Words and Music

Guest Blogger Dept. : Let’s welcome Don Marquis to these pages. Best known for the free-verse, lower-case writings of the reincarnated cockr...

From the Food Vault Dept .: Ten years ago, my wife and daughter and I treated ourselves to a post-Labor Day getaway to the mountains of Verm...

Photo by B. A. Nilsson

WHY DID MARFA SOBAKINA SICKEN AND DIE immediately after her wedding to Ivan the Terrible?  Scholars speculate that it was the result of a fe...

SASHA MARGOLIS IS A VERSATILE VIOLINIST, an accomplished actor, a witty novelist – but at heart he’s a tummler. He wants you to enjoy yourse...

DUTCH SCHULTZ IS SUPPOSED TO HAVE buried his $5 million fortune in the Catskill woods; his delirious deathbed confession has sent countless ...

Guest Blogger Dept. : George Ade was a best-selling author in his day, and his legacy persists among those who honor the encomia paid the Ch...

From the Computer Vault Dept. : Again, from the pile of magazines that recently turned up, a piece I wrote in 1994 about the variety of port...

From the Computer Vault: Back before the Flood, computerists had to call one another to share files and such, and an enterprising techie wi...

From the Food Vault: The expected life of a restaurant is, sadly, brief. Unless it’s a chain with endless advertising money behind it, able...

From the Classical Vault Dept. : Eight years ago, the avant-garde quartet Brooklyn Rider snuck into Schenectady to inflict its adventurous p...

Guest Blogger Dept. : There’s no question in my mind that Henry Livingston wrote “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” the poem we incorrectly title...

I FINALLY GOT AROUND to digitizing those remaining records that seemed worth having and which lacked affordable (or any) CD replacement. Not...

“WEST SIDE STORY” SHOWS ITS AGE in many ways. Language that seemed hip 60 years ago has been replaced by terms even more evanescent. What se...

AS THE POLITICAL FUTURE of the United States grows bleaker – with its corresponding drag on the future of everyone everywhere – it’s more im...

ROSSINI’S “THE BARBER OF SEVILLE” is so iconic that you can’t help but collect recordings of it, and I’m most interested in hearing how Figa...

OPERA SARATOGA ISN’T AFRAID of making statements. In 2015, Jeremy Howard Beck’s “The Long Walk” told the true story of Iraq veteran Brian Ca...

ALTHOUGH RUDOLF TESNOHLÍDEK’S NOVEL about a resourceful, willful fox was presented as a comedy when serialized (with drawings) in 1920, comp...

Guest Blogger Dept. : As the 20th century began, Mark Twain suffered the deaths of his daughter and his wife, and seemed to owe money to eve...

BY THE TIME Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released, we were but one year shy of Neil Armstrong’s moon walk. Even as Cold War...