Karaoke may be brutal on sober ears, but until recently it has had one fortunate characteristic: performances were ephemeral.
Jaylah's presence and Boutella's performance are fortunate, as the rest of the doings on Altamid are of a nearly relentless dreariness, not least because the battles on which the heroes' survival depends could have been borrowed, costumes and actors aside, from more or less any superhero movie.
Willy And The Poor Boys contains an unearthed, live Manchester performance of "Fortunate Son" and a jam version of "Down On The Corner" with r&b legends, Booker T. & The MGs. Cosmo's Factory has a rare, stripped down, hornless re-recording of "Travelin' Band" and another musical workout with Booker T., a revisit of "Born On The Bayou".
After all, there's plenty of holiday cheer around my own home between school performances, a fortunate bounty of gifts under the tree, and the pending arrival of our large extended family.
It is thoroughly disappointing but if we had gone through we could have counted ourselves fortunate because our level of performance was nowhere near what it reached last season".
"I have been very fortunate in 60 years of performance," he said in 1995, "to have learned what it means to be an eternal student, an eternal optimist -- because you hope the next time will always be a little better -- and eternally in love with music.
It felt doubly fortunate, then, to encounter a performance of Cage's seminal Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano on Wednesday evening at the Stone, the spartan East Village music laboratory founded and maintained by the composer John Zorn: doubly not only because the account, by Conor Hanick, was a marvel of poetic concentration, but also because it was not even planned until a few days ago.
I was fortunate to attend the last performance in the tour, in Southern California, where I watched graying and balding fans, many in t-shirts stretched over muffin-top middles, dance from the stands, sing along and wipe their eyes.
Directed by Richard Laxton, "Effie Gray" is fortunate to have enough strong performances by Fanning, Thompson and top-flight costars (including cameos by James Fox, Robbie Coltrane, Derek Jacobi and even Claudia Cardinale) to eventually overcome the doldrums of decorum and create the feeling we've been needing.
Considering her performance Saturday, she was fortunate to take his advice.
