Ouch
From Pauline Kael’s For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (1994):Rain Main is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes. It’s his dream role.
View ArticleBix, the Blitz, and Condoms (Two)
From a story in the Independent of London about the radical theater director Joan Littlewood and her protégé Howard Goorney:Devoted to Littlewood’s style of work, Goorney remained crucial to her...
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‘The band blared. Bix Beiderbecke blew.’
From “Quartet” by David Glines, in the autumn 1978 issue of Chicago Review:Whiteman, in blackface, wearing a straw hat and bow tie, burst in on Gershwin, who was listening to Milhaud’s La Creation du...
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A Hero’s Death
I’m reading Dead Certainties by Simon Schama, a rather odd book that explores the often uneasy boundary between history and fiction. Schama is particularly interested in the death of James Wolfe, the...
View ArticleA Pulitzer to the Monitor
I’m excited to say that a former colleague of mine has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Congratulations to Preston Gannaway, who was just starting at the Monitor when I left. The...
View Article‘Ain’t had a bath for a year, dig me!’
In the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 24, 1974, the incomparable rock critic Lester Bangs reviewed Remembering Bix, a memoir by Ralph Berton. But in the end the lapidary triumph of Beiderbecke’s art may be as...
View Article‘It moves men mightily’
Wouldn’t you know, all the action is somewhere else. At the Encyclopedia Virginia blog—which you should definitely check out—a series of posts considers that well-traveled intersection of myth and...
View ArticleIn Gabriel’s Band
Satch on Bix, from the former’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1971:In 1959 after recovering from a serious illness he reported to Down Beat magazine that “Bix [Beiderbecke] tried to get me...
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The Difficulty with Reenacting
Last Saturday, I sat through a two-hour panel discussion on slave housing. I’ll admit that it was a tiny bit tedious, eighteenth-century building techniques not being my primary interest, but I was...
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Crepuscule with Molly
In 1957, Thelonious Monk wrote the ballad “Crepuscule with Nellie” to honor his wonderful wife, who was then undergoing surgery for a thyroid ailment. (The tune is one of Monk’s dozen essentials, or...
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On the Voice of Nat Turner
The Civil War is the order of the day at work and, consequently, I am trying to get started on some Civil War reading of my own. At the moment, that includes James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom...
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What Would Willie Do
“He’s an interesting guy, but just about impossible to pin down.” That’s Jonathan Yardley on the now 75-year-old Willie Nelson. Yardley reviewed the new Nelson biography by Joe Nick Patoski in the...
View ArticleSurpassing Fine
I was sitting on my front porch the other morning reading Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was a beautiful morning—clear, warm, breezy—and with my coffee and a decent view of the Blue Ridge,...
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Mr. Lincoln and the Picketts
I took Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974) off the shelf on Friday and idly opened to the foreword. I’ve always loved how it includes dramatic biographical sketches of the major players at...
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It's a Complicated Story (Part 2)
. . . by which I mean race in America.* I know, this is hardly a penetrating insight, but it’s on the mind regardless, what with Barack Obama reminding us that he has “brothers, sisters, nieces,...
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A Modest Salute
My grandfather, Ray Wolfe, was 21 years old in 1917, a farmer from tiny Lost Nation, Iowa, who was drafted into the Navy as the United States prepared for war with Germany. He didn’t go overseas—he...
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‘I don’t see color’
Several days ago I patched together a few thoughts on race-mixing. The writer Steven Augustine posted a series of comments, arguing that race is in need of a “re-think,” that the term “race” itself is...
View ArticleLast of the Penobscot (UPDATE)
Downeast magazine recently published an article on the Penobscot Indian Nation’s ongoing effort to preserve its native language. The first comment on the story included a link to my own report on the...
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Oozing the Energy of Cool
So Barack Obama is now the president-elect, and Barack Obama is cool. This is true regardless of whether you’re from the right or the left. It’s not about politics, it’s about culture and it’s about...
View ArticleFrom Nabokov to Jazz to Baseball
It's been awhile since I posted here, and the various messages and e-mails I've received in support of the blog have been much appreciated. I've been working on my Bix Beiderbecke book, but I think...
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