At Voice Alpha, they’re concerned with the art of reading poetry aloud for an audience (h/t Writing Without Paper). A little while back the discussion centered around the choice between reading or reciting one’s poetry. I offered the following thought about my own choice. I don’t write my poetry to be performed, but to be […]
Jazz Is: 28 – The Grammys’ “Best New Artist”
If you came of age watching the Academy Awards play all hail Hollywood while the most innovative filmmaking was ignored, or the Grammy’s spend the 60s and 70s honoring mainstream bland while rock was busting out all over, Sunday night’s Grammy Awards delivered the pleasure of the voting membership delivering up its Best New Artist […]
Politics and Art
Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels […]
CineFile: Mothers, Sons, & Political Paranoia
In the 1950s there really was a communist threat. It just wasn’t in the United States, even though there were surely many more American communist supporters and sympathizers then than there are Americans today who are supporters of any form of Islamism. Even then Joe McCarthy claimed that there were communists in the Pentagon, and […]
Jazz Is: 27 – In the Shape of Mood to Come
Only twenty years separate these two numbers. Glenn Miller‘s “In the Mood,” recorded in 1939, is one of the most famous pieces of the Swing, big band era. Here it is in a rendition led by Tex Beneke, who took charge of Miller’s orchestra in the immediate post-War years, after Miller disappeared in a flight […]