The Eastside View

T WO CONCERTS HEARD last Saturday in the Frank Gehry-designed Disney Hall, the home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, have given me much to t...

W E DO LIKE TO GO to the theater, Lindsey and I. We see all the plays in Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival ; we see nearly all the...

I'M THINKING ALOUD, or rather my fingers are, mulling over what on earth I'm going to say for half an hour this evening about my Duc...

HERE WE ARE again, revisiting old work instead of doing new work. I think it's one of the great drawbacks of technological improvements:...

I WROTE ABOUT last Saturday's Futurist Banquet over at Eating Every Day , but find I have more to say about it; and comments more gene...

A MONG THE BLOGS I follow, using Google Reader, one of my favorites — once past the truly wonderful blogs my daughter and granddaughters ma...

T HE TIMES ARE NOT good. The nice Greengrocer in the nearby town of Windsor is closing at the end of the month. It was too good to make it...

I think there's something to be said for the idea that Modernism stands at the beginning of the third of three great ages of human exist...

J UST FOR THE hell of it, and because Marcel Duchamp's final work Given: 1st the waterfall; 2nd the illuminating gas is in the news th...

In 1971 I wrote a piece of music called Handler of Gravity as the centerpiece of a concert of instrumental music from an opera, then in pro...

Kate Walbert: A Short History of Women . New York: Scribner, 2009 A novel about five generations of women, from Dorothy Trevor (married name...

MICHAEL STEINBERG 1929-2009 Michael Steinberg, music critic and musicologist, died yesterday, peacefully a mutual friend tells me, in hospic...

I T IS VERY SAD to hear about the death of Merce Cunningham, surely one of the most remarkable men I ever had the pleasure to meet. What I ...

Portland, July 10— I DON'T KNOW WHEN I've enjoyed meeting a new writer so much. Novella Carpenter's book Farm City is a compl...

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, June 25, 2009— N EARLY THREE YEARS AGO I wrote here about a production of Jean Racine's magnificent traged...

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, June 25, 2009— F OR A NUMBER OF YEARS now I've been enjoying (inadequate word, that) the painting of the Oak...

T HE MODERN THEATER BEGINS with Chekhov, say I. By Modern Theater I mean theater that primarily addresses the modern condition, which puts ...

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, May 5— A ND WHAT OF the last of the three plays we saw over the weekend in Glendale? Well, treated reasonably de...

Glendale, May 3— I 'VE BEEN THINKING all day about last night's play, The Rehearsal , translated from Jean Anouilh's La Répéti...