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The other day, someone posed an interesting question over on the Threads platform: Dear white people, It’s Black History Month. Who made you see us? Who was your first Black celebrity crush? It didn’t take me long to figure out my answer, because it was Donna Summer. What follows is the post I wrote when Donna Summer died. I remember that day very well, and when I learned she was gone, I had to go outside and…well, here’s the post. Donna Summer was my Whitney Houston. I never realized that, until earlier today, when I went outside toward the endDown the rabbit hole….

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John Williams, who turns 94 on Sunday (and I’ll have more to say about him, believe me), is an example of a curious phenomenon: he has been so prolific, and so many of his amazing themes have become part of our popular culture, that I have to remind myself that even I haven’t heard everything he’s written. This is a good example: he scored the movie The Long Goodbye, a noir thriller starring Elliott Gould as private eye Philip Marlowe, in 1973, two years before JAWS and four before Star Wars: A New Hope. This is a live performance of a new version ofDown the rabbit hole….

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Two days ago marked the 270th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart was one of those miraculous artists whose talent eclipsed the perceived limits of human ability. Mozart produced work of effortless profundity, in perfect proportion, in all genres and for nearly every instrument that existed in his time. Not one musical form was not elevated by his having touched it. Mozart stands among the very greatest artists in all of human history…and to think, his life nearly overlapped that of JS Bach and did overlap that of Ludwig van Beethoven. Were I forced to name one favoriteDown the rabbit hole….

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Here’s a movement from a Bach partita for solo violin. But what is a partita? It is simply a suite for solo instrument or voices, usually in several movements. Hey, why should everything have a complex definition? This particular movement, the third from Bach’s Partita No. 3 for solo violin, is pretty well known, and it could be even more well-known across the universe as the centuries pass: this movement is one of the selections on the Voyager record. Cool, huh? Here it is played by Hillary Hahn. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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It’s always amazing to me what random stuff people will suddenly be talking about on social media. The last few days I’ve seen chatter as millennials and GenZers discover “Schoolhouse Rock”, those wonderful animated shorts with memorable songs that taught us things back when we were otherwise watching cartoons on Saturday morning and flooding our bodies with sugary cereal. Ahhh, those were the days. Anyway, this isn’t even the first batch of “Schoolhouse Rock” nostalgia that I can remember! The first wave came in the mid-90s, when Gen X rediscovered all those old cartoons and songs. There was a CDDown the rabbit hole….

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I know I said the other day that I’ve always had difficulty with the music of Claude Debussy, but that doesn’t apply to everything he wrote. There’s a piano miniature of his that I have always loved, called “The Girl with the Flaxen Hair”. Here it is, played by a cello quintet, because hey, why not. Share This PostDown the rabbit hole….

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Watching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade this morning is one of our very rare forays into commercial television each year. We have become such infrequent viewers of commercial television that it’s always something of a shock to us to have to endure all the advertising. We’re always like, “We just watched four minutes of teevee! Now we have to sit through another six minutes of commercials?!” I have to admit that I have mixed feelings about the common practice of using old songs on commercials. On the one hand, it does at times feel a bit…dirty. But on the otherDown the rabbit hole….

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We all have those movies, don’t we? They’re the movies where we’ll be going about our day, doing stuff that we’ve planned out and intended to get done…but then we’ll see that one of those movies is on teevee or something, and that’s that, screw the To Do List, we’re watching that movie again! One of those movies for me is The Hunt for Red October, that wonderful submarine thriller based on the Tom Clancy novel. (I never read that particular Clancy book. I read a couple other ones and honestly, I wasn’t super-impressed beyond an appreciation for his plotting. My drug-of-choice for late-80s-early-90s spy fictionDown the rabbit hole….

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We’ve been rewatching Mad About You lately. Mad About You is a sitcom that aired in the 1990s for seven seasons. It was about the day-to-day life of a young couple in New York City, Paul and Jamie Buchman, played by Paul Reiser* and Helen Hunt. The show tended to be very down-to-earth in its concerns, almost mundane; in a way, Mad About You was better at being a “show about nothing” than Seinfeld was. We loved Mad About You when it first aired. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) discovered it before I did, but it quickly became a bonding thing for us during theDown the rabbit hole….