John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Doctor! Doctor! I have such terrible pain in my factoid process! 030 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 01/10/2026It's "with," which is pretty strange if you know what a petard is. Twenty years ago I quoted the line (correctly) in a song lyric but ended up having to change it. None of the Equity actors in the cast knew what it meant. 040 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 30/09/2026They were both ubiquitous, but I think I've seen/heard "This is your brain on drugs" referenced more, and more recently. 000 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 30/09/2026On the album, he says, "At last, my arm is complete again!" In the current rental score, it's "At last, my right arm is complete again!", which scans as a line of iambic pentameter. 210 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 23/09/2026Several centuries of being legally unable to own land might have something to do with that. 1100 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 20/09/2026No idea. But I think he was challenging himself (or maybe had been challenged by someone else) to write a scene where the jokes would work even for audience members who didn't speak French. 120 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Thank you! I don't recall hearing anything like that while I was growing up, which is odd, because there's a secluded park in my hometown where it would fit right in. 010 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 19/09/2026The Hook? That's not in my New York–Pennsylvania dictionary. 110 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 15/09/2026The rules in opera are completely different from those in musical theater. Opera soloists are also expected to arrive knowing their music, whereas in musicals it's taught during rehearsals. The pay is better in opera but I'm not sure how much better. 050 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 15/09/2026On the other hand, no relation to Whitelaw Savory. 010 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 13/09/2026I wouldn't do this to anyone else, but since it's you... :) 120 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 10/09/2026AI writing, drawing, music, etc. are for the Lady Catherine de Bourghs of the world. The people who would once have said "If I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient" now consider themselves absolved of the need to learn. 091 0
Reposted by John BaxindineBenjamin Dreyer @bcdreyer.social · 08/09/2026RT if you’ve never had a tab of ChatGPT open, period. 4204126 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 28/08/2026I just realized that no one has posted this in response to your Swanson piece: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hfc4...youtube.comGloria Swanson - musical version of Sunset Boulevard (1957)YouTube video by vintage video clips 030 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 28/08/2026I hope so, because I know who he is and I'd hate to think the condition was terminal. 050 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 23/08/2026I always second-guess the pronunciation of "enjambment." The high-school English teacher from whom I learned the word pronounced it the French way, and I must have looked it up ten times over the years to confirm that yes, it's OK to pronounce it the way it looks. 010 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 23/08/2026It's an example of both enjambment and mosaic rhyme. Maybe other things, too, but those are the two that leap to mind. 120 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 22/08/2026You won't be sorry, though the technical deficiencies of the Blackman kinescopes sometimes make for frustrating viewing. The Rigg episodes are often downright silly but hold up pretty well even so. 260 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 21/08/2026There's one book that saved at least six lives by making it a central plot point that thallium poisoning causes severe, rapid hair loss. Unfortunately, saying even that much is a spoiler for the book, which masquerades as a supernatural thriller for two-thirds of its length. 0160 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 15/08/2026So your list for the hangman includes: Jimmy Van Heusen Sammy Cahn Harvey Schmidt Tom Jones Ned Rorem J.D. McClatchy ...? 110 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 15/08/2026Introduce yourself as what almost killed you. Hi, I'm the car that a three-year-old boy backed into traffic on a busy road at rush hour. (I got the car into accessory mode, then neutral, and it started down the hill by itself. I pounded on the brake but I wasn't heavy enough to depress the pedal.) 030 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 15/08/2026"A kind of English, sir. I think he learnt it in a place called Chicago." 180 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 14/08/2026When I was in college, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur was the frequent subject of confusion at the library circulation desk where I worked. He gets alphabetized under S. He was the son of the Count of Crèvecœur but adopted the surname "St. John" in America. 020 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 13/08/2026In old German script a macron denotes a double consonant, so you could write his first name as "Em̄anuel." 120 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 13/08/2026...which, if you read the discussion in Hitchcock/Truffaut, he plainly didn't: "The man wants to go to bed with a woman who's dead; he is indulging in a form of necrophilia." But: The subsequent discussion of how Hitchcock treated Novak on set makes for uncomfortable reading in context. 010 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 13/08/2026I think that people who have problems with Vertigo think *Hitchcock* saw Scottie as a wholly good, sympathetic person. 110 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 13/08/2026I've only seen it once, long ago. The last twenty minutes were hard to watch because I was following the emotions of both main characters. That's a tough trick to pull off, and I admire that Hitchcock did it, but it's not a film I'd leap over all hurdles to watch again. 120 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 13/08/2026Whether or not you like Vertigo depends largely on whether you think the film interrogates Hitchcock's own fetishes or merely replicates them. 110 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 13/08/2026I stumbled across this video yesterday but didn't see your question until just now. Here's her own explanation: www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOKv...youtube.comMitzi Gaynor: "I quit film because I was ordinary in them."YouTube video by Eileen Prose 230 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 10/08/2026Don't forget Leslie Howard, Noël Coward, Vera Zorina, Cobina Wright, and Tyrone Power in that number as well. Mickey Rooney hadn't appeared on Broadway yet when the number was written. (Rosita Royce didn't appear on Broadway either.) 110 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 08/08/2026(BTW, I have spent a little time with the Sondheim papers. They're exactly as much fun as you'd expect.) 060 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 08/08/2026It may well be at the Library of Congress. The finding aid for the Sondheim manuscripts indicates that audio recordings were received as part of the bequest, but there doesn't seem to be a separate finding aid yet for the recordings. 150 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 23/07/2026There is a little-known Cy Coleman/Avery Corman song, "Have You Ever Been to Lakewood" from The Great Ostrovsky, whose interlude includes a long list of towns in New Jersey: "You'll be traveling through Whippany, Rahway, Metuchen, Piscataway / Englewood, Weehawken, then you go thataway..." 120 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 22/07/2026"Jimmy Whale was inclined to take strong likes, and one of them was for music marked 'agitato.' [...] It was one of our music department jokes that if there was any danger of a passage of background score being cut it could be saved by calling it an agitato." —Robert Russell Bennett 150 0
Reposted by John BaxindineNathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 21/07/2026What AI (LLM) boosters don't understand is that the use cases for LLMs are centered around people who know how to think, how to learn and how to say "I don't know". ChatGPT's public release in late 2022 was carcinogenic to thought 724451 0
Reposted by John BaxindineNathan Tankus @nathantankus.bsky.social · 21/07/2026Humans not engaging in reasoned deliberation and who are relatively unskilled at critical thinking aren't proof against all humans having these innate capacities. We can't let Big Tech convince us otherwise. Literally, human life surviving this century depends on it. 23910 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 20/07/2026Several years ago Previn's publisher asked me how much it would cost to recreate the orchestration of "A Happy Song" (cut from Inside Daisy Clover) based on the surviving short score. I gave them a price but I knew it would never happen. Arr./Orch. Alexander Courage: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sAM...youtube.comJackie Ward & Ernest Newton - A Happy Song (Outtake)YouTube video by Robert Isaiah 010 0
Reposted by John BaxindineJasmin Mujanović @jasminmuj.bsky.social · 19/07/2026It seems like there are ever greater reasons to write, and an ever diminishing reading public. A greater need for patience and deliberation, but only the appetite for furious cacophonies. And everywhere little princelings ruling over shattered, empty lands. 0318 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 15/07/2026You haven't been hanging out near my hometown, have you? My high school's football team is called the Hatters. 010 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 10/07/2026Agatha Christie John Creasey Ngaio Marsh Terry Pratchett Rex Stout 000 0
John Baxindine @jbax.bsky.social · 03/07/2026Just about the entire score of the Menken/Schwartz Hunchback of Notre Dame. 150 0
