On this week's broadcast of Mountain Stage, we revisit an episode from 2019 featuring Gregory Alan Isakov, Elysian Fields, Mandolin Orange, The Brother Brothers and Hush Kids. Recorded in Morgantown, West Virginia at the WVU Canady Creative Arts Center with host Larry Groce.
Literary giant T.S. Eliot was a fan of comedic genius Groucho Marx and vice versa.
It is thought that expectations of one another thawed what could have been a spectacular meeting of the minds.
This BBC special is part history and part speculation about their friendship. King Crimson’s Jakko Jakszyk created this work as well as the music.
After a correspondence beginning in 1961, after a number of failed attempts to arrange a meeting, Eliot and Marx had dinner at Eliot’s flat in 1964.
From the BBC site:
"After a number of failed arrangements, in June 1964, a car arrives at the Savoy to collect Groucho and his wife to take them the short distance to Eliot's home for the much-awaited dinner. Yet such is the nature of celebrity that when Groucho quoted lines from Eliot's The Wasteland back to him, he was uninterested, and Groucho, in turn, was unable to recall the scene from Duck Soup that Eliot particularly loved. They parted, disappointed and a little dejected."
Artists are and are not their work. First and foremost, they are people. It’s too bad Tom and Groucho could not let go of their image of the other.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., said Thursday she is open to extending a water bill subsidy program, following requests from the Public Service Commission of West Virginia.
West Virginia and Indiana are leading a lawsuit, along with 25 other states, against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stop new rules on existing coal and new natural gas-fired power plants.
Initially, the only way the public knew about the incident was because a landowner reported the sediment-laden water had inundated her property to the state’s Department of Environmental Quality.