Pitts is now 69 and talks freely of the distant past, as we sit at China Doll restaurant by Sydney Harbour, on a clear winter's day. James Pitts, former chief executive of Odyssey House drug and alcohol rehabilitation service. You would need to be out of your f.ing mind." "When you look back at some of the things I did on drugs, I can't believe them. I always say that was divine intervention, because I was going to probably kill him," he says. "I shot him through the door and I was trying to get the door open so I could shoot him again but I couldn't get it open. He once shot in the shoulder a man who tried to rob him and would have murdered him had not a jammed door come between them. "I had the diamond watch, the nice car, that all went with the lifestyle," he says. Diamond Jim rolled with Pretty Rick, Brown Sugar and Choice Horse, among others. His other nickname of Skis (a nod to his big feet) did not.Īny hoodlum worth their salt in the 1970s needed a handle.
His Diamond Jim moniker (a nod to his fancy tastes) gave him credibility in the criminal underworld.
He wore a shiny suit, a pistol and plenty of bling as he peddled drugs about Motor City during his 20s. It’s a piece that is miles from its source material in many ways, but strangely original and unexpectedly impactful.Back when he was a gangster, James Pitts was known on the back streets of Detroit as Diamond Jim.
ODYSSEY HOUSE HOW TO
And an experiment in how to talk about environmental crisis without talking about it working on the senses rather than storytelling, offering nature as its hero, and giving just the slightest possibility of hope. It’s like a meditation, a bleak but strangely powerful one. Sucked into the enveloping swell of Joel Cadbury’s ambient soundtrack, UniVerse seems to be in its own time zone – you have no idea how many minutes have passed. Those images, allowed to linger, are arguably more effective than the dance. And film designer Ravi Deepres provides arresting single images: an oil rig ablaze, a bird washed up on a beach, slowly swallowed by a thick black slick. We get direct words from young poet Isaiah Hull, listing the world’s ills: “The next generation pays the price,” he says in voiceover. Rather than the characterful protagonists that tell the film’s story, the always-impressive dancers from Company Wayne McGregor embody the natural elements: water (or melting icecaps), with bodies flowing snakily and mouths contorted in silent screams earth, signified by beautifully twisting tree roots on their catsuits, the art-meets-avant-garde-fashion costumes designed by Philip Delamore and Alex Box air, with celestial skies and a scene complete with staring eyeball, a nod to oracle Aughra from the film and fire, in which the dancers wear wing-like lacy sleeves, raging through a forest that’s burnt to black.Īrresting images … UniVerse: A Dark Crystal Odyssey. McGregor’s point is that this isn’t fantasy, this is our world. But a picture of a world in peril, yes, that is here, a place with its elements dangerously out of balance on the verge of destruction. There are no fantastical puppets here, no mythical worlds, no sweet elf-like creatures on a quest for a crystal, no obvious division between two sides, the wise and the cruel, goodies and baddies. T he key thing to know about Wayne McGregor’s new show is that, although it was inspired by Jim Henson’s cult 1982 film The Dark Crystal, it is nothing like The Dark Crystal.
0 kommentar(er)
