– Cost in 1908 of single-sided Victrola Red Seal Record No. 96200, the sextet from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (playing time: four minutes and one second), performed by Enrico Caruso, Marcella Sembrich, Antonio Scotti, Marcel Journet, Gina Severina and Francesco Daddi: $7

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $138.54

(Source: Mark Obert-Thorn)

“The lesson I learned from the Charlie d

Here’s my life in a nutshell:

– On Wednesday night I was in Madison, dining with the divine Ms. Althouse (who is not only great fun but knows how to pick a good restaurant) and watching a preview of Madison Repertory Theatre‘s production of Rembrandt’s Gift, a new play by Tina Howe.

– I got up this morning, checked my e-mail and the “About Last Night” referral log, and discovered that a blogger I’d never heard of has been reading my Wisconsin postings and thinks they’re “vapid and cloyingly precious,” not to mention “lower-middlebrow.” Interested in knowing exactly what sort of writing the blogger in question thought was worth reading, I spent a few minutes looking over the self-written “serialized blog novels” he’d posted elsewhere on his site, an experience I commend to all connoisseurs of unpublished fiction.

– I spent the next couple of hours driving around Madison in search of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, of which I found several. Then I headed back to Spring Green, checked into the same motel I occupied two nights ago, and took a well-deserved nap.

– This evening I went to see American Players Theatre‘s production of Ferenc Molnar’s The Play’s the Thing, performed in an English-language version by none other than P.G. Wodehouse.

– Tomorrow I’m off to Milwaukee, where I’ll tour the Milwaukee Art Museum and attend a performance by Milwaukee Repertory Theatre of A Flea in Her Ear.

– On Saturday it’s back to Spring Green for performances of Macbeth in the afternoon and Candida in the evening.

– On Sunday I’ll be seeing one last play, Tartuffe, then spending the night in another Wright house, the Seth Peterson Cottage.

Forgive my terseness, but I really did just get back from the theater and am longing to shed my clothes and crawl into bed! You won’t be hearing from me again until Monday, and by now I expect you can see why. I’m still having fun yet, but I’ll be more than ready to head for home come Monday afternoon. I’ll post that day and possibly on Tuesday as well, but I’ll definitely be taking Wednesday and Thursday off, about which more later. For now, have a nice weekend.

(By the way, I’m not in today’s Wall Street Journal, which is why there’s no drama-column teaser this week. I’ll be back at the same old stand as usual next Friday.)

December 2003:

I belong to the last generation to have grown up without VCRs. Born in 1956, I was raised in a small town that had one movie theater. The only “arty” films I saw in high school were 2001: A Space Odyssey and Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet. The nearest public TV station was in St. Louis, just beyond the range of our rooftop antenna–this was before the invention of cable TV–so it wasn’t until I left home to go to college that I saw any old movies other than an occasional Saturday-afternoon John Wayne….

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

– Fee paid in 1956 by Art News for a 100-word review of an art exhibit: $3

– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $20.69

(Source: Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir)

“It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”

P.G. Wodehouse, The Code of the Woosters

As I trolled the Web in my Milwaukee hotel after dinner, I ran across this fugitive fantasy spun by my favorite blogger during choir practice:

These notes we sing are like a little community of people, and you can’t hold a person too tight for fear of extinguishing their creative impulses–their musical “movement” and direction, if you will. Yes, let them go, let them wander and explore. The best you can do is offer guidance, sustain them somehow, and give shape to their meanderings. Dear Palestrina. If I had to live in a piece of music…well, it couldn’t get any better than that.

Like Jack Benny, I’m thinking it over. If I had to live in a piece of music…but exactly what might that mean? It’s a complex, oddly self-revealing fantasy, one that necessarily entails something not unlike an act of synesthesia. Would I be a constituent part of the piece in question–a chord, say? Or would the piece as a whole be the world in which I lived, going to and fro and walking up and down in it? I can think of some chords I’d like to be (the first chord of the “Eroica” Symphony), as well as a few of the other kind (Le Sacre du printemps, anyone?). Still, it’s a lot easier to imagine a piece of music as a physical environment–a room, a house, a neighborhood.

The top five pieces of music I wouldn’t want to live inside:

(1) Sibelius Tapiola (too cold)

(2) Shostakovich Fourteenth Symphony (too depressing)

(3) Anything by Philip Glass (too boring)

(4) Bart

I’m sitting in a Madison hotel room that looks out on Lake Mendota, so tired from Wednesday’s wanderings that I can barely see straight. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow for a fuller account of my adventures, but I do want to say something now about my visit to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home and headquarters. I spent most of the morning and afternoon walking the grounds, escorted by Keiran Murphy, one of Taleisin’s resident archivists and historians. Keiran was kind enough to serve as my tour guide for the day, though calling her that would be like calling Hilary Hahn a fiddler. Never in my life have I been given a more sensitive and comprehending tour of anything, anywhere. Listening to her talk about Wright and looking at everything she pointed out, I felt as if my eyes had opened to twice their normal size.

At the end of the day, Keiran and I stood together on a hill overlooking Taliesin, gazing at the house and the vast, all-encompassing view beyond it. (You can see the foot of the hill at the right-hand edge of this photo.) For a moment I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“I guess you get used to everything,” I finally said, “but I don’t see how anyone could get used to seeing this every day.”

“Oh, you do,” Keiran replied. “Most of the time, anyway. Except when the wind and sun and humidity are just right. When everything is right.” She paused. “Then it’s so beautiful, it hurts.”

“Such beauty as hurts to behold,” I said, thinking of the first line of a poem by Paul Goodman that I love:

Such beauty as hurts to behold

and so gentle as salves the wound:

I am shivering though it is not cold

and dark as in a swoon.

She nodded. We stood in silence for a little while longer, clinging vainly to the passing moment.

“I guess we’d better go back to the world,” I said at last.

“I guess we’d better,” she said, and we walked down the hill to the house.