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Botanic Gardens -Singapore

  What is ‘Nature’s Birdsong?’ Ethan Putterman on the Joys of Singapore’s Famous Botanic Gardens   Enjoying the July sunshine at Singapore’s famous Botanic Gardens, Ethan Putterman muses that few places in the world are so lovely in summertime. “It has everything,” says Putterman, a devoted lover of nature who even named a child, Walden, after Henry David Thoreau’s celebrated book of 1854.   “The orchids are lovely, and of every different shape and color! It’s why I raised my kids here. And it’s why children from all over Singapore and Asia visit together with their parents every summer and throughout the year. The warm weather allows it whatever the season.”   A twenty year resident of Singapore, Putterman muses that such stunning flora is the country’s hidden secret, “when people think of Singapore, the first thing that comes to mind isn’t flora or fauna but commerce, architecture and a great university.”   A former professor in the Department of Poli
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Ethan Putterman/film reviee

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  Ethan Putterman on ‘The Greatest Movie of All Time: Fellini’s ‘Nights of Cabiria’ What is the greatest movie in history? Taxi Driver? Star Wars? The Godfather? The Searchers? The question begs a sparkling list of Oscar winners that film reviewers on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes rank among the very best. Of little dispute, you will find Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull or, among the devout of film aficionados, masterpieces such as Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai and de Sica’s The Bicycle Thief. Yet this necessarily begs the question, what movie do Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg themselves regard as number one? Although none agree, what all do agree is that Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) is top five or, top ten best of all time. Last year discussing the Italian director in a self-penned essay in Harpers, Scorsese remarks, “You can say a lot of things about Fellini’s movies, but here’s one thing that is incontestable: they are cinema. Fel
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‘TICK, TICK, BOOM!’ and the Genius of Jonathan Larson After 30 Years

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“Jonathan Larson is regarded as a great composer yet it’s really a disservice to the wider lesson of his brief life,” says Ethan Putterman, “beyond amazing scores and lyrics is a tale of do-or-die perseverance for the benefit of art.”    The creator of the blockbuster musical, ‘Rent’, Larson, who passed away at the premature age of 35 from an undiagnosed heart condition in 1995, is finding renewed celebrity in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s ‘Tick, Tick, Boom!,’ starring Andrew Garfield on Netflix.    The story of Larson’s frustrating and futile efforts to get an earlier musical produced, ‘Superbia’, when the late composer was still an undiscovered, struggling twentysomething in New York City in the 90’s, it is an enchanting blurring of facts and fiction originally staged as a one man show.    With just Larson with a supporting band, ‘Tick, Tick, Boom!,’ arrived and disappeared with little fanfare until the marathon success of ‘Rent’ ushered forth a new generation of theatregoers -‘Rentheads’- hu
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