Archives for June 9, 2015

• If you visit this blog with even modest regularity, you know that the next stop for Satchmo at the Waldorf is San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre, where the John Douglas Thompson-Gordon Edelstein off-Broadway production will be transferring in January. On Friday A.C.T. ran a full-page ad on the back page of the San Francisco Chronicle announcing its 2015-16 season, and my agent e-mailed me a photo that morning. It is, if I may say so without undue immodesty, way, way cool.

Later that same day, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel ran a story about Palm Beach Dramaworks’ 2015-16 season that contained, among other things, reproductions of the posters for the five plays being produced there this coming season, all of them created by New York’s Fraver/Fraver Design, a major name in theatrical poster art.

I saw and approved the Satchmo at the Waldorf poster a few weeks ago, and since then I’ve been boiling over with eagerness to show it off. Now that it’s been released for publication, you can see it for yourself. I hope you like it as much as I do.

• I know not how or why, but Duke, my 2013 biography of Duke Ellington, unexpectedly turned up on the New York Times’ list of best-selling books about culture for June 7, 2015. Among the other books on the list: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Pioneer Girl, Anne-Marie O’Connor’s The Lady in Gold, Harold Bloom’s The Daemon Knows, and Reynold Levy’s They Told Me Not to Take That Job.

To see the complete list, go here.

From 2005:

Perhaps my powers of concentration have been diminished by advancing age, or maybe I’ve simply become more sensitive to the emotion-evoking power of music. (I cry more easily now than I did a decade ago.) Whatever the reason, I now find music more distracting than I used to, and I no longer listen to any kind of music while working on first drafts. Editing is different, and unless I’m doing battle with a tight deadline, in which case I prefer to struggle in silence, I sometimes listen to music when I’m polishing a piece, though I don’t really hear it….

Read the whole thing here.

“The only ‘ism’ that has justified itself is pessimism.”

George Orwell, “The Limit to Pessimism”