Something Old, Nothing New

Recently, in listening to records and attending concerts, I've become more aware of differences in orchestral layout, and in particular ...

One of the many interesting things about the late Rodney Dangerfield is that he was an old-fashioned comic who became a star at a time when...

And speaking of bad men: While I was sick, I rented the first two seasons of Dallas . First things first, here's my attempt to put lyri...

I was going to write this after the U.S. presidential election, but by then everyone will be preoccupied with the inevitable recount in seve...

Has any hit musical been re-worked, revised and overhauled as often as Cabaret? I guess the prize goes so some of the pre- Oklahoma! musi...

Here's a link to my favorite piece on Civil-War buffery (buffdom?), Joe Queenan's The Civil War Sucks! Since this piece was publis...

I borrowed an advance copy of Taxi : The Complete First Season , due from Paramount on October 12. As with Paramount's other recent TV-...

The news that Fox is preparing a special edition DVD of Mike Judge's Office Space has pleased a lot of people -- particularly those wh...

One of my favorite scenes in the movie Clueless is the scene where a pretentious college student quotes Shakespeare to back up some asinine...

Getting sick is a good excuse to watch DVDs, because germs make you light-headed and disoriented, and therefore allows you to watch drug-tri...

Do you remember those vaguely religious Archie stories in the digests you read as a kid? The ones where Archie would meet an angelic girl ...

So my Montreal Expos may become Washington Senators . Or, rather, "Washington Senators III: New Nightmare." I can't say I...

I'm fighting a cold (actually, the cold already won the fight, but I'm just too stubborn to accept it), which makes my already light...

I'm hardly going against the grain (choose whichever grain you prefer) by saying that I like Bob and Ray . During election season, one ...

Randy Salas of the Minneapolis Star Tribune has a new article reporting that The Mary Tyler Moore Show , the most notorious sales flop in ...

While talking about national anthems the other day, I mentioned -- and I know I'm not the only one to point this out -- that several cou...

Whew! Now that the New York Times Magazine has done an article on blogging , that makes blogging officially unhip. Good news for me. As ...

So Terry Teachout has a new book about choreographer George Balanchine. I don't know a great deal about ballet -- I'm familiar, s...

Silent movies need music, and there are all kinds of ways to provide it. Sometimes there's a live musician, or, on special occasions, a...

"The spirit killeth, the letter giveth life." -- T.S. Eliot