There's a new 30 minute Wallace and Grommit short coming! (HT: More Than 95 Theses)

My eldest, is a serious bassoonist and offers some helpful tips, from a musician's pov on what audience members should and should not do during an orchestra concert.

In my limited experience as a performer over the years, I've come to notice that audiences are VERY supportive of any kind of musical activity, even if they have no musical back-ground themselves. To those people I would like to give a big-warm thank you! Without people like you, musicians would die off, and disappear from existence.

Though, without being too persnickety or picky, and I don't really know how to put this, but sometimes I feel that the great support that musicians feel, isn't sometimes misdirected? ...more

There is a new edition of Jack Keruoac's Road novels forthcoming that has been attracting attention in the pages of the New Yorker. Louis Menand has a fascinating account of Kerouac and "the beats." They weren't what you might think and, as it turns out, the there are Christian themes in Kerouac. So he's not Bob Denver after all? Cool, man, cool. Warning: This essay contains adult themes.

Diana West has a new book out that looks fascinating. There's an interview at Vent that introduces the book. Warning: There is reference made to an episode in which the pop singer Bono used an ancient Anglo-Saxon participle that begins with the sixth letter of the alphabet.

A
On the air at KGRL (Bend, OR) in 1981s a child I grew up with an AM radio in my ear. I fell asleep listening to the local top-40 station ("the mighty 1290 KOIL").  In another life I played records for a living. I played everything from polka to big band to beautiful music to CCM to pop to country. The one thing I never got to play good old fashioned rock and roll -- though the first time I was ever consigned to perdition by a fundamentalist
KBHL Lincoln "New Life 95" in 1980(who, I'm sure was only interested in the state of my soul) it was for playing "God Gave Rock and Roll" with "A Little Rock and Roll Never Hurt a Single Soul" back to back.

Of the early rock and rollers one of my favorites is Antoine "Fats" Domino. A life-long resident of New Orleans' Ninth Ward, he lost his house in Hurricane Katrina. I'm sitting here editing a typescript and listening to Fats. I remembered that he had gone missing for a few days so I checked Google News to see how he's dong and found this touching USA Today story. His life is a remarkable story. Arguably, he made the first rock and record ever. With Chicago bluesman Muddy Waters his pioneering work made it possible for white musicians to make obscene amounts of money covering his records. Judging by the picture, Fats got ripped off. While white musicians stayed in first class accommodations (sometimes) Fats lived on the other side of the color barrier. He stayed in dingy rooms. Then there was the humiliation of looking for a "colored" restroom. Can you imagine some moron telling Fats Domino, "Colored can't stay here." Fats Domino? The only person who sold more records, in his day, was Elvis.

Be sure to read the story all the way to the end. God bless Fats Domino.