Archives for January 28, 2013

I flew from Orlando (where it’s warm) to New York (where it isn’t) last night. This morning I’ll be giving a speech at TEDxBroadway 2013 which I hope will be of interest to all those present. It’s called “The One Good Reason to Take a Chance on Broadway.”
As soon as I finish talking, I’ll run to the nearest corner, jump in a cab, head for LaGuardia Airport, fly back to Orlando, collect a rental car and Mrs. T–presumably in that order–and head for West Palm Beach, where I’ll be seeing a revival of A Raisin in the Sun, writing two Wall Street Journal columns, correcting the proofs of the Commentary essay about John Gielgud that I finished writing yesterday morning, and finishing Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington.
Or so, at any rate, I hope.
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“Something for Nothing,” a 1940 short in which Rube Goldberg explains the principle of perpetual motion:

Charles Boyer appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? in 1957:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“The great composers belong among the undisputed geniuses. More questionable is their perpetuity. It depends in the first place on the ever renewed efforts of posterity, to wit performances, which must compete with performance of all subsequent and (each time) contemporary works, while other arts can display their products once and forever; and depends in the second place on the survival of our tone system and rhythm, which is not everlasting. Mozart and Beethoven may become for a future mankind as incomprehensible as might now be to us the Greek music so highly praised by its contemporaries. They will remain great on credit, on the enthusiastic say-so of our times, like, say, the painters of antiquity, whose works have been lost.”
Jacob Burckhardt, Reflections on Music (courtesy of John Simon)