According to Hollywood Reporter, Hello Kitty will be making her Hollywood film debut.

Sanrio, the Japanese company behind the iconic feline, has granted film rights to the Warner Bros. label New Line Cinema and Flynn Picture Company to develop the character’s first English-language feature film.

The partnership marks the only time Sanrio has granted film rights to Hello Kitty and its other popular characters — including Gudetama, My Melody and Little Twin Stars, among others — to a major film studio.

It is currently unclear if the project is being developed as an animated or live-action feature, but the search for writers has already begun. Beau Flynn will produce and Wendy Jacobson will executive produce for Flynn Picture.

The big question: will Hello Kitty, who does not have a mouth, actually speak?

Hello Kitty has previously appeared in comic books, TV series, video games and several Japanese-language animated movies, as well as on more than 50,000 different branded products (if you can name it, you can find a Hello Kitty version of it).

Virginia Ballet Theatre presents its WINTER CONCERT 2019

Come experience the magic of dance with Virginia Ballet Theater, Hampton Roads premiere professional Ballet Company, in its annual WINTER CONCERT at The University Theatre at Old Dominion University; Friday & Saturday, February 22 & 23, 2019 at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, February 24, 2019 at 2:00 p.m.

The program will open with two virtuoso dances from the classical repertoire: the pas de duex from Le Corsaire featuring our own Deana Bortnick with Guest Artist Omar Nieves, former principal for Ballets de San Juan. Also in the program Amber Romano and Timothy Knoll will perform the Black Swan pas de duex from the 3rd act of Swan Lake.

Adding to the experience, Virginia Ballet Theater will present Twilight choreographed by Guest Choreographer David Keener, former Director for the Virginia School of the Arts and the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Twilight, set to Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, is a neoclassical piece that epitomize the American influences to the world of classical ballet.

Later in the program enjoy Fragile Strength, a new work by Artistic Director Ricardo Melendez, to the sound of Sonata for Cello by contemporary composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Inspired by the artwork of Danielle Tegeder’s “Lightness as it Behaves in Turbulence”, presently in exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art’s “Chaos and Awe” exhibit, the piece is an experiment on classical ballet lines as impacted by contemporary influences and aesthetics; an allegorical image of fragility as it confronts obstacles.

Come and experience the passion and beauty of Virginia Ballet Theater and indulge your senses in an evening of past and contemporary classics of dance. More information is available at TRDance.org.

Tickets             Adults                                      $27.00

                        Senior Citizens & Military       $22.00

Students                                  $15.00

Available in advance at CoVaTix.com, or at the door.

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Todd Rosenlieb Dance is a center for Dance promoting the highest level of professional performance, education, and community outreach. Through innovation, creativity, and inclusion, we explore Modern Dance and Contemporary Ballet that enriches the culture and community of the mid-Atlantic region.

“The list is the origin of culture”–Umberto Eco.

Psychologists say that obsessive compulsive list makers are trying to create an illusion of control in otherwise chaotic lives.

And, there’s nothing wrong with that. In the words of the American abstract artist, Charles Green Shaw: “Real happiness consists in not what we actually accomplish, but what we think we accomplish.”

In 1983, Susan Sontag edited an anthology of French critic Rolande Barthes’s work and penned the introduction to it. She included Barthes’s own list of likes and dislikes, originally titled J’aime, je n’aime pas (I like, I don’t like):

I like: salad, cinnamon, cheese, pimento, marzipan, the smell of new-cut hay (why doesn’t someone with a “nose” make such a perfume), roses, peonies, lavender, champagne, loosely held political convictions, Glenn Gould, too-cold beer, flat pillows, toast, Havana cigars, Handel, slow walks, pears, white peaches, cherries, colors, watches, all kinds of writing pens, desserts, unrefined salt, realistic novels, the piano, coffee, Pollock, Twombly, all romantic music, Sartre, Brecht, Verne, Fourier, Eisenstein, trains, Médoc wine, having change, Bouvard and Pécuchet, walking in sandals on the lanes of southwest France, the bend of the Adour seen from Doctor L.’s house, the Marx Brothers, the mountains at seven in the morning leaving Salamanca, etc.

I don’t like: white Pomeranians, women in slacks, geraniums, strawberries, the harpsichord, Miró, tautologies, animated cartoons, Arthur Rubinstein, villas, the afternoon, Satie, Bartók, Vivaldi, telephoning, children’s choruses, Chopin’s concertos, Burgundian branles and Renaissance dances, the organ, Marc-Antoine Charpentier, his trumpets and kettledrums, the politico-sexual, scenes, initiatives, fidelity, spontaneity, evenings with people I don’t know, etc.

The recently released volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries, As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 (public library), was among the best psychology and philosophy books of 2012 and has already given us Sontag’s wisdom on writing, boredom, censorship, and aphorisms, her radical vision for remixing education, and her illustrated insights on love and art. All through her list making.

Beliefs
This is the very first entry in Sontag’s earliest published journal, dated November 23, 1947

I believe:

(a) That there is no personal god or life after death

(b) That the most desirable thing in the world is freedom to be true to oneself, i.e., Honesty

(c) That the only difference between human beings is intelligence

(d) That the only criterion of an action is its ultimate effect on making the individual happy or unhappy

(e) That it is wrong to deprive any man of life

[Entries “f” and “g” are missing.]

(h) I believe, further more, that an ideal state (besides “g”) should be a strong centralized one with government control of pulic utilities, banks, mines + transportation and subsidy of the arts, a comfortable minimum wage, support of disabled and age. State care of pregnant women with no distinction such as legitimate + illegitimate children.

To Read
from Sontag’s journals, December 19, 1948 (NB: she’s 15)

There are so many books and plays and stories I have to read—Here are just a few:

The Counterfeiters—Gide
The Immoralist—”
Lafcadio’s Adventures—”
Corydon—Gide

Tar—Sherwood Anderson
The Island Within—Ludwig Lewisohn
Sanctuary—William Faulkner
Esther Waters—George Moore
Diary of a Writer—Dostoyevsky
Against the Grain—Husmans
The Disciple—Paul Bourget
Sanin—Mikhail Artsybashev
Johnny Got His Gun—Dalton Trumbo
The Forsyte Saga—Galsworthy
The Egoist—George Meredith
Diana of the Crossways—”
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel—”

poems of Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Tibullus, Heine, Pushkin, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Apollinaire

plays of Synge, O’Neill, Calderón, Shaw, Hellman . . .

[This list goes on for another five pages, and more than a hundred titles are mentioned.]

On Interpretation
from Sontag’s journals, December 31, 1956

1. Nothing is uninterpreted.
2. To interpret is to determine, restrict; or to exfoliate, read meaning into.
3. Interpretation is the medium by which we justify context.
4. To interpret a word is different from defining it; it means to specify a range of contexts (not equivalents)

Rules + duties for being 24
from Sontag’s journals, January 15, 1957 (the day before her 24th birthday)

1. Have better posture.
2. Write Mother 3 times a week.
3. Eat less.
4. Write two hours a day minimally
5. Never complain publicly about Brandeis or money.
6. Teach David to read.

Later, undated but “most likely late February or early March 1957”:

DON’T

1. Criticize publicly anyone at Harvard—
2. Allude to your age (boastfully, mock-respectfully, or otherwise)
3. Talk about money
4. Talk about Brandeis

DO

1. Shower every other night
2. Write Mother every other day

Self-assessments
from Sontag’s journals, 1957

What do I believe?

In the private life
In holding up culture
In music, Shakespeare, old buildings

What do I enjoy?

Music
Being in love
Children
Sleeping
Meat

My faults

Never on time
Lying, talking too much
Laziness
No volition for refusal