Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

I plan for the imminent future a little stroll down this particular geographic and psychological stretch of my personal Memory Lane derived from the first sixteen years of my life, spent in my birthplace El Paso (where you could walk across the international bridge over the sometimes totally dry “Silvery Rio Grande” into Los Estados [...]

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Thanks to a bit of virtuoso clipboardery I’ve whupped this philologically challenged provincial Californian software into replicating that pesky Danish/Norwegian fifth letter of Aksel Schiøtz’s surname, but in order to confuse and frustrate Googlers and surfers as little as possible I want, prophylactically, to zing in a version that’ll at least make this bloggery noticeable [...]

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[Several fans of Richter - does my personal involvement distort my own impression that the music world, especially music-lovers, have meanwhile come around to regarding him as the preëminent pianist of his time? - have for years urged me to make generally available again the story of his reunion with his mother the summer of [...]

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For not years but decades I’ve intended to research the transformation into this famous pianist-teacher from li’l ol’ Lucie Hickenlooper, born in li’l ol’ San Antone Texas, and my recent stroll down Memory Lane in tribute to her Juilliard pupil William Kapell has finally, finally goosed me into doing it. 
In 1958, Time-Life International sent me [...]

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[For some time now, I've had a short book of very personal memoirs about the great Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter on my mind, and my blogfather Perry Nelson, the sage and techno-wizard of Knoxville, Tennessee, has done his best to pound it into my head that I'd do the really hip thing if I'd get [...]

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Mention the little un-iced pastry known in France as une madeleine and anyone familiar with literature thinks immediately of Marcel Proust, whom the sight and taste of a madeleine dipped in tea launched on a protracted stroll down his own Memory Lane that gave the world the great multi-volume autobiographical novel for which he borrowed [...]

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During my years as a gung-ho Parisian Left-Banker (1949-51) - complete with full beard, beret basque, British Army surplus duffel-coat, and a grungy little walk-up hotel room that cost me $1 a night at those days’ black-market rate (and where, the New York girl who’d preceded me to Paris and got me installed there assured [...]

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During my New York years (until I fled the country in 1949 at the age of 25) I frequently read the admirable New York Post because of its status as the only truly liberal daily newspaper in town.  Deplorably, as so frequently happens in the U.S. media world, some unperson eventually bought it and turned [...]

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It should surprise no one familiar with her writings that as soon as decently possible after her so casual, offhand invitation to stop in for a drink the next time I found myself in her Manhattan neighborhood around that time of the afternoon, I did just happen to find myself around Madison Avenue and the upper [...]

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On this day 114 years ago, a New York couple named Rothschild, who had a summer cottage in the little New Jersey beach town of Long Branch, became parents of a baby they named Dorothy.  (A brief momentary aside: on this same date, 79 years ago, a German couple named Stockhausen living near Cologne became [...]

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