I’m in need of musical awe today. I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time, meant to for the not long departed Abbley Lincoln’s 88th birthday almost two weeks ago. Here she is singing “Freedom Day,” with the great Max Roach on drums, Eddie Kahn on bass, Coleridge Perkins on Piano, and Clifford […]
The French, Sex, Power – and Syria, Too
The Dominique Strauss-Kahn case has been one of those periodic cultural Rorschach’s we get to experience, in this case internationally. You learn things about people you might never have known or guessed. Some people’s reputations and I don’t mean DSK’s, are ruined in other people’s eyes. “Jack Lang, minister of culture under François Mitterrand,” we […]
CineFile – Nobody’s Fool
In my previous post I offered a couple of links to video excerpts from Paul Newman films. Sometimes, though, people don’t click on links. (What’s that all about? Don’t they know how web surfing works? How else are they going to go down the rabbit hole?) So I thought I’d offer one of those excerpts […]
Born on This Day
According to the calendar, today is the birthday of my nephew, Rob, my sister’s eldest, who cannot be the age he fears to be turning, as I am not that old, and I will be seeking a recount. Nonetheless, as you can see from the photo, Rob has been monomaniacally engaged from an early age, and is […]
How We Lived on It (38) – A Venn Diagram of “Things That Are Bad” in the World and the Few That Are Not
I could not have suspected when I began this series that one day a single post would so approach universal completeness as nearly to obviate the need for going on. But it was in the space between nearly and not, I believe, that the Big Bang occurred, so, in the nearly words of Mr. Beckett, […]