Archives for 2021

“Guy don’t need no sense to be a nice fella. Seems to me sometimes it jus’ works the other way around. Take a real smart guy and he ain’t hardly ever a nice fella.”

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

From 2018:

Mrs. T and I were recently watching John Ford’s film of Mister Roberts, in which Henry Fonda repeated his much-admired performance from the original stage production, and it occurred to me to draw up a list of other films and telecasts that preserve—more or less—significant English-language “creator” performances of the past. I invited my followers on Facebook and Twitter to chime in, and the result was this informal catalogue…

Read the whole thing here.

“Justice is a machine that, when someone has once given it the starting push, rolls on of itself.”

John Galsworthy, Justice

Krystian Zimerman, Leonard Bernstein, and the London Symphony perform Bernstein’s “Age of Anxiety” Symphony in 1986. The work, inspired by W.H. Auden’s book-length 1947 poem of the same name, is introduced by a short interview with Bernstein:

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

“Anxiety is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power which grips the individual, and yet he cannot tear himself away from it and does not want to, for one fears, but what he fears he desires.”

Søren Kierkegaard,The Concept of Anxiety

Fats Waller and His Rhythm perform “Your Feet’s Too Big” in a 1941 soundie:

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

“Perhaps I know best why it is man alone who laughs; he alone suffers so deeply that he had to invent laughter.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power

“What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering.”

George Bernard Shaw, John Bull’s Other Island