The Eastside View

Saturday May 8: Herculaneum, we call it in English; I don't know why. Since Fran had been to Pompeii two or three times we decided to sk...

In the next few weeks this site will become a travel journal, if you don't mind — notes more or less chronological, otherwise random. Fo...

Madrid— M IKHAIL M IKHAJLOVITCH I PPOLITOV- I VANOV is one of those "minor" composers known for only one piece, the colorful Cau...

Y OU CAN DRIVE from Los Angeles — well, Glendale, next thing — to Berkeley in nine hours and still take in the Carrizo Plain. I shouldn...

Glendale, April 25— A FINE CLOSE TO a fine season tonight at A Noise Within: John Millicent Synge's The Playboy of the Western World i...

Glendale, April 24— A FEW YEARS BACK our friends Jim and Lisa told us about a curious place down here in Los Angles, the Museum of Jurassic ...

Glendale, April 23— For our second night of theater here Noise Within gave us a stunning performance of Clifford Odets's Depression-era ...

Glendale, April 23— We're in Glendale to see the spring season of A Noise Within , the Equity repertory company we've subscribed to ...

T AKING A BREAK from reading about Sicily, on Lindsey's advice, I've just read two books touching on World War II, a subject that...

W E'VE SEEN M OLIERE'S classic Tartuffe four times in five years now, and what I wrote about it the last time, nearly three years ...

A FRIEND WHO'S INVOLVED with opera called the other day, asking if I planned to go to Berkeley Opera that week. No, I said, I didn...

J UST A QUICK NOTE to recall Francis Ponge , the great French poet and homme des lettres . In the mail today a letter from an assistant to ...

O N THE ROAD: P ORTLAND . A couple of days ago I bought an iPad, thinking it would be the answer to writing, even blogging, while on the roa...

Ashland, Oregon, April 1— T WO NEW PLAYS , seen last night and tonight, bring our spring visit to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to its clo...

Ashland, Oregon, March 31— WHAT TO SAY about last night's production here of Hamlet ? First, if you don't want to see it unprejudice...

Ashland, Oregon, March 29— W E SAW T ENNESSEE W ILLIAMS 's Cat on a Hot Tin Roof here yesterday: a fine, complex, noble play; in a res...

Berkeley, March 26— Do not ask the following to be a true account of the facts concerning tonight's performance of Nearly Ninety , by th...

Excellenz von Schubert Y ES , V OLTAIRE . It's from the close of Candide — now where did I put that book? — describing the moment when...

I read this morning of the death of Wanda Tomczykowska , whom I met briefly in the 1060s. At the time I was working as music director at rad...

THERE ARE PLACES we have visited on various travels that have seemed very special, from a "medicine wheel" at 10,000 feet in Wyomi...