John Adams
David McCullough in conversation with Kenneth Whyte
On presidents who were failures, the trouble with historians, and how to tell a story
Music: Break, blow, burn and make me new
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBmbtr5Uw7I
Where have you gone, Rutherford B. Hayes?
The President gets to play rock star once a year with the Vice-President and the Speaker of the House as his rhythm section
Read a book with Jim Flaherty
The Princeton-educated Finance Minister enjoys fancy book-learning. Seems possibly to be projecting.
Liveblog: Golden Globe Dust
Kate Winslet and Slumdog Millionaire are the night’s big winners
Music: “…bend Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new”
The centrepiece of John Adams’ mighty opera Doctor Atomic: On the night before the Trinity bomb test at Los Alamos, Robert Oppenheimer offers up his fate to the “three-person’d God” — the Trinity. Poem by John Donne (text here); music by John Adams; from the Metropolitan Opera production now underway. Sound file courtesy of that noted MacArthur fellow, Alex Ross. My 2005 profile of the baritone, Ottawa’s own Gerald Finley, is, sadly, nowhere to be found online happily, right here.
What’s wrong with a withered hand
And now, for your weekend listening and viewing pleasure, we combine the twin arts of 20th-century orchestral composition with found audio and Lego people: