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The World Was Too Much With Them All
I just finished reading Susan Orlean‘s Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend. Aside from the heart (and I mean heart) of the main story itself, after something like ten years of borderline-obsessive research Orlean managed to weave into the book dozens of little stray details about the lives and personalities of the many [...]
Plugged Right Between the Eyes
I’ve been following the Letters of Note blog for a good while now. The curator/editor, Shaun Usher, collects samples of real letters — often but not always from “famous” people — on matters of real import, and/or in styles worth sharing. Today’s entry features a 1914 letter from Jack London to a young aspiring writer named [...]
Midweek Music Break: Collins H. Driggs (on the Novachord), “Estudiantina,” and… Beer
[The Novachord, closed and open (click either photo for an enlargement); both photos per Wikipedia] When you grew up in the US during a certain window of time (and maybe in certain geographic areas, within certain socioeconomic strata), the culture you could absorb from the adult world was this weird amalgam of past and present. [...]
What’s in a Song: Body and Soul (1)
It starts in silence. By the end, the singer has thrown him- or herself melodramatically, almost operatically on the mercy of a lost love. It’s drenched in self-pity, but was written for and first performed by a woman once dubbed “Hollywood’s first maneater.” One of its most famous covers includes no vocal at all, and [...]
Pottermore
From The Atlantic: In a much-anticipated press event this morning, J.K. Rowling announced the launch of Pottermore, a new website meant to bring all-things-Harry Potter to the Web. It was revealed in a leaked memo yesterday that a central focus of the site would be an online gaming experience developed by the company Adam & [...]
Midweek Music Break: “One Shoe Blues” (Sandra Boynton via B.B. King)
[Image: B.B. King and Boynton sock puppet] I had occasion recently to be searching around for an image from the 1970s, the cover of possibly the biggest-selling greeting card in the planet’s (if not the universe’s) history. It was a cartoon, at the top of which was depicted a single hippopotamus, a small avian creature, [...]
Midweek Music Break: Josephine Baker and “J’Ai Deux Amours”
Froog posted the other day on great movie songs, taking inspiration from the American Film Institute’s (AFI’s) “100 Years – 100 Songs” list of 2004. He pointed out some strange omissions (even considering the raw list of four hundred nominees from which the hundred were selected). I’m not much surprised that no songs from the [...]
Unreal-Life Dialogue: Midweek Music (Emmylou Harris) Edition
[The scene: A Saturday evening in mid-June, 2011. A living room in suburban northwest Florida, USA. A man and a woman watch TV -- something the man has chosen, because it is his birthday. A knock comes at the front door; The Pooch begins to bark madly, as usual, except she is also spinning: something [...]
Hello, World
An old 1960s TV program called Checkmate featured a striking title sequence: as the credits displayed on-screen, the background showed what appeared as a pool of swirling paint of multiple contrasting colors. (I say “appeared” because in those pre-color television days, the paint actually displayed as shades of gray. You can see it here, in the [...]
Everybody* Believes in Music
Lyrics: Atheists Don’t Have No Songs (Steve Martin and the Steep Canyon Rangers Christians have their hymns and pages, Hava Nagila’s for the Jews, Baptists have the rock of ages, Atheists just sing the blues. Romantics play Claire de Lune, Born agains sing He is risen, But no one ever wrote a tune For godless [...]
