Quote of the Day (Anne Perry, on the Need for ‘The Voice of Dissent’)

“Let us hear the voice of dissent, because the person who asks you why you think what you do and expects you to explain is your best friend. They are clarifying your view, and if you don’t really think what you do, it’s a good time to change. And if you do think what you do, it can make you realize that, well, it’s because of so-and-so. No friend lets you walk over the cliff. They give you the voice of warning.” — British historical mystery novelist and convicted teen murderer Anne Perry (1938-2023), in conversation with Andrew F. Gulli, “Interview: Anne Perry,” The Strand Magazine, Issue 13 (June/September 2004)

Quote of the Day (Bob Dylan, on Willie Nelson)

“How can you make sense of him? How would you define the indefinable or the unfathomable? What is there to say? Ancient Viking Soul? Master Builder of the Impossible? Patron poet of people who never quite fit in and don’t much care to? Moonshine Philosopher? Tumbleweed singer with a PhD? Red Bandana troubadour, braids like twin ropes lassoing eternity? What do you say about a guy who plays an old, battered guitar that he treats like it’s the last loyal dog in the universe? Cowboy apparition, writes songs with holes that you can crawl through to escape from something. Voice like a warm porchlight left on for wanderers who kissed goodbye too soon or stayed too long. I guess you can say all that. But it really doesn’t tell you a lot or explain anything about Willie. Personally speaking I’ve always known him to be kind, generous, tolerant and understanding of human feebleness, a benefactor, a father and a friend. He’s like the invisible air. He’s high and low. He’s in harmony with nature. And that’s what makes him Willie.”—Singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, on 92-year-old country-music legend Willie Nelson, quoted by Alex Abramovich, “Profiles: Last Highway: How Willie Nelson Sees America,” The New Yorker, Dec. 29, 2025 and Jan. 5, 2026 issue

(The accompanying photo of Willie Nelson getting ready to perform at Farm Aid 2009 was taken by Larry Philpot.)

Quote of the Day (Joe Queenan, on Technology and ‘The Problems That Really Matter’)

“If the future is anything like the past, technology will continue to solve problems that are not all that pressing, while doing nothing to address the problems that really matter. Thus, while a 2-year-old may never know what Roku boxes are, he will know what massive traffic jams are. To date, technology has done nothing to improve the flow of traffic on I-95, I-25 or the 405, much less the Cross-Bronx Expressway. Desktop PCs may go the way of tape recorders and pocket calculators, but the Beltway will still be backed up halfway to Baltimore.”— Humor columnist Joe Queenan, “Moving Targets: There Are Some Things Technology Won’t Change,” The Wall Street Journal, May 25-26, 2019

Well, for a while, during the pandemic, it looked like traffic jams were easing, including in the DC-Baltimore area that Queenan talks about—and I suppose that tech-enabled remote work facilitated that.

But, according to this report from a year ago by an NBC affiliate, more people were on the road in that area than before the pandemic, with return-to-office edicts rising. It just goes to show: technology can’t really dislodge institutions and individuals from their stuck-on-stupid mode—even if stuck-on-stupid means being caught in massive traffic jams. 

This Day in Musical History (Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Pacific Overtures’ Opens)

Jan. 11, 1976—After a Boston preview and a one-month run at the Kennedy Center, Pacific Overtures premiered at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. It was another success d’estime, but hardly a blockbuster, by Stephen Sondheim, closing after 193 performances.

Starting in the 1960s, twentysomething John Weidman worked on the story, about how the "black ship" of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry's East India Squadron ended more than two centuries of isolation from non-Dutch Westerners imposed by Japan's shogunate.

But after toiling on this straight drama for years, producer Harold Prince told Weidman he saw wider possibilities for opening it up, particularly as a musical in collaboration with Sondheim.

Though the show’s title came from a letter sent by Commodore Perry, it appealed to Sondheim’s interest in wordplay and ambiguity. The U.S. naval leader meant the phrase to signal peaceful gestures toward diplomacy (absurd on its face, considering that Perry trained guns on the populace during “negotiations”). But for Sondheim, it also meant an opening through music (“overtures”) of two nations separated by an ocean (the Pacific).

If not quite a 21^st-century “clash of civilizations,” the encounter certainly changed both races. And it startled both the creators of the show and its American viewers in that bicentennial year—who, if they heard of Commodore Perry at all, would have associated him with the kind of triumphalism displayed by Samuel Eliot Morison in his 1967 biography, Ol’ Bruin.

(For a more modern and objective perspective on these events, you might want to turn to Peter Booth Wiley’s 1990 history, Yankees in the Land of the Gods.)

In the Seventies, each show that Sondheim and Prince, had already mounted (Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, The Frogs) stretched the boundaries of the American musical. But this topped it all.

The all-male cast (an issue that Sondheim and Prince eventually revisited) was the least of it. The plot would be seen entirely through non-Western eyes: two Japanese friends caught (and made the scapegoats for) the ensuring epic national transition, through the conventions of Kabuki (a form of Japanese theater).

And Sondheim had set himself the task of writing the score within quasi-Japanese style of parallel 4ths, without any leading-tone or pentatonic scale. The whole thing proved unexpectedly, devilishly difficult.

(Nearly 30 years later, at the Roundabout Theater Company’s 2004 revival at Studio 54, Prince and Sondheim would live to witness the logical conclusion of their wish that the action be viewed through foreign eyes, as the musical was directed this time by Amon Miyamoto.)

As with most of those pre-workshop days of musical theater, changes were made on the fly, with deadlines bearing down on everyone. In getting ready the Kennedy Center production, Sondheim told one actor that his big number would be replaced with “Chrysanthemum Tea,” a song with four verses that needed to be memorized in three days!

In addition, “Welcome to Kanagawa,” Sondheim wrote in Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981), was “the most annoyingly problematic song I’ve ever written. With each revival of Pacific Overtures I rewrite it and with each revival it fails to be funny.”

The wonder is that everything turned out as well as it did. Sondheim himself claimed to the end of his life that “Someone in a Tree” was the favorite of all his songs: “I like the swing and relentlessness of the music and the poetic Orientalism of the lyrics, but what I love is its ambition, its attempt to collapse past, present and future into one packaged song form.”

For more than 40 years, this was the Sondheim musical with which I was least familiar. I never heard the whole thing with lyrics, and had to make do with an orchestral suite arranging its seven “dances” or songs through a 1985 Book-of-the-Month Club collection of his work.

Then this week, in preparing this post, I came across this YouTube clip of the 1976 production, which ended up being shown then on Japanese television.

The Kennedy Center staged Pacific Overtures again as part of its 2001-2002 Sondheim Festival. But I think that producing it at this time would be the last thing that current management would consider.

A show about—let’s face it—imperialism, would not sit well with a chauvinistic, saber-rattling administration that effectively dictates policy and governance to a cultural institution once largely insulated from it.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (G. K. Chesterton, on Faith, Hope, and Charity)

“Charity means pardoning the unpardonable, or it is no virtue at all. Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.” — English man of letters (and Catholic convert) G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936), Heretics (1905)

Quote of the Day (Dennis Lehane, on Boston Working-Class Humor)

“To this day… I've never met a comedian half as funny as at least five people I knew growing up. In Dorchester … my dad was part of a bar culture. He used to bring me into bars all the time and pretend, telling my mother we were at a farmers’ market so he could sneak in and have a drink on a Saturday. So I grew up listening to people talk and tell stories and they were always working-class stories. The point of any working-class story is ‘I got screwed,’ right? But [also] ‘I got a little bit of vengeance,’ like ‘I keyed his car,’ ‘I slept with his sister.’ It's a tragic story: ‘I got screwed.’ But it's got a little bit of levity in it…. I think in Irish culture, personally—and that's where Dorchester is, and Savin Hill, where I grew up— that's where we get our sense of humor, [from] the Irish. They believe that God is a prankster and we're the butt of the joke, you know.  That's something that just goes into my work.”—American crime novelist and screenwriter Dennis Lehane interviewed by Anna Kusmer for the “Say More” podcast, Boston Globe, Jan.8, 2026 episode

The image accompanying this post, showing Dennis Lehane at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, was taken by David Shankbone.

Tweet of the Day (‘MichaelTrying,’ on the Results of a New Year’s Exercise Program)

“I finally have the body I want after a rigorous six-month program of lowering my expectations.”--@MichaelTrying,” quoted in Eric Zorn, “Nyuk Nyuk Nyuk! A Dozen Finalists for Tweet of the Week,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 10, 2017

Film fans may remember the fellow in the accompanying image as Dave (played by Mark Addy) in the 1997 British comedy The Full Monty.

Trust me: you don’t want to see any more of him than what is revealed here. Suffice it to say, Dave really had to “lower his expectations” for the desperate but uproariously confidence-boosting act he and his friends resorted to!