The Royal Ballet dances Les Noces, choreographed by Bronislava Nijinska to a score by Igor Stravinsky:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
Archives for January 2012
TT: Almanac
“Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.”
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
TT: Feeling new strength
My brother, who is taking care of my mother in Smalltown, U.S.A., reports that she’s doing quite a bit better today. I’ll let you know how things develop, but Mrs. T and I are allowing ourselves to feel somewhat more hopeful.
More later.
TT: Almanac
“Thought must be divided against itself before it can come to any knowledge of itself.”
Aldous Huxley, “Wordsworth in the Tropics”
TT: Scenes from a marriage (cont’d)
Time: 11 p.m., toward the end of a long and exhausting day. Place: A nursing home in Smalltown, U.S.A. A nurse has given my mother a dose of Ativan to help her sleep. She mumbles a sentence repeatedly but unintelligibly.
HE Mom, I’m sorry, but I just don’t understand you.
MOTHER (very clearly and emphatically) YES, YOU DO.
SHE (teasingly) He’s pretending not to understand you. Smack him up the side of the head.
MOTHER I would, if I could get my hand loose.
Laughter, followed by relief.
TT: Just because
Benny Goodman plays “Sing, Sing, Sing” in the 1937 movie Hollywood Hotel, with Harry James on trumpet and Gene Krupa on drums:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)
TT: Almanac
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.”
Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing
RED-STATE BALLAD
“More than 16 million people tuned in to the Country Music Association’s 2011 awards show on ABC in November–the fourth most watched program of the week. Its success was predictable. Although rock albums outsell country albums by a wide margin, country outranks rock on Billboard‘s weekly “Hot 100″ chart of single record sales and the number of radio stations with all-country formats is roughly twice that of the stations that play rock. Yet the CMA awards no less predictably received scant attention from the mainstream media. Country is rarely written about in major newspapers and magazines and almost never seen or heard on network TV or in Hollywood films. Nor is its place in middlebrow culture other than marginal…”