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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.
Hi! Where've you been?
I've been working on the new entries for our upcoming "Recommended Components" feature. Our "Recommended Components" feature is big. It appears twice a year—in our April and October issues—and is a fun way for readers to become quickly familiar with the many products we've reviewed. Every product listed in "Recommended Components" has been placed in one of four or five quality classes. Components in Class A offer something extraordinarily special, but every component included in our list is truly excellent or offers excellent value for…
What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t be self-indulgent now and then? So allow me to plug my new book, Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power (Wiley & Sons). As the subtitle may suggest, it is not a biography of the Monkees but rather a journalistic dissection of why the United States’ global adventures and image have gone to hell in recent years. Some of you may know that I write a twice-weekly column in Slate about such matters. My book is not a compilation of my columns; it’s all new stuff. The official pub date is February 4, but it’s already in…
Jaki Byard’s Sunshine of My Soul (High Note) has come to my attention a bit late, otherwise it would have made my Top 10 list at the end of last year. Yet another long-lost concert-tape dug out of the vaults, it takes us to San Francisco’s Keystone Korner in June 1978, where Byard is flying barrel-rolls solo. Byard—who died in 1999 at 77, gunned down on his doorstep for still-unknown reasons—was a pianist both virtuosic and rowdy. His left hand is rock-solid, his right hand fleet with fury. Imagine Willie “The Lion” Smith pressure-cooked by Mingus (Byard played in Mingus’ band through most of…