Penny Anderson

Although this is really an extended advertisement, there's wisdom and beauty here.

Madagascar is a smallish place (about the size of Texas) with an incredibly rich diversity of music. The island was populated successively from Borneo, Africa, Arabia, France and elsewhere. Here's a mere taste of the resulting music, from a concert…

Returning to The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study' Take Note exhibition, I was amused and impressed by William James's vividly imagined cat fighting it out with his medical school notes on writer's palsy.

Julianne Baird's singing has everything: a beautiful instrument, seemingly flawless technique, thoughtful control, but above all a sensibility that takes you from great depths to great heights in the little space of this brief Italian song.

It wasn't possible to save it, but the old Paris that was vanishing away 100 years ago was documented in thousands upon thousands of beautiful photographs by Eugène Atget, a failed painter and actor who never thought of his photography…

As long as I'm in the mood for jokes about men and women, here is a long video of the Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo sending up femininity, masculinity, and art in fine style.

While fishing for Julianne Baird videos I ran across the YouTube channel for The Loathly Lady, a comic opera on the theme of Freud's question "what do women want?" How could I resist linking to a work that references…

As it's very unlikely I'll ever visit the Daijyoji Temple in northern Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, I'm grateful for this virtual tour even though it takes some tinkering to figure out how to use the controls. The Hyogo International Association has…

I love illustrated books, and this edition of W.S. Gilbert librettos for The Pirates of Penzance and others (again via the Open Library) reminds me of solitary childhood pleasures: puzzling over my parents' Gilbert & Sullivan with its cartoon-like…

Via the Open Library and Google Books, you can download a pdf file containing images of the entire text of a 19th-century German reprint of Michael Praetorius's De organographia (1618). As best I can tell from a quick look, this…