Mexico
David Nice
How old Placido Domingo? Old Placido Domingo in not bad vocal health, to paraphrase Cary Grant's celebrated telegram reply. The other answer depends on your source of reference. Domingo is 68 in the eyes of last night's rather lazy, over-reverent Imagine, but 75 according to my not so New Everyman Dictionary of Music. Where did that come from? It would make him an octogenarian by the time of the date he proudly announced at the programme's end as the furthest-forward in his singer's diary. Perhaps this isn't that much of an issue. There are plenty of others that Alan Yentob Read more ...
admin
History is written in blood, however elegant the cover. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the collapse in 1521 of the Aztec Empire, a culture that presented Europe with a vision of such otherness that it could only be destroyed. In 2002, the Royal Academy of Arts tried to persuade us to look beyond the grisly tales of human sacrifice to a more nuanced portrait of a people steeped in gory rituals that we, soaked in the serial-killer television porn of the 21st century, might strangely understand.It didn’t work – how many vessels designed to receive still-beating human hearts do you need to Read more ...
tom.russell
To mark the release of Tom Russell's superb new album Blood and Candle Smoke this week, the cowboy singer-songwriter reports on his trip earlier this month to the Mexican city of Juarez, one of the most dangerous cities in the world, just over the border from where he lives in El Paso, Texas.
"Down below El Paso lies Juarez, / Mexico is different, like the travel poster says…" Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard, "Mexican Divorce"That was the summer of "birds falling out of trees," as the Apaches might say. Looming weirdness. I'm in a beat-up Juarez taxi cab, inching slowly away from the Read more ...