Sleeping Muse and Falling Rocket

So, wait a minute... before David Coverdale broke out as the lead singer of Whitesnake, he took over as lead from Ian Gillan in Deep Purple? I'd always thought he was a pretty boy with a leather larynx. I didn't think of him as having real Metal chops. How'd I miss that?

Art history and gallery politics by the brilliant and long missed Thomas Hoving.

   The other day, I was chatting about Shakespeare and Auden. A  colleague, thinking me pretentious, asked what my thoughts were about Ozzy Osborne. I responded by quoting from Crazy Train. I'll see your 'pretentious' and raise you a pompous humble-brag!

My daughter is at her first Homecoming football game! At last, all of those hours sitting with her father watching football will pay off.   All of those esoteric rules I taught her, like the Rule of Three, the Golden Rule, the Rule of Thumb, Ann Rule, the rules of capitalization, the rule of inference, the long forgotten Rule of Law, the literary rule of three, The Forty Rules of Love, the Rule of St. Benedict, Ja Rule, The Rules of the Game, and the Oxford Comma. Patterns she'll see on the field (or the pitch or the court or the table or whatever they choose to call it this time). Patterns like the Sonnet Form, the Sonata Form, parallel fifths, the Middle Eight. The Golden Mean, The Golden Ratio, the Kepler Triangle and the Sublime Triangle. Rabattement. Play ball!

I think Fred Armisen would be a wonderful Cyrano.

Depeche Mode, Yazoo, The Assembly, Erasure... Just Can't Get Enough, Don't Go, Nobody's Diary, Only You, Situation, Chains of Love, Always, Sometimes, A Little Respect,  Like him or not, he's a monster song writer and belongs in a Hall of Fame.