Sylvester turner

DEBUSSY A Painter in Sound In 1890, the 28-year-old Claude Debussy felt forced to write the archetypal starving-artist letter to a friend. “Forgive me, but could you lend me 20 francs until the end of the month,” he pleaded. “I’m very ashamed at writing to you, but I’m desperately hungry .” This was the same Debussy who within the next dozen years would produce some of the most radically original, influential and popular of all European art music. Hungry he may well have been (according to another friend, the composer could afford neither to eat nor to clothe himself), but “desperate” is a word almost impossible to associate with this most fastidious and discriminating of composers. Perhaps, as Stephen Walsh muses in his new biographical study, “Debussy: A Painter in Sound,” he was merely resorting to his skills as “an adept borrower.” Money and the practical necessities of life would remain a lifelong torment for him, an artist forever locked into his own internal world of … [Read more...] about John Adams on Debussy, the First Modernist

See the article in its original context from March 21, 1997 Section Page Buy Reprints View on timesmachine TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. On its scandalizing surface, David Cronenberg's ''Crash'' suggests exploitation at its most disturbingly sick. Adapting the cult novel by J. G. Ballard (the ''Empire of the Sun'' author who will never again be thought of as that nice little boy growing up near Steven Spielberg's Shanghai), Mr. Cronenberg explores a newly pornographic realm of screen sex. The characters in ''Crash'' are aroused by violent car crashes, and their fetishism extends up to and even beyond the point of death. The sickest joke here is the reverence extended to highway accidents of the rich and famous, as an audience attends a stylized re-enactment of James Dean's Porsche collision. The oft-repeated bravado of Dean's ''live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse'' credo looks like a nursery rhyme next … [Read more...] about An Orgy of Bent Fenders and Bent Love