Miles Davis Showed Us How Taking Risks Was Cool
It takes self-assurance to throw yourself or your plans away in the belief there is no wrong path, only other opportunities to exercise mastery. It is not a game without risk.
Arts & Letters
Why the Clothes of My Past Stay Closeted
The idea of resurrecting clothes of my youth half a century later, redeeming the hot sting of embarrassment with carefully chosen accessories, intrigued me. Until I remembered what I would be resurrecting.
The Fragile Pleasures of a Road Trip
For better and worse, travel has an emotional component. We see better when we do it, until fatigue and familiarity roll in like fog.
How Did an Estonian Violinist End up in St. Louis’s Concordia Cemetery?
Her early life was a blur, with all those moves—fleeing to safety, getting bombed, getting evacuated, being forced to Berlin, touring, Paris, New York. Her music was the home she carried with her.
Mozart Would Wince at Our Loud Pianos
Today’s pianist, Daniel Adam Maltz, is performing not on a big glossy piano but on the instrument Mozart wrote for: the elegant little Viennese fortepiano.
Abracadabra! The Magic of Words
We forget to ask what our own words are bringing into existence.
Inarticulate Jann Wenner Dislikes Inarticulate Blacks and Women
Alas, it is not the music that is the relic but Wenner himself.
Monk on the Run
“Monk on the Run” is shaped the way Warren Rosen has lived his life: moment to moment, choosing freedom over convention, scorning practicality, following impulses. Lots of digressions, in other words, and prose that is not always linear or logical but stays vivid, a paintbox spattered with bright personalities.“
Strange Fle$h
Joe was grieving his friend as he wrote “Strange Fle$h,” and when he finished the book, his new pseudonym was obvious. Joe West would be a stronger name—the short, plain, masculine sound of it, and the connection to Thom.As an author, though, Joe West is stronger because he is also Joe Schwartz.
Moving Along Through Time
I had been thinking about how long I had wanted to see the Connecticut coast, where my Griswold ancestors—the middle portion of an unbroken line of fathers and sons going back to the year 1200—first arrived in the Americas, but I was not planning to visit on this trip. It felt like a missed opportunity, but the drive was already long, and, besides, I knew my end of the story.