Archives for 2013

From 2003:

I was a small-town second-grader on November 22, 1963. My teacher, Jackie Grant, told the class that the president had been shot and killed, and then we all went home. For me, home was a block away from the classroom door, but my mother still drove to the school to pick me up, and my family spent much of the rest of the long weekend watching television. That much I remember, but I have no direct recollections of any of the TV images, except for this: I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk just before Oswald was shot, and returned to the living room to find chaos on the screen.
That’s it. Not many memories, and no trauma at all. Which makes sense: I was born in 1956, the exact midway point of the baby boom, making me just too young to have been marked by the JFK assassination or to have served in Vietnam. In both of those respects, we younger baby boomers are more like Gen-Xers than our older brothers and sisters….

Read the whole thing here.

“There’s nothing more, well, naked than writing a play. If you write a book and the critics pan it, you can comfort yourself by believing that you are a misunderstood genius, but when most of an audience walks out on you after the first act, it’s your own fault, and it’s one of the worst in the realm of human experience.”
John P. Marquand, Women and Thomas Harrow

I’ll be hitting the road on Wednesday morning for two more Duke-related out-of-town appearances:
• On Wednesday at 6:30 I’ll be lecturing about Duke at the Kansas City Public Library’s central library, which is at 14 W. 10th St. Admission is free.
For more information, go here.
• On Sunday at 1:30 I’ll be joining three other authors for a panel discussion at Miami Book Fair International. My fellow panelists are Deborah Solomon (American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell), Brian Jay Jones (Jim Henson), and R. Clifton Spargo (Beautiful Fools: The Last Affair of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald).
For more information, go here.

Given the recent frenzy of activity that I’ve been reporting in this space, I’m sure you weren’t surprised to find that several weeks went by without my posting anything new in the right-hand column. Fortunately, things calmed down just a little bit over the weekend, thus allowing me to completely update the Top Five and “Out of the Past” modules with brand-new postings. Take a look!
Special note should be taken by Christmas shoppers who’ve already purchased copies of Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington for their nearest and dearest (and if not, why not?) but have additional unfilled slots on their gift lists. Click on the links and order with impunity.

A 1964 commercial for Muriel Cigars, featuring Edie Adams and Stan Getz:

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

“What is always overlooked is that although the poor want to be rich, it does not follow that they either like the rich or that they in any way want to emulate their characters which, in fact, they despise. Both the poor and the rich have always found precisely the same grounds on which to complain about each other. Each feels the other has no manners, is disloyal, corrupt, insensitive–and has never put in an honest day’s work in its life.”
Elaine Dundy, Elvis and Gladys