She Falls from a Tower
Shaped Like a Dagger
The paradox of civilization is that the power required to achieve, maintain, and protect it requires physical coercion, inculcated virtue, and the fictions of law, money, state, religion, and human rights.
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Don Giovanni vs. Gene Simmons
Don Giovanni cannot match the sexual prodigality of Gene Simmons of hard rock band KISS. The Don’s conquests in the salons, kitchens, and petticoats of 18th century Europe comprise a mere 640 women and girls in Italy, 231 in Germany, 100 in France, 91 in Turkey, and 1,003 in Spain. Gene Simmons’s worldwide conquests exceed . . .
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A Sharply-Pointed Stick of Black and White American History
Morgan Freeman, the iconic, Oscar-winning American actor, doesn’t want your condescension. For him, an attitude of patronizing superiority—of disdain, even—inhabits the folds and air pockets of your blanket generalizations. “You’re going to relegate my history to a month?” the 79-year-old actor said during a 60 Minutes interview . . .
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A Song of Love and Death
Aida’s plight is our plight. We struggle with passion versus duty, loyalties divided, the separation of individual conscience from religion and politics or, worse, politicized religion. Mostly, we suffer under self-delusions about our status and nature as Homo sapiens, the most deadly predator the world has ever known.
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The Scorpion and the Lion
The human scorpion is perpetually at war with itself and the world. It stabs or tears at the flesh of others with words and actions of subtle or astonishing cruelty. It can’t stomach the success, talent, beauty, intelligence, happiness, or fulfillment of others, and so must destroy every felicity with gossip, manipulation, and spite.
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Anne Frank Lives in New York
As Hitler looted and murdered his way through Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and North Africa; as the concentration camps of Auschwitz, Sobibor, and Bergen-Belsen gassed and incinerated millions of Jews, Gypsies, communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and the disabled . . .
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Elektra Will Take the Top
of Your Head Off
Alone, abandoned, dejected, and half-mad with grief, Elektra, Princess of Argos, bleeds white under a Throne of Blood. With monomaniacal intensity, she seeks to kill Queen Clytemnestra, her mother, who with her lover Aegithus has murdered King Agamemnon, her father, upon the latter’s return from leading the Greek armies against Troy . . .