Tag: Entertainment
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New York Pays About $7,000,000 Yearly For Its Music
The New York Times runs some numbers. They figure out how much money is spent each year on organ grinders, restaurant musicians, philharmonic performers, pianolas, sheet music, opera singers, piano teachers, phonographs, and every other form of music they can think of. They come up with a total just shy of $7,000,000 and wonder if […]
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“Americans Have An Incapacity For Leisure,” Says Percival Chubb
“Americans, young and old, rich and poor, have an incapacity for leisure. They know how to kill time, but they don’t know how to spend it profitably; they don’t know what fruitful leisure is. I don’t think much can be done for the elder generation. The only hope is in the proper education of the […]
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Wind In The Moving Pictures
Apparently, there was a lot of wind in early movies. Why were they all so windy? The question is asked by almost every one who has been bitten by the bug of the moving picture show. It is a fact that in every scene where there’s half a chance of getting up a breeze it […]
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Gives Up Royalties On Great Telephone Invention
Major George Owen Squier gave the world a gift with one invention, and a decade later invented a technology which would become the butt of jokes. First, he invented the multiplex telephone. That’s the technology which allows several conversations to be carried simultaneously on the same wire without crossover. Instead of profiting from this invention, […]
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Possibilities In Mahler Symphony
When I saw the Philadelphia Philharmonic Orchestra perform Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at Carnegie Hall in 2008, there were 335 performers on stage, including a chorus of 205 people. It was pretty impressive. But that was nothing compared to the symphony’s premiere. Mahler’s Eighth is sometimes called the Symphony of a Thousand and it turns out […]
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The Passing Of The Once Popular Sideshow Freak
The phenomenon of the sideshow freak is one of the most fascinating bits of popular culture history I can think of. On the one hand, forgetting for a moment that these are actual people with feelings to consider, there is just the natural curiosity about the different shapes and sizes people come in, and the […]
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A Man Who Has To Read 10,000 Jokes A Month
In the 1920s, Franklin Pierce Adams was a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table. He made his name as a columnist for various newspapers where, under the simple byline F. P. A., he wrote humorous jokes and poems, often lampooning popular verse of the period. In the 1930s, he named his column “The Conning […]
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Living Stage Folk Who Knew And Cheered Lincoln
On President Lincoln’s 102nd birthday, the Magazine found some of the actors whom he had befriended, and sought their recollections of the President. Here is Teresa Carreño‘s story of meeting the President when she was just nine years old: “I was a capricious little minx,” she said in relating the episode, “not a day older […]
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Is The Demand For Dickens As Great As It Used To Be?
Choice quote: The further downtown you go, the less of Dickens the second-hand book-dealers sell. Far down, Gorky, Tolstoy, Karl Marx — serious, revolutionary writers — are the ones who make the hit. Dickens with his come-gather-round-the-fire-and-we’ll-all-have-a-fine-time-spirit seems completely out of touch with the people down there. On the whole, judging from first and second […]
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Says He Can Stop His Heart’s Beating At Will
Nordini, the man who said he can stop his heart’s beating at will, also claimed he could hold his breath for extended periods of time, and was buried under a ton of sand to prove it. Is that more or less impressive than David Blaine doing the same stunt in a tank of water? According […]
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