A nightly pause from the news to give the reader/viewer a bit of classic entertainment.
An evening pause: The future, or as I like to say, the coming dark age.
Jane says
I’ve never been in love
I don’t know what it is
Only knows if someone wants her
I want them if they want me
I only know they want me
Hat tip Joseph Griffin.
An evening pause: In honor of what happened today, 48 years ago, when three American astronauts safely landed home on Earth, after walking on the Moon. From the chorus:
Only in America
Dreamin’ in red white and blue
Only in America
Where we dream as big as we want to
We all get a chance
Everybody gets to dance
It will be the American ideas of freedom, individual achievement, and capitalism that will make the settlement of the solar system possible. Other nations will participate, but it will still be these ideas that fuel the journey.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: We started the week with some fast piano playing. Let’s do it again.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An evening pause: A very simple song. But then, sometimes simplicity is the most beautiful.
Hat tip Kyle Kooy.
An evening pause: In this case the word “minute” does not refer to time. It is pronounced “my-nute,” and refers to the piece’s small-size, delicacy, and fast-paced shortness.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An evening pause: Two minutes of simple unblemished cuteness, to cheer us all up.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: I think the chorus here describes our entire intellectual society today.
What are words for when no one listens anymore
What are words for when no one listens
What are words for when no one listens it’s no use talkin at all
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: From one of the best films ever made, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). As I wrote about it at the time for a comic book fan group, it recognizes that there is good and evil, and that there is something in the universe that casts judgement on each. Such concepts had and continue to be largely rejected by modern intellectualism, at our peril.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An evening pause: Hat tip Jim Mallamace, who noted that this is “a song about getting arrested for marijuana possession and being given a prison number in the late 60’s.” Jim also added, “The song is meaningful to me because at the end of 2011, I couldn’t imagine the country would re-elect a failed president with a legacy of disastrous economic, domestic, and foreign policies. I thought Mr. Obama would lose by 54 to 46. When he went on to win his second term, 54-46 felt like our prison number for the next 4 years.”
An evening pause: It is quite surprising how this process is still almost entirely done by hand.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
I sure could use more engineering type evening pause suggestions like this. You all like them, so you must know how to find them. If you have a suggestion, let me know in a comment here. Don’t give the link, I will email you for it.
A evening pause: From the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988), and sung by Amy Irvine.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
An evening pause: This clip includes the scene that leads up to the song, and helps explain its dramatic context.
To be honest, this has never been one of my favorite Rodgers & Hammerstein songs. The musical, South Pacific, is magnificent, and has been featured before as an evening pause, but this song to me always seemed a bit preachy. It was written in the 1950s, however, and thus for its time was, as was the musical, important components of the civil rights movement that ended the bigoted discrimination against blacks in the United States.
I should add that as a child who loved this musical when I first heard and saw it in the early 1960s, I never understood what Nellie’s problem was. Why did it matter that the kids’ mother had been Polynesian?
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
An evening pause: I posted this last year for the Fourth of July. It is worth watching again, and again, and again. From the 1976 movie version of the 1972 musical, 1776. As I said last year, not only did the musical capture the essence of the men who made independency happen, it is also a rollicking and entertaining work of art.
An evening pause: From the Broadway musical Annie Get Your Gun. In January 2001, McEntire, a well known country singer, made her Broadway debut in the 2000 revival of the musical that was opened originally with Bernedette Peters in the role. McEntire was an instant sensation, performing the role on Broadway for eighteen months. In many ways this role made her, as it showed she could do far more than sing, and was in fact a very skilled comedic actor.
This clip, shot by an audience member, does a remarkable job of capturing part of one of those performances.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
An evening pause: From a very amusing 1967 Batman television episode, with the evil arch villain Catwoman, played by Julie Newmar. Lesley Gore’s lip-syncing isn’t the best, but the overall silliness of the scene, as well and the entire show, makes it is worth watching. The song is nice too. Unfortunately, I can’t find the whole episode, but this search on youtube finds a host of scenes from that classic of campy 1960s television.
Hat tip Diane Zimmerman.
An evening pause: I’ve posted this song previously, performed by writer Brubeck and his quartet. This Pakistani version is definitely worth its own viewing, however, as it uses some very different instruments to make it happen.
Hat tip Tom Wright.
An evening pause: The history of this band (which I hadn’t known until I began putting this post together) is very interesting, as it mirrors the overall cultural disaster of the 1960s. The finale is especially depressing:
Marc Bolan and his girlfriend Gloria Jones spent the evening of 15 September 1977 drinking at the Speakeasy and then dining at Morton’s club on Berkeley Square, in Mayfair, Central London. While driving home early in the morning of 16 September, Jones crashed Bolan’s purple Mini 1275GT into a tree (now the site of Bolan’s Rock Shrine), after failing to negotiate a small humpback bridge near Gipsy Lane on Queens Ride, Barnes, southwest London, a few miles from his home at 142 Upper Richmond Road West in East Sheen. While Jones was severely injured, Bolan was killed in the crash, two weeks before his 30th birthday.
Bolan’s death ended the band. Steve Peregrin Took died from asphyxiation from a cocktail cherry after his throat was numbed from his use of morphine and magic mushrooms in 1980, Steve Currie also died in a car crash, in 1981; Mickey Finn succumbed to illness in 2003. Peter ‘Dino’ Dines died of a heart attack in 2004.
Regardless, they created good music, for a short time.
Hat tip Jim Mallamace.
