Archives for August 2020

“A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.”

G.K. Chesterton, interview, New York Times (November 21, 1930)

“Music is essentially useless, as life is.”

George Santayana, The Life of Reason

Duke Ellington and His Orchestra perform Ellington’s “Afro-Bossa” at a 1965 concert in Baghdad:

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

“Its beauty comes from the fact that nothing you see was built before 1900.”

Marcel Duchamp (quoted in Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson)

From 2004:

I’m not funny, and wish I were. Witty, yes, sometimes, and I’m pretty good at making an audience laugh when lecturing (a situation in which the prevailing standards are admittedly fairly low). But plain old drop-dead funny? Absolutely not. The only time I ever brought down a house was when I contrived to be hit in the face with a cream pie in front of an audience of pubescent classmates who thought they were going to be forced to listen to me give a prize-winning speech as part of a talent contest. That stopped the show….

“I have never known an artist of any kind who didn’t do better work when he got properly paid for it.”

Virgil Thomson, The State of Music

Charles Coburn appears as the mystery guest on What’s My Line? John Daly is the host and the panelists are Steve Allen, Bennett Cerf, Arlene Francis, and Dorothy Kilgallen. This episode was originally telecast by CBS on August 2, 1953:

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

“Journalists are plentiful everywhere and entertaining too, full of jokes and stories. Only their jokes are not very funny and their stories not quite true. Their information is always incomplete, because nobody tells them the truth about anything.”

Virgil Thomson, The State of Music