According to long-accepted, though unverifiable anecdote, the idea for the first charitable fund for musicians was born when three London players had just exited a popular coffee house in the Haymarket in 1738 and saw…
Posts published by “David Yearsley”
Seth MacFarlane claimed in his opening monologue that this year’s Oscars adopted for the first time ever a theme — “the wedding of film and music” as he put it. The spectacle that followed the…
The Military-Football Complex becomes more sinister every year. One should never be fooled into thinking the apogee of cynicism has been reached when the first Sunday in February rolls around and the beast’s infernal machinations…
Panic set in not for the obvious reasons: the blinding white stone of the Capitol dome, ramparts and columns resembling nothing so much as Albert Speer’s Hall of the People after a full-on peroxide scrub…
Every time Russell Crowe appeared on screen in Tom Hooper’s new film of Les Misérables all I could think was: Thank God The Gladiator wasn’t a musical. Imagine if Crowe’s lean, mean, fighting machine Maximus…
An armchair psychologist might say it could only be a December baby born in the Great Depression who could have devised a song so devastatingly critical of the contradictions between consumerist Christmas and Christian charity…
Last year during the crux of pre-Christmas consumption, I ventured into the greatest musical basement east of the Village Vanguard: the classical CD section of Dussman’s Cultural Department Store in the heart of Berlin. One…