escapethetechnocracy.com/geopoliticsPassVult https://passvult.comSociatates Civis (CitizenHR, CitizenIT, CitizenPL) https://societates-civis.comWise Wolf Gold https://www.wolfpack.gold/?ref=geopolitics Websites Leo Zagami http://leozagami.com Leo Zagami Books https://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Illuminati-Antichrist-Sound-Devil/dp/B0BPBCSW1Y About Leo Zagami Leo Lyon Zagami is a writer and researcher and the son of Dr. Elio Zagami (1939- 2010), known Jungian analyst, writer, and co- founder of GAPA (Independent Group of Analytical Psychology, of which he was president). His grandfather was Senator Leopoldo Zagami, a Sicilian politician who was also a known historian and author, who married into the aristocratic family of the Marquis de Gregorio. Leo's mother, Jessica Lyon Young, is a member of the family of the Queen Mother of England. Her father, Henry Lyon Young was also a writer. Felicity Mason, her mother, Leo's maternal grandmother, helped Leo in developing his talents from a young age. Felicity was an old time collaborator and friend of avant-garde eccentrics such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She was also known under the pseudonym Anne Cumming, which made her famous in the 80's as a controversial novelist, after working for many years in the cinema business with prestigious figures such as Fellini and Zeffirelli. Zagami, who is known for a brilliant career as Leo Young in the media and music industry as a Record Producer, became quickly popular on the web in 2006, because of his direct involvement in the New World Order and Secret Societies known to the majority of us as the “Illuminati.” His blog rose quickly and gained attention from people such as David Icke, for it's accurate fully documented ground breaking inside information. Between 2009 and 2013 Zagami began publishing books in Europe and Japan based on a variety of subjects that range from the history of secret societies and the Vatican, to geo-political matters concerning the New World Order. In 2013, he collaborated with well known Italian journalists, Ferruccio Pinotti and Giacomo Galeazzi, in drafting a chapter for their Italian Best Seller “Vaticano Massone,” which was released in May 2013, dedicated to the secretive world of Vatican Freemasonry. Zagami has collaborated in the past with a series of articles and scoops for Infowars, and was the protagonist of a highly successful documentary made by Alex Jones in Rome, called “Demonic Possession Of The Vatican Exposed.” Leo also was the one to reveal to the world on Infowars the Gay Vatican Drug/Orgy in the summer of 2017, that forced the mainstream media to later cover the story. After publishing many books in Italy and Japan with great ...

Ora over 70, 'sfruttamento immagini sessuali di minori'

Episode 399: From the Rise of the Antichrist To the Sound of the Devil and the Great Reset Movies and music are two sensorial experiences capable of exerting profound suggestions on the masses and on single individuals. The first is described as cinematic magic and the second is often depicted as the sound of the Devil. They are the instruments of propaganda in the hands of restricted circles of initiates controlled by the Illuminati elite, who want to succeed in their perverse and diabolical plan using these tools. Zagami reveals for the first time the secret mission of Hollywood, which was created to change society and prepare the way for the coming Antichrist and the End times. In the following pages, you will find a unique vision of show business that will astound even the most demanding readers and debunkers thanks to the incredible amount of well-researched information, as well as the personal testimony of the author, who was involved in the entertainment industry through his own work as a record producer and his family connections to film directors like Fellini and Zeffirelli. You will learn about not only the diabolic roots of contemporary music but also how the Sabbatean-Frankist Messianic conspiracy landed in Hollywood amongst occult rituals and the first silent films, all linked from the very beginning to the U.S. Military Industrial Complex and the Global Banking Cartel, that has transformed the original American dream into a Satanic “woke” nightmare under the precepts of the Prophet of dissolution, Aleister Crowley. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/michaeldecon/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/michaeldecon/support

TWGTF Brothers and Sisters!!! Gather around your favorite podcast device and feel the power of the most Spooktacular episode of the show to date! Everyone who was hoping for the heat to be brought in part two my only suggestion is get some oven mitts!! I am so excited to say that this is one of our strongest lists and even maybe the strongest top fives we have ever done. 0:00:00 to 0:05:53 Preamble & Music: ...Welcome to the back half of the 80's in horror! 0:05:54 to 0:07:00 Show Open and how is everyone doing? 0:07:01 to 0:24:31 Tyler's Number 5 0:24:32 to 0:43:42 Ben's Number 5 0:43:43 to 0:56:09 Tyler's Number 4 0:56:10 to 1:10:02 Ben's Number 4 1:10:03 to 1:24:59 Tyler's Number 3 1:25:00 to 1:39:28 Ben's Number 3 1:39:29 to 1:56:37 Tyler's Number 2 1:56:38 to 2:11:12 Ben's Number 2 2:11:13 to 2:25:42 Tyler's Number 1 2:25:43 to 0:00:00 Ben's Number 1 2:41:29 to 2:44:45 What is happening on the next TWGTF and Outro Spoiler Alert: The Twists and turns of where each of our lists go is as shocking as the movies themselves

In this episode, Lexman talks to David Patterson about boilerplate writing. They discuss how to avoid coming across as apart from your audience, and how to make yourself seem more like a valuable resource. They also chat about the film Maars, and the plesiosaur therein.

TESTO DELL'ARTICOLO ➜ www.filmgarantiti.it/it/articoli.php?id=478IL TALENTO ARTISTICO DI MEL GIBSON di Roberto MarchesiniGran bel film, La Battaglia di Hacksaw Ridge: splendido dal punto di vista tecnico, commuove, appassiona ed eleva lo spirito.Prima di parlarne, ripercorriamo la carriera dell'autore, il famoso Mel Gibson. Che, forse, dà uno spaccato dell'evoluzione del pensiero di un cattolico negli Stati Uniti... Diventa una star di Hollywood negli anni '70 e '80 grazie alle serie Mad Max e Arma letale. Sembra destinato al genere avventuroso-fracassone quando, nel 1990, Zeffirelli lo chiama per vestire i panni di Amleto. Gibson coglie l'occasione, e sfodera una prova da grande attore. Nel 1993 esce il suo primo film da regista: L'uomo senza volto. Un grande, commovente e drammatico film sulla figura paterna, oggetto di diffidenza e anche odio, ma necessaria.BRAVEHEART (1996), IL PATRIOTA (2000) & WE WERE SOLDIERS (2002)Tre anni dopo ecco l'epico e monumentale Braveheart Cuore impavido. Di questo film ricordiamo il realismo, la violenza ed uno dei più grandi discorsi della storia del cinema («Agonizzanti in un letto, fra molti anni da adesso...»), probabilmente ispirato all'Enrico V di Shakespeare. Emerge anche il tema politico: l'indipendenza della Scozia dalla tirannia inglese. Il film regala a Gibson, oltre ad un importante incasso, 5 premi Oscar. [leggi: UN CUORE IMPAVIDO PER LA LIBERTA', clicca qui, N.d.BB]Nel 2000 Gibson interpreta Il patriota. Apparentemente un film sull'indipendenza degli Stati Uniti che nasconde però ben altro. Innanzitutto, il patriota del titolo non combatte per la patria, anzi: al momento dell'arruolamento, si rifiuta, anteponendo i suoi doveri di padre a quelli nei confronti della «nazione americana» («Perché dovrei scambiare un tiranno a tremila miglia di distanza con tremila tiranni lontani solo un miglio?»). Feroce guerriero, Benjamin Martin si schiera risolutamente dalla parte della pace («Vi sono alternative alla guerra»). Più che un film patriottico, Il patriota è piuttosto un film libertario; la sua bandiera non è quella a stelle e strisce, ma quella che verrà usata anni dopo dal Tea Party. [...]Nel 2002 Mel Gibson è impegnato in un film alla Berretti verdi: We were soldiers - Fino all'ultimo uomo. Interpreta un ufficiale - cattolico ed oltremodo eroico - impegnato nella guerra del Vietnam. Siamo all'esordio alla presidenza di Bush Jr: Gibson sembra concedere un minimo di fiducia alle istituzioni statunitensi dopo due mandati Clinton. [leggi: WE WERE SOLDIERS - FINO ALL'ULTIMO UOMO, clicca qui, N.d.BB]LA PASSIONE DI CRISTO (2004) & APOCALYPTO (2006)Nel 2004 esce La passione di Cristo: un film brutale e realistico su passione, morte e risurrezione di Gesù, con luci caravaggesche e recitato in aramaico, ebraico, latino. Prima dell'uscita nelle sale si diffonde la notizia secondo la quale il padre di Mel Gibson sarebbe un cattolico sedevacantista antisemita. Appena il film esce nelle sale fioccano le stroncature: si schierano Natalia Aspesi («Un'orgia di sangue...») e Vittorio Zucconi («Sangue, torture e integralismo»); persino eminenti prelati criticano il realismo del film, rimpiangendo la passione proletaria di Pasolini. Ma l'accusa più grave (anche se non ben circostanziata) è quella di antisemitismo: Jim Caviezel, interprete di Cristo, dirà di essersi giocato la carriera con questo film. Nonostante questo, il film incassa più di seicento milioni di dollari. Alle accuse di antisemitismo si accompagnano altri giudizi: Mel Gibson è padre di otto figli ed è sempre stato sposato con la stessa donna, un unicum, ad Hollywood. [leggi: UNA PASSIONE DI VIOLENZA E DI AMORE, clicca qui, N.d.BB]Due anni dopo Gibson sforna un altro capolavoro: Apocalypto. Ambientato nella brutale e feroce America precolombiana, narra la vicenda di Zampa di Giaguaro, che sfugge alla morte per salvare la famiglia. Alla fine del film, quando il protagonista sta per essere ucciso, ecco sbarcare dall'oceano una nave: trasporta soldati, religiosi e la croce di Cristo. [...] Oltre al tema della lotta per la famiglia, ne emerge prepotentemente un altro: quello dell'aborto. Cos'altro è il sacrificio umano praticato incessantemente dai capi del popolo Maya, se non l'uccisione di milioni e milioni di bambini? La società americana pre-cristiana è dunque quella statunitense? [...] [leggi: UNA CIVILTA' VIENE DISTRUTTA DALL'ESTERNO SOLO QUANDO SI E' GIA' CORROTTA AL SUO INTERNO, clicca qui, N.d.BB]Dall'uscita di Apocalypto, la carriera di Gibson va a rotoli. La sua immagine di padre di famiglia irreprensibile è deturpata: al suo fianco compare una giovane musicista russa ebrea Oksana Grigorieva (ma Gibson non era antisemita?), divorzia dalla moglie e va a vivere con lei. Viene fermato illegalmente da un poliziotto (alla presenza di telecamere) mentre è alla guida in stato di ebbrezza: si lascia scappare frasi antisemite («Gli ebrei sono responsabili di tutte le guerre del mondo»). Ha altri progetti cinematografici (un film su Giuda Maccabeo - ma Gibson non era antisemita? - ed un altro sugli insorgenti italiani), ma rinuncia: erano film - dirà - che interessavano solo a me. Solo pochi amici gli restano vicino (Robert Downey Junior e l'attivista lesbica Jody Foster - ma Gibson non era intollerante?). Nel 2010, a carriera ormai distrutta, viene lasciato dalla musicista russa, che lo denuncia per averle detto al telefono frasi razziste (registrate su nastro). Da quel momento Gibson recita in alcuni (anche ottimi) film d'azione: Fuori controllo, Viaggio in paradiso, Machete Kills, Blood father; come autore sembra finito. [leggi: DEBOLEZZE UMANE NELLA VITA DI MEL GIBSON, clicca qui, N.d.BB]LA BATTAGLIA DI HACKSAW RIDGE (2017)Ed eccoci arrivati al febbraio 2017 con la sua nuova prova da regista: La Battaglia di Hacksaw Ridge. È la storia vera di Desmond Doss, un obiettore di coscienza che si arruola volontario durante la Seconda Guerra Mondiale. Non vuole toccare le armi per motivi religiosi (è avventista del settimo giorno); ma non si sente da meno rispetto agli altri giovani che decidono di servire il loro paese in guerra. La sua posizione non viene compresa e, considerato un vigliacco, durante l'addestramento è fatto oggetto di insulti, punizioni e violenze. Viene addirittura incriminato per aver disobbedito agli ordini, rischia il carcere, ma non rinuncia ai suoi principi. Alla fine, grazie all'intervento del padre, alcolizzato e violento, traumatizzato dalla Prima Guerra Mondiale, viene riconosciuto il suo status di soldato obiettore di coscienza ed assegnato alla sanità militare. I compagni e gli ufficiali continuano a considerarlo un vigliacco, ma Doss riuscirà a dimostrare il contrario. Viene inviato nel Pacifico e partecipa alla battaglia di Okinawa; viene assegnato a Hawksaw Ridge, una impervia montagna controllata dai giapponesi. Il primo giorno di battaglia è cruento, ma vede la vittoria degli statunitensi; il giorno seguente, però, i giapponesi riconquistano la posizione. É il momento della ritirata, ma non per tutti: Doss resterà in cima, recupererà uno ad uno i suoi compagni calandoli con delle corde, sarà l'ultimo a calarsi dopo aver salvato commilitoni e giapponesi feriti. Una cinquantina, disse Doss; un centinaio, lo corressero i suoi compagni (alla fine gli vennero attribuiti 75 salvataggi, una via di mezzo).Del film notiamo l'eccellente tecnica e l'ottima recitazione, soprattutto del protagonista Andrew Garfield (al quale era stato «sconsigliato» di lavorare con Gibson). Colpiscono anche la castità del fidanzamento di Doss (quando mai, nei film hollywoodiani?) e i dialoghi, che rimandano ai valori più nobili. Il film gronda eroismo e fede religiosa: ogni volta che Doss cala un compagno dalla montagna, si ferma a pregare: «Fammene trovare ancora uno». Gibson chiarisce che la vera forza non è quella dei muscoli (la recluta culturista «Hollywood» - sottile ironia - non si distingue, in battaglia, per il coraggio), ma quella interiore: la virtù della fortezza.E torna, nuovamente, il tema della guerra. Il realismo è terribile e spettacolare: la guerra è morte, dolore e sofferenza. [...] Gibson, pur avendo firmato film di guerra, non è mai stato un guerrafondaio; ma con questo film sembra compiere un passo ulteriore. «Non mi sembra una brutta cosa rimettere insieme qualche pezzo del mondo, mentre sono tutti così intenti a farlo a pezzi», dice Desmond Doss. Lo pensa anche Gibson. [...]Il suo messaggio è chiaro: la guerra non è di per sé eroismo. L'eroismo è quello di chi - anche in guerra - è disposto a donare la vita per i propri fratelli, anche se di un'altra nazione. L'eroismo è quello di Doss, che salva uno ad uno i propri compagni e i propri nemici, e che prega «Fammene trovare ancora uno». Non per ucciderlo: per salvarlo.

Pastor Andy Davis preaches on Mark 5:35-43. In the account of Jesus’ interaction with the bleeding woman and Jarius, we see both Jesus’ power over death and his great tenderness and desire for intimacy with his people. - SERMON TRANSCRIPT - Turn in your Bibles to Mark chapter 5. We're going to continue our study in the Gospel of Mark with this incredible account. I want to preach today on the infinite power and the intimate tenderness that Jesus Christ displays. I've meditated on those themes in God for a long time. Two verses in Isaiah 40 capture the staggering combination of God's infinite power with his gentle tenderness for his people. Isaiah 40:11-12, “He tends his flock like a shepherd. He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart. He gently leads those that have young. Who has measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, over with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket or weighed the mountains on the scales and the hills in a balance?” The same God that measures the waters of the oceans and the seven seas in the hollow of his hand. And who, later in that chapter, marks off the dimensions of the heavens with the breadth of his hand? It also says, "Carries the lambs, tenderly in his arms and gently leads those that have young." The same God. I. God Majestic Over Us, Yet Close to Us Now, in our text today, we're going to see Jesus Christ picturing both aspects of God. We're going to see him displaying infinite immeasurable power in raising this little 12-year-old girl from the clutches of the monster known as death. But he does it with the gentle touch of his hand, an intimate tenderness. As he touched her, he spoke these words, "Talitha koum." Talitha, as I'll discuss later, the etymology of it as “little lamb.” Little lamb. Jesus, just in saying that, fulfills these marvelous words of Isaiah 40, “He tends his flock like a shepherd, and he gathers the little lambs in his arms.” We're pondering a God who is infinitely majestic over us and yet desires intimate closeness with us. The infinite majesty of God is taught in the Bible from the very first verse of the Bible. In the beginning, “God created the heavens in the earth.” Almighty God is infinitely beyond. He soars beyond anything we can possibly comprehend. The boundless scope of the nature that he has created confirms this, the ocean, which stretches out to the horizon as far as the eye can see, unfathomably deep roaring with power. God made it. The towering mountain ranges peak after peak, dwarfing us, looming over us with their brooding magnificence, the limitless reaches of outer space, which has no boundary, stretches to infinity in every direction from our tiny planet. It is the power of God, creating all of that saying, "Let there be," and there is. It's the majesty of God. And yet, the intimate closeness of God, the Bible reveals a God that is closer to us than we can possibly imagine. We are dependent on him every moment for our very existence as Paul said in Acts 17, God is not far from each one of us “for in him, we live and move and have our being.” More than that, God yearns to have a close relationship with us, a love relationship with us. He wants to love us. He wants us to love him moment by moment. He created humanity in his image with the capability to do that, the capacity to have a relationship, a love relationship with God. Therefore, this intimate relationship with God is truly what life is all about. As Jesus said in his prayer to his heavenly Father in John 17:3, “Now this is eternal life that they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” But sin ruptured that intimacy. As soon as Adam and Eve sinned, if you read the account, they immediately sought to hide from God. With sin, a terrible barrier has been erected between us and God. And in our sin and in our misery, we live our lives distant from God. "The intimate closeness of God, the Bible reveals a God that is closer to us than we can possibly imagine. We are dependent on him every moment for our very existence..." God seems distant. To some, he seems literally non-existent. Suffering people cry out to God for relief, and they seem to get no answer. They thought that the lack of an answer proved that God doesn't exist or that God doesn't care. But the problem is sin. The problem between us and God is sin. As Isaiah 59 says, verse 1-2, "Surely the arm of the Lord is not too short to save nor his ear too dull to hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he will not hear.” Because of our sins, our intimate relationship with God is severed, destroyed. God is distant from us relationally, ready to judge us for our sins, not seeking intimacy with us, apart from atonement for our sins. The incarnation of the Son of God is God's answer to that problem that we cannot solve. In Christ, we have God drawing near to us. Christ is Immanuel, God with us. By his incarnation, Christ has come to live among us in very close intimacy. John, 1:14, “The word, Jesus Christ, became flesh and made his dwelling among us. And we have seen his glory. Glory is of the only son from the Father full of grace and truth.” The Greek says he literally “pitched his tent among us,” hearkening back to the days of the patriarchs, their tent dwelling days. He came in our midst and pitched his tent right in the middle of us. God, in Jesus, came to draw near to us seeking an intimate relationship with us. He is near to us in our misery, in our sin, in our alienation from God, in our suffering, our diseases, even in our death. All of Christ's ministry is to achieve one end, a reconciled relationship between us and God, between a Holy God and sinful humanity.The restoration, the perfection of intimate closeness, as it says in I Peter 3:18, “for Christ died for sins, once for all the righteous, for the unrighteous to bring you to God.” Meditate on those words. That's the work of atonement, to bring us to God. Therefore, in II Corinthians 5:20, we are told that we have been given a message and a ministry of reconciliation,"We are, therefore Christ's ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf be reconciled to God.” Reconciliation is a restored relationship with God, intimacy with God. I think Jesus's parable of the Prodigal Son perfectly gives me a picture of that from the father's point of view. As this sinful son comes back, trying to get a job on his father's plantation working with him, it ends with [Luke 15:20], “but while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him. He ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”We sinners should meditate on that much. That is our father running to us, throwing his arms around us and kissing us while we're still stinking of pig manure and covered with filth, just recently come out of rebellion. This is what our father does. Jesus's ministry is all designed to repair the breach between sinful human beings and a Holy God. In Christ, therefore, we have the perfection of intimate tenderness but also infinite power. He was compassionate toward broken sinners. He showed them astonishing tenderness. He also displayed stunning power to heal their diseases and even to raise the dead. Let's talk about the context of today's account. We're spending two weeks on one lengthy account, two encounters that Jesus has with two desperate people, a desperate father with a dying daughter, and then a desperate woman with an incurable illness. They're united together in Jesus' display of tenderness and power. It began last week as we saw and continues this week with a man named Jairus, a synagogue ruler, a powerful man, well connected with a Jewish religious leaders of the day, but a desperate man whose precious little daughter is dying, his only daughter. He has nowhere else to turn. Abandoning all restraint and all decorum, he comes and throws himself down on the ground before Jesus and begs him. Verse 23, “My little daughter is dying. Please, come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” Now, we know from other accounts, Jesus could easily have healed her from a distance. Occasionally, he did that, but generally not. He wanted intimacy. He wanted relationship. So in humility, he gets up and goes with this sorrowing man, surrounded by a crushing crowd. On route, the second desperate person approaches him, a woman suffering from a chronic bleeding problem, heard about Jesus's healing power, a kindled hope and faith in her heart. Mark tells us her sad story of seeking healing. Verse 26, “She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had. Yet, instead of getting better, she only grew worse.” She sought to be healed from Jesus without any interaction at all. I don't mean to disparage her at all. But she seems to be a miracle shoplifter, like kind of a smash and grab job. Come up behind, touch the hem of the garment, and get out of there quick. Verse 27- 28, “When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak because she thought, ‘If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.’" Her healing was instantaneous. She felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. But Jesus felt in his body that the power of God had flowed through him to someone in that crushing crowd, someone different than all the others. Verse 30, “At once, Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, ‘Who touched my clothes?’” As we have noted, Jesus had come into the world, not merely to be a dispenser of miracles, like a miracle-vending machine, a pipeline of impersonal blessings. You need to know that God and his goodness does that every day. He causes the sun to rise on the good and the evil. In his goodness, He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous to unbelievers, atheists, whoever. He's an impersonal goodness vending machine, and they never think to thank him. Jesus didn't come to do that. He wanted an interaction with this woman. Verse 32, “Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it.” The surging massive humanity was not his focus at that moment. One person in that crushing crowd was his focus, one desperate sinner. He wanted to do more than just heal her body, He wanted to save her soul. Verse 33:34, “then the woman knowing what had happened to her came, fell at his feet, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. And he said to her daughter, ‘Your faith has saved you.’" The Greek said “saved you” though healing is involved. “Go and peace and be freed from your suffering.” But in the intervening time that Jesus spent with this woman, Jairus's daughter died. The flickering candle of her life went out. II. The Terrible Crisis of Faith This brings us to this man's terrible crisis of faith. It begins with the faithless bearers of bad news, verse 35, “While Jesus was still speaking, some men came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue ruler. ‘Your daughter is dead,’ they said. Why bother the teacher anymore?” These messengers are curt, they’re unfeeling. They crush Jairus with this devastating news, with the delicacy of a sledgehammer, "Your daughter is dead.” Behind this blunt news is a significant measure of unbelief. Why bother the teacher anymore? In other words, there's nothing he can do. Everyone knows death is final. It's the end of the line. In our technologically advanced world, we have the advantage here in the Raleigh, Durham area of being surrounded by some of the best doctors, nurses, medical practitioners in the world, state of the art. You could picture them working in an emergency room on a person who comes in right on the edge of death. You can imagine all of the frantic activity and the commands and the energy and people running in and out of the room and bringing equipment or medicines or techniques, whatever's needed to try to save this person's life. But when the physician in charge declares that the individual is dead, all of that stops. Time of death is noted. All that activity, then people slow down. They walk. There's nothing more that can be done. We know that. It's finished. That's how these messengers were. That's how it is in almost every case. They believe there is nothing Jesus can do. Death is the final enemy, the monster no one can defeat. Along with this is the great sorrow of a dead child. Few things are sadder than the funeral of a child. Death is hard in any case, but the agony is greater when someone's young, a teenager or younger child. It's a sense of rage, a sense of injustice and fairness, like something was stolen. In 1741, Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon for a young teenager named Billy Sheldon who died in their community. The name of the sermon and the funeral sermon was “Youth Is Like a Flower Cut Down.” Later with many tears, Edwards revised that same sermon and used it to preach the funeral of his own beloved daughter, Jerusha. The message said, in part these words, "Youth maybe liken to a beautiful wildflower growing in a field. And their death is like the sudden cutting of the flower in the stem. Youth is an age wherein people are commonly full of hopes and promises to themselves of the good and the prosperity that they shall see in this world. They're just entering upon the stage of this world. And they promise themselves much that they shall see and enjoy afterwards. And their parents and their friends are also ready to promise themselves much future comfort in them and are full of hope in seeing them settled.” He told the young people at the funeral to come and look on the face, the dead face of this young boy, Billy Sheldon, "Come and look at him. Do you see how cold and gray is his power, how stripped of color his cheeks, like when a wildflower is cut and soon droops and withers and loses all of its beauty in its vitality, how instantly this happens.” So it was with Jairus's daughter, the end of the account. We're told that she's 12 years old. You picture her happy, energetic, promising life and joy to her parents, still happily hugging her beloved father, kissing his cheek with tender affection. He imagined the years ahead. Soon, she would be of an age to be married, bear them grandchildren, perhaps even a beautiful little granddaughter to kind of take her place and then jump up in his arms and kiss his cheeks. He's imagining this. But suddenly, sickness gripped her, and it just got worse. We don't know much about the sickness, maybe she had a fever or something like that burning up. As the days passed, she only got worse, not better. Her mother nursing her, caring for her, patting her, fevered brow with a cloth. Not much anyone could do. Parents crying out to God for healing, but to no avail. Instead of getting better, she grew worse. But Jairus had one hope. He'd heard about this healer, Jesus, and he went to find him. It's a last hope for his daughter, Jesus wasn't there. He'd gone across the Sea of Galilee. There was no no telling when he was going to come back. It seems he just stood there and waited by the shore, waited for Jesus to come because in the account, as soon as he has got back from the gatherings, he's there right away. With urgent anguish, he comes and throws himself on the ground before him and Jesus gets up and humbly goes with him. But on route, we have this encounter with the woman and the bleeding and all of that. And that must have taken some time because by the time they get back to Jairus's home, the funeral rituals are well on. They're well established, so it must have been a while. Then the messengers come with that cold blunt message, "Your daughter is dead. Why bother the teacher anymore?" Now, what did Jairus feel? We don't know, but it's not hard to imagine, waves of dark grief, sorrow. What he dreaded has now happened. And perhaps some anger at the crowd. Jesus could have gone faster. If it weren't for the crowd. Maybe he's even frustrated with the woman, perhaps questioning Jesus in his priority structure. And like the men who brought the message, it doesn't seem like his faith is much beyond theirs, “There’s probably nothing more Jesus can do.” His faith in Jesus had reached a crisis level, so Jesus addresses Jairus's faith right away. Verse 36, “Ignoring what they said, Jesus told the synagogue ruler, ‘Don't be afraid. Just believe.’" In all of the accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all of his encounters with people, Jesus never coddled unbelief. He never excused unbelief. It was never okay to not believe, ever. Even the most extreme circumstance, like a raging hurricane, professional fishermen in the boat seeing their boat filled with water. Matthew 8: 26, he said, "You of little faith, why are you so afraid? You shouldn't be." Now, we know in the economy of God and salvation and the gospel work, we are justified, forgiven of our sins by faith in Jesus, by simple faith in Christ, not by works. By trusting in Jesus are our sins forgiven. Jesus knew that. So when any disciple doubts or begins to doubt, it is a big deal. It is a bigger crisis than any fever or any bleeding problem, so he addresses the problem. He speaks directly to Jairus's soul. Literally in the Greek, it's this, “stop being afraid and keep believing.” Stop being afraid and keep believing. Fear and faith are often opposites in the Bible. Jairus needs to beat back his fear by trusting in Jesus. He did believe, but he needs to keep believing through this, even in the face of our greatest and our final enemy, death itself. Jesus gives an additional promise to help him. Faith feeds on the promises of God. That's where faith comes from, the promises of God. In Luke's gospel, Jesus gives Jairus an additional promise to help feed his faith. In Luke, 8:50,”Hearing this, Jesus said to Jairus, ‘Don't be afraid. Just believe, and she will be healed.’" She will be healed. "Faith feeds on the promises of God." So it is with us. In our greatest trials, God has the power to speak directly to our souls based on the scripture and remind us of things maybe that we had forgotten so that our faith can be fed and strengthened in the midst of the suffering to renew our faith in Christ. Notice also, and isn't it beautiful again, and again, how beautiful, the serenity, the leadership of Jesus, the majesty of his person, never flustered, never distressed, never not knowing what to do, always in command of the situation. So beautiful. He is the captain of our salvation. That's Jesus. III. The Commotion of Unbelieving Grief So now, we see the commotion of unbelieving grief in the account. First, Jesus weeds out the crowd, whittles them down quickly, he doesn't want them coming. He filters out his own apostles, nine of them and the disciples, the huge crowd that's following him. Then, just the hangers on, all of them, weeded out. It doesn't let any of them follow, verse 37, “He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John, the brother of James,” the inner three. The inner circle of the 12 apostles was Peter, James, and John, the rest of the apostles are excluded. The disciples are excluded. The huge crowd is excluded. No one else can come. Then, Jesus arrives at Jairus's house. He's confronted by another crowd. But this time, a crowd of noisy mourners, verse 38, “When he came to the home of the synagogue ruler, Jesus saw commotion with people crying and wailing loudly.” Jewish funerals back then very different than what we are accustomed to, very different. If you go to a funeral home now for the visitation, everyone there speaks in hush tones. Everybody's whispering and go up quietly and say to the grieving family, "Praying for you," expressing condolences, this kind of thing. I've been to lots of them. That's how it is. It would not be appropriate for me to wail loudly and express grief at the funeral home. People would be thinking I was out of my mind. But in the first century, this is what they did. People were actually expected to give loud and boisterous voice to their grief and anguish. The more they did, the more they were connected with the family and showing the anguish that they have in reference to this death. They're also expected to tear their clothing in displays of grief. Now, along with this apparently, there was a class of professional mourns who did this for a living. They would show up and they would do some wailing and grieving for a fee. Hard to believe but there it is. They would bring along musicians, flute players who would play in loud discordant notes to kind of represent in musical tones, the anguish everybody's feeling. That's what's going on as Jesus comes. Now, these professional mourners are merely actors. They don't have any genuine compassion for the people. They felt no appropriate level of grief for Jairus and his wife. Why do I say that? Well, look at the account. In a short time, they are instantly laughing at Jesus. Where did all the grief go? Where was all the grief? It was fake. It wasn't genuine. Even worse though, they're unbelieving toward Jesus. Verse 39, “He went in and said to them, ‘Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.’" IV. The Tender Touch of Infinite Power Jesus is about to show his infinite power in the greatest possible context. Our ultimate enemy, death, will be defeated effortlessly. But he's not going to do it in front of these unbelieving people, so he has to rebuke these fake mourns. He makes this clearest assertion, "She is not dead. The child is not dead, but asleep." Death is like sleep. It's only temporary. In other words, it is no more difficult for Jesus to raise this girl from the dead than it would be for her parents to wake her up from an afternoon nap. Jesus' resurrection is going to prove this for all time. But the mourner's reaction is pure faithlessness and mockery, verse 40, “They all laughed at him.” They laughed at him, so Jesus clears them all out. After He'd put them all out, he took the child's father and mother and the disciples who were with him and went in where the child was. So picture this, our powerful commander, the master of our souls, going down into the valley of the shadow of death alone to defeat the foe for us. Now, picture that. I know that there's people with him, but in terms of who's going forth to do the battle, it's Jesus. Now we see the tender touch of infinite power. As I've said, everything Jesus did was for relationship. He could have healed this girl from a distance, no problem, but instead, he wanted to touch her hand with his own hand. He wanted to reach out his hand and take her by the hand. He wanted to display his power nestled in his astonishing tenderness in gentle mercy. "He wanted to display his power nestled in his astonishing tenderness in gentle mercy." Verse 41, “He took her by the hand and said to her, "Talitha koum," which means, “little girl”, I say to you, get up.” You have the touch and the word. It's beautiful. In Franco Zeffirelli's classic Jesus of Nazareth, it films this encounter with tremendous sensitivity. Jesus goes into her room. There's three square windows, way up high. She's laying flat on the ground on a palette, and sunlight is streaming in through these three little kind of portholes, but mostly the room is shrouded and shadow. Jesus goes over and kneels down near her. The camera zeros in on Jesus's face. Look on his face and then down on his hand. The hand, just the way it's shot, is covered with light, but there's darkness all around it. Then, he reaches down and takes her by the hand. Instantly, she just sits up and puts her arms around his neck. He hugs her and picks her up. That's how Zeffirelli pictured it. Probably something like that. Along with that are the words that he spoke, which I've already noted. Only Mark's gospel gives us the Aramaic, “Talitha koum.” Now the word Talitha's translated for us “little girl,” but like I said, etymologically, it means “little lamb.” It's definitely a term of endearment, tender affection for a little girl. Though she was 12 years old and would soon be entering into the duties of adulthood, of motherhood, of marriage and motherhood, still to her parents, probably, especially to her dad, she's a little lamb, but so, it is with him. That's the way it is for Jesus. This scene is why Christii and I named our daughter Daphne Talitha, because we trusted that Jesus would raise her from the dead spiritually while she lived, which he has through faith in Christ and that he would raise her from the dead physically at the end of the world, which he will. Talitha koum, “little girl,” arise. Instantaneous healing. Jesus has absolute effortless power over death. Verse 42, “Immediately, the girl stood up and walked around.” She was 12 years old. As with all of Jesus's healings, there's no need for convalescence, no need for rehab or long process of recovering her strength. Her body is as healed as it was before the sickness came. This dark enemy, this powerful implacable, undefeatable foe of the human race, death, Jesus defeats with effortless power. After his own resurrection, Jesus will claim absolute power forever over death for all of his people. Then comes worship, verse 42, “At this, they were completely astonished.” Jesus's awesome power is breathtaking. We're going to spend eternity in heaven, completely astonished in wave upon wave upon wave of astonishment. It's never going to end. As he keeps telling you and teaching you things he did, you never knew he did, you'll be on the ground praising, worshipping. Then you'll get up ready for the next wave, completely astonished. This is the essence of worship. V. “Don’t Tell Anyone” But then comes this strange command, “Don't tell anyone.” In verse 43, he gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this. Again and again, we see this restriction in these gospel accounts. We must acknowledge this is obviously temporary. How do you know that? Well, it's in the Bible. The Bible's a very famous book. The Holy Spirit inspired this account to be written. Clearly, God wants this story published abroad. There is no restriction now. There's no strict command, “Don't tell anyone.” Actually, we have strict commands to tell everyone. So I just charge all of you this week. Tell this story in the workplace. You're free to do it. Then, why did he restrict them? Why this Messianic secret? Why this command? I think it really just comes down to crowd control. They had misunderstandings of the kingdom. So, it's already crazy. Remember that the whole woman with the bleeding problem, Jesus can't even breathe just because of the healings, but this knowledge would make it more difficult. That's probably the reason. Another interpreter says it's also because Jesus hasn't finished his work over death yet, so the message isn't complete yet. He wants to finish the message by his resurrection from the dead. Then this can get out. That's possible. After Jesus rose from the dead, he appears to the apostle John in the island of Patmos and in Revelation 1:17-18, he says, "Do not be afraid. I am the first and the last. I am the living one. I was dead and behold, I am alive forever and ever. And I hold the keys of death and the grave." Isn't that awesome? The message has been completed by Jesus' historical bodily resurrection from the dead. He also gives one final practical command. Did you notice? He told her parents to give her something to eat. I love that. “Give her something. She hasn't eaten in a while.” I just love it, this show of tender care. He cares for every aspect of life. VI. Lessons What lessons can we take from this? First, the way I couched this entire sermon was infinite power and intimate tenderness. Ponder that. Ponder both sides. It is vital for us to realize how powerful Jesus is. There is nothing he cannot do. There is no enemy we face that he cannot defeat. There is no need we have that he cannot meet. He created the universe by the word of his power and sustains it by the word of his power. That's who Jesus is. He rules the win and the waves. But instead of that making us terrified of him and distant from him, we need to see how tender he is with sinners and with little girls and with women and with weak people. He's so tender with them. “The bruised reed He will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.” He is skillfully tender with broken people, perfectly gentle. All of his power, his ministry, his miracles, his teachings, his atonement on the cross, his resurrection from the dead, all of it is toward one end, to bring us to God. Do you know him today? Do you know him? Have you trusted in Jesus for the forgiveness of your sins? Have you realized he shed his blood on the cross so that you would not have to burn in hell forever and ever as you would deserve to do? So would I if it weren't for the blood shed. He died the death we deserve so that we could live a life with him forever. Do you trust him? Have you trusted in him? Secondly, this theme of faith versus fear, there is a category of faithless fears that we're all plagued by in life. I've seen it a lot in COVID. I still see it sometimes. I worry about some folks. I can't judge him. I don't know. But I wonder if they're enslaved to some faithless fears. If it wasn't just COVID, it’s just in general. We're all plagued by faithless fears by that, I mean fears, we should not have, fears that faith in the word of God and Jesus should drive out. There are some fears we should have, fear of the Lord, the beginning of wisdom, fear of what sin might do to my life. There are certain things we should fear. But there are faithless fears, usually having to do with circumstances, things that go on in life. Are you suffering from any faithless fears today? Jesus says right in this text, "Don't be afraid. Keep on believing. Stop being afraid. Keep on believing. Bring your faith into that fear." The big lesson of this text must be Jesus' power to raise the dead. That must be the big lesson here. Death is the final enemy, and we have no answer to it. There is no pharmaceutical company, there’s no research hospital that's working on this problem of death. They may be working on not dying in this way or that way or the other way. But death itself stands over all of us. It is the final enemy. Jesus has absolute power over it. "That must be the big lesson here. Death is the final enemy, and we have no answer to it. ... It is the final enemy. Jesus has absolute power over it." Think about Revelation 1, “I hold the keys of death and the grave. I was dead, and behold, I'm alive.”Jesus claims to be able to give that power to us. He is going to raise us from the grave. As John 5 28 says, "Do not be amazed at this. A time is coming when all are in their graves will hear his voice and come out,” just like Talitha koum. He won't say that to you. But he'll say like, "Lazarus come forth," something like that. Only you'll come forth in a resurrection body never to die again. He has that power. In John 11, he says, "I am the resurrection in the life. He who believes in me will live. Even though he dies and whoever lives and believes in me will never die." Like he said to Martha, "Do you believe this? If you believe in Christ, he is resurrection in life.” Finally, we have a responsibility to liberate people in this area, this geographical region, from their fear of death. We have the power to do that. Jesus by his death, Hebrews 2 tells us, destroyed him who holds the power of death, the devil, so that he might liberate or set free those who all their lives are held in slavery by their fear of death. I want to say it comes in two steps. First, if they are lost, if they're dead in their transgressions and sins while they live, they ought to fear death because if they die in that condition, they will spend eternity apart from God in hell. So I want them to be afraid and then flee to Christ. As Newton said in Amazing Grace, "T'was grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved." We get to do that with people. We get to help them to fear like they should and then say, "Jesus will relieve those fears through the gospel.” Close with me in prayer. Father, thank you for the time we've had to walk through incredible account. Thank you for the infinite power and the tenderness of Jesus. I pray that you'd help us to understand what this teaches us about Jesus to draw close to him. I pray for brothers and sisters who have been trusting in Christ for years, but are going through trials that they would be able to draw near to you and allow your words to drive out faithless fears. I pray, Lord, that you would strengthen each of us to be faithful to share this gospel message with people who are lost in our community, lost who need to hear of Christ. And we pray these in Jesus's name. Amen.

Zeffirelli at his best or worst, depending on your point of view. This episode is also available as a blog entry at https://tashpix.wordpress.com/2021/06/06/romeo-and-juliet-1968/

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

"Musica Maestro" è il programma di Radio 24 dedicato alla musica classica: lirica, sinfonica, d'epoca, strumentale e da camera commentata dai protagonisti del momento. Il programma affronta la musica sotto molteplici sfaccettature, indagando e portando alla luce anche i rapporti con la cultura, la filosofia, la scienza e la società, ponendo un'attenzione particolare all'attualità: ogni settimana la segnalazione di un libro o un disco appena uscito, un esecutore o un giovane musicista, un anniversario o un avvenimento di rilievo.

Nuove formule per avvicinare i giovani e anche nuovo look

Ai giochi addio? Mai! La clip all'inizio e alla fine è “Ai giochi addio” dalla colonna sonora del film di Franco Zeffirelli “Giulietta e Romeo”, qui nella versione cantata dalla Piccola Orchestra Avion Travel dall'album “Nino Rota, l'amico magico” (etichetta Sugar Music-2009 all rights reserved). La musica del brano originale è di Nino Rota e il testo di Peppino Caruso a cui ovviamente vanno i credits. Nell'immagine, Elsa Morante con i suoi due gatti siamesi all rights reserved

Season 2 is here!! Star Crossed is the name, and Romeo and Juliet is the game. In our season premiere, we talk about our history with the play and the discuss Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 adaptation (aka the one you probably watched in high school). We ask burning questions like: Does Romeo look like Zac Efron? What's Mercutio's deal? Why is there so much ADR? Find out all of this and more!! Socials! https://www.tiktok.com/@iftheshoefitspod https://www.instagram.com/_iftheshoefitspod/ ——————————————— Attribution: Romeo and Juliet (1968) Theme - Nino Rota Indie Folk Acoustic by Coma-Media from Pixabay Ambient Piano & Strings by ZakharValaha from Pixabay

Franco Zeffirelli being Zeffirelli at the expense of St. Francis of Assisi. This episode is also available as a blog entry: https://tashpix.wordpress.com/2011/06/14/brother-sun-sister-moon/

TESTO DELL'ARTICOLO ➜ http://www.filmgarantiti.it/it/articoli.php?id=24IL FILM DI MEL GIBSON E' PIENAMENTE CATTOLICO di Padre Di NoiaDiversi alti ufficiali del Vaticano hanno assistito ad una proiezione privata del film 'La Passione' di Mel Gibson e ne sono rimasti entusiasti. Componenti della Segreteria di Stato del Vaticano, del Pontificio Concilio delle Comunicazioni Sociali, e della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede, il gruppo che supervisiona le questioni dottrinali cattoliche, hanno espresso unanime approvazione e apprezzamento del film. Quella che segue è un'intervista esclusiva di ZENIT ad unodegli spettatori, il Padre Domenicano Augustine Di Noia, sottosegretario della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede.Padre Di Noia ha insegnato teologia a Washington D.C., per 20 anni e ha prestato servizio come teologo per la Conferenza Episcopale degli Stati Uniti prima di venire a lavorare per il cardinale Joseph Ratzinger presso la Congregazione dottrinale, poco più di un anno fa. Il film dovrebbe uscire nelle sale nel 2004.'LA PASSIONE DEL CRISTO' DI MEL GIBSON HA FATTO NOTIZIA DA MESI, MOLTO PRIMA DEL PERIODO PREVISTO PER L'USCITA NELLE SALE. IN QUALITÀ DI SPETTATORE, QUAL È LA SUA IMPRESSIONE GLOBALE SUL FILM?Guardare questo film, costituirà un'esperienza profondamente religiosa per molti. Per me lo è stata. Una cinematografia eccezionale e una recitazione altrettanto brillante, combinate con la profonda introspezione spirituale del regista sul significato teologico della passione e morte di Cristo: tutto ha contribuito ad una produzione di squisita sensibilità artistica e religiosa.Chiunque veda questo film, credente o non credente, sarà costretto a confrontarsi con il mistero centrale della passione di Cristo e in definitiva con il Cristianesimo stesso: se questo è il rimedio, quale dovrà essere stato il male?Il Curato d'Ars sostiene che nessuno possa avere cognizione di cosa Nostro Signore abbia sofferto per noi; per capirlo, dovremmo conoscere tutto il male causato dal peccato, e questo non lo potremo sapere fino al momento della nostra morte.Solo come una grande opera d'arte può fare, il film di Mel Gibson ci aiuta a cogliere qualcosa che è quasi al di là della nostra comprensione.All'inizio, nell'Orto del Getsemani, il diavolo tenta Cristo con la domanda inevitabile: come può qualcuno sopportare i peccati del mondo intero?È troppo. Cristo quasi soccombe all'idea, ma poi prosegue con convinzione per portare avanti esattamente questo: per accogliere su di sé, secondo la volontà del Padre, i peccati del mondo intero. È davvero impressionante. Vi è un forte senso, presente per tutto il film, del dramma cosmico del quale siamo tutti parte. Non c'è possibilità di rimanere neutrali, e nessuno può semplicemente restare spettatore di questi eventi.La posta in gioco è davvero molto alta: qualcosa che, a parte Cristo stesso, è intuita chiaramente solo da Maria sua madre e dal demonio sempre presente.Gradualmente lo spettatore si unisce ai personaggi in una progressiva comprensione di questo, mentre che l'azione si sposta inesorabilmente dal Monte degli Ulivi verso il Monte Calvario.IL FILM È FEDELE ALLA NARRAZIONE DELLA PASSIONE DI CRISTO DEL NUOVO TESTAMENTO?Bisogna tener presente che vi sono quattro racconti della passione di Cristo nel Nuovo Testamento, che si concentrano soprattutto sul significato religioso degli eventi.Nel 'La morte del Messia' (probabilmente il più completo ed equilibrato racconto della Passione) Padre Raymond Brown ha dimostrato che, pur essendovi alcune differenze tra i Vangeli, essi sono in generale sostanzialmente univoci.Il film di Mel Gibson non è un documentario ma un'opera di artistica immaginazione.Il regista ha incorporato elementi dalla Passione raccontata da Matteo, Marco, Luca e Giovanni, ma rimane fedele alla struttura fondamentale comune ai quattro Vangeli.Entro i limiti possibili in una ricostruzione immaginifica della passione di Cristo, il film di Gibson e pienamente fedele al Nuovo Testamento.CHE COSA L'HA COLPITA DI PIÙ RIGUARDO A QUESTO FILM?Vuole una risposta semplice? Jim Caviezel e Maia Morgenstern. Il ruolo di Cristo deve essere uno dei più difficili ruoli da interpretare. Sono stato molto colpito dall'intensità con cui Caviezel ha rappresentato Cristo. Non è facile da ottenere senza manifestare una sorta di autocoscienza intrusiva. Caviezel, e sicuramente anche Gibson, comprendono che Gesù è il Figlio di Dio incarnato, ed è al contempo pienamente umano. Ripensando al film, mi pare che Caviezel ottiene questo principalmente mediante il suo sguardo, anche quando guarda direttamente noi e quelli che lo circondano con il suo occhio sano.Caviezel rende, in modo pienamente convincente ed efficace, il Cristo che sopporta la passione e la morte volontariamente, in obbedienza al Padre suo, in riparazione della disobbedienza del peccato. Assistiamo a ciò che la Chiesa chiamerebbe la 'sofferenza volontaria' di Cristo.Richiama le parole di San Paolo: 'Come per la disobbedienza di uno solo tutti sono stati costituiti peccatori, così anche per l'obbedienza di uno solo tutti saranno costituiti giusti' (Romani 5,19).E non è solo questione di obbedienza, ma è principalmente questione di amore. Cristo compie tutto per amore al Padre - e a noi. Questo emerge tecnicamente in maniera lampante nell'eccezionale interpretazione di Cristo da parte di Jim Caviezel.Ma la Maria di Maia Morgenstern è egualmente efficace. Mi ha ricordato qualcosa che Sant'Anselmo aveva detto in un'omelia sulla Madre Benedetta: Senza il Figlio di Dio, nulla potrebbe esistere; senza il Figlio di Maria, nulla potrebbe essere redento.Ammirando l'interpretazione della Mrogenstern, si sente fortemente che Maria 'lascia andare' il suo Figlio affinché lui possa operare la salvezza, e unendosi alle sue sofferenze diventa la Madre di ogni redento.ALCUNI HANNO SOSTENUTO CHE IL FILM È ECCESSIVAMENTE VIOLENTO. LEI CHE NE PENSA?Più che violento direi che è brutale. Cristo è trattato in modo brutale dai soldati romani. Ma non vi è violenza gratuita. La sensibilità artistica all'opera è chiaramente più quella del Grünwald e del Caravaggio, piuttosto che quella del Beato Angelico o del Pinturrichio.Stiamo parlando di un film, certamente, ma Gibson ha chiaramente subito l'influenza della raffigurazione delle sofferenze di Cristo della pittura Occidentale. Il corpo di Cristo estremamente malridotto (graficamente ritratto in questo film eccezionale) deve essere posto in questo contesto di artistica rappresentazione. Ciò che molti artisti meramente suggeriscono, Gibson ce lo vuole mostrare. Pienamente in linea con la Tradizione teologica cristiana, Gibson ci rappresenta il Figlio incarnato che è capace di sopportare ciò che una persona ordinaria non può: sia in termini fisici che di tormento mentale. Il corpo rovinato di Cristo deve essere contemplato con gli occhi del profeta Isaia che descrive il Servo sofferente sfigurato e irriconoscibile.La bellezza fisica di Jim Caviezel serve ad accentuare l'impatto generale della progressiva deturpazione che Cristo subisce sotto i nostri occhi: con il terribile risultato che, come il Servo sofferente, 'Non ha apparenza né bellezza per attirare i nostri sguardi, non splendore per provare in lui diletto' (Isaia 53,2).Richiede gli occhi della fede per vedere che lo sfiguramento del corpo di Cristo rappresenta lo sfiguramento spirituale e il disordine causato dal peccato.La raffigurazione di Gibson del Cristo flagellato, dal quale molti spettatori potrebbero essere tentati di volgere via lo sguardo, presenta graficamente ciò che San Paolo disse nella seconda lettera ai Corinzi: 'Colui che non aveva conosciuto peccato, Dio lo trattò da peccato in nostro favore, perché noi potessimo diventare per mezzo di lui giustizia di Dio' (5,21).Quando guardiamo il corpo rovinato di Cristo in questo film capiamo cosa significa 'lo trattò da peccato'.NEL CORSO DEGLI ANNI, MOLTI REGISTI SI SONO CIMENTATI CON FILM SU GESÙ O SULLA PASSIONE. RITIENE CHE IL FILM DI MEL GIBSON SIA PARTICOLARMENTE ORIGINALE?Non sono un critico cinematografico. Saranno i critici a giudicare il film di Gibson e a confrontarlo con ad altre grandi descrizioni della vita e della passione di Cristo, quali quelle di Pasolini e di Zeffirelli. Come gli altri registi, Mel Gibson apporta la propria sensibilità artistica all'argomento, e in questo senso il film è assolutamente originale. Certamente, 'La passione del Cristo' è più intensamente incentrata sulla sofferenza e la morte di Cristo che la maggior parte di altri film del genere. Ma, come reazione iniziale, tre cose del film di Gibson mi colpiscono per essere alquanto particolari.Una è la rappresentazione del diavolo, che libra sullo sfondo, e a volte in primo piano, come una costante e sinistra presenza minacciosa. Non mi viene in mente un altro film che abbia ottenuto questo effetto con tale drammatica efficacia.Un altro elemento è la solitudine di Cristo: In qualche modo, anche se circondato dalle folle, il film mostra Gesù realmente da solo nel sostenere la terribile sofferenza.Infine, la rappresentazione dell'Ultima cena con una serie di flashback inseriti nell'azione del film. Quando giace sul pavimento insanguinato dopo la flagellazione, Cristo guarda i piedi cosparsi di sangue di uno dei soldati e i film torna in modo significativo alla lavanda dei piedi durante l'Ultima cena.Simili flashback nel corso della passione e crocifissione ci riportano allo spezzare del pane e al bere dal calice. Gli spettatori, attraverso gli occhi di Cristo, assistono alle parole: 'questo è il mio corpo' e 'questo è il mio sangue'. Il significato sacrificale e quindi eucaristico del Calvario è raffigurato mediante questi persistenti flashback.

Are the boys classic literature majors? No. In fact, far from it. And both Stuart and Jacob repeatedly make that abundantly clear throughout the course of the episode. But either way, Shakespeare is up on the chopping block today as the duo look at both the Zeffirelli and Luhrmann adaptations of the classic Romeo and Juliet story. Their thoughts on the subject may shock and amaze! But if you've been paying attention up to this point, probably not. Also in this episode is discussion on the recent Uncharted movie, Pat Heywood's joyous appearance, frankly too much discussion on the Moulin Rouge, and the idea that you are free to like whatever movies you want... to an extent. All this and more on They Remade It! Plot Synopsis Timestamps: 28:00-37:00 ---------- Socials ---------- @ItRemade on Twitter @theyremadeit on Instagram theyremadeit@gmail.com

TESTO DELL'ARTICOLO ➜ www.bastabugie.it/it/articoli.php?id=6861COME VIENE INSEGNATO DANTE NELLE SCUOLE? di Rino Cammilleri«...non so se Dante era un uomo libero, un fallito o un servo di partito». Così cantava il cantore del Sessantotto scolastico, Venditti, e il verso la dice lunga sulla profondità dei sinistri di allora. «Tutto è politica. Il privato è politico» (Gramsci). Cioè, l'unica cosa che esiste è la politica. Infatti, a quelli non interessa altro. No, mi correggo. Il rigo seguente di Venditti recita: «Ma Paolo e Francesca, quelli me li ricordo bene».Eggià, la sola cosa che in tutto il triennio liceale passato a studiare (?) Dante rimane in testa a un adolescente politicamente orientato sono i due adulteri che non a caso Dante mostra in balìa dei venti della passione. Senza l'ancoraggio della ragione si finisce preda del ventre più o meno basso. Come un adolescente politicizzato: non ha cultura né esperienza, basta un pifferaio per plagiarlo. Dice un vecchio adagio: se a sedici anni non sei comunista non hai cuore, se a quaranta lo sei ancora non hai cervello. Va pur detto, a discolpa di Venditti, che l'insegnamento di Dante nei licei era, come tutte le cose obbligatorie, semplicemente insulso. Almeno a mia memoria (ma anch'io appartengo alla generazione di Venditti). L'insegnante leggeva i versi della Commedia e li traduceva in italiano corrente. Che il libro che Paolo e Francesca leggevano insieme fosse «galeotto» probabilmente non lo sapeva nemmeno lui, perciò appresi che si trattava di un cavaliere della Tavola Rotonda - Galeotto, signore delle Terre Lontane - solo da adulto e per conto mio.È vero, Umberto Eco diceva che la scuola non serve tanto a insegnarti cose, quanto a metterti in grado di trovare in tre minuti l'informazione che ti serve, quando ti serve. Ma è anche vero che l'interrogazione su Dante consisteva, pur'essa, nella traduzione in italiano corrente dei versi. Certo, pretendere che un insegnante laureato sia anche bravo è troppo. Anche i preti, non si può pretendere che siano degli oratori avvincenti. Però l'omelia devono farla lo stesso. Anche se il pubblico sbadiglia. O si distrae, come a scuola, e Dante rimane per sempre un ricordo fastidioso o distorto (se il pomeriggio qualcun altro me lo spiega in sezione).Mi si permetta un aneddoto personale (anche perché in questo settecentenario legioni più competenti di me si sono cimentate, perciò ci sarebbe poco da aggiungere). Per un breve periodo fui assistente agli esami di Storia degli Stati Uniti, materia appena introdotta in Facoltà. A una sessione si presentò una candidata che, invitata a un argomento a piacere, partì con una velocissima cantilena ovviamente memorizzata a pappagallo. A un tratto una parola fuori posto mi mise in allarme e interruppi: «Ma signorina, lei lo sa che cosa è il Congresso?». Silenzio attonito e sudato. Il titolare allora le fece cenno di continuare, e lei riprese con la stessa parola su cui era stata fermata. Ta-ta-ta-ta... All'ora del voto, il titolare scrisse 27. E io: «Ma come? Quella passerebbe a Storia degli Stati Uniti senza sapere che cosa è il Congresso? Si rende conto che sicuramente andrà a fare l'insegnante?». Risposta: «Se comincio a bocciare, gli studenti disertano il corso e me lo aboliscono per mancanza di utenza».Insomma, qualcuno inventi un modo nuovo per insegnare Dante nelle scuole, altrimenti dovremo adattarci ai comici come Benigni. Ma guardate i film americani e inglesi, se proprio non siete mai stati nei Paesi anglofoni. Il loro poeta nazionale è Shakespeare e lo citano continuamente, lo rappresentano, organizzano teatri nelle scuole, lo sanno a memoria, perfino nei saloon del west c'è chi lo recita. Moltissimi, se non tutti, attori inglesi sono «shakespeariani», nel senso che è sui testi del Bardo che si sono formati e hanno fatto carriera. Tanti sono diventati «sir» e parecchi sono Oscar. Non ce n'è uno che, cimentatosi alla regia, non abbia messo in scena un'opera di Shakespeare. Il nostro Zeffirelli, conoscendo bene il mercato internazionale, vi ha attinto più volte. Perfino il Capitano Picard di Star Trek viene da quelle esperienze. In Italia abbiamo Dante. E lo lasciamo a Benigni.

A very special opera queen episode profiling an opera queen gone wrong: the Italian opera and film director (of 1968's famous Romeo and Juliet) who fought fascists as a partisan in the hills over Florence, mingled with Visconti and Cocteau and Marais and Chanel, and directed Callas in many of her mid-career triumphs before beginning to harden his style from lush realism to a celebration of set decoration above all. Zeffirelli, born at a time when the last composers whose works still fill the grand opera repertory were dying, faced, like all practitioners of the operatic arts in the 20th century, a choice between making living theatre or dead, ten-ton museum pieces. He chose the museum-piece approach and in so doing did tremendous artistic damage. CONTENT WARNING: THIS EPISODE DISCUSSES CHILDHOOD SEXUAL ABUSE AND RACIST LANGUAGE. ----more---- See Callas in Tosca in 1964 here. See Leontyne Price's costumes for Antony and Cleopatra here and  here. See Zeffirelli's MET Opera Turandot set here. See Waltraud Meier sing the Liebestod here. SOURCES: Duane Byrge, “Franco Zeffirelli, Oscar-Nominated Director for ‘Romeo and Juliet,' Dies at 96,” The Hollywood Reporter (blog), June 15, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/franco-zeffirelli-dead-romeo-juliet-920639/ Rachel Donadio, “Maestro Still Runs the Show, Grandly,” The New York Times, August 18, 2009, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/19/arts/music/19zeffirelli.html Roger Ebert, “Romeo and Juliet Movie Review (1968) | Roger Ebert,” accessed January 31, 2022, https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/romeo-and-juliet-1968 Johanna Fiedler, Molto Agitato: The Mayhem behind the Music at the Metropolitan Opera (New York: Anchor Books, 2003)  Jonathan Kandell, “Franco Zeffirelli, Italian Director With Taste for Excess, Dies at 96,” The New York Times, June 15, 2019, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/15/arts/music/franco-zeffirelli-dead.html Rebecca Keegan, “The Dark Side of Franco Zeffirelli: Abuse Accusers Speak Out Upon the Famed Director's Death,” The Hollywood Reporter (blog), June 18, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/franco-zeffirelli-abuse-accusers-speak-1219298/ Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (London: Da Capo Press, 2001) Barbara McMahon, “Zeffirelli Tells All about Priest's Sexual Assault,” The Guardian, November 21, 2006, sec. World news, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/21/books.film  Peter Murphy, “Bruce Robinson Interview,” The New Review, accessed January 31, 2022, https://web.archive.org/web/20070707184620/http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/brucerobinson.html John J. O'Connor, “TV Review; Zeffirelli's Lavish ‘Turandot' at the Met Opera,” The New York Times, January 27, 1988, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/1988/01/27/arts/tv-review-zeffirelli-s-lavish-turandot-at-the-met-opera.html Neda Ulaby, “Franco Zeffirelli, Creator Of Lavish Productions On Screen And Stage, Dies At 96,” NPR, June 15, 2019, sec. Obituaries, https://www.npr.org/2019/06/15/514094174/franco-zeffirelli-creator-of-lavish-productions-on-screen-and-stage-dies-at-96 Daniel J. Wakin, “For Opening Night at the Metropolitan, a New Sound: Booing,” The New York Times, September 22, 2009, sec. Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/arts/music/23opera.html Franco Zeffirelli, Zeffirelli: The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli, 1st American ed (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1986) “Opera: ‘Falstaff' Staged by Zeffirelli; New Production of the Met Is Magnificent; Bernstein Conducts —Colzani in Title Role,” The New York Times, March 7, 1964, sec. Archives, https://www.nytimes.com/1964/03/07/archives/opera-falstaff-staged-by-zeffirelli-new-production-of-the-met-is.html Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner. ----more----

Olivia Hussey is a beacon of light through her works on stage and off. She was chosen out of 800 actresses in London alone to play the role of Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's film version of Romeo and Juliet in 1968. She won a Golden Globe and the David di Donatello Award for her performance, and gained International recognition.Olivia was reunited with Zeffirelli in the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth and Mary, mother of Jesus in 1977.  She played the lead in Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 2003,  a biographical film for which she was presented with a Character & Morality in Entertainment Award in May 2007. it had been her dream and wish to portray the role of Mother Teresa of Calcutta since she finished her role as the Virgin Mary. Also she is an author of her memoir, The Girl on the Balcony: Olivia Hussey Finds Life After Romeo and Juliet, which was released on 31 July 2018.Olivia has spent her life spreading goodness and light on screen and off and still does as an animal and human rights activist,  amongst other things. The planet is lucky to have her as she is always a beacon of positivity and light to us all.

Leo Lyon Zagami, writer, researcher and Illuminati whistle blower shares about his illustrious connections to European Royalty. What he learnt as a Free mason and in other secret societies and the price he has paid for spilling the beans. He talks about the loss of a friend in the Norwegian Freedom Movement who died under suspicious circumstances and persecution in Italy. Is depopulation part of the Deep State agenda? Is socialism destroying Europe? Should Americans keep their guns? Are the secret societies practising Satanism? Leos website: https://leozagami.com/ Leo on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leolyonzagamiamericanadventures Leo's book: Confessions of an Illuminati Vol. 6.66: https://amzn.to/3h6Z4Yi Further content information from this episode: https://www.livetheimpossible.today/169 Get the free Live the Impossible Playbook, here: https://www.livetheimpossible.today/ Oliver & Tora Zophias (Susana) mentoring programs: https://silverhoj.com/ Pam the Health Genie: https://www.pamlob.com/ Jon Century our household Magic Musician: https://www.joncentury.com/music Leo Lyon Zagami, writer and researcher is the son of Dr. Elio Zagami (1939- 2010), known Jungian analyst, writer and co- founder of GAPA (Independent Group of Analytical Psychology, of which he was president). His grandfather was Senator Leopoldo Zagami, a Sicilian politician who was also a known historian and author, who married into the the aristocratic family of the Marquis de Gregorio. Leo's mother is Jessica Lyon Young, a member of the family of the Queen Mother of England whose father, Henry Lyon Young was also a writer. Felicity Mason, Leo's maternal grandmother, helped Leo in developing his talents since a young age. Felicity was an old time collaborator and friend of avant- garde eccentrics such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She was also known under the pseudonym Anne Cumming, which made her famous in the 80's as a controversial novelist, after working for many years in the cinema business with prestigious figures such as Fellini and Zeffirelli. Zagami, who is known for a brilliant career as Leo Young in the media and music industry as a Record Producer, became quickly popular on the web in 2006, because of his direct involvement in the New World Order and Secret Societies known to the majority of us as the “Illuminati.” His blog rose quickly and gained attention from people such as David Icke, for it's accurate fully documented ground breaking inside information. Between 2009 and 2014 he began publishing books in Europe and Japan, based on a variety of subjects that range from the history of the secret societies and the Vatican, to geo-political matters concerning the New World Order. In 2013, he collaborated with well known Italian journalists, Ferruccio Pinotti and Giacomo Galeazzi, in drafting a chapter for their Italian Best Seller “Vaticano Massone,” which was released in May 2013, dedicated to the secretive world of Vatican Freemasonry. Zagami who has collaborated in the last few years with a series of articles and scoops for Infowars, has been the protagonist of a highly successful documentary made by Alex Jones in Rome, called “Demonic Possession Of The Vatican Exposed” launched in 2015  during the 24 hour Infowars special called “Operation Money Bomb ” and later broke a scoop on Infowars in 2017 on a Gay Vatican Drug/Orgy, that forced the mainstream media to cover the story. After publishing 12 books in Italy and Japan with great success, he finally reached the English speaking public thanks to a 5 book deal made with San Francisco's CCC Publishing, who made available some of his previous works in the English language. However Leo's latest books, Confessions volume 4, Confessions Volume 5 and Vol. 6.66, published by newly established publishing house Cursum Perficio, were written entirely in English and not translated from Italian. Leo travels around the world giving conferences and has recently relocated to the U.S. after suffering political and religious persecution for his work in his native Italy. He is also publicly known for being one of the founders of Italians4Trump and Trumpiani d'Italia, the first Trumpian organizations out of the U.S. created to support the election and later the work of president elect Donald J. Trump. Further content information from this episode: https://www.livetheimpossible.today/169

Sul palcoscenico per sessant'anni, Umberto Orsini si è dedicato a cinema, televisione e soprattutto teatro, lavorando con Fellini e Visconti, Zeffirelli e Ronconi. Ma quando racconta di sé e delle sue esperienze professionali, non lo fa con la malinconia del bilancio. Pensa al teatro come a un eterno presente, come a un futuro che si costruisce osando: nella scelta dei testi, nell'interpretazione che si perfeziona, tocca nuove sfumature. Nel dialogo con la platea. Nella costruzione di un pubblico. «Quando sto per entrare in scena ‒ confessa Orsini, che sul palco del festival converserà con Paolo Di Paolo e leggerà pagine della sua autobiografia ‒ penso che sottrarre due ore del nostro tempo all'ovvietà delle parole quotidiane per dire parole scritte da altri è una cosa impagabile. Che ladro è l'attore, e nello stesso tempo che benefattore!».

READ: Matthew 5.3 NLT “God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs.” Robert Powell acted the part of Jesus in Franco Zeffirelli's film Jesus of Nazareth. He claims that his life was changed by the experience and recalls the day when he was filming the Sermon on the Mount. Powell had no time for Christianity but as he preached the sermon he said that he was so affected by its beauty that he began to cry. The tears were not in the script but Zeffirelli wisely kept them in the movie. It is easy to see why he was so affected by these words because they take us to the heart of what it means to be alive. They stand before us as a challenge and encouragement to us all as we seek to understand what it means to live the Christian life. Today's verse is the first of the so-called Beatitudes. Before we launch into it we need to be clear what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of Heaven, an expression he often used. The Kingdom of Heaven comes where God is allowed to be in control and, amazingly, that can happen in our lives today which is why Jesus encouraged us to pray for his Kingdom to come here on earth as it is in heaven. The Kingdom of Heaven gives us a preview of what heaven itself will be like, and it is by definition life at its very best. Jesus declares that the people who possess this wonderful Kingdom of heaven are those who are spiritually poor. The word used here for ‘poor' in the original Greek  language speaks of absolute poverty or destitution. Jesus is saying that the way into the Kingdom of Heaven is to understand that, spiritually, you've got nothing to offer apart from empty hands. We need to come to Jesus in absolute weakness knowing that we are totally dependent upon him. The moment arrogance and self-confidence creeps in, we spoil everything. From first to last we are dependent on our loving and gracious heavenly Father. QUESTIONS: Where have you seen the Kingdom of Heaven come on earth? PRAYER: Lord God, help me depend totally upon you so that in my life your Kingdom will come here on earth as it is in heaven. Amen

La semana santa no es la misma sin la programación de cintas bíblicas en televisión. Una de las más famosas y más emitidas en Chile es “Jesús de Nazaret”; una miniserie dirigida por Franco Zeffirelli, con apoyo de El Vaticano y estrenada en 1977. Fue escrita por Anthony Burgess, un cínico famoso y desaforado respecto a la religión; pero que durante la labor encomendada por Zeffirelli alcanzó un impensado e inédito respeto por la figura de Jesucristo. Esta es la historia detrás de la miniserie “Jesús de Nazaret”.

Olivia Hussey is a beacon of light through her works on stage and off. She was chosen out of 800 actresses in London alone to play the role of Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's film version of Romeo and Juliet in 1968. She won a Golden Globe and the David di Donatello Award for her performance, and gained International recognition.Olivia was reunited with Zeffirelli in the miniseries Jesus of Nazareth and Mary, mother of Jesus in 1977.  She played the lead in Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 2003,  a biographical film for which she was presented with a Character & Morality in Entertainment Award in May 2007. it had been her dream and wish to portray the role of Mother Teresa of Calcutta since she finished her role as the Virgin Mary. Also she is an author of her memoir, The Girl on the Balcony: Olivia Hussey Finds Life After Romeo and Juliet, which was released on 31 July 2018.Olivia has spent her life spreading goodness and light on screen and off and still does as an animal and human rights activist,  amongst other things. The planet is lucky to have her as she is always a beacon of positivity and light to us all.Tune into Dr. Randall and Olivia Hussey in this very special episode #4 of Soul Stories.

Episode 248: From Italy To America Leo Lyon Zagami, writer and researcher is the son of Dr. Elio Zagami (1939- 2010), a known Jungian analyst, writer, and co-founder of GAPA (Independent Group of Analytical Psychology, of which he was president). His grandfather was Senator Leopoldo Zagami, a Sicilian politician who was also a known historian and author, who married into the aristocratic family of the Marquis de Gregorio. Leo’s mother is Jessica Lyon Young, a member of the family of the Queen Mother of England whose father, Henry Lyon Young was also a writer. Felicity Mason, Leo’s maternal grandmother, helped Leo in developing his talents at a young age. Felicity was an old-time collaborator and friend of avant-garde eccentrics such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She was also known under the pseudonym Anne Cumming, which made her famous in the 80’s as a controversial novelist, after working for many years in the cinema business with prestigious figures such as Fellini and Zeffirelli. Zagami, who is known for a brilliant career as Leo Young in the media and music industry as a Record Producer, became quickly popular on the web in 2006, because of his direct involvement in the New World Order and Secret Societies known to the majority of us as the “Illuminati.” His blog rose quickly and gained attention from people such as David Icke, for it’s accurate fully documented groundbreaking inside information. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Episode 248: From Italy To America Leo Lyon Zagami, writer and researcher is the son of Dr. Elio Zagami (1939- 2010), a known Jungian analyst, writer, and co-founder of GAPA (Independent Group of Analytical Psychology, of which he was president). His grandfather was Senator Leopoldo Zagami, a Sicilian politician who was also a known historian and author, who married into the aristocratic family of the Marquis de Gregorio. Leo's mother is Jessica Lyon Young, a member of the family of the Queen Mother of England whose father, Henry Lyon Young was also a writer. Felicity Mason, Leo's maternal grandmother, helped Leo in developing his talents at a young age. Felicity was an old-time collaborator and friend of avant-garde eccentrics such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She was also known under the pseudonym Anne Cumming, which made her famous in the 80's as a controversial novelist, after working for many years in the cinema business with prestigious figures such as Fellini and Zeffirelli. Zagami, who is known for a brilliant career as Leo Young in the media and music industry as a Record Producer, became quickly popular on the web in 2006, because of his direct involvement in the New World Order and Secret Societies known to the majority of us as the “Illuminati.” His blog rose quickly and gained attention from people such as David Icke, for it's accurate fully documented groundbreaking inside information.

Vídeos com ótimas reflexões, para transformar nossa quarentena em retiro de vida Interior! Assistam aos comentários filosóficos da professora Lúcia Helena Galvão sobre o filme O FANTASMA DA ÓPERA https://youtu.be/I1j3m_D0V1I FILOSOFIA EM QUARENTENA Alguns filmes de que eu gosto muito (Lúcia Helena Galvão Maya) Mais uma dica para estes “tempos bicudos”, como diria minha querida avó: que tal uma lista dos filmes que mais nos tocaram ao longo dos tempos? Vejam bem: esta é uma lista pessoal minha! Não são os “melhores filmes”, não me arvoraria a isso, mas os que me tocaram; cada um é livre para ter seus critérios, mas também para recolher algo de bom dos critérios alheios. Nem sei se todos são possíveis de se encontrar facilmente, mas dão uma interessante e válida busca. Nem preciso dizer que deixo implícito nesta lista todos os desenhos da Disney, é claro. Não coloco os filmes em uma ordem necessária, mas vou citar a medida que me lembro deles. Vamos lá: - “Excalibur”: aquele antigo (1981) de John Boorman. Não conheço nada melhor sobre este mito! Simplesmente lindo! - “El Cid”: filme de 1961, estrelado por Charlton Heston. Incomparável. - “O Mahabharata”, de Peter Brook. Recomendo a versão original, com quase seis horas de duração. Seis horas de quarentena muito bem empregada! - “Irmão Sol, irmã Lua”: Clássico de Zeffirelli de 1972, abordando a vida de São Francisco de Assis. Quem quiser seguir com Zeffirelli e assistir seu “Romeu e Julieta”, também está valendo! - “Yentl”: esse é um danado de um filme com a Barbra Streisand que jamais saiu da minha memória. Algo profundo e delicado, o amor ao conhecimento, é tratado aí. - “Caminhando nas nuvens”, de 1995, com Keannu Reeves. Um homem honrado tocando o mundo de um família tradicional... Vale conhecer! - “A Partida”, 2009, com trilha sonora de Joe Isaichi... Dispensa palavras. - “O mestre da música”, filme francês de Gérard Corbiau. Belo, simplesmente. - “Energia pura”, filme de 1995, de Victor Salva. Se não bastasse a bela história, a música composta por Jerry Goldsmith “mata”, literalmente. - “Jodhaa Akbar”: e olha Bollywood aí, genteee! Lindíssimo romance histórico indiano de 2008, envolvente e musicado de forma igualmente bela. Não dá para perder. - “A Princesinha”, uma pérola em forma de filme, de Afonso Cuarón, 1995. Ótimo para crianças, obrigatório para adultos. - “Em algum lugar do passado”: esse, embora bem mais conhecido, tem uns “millennials” por aí que ousam nunca ter ouvido falar. Um absurdo. EUA, 1980. Morram de chorar com a trilha sonora. - “Forrest Gump”. O que dizer deste filme? Simplesmente que ele não te larga mais pelo resto da vida. Coisa de gênio. EUA, 1994. - “My fair lady”: vão se passar mil anos e eu não pararei de curtir este filme. Divertido, inteligente, atores excelentes... Daquelas coisas que poucas vezes se faz, na história do cinema. EUA, 1965. - “O clube da felicidade e da sorte”: Wayne Wang, EUA, 1993. Delicado como uma flor caída num lago. Doloroso, mas também redentor. - “Orgulho e preconceito”: versão de Joe Wright, 2006. Eu seria falsa se não dissesse a vocês que eu dou um braço por este filme. O livro homônimo de Jane Austen é sua obra prima: ironia fina, retrato de costumes de uma época e de tipos humanos de todos os tempos. Vale: confira! Vou omitir alguns outros, também muito dignos de nota, mas tristes demais para momentos como este; há uma lista perfeita para cada momento da vida. Se alguém assistiu a algum deles, comente conosco! Um abraço! Corpos separados, corações unidos, mais unidos que nunca!

 The Sonnet Sessions continue... You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or by email at podcastshakespeare@gmail.com. You can subscribe to the podcast at  iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, or download direct from Libsyn.   William Shakespeare, Sonnet III    Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest Now is the time that face should form another; Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. For where is she so fair whose uneared womb Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? Or who is he so fond will be the tomb Of his self-love, to stop posterity? Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime; So thou through windows of thine age shalt see, Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time. But if thou live, remembered not to be, Die single and thine image dies with thee.   Music clips:   Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Fantasia on Greensleeves“, from Sir John in Love, opera adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1928 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy)   Nino Rota, “Sarabande” from soundtrack to Zeffirelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, 1967 (Columbia Pictures, US / Italy) orchestra conducted by Carlo Savina

The Sonnet Sessions continue... You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or by email at podcastshakespeare@gmail.com. You can subscribe to the podcast at  iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, or download direct from Libsyn.   William Shakespeare, Sonnet II  When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field, Thy youth's proud livery so gazed on now, Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held: Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies, Where all the treasure of thy lusty days; To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes, Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise. How much more praise deserv'd thy beauty's use, If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,' Proving his beauty by succession thine! This were to be new made when thou art old, And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.    Music clips:   Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Fantasia on Greensleeves“, from Sir John in Love, opera adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1928 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy)   Nino Rota, “Sarabande” from soundtrack to Zeffirelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, 1967 (Columbia Pictures, US / Italy) orchestra conducted by Carlo Savina

"From fairest creatures we desire increase...." Hello, friends! This is the first in my Sonnet Sessions. You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or by email at podcastshakespeare@gmail.com. You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, or download direct from Libsyn. William Shakespeare, Sonnet I FROM fairest creatures we desire increase, That,  thereby,  beauty's rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory: But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel. Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament And only herald to the gaudy spring, Within thine own bud buriest thy content And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding. Pity the world, or else this glutton be, To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee. Music clips: Sergei Prokofiev, “Montagues and Capulets”, from Romeo and Juliet (ballet), 1935 Ralph Vaughan Williams, "Fantasia on Greensleeves", from Sir John in Love, opera adapted from William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1928 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy) Nino Rota, "Sarabande" from soundtrack to Zeffirelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, 1967 (Columbia Picutres, US / Italy) orchestra conducted by Carlo Savina

In 1992 Jonhathon Schaech was chosen by Italian auteur Franco Zeffirelli to star in his new movie Sparrow. Zeffirelli was then at the peak of his power and influence. Jonathan was 22 years old and thrilled to have been chosen by such an artist from all the young actors in the world. In 1995 Jonhathon starred opposite Rose McGowan, now a mutual friend, in Gregg Araki’s stylish thriller The Doom Generation. Since then Jonhathon has accrued nearly 100 onscreen credits, working with many of the world’s greatest and most influential actors and directors. He’s also a writer, producer, and director himself, with multiple credits in each role. It wasn’t until he saw his former costar Rose go public with her story, that Jonathon felt ready to come forward with his. In the January 11, 2018 issue of People Magazine, he published a moving personal account of his harassment and sexual abuse by Franco Zeffirelli on the Italian set of Sparrow, writing frankly about its devastating effect on his next twenty-five years as a man. If you don’t know what Jonhathon looks like, he said it himself on Twitter: “I’m 190 lbs 6 foot and lean as a Cobra!” Every bit of that is true. He’s a big guy with a powerful presence—and the courage to talk about the vulnerability and fear that even big men can suffer in the face sexual aggression from a respected and powerful mentor.   ***WARNING***  This podcast contains graphic conversations about trauma, rape, and sexual violence.

EPISODE 212: AS ABOVE SO BELOW Leo Lyon Zagami, writer and researcher is the son of Dr. Elio Zagami (1939- 2010), known Jungian analyst, writer and co-founder of GAPA (Independent Group of Analytical Psychology, of which he was president). His grandfather was Senator Leopoldo Zagami, a Sicilian politician who was also a known historian and author, who married into the aristocratic family of the Marquis de Gregorio. Leo’s mother is Jessica Lyon Young, a member of the family of the Queen Mother of England whose father, Henry Lyon Young was also a writer. Felicity Mason, Leo’s maternal grandmother, helped Leo in developing his talents at a young age. Felicity was an old-time collaborator and friend of avant-garde eccentrics such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She was also known under the pseudonym Anne Cumming, which made her famous in the 80’s as a controversial novelist, after working for many years in the cinema business with prestigious figures such as Fellini and Zeffirelli. Zagami, who is known for a brilliant career as Leo Young in the media and music industry as a Record Producer, became quickly popular on the web in 2006, because of his direct involvement in the New World Order and Secret Societies known to the majority of us as the “Illuminati.” His blog rose quickly and gained attention from people such as David Icke, for it’s accurate fully documented groundbreaking inside information. *SECOND HALF* An author and speaker on the subjects of self-mastery, self-development, spirituality, and esotericism, New Dawn magazine has described the work of Angel Millar as “…of extraordinary importance in this time of cultural and even spiritual conflict.” In his highly-anticipated fourth book, The Three Stages of Initiatic Spirituality: Craftsman, Warrior, Magician, Millar explores the three archetypes, from their appearance in ancient, tribal society, through ancient Greek thought, Buddhism, Hinduism, the martial arts, Taoist inner-alchemy, Kundalini, Tantra, to alchemy, sex magic, chaos magic, and the positive thinking movement. While providing a solid understanding of the history, mythologies, rituals, and symbols associated with these foundational archetypes, the book also provides details on specific practices and instructions for balancing them within your life. --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

EPISODE 212: AS ABOVE SO BELOW Leo Lyon Zagami, writer and researcher is the son of Dr. Elio Zagami (1939- 2010), known Jungian analyst, writer and co-founder of GAPA (Independent Group of Analytical Psychology, of which he was president). His grandfather was Senator Leopoldo Zagami, a Sicilian politician who was also a known historian and author, who married into the aristocratic family of the Marquis de Gregorio. Leo's mother is Jessica Lyon Young, a member of the family of the Queen Mother of England whose father, Henry Lyon Young was also a writer. Felicity Mason, Leo's maternal grandmother, helped Leo in developing his talents at a young age. Felicity was an old-time collaborator and friend of avant-garde eccentrics such as William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She was also known under the pseudonym Anne Cumming, which made her famous in the 80's as a controversial novelist, after working for many years in the cinema business with prestigious figures such as Fellini and Zeffirelli. Zagami, who is known for a brilliant career as Leo Young in the media and music industry as a Record Producer, became quickly popular on the web in 2006, because of his direct involvement in the New World Order and Secret Societies known to the majority of us as the “Illuminati.” His blog rose quickly and gained attention from people such as David Icke, for it's accurate fully documented groundbreaking inside information. *SECOND HALF* An author and speaker on the subjects of self-mastery, self-development, spirituality, and esotericism, New Dawn magazine has described the work of Angel Millar as “…of extraordinary importance in this time of cultural and even spiritual conflict.” In his highly-anticipated fourth book, The Three Stages of Initiatic Spirituality: Craftsman, Warrior, Magician, Millar explores the three archetypes, from their appearance in ancient, tribal society, through ancient Greek thought, Buddhism, Hinduism, the martial arts, Taoist inner-alchemy, Kundalini, Tantra, to alchemy, sex magic, chaos magic, and the positive thinking movement. While providing a solid understanding of the history, mythologies, rituals, and symbols associated with these foundational archetypes, the book also provides details on specific practices and instructions for balancing them within your life.

In questo episodio, il trasferimento a Roma! Sistemazioni precarie e l'incontro con Zeffirelli, che mi cambiò la vita... forse.

We were thrilled to have Erica Daniels Strater join us in the Booth, starting our next 100 episodes off in style! She has been an agent, casting director, Associate Artistic Director, president, and now Executive Director. All at top-flight companies. Erica has so many dear friends in the Chicago theatre community. She helped us all out when we were with small companies who needed casting help and couldn't afford our own casting directors. Her email response would come back pronto with a list of really great suggestions for a role. Early in her career, she joined her close friend and mentor, Martha Lavey, in choosing to make the effort to pay attention to smaller companies and emerging talents and to lend a hand up. A graduate of Northwestern University with a degree in Performance Studies, she studied with an amazing group of artists, including Martha Lavey, Frank Galati, Mary Zimmerman and Dwight Conquergood. When she graduated and was planning to start auditioning, Erica broker her foot. While she was recuperating, she thought maybe she could help out in a casting director's office. She worked in Jane Brody's office, then Shirley Hamilton's, two of the best casting people in Chicago. Then, after an exciting stint as the Theatre Department coordinator at William Morris in New York, she went to work for Steppenwolf as their in-house casting director. She was then promoted to Associate Artistic Director and did a wonderful job in that capacity while continuing to do their casting. She is providing great leadership at Victory Gardens, collaborating with her partner, Artistic Director Chay Yew. Erica is eloquent about Victory Gardens' mission to "be a leader in developing and producing new work and cultivating an inclusive theater community." We have seen so many marvelous productions there, most recently, Tiny Beautiful Things. Erica and Chay were listed as #1! in New City Stages' feature: Players 2019: The Fifty People Who Really Perform for Chicago.. Gary talks to Erica about getting her start in the business, what she looks for in an actor, the audition process, working with directors to cast just the right actor for the role, and what challenges an Executive Director of a Tony Award-winning Chicago off-loop theatre faces on a daily basis. You'll find Erica to be eloquent and forthright in her responses. Just a joy to have as a guest in the Booth. Kiss of Death: Franco Zeffirelli, Italian director with a penchant for excess. Renowned for his extravagantly romantic opera productions, immensely popular film versions of Shakespeare and an active and sometimes controversial social life. Wiki tells us he was one of the only living people traceably consanguineous with Leonardo da Vinci. Mr. Zeffirelli was 96.

TESTO DELL'ARTICOLO ➜ http://www.bastabugie.it/it/articoli.php?id=5716BISAGNO, VIA LIBERA ALLA CAUSA DI BEATIFICAZIONE DEL COMANDANTE PARTIGIANO (E CATTOLICO) di Rino CammilleriIl 13 giugno l'arcidiocesi di Genova ha dato l'annuncio dell'apertura del processo di beatificazione del concittadino Aldo Gastaldi (1921-1945), passato alla storia nazionale come il «primo partigiano d'Italia». Col nome di battaglia di «Bisagno» (tutti gli uomini al suo comando avevano scelto di chiamarsi come i fiumi della Liguria) aveva combattuto i tedeschi fin dall'inizio, cioè il giorno dopo l'8 settembre. L'iniziativa è stata salutata con favore dall'Anpi ligure per bocca del suo coordinatore: «Mi pare un segnale molto importante da parte della Curia soprattutto in un momento storico in cui c'è qualcuno che mette in discussione i valori fondamentali della nostra democrazia».Ma davvero Bagnasco ha voluto fare un gesto polemico nei confronti dei leghisti al momento trionfanti? Figurarsi, si scherza coi fanti ma si lasciano stare i santi. E Bisagno forse era proprio santo, per questo il cardinale vuole che si vada a scrutarne la vita. Basta dire che il nostro candidato agli altari, quando decise di andare in montagna, la prima cosa che fece fu associarsi un prete, don Attilio Fontana, il quale diventò cappellano della prima formazione armata della Resistenza, la Divisione Cichero comandata da Bisagno. Il quale finì col diventare un mito per la sua imbattibilità su tutto l'Appennino ligure-emiliano. Un esperto di questa storia è Luciano Garibaldi, giornalista e storico, che ha scritto il libro I Giusti del 25 aprile. Chi uccise i partigiani eroi (Ares).Ci informa che Bisagno proibiva ogni molestia alle donne, imponeva il pagamento di ogni rifornimento alimentare richiesto (si badi: non requisito) ai contadini, vietava il turpiloquio e soprattutto le bestemmie: «La bestemmia è, per chi crede, una abiezione e, per chi non crede, una stupida inutilità. In ogni caso è simbolo di pervertimento», lasciò scritto nelle sue direttive. Per se stesso: «Il capo mangia sempre per ultimo, sceglie per ultimo la sua parte, beve per ultimo alla fonte o alla bottiglia, fa di notte il turno più pesante». Bisagno era religiosissimo e solo ventenne così scriveva alla madre: «Credo e penso che tutti coloro che vedono ogni bellezza della vita nel solo piacere materiale siano dei deboli».Vedeva, sì, la gioventù di quelli che si tenevano «lontani da Dio», ma non lui, tutt'altro. Per esempio, il giorno di Natale del 1944 ruppe il ghiaccio di una fontana gelata e si lavò, incurante del freddo, fino alla vita perché voleva andare a messa. Ma era un fustaccio, alto, bello e atletico, nonché un fegataccio da imprese eroiche. Arruolato nel Genio come soldato semplice, salì tutti i gradi per merito fino a sottotenente.Anziché cedere ai tedeschi gli armamenti di cui era responsabile, convinse i suoi uomini a portarli in montagna. Alla sua Divisione affluirono ben presto i soldati inglesi e australiani fuggiti dalla prigionia, nonché molti di quei soldati italiani che intendevano continuare a combattere in nome del Re. I problemi per Bisagno vennero dal Cln. Non sopportava quei gruppi che operavano per politicizzare la Resistenza, specialmente i comunisti.Il recentemente scomparso Zeffirelli, che fu partigiano bianco, raccontò di aver visto un prete ucciso e poi gettato in una latrina solo perché aveva benedetto le salme di alcuni fascisti. Bisagno vide per molte mattine le vie di Genova sparse qua e là di cadaveri di fascisti o stimati tali finiti col classico colpo alla nuca ed ebbe per questo una tempestosa discussione col Comitato nella sede genovese all'Hotel Bristol.Ora, alla sua Divisione si erano uniti parecchi repubblichini di leva, cioè giovani praticamente costretti. A guerra finita, tornati alle loro case, però, dato il clima chi avrebbe creduto alla loro partecipazione alla lotta partigiana? Bisagno decise di accompagnarli personalmente per testimoniare a loro favore. Al ritorno da uno di questi viaggi cadde dal tettuccio del camion su cui stava seduto e finì sotto le ruote. Era il 21 maggio 1945, così morì il «primo partigiano d'Italia», a ventitré anni.Luciano Garibaldi nel suo libro avanza dei dubbi su questa morte: perché non fu portato subito al più vicino ospedale ma in uno ben più distante? Perché non fu fatta l'autopsia? Così ha scritto (su «Il Timone»): «Sessant'anno dopo, il suo cugino e compagno di battaglie Dino Lunetti, in una intervista concessa a Riccardo Caniato e pubblicata nel libro I Giusti del 25 Aprile, ha demolito tale versione fornendone una molto più verosimile: avvelenato fino a fargli perdere i sensi e farlo precipitare». E se le indagini per la beatificazione si imbattessero in qualcosa di imbarazzante, ci sarebbe il coraggio di parlare di martirio in odium fidei? Si consideri che il cardinale croato e beato Stepinac, la cui morte in terra comunista rimane del pari avvolta nei dubbi, costituisce ancora un grattacapo per la Santa Sede.

Mal Vincent remembers late director Franco Zeffirelli along with a close call while on the set of Zeffirelli's classic film, THE CHAMP.

con Gianfranco Cabiddu, Mario Tronco, Fabrizio Bentivoglio e Carlo Cotti

00:00 La morte del grande Franco Zeffirelli, un vero genio controcorrente che la sinistra non ha mai amato… 01:40 Aldo Grasso se la prende con Salvini per la proposta sulle […]

Aidan and Lindsay tuck into the epic battle between Katharina and Petruchio in Shakespeare's early comedy The Taming of the Shrew. In a play about breaking the spirit of a strong woman, the conversation here travels around feminism and the social order of Elizabethan England, Shakespeare-adjacent texts, philosophy, and questions of who really is the titular Shrew in this story? Join us for a spirited discussion that ends with our debate: Should the famous ending of the play be read/portrayed satirically? Notes: The Taming of A Shrew, which echoes Shakespeare so much people think it must be related to his work, is the focus of this overview by Dr. Michael Delahoyde of Washington State University. Zeffirelli's The Taming of the Shrew (1967) stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and co-stars a number of popular character actors from the time (Michael York and Victor Spinetti, yo!) and is fun in parts and aggravating in parts but it's a lavish production. If you only watch one production of Shrew, let it be this one. Taming of the Shrew (1929) starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks is available in its entirety on Dailymotion and we highly recommend checking it out for a unique take on this play! 10 Things I Hate About You is a fun '90s take on Shrew and it's worth a look for purely nostalgic reasons alone. It comes in the middle of this weird resurgence in popularity of Shakespeare's works in the last decade of the 20th century, and is a rather loose adaptation of the play, but if nothing else it's kind of a neat little film. Check it out!  Our favourite Shakespearean editions, from the Folger Shakespeare Library, have put out a version of The Tamer Tamed online.  "Local Elevator" by Kevin MacLeod is the song we sampled for our brief intermission early in the episode. Aidan misspoke when discussing our next play. Henry IV was actually written several years after Henry VI, and there are only two parts to that particular historical Henriad. We are in fact heading into the long discussion of Henry VIs - Parts 1, 2, and 3!

In this, the conclusion of our first two-part episode of Adapt or Perish, we discuss Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre! In part one, we covered the original novel, Robert Stevenson’s 1943 movie, Delbert Mann’s 1970 TV movie, Joan Craft’s 1973 BBC miniseries, and Julian Amyes’ 1983 BBC miniseries. In this episode, we’ll discuss: The 1996 movie, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, written by Zeffirelli and Hugh Whitemore, and starring Charlotte Gainsbourg and William Hurt. Watch it on iTunes or Amazon. The 1997 TV movie, directed by Robert Young, written by Richard Hawley, Kay Mellor, and Peter Wright, and starring Samantha Morton and Ciarán Hinds. Watch it on iTunes or Amazon. The 2006 BBC miniseries, directed by Susanna White, written by Sandy Welch, and starring Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens. Watch it on iTunes or Amazon. The 2011 movie, directed by Cary Fukunaga, written by Moira Buffini, and starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender. Watch it on iTunes or Amazon. Footnotes: Franco Zeffirelli and our episode on Romeo and Juliet Cinematographer David Watkin Dame Joan Plowright and Laurence Olivier Billie Whitelaw and Samuel Beckett Literal supermodel Elle Macpherson Jean Rhys’ 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, which was adapted as a movie twice in 1993 and 2006 Pam Ferris and Call the Midwife The Brit List and The Black List Cary Fukunaga and True Detective You can follow Adapt or Perish on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, and you can find us and all of our show notes online at adaptorperishcast.com. If you want to send us a question or comment, you can email us at adaptorperishcast@gmail.com or tweet using #adaptcast.

"From fairest creatures we desire increase...." Hello, friends! This is a bonus episode to give you a taste of my new Patreon campaign. Subscribers to the Patreon can contribute a few dollars to the running of the podcast in exchange for bonus content. I'll be recording Shakespeare's sonnets, with analysis and discussion, and posting them exclusively to Patreon. In the meantime, my standard episodes will always remain free via your favourite podcast app. You can visit the Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/podshakespeare. And you can listen to this bonus episode, and previous public episodes,   You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or by email at podcastshakespeare@gmail.com. You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, or download direct from Libsyn. William Shakespeare, Sonnet I FROM fairest creatures we desire increase, That,  thereby,  beauty's rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory: But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel. Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament And only herald to the gaudy spring, Within thine own bud buriest thy content And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding. Pity the world, or else this glutton be, To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee. Music clips: Sergei Prokofiev, “Montagues and Capulets”, from Romeo and Juliet (ballet), 1935 Ralph Vaughan Williams, "Fantasia on Greensleeves", from Sir John in Love, opera adapted from William Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1928 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy) Nino Rota, "Sarabande" from soundtrack to Zeffirelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, 1967 (Columbia Picutres, US / Italy) orchestra conducted by Carlo Savina

“He that is giddy thinks the world turns round” – The Widow We’re back with episode 8! Despite some mid-episode audio issues, we’re commencing my look at The Taming of the Shrew, circa 1592, one of the Bard’s rougher early works. Join me for a journey through the plot’s highs and lows, Shakespeare’s first googlewhack, and a heckuva lot of male privilege.   You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or by email at podcastshakespeare@gmail.com. You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, or download direct from Libsyn. Key links below. You can also visit the bibliography page here, which is a work in progress. Links mentioned: Patient Griselda Ovid, Heroides (Penelope to Ulysses) Dittography 10 Things I Hate About You (1999; d: Gil Junger) Deliver Us From Eva (2003; d: Gary Hardwick) ShakespeaRe-Told: The Taming of the Shrew (2005; d: David Richards) Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (Penguin Random House, 2005) John Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize, or the Tamer Tamed (1611) Music clips: Nino Rota, soundtrack to Zeffirelli’s “The Taming of the Shrew”, 1967 (Columbia Picutres, US / Italy) orchestra conducted by Carlo Savina -Overture -Student’s Masquerade -Sarabande -Married on Sunday “Orchestral selections from Kiss Me, Kate” (Naxos), conducted by Richard Hayman Excerpts: “The Taming of the Shrew”, Shakespeare’s Globe (2011), d: Toby Frow; members of the company (Lord / Huntsmen), Simon Paisley Day (Petruchio), Samantha Spiro (Katharina), Pearce Quigley (Grumio) “The Taming of the Shrew”, Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1994), d: Aida Ziablikova, Malcolm Storry (Christopher Sly); John Warner (Servant), and Hilton McRae (Peter) “Kiss Me Kate” by Cole Porter, and Sam and Bella Spewack, PBS: Great Performances (2003), d: Chris Hunt; Brent Barrett (Petruchio) “The Taming of the Shrew”, BBC Television Shakespeare (1980), d: Jonathan Miller; John Cleese (Petruchio), Susan Penhaligon (Bianca), Simon Chandler (Lucentio), Jonathan Cecil (Hortensio), Harry Waters (Biondello), Anthony Pedley (Tranio), John Barron (Vincentio), Sarah Badel (Katharina) “Kiss Me, Petruchio” (BBC2, 1979), d: Christopher Dixon, from Joseph Papp’s 1978 Taming of the Shrew (Delacorte Theatre, Central Park); Meryl Streep (Kate), Raul Julia (Petruchio) “The Taming of the Shrew”, Arkangel Shakespeare (2005); Roger Allam (Petruchio), Frances Barber (Katharina), Charles Simpson (Hortensio) “The Taming of the Shrew” (Pickford Corporation, 1929), d: Sam Taylor; Mary Pickford (Katherine) Final speech (details above): Meryl Streep (1979); Mary Pickford (1929); Frances Barber (2005); Samantha Spiro (2011); Sarah Badel (1980)

This week, in honor of The Bard’s birthday later in the month, Frank and I are talking about his list for the best adaptations of Shakespeare tragedies. In the episode, we break down Roman Polanski’s Macbeth, Akira Torasawa’s King Lear adaptation, Ran, the Kenneth Branagh versions of Hamlet and Othello, and both the Zeffirelli and Luhrmann versions of Romeo and Juliet. Please remember to subscribe if you like what you hear! Beyond subscribing, there are other two important ways you can help us. First, if you are a fan of the podcast, please rate and leave reviews on your podcast client. That not only would be useful to us for the feedback, but also help us receive more attention. Second, if you like your Facebook page, 2 Guys 5 Movies, it would be helpful to like or share our posts so others can learn about 2 Guys 5 Movies and decide if it is for them. Finally, if you have your own ideas for the podcast, you can also email us with list suggestions at 2guys5movies@gmail.com, and thank you all for listening and your support.