December 22nd, 2007
As we all wind up for several days of joyous celebrations with family and friends, here’s a bit of levity to accompany your last-minute orgy of gift-shopping and present wrapping, courtesy of our favorite Catholic jazz singer, Harry Connick, Jr.–seriously, his Christmas album (not the one featured in the skit!) is a classic–and the Rev. [...]
October 31st, 2007
In honor of All Hollow’s Eve, here’s one of those wonderful YouTube clips devised by some cracked savant with too much time on his or her hands. It’s a spoof movie trailer that re-imagines Kubrick’s the Shining as a cuddly, warm-hearted family movie.
Thanks to Angelo Matera, edit0r-in-chief at Godspy.com, for putting me on to [...]
September 9th, 2007
As readers of this blog may know, Clan Murphy is united in its appreciation of tennis in general and Roger Federer in particular. Moreover, as the last two weeks of the US Open have worn on, those of us in the Clan who have read Donna Byrne’s The Secret and have enjoyed discussing its merits [...]
July 9th, 2007
One of the great little pleasures of my youth was watching Danny Kaye’s TV variety show every week. (I credit this dear lunatic with introducing me to my first Gilbert & Sullivan patter song—an important moment in any young life!)
I don’t know the origin, but here’s an operatic (ahem) duet Kaye did with the late [...]
March 29th, 2007
…in a sauna.
I’m not kidding.
This is a perfectly outrageous clip from Dame Edna’s show, filmed around the time of the release of Mel’s Hamlet, and posted on Mel’s MySpace page:
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog&friendID=98949622
And in case you missed it, here’s our bardolatry review of Mel’s Hamlet, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, which I wrote back in 2002 or thereabouts.
And if [...]
The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective by Kate Summerscale
Joan of Arc: A Life (Penguin Lives) by Mary Gordon
None
Those were the days [the nineteenth century] of the great schism between the artist and Catholicism when it seemed that art and sanctity must be forever separated. One thinks of the convert J.K. Huysmans standing among the crowd of pious pilgrims at Lourdes, his soul harassed by the observation that, although Mary had chased the devil from the rocks of the shrine and the hearts of the pilgrims, he was still there blaspheming her and her Son by the ‘hideous’ architecture of the place. He distinctly hears the devil say to Mary: ‘I shall dog your footsteps, and wherever you stop, there I shall establish myself; you may have at Lourdes all the priests you please, but art, which is the only worth-while thing on earth after sanctity, not only will you not have, but I shall so effect that it will unceasingly insult you by the prolonged blasphemy of its uglinesss….All that represents you and your Son will be grotesque…’
—
Kelly Hatzenbihler on 