"One two three up, one two three up, one two three up."
"Good work."
I remembered restless nights after long days at Suntan Lake, somewhere in childhood New Jersey, days spent struggling through the waves…
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In bed the night before last, images of large and heavy loudspeakers carefully maneuvered into their old shipping cartons and up the narrow flight of stairs from JA's listening room, around a tight bend made tighter by piles of shoes and other things, and up another flight into a hall separating dining room from living room. One heavy step at a time, carefully.
I'd pay cash money to know how "Some stupid with a flare gun" translates into Japanese.
Hat tip to John Marks, who observes: "What is most wonderful about it is that there are a lot of people in the audience who recognize the tune in three notes—admittedly, though, the three notes are perhaps the most distinctive broken arpeggio in classic-rock history."
I feel a bit remiss about not commenting on Bobby Fischer's passing. As a bookish chess-obssessed kid, I lived for his Boy's Life chess column and, during the "Match of the Century," I was hitchhiking to and from Iowa and the Spassky/Fischer battle of wits was always a safe topic of conversation. (1972 was ground zero for the mainstream born again movement and it seemed like half the people that picked me up wanted a conversion in exchange for the ride. Thank goodness for chess!)
When I moved to New York, I met many chess players who had played Fischer or played in tournaments where…
The great Eliane Elias put on a quite a show last night in NYC. Touring in support of her new album, Something For You, Eliane Elias Sings and Plays Bill Evans, the pianist, singer and longtime Evans admirer lit up Dizzy's at Jazz at Lincoln Center, which is easily one of the best–sounding rooms for live music that I've ever been in. The food in there is fairly tasty and not wildly overpriced, a total rarity on the New York jazz club scene. And that behind the stage, floor to ceiling glass that adds a Central Park West backdrops to every performance is genuinely divine. Say what you…
In her kittenage, before we adopted her, Bagheera was a deli cat. I don't want to psychoanalyze an animal with a brain the size of a walnut, but Bagheera loves cardboard boxes. She will lie on them for hours—unless we do something silly like pet her or notice her. Then she'll go sulk in the corner.
Huckleberry likes to sleep just above my keyboard. That part's cool, but when he wakes up, he'll decide to play swat the fingers until I give chase.
Silly cat. Does he think us staff are only here for his amusement?
Obviously.
I was eating tagine with John Atkinson and Cantus' Erick Lichte a few nights ago and mentioned having read Anne Midgette's essay about her antipathy towards Brahms.
"Really? The composer of the glorious First Symphony?" Erick was aghast.
"Oh," said JA, "who could dislike that gorgeous clarinet quintet?"
I said, "Actually, my reaction was that nobody could be deaf to the opus 51 quartets. Even Schoenberg liked them."
So you have three classical music fans reacting to a composer and we all chose radically different works from different periods of Brahms' career. That…
Steve Martin has just published an autobiography, Born Standing Up, in which he describes how he created his comedic persona by using logic. That was the easy part, next he had to figure out how to sell it to the audience.
As with everything in comedy, it's all in the timing.