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What’s in a Song: Begin the Beguine (2)
[This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with long histories. Part 1 -- which focused on the song's composition and lyrics -- appeared on Wednesday.] How many times and by which performers has “Begin the Beguine” been covered? It is to laugh. The most comprehensive list I’ve seen was on the page [...]
What’s in a Song: Begin the Beguine (1)
[Cole Porter at the piano, sometime in the 1930s. For me, it's easy to see in him, from this photo, the song "Begin the Beguine" -- but not the beguine itself.] [This is another in an occasional series on popular songs with appeal across the generations. This post will be broken into two parts; Part [...]
Art Forms
[Above, the trailer for the short film Lost and Found, an adaptation of the children's book of the same name by Oliver Jeffers. For stills from the movie, visit the Cartoon Brew link above, and STUDIO aka.] From whiskey river: Recipe for an Ocean in the Absence of the Sea You have the ingredients on [...]
Things Pass Away
From whiskey river: September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt, evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret. (Alexander Theroux) For summer there, bear in mind, is a loitering gossip, that only begins to talk of leaving when September rises to go. (George Washington Cable) …and: If we were not beings who pass quickly [...]
Good Will, Slumming
[Entry from William Shakespeare's recently discovered blog, "Honour'd in the Breach"] Well now I’m not so sure workshopping Shrew was such a great idea. Like I said the other day, I was really looking forward to the new group. I’d been working with the others for like SO LONG that we were all starting to [...]
When Language, Pop Culture, and Politics Collide
You know what driver’s-ed classes don’t teach you? They don’t teach you how complicated it is to make your way through a busy intersection of more than two streets, especially when there are no traffic signals. I thought about this failure today, in connection with the 1972 film of the musical 1776. Until last night, [...]
How Important Is Reading?
Scary question? It depends on the answer. A young actress, Ashley Brown of Broadway’s Mary Poppins revival, provides her take on it: Not so scary, hmm?
