The composer recounts his life in five parts: The Record Store Apprenticeship, The Taxi-Driving Years, The Record Label Mogul, Collaborating With Leonard Cohen, and The New School.
Tag: 05.28.10
Why Not Speak Ill Of The Dead?, Asks Dick Cavett
In a remembrance of Art Linkletter, Cavett writes, “Someone, I guarantee, will react to this with the pre-recorded, ‘How can you speak disrespectfully of the dead?’ Truth is, I have always found it remarkably easy. Why anyone, by dying, should thereby be declared beyond criticism, innocent of wrongdoing, suddenly filled with virtue and above reproach escapes me.” (Sure enough, readers join in with mixed comments on Linkletter and his legacy.)
Marion McClinton: Where Is Chicago’s Black Theatre?
“It is a question that baffles me because of the adventurous nature of Chicago theater and I mean, it’s CHICAGO, land of Wright, Brooks, Hansberry, Forrest…. I know there are theatres in Chi that presently stand and are successful but I am talking about one that speaks to an America of the 21st Century, the one that voted in the US’s first black president (from Chicago!).”
Margot Fonteyn, Prima Ballerina, Revolutionary And Adventurer
“In its broad detail, the episode has been known about for some time, but confidential British documents declassified on Friday offered new insight into the extent of Dame Margot Fonteyn’s efforts to support her husband, the lawyer, diplomat and journalist Roberto Arias, in a seaborne — and ultimately bungled — attempt to overthrow the Panamanian government with the help of 125 Cuban revolutionaries.”
How Can We Improve Coverage Of Theatre?
“My view has always been that we need more critical voices, and that the web offers the space for those voices to be heard and to develop. It has already helped open up theatre criticism considerably, and for the better; perhaps it won’t be long before we have the equivalent of Matt Trueman, Alison Croggon or the West End Whingers in every city and region, alongside professional reviewers.”
So Maybe Beethoven Didn’t Die Of Lead Poisining After All?
“Last week a lead-poisoning expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York tested the same piece of Beethoven’s skull that had been examined in 2005, along with another, larger, fragment. The researcher, Dr. Andrew C. Todd, said that over all he had found no more lead than in the average person’s skull.”
Is Norman Foster The World’s Most Important Architect?
His latest buildings and city plans are redefining life and environmental conditions in the world’s fastest growing economies, where legions of steroidal architectural implants recall the novelist Norman Mailer’s warning in 1964 about Modernist architecture’s “empty landscapes of psychosis”.
Was Legendary Ballerina Involved In Coup Attempt?
Dame Margot Fonteyn, one of Britain’s most famous ballerinas, was “up to her neck” in a coup plot in Central America – along with Fidel Castro, according to government files released today at the National Archives.
What Can Save Detroit? Motown!
“Motown revived Detroit. We were in a recession in 1959 when Barrett Strong first sang Money. We all needed some money. So when more Motown records hit, all of a sudden Detroit started getting more attention.”
Ideas – We Need A Return To A Culture Of Stealing
“I and many other contemporary writers, musicians, visual artists, and copyleft lawyers are trying to think in new and different and (we believe) exciting ways about quotation, citation, appropriation, and plagiarism. We’re trying to regain the freedoms that writers for millennia took for granted but that we have lost.”