March 18, 2006

  • ART WARS:
    The Crimson Passion continues...

    How to Grow
    a Crimson Clover

    Published in the Harvard Crimson

    on Thursday, March 16, 2006, 6:24 PM

    by Patrick R. Chesnut,

    Crimson staff writer

    Stephen Dedalus, James
    Joyce's literary alter ego, once described the
    trappings of Irish culture as nets that hold a soul back from flight.
    By his standards, Harvard has soared.

    Irish
    culture has been an indelible part of Boston, but the names on our
    red-brick buildings tell a different story: Adams, Lowell, Winthrop. It
    would be easy to assume that for Harvard students, Irish culture
    consists of little more than guzzling alcohol in Tommy Doyle's Irish
    Pub or at St. Patrick's Day Stein Club.

    Recently, however, a
    small but lively Irish subculture, centered on Celtic music and
    language, has been developing at Harvard. But despite its vivacity, it
    remains largely unnoticed by the broader student body.

    Efforts
    by groups like the Harvard College Celtic Club and by the producers of
    the upcoming Loeb mainstage of J.M. Synge's "The Playboy of the Western
    World" may be just the sort of first step needed to finally make
    Harvard a place where Irish artistic culture lives....

    REACHING OUT

    "The Playboy"-- which will run
    from April 28 through May 6-- revolves around the disruption of life in a
    provincial Irish village when an outsider arrives with an extravagant
    story. All points converge at this play's production: members of the
    Celtic Club coordinated and will perform the play's music, the
    producers hope to draw Boston's Irish community, and the production
    will present Harvard's students with a script deeply entrenched in
    Irish history, but that boasts a universal appeal.

    As Kelly
    points out, the Irish roots of "The Playboy" are clearer than in the
    plays of the nominally Irish, but Francophone, absurdist writer Samuel
    Beckett. And unlike the plays of Sean O'Casey, which are extremely
    rooted in Irish culture, "The Playboy" boasts a visceral appeal that
    will be accessible to Harvard students.

    From a site linked to in yesterday's St. Patrick's Day sermon as the keys to the kingdom:

    "In the western world, we tend to take for granted our
    musical scale, formed of whole tone and
    half tone steps. These steps are arranged in two ways: the major scale and the
    minor."

    From the obituary
    in today's online New York Times of fashion designer Oleg Cassini, who
    died at 92 on St. Patrick's Day, Friday, March 17, 2006:

    "... he was always seen in the company of heiresses, debutantes,
    showgirls, ingenues. Between, before or after [his first] two marriages, he
    dated young starlets like Betty Grable and Lana Turner and actresses
    like Ursula Andress and Grace Kelly, to whom he was briefly engaged.

    'He
    was a true playboy, in the Hollywood sense,' said Diane von
    Furstenberg, the fashion designer and a friend of Mr. Cassini's. 'Well
    into his 90's, he was a flirt.'"

    "How strange the change from major to minor...
          Ev'ry time we say goodbye."
       -- Cole Porter