You Are Here: Home » Smoliar’s Corner!
According to today’s news (in the San Francisco Chronicle, among other places), Saw Wo’s will close tonight. This has been my restaurant-of-choice for lunch ever since I started writing about the recitals in the Noontime Concerts™ series...
While reading David Schiff’s The Ellington Century, I encountered an interesting riff on Othello, presented as part of a discussion of the Duke’s Shakespeare-inspired suite, Such Sweet Thunder. The following passage caught my attention:
Othello...
Yesterday I happened to mention that “Charles Mingus used to be very fussy about receiving respectful attention at a club gig.” Actually, he was very sensitive about being recorded under proper conditions. If this meant “live” recording, then...
Last week it seemed as if BBC News broadcasts had become obsessed with the centennial anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that they had a reporter on the vessel that was going to duplicate the path...
My Examiner.com interests have recently brought my attention to a new book by Luciano Chessa entitled Luigi Russolo, Futurist. Since I know very little about the Italian Futurists, I figured this might be a good way to fill in a gap that might provide...
Yesterday I ran a piece on how the Occupy movement in London has extended its attention to consumerism in the art world. Here in the United States, however, the primary focus of Occupy has been the efforts of the 99% to do something about economic inequality. ...
As a result of a report in the London Telegraph concerning a modest graffiti attack by the Occupy movement on Damien Hirst's “Hymn” sculpture, I found myself reading an article about Hirst prepared by Kester Brewin for The Occupied Times...
One of the more profound insights of Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was the observation that every culture in the cosmos had some variant of the noun phrase “G and T,” the implication being that one could chill out...
Since the Blackhawk, which used to one of the best places to listen to jazz in San Francisco, was just a few blocks down from where I now live, I decided I needed to educate myself a bit about it. There is a nice little article about it on Wikipedia,...