Noted and Quoted: ‘Rocky Horror’ and the Fall of Man

“It taps into the most primal story of western civilisation: the fall of man. Brad and Janet are Adam and Eve, and Frank-N-Furter is the serpent.”  — Richard O’Brien, who wrote and co-starred in the midnight cult hit The Rocky Horror Picture Show, on the film’s allegorical nature.

Noted & Quoted: Colin Meloy Is Your New Ben Brantley

Speaking about the Decemberists’ concept album/rock opera/folk musical “The Hazards of Love” and his larger musical aspirations, given the current state of Broadway:  “The Broadway musical used to be an art form that was financially viable even on the margins, and there were more people practicing it, more people invested in making it great. Now the musical is a niche that’s only really happening in New York, at least the financially viable stuff, and it’s run by huge corporations catering to tourists. It panders to the lowest common denominator, with schlock music that just gets worse and worse.” Chicago Tribune [via Largehearted Boy]

Noted and Quoted: Bret Easton Ellis Will Brook No Jazz Hands

“It’s a rock musical, with like a band. It’s like a multimedia rave situation. It’s not like a straight-ahead Broadway musical with guys in Armani suits doing jazz hands with an old-style score. It’s like a concert, in a way. You get this idea in your head that it’s 42nd Street or something, and it’s not. It’s a very different kind of musical. We’ll see. It’s still a long way down the road. But I’ve talked to everybody involved, and the reason to move forward with it was exactly because of how the guys who are doing this want to do it. It’s not old-school Broadway. It’s very new, interesting concepts.” — Bret Easton Ellis, on turning American Psycho into a musical.

Noted and Quoted: Grant Morrison

“Blogging makes everyone a writer or a critic. MySpace makes everyone famous until there are so many famous people that no-one’s really famous for anything at all. Twitter turns every twitch, fart and half-baked thought into a global press statement. ‘American Idol’ makes everyone a potential celebrity. The Renaissance/Romantic idea of the special person, the genius, the ‘superhero’, is dying before our very eyes. Everybody wants to be a rockstar and nobody wants to clean the streets. At the same time as all this desperate self-aggrandizement, we’re watching endless reruns of the same shows, the way kids repetitively watch the same DVD cartoons over and over again. Our most successful movies are about children’s cartoon characters as we try to cocoon ourselves with nostalgia and repetition against the howling, incoherent darkness of ecological disaster, paranoid surveillance culture, Terror and financial collapse.”  — Comic book mage Grant Morrison, from an interview on — slight traces of irony — MySpace [via io9]

Noted and Quoted: Augusten Burroughs Is Crazy For You, Madge

“Madonna is the best role model possible for a child. She was not born into wealth or a powerful family. She created herself from the elements in the universe around her – a true star. She says: if you want it, get it. It’s that simple.” — Author Augusten Burroughs.