Archives for 2017

Paul Desmond and Dave Brubeck play a duet version of “Balcony Rock” at a 1976 concert in Boston:

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

“It is in the thirties that we want friends. In the forties we know they won’t save us any more than love did.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, notebook entry, The Crack-Up

From 2007:

Anybody who knows anything about American theater knows that George M. Cohan, Broadway’s very own Yankee Doodle Dandy, starred in the original 1933 Broadway production of Ah, Wilderness! It was the first time Cohan had ever acted in a straight play of any significance, and by all accounts he was terrific—but he wasn’t the only star of the show. Who played his sixteen-year-old son, the painfully earnest writer-in-the-making that O’Neill based on himself when young?…

Read the whole thing here.

“Without intending it, women in the midst of a successful marriage always conveyed a sort of rebuke to other people, implying that if they could do it why couldn’t everyone else.”

John P. Marquand, B.F.’s Daughter

George Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, set to Bach’s Two-Violin Concerto. This 1966 performance, originally telecast by the CBC, features Suzanne Farrell, Marnee Morris, and Conrad Ludlow:

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

The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws
And grasses in the mead renew their birth,
The river to the river-bed withdraws,
And altered is the fashion of the earth.

Horace, “Diffugere nives” (Odes, IV.vii, trans. A.E. Housman)

Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson perform “Boogie-Woogie Dream” in the 1944 film short of the same name, directed by Hanus Burger. This is thought to be the only film appearance of the two pianists. The woman in the clip is Lena Horne:

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

“ Critics generally come to be critics by reason not of their fitness for this but of their unfitness for anything else.”

Samuel Butler, The Note-Books of Samuel Butler