Authors Electric

Alas, poor Yorick! from Hamlet. By Eugène Delacroix - The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php? curid=150167 Now here’s something I never expected.  I knew there had to be a word for a false collective memory of a line in a film or play, famously always slightly misquoted because it sounds right. ‘Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well,’ for instance, instead of what Shakespeare actually made Hamlet say, which was ‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio.’ Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca By Trailer screenshot - Casablanca trailer, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ w/index.php?curid=1757187 Or, ‘Play it again, Sam,’ which feels much more prosaic than the haunting, ‘Play it, Sam, play it,’ from a dewy-eyed Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca .  So anyway, I googled the phenomenon, of course I did, and you’ll never gue...

Smocked Puglia in "20 Million Miles to Earth," 1957 The first time I saw Arturo Toscanini was on a then state-of-the-art, 16-inch, Philco TV set at Frank Puglia's house in Beverly Hills, where my mother and I were regular Sunday guests. It was in the early 1950s. Toscanini was featured on a then-special, coast-to-coast broadcast with a stellar cast, conducting the NBC Symphony Orchestra (specially created for him by the network, now the New York Philharmonic.) performing Giuseppe Verdi's Aida, live from New York. The white-haired, mustachioed, octagenarian maestro electrified viewers even on that a fuzzy black-and-white screen that seemed otherworldly. I was 12 or 13 years old at the time, but knew I was watching history. Besides having been a musical genius who changed the fundamental of the way orchestras had been conducted, Toscanini was a genuine, anti-fascist, World War 2 era hero, a larger-than-life link to great composers of the 19th and early 20th cen...