music | The Smart Set

My Cousin Lenny

Paula Marantz Cohen — Thu, 07 Mar 2024 12:30:00 +0000

With the debut of the Bradley Cooper movie, Maestro, we were reminded of writer Paula Marantz Cohen’s testimonial to the inimitable Leonard Bernstein some years back. She and Cooper, though a generation apart and from different backgrounds, were both fascinated by Lenny. Here’s her take from 2017. For our third piece in our Oscar series, […]

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August and Everything After

Michael James — Mon, 02 Oct 2023 11:30:00 +0000

It’s the natural way of things, that some works of art are remembered, some revived, some forgotten. Nirvana has had a revival among Gen Zs, or at least Nirvana T-shirts. Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains, far less so. So far, it seems to me, August and Everything After, the 1993 debut album by the […]

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My Sister’s Bookshelf

Chris Orlet — Mon, 14 Aug 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Throughout the long-gone days of my childhood a thick, worn paperback sat on top of the lid of the tank of our upstairs toilet. Wilt, a biography of Wilt Chamberlain, the Hall of Fame center for the Los Angeles Lakers. My father had checked out the book on the only trip he ever took as […]

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Arthur Alexander and the Art of Listening

Colin Fleming — Mon, 31 Jul 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Have you ever learned about a set of recordings and thought, “I would like to love those?” There’s an embedded knowledge you pick up on — a kind of reader’s contact high — that the recordings would match well with who you are, who you wish to be, how you’d like to think of yourself. […]

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Curious Listening

Cameron Carr — Mon, 26 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

There’s a familiar refrain from an older generation speaking to a younger one: Why isn’t there any good music these days? It’s often posed like that, as a question, and accompanied by an insincere request for the younger to show the older something good. I can expect to hear it every holiday when I hop […]

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“Children (and Geniuses)”

Sarah Day-O'Connell — Thu, 22 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

Lucy has never been able to make Schroeder love her. But she has a fail-safe method to arouse his passion: impugning his beloved Beethoven. PEANUTS © 1959 Peanuts Worldwide LLC. Dist. By ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. The Peanuts world is a child’s world, inhabited exclusively by children (and a dog). […]

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[See:] Weed [Read:] Control

Gabriela Denise Frank — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

12. Like perfection or success, weeds are ideals, not units of measure. [See: every artist whose work was appreciated after they were dead. 13. Which is to say artists are opportunistic entrepreneurs searching for nooks and crannies to shelter their idea-seeds, knowing the right conditions will spur internal rupture: the hull cracks, the organism unfurls […]

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On Saudade

Alex Viviano — Thu, 01 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

“Saudade, saudade. Nothing more that I can say says it in a better way.” The artist Maro sang these lyrics while representing Portugal in the annual Eurovision song contest in 2022. These lyrics in particular acknowledge the difficulty of making a concept with a high degree of cultural connotations from the artist’s home country accessible […]

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Wreaths and Reyez

Labeja Kodua Okullu — Thu, 30 Mar 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I am obsessed with wreaths. Of all kinds. The ones that garland graves and coffins, the ones that hang on doors throughout Christmas. I love the white rose-studded wreaths hanging over the altar in between a couple sharing vows. I love the thistles and burnished brown leaves tied to make autumn wreaths. I love the […]

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John Coast

Scott Anthony — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 11:25:00 +0000

The transformations in John Coast’s life are bewildering to comprehend. There is not a chapter of Coast’s life that was anything less than extraordinary. Even in its bare bones, Coast’s life reads like a modernist experiment in biography. Something like a cut-and-paste collage of some of the twentieth century’s most extreme episodes. An assault on […]

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