An evening pause: R.I.P. Davy Jones. This reunion performance, which included Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz, and Peter Tork of the Monkees, occurred on June 16, 2011 at the Beacon Theater, New York City. Less than a year later, Davy Jones had passed away.
Though the audio isn’t great, the joy of the song and those singing it comes through loud and clear. Go here to hear the song as performed in 1967.
An evening pause: The finale of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Just before the song begins, Candide says this:
We will not think noble, because we are not noble. We will not live in perfect harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We can only promise to do our best, and to live out our lives. Dear God, that is all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.
R.I.P. Davy Jones, 66, of the Monkees has died.
Oops! A cannonball fired during a Mythbusters stunt went off course, bouncing through two walls of a nearby home and then crashing through the window of a minivan.
India’s satellite television channels are facing blackouts due to the unreliability of an aging satellite.
An evening pause: In honor of Shakespeare’s 400th birthday in 1964, the Beatles performed this short excerpt from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How else could you see John Lennon dressed as a girl?
An evening pause: From 1965, the Top of the Pops show. I’ve always liked this song, “Ferry Cross the Mersey,” but it is also fun to watch early television, with the band attempting to simulate playing to the original recording, while the kids on the dance fall make believe they’re dancing as they repeatedly sneak peaks at the cameras.
An evening pause: The video is a bit too darkly lit, but the chemistry of the audience with Neil Diamond’s singing is enthralling. “Today!”
An evening pause: This March 22, 1952 television performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony from Carnegie Hall by the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, was probably the most remembered by the generation of our parents. I show the second movement, because it happens to be my favorite. Listen as the opening theme returns several times during the piece, only changing the last time into something even more beautiful.
Watching Toscanini as he conducts is fascinating as well.
An evening pause: William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Stolen Child, set to song.
Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breat,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal-chest.For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
From a world more full of weeping
than he can understand.
An evening pause: Walking on water. As the youtube website explained, “They filled a pool with a mix of cornstarch and water made on a concrete mixer truck. It becomes a non-newtonian fluid. When stress is applied to the liquid it exhibits properties of a solid.”
An evening pause: I dare anyone to watch these guys perform this song and still claim that rock stars aren’t talented musicians.
