- Dick Cavett with Oscar Peterson.

There are many interesting illustrations to be found at http://goldenagecomicbookstories.blogspot.com/

Edit: this blog seems to have been taken down.

- Rachmaninoff playing Chopin's Nocturne in E Flat with impossible dignity and grace.

The only useful critics were those who knew what writing was all about...

"At the same time, he refused to be impressed by this [critical] attention - which earned him the jealousy and hatred of other mystery writers - because he thought most critics were simply illiterate. To him, The Memoirs of Hecate County proved that Edmund Wilson didn't know how to write, and he poked fun at the solemnity of Auden's remarks about the "criminal milieu." The only useful critics were those who knew what writing was all about. ... But the real development in Chandler is that he had grown suspicious of the kind of critical and intellectual magazines he had written for in his youth, because "they never achieve life, but only a distaste for other people's view of it. They have the intolerance of the very young and the anemia of closed rooms and too much midnight smoking.' "

- MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler. Just so.

Postscript: Chandler: "Here I am halfway through a Marlowe story and having a little fun (until I got stuck) and along comes this fellow Auden and tells me I am interested in writing serious studies of a criminal milieu. So now I look at everything I put down and say to myself, Remember, old boy, this has to be a study of a criminal milieu."

A few photographs...

- Photos of Dizzie Gillespie, Shelly Manne, and the Stan Kenton Orchestra, all from the late 1940s, all taken by William P. Gottlieb. Found here, a site with a large number of excellent jazz photographs.

The streets were dark with something more than night.

"Looking back on his stories in 1950 he identified their main characteristic as the 'smell of fear' they managed to generate. In this, they echoed his own experience, for they were about 'a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and characters, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them.' "

- The Life of Raymond Chandler, Frank MacShane

First man on the moon

- Neil Armstrong visiting the Wright Brothers' house in Detroit in 1972, sixty-nine years after the brothers flew their first craft. From here.

The Onion's own TED talks.  Mind-blowing. 

When I turn on the radio, I would like to hear something beautiful.

- Elvin Jones, 1927-2004. 

Buildings

- The Rockefeller Center on December 5, 1933. From here.

The Eiffel Tower in 1900, the year of the Exposition Universelle. From here.

An immoral face...

- Cavett with R. Mitchum. Has there ever been another actor less like the parts he plays?  Part 1 of 7.