Tuesday, September 29, 2020
"The power of the Latin classic is in character, that of the Greek is in beauty. Now character is capable of being taught, learnt, and assimilated: beauty hardly."
Matthew Arnold, S…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Monday, September 28, 2020
Connee Boswell sings "Basin Street Blues," "Nobody's Sweetheart," and "Rockin' Chair" (with Woody Herman) on a 1950 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show:
(This is the latest in a series of ar…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs."
Max Beerbohm, "Dan Leno,"Â Saturday Review (November. 5, 1904)
Cont…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Friday, September 25, 2020
"The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. The demaslave is one who listens to what these idiots have to say and pretends to believe …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 24, 2020
In today's Wall Street Journal I review an Irish Repertory Theatre webcast of Geraldine Hughes' Belfast Blues. Here's an excerpt.
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Geraldine Hughes gave a great performanc…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"Like all very wealthy women, Alice had strange cold pockets of miserliness."
Richard Stark, Flashfire
Continue reading Almanac: Richard Stark on the cheapness of the rich at About Last N…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 23, 2020
In today's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column, I write about the disastrous decision of a small museum in upstate New York to sell its only important painting"and what it means for th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AM[SHARE]Buddy Rich and his big band perform a medley from West Side Story arranged by Bill Reddie on TV in 1969:Â
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"When technology makes it perfect, art loses."
Brian Eno (quoted in Wired, January 1999)
Continue reading Almanac: Brian Eno on technology at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 22, 2020
From 2010:
"No doubt the day is almost here when it will be possible for people like me to download the Complete Performances of Everybody to our computers…except that I'm no longer that k…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"He was a bureaucrat, he lied effortlessly."
Richard Stark, Backflash
Continue reading Almanac: Richard Stark on bureaucrats at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Monday, September 21, 2020
Judy Holliday's last TV appearance, as the mystery guest on What's My Line? on April 28, 1963. (She died two years later.) John Daly is the host and the panelists are Shelley Berman, Bennett…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"A well-written life is almost as rare as a well-lived one."
Thomas Carlyle, "Richter" (courtesy of Richard Zuelch)
Continue reading Almanac: Thomas Carlyle on biography at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Friday, September 18, 2020
In today's Wall Street Journal I write about the 1955 TV version of Charles Laughton's stage version of The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, starring Lloyd Nolan as Queeg. Here's an excerpt…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble,' and almost immediately pride"pride at his own humi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 17, 2020
"Courage is a moral quality; it is not a chance gift of nature like an aptitude for games. It is a cold choice between two alternatives, the fixed resolve not to quit; an act of renunciation…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 16, 2020
Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic perform the first movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony in concert in 1978:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related video…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 15, 2020
From 2010:
I watched Napoleon Dynamite last night for the first time since its original release, and was pleased to see that it holds up exceptionally well….
Read the whole thing her…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed,…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Monday, September 14, 2020
Fred Allen and Oscar Levant star in "The Ransom of Red Chief," a 1952 dramatization of O. Henry's short story that was released as part of an anthology film called O. Henry's Full House.T…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"Very often when an actor forgets his lines, it is because a voice inside his brain has whispered to him, 'Wouldn't it be dreadful if you forgot the lines?' And that voice has generally ente…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Friday, September 11, 2020
In today's Wall Street Journal I review a webcast of the Lincoln Center Theater premiere of Dominique Morriseau's Pipeline. Here's an excerpt.
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If you're looking …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AM[SHARE]The Art Farmer Quartet, with Farmer on flugelhorn, Jim Hall on guitar, Steve Swallow on bass, and Walter Perkins on drums, plays "My Kinda Love" on a 1964 episode of Ralph Gleason's Jazz …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]Envy, to which th' ignoble mind's a slave,Is emulation in the learn'd or brave.
Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man
Continue reading Almanac: Pope on envy at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Thursday, September 10, 2020
In this week's Wall Street Journal "Sightings" column I write about the likely effects of social distancing on the arts in America. Here's an excerpt.
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With Labor Day i…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Wednesday, September 9, 2020
Glenn Gould: Off the Record, a 1959 CBC documentary about the pianist's life in his lakeside cottage:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM[SHARE]"Few there are who can truly rejoice in their neighbor's good fortune. In most, envy and malice taint the spirit."
Aeschylus, Agamemnon (trans. David R. Slavitt)
Continue reading Almanac:…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE]Tuesday, September 8, 2020
From 2005:
I'm left-handed, with an ink-smudging overhand hook so exaggerated that my first-grade teacher, who in 1962 was already a thoroughly cranky old woman, tried briefly and vainly to …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:57AM[SHARE]"In jealousy there is more self-love than love."
François de la Rochefoucauld, Maxims, #334
Continue reading Almanac: Rochefoucauld on jealousy at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM[SHARE] 
