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July 14, 2004
TT: Down memory lane
Blogging is a fugitive medium, which is at once its charm and its flaw. I've spun some of what I've written for "About Last Night" into print-media pieces (and vice versa), but most of it has disappeared into the ether. On the other hand, everything posted on this blog is electronically archived, and I recently spent a sunny afternoon trolling through my postings of the past year. Here are some that caught my eye:- "In the words of one of the gazillion e-mails I've received since opening for business on Monday, 'Do you realize that once you start blogging, you cease to have a life?' That's what a new blogger likes to hear at 1:18 in the morning as he wonders whether he remembered to put in all the serial commas." (Alias terryteachout.com, July 16, 2003.)
- "I've come to feel that as a rule, the thing I do best is point people in the direction of that which and those whom I love. Let somebody else ice Piss Christ--I'd rather spend my remaining hours on earth telling you how beautiful The Open Window is, especially if you've never seen it before. In the long run, silence may be the most powerful form of negative criticism." (Let's drop the big one (and see what happens), August 6.)
- "If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation--I feel it myself--but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you're pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose. Needless to say, this is a problem without a solution. The only thing you can do is fiddle with the proportions and try to get them right, or at least righter." (Going, going, September 25.)
- "Somebody (me, I guess) ought to write an essay about how jazz has come to be used as a cultural signifier in films, TV shows, and ads, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness. That's part of the reason why a pathbreaking musical statement has become so ubiquitous--but not the biggest part. Kind of Blue, lest we forget, was always popular. It was a hit in 1959, too. Why? Because for all its undeniable radicalism, Kind of Blue is also accessible and memorable. You don't have to know what modal improvisation is to revel in its spare, lucid textures. You don't even have to know who Miles, Trane, Cannonball, and Bill Evans were. Yes, they're doing astounding things--but they don't hit you over the head with their innovations, or try to tie your ears in knots. The results are simple, beautiful, and new, and the last of these is not the first." (Kind of omnipresent, October 21.)
- "Above all, blogging is fun. And that's one thing I don't get from Jennifer Howard's eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we're all having out here. ‘We' meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It's not a private party. There's no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do." (Not exactly Heathers, November 15.)
- "Is it just me, or are any of you out there offended by the tone of the countless clever-clever op-eds, think pieces, and thumbsuckers of the past couple of days that have sought to ‘interpret' and pseudo-intellectualize the Michael Jackson story? Jackson's arrest isn't a Media Phenomenon, nor is it a sign of the times. It's a news story about an alleged pedophile, one who has spent millions of dollars to keep himself out of jail. And I don't give a good goddamn about the social significance of his mug shot, either. If he did what he's said to have done, I want to see him in a jail cell, and once he's there, my interest in him will be over and done with." (While I'm at it, November 22.)
- "I believe devoutly and passionately in the permanent significance of classical music. What's more, I believe truly great music is being written right this minute. But pop culture isn't going away, and that means symphony orchestras have to build their own audiences. If they don't, nobody else will. And if their audiences are shrinking, it means they're doing a bad job--period. It doesn't matter whether they're playing well. It doesn't matter whether they're playing good music. If nobody's listening, something's wrong. You can spend all day assigning blame, or you can try to figure out what to do to change things. There is no third way. Minds won't open themselves." (It's dark in here, damn it, December 1.)
- "Jenni Ringley has earned herself a footnote in the history of the information age: she will be remembered as the Milton Berle of the Web. She was present at the creation of a radically innovative form of interpersonal communication, and used it to show the world her underwear. What's more, the world turned out to be interested in her underwear--briefly. Then something more interesting came along, and Jenni's underwear turned out not to be soooooo special after all." (14:59, December 9.)
- "I'm always struck by the small things that distinguish my home town in southeast Missouri from my adopted home, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I'd never really noticed until today, for instance, but the only houses that are architecturally 'modern' in any recognizable sense are a half-dozen Frank Lloyd Wright knockoffs built in the late Fifties. Similarly, you rarely see reproductions of modern art on anybody's walls. It's as though time had stopped in 1900." (A visit to Red America, December 23.)
- "Once a year, every working art critic should be required to attend a blockbuster show on a weekend or holiday. He should buy a ticket with his own money, line up with the citizenry, fight his way through the crowds, listen to an audio tour--and pay close attention to what his fellow museumgoers are saying and doing. In short, he should be forced to remind himself on a regular basis of how ordinary people experience art, and marvel at the fact that they keep coming back in spite of everything." (When size matters, January 7, 2004.)
- "6. Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing. That's why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it." (Notes on blogging, February 1.)
- "All I can say for sure is that I've never been intimate with anyone lacking a sense of humor, or truly loved a work of art by a humorless artist. That might just be the most revealing thing about me." (Clubbability, February 27.)
- "Three months ago, All in the Dances didn't exist. Over the years I'd told dozens of people all about George Balanchine's life and work, but every time I had to start fresh. Now there's an inch-thick pile of paper on my kitchen table with a title page on top, the gateway to a world I made, and even though I'll be reviewing a Broadway play tomorrow morning, then writing my Washington Post column in the afternoon, part of me is still back in that world of shadows." (Finishing the book, March 31.)
- "I'd rather go to good plays than bad ones, just as I'd rather be happy than unhappy--and maybe that explains why I'm a critic instead of a creator. I've been desperately unhappy on many occasions in my life, but never did it occur to me that I might profit from my misery, much less write a sonata about it. All I wanted was for it to stop." (Gladder to be happy, April 22.)
- "At the time of the original publication of one of the best essays in A Terry Teachout Reader, I received a letter of praise from a well-known author who singled out for particular comment a sentence I hadn't written. To be sure, it had been implicit in my draft, but I didn't make it fully manifest: my editor did the job for me, and I gladly accepted his contribution. That sentence now appears in the Teachout Reader without benefit of asterisk or footnote. It's taken for granted that I wrote it, and I don't propose to blow the whistle on myself now. That's what good editors do--they make your stuff better by any means necessary, and they keep their mouths shut about it." (Ghost writers in the sky, May 13.)
- "Few biographers and fewer critics long outlive their own time, and I doubt I'll be one of them. More likely I will go down in history as the first known owner of Hart-Davis 631, and in 2104 some art historian specializing in the Edwardian era will click on that entry in a computerized catalogue raisonné, scratch his head, and say, ‘Who was that fellow with the odd name? Did it ever occur to him that the only thing he'd be remembered for was having owned a Max Beerbohm caricature and edited an H.L. Mencken anthology?' Indeed it did--and let it be said, if not necessarily remembered, that the prospect made me smile." (A peep into the future, June 7.)
- "By removing myself from the scenes of my professional excesses--the desk, the computer, the city itself--I had catapulted myself out of my confining routine. Instead of reconstituting it in Cold Spring, I happily frittered away the better part of two whole days without a second thought. Anywhere you go, there you are: so runs a favorite saying of mine, yet in my case it turned out to be not so true as I'd always thought. Yes, I was still me, but a slightly different me, one unexpectedly content to be idle. Perhaps I had rediscovered a part of me that my father had buried under the weight of his own obsessions. Perhaps I had simply figured out for myself what my friends always knew, which is that to do and to be are not necessarily the same thing, at least not when you're sitting by the Hudson River, watching the sun set behind a green-topped mountain." (Nothing to do, June 24.)
- "Middle age has its cold consolations, one of which is the knowledge that you're not nearly as important as you thought you were, or hoped someday to become. I used to save copies of everything I wrote, and for a few years I even kept an up-to-date bibliography of my magazine pieces! Now I marvel at the vanity that once led me to think my every printed utterance worthy of preservation." (Remnants, July 9, 2004.)
Posted July 14, 2004 12:02 PM
