Patti LuPone sings the opening scene of Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock in a revival by the Acting Company that was telecast on PBS in 1986. The production was directed by John Houseman and Christopher J. Markle:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
Archives for 2010
TT: Free for the asking
If you visit this blog more than occasionally, you’ve been encouraged numerous times to read A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume roman fleuve about twentieth-century England, which was originally published between 1951 and 1975. In 2004 I wrote an essay about A Dance to the Music of Time for the New York Times Book Review in which I praised it in the strongest possible terms.
Should you need a stronger push, Levi Stahl, an accomplished litblogger who works for the University of Chicago Press, advises me that effective today, all twelve volumes of Dance will become available as e-books and will be marketed on all existing e-book platforms. What’s more, A Question of Upbringing, the first volume in the cycle, can be downloaded for free. No catch: it’s yours. The eleven other volumes will cost you eight bucks apiece.
This is, in my opinion, an absolutely brilliant piece of marketing, and I cannot commend it to you too enthusiastically. For more information, go here and here, then get cracking. You won’t be sorry.
TT: Prose in motion
Every writer dreams of seeing one of his books being read in public. It’s never happened to me, alas, but a friend of mine snapped this photograph on the B train in New York City the other day and e-mailed it to me. The book on the left is, needless to say, the paperback edition of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong.
Whoever and wherever you are, dear reader, I hope you were enjoying yourself as much as I enjoyed seeing you on the screen of my MacBook!
TT: Almanac
“The whole idea of interviews is in itself absurd—one cannot answer deep questions about what one’s life was like—one writes novels about it.”
Anthony Powell, (interview, London Times, May 15, 1986)
THE ORIGINAL MOVIE MOGUL
“For the past half century and more, it has been generally taken for granted that the director of a film is to be considered its ‘author,’ the individual who is primarily responsible for the film’s total effect, even when the weight of factual evidence pertaining to a specific film clearly indicates otherwise. Yet it remains unusual for the average American filmgoer to be able to name the directors of more than a handful of his favorite movies, and prior to the Fifties, when the ‘auteur theory’ became fashionable, it was far less common. For years, the only Hollywood directors widely known by name were those who, like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles, also starred in the films they directed–and a mostly forgotten man named Cecil B. DeMille…”
TT: Just because
Nat King Cole sings “Stompin’ at the Savoy,” accompanied by Roy Eldridge, Coleman Hawkins, Stan Getz, and the Oscar Peterson Trio with Jo Jones on drums:
TT: Memories on the walls
One of the frustrating things about changing apartments on the fly is that Mrs. T and I haven’t had time to hang any of the two-dozen-odd pieces in the Teachout Museum. If you’re serious about it, hanging pictures is an excruciatingly serious business, especially when you have a lot of them, and we’re still in the maybe-this-one-should-go-there stage of what promises to be a protracted process. Hence it’s pleasant to be reminded of what we’re missing, and on Saturday The Wall Street Journal ran a very good interview with one of our favorite artists, Jane Wilson, whose “Breaking Light” (pictured above) is one of our proudest possessions.
We met Wilson in a midtown elevator last year—she’s eighty-six years old and still a beauty—but can’t claim to know her, so it’s nice to find out that she likes to listen to the music of Francis Poulenc while painting, and that she sees her work as being filled with sky and space:
Ms. Wilson starts each new work with a horizontal line near the bottom of the canvas. Not necessarily a bold line, but something she can use to orient herself. “I know I want a lot of sky,” she said. “My subject is really atmosphere and the quality of air as we live it. That’s what I think about: the vitality in surrounding spaces.”
Read the whole piece, then pick up a copy of Elisabeth Sussman’s Jane Wilson: Horizons. You won’t be sorry.
TT: Almanac
“‘Yes, sir,’ said Jeeves in a low, cold voice, as if he had been bitten in the leg by a personal friend.”
P.G. Wodehouse, Carry On, Jeeves