Archives for 2009

“Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness.”
Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness

Leonard Bernstein and the London Symphony Orchestra perform Bernstein’s Candide Overture:

(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)

“A happy marriage has in it all the pleasures of friendship, all the enjoyments of sense and reason; and indeed all the sweets of life.”
Joseph Addison, The Spectator, Dec. 29, 1711

I’m sick while my cobloggers are both traveling, but here’s a little something to tide you over. In Lolita, D. G. Myers finds, Humbert Humbert offered many of the same lines of defense that Roman Polanski and his supporters are spewing today.

Polanski is a “renown [sic] and international artist,” say Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Martin Scorsese, and other film people in a petition demanding his immediate release. “The gentle and dreamy regions through which I crept were the patrimonies of poets,” Humbert protests–“not crime’s prowling ground.”

Read the rest.

“Pleasure is the only thing to live for. Nothing ages like happiness.”
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

Mrs. T and I got married two years ago this Wednesday. We’ve decided to celebrate the occasion by flying the coop and spending a few days at Ecce Bed and Breakfast, the country retreat where we spent the first part of our honeymoon. The snapshot on the right was taken by a friend on the morning after the ceremony in a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, a few hours before Hilary and I departed for Ecce. We were both sick at the time–she came down with pneumonia a couple of weeks later–but that didn’t matter in the slightest. Neither of us had ever been happier, and we’re even happier today than we were then.

The photo on the left is the view from the hammock in the backyard of Ecce, which overlooks the Upper Delaware River. Some pictures lie, but this one tells the plain truth: Ecce is really that pretty, and that serene. I can’t think of a nicer place to be, or a better person with whom to be than my beloved Mrs. T. In a life that has been full to the brim of good fortune, she is by far the best thing that has ever happened to me.

Except for the usual almanac entries, Wednesday video, and theater-related postings, I plan to be absent from this space all week.

See you Monday.

“Wheresoever she was, there was Eden.”
Mark Twain, “The Diaries of Adam and Eve”

Much has been written about Roman Polanski since his arrest in Zurich last week, but one aspect of the story that has struck me forcibly in the last couple of days is the widening fissure between Hollywood celebrities, most of whom have lined up more or less solidly behind Polanski, and the public at large, which appears unwilling to cut him any slack at all. Moreover, a growing number of decidedly unusual subjects, including Kevin “Silent Bob” Smith and Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post, are choosing to break cultural ranks and condemn Polanski.
What triggered this split, and what is its significance? I’ll be talking about these questions–and supplying a bit of historical perspective–in my “Sightings” column for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal. Pick up a copy of tomorrow’s paper and see what I have to say.
UPDATE: Read the whole thing here.