Tuesday, January 1, 2019
“The sea, if it teaches nothing else, does at least compel a submission to the inevitable which resembles patience.” Patrick O’Brien, Blue at the Mizzen
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, December 31, 2018
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that Mrs. T’s chronic illness has put us through the wringer of late. Among other things, she spent two weeks in a Connecticut hospital in Novemb…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:03AMIn the three weeks that have gone by since Mrs. T’s hospital stays kept me from putting up new postings, I’ve reviewed four shows for The Wall Street Journal. One of them, Signature…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMA live performance of Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants, taped for TV at New York’s Second Stage Theatre in 1996 and telecast by HBO. This show was directed for the stage by David Mamet: (Th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AMPYLADES I’ll take care of you. ORESTES It’s rotten work. PYLADES Not to me. Not if it’s you. Euripides, Orestes (translated by Anne Carson)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, December 28, 2018
Chet Atkins and Doc Watson perform “Tennessee Rag,” “Beaumont Rag,” and “On My Way to Canaan’s Land” on The Tonight Show. They are introduced by Johnny Carson. This performance…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Someone asked me about the long marriage to Joe [Gousha, Powell’s recently deceased husband]—42 years—and I reflected that he was the only person in the world I found it always a ki…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, December 27, 2018
“It is a mistake to suppose it is only the people who would like to be what they are not who are snobs.” Henry James, “The Solution” (courtesy of Levi Stahl)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, December 26, 2018
Glenn Gould plays Richard Strauss’ Burleske on TV, accompanied by Vladimir Golschmann and the Toronto Symphony. (The announcer is Alex Trebek.) This performance was originally telecast by …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“He was the truest friend, and practiced in the best friend’s best response: ‘You bet.’” David Mamet, “David Mamet on Ricky Jay, a Great Astonisher and ‘Truest Friend’” (Ne…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, December 25, 2018
An excerpt from City Limits: Memories of a Small-Town Boy, my first book, published in 1991. * * * Not long after Thanksgiving, my mother would spend the better part of a Saturday afternoon …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“The miracle of Christmas is that, like the distant and very musical voice of the hound, it penetrates finally and becomes heard in the heart—over so many years, through so many cheap cu…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, December 24, 2018
Louis Armstrong recites Clement Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas.” This was Armstrong’s last commercial recording. He made it at his home in Queens on February 26, 1971, f…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.” Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFriday, December 21, 2018
Tony Perkins appears as the guest on a 1958 episode of The Mike Wallace Interview: (This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.” Henry James, Hawthorne
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, December 20, 2018
“History must not be written with bias, and both sides must be given, even if there is only one side.” John Betjeman, First and Last Loves
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AMWednesday, December 19, 2018
Otto Klemperer leads Agnes Giebel, Marga Hoffgen, Ernst Haefliger, Gustav Neidlinger, and the New Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra in a live performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Thi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Underlying this succession of moments which constitutes the superficial existence of beings and things, and which is continually modifying and transforming them, one can search for a true…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, December 18, 2018
From 2005: Falstaff, after all, is no knockabout farce but one of Western art’s most searching commentaries on the vanity of human wishes, no less so because it says what it has to say wit…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“There is no such thing as was— only is. If was existed, there would be no grief or sorrow.” William Faulkner, Paris Review interview (Spring 1956)
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AMMonday, December 17, 2018
A 1931 newsreel of George Gershwin playing “I Got Rhythm” at the old Manhattan Theater (now the Ed Sullivan Theater) in New York. The performance was filmed from three different angles, …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would amount to the same.” Blaise Pascal, Pensées
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AMFriday, December 14, 2018
“A Recording Session With a Composer: Igor Stravinsky,” a Columbia Records promotional film in which Stravinsky is seen conducting a 1955 studio performance of his L’histoire du soldat…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“We get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain af…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMThursday, December 13, 2018
“Time lost is time when we have not lived a full human life, time unenriched by experience, creative endeavor, enjoyment, and suffering. Time lost is time not filled, time left empty.” D…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMWednesday, December 12, 2018
Dock Boggs sings and plays “Country Blues” at the 1966 Newport Folk Festival: (This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, W…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“People never want to be told anything they do not believe already.” James Branch Cabell, The Cream of the Jest
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMTuesday, December 11, 2018
From 2008: Louis Armstrong was not only a great artist but one of the brightest stars in the sky of America’s popular culture. One of the signs of his admittance to that pantheon was the f…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“To think out a problem is not unlike drawing a caricature. You have to exaggerate the salient point and leave out that which is not typical.” Eric Hoffer, undated notebook entry (quoted…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMMonday, December 10, 2018
Members of the original off-Brodway cast of Godspell sings “Day by Day,” by Stephen Schwartz, on The Mike Douglas Show. This episode originally aired on April 29, 1973: (This is the late…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM 
