“We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?”
Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (courtesy of Rod Dreher)
Just because: Louis Armstrong performs “Basin Street Blues”
Louis Armstrong and the All Stars perform “Basin Street Blues” on The Bell Telephone Hour. This episode was originally telecast by NBC on February 2, 1964:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
Almanac: Pablo Neruda on hope
I wait for you in the harshest desert
and next to the flowering lemon tree,
in every place where there is life,
where spring is being born,
my love, I wait for you.
and next to the flowering lemon tree,
in every place where there is life,
where spring is being born,
my love, I wait for you.
Pablo Neruda, “Letter on the Road” (trans. Donald D. Walsh)
Rear-view mirror
Such being the case, allow me to quote Ogden Nash, as is my longstanding custom on the last day of the year:
Come, children, gather round my knee;Something is about to be. Tonight’s December Thirty-First,
Something is about to burst. The clock is crouching, dark and small,
Like a time bomb in the hall. Hark! It’s midnight, children dear.
Duck! Here comes another year.
If, like me, you have come to the conclusion that chance is in the saddle and rides mankind, then I hope the year to come treats you not unkindly and that your lives will be warmed by hope and filled with love—and if you feel otherwise, then I wish for you the very same thing. No one should have to be unloved on New Year’s Eve.
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The Miles Davis Quintet plays Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” on Swedish TV in 1967. Wayne Shorter is the tenor saxophonist, Herbie Hancock the pianist, Ron Carter the bassist, and Tony Williams the drummer:
The cost of talent—and grief
* * *
Alan Ayckbourn, a great playwright who masquerades as a popular entertainer, remains abundantly active at the age of 81. Not only does he continue to write—80 plays to date—but he acted in a radio play of his own, “Anno Domino,” that was webcast in June by Scarborough’s Stephen Joseph Theatre, the company Mr. Ayckbourn led from 1972 to 2009. Now he has given us a second radio play, “Haunting Julia,” first staged in 1994 and newly adapted and directed by the author for audio-only performance, in which he plays three parts with seemingly casual virtuosity.
“Haunting Julia” is a latter-day ghost story about a Mozart-like musical prodigy who died of an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of 19 and with whose suicide the play’s three characters are still obsessed 12 years later….
“Haunting Julia” is a ghost story in the sense that inexplicable things take place in it (none of which I will describe here). But it is, I think, better understood as a psychological drama about the devastating emotional damage wrought upon people who find it impossible to come to terms with the untimely death of a loved one. Seen from that point of view, it is singularly well suited to the moment…
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Read the whole thing here.Almanac: Philip Larkin on love
The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.
Philip Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb”
Just because: Louis Armstrong performs “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”
Louis Armstrong and his big band perform “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues,” by Ted Koehler and Harold Arlen, in 1933:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
Almanac: Terence on memory
I will make you always remember this place, this day, and me.
Terence, “Eunuchus”