“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, Sch…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMConnee 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 …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“Only mediocrity can be trusted to be always at its best. Genius must always have lapses proportionate to its triumphs.” Max Beerbohm, “Dan Leno,” Saturday Review (November. 5, 1904…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM“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 07:00AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I review an Irish Repertory Theatre webcast of Geraldine Hughes’ Belfast Blues. Here’s an excerpt. * * * Geraldine Hughes gave a great performance …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMIn 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 …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMBuddy Rich and his big band perform a medley from West Side Story arranged by Bill Reddie on TV in 1969: (This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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 07:00AMFrom 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 th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“He was a bureaucrat, he lied effortlessly.” Richard Stark, Backflash Continue reading Almanac: Richard Stark on bureaucrats at About Last Night.
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMJudy 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, Ben…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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 Las…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMIn 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 excer…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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 hi…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AM“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 renunciati…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMLeonard 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 vid…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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 …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFrom 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 here. C…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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, to have d…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFred 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 H…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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 genera…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMIn today’s Wall Street Journal I review a webcast of the Lincoln Center Theater premiere of Dominique Morriseau’s Pipeline. Here’s an excerpt. * * * If you’re looking for st…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:02AMThe 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 J…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AMEnvy, 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 07:00AMIn 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. * * * With Labor Day in …
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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 porti…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMGlenn 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 th…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:01AM“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 Alma…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:00AMFrom 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 t…
SOURCE: ArtsJournal at 07:57AM“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
