Welcome to another clip of Leonard Bernstein in conflict with his orchestral players. This time, during a rehearsal of Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’, he rubs one of the three trumpet players the wrong way when imitating they’re playing in order to describe what he doesn’t like. His imitation is a bit
Last Friday I posted a short clip of Leonard Bernstein calling out a student conductor. This of course led YouTube to generate a number of Lenny B. arguments with orchestra personnel all of which are quite delightful (and short). Here’s Lenny tussling with alto Krista Ludwig during a rehearsal for
I saw the superb Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim’s ‘Merrily We Roll Along’ this past Sunday which of course led to a deep Stephen dive on YouTube. Of primary importance in the canon of filmed Stephen stuff is D.A. Pennebaker’s remarkable documentation of the marathon recording session of the original
Enjoy a condensed day/evening in the Berlin of 1927, featuring some awfully well-dressed Menschen, lovely streets and shops, a fine looking Neutrum for luncheon and an evening at a Nachtclub that may well have featured Anita Berber (our subject of Monday’s post which has kicked off this weeks interest in
Behold Anita Berber, a dancer/actress/performer/scandalous provocateuer of the late teens/1920s German cultural landscape. Berber was daring, mad, wildly admired and reviled and died young in 1929 of multiple drug addictions and a general exhaustion of excessive existence. Little of her film work is extant but the above video features two
Dig this nifty mini-doc (27 packed minutes) that is not about Raymond Chandler per se. It’s about the corrupt doings of Los Angeles in the 1930s and how they inspired and impacted what Chandler wrote about as his mid-life career as a writer was launched (he’d been an executive at
See that top video of New York City in 1956? See the video below it of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier Book 2? Roll them both simultaneously (the NYC footage has no sound) and spend a few minutes of your Friday taking a poignant time travel trip to a New York
On November 9, 1965, shortly after 5PM, New York City began experiencing the ominous signs of an impending blackout due to a gradual loss of available electricity. The cause of the failure was the setting of a protective relay on one of the transmission lines near Niagara Falls. The safety
Here is a most peculiar piece of footage (and short–only 28 seconds) showing a garden party at Francis Ford Coppola’s Napa Vally home sometime in the mid 1970s. We see Francis quaffing white wine in a plastic cup, George Lucas picking his teeth, Dennis Hopper bedecked in cowboy duds and
To finish off this weeks Marilyn M. expedition, let’s view this very short but very interesting clip of film from the abortive ‘Somethings Got To Give’ shoot. It’s a brief moment just after the shot’s been slated but before Cukor has said ‘action’ (or ‘camera’ as was his habit) in