Archives for April 2018

“Of this I am certain, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.”

Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, June 18, 1940

New York City Ballet dances Mozartiana, choreographed by George Balanchine to Tchaikovsky’s orchestral arrangements of the music of Mozart. The soloists are Suzanne Farrell, Ib Andersen, and Victor Castelli. This performance was originally telecast on PBS in 1983:

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

“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.”

Winston Churchill, speech to the National Book Exhibition, November 2, 1949

From 2008:

I speak as one whose taste in barbecue is nothing if not inclusive. I’ve eaten it everywhere from Arthur Bryant’s in Kansas City to Rub BBQ in Manhattan, my adopted home. I’m not a particularly fussy eater, and I like most of the better-known regional variations of barbecue that I’ve run across in my travels. When all is said and done, though, the kind I like best is the kind I grew up with, and I suspect that most people lucky enough to have grown up eating barbecue feel the same way about the kind they grew up with….

Read the whole thing here.

“All events and experiences are local, somewhere. And all human enhancements of events and experiences—all the arts—are regional in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life.

“It is this immediacy that distinguishes art. And paradoxically the more local the feeling in art, the more all people can share it; for that vivid encounter with the stuff of the world is our common ground.”

William Stafford, “On Being Local”

Vincent Price is interviewed by James Day on Day at Night, originally taped by CUNY-TV in 1974:

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

“The only good copies are those which exhibit the defects of bad originals.”

François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims

In today’s Wall Street Journal, I review a revival of Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique. Here’s an excerpt.

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“Symphonie Fantastique,” Basil Twist’s abstract, wordless 1998 underwater puppet show set to the music of Hector Berlioz, is being revived downtown. Here’s part of what I wrote about it in 2004: “What you see…is one wall of a shallow glass tank into which five wet-suited puppeteers dip and slosh 180 peculiar-looking objects, none of which even remotely resembles Charlie McCarthy. Inspired by the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Berlioz’s own program for the ‘Fantastic Symphony,’ Mr. Twist uses this equipment to conjure up a bewitching string of complex scenes that unfold with the nagging compulsion of a love story (which is what Berlioz’s symphony is, more or less)….”

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To read my review of Symphonie Fantastique, go here

The trailer for Symphonie Fantastique: