THE WRITE STUFF
We’ve seen Pat Cooper perform many times.
And we’ve always hooted and hollered.
Who knew he could be so funny (and sensitive and insightful) on paper?
Now, in How Dare You Say How Dare Me! (Square One Publishers, Inc. $24.95), Pasquale Caputo shares the amazing, offbeat story of his life and career.
Cooper covers it all, including his legendary appearances throughout the years on The Howard Stern Show and the reason why he told film director Martin Scorsese that he didn’t want to be in his film Casino.
Jerry Lewis penned the foreward, and fellow performers Robert De Niro, Jerry Seinfeld, Jason Alexander, and Billy Crystal have heaped praise onto the book.
Analyze this and you’ll understand Cooper’s genius.
DVD QUICK PICKS
Now why we know why Jung Ji-hoon, aka “Rain,” was the first Korean to win an MTV Movie Award. He’s good.
In Black Eagle, he plays hotshot elite Air Force pilot Tae-hun, kicked off the military’s top-notch air team and demoted into combat where his brash ways cause tension with the unit’s strait-laced top gun Cheol-hui Now they must set aside their differences and lead the way to rescue a comrade and prevent war …
Relive all your favorite memories with your Sesame Street friends as Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Sesame Workshop release Sesame Street: Best of Friends. The DVD includes memorable SS songs, beloved performances and everyone’s favorite characters featured with celebrity appearances by Elvis Costello, Julianne Moore, Ricky Gervais and Gloria Estefan.
Kultur adds four more exciting titles to their line:
The Globe Theatre production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus is at the top. Doctor Faustus, restless for knowledge, forsakes scholarship for magic and makes a pact with the Devil: if the veil spirit Mephistopheles will serve him for 24 years, Faustus will yield his soul to the Devil after death.
It isn't long before Faustus has doubts about the bargain, but Mephistopheles has plenty of entertainment at hand to distract Faustus from the terrifying reality of his position and the prospect of its agonizing conclusion.
In Doctor Faustus, the greatest tragedy in English before Shakespeare, Marlowe puts some of the finest poetry ever written for the stage and a good deal of anarchic comedy at the service of a mythic tale illustrating mankind's insatiable desire for knowledge and power.
Armchair traveling just got more exotic with the new addition to the Sites of the World’s Cultures Series, Damascus: Paradise on Earth. Once the legendary dynasty of the Omayyads had chosen Damascus as its capital in the 7th century, the Syrian city acquired a fabulous reputation. For almost 100 years Damascus was the cultural linchpin of the world, a city where the most learned men of the Mediterranean region lived and the most skillful craftsmen worked. The Omayyad caliphs contributed to this golden age; they summoned the most skilled craftsmen in Byzantium to work on the mosaics in the newly constructed Omayyad Mosque.
The name Damascus, however, is closely connected not only with Islamic history, but also with Christianity. The nearby Mount Kassyoum is regarded as the place where Cain is said to have murdered Abel. The apostle Paul met his destiny at Damascus: here he underwent his conversion. Even today there are still numerous Christian communities in this historic city.
The latest addition to the Sites of the World’s Cultures Series: Persepolis: Stage of Kings.
It seems as if the people who built Persepolis–and this they did even before the ancient Romans created their world empire–appeared out of nowhere.
Presumably it was a tribe of herdsmen who settled in the south-west of present-day Iran in the 8th century B.C. This region was known as Parsa, or Persis as the Greeks called it. When, in 550 B.C., the Achaemenid Kyros ascended the throne, it took only a few years for the Persian Empire to be feared as a terrifying opponent.
One of his successors, Dareios I, had a residence built for himself which was to be more magnificent than anything ever known before: Persepolis. It soon gained a reputation as "the richest city under the sun".
After conquering the city, Alexander the Great employed 20,000 mules and 5,000 camels to carry away the riches of the city. Nevertheless, the splendid reliefs and ruins still convey a picture of a royal court which reveled in pomp and luxury.
Take a voyage on the High Cs with the Blu-ray relase of Theodora.
For his 1996 Glyndebourne staging, radical American director Peter Sellars and winner of the 2012 Opera News Achievement Award takes George Frideric Handel's penultimate English oratorio–a tale of self-sacrificial love between a Christian virgin and a Roman imperial bodyguard in fourth-century, enemy-occupied Antioch–and, by resetting it in modern-day America, transforms it into a timeless parable of spiritual resistance to tyranny and persecution.
Featuring an all-star cast starring Dawn Upshaw, David Daniels, Frode Olsen, Richard Croft and Lorraine Hunt.
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