Quote of the Day (William Shakespeare, on Moonlight and ‘The Sounds of Music’)

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank.
Here will we sit and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony.
Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still choiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls,
But whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.” — Lorenzo from English playwright-poet William Shakespeare (1564-1616), The Merchant of Venice, Act V, Scene 1 (1596-98)

Flashback, September 1951: ‘Streetcar’ Brings to Hollywood ‘The Method'—and Censorship Issues

A Streetcar Named Desire wasn’t the first Hollywood adaptation of a Tennessee Williams play when it was released in the U.S. 75 years ago this month, but it left the most lasting impact on the film industry. Unlike The Glass Menagerie the year before, it was perfectly cast and adeptly directed by Elia Kazan (as he had done on Broadway).

Moreover, with Marlon Brando repeating his sensational stage turn as brutish Stanley Kowalski only a few weeks after Montgomery Clift’s acclaimed performance in A Place in the Sun, it demonstrated the full power of the style that Kazan had been advancing at New York’s Actors Studio: “The Method,” with performers encouraged to use their memories of past emotional experiences to create a character.

Critics and audiences applauded how Kazan had translated the sweaty sensuality and tragic lyricism of Williams’ Pulitzer Prize winning drama from the stage to the screen.

But the source material’s frank depiction of an offscreen gay character, nymphomania, and sexual assault, among other issues, put Warner Brothers Studio on a collision course with the movie industry’s censorship arm, the Production Code Administration (PCA).

Much of this latter story is told in a long section of Inside Warner Bros. (1935-1951), a volume of revealing letters, telegrams and memos edited by film scholar Rudy Behlmer. As much of a landmark as the film is considered in terms of its overall excellence (including, by Alex North, the first notable jazz score in a major Hollywood film, and Harry Stradling’s vivid cinematography), the pitched battle over its content represented a milestone of its own.

PCA executive Geoffrey Shurlock may have summed it up best: “For the first time we were confronted with a picture that was obviously not family entertainment. Before then we had considered Anna Karenina a big deal. Streetcar broke the barrier.”

Kazan and Williams presented a united front against the PCA. They grudgingly softened the treatment of the promiscuity of faded Southern belle Blanche DuBois and the intimate relationship between her dead husband and an older male friend. But they drew the line at the PCA’s suggestion that she could imagine her rape by Stanley because of her mental fragility.

Williams protested to PCA head Joseph Breen, vehemently and eloquently, that if the sexual assault were treated in this fashion, “the play loses its meaning, which is the ravishment of the tender, the sensitive, the delicate, by the safe and brutal forces in modern society. It is a positive plea for comprehension.” He vowed that if he and Kazan had “our backs against the wall…none of us is going to throw in the towel!”

Kazan and Williams won that round, though making one compromise (spoiler alert): Stanley would be punished by having wife Stella leave him. They were able to prevail again when Breen seemed ready to wobble about the rape scene.

What neither the director nor playwright could imagine was that the Catholic Legion of Decency would interfere just as the film was ready for release. Its threat to issue a “Condemned” rating—guaranteed box-office poison—led Warner Brothers to cancel the movie’s Radio City booking and call editor David Weisbart in, without Kazan’s knowledge, to make further excisions.

The studio refused to accede to Kazan’s plea that the film be released in two versions clearly labeled as being edited or not. In all, he estimated, the 12 cuts amounted to roughly five minutes—footage not seen until Warner Brothers restored it for the director’s version in 1993. (The deleted scenes are in this YouTube clip.)

Vivien Leigh, the only member of the central quartet at the heart of the drama who was not carried over from Broadway (producers thought she would provide a greater box-office boost than Jessica Tandy), was, unlike Brando, Kim Hunter, and Karl Malden, classically trained rather than schooled in The Method.

But she had played Blanche in a London production directed by husband Laurence Olivier, and, as author and screenwriter Logan Kelly discussed in this 2023 post on the Collider blog, she threw herself so strongly into the role onscreen that it exacerbated the bipolar disorder that was already afflicting her.

Though Brando drew favorable notices with his film debut the prior year, The Men, it was Streetcar that stunned longtime Hollywood professionals. 

His transformation into Blanche’s loutish but sensual antagonist was revelatory, in the same manner described by Truman Capote watching him in rehearsal for Broadway: “with what chameleon ease Brando acquired the character’s cruel and gaudy colors, how superbly, like a guileful salamander, he slithered into the part, how his own persona evaporated.”

Ironically, despite the effect that Brando’s performance had on cinema acting, he did not join fellow nominated cast members Leigh, Hunter, and Malden in the winner’s circle. Best Actor that year went to industry veteran Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. Brando would have to wait another three years to collect his, for the equally electrifying On the Waterfront.

Song Lyric of the Day (Stevie Wonder, on ‘Precautionary Measures’ We Still Need)

“We all must take precautionary measures
If love and peace you treasure.”—American Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Stevie Wonder, “Love's In Need Of Love Today,” from his Songs in the Key of Life LP (1976)
 
A half century ago, Stevie Wonder was such a force to be reckoned with in pop music that, when Paul Simon won the Best Album Grammy for 1975, he thanked the Motown artist for clearing a path for him to win the award by not releasing a record that year.
 
Wonder made up for that absence from the record stores with his much-anticipated, much-delayed double album (plus a single, four-song 33-rpm disc), Songs in the Key of Life, released 50 years ago this week.
 
The LP went to #1 on the charts that first week, and continued the momentum thereafter with five singles: "I Wish," "Sir Duke," "Another Star," "As," and “Isn’t She Lovely?” The following February, Wonder collected four Grammys: Album of the Year, Best Male Pop Performer, Best Male Rhythm and Blues Performer, and Best Producer.
 
Why did this become my favorite collection of Wonder songs? Was it because there was so much in this collection? Because it was his first album that I could buy from my own work earnings? Or because, as a perfectionist, he had produced 21 songs (including several where he handled all the instruments himself!) in a dazzling variety of styles (including the Latin-infused soul and salsa track “Another Star”)?
 
So many of these tunes address love in various forms: with a current mate, a past love, or a newborn daughter (“Isn’t She Lovely?”). But the one with which he started the album, “Love's In Need Of Love Today,” addressed a different kind: what the ancients called agape or caritas—selfless, universal love that makes life possible at all for human beings.
 
Sociopolitical commentary had informed a couple of Wonder songs before: "Living for the City," about a black youth’s struggle for survival in the inner city and the justice system, and, more pointedly, “You Haven't Done Nothin,'" a scathing critique of President Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal.
 
But “Love's In Need Of Love Today” took a broader view, beyond politicians, of the ills besetting America in the year of its bicentennial. His warning was stark, aimed at the heart of each of his listeners: “The force of evil plans to make you its possession/And it will if we let it destroy everybody.”
 
The passage of 50 years. The divisions in America continue to distress Wonder, as seen two years ago when, on the brink of the 2024 Presidential election, he appealed for civic understanding with “Can We Fix Our Nation's Broken Heart."
 
That race and the resulting daily chaos at home and abroad has only underscored the moral urgency of Wonder’s message from 50 years ago. Too bad more citizens haven’t heeded the plea for “precautionary measures” urged by Wonder and others who covered this song over the years (notably Joan Osborne, on her 2002 CD How Sweet It Is).

Joke of the Day (Edwin Newman, on a Method for Dealing with Rainy Weather)

“These are The Times that dry men’s soles.”—TV newscaster and language maven Edwin Newman (1919-2010), on using newspapers to absorb moisture from wet shoes, quoted by Margalit Fox, “Edwin Newman, 91, Newsman, Defender of English and Partisan of Puns, Is Dead,” The New York Times, Sept. 16, 2010

I loved this pun anyway, but using it in this space felt mandatory today, considering that this is the third straight day of prolonged precipitation up by me in the Northeast.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (St. Therese of Lisieux, on Deeds and Love)

“Without love, deeds, even the most brilliant, count as nothing.” —French Carmelite nun—and “Doctor of the Church”—St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-1897), The Thoughts of St. Therese of the Child Jesus (1915)

This Thursday, the feast day of “The Little Flower”—a saint of unsurpassed humility and devotion to God—will be celebrated.

Quote of the Day (Robert Browning, on How ‘Truth is Within Ourselves’)

“Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise    
From outward things, whate’er you may believe.     
There is an inmost centre in us all,    
Where truth abides in fullness; and around,  
Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in,            
This perfect, clear perception—which is truth.         
A baffling and perverting carnal mesh          
Binds it, and makes all error: and, to KNOW,          
Rather consists in opening out a way
Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape,               
Than in effecting entry for a light      
Supposed to be without.”—English poet Robert Browning (1812–1889), Paracelsus (1835)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Yes, Prime Minister,’ In Which a High-Level Leaker Is Not Just Caught Out But Embarrassed)

[Sir Humphrey Appleby makes several highly indiscreet, "off-the-record" statements regarding government policy on unemployment and the media during an interview for a BBC radio documentary. implying the government lacks courage and that the true, harsh nature of unemployment policy is hidden. A tape of this outtake is sent to Humphrey, and the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker, obtains it, using it to blackmail Humphrey, turning the tables on his often-manipulative Cabinet Secretary.]

James Hacker [played by Paul Eddington, back turned in picture]: “How did your broadcast go?”

Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Nigel Hawthorne, facing in picture] [quickly]: “Oh, very well, very well.”

Hacker [smiling, waiting to pounce]: “What did you say?”

Sir Humphrey: “Oh, nothing in particular. I think I pointed out some of the difficulties in allocating responsibilities as between [waving hands quickly] politicians and civil servants.”

Hacker: “But you were discreet?”

Sir Humphrey [more nervously]: “Why do you ask?”

Hacker: “Were you or weren't you?”

Sir Humphrey: “Yes!”

Hacker: “Yes you were or yes you weren’t?”

Sir Humphrey: “Yes.”

Hacker [prodding, with a cunning smile]: “Humphrey…”

Sir Humphrey: “Oh yes. Well, didn’t you expect me to be discreet?”

Hacker: “Well, yes, of course.”

Sir Humphrey [quickly trying to conclude this]: “Well, there you are, then!”

Hacker: “Well, that's all right, isn’t it?” [Sir Humphrey relaxes and smiles, thinking he’s escaped danger.]

Sir Humphrey: “Why do you ask, Prime Minister?” [He starts to sit down at last.]

Hacker: “Well, it's just that the BBC sent me a tape…” [Sir Humphrey shoots out of his seat, alarmed.]—Yes, Prime Minister, Season 2, Episode 8, “The Tangled Web,” original air date Jan. 28, 1988, teleplay by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, directed by Sydney Lotterby

I wonder if a variation of this scene occurred recently on this side of the Atlantic Ocean? You know how the Trump Administration used a Politico story to justify denying it access to the White House grounds—all because of it having allegedly “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods”?

Well, guess who the (once anonymous) source of that story was? None other than J.D. Vance, who, according to this Daily Beast article, wanted to put a positive spin on ongoing peace negotiations with Iran.

It all goes to show that when it comes to secrets divulged, Washington leaks from the top. Vance would just be the latest member of what the late great syndicated satirist Art Buchwald, back in March 1983, referred to as “the National Council of Office Leakers,” which meets weekly “and is chaired by a very high White House source.”

Quote of the Day (Jessamyn West, on What Heals or Festers)

“A broken bone can heal, but the wound a word opens can fester forever.”— American novelist Jessamyn West (1902-1984), The Life I Really Lived (1979)

This Day in Jazz History (Birth of John Coltrane, Saxophonist Supreme)

Sept. 23, 1926— John Coltrane, a saxophonist, bandleader, and composer who, after overcoming a heroin addiction in his early 30s, achieved a spiritual awakening that fueled his subsequent jazz masterpieces, was born in Hamlet, NC.

Early on, the musical promise of this country boy was recognized by a bandleader only four months his senior: Miles Davis. But six years of dependence on heroin and alcohol turned Coltrane into an unsteady, unreliable member of the Davis quintet, leading to his abrupt ouster.

The way back nine months later into the good graces of the bandleader he called “Teacher” was harrowing: locking himself in his mother’s room in Philadelphia and, without medication or medical assistance, quitting his chemical dependence cold turkey.

For the decade remaining before he died of liver cancer, “Trane” gave thanks to God for his liberation from drugs, and sought a purity in sound that mirrored his ecstatic spiritual vision.

Particularly in albums like the Grammy-nominated A Love Supreme (1965), listeners discerned a spiritual path of devotion and redemption, open to all. In fact, for more than half a century, the African Orthodox Church, founded by Black Episcopalians critical of what they saw as racism in the larger denomination, has even officially canonized him, naming its San Francisco house of worship in his honor.

Not everyone felt well-disposed towards the even greater religious intensity his work assumed in the last couple of years of Coltrane’s life. Critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, for all his appreciation of the musician’s early work, dismissed his late ventures as “naive submission to actual noise and incompetence.”

But few would deny that Coltrane was relentlessly dedicated to practicing his craft, as well as pursuing a musical question as unexpected as his spiritual one.

“Sheets of sound” is how Downbeat jazz critic Ira Gitler described the vertical improvisational style emanating from Coltrane’s saxophone—dense layers of scales, modes and keys over an entire progression. It proved extremely influential. 

But Coltrane was uninterested in repeating himself, and his devotees could hardly keep up with his innovations over the course of the 25 albums he released as a bandleader in his abbreviated lifespan.

Even with the Great American Songbook, the corpus of popular standards that jazz has plumbed for years, Coltrane created something unique with his 1961 interpretation of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “My Favorite Things.” He transformed that approximately three-minute chestnut from The Sound of Music into what Sam Stephenson called, in a 2014 blog post for The Paris Review, “a thirteen-minute warhorse of dominion.”

Like Davis, Coltrane was connected to the area of New Jersey where I live: Bergen County, NJ. Together they worked Cookin' with the Miles Davis Quintet in autumn 1956 at the Hackensack home studio of legendary jazz recording engineer Rudy Van Gelder. Leading his own band, Coltrane created three albums in Van Gelder’s later Englewood Cliffs studio, including, most notably, A Love Supreme.

(For a good, concise summary of Coltrane at his zenith, I recommend Patrick Jarenwattananon’s September 2010 blog post on—what else?—“Your Blog Supreme.”)

Quote of the Day (Edna St. Vincent Millay, on How Autumn ‘Shudders’ and ‘Clambers’)

“Now the autumn shudders
In the rose's root.
Far and wide the ladders
Lean among the fruit.
 
“Now the autumn clambers
Up the trellised frame,
And the rose remembers
The dust from which it came.” —Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), “Autumn Chant,” in Edna St. Vincent Millay: Selected Poems, edited by J. D. McClatchy (Library of America edition, 2003)

This Day in Television History (‘Charlie's Angels’ Soars in Debut)

Sept. 22, 1976— Charlie's Angels, the latest product from the factory of TV writer-producer Aaron Spelling, quickly took flight in the Nielsen ratings following its premiere on ABC.

The series, featuring three beautiful women working for an unseen but often heard male owner of a detective agency, only heightened the criticism that Spelling was, according to the highbrow The New Yorker, a “schlock merchant.”

Spelling he laughed all the way to the bank, as his fantasy detective drama began what turned out to be five seasons in prime time.

This current post might not be the kind of elevated fare that longtime readers of this blog might recall from earlier items concerning, for instance, the Metropolitan Opera’s 1966 debut at Lincoln Center, the NY Times Jayson Blair scandal, or the death of landscape painter Thomas Moran.

But the show, even in its earliest incarnation a half-century ago, exerts a tenacious hold, particularly on those of a certain age. Just witness the social-media hoopla surrounding “Angel” Jaclyn Smith’s just-published memoir, and her appearance with former co-star Kate Jackson on The Drew Barrymore Show. 

Beyond that, the story of the show says much about manufacturing and maintaining fame, managing star egos, and an often-unacknowledged adjunct of TV production: attorneys on speed dial to launch or defend against lawsuits resulting from success.

Though Spelling, the most prolific producer in TV history (according to the Guinness Book of World Records) cheerfully acknowledged that his shows represented “mind candy,” this series—which made stars of Smith, Jackson, and Farrah Fawcett—was more like eye candy.

One nickname, more scornful, quickly caught on: “Jiggle TV,” for scenes focusing on its stars’ physical assets. The opening credits, with Smith in a bikini, would hardly be the last time that the show was associated with swimsuits.

In a fortuitous bit of marketing synergy, a poster featuring Fawcett in a red swimsuit went on sale right around the time the show premiered. By March 1977, five million copies were decorating bedrooms and dorms all across the country, making it, according to this 2020 Biography article, the bestselling poster of all time.

A year later, at the height of Farrahmania, an incorrect rumor circulated where I lived in Bergen County, NJ, that the former Texas model with the tousled blond hair was planning to live on the same street as Yankee catcher Thurman Munson in Norwood. The news was enough to lead one teenage guy I knew to vow to camp out overnight to catch sight of her!

Fawcett was careful to appear in a one-piece swimsuit to conceal a childhood scar on her stomach. No such problem existed for later Angel Cheryl Ladd, who, tired of being asked incessantly to wear a bikini on the show, finally came to the set one day with one that left very, very little to the imagination. 

In a 2016 oral history of Spelling in The Hollywood Reporter, the actress recalled, “I got a note from Aaron that said, ‘OK, little rebel, I got the point. And this will never happen again.’ But he didn’t mean I’d never be in a bikini again. It was more like, don’t try that again.”

Externals like clothes and hair absorbed much of Spelling’s attention, as they would for his later nighttime soap operas like Dynasty, Beverly Hills 90210, and Melrose Place. But the success of Charlie’s Angels meant that he would be ensnared, not always successfully, in keeping his stars satisfied. 

After one season, Fawcett quit to pursue other opportunities. Spelling and partner Leonard Goldberg filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit. (The case was settled out of court, with the actress agreeing on six guest appearances before bowing out.)

For her increasing annoyance with the show’s declining script quality, lack of compensation for suggesting the series’ name in the first place, and Spelling’s refusal to adjust her shooting schedule to allow for outside work like the Oscar-winning Kramer vs. Kramer, Jackson went from being nicknamed “The Smart One” among the angelic trio to being tagged “The Difficult One.” To her vast relief, she was gone after Season 3.

Smith would be the only one of the original trio to last all five seasons and 115 episodes of the show. Unlike, say, M*A*S*H or Cheers, where cast changes revitalized the series for the long haul, lineup alterations did not have a similar effect for Charlie’s Angels. Ratings were drooping when everyone decided to call it a day after the fifth season.

Spelling, Goldberg, and ABC executives may have felt particular relief in moving on. In 1979, husband and wife actors Robert Wagner and Natalie Wood, silent investors in the show but not listed as producers, sued Spelling for misappropriation of funds, claiming that he had channeled their money towards another crime show, Starsky and Hutch.

The investigation dragged on for a year, until the L.A. District Attorney’s office announced that there were “insufficient grounds to institute criminal charges.” With that, “Angelgate” was consigned to history, though it involved enduring questions about proving that head-scratching Hollywood bookkeeping represented fraud rather than sloppiness.

(More than two decades later, Wagner was back in court over the angels, this time hoping for a share of the profits from the two Charlie’s Angels feature films. He gained no satisfaction or money from that lawsuit, either.)

Astonishingly, nearly decades after the show went off the air, it was revived as a multi-media franchise, on film (Charlie's Angels, 2000; Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, 2003, and a 2019 reboot), TV again (a short-lived 2011 series and an animated web series), and even a video game.

That subsequent history underscored how much the series confounded its critics.  Its appeal to male viewers was, well, obvious. (Hint: it had nothing to do with plots!) But I was surprised to discover that even among females, the show had its defenders.

In my high school yearbook, for instance, several female classmates listed among their memories “C’s A’s.” It took me a while to surmise that this referred to their time together watching Charlie’s Angels in its original Wednesday night slots.

Drew Barrymore must have felt a similar affinity for the show, as she not only starred in the two film versions of the early aughts but produced them. The appeal of the show for her? Girl Power—a reminder in the new millennium that Sisterhood Is Powerful.

Quote of the Day (Lee Bollinger, on How Authoritarian Threats to Higher Education Developed)

“You would have to go back to the McCarthy period in the 1950s to see something comparable to what’s happening today. For many decades we lived free from government efforts to seize control of universities and suppress criticism and independent thought. And in this time, we forged individualistic identities. We want our students and our faculty to think of themselves as loyal to our particular institution, and at the same time, we’re competing for students and faculty against other schools. So we’ve set up a system in which institutions have individual identities and compete with one another, and this makes us more vulnerable to authoritarian efforts to undermine us.”—Former Columbia University President Lee Bollinger interviewed by Paul Hond, “Defending the Fifth Branch: A Response to Authoritarian Attacks on Universities,” Columbia Magazine, Spring/Summer 2026

With the academic year in full swing now, new threats are sure to develop against America's colleges and universities, even beyond the wide-ranging war aged by the Trump Administration outlined in Cecelia Smith-Schoenwalder's US News article from earlier this month. 

In the face of all of this, Bollinger advocates “the equivalent of a NATO charter, with an Article 5 for universities in the US: If any institution among us is attacked, all of us will come to its defense.”

That may be not just the best way, but the only way to proceed now. Following President Trump’s ban on CNN, Politico and MS NOW, the White House TV pool, which includes CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN and Fox, responded by not covering him last night. (Predictably, the President counterattacked with—what else?—“Trump TV.”)

If the pool’s strategy works, other American institutions—like higher education and prominent law firms—should follow with a similar resort to collective action.

(The image of Lee Bollinger that accompanies this post was taken on Oct. 11, 2007, by Daniella Zalcman.)

TV Quote of the Day (‘Maude,’ Giving a Quick English Usage Lesson to Her Husband)

[Walter Findlay doesn’t like his wife’s new male friend.]

Walter Findlay [played by Bill Macy]: “Maude, we are not having dinner with that guy tonight! I told you, I can't stand him! Guy gets some special pleasure reminding me that I didn't graduate high school. Like last time in front of everybody, giving me that lecture on the difference between 'infer' and 'imply,' as if I didn't know.”

Maude Findlay [played by Bea Arthur]: “Come on now, Walter, he just gets impatient with ninnies who constantly misuse those words.”

Walter: “Are you inferring I'm a ninny?”

Maude: “Of course not, sweetheart. I'm implying you're a ninny; you were inferring.”—Maude, Season 3, Episode 12, “Maude's New Friend,” original air date Dec. 2, 1974, teleplay by Rod Parker and Elliot Shoenman, directed by Hal Cooper

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Fulton J. Sheen, on Christianity’s Journey From Defeat to Victory)

“Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.”— Blessed Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979), Life of Christ (1958)

Technically, Archbishop Sheen will not be beatified until Thursday, Sept.24. But by the time many readers notice this post, the event will have taken place.

In any case, thousands have already taken to heart, during his lifetime or in the nearly half-century since his death, the spiritual lessons of perhaps the greatest mass communicator in the history of American Catholicism.

Quote of the Day (Leo Tolstoy, on the Right Way of Doing Good)

"It's much better to do good in a way that no one knows anything about it." ― Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), Anna Karenina (1877)

Quote of the Day (Annie Dillard, on the Source of Good and Evil)

“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world's rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here. This is given. It is not learned.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American essayist, novelist, and memoirist Annie Dillard (1945-2026), “Total Eclipse,” in Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (1982)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Licorice Pizza,’ As a Sister Fights With a Sibling)

Alana [played by Alana Haim, pictured] [during a fight with her sister]: “Este, don't you even look at me! Don't you even look at me! You're always looking at me!”

Este [played by Este Haim]: “Oh, my...”

Alana: “What are you doing?”

Este: “I didn't even say anything!”

Alana: “What are you doing? What are you thinking, huh? ‘I'm Este. I work for mom and dad. I'm perfect! I'm a real estate agent. Alana doesn't have her life together. Alana brings home stupid boyfriends all the time.’"

Este: “I mean...”

Alana: “I knew it! I knew that was what you were thinking. You're always thinking things, you thinker! You thinker! You think things!”— Licorice Pizza (2021), written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson

Quote of the Day (Aldous Huxley, on ‘The Most Profoundly Important Sociological Factor of Modern Times’)

“The most profoundly important sociological factor of modern times [is] the growth of technology and the technicization of every aspect of human life.” — English novelist/essayist Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), The Human Situation: Lectures at Santa Barbara, 1959 (1977)

This Day in Opera History (The Met Meets Disaster in New Lincoln Center Home)

Sept. 16, 1966—There’s something in the story of Cleopatra that inspires wretched creative excess. Three years after a four-hour blockbuster film starring Elizabeth Taylor broke up two marriages and put Twentieth-Century Fox on the financial brink, the Metropolitan Opera made the ancient Egyptian queen the centerpiece of its inaugural production at its new home in New York’s Lincoln Center.

You’ve probably already guessed that Antony and Cleopatra (whose program appears to the left), composed by Samuel Barber and directed by Franco Zeffirelli, became a legendary fiasco. How could it go so wrong?

The Met’s longtime general manager, Rudolf Bing, had done everything he could to ensure a fail-safe production. He secured the services of Leontyne Price, already an international opera superstar; Justino Diaz, a 26-year-old bass-baritone who, three years before, had become the first Puerto Rican to win the Met’s National Council Auditions; and Thomas Schippers, a charismatic young conductor.

Box-office considerations usually governed Bing’s pronounced predilection for tried-and-true European opera imports. (In fact, in his 22 seasons at the helm of the Met, he commissioned only four new pieces composed by Americans.)

But for the company’s new home, the occasion all but begged for something that would stake out an American claim to greatness. So he turned to Barber, who had won critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize for his 1958 opera at the old Met, Vanessa—and whose neo-romantic scores would not shock or offend the Met’s conservative listeners.

What Barber (increasingly anxious that his operas would make listeners stop talking about his searing Adagio for Strings) had in mind for the new work was something low-key and subdued, according to Sudip Bose’s 2016 retrospective for American Scholar: “an intimate piece highlighting the conflict between politics and passion, a work that reveled, above all, in Shakespeare’s intense and febrile poetry.”

Pairing one Shakespeare admirer with another, Bing hired Zeffirelli, who had won plaudits at the Met with his 1964 production of Verdi’s Falstaff. The Italian’s film versions of The Taming of the Shrew (1967), Romeo and Juliet (1968), and Hamlet (1990) would underscore an affinity with The Bard so strong that he was nicknamed Scespirelli (“Shakespearelli”).

An accomplished director and designer, he thought he could take on the role of librettist for this show, too, weaving the Elizabeth playwright’s blank verse around Barber’s score.

With revolving stages and five underground floors, the Lincoln Center Met was a decided technical improvement over the site it had occupied since 1883 at Broadway and 39th Street—one with so little storage capacity that stagehands had to pull scenery off-stage and store it out on the street.  

Zeffirelli decided to take full advantage of the enhanced new space. As Barber later recalled, “Zeffirelli wanted horses and goats and 200 soldiers, which he got, and he wanted elephants, which fortunately he didn’t get.”

The audience filling the new theater’s 3,850 seats (making it the largest capacity opera house in the world) along with TV watchers who saw news reports and documentary footage beheld a train wreck, including:

*400 principals, choristers, dancers (choreographed by Alvin Ailey) and supernumeraries that often hindered movement onstage;

*missed lighting cues;

*a massive, Egyptian-modeled headdress that even the director admitted was meant to make Ms. Price look like “a giant praying mantis,” and widely derided as unbecoming the voluptuous diva;

*a turntable that broke down just a few days before the premiere, leading to a frantic reconception of the set; and,

*most terrifying, a massive moving pyramid that inexplicably stalled during a dress rehearsal, leaving Ms. Price locked inside—and which still couldn’t be fixed by opening night.

An African-American entertainer at the height of the civil-rights movement, Price was already acutely conscious of her heavy burden in inaugurating the Met’s new venue. “I got fed up with the attitude which I received from the former Met administration [Bing’s] that I had the plum of the century,” she told Stephen E. Rubin in a 1973 New York Times interview.  “That's not true. I had the plum of responsibility.”

It wasn’t Barber (who had given her one of her early great roles in Vanessa) whom she blamed for the chaos on and off stage, nor Schippers, who, by many accounts, kept everything from spinning completely out of control with his brisk leadership of the orchestra. When Bing offered her the lead in her next Met production, Il Trovatore, she successfully insisted that Zeffirelli be removed as designer and director.

Barber had it out with the director sooner. Antony and Cleopatra was not only removed from the Met’s repertory after only seven performances, but when the composer sought to revise the opera in 1975, he turned to his longtime companion, Gian Carlo Menotti, to rework the libretto. By this time, critics, though still not enthusiastic about the opera, showed greater appreciation for Barber’s sonorous score.

In a way, however, it was already too late for the composer. After the catastrophic dress rehearsal at the Met, he vowed to a cousin, “I’m not going to write any more music—I’m through.” It wasn’t entirely true, but his final 15 years were plagued by intensifying alcoholism, depression, and creative blocks.

Quote of the Day (George Eliot, on Youth, ‘The Season of Hope’)

“[Y]outh is the season of hope... only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt... to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final,... because it is new.” — English novelist Mary Ann Evans, a.k.a. George Eliot (1819-1880), Middlemarch (1871) 

Quote of the Day (Ross Macdonald, on ‘The Circuit of Guilty Time’)

“The circuit of guilty time was too much like a snake with its tail in its mouth, consuming itself. If you looked too long, there’d be nothing left of it, or you. We were all guilty. We had to learn to live with it.” ― American-Canadian crime fiction writer Ross Macdonald (1915-1983), The Doomsters (1958)

Quote of the Day (Gillian Tett, on Why Voters Should Pay Attention to the Latest Census News)

“Worrying about the state of America's statistics might not seem that urgent, given all the other explosive political rows swirling in Washington. But voters should pay attention. For at the heart of this story are three key questions: can anyone paint an accurate portrait of what America is today? If so, how should this shape voting processes? And can this data be trusted in an era of manipulation, cyber hacks and artificial intelligence?”— British columnist and editor Gillian Tett, “Who Counts?”, The Financial Times, Aug. 22-23, 2026

Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Miracle of Morgan's Creek,’ As a Lawman Vents Frustration With His Teenage Daughter)

Constable Edmund Kockenlocker [played by William Demarest, center] [to his 14-year-old daughter]: “Listen, Zipper-puss! Someday they're just gonna find your hair ribbon and an axe someplace. Nothing else!”— The Miracle of Morgan's Creek (1943), written and directed by Preston Sturges

Song Lyric of the Day (Paul Simon, on The Lord, ‘My Engineer’)

“The Lord is my engineer
The Lord is the earth I ride on
The Lord is the face in the atmosphere
The path I slip and slide on.”—Grammy winning American singer-songwriter Paul Simon, “The Lord,” in his Seven Psalms CD (2023)

The image of Paul Simon that accompanies this post was taken of him performing live in Mainz, Germany, on July 25, 2008, by Miho.

Photo of the Day: Twilight on NYC and the Hudson River

The other night, at a restaurant near me in Bergen County, NJ, I was given the choice of eating inside or outside. Considering the view just before sunset, as seen in this photo I took then from the Hudson River Walkway in Edgewater, I don’t think my decision to sit with the skyline in view was surprising.

Quote of the Day (Robertson Davies, on the Eye and the Mind)

“The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”—Canadian man of letters Robertson Davies (1913-1995), Tempest-Tost (1951)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,’ on ‘A Man With Ideas’)

J. Pierpont (Ponty) Finch [played by Robert Morse, right]: “Sir, if you had a man with ideas….”

J. B. Biggley [played by Rudy Vallee, left]: “Ideas? That's what I look for. I keep hiring a lot of fellows who are supposed to have brilliant ideas, but not one of them will ever do what I tell him.” — How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (1967), based on the novel by Shepherd Mead, adapted into a Pulitzer and Tony-winning musical with book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, movie written and directed by David Swift