Gosh, I do love a good rant.
search
Paul West writes the first aphasic memoir. As a writer, I find the loss of language skills the most terrifying boogie man of them all.
Florence Foster Jenkins was many things. A teacher, a philanthropist, and a kind and generous friend, by many accounts. What she was not, was a gifted vocal artist, despite her unshakable belief to the contrary.
Possessed of a "sliding scale" and lacking any conception of pitch or rhythm—heck, she was barely capable of sustaining a note—what Jenkins had was the money to pursue her dream. She hired concert halls and passed out tickets to her recitals to her close circle of friends. She recorded records and gave them to her coterie. She sold out her 1944 Carnegie Hall recital.
…
Once united by poverty and marginalization, American Indians are now confronting success and wealth, thanks to their new casinos. How can that be a bad thing?
I was in an elevator with several others, coming down from the penthouse floor of an ordinary building on 32nd Street. My companions for the ride spoke in Spanish, lovely currents of flowing sound like:
1. The secret beaches of Aguadilla
2. The shuffling and chatter of the smiling patrons at Rolon's Tavern in Jersey City
3. A game of dominoes in the garage of 852 Devon Street in Kearny
Though I only recognized a very few random words, I knew from their accents, from their rhythms, from the music of their speech, that these people were Puertorriquenos.
They were…
Alexander Zakharov posts, well, a Soviet poster every day. Best of all, he provides a lot of useful historical and artistic context for them. I've always been fascinated by the visual bravura of these posters, now I get to discover the "hidden" meaning to them, which, of course, weren't hidden to the proletariat .
Bryson writing about Shakespeare, that is. The Times offers an excerpt from Shakespeare.
Journalist Malcolm McPherson has become satiric novelist Malcolm McPherson. How come? Because the best stories in his reporter's notebook stayed in his reporter's notebook.
"What are you going to do with this anecdote? Time, believe me, doesn’t want to hear about it, because it does not easily illustrate anything and is not news. In the notebook it goes. And stays."
Thus, novels are born.
Sky Blue, Maria Schneider’s sixth album in 13 years, is at once her most ambitious and most fulfilled, a sweeping, gorgeous work about memory, dreams, love, life, death, the joys of birding…but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Schneider is that rare creature these days: the composer, arranger, conductor, and manager of a working 17-to-20 piece jazz orchestra. She studied with Gil Evans and Bob Brookmeyer, and her work reflects their penchants for stacked harmonies and swaying rhythms. A jazz critic I know once said of some of her earlier pieces, “Too much vertical, not enough horizontal”—…