Manzarek grew up in Chicago, then moved to Los Angeles in 1962 to study film at UCLA. It was there he first met Doors singer Jim Morrison, though they didn’t talk about forming a band until they bumped into each other on a beach in Venice, California in the summer of 1965 and Morrison told Manzarek that he had been working on some music. “And there it was!” Manzarek wrote in his 1998 biography, Light My Fire. “It dropped quite simply, quite innocently from his lips, but it changed our collective destinies.”
Ray Manzarek
Ray Manzarek pays tribute to Jim Morrison and realizes his own filmmaking dreams with ‘Love Her Madly’
“I had a class with Joseph von Sternberg at UCLA, which changed my life, if not my attitude towards women, which has always been lustfully wonderfully beautiful, but in terms of style,” he says.
The influential jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd died on Monday at the age of 80, his nephew has said.
Byrd is best known as one of the only bebop jazz musicians who successfully pioneered the funk and soul genres while simultaneously remaining a pop artist.
The film consists of voice interviews between Schell and Dietrich in which she often ignores his questions, makes acerbic comments about, among other things, some of the people she has worked with and some of the books written about her life and films. In the process, she touches on the subjects of life and death, reality and illusion and the nature of stardom. By her very reluctance to reveal much about herself, she gives one a much deeper understanding of her character than if she had participated in a more conventional format.
Happy birthday Maximillian Schell (He is a godparent to Angelina Jolie. He was great in Julia and Little Odessa)
In 1975, when Saul Bellow’s novel, Humboldt’s Gift, was published by Viking, Karyl Roosevelt stated that the protagonist Humboldt was “a thinly disguised portrait of the late poet Delmore Schwartz, with whom Bellow had a complex friendship in real life.”
The Mind Is an Ancient and Famous Capital
By Delmore Schwartz
The mind is a city like London,
Smoky and populous: it is a capital
Like Rome, ruined and eternal,
Marked by the monuments which no one
Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains
Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,
Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.
The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins
Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.
“Call us what you will: we are made such by love.”
We are such studs as dreams are made on, and
Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,
Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping
All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,
Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.
Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,
After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,
Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which
Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when
Will the houselights of the universe
Light up and blaze?
For it is not the sea
Which murmurs in a shell,
And it is not only heart, at harp o’clock,
It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable
Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread
Toward Arcturus—and returning as suddenly…
Couperin acknowledged his debt to the Italian composer Corelli.
His most famous book, L’art de toucher le clavecin (“The Art of Harpsichord Playing”, published in 1716), contains suggestions for fingerings, touch, ornamentation and other features of keyboard technique.
Listening to The Rite of Spring changed his life. (via) Igor Stravinsky and Elliot Carter
Elliot Carter Remembered : Music seemed to erupt from his very being’
Daniel Barenboim
He had the most extraordinary memory. He remembered what happened last week, last year, and 90 years ago. In fact, when he was in his 90s, I performed his music in Chicago. He told me about his first visit to Berlin when he was 14, in 1922. He said he’d heard the last concerts conducted by Arthur Nikisch at the Berlin Philharmonic before Furtwängler took over – and he told me what he’d heard! I must say, I was a little suspicious and had the concert programmes checked. He was absolutely right.
Gould’s 1957 trip to the Soviet Union, when he became, at age 24, the first North American to perform behind the Iron Curtain
(Direct link)
Describing Gould’s 1957 tour of the Soviet Union, Russian conductor and pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy recalled: “He was unbelievable… deliberately playing certain music not often heard in the Soviet Union. The [concert] hall was half empty. [Gradually] people started going to the telephones…. By the second half, the hall was filled. It was like a Martian coming to earth. In Leningrad, [they] ignored fire regulations and allowed 1,100 standees. If anyone fainted, there was nowhere to fall. They listened as if their lives depended on it.” ( A Life of Music and Love)
Glenn Herbert Gould (September 25, 1932 – October 4, 1982)
Glenn in Love?
The enigma
“I think there were a lot of misconceptions about Glenn and it was partly because he was so very private. But I assure you, he was an extremely heterosexual man. Our relationship was, among other things, quite sexual.”
(Cornelia Foss ) Inner Life of Glenn Gould (Youtube documentary)
Louis Armstrong was born in a poor section of New Orleans known as “the Battlefield” on August 4, 1901.
By the time of his death in 1971, the man known around the world as Satchmo was widely recognized as a founding father of jazz—a uniquely American art form. His influence, as an artist and cultural icon, is universal, unmatched, and very much alive today.
Louis Armstrong’s achievements are remarkable. During his career, he:
developed a way of playing jazz, as an instrumentalist and a vocalist, which has had an impact on all musicians to follow;
recorded hit songs for five decades, and his music is still heard today on television and radio and in films;
wrote two autobiographies, more than ten magazine articles, hundreds of pages of memoirs, and thousands of letters;
appeared in more than thirty films (over twenty were full-length features) as a gifted actor with superb comic timing and an unabashed joy of life;
composed dozens of songs that have become jazz standards;
performed an average of 300 concerts each year, with his frequent tours to all parts of the world earning him the nickname “Ambassador Satch,” and became one of the first great celebrities of the twentieth century.
and Leonard Cohen
