Saturday, January 30, 2010
30
posted at 8:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Pat Boone is 76 (he'll turn 77 on June 1st) and, although his voice isn't quite as agile and able to hit all the little grace notes as it once was, you can see how startlingly handsome a young man he was partly because he still radiates enourmous charm and a sense of humor about his crazy success and his fortuitous ability to withstand the insanity of the decades that ate and chewed up his main rival, Elvis - and he still wears bright orange jackets and ties!

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Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Love means never having to say.....
posted at 4:41 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Writers of novels, songs, screenplays and academic tomes all died this week. Three of them. Two men who moved and entertained millions of readers: Robert Parker yesterday and, on Sunday, Eric Segal, and a woman who wrote and sang lush music and poetry, Kate McGarrigle.

I wrote about Parker yesterday and will write more in the near future. He and his characters have been an influence and companions for me and several friends, for years.  Here's a nice piece on him by the proprietor of The Rap Sheet.

Segal, a scholarly classics professor at Yale, author of many books in his field and member of an Oxford college, was also the author of the monumentally popular Love Story and Oliver's Story and, surprising to me, screenwriter of the Beatles' The Yellow Submarine. One of his obituaries called him the progenitor of "bereavement fiction," something with which we are now entirely familiar. He had suffered from Parkinson's for years but refused to be bowed by it or anything else, evidently. At his funeral, his daughter, Francesca, paid him marvelous tribute by saying that "[at] the core of who he was [was] a blind obsessionality that saw him pursue his teaching, his writing, his running and my mother, with just the same tenacity."

Meanwhile, Kate McGarrigle, sister of Anna and one half of the McGarrigle Sisters, and mother of marvelous Rufus Wainwright, died earlier this week as well. She had learned to play the piano from nuns in the small Canadian town where she grew up. Her son's moving tribute is on his website.

A sad week.

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Saturday, November 7, 2009
Tennessee and Cape Cod
posted at 5:17 PM | Permalink | 3 comment(s)
Those of us who grew up before rap and hip hop probably all remember The Tennessee Waltz and Old Cape Cod, among other songs that Patti Page made popular. Her slight twang and almost too sweet voice are memorable as soon as you simply say the titles. It's her birthday this week and I think we should all hum some of her songs, in tribute.

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Thursday, September 10, 2009
A.I.2009-10
posted at 9:24 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Ellen de Generes? Huh?

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Thursday, August 13, 2009
Waiting for the Sunrise
posted at 12:23 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Les Paul has died. He was 94 which is certainly a good run (although the older I get, the younger 100 sounds) and he made quite a wonderful difference in many people's lives. As a musician, a guitarist, a composer and lyricist, a fantastic singer/partner with Mary Ford, a designer of guitars and amplification technology. . . . I recommend reading about him, even here, and listening to anything you can get your hands on, if you love the sheer sound of agile playing and singing.

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Monday, August 3, 2009
A few minutes of fame
posted at 12:48 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
A friend of mine was on a panel about Woodstock at the Darien Library last week. Apparently he was a young boy at the time, in a car on the way to spend some time at a house by a lake near Bethel and they got stuck in the traffic (as I did too, on the way to my family's house in Vermont). Well, apparently my friend wrote a short story/memoir kind of thing about it and someone saw it and showed it to a woman who was writing a book about Woodstock, what with the 40th anniversary and all, and one thing led to another and now he's having his fifteen or so minutes of odd fame. I say "odd" because (a) he doesn't remember it because (b) he wasn't actually there and (c) he was only 7 and anyway (d) his father hated "those annoying hippies."

An amusing/cynical side note is that the book is entitled "Woodstock Revisited: 50 Far Out, Groovy, Peace-Loving, Flashback-Inducing Stories from Those Who Were There" and is therefore an example of how untrustworthy titles and perhaps reporting in general are since we have personal knowledge of one of the 50 eponymous people not being there. But I'm happy my friend is getting time in the limelight - he's a really nice guy - and he does know what he's doing and he's having a blast with it. He's being interviewed by newspapers and was taped for appearances on NY1 as well as some stuff on WLIW.

Oh, AND he thought Darien Library was awesome - as indeed it is - and was delighted that I know and like it too.

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Sunday, August 2, 2009
Gym clothes and today's movie
posted at 12:28 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
In case one's children and grandchildren don't believe one (me), The Seventh Veil shows girls romping around in their gym uniforms that are the same ridiculous pleated almost-dresses we wore in the late sixties at the Catholic academy I attended in New York City. I don't think anyone would believe it unless there were actual evidence. Thank goodness for movies.

The Seventh Veil is one of those noir-ish films that requires a total suspension of modern (dis)belief but is, after that, irresistible and engrossing . It has Ann Todd and James Mason with a lovely turn by the always wonderful (if occasionally absurd) Herbert Lom as a psychiatrist. She plays a world-class pianist who has attempted suicide when the film opens. Unfortunately the script's solution for her troubles is the love of a man - although it's not as if that wasn't and isn't the solution offered in many movies and novels. When the seventh veil covering her awareness is lifted - to employ the linguistic metaphor of the script - she is free to choose her partner - will it be her domineering guardian uncle (Mason) or her musician beau (Hugh McDermott) or the understanding doctor (Lom)?

I like a lot of the music in this movie - although I agree with the uncle that sometimes she plays slightly overblown and romantic pieces that are too pop and unctious for my taste. I especially like the first piano scene between Mason and Todd when he's playing the Mozart 3rd piano sonata - the one all students, me included, play until the cows come home - and she cannot stop herself from joining the fun. It's a nice scene and a nice rendition of the piece.

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Wednesday, June 3, 2009
L.C.
posted at 2:16 PM | Permalink | 1 comment(s)
Lovely paean to Leonard Cohen after attending his recent Boston concert (lucky, lucky woman).

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Sunday, March 29, 2009
A.I. two million
posted at 10:15 PM | Permalink | 2 comment(s)
I'm not sure what season of American Idol this really is but I've had a hard time warming up to this year's group. I watched early on and couldn't stand anyone's voice or song choice. However, this week I was caught up at the end of the show and saw only two and a half performances but was blown away by Allison Iraheta. She's only 16 and you'd expect one of those annoying current kinds of renditions but she belted "Papa was a rolling stone" to the tops of the rafters while still remaining coherent. I have no idea if she's "pop" enough to win or even if she should, given the kind of powerful voice and presence she has, but she was terrific. The others, at least in their brief revisits, all seemed boring and uninteresting. Maybe I'll have to watch again, now.

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Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Tower of Love
posted at 9:24 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
If you already know and like Leonard Cohen's music, the announcement of a tour and new album/CD will make you very pleased indeed. If you don't know his music, you really probably do and just don't realize it (Hallelujah, Suzanne, I'm Your Man, Tower of Love, Bird on a Wire, plus on and one). In any case, this article in today's NYT's art section is good reading. At one point, I spent several months listening to almost nothing else. There's something about his music and lyrics - not to mention his voice - that can be extraordinarily moving and compelling. There's strength, gentleness, humor, gracefulness, depth, silliness, word play... everything.....

Starting tomorrow (2/26), a selection from last week's Beacon Theater concert will be streamed online on npr.org/music and/or nprmusic.org. (That could make for an unusual office atmosphere.)

This piece from NPR's site is fun to read and fires you up to go see the man.

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Friday, January 30, 2009
Neil the weeble Diamond
posted at 9:24 AM | Permalink | 2 comment(s)
He's amazing, isn't he?! He's been at this composing and writing gig since the nineteen-fifties and he just keeps on performing and drawing enormous, enthusiastic crowds. As a reader pointed out, his renewed continued popularity means that some parents and children can bridge the generation gap (at least temporarily) because both of them think he's cool. How many musicians have managed that?!

Plus, on this current tour, he's donating all proceeds from concert merchandise to Hurricane Ike relief. Apparently 2008's Hurricane Ike was the 10th largest hurricane ever in the U.S. and it caused appalling damage, especially around Galveston. I'm not sure why so relatively little fuss was made about it but there's a lot to learn about it. Some details here and some really amazing photos here about Ike. (Just as a point of journalistic note, the hurricane is "Ike" and not "Ikea" which is what the CNN article called it yesterday - I wish I'd screenshot it so I could prove it.)

You'd think there'd have been lots more publicity about Ike (given Katrina) and more national pleas for assistance (given Katrina) but at least there's Neil Diamond and his merchandise proceeds.

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Tuesday, January 27, 2009
January 27, 1756
posted at 8:52 AM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
The birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is today, according to generally accepted rules of calendar conversion. Talk about prolific -- he wrote over six hundred compositions, beginning at five years old -- and 6,160 recordings of his are available at ArkivMusic. I've always wondered what it must have been like for his parents and older sister one Sunday when they returned from hearing a Bach cantata and their little boy proceeded to work it out on the clavier during the course of the afternoon, perfectly. Papa (Leopold) stopped his own composing when he realized what an astonishing son he had and unfortunately for Wolfgang channeled all his energy into teaching his son and being the original little league taskmaster parent (although I suppose that was fortunate for the rest of us, come to think of it). When Mozart was 13, his father took him on a two-year tour of Italy to establish his reputation. Thereafter, he was highly regarded but often, despite some enormous success, in penurious circumstances. He died at a mere 35 years of age although my father, who wrote a biography of Mozart years ago, believed that in fact Mozart died of old age, packing two or three years of life and experience into each twelve months. A lovely theory which perhaps explains the amazing quantity and quality of his work.

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Tuesday, January 13, 2009
A.I.2009
posted at 11:55 PM | Permalink | 0 comment(s)
Who'd have thought MSNBC would have the first piece I enjoyed reading on America Idol this year?

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