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ABOUT "ABOUT LAST NIGHT" AND ITS AUTHORS 
This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout, Laura Demanski (otherwise known as Our Girl in Chicago, or "OGIC" for short), and Carrie Frye (who signs her postings "CAAF"). Terry, who lives in New York, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary. more

ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS 
Terry recently finished writing Rhythm Man: A Life of Louis Armstrong, forthcoming in 2009 from Harcourt. He wrote the introductions to William Bailey on Canvas and the paperback edition of Elaine Dundy's The Dud Avocado. more

ABOUT TERRY'S OPERA 
Terry is collaborating with Paul Moravec on The Letter, an operatic version of Somerset Maugham's 1927 play. It was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera and will open there on July 25, 2009. Here is an ongoing series of progress reports on the writing and production of The Letter.
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Lend me your ears (and eyes)
Men at work
Men at work (II)
Men at work (III)
Men at work (IV)
For better and worse
Men at work (V)
Men (and women) at work (VI)
Notes from an unkept diary
The case for lower-case opera
The envelope, please
Right turn at Albuquerque
Moment's notice
Men at work (VII)

SEE TERRY TALK 
To view Terry's December videoblog, go here.

Archive  5153 entries and counting

CONTACT
tteachout@artsjournal.com
ogic@artsjournal.com
caaf@artsjournal.com

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TOP FIVE

A list of new things we've liked (subject to unexpected and wildly capricious updating).

CD 
Cy Walter, Rodgers Revisited: Cy Walter Plays Richard Rodgers Compositions (Collectables). Two years after I heralded the first CD reissue of the long-forgotten recordings of Cy Walter, the man who turned cocktail piano into an art, a sequel has finally come along. Walters' 1956 recital of thirteen songs by Richard Rodgers, originally released by Atlantic, is as suave and elegant a display of piano playing as has ever been committed to disc--but don't be fooled by the high gloss. Alec Wilder said in his original liner notes that "anyone who has heard his own songs played by Cy immediately has a greater respect for his own work....though utterly respectful of the composers and songwriters whose music he plays, he is also highly complex both rhythmically and harmonically in his interpretations of their music, all the while maintaining a constant balance of delicacy and sensitiveness." Listen to "The Gentleman is a Dope" and you'll hear what Wilder meant. More, please! (TT).

BOOK 
Elaine Equi, Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House Press, $18). This effervescent collection, which gathers two decades of Equi's work with Coffee House Press as well as a handful of early poems, is one of those happy books that you can open to just about any page and find something to delight. Of her work, Equi has said, "I like the fact that for the most part, my poems are pretty accessible." And it's true; there's a Rumi-esque directness to the work here, as well as a playfulness and wit, that's wonderfully light-footed and sure (CAAF).

MUSEUM 
J.M.W. Turner (Metropolitan Museum, up through Sept. 21). The Met's 140-piece Turner retrospective, the first full-scale look at Turner's work ever to be mounted in America, is a once-in-a-lifetime occasion, a priceless opportunity to track the evolution of the nineteenth-century English painter whose late canvases (generously represented in this show) march right up to the very brink of abstraction. Like most blockbuster shows, this one is far too much of a muchness, but if you can stand in front of a painting like this without being thrilled to the marrow, you're looking in the wrong direction (TT).

DVD 
Peter Grimes (Decca). In 1969 Benjamin Britten conducted a fully staged studio performance of his most popular opera for the BBC, with Peter Pears singing the title role that he had created a quarter-century earlier. Now that telecast has been released on home video for the first time ever, and it's a stunner, a handsomely staged, unexpectedly intimate production that shows us exactly how Pears interpreted the role that made him famous. Britten's conducting is magnetically compelling, just as it is in the studio recording that he and Pears had made a decade earlier, but you will not soon forget the experience of seeing Pears as Grimes. This is one of four DVDs released as part of the new Britten-Pears Collection, and the others, including a similarly memorable 1966 film of Billy Budd, are no less essential--but Grimes is the place to start (TT).

BOOK 
Erin Hogan, Spiral Jetta: A Road Trip through the Land Art of the American West (University of Chicago, $20). A city-dwelling, solitude-hating connoisseur of modern art hops in her compact car, drives west in search of Robert Smithson's "Spiral Jetty" and a half-dozen other pieces of monumental land art, and finds...herself. Even if (like me) you don't have any use for minimalism, you'll be charmed by Hogan's wryly self-deprecating account of her desert pilgrimage, in the course of which she learned that being alone isn't so bad after all (TT).

Out of the Past

Not new, but still worth a look or listen (and no less subject to change without notice).

BOOK 
Sybille Bedford, A Legacy (Counterpoint, $16). All of the adjectives Sybille Bedford's writing brings to mind belong to the same family: sharp, acute, penetrating, piercing, and so on. In her most famous novel, two marriages, inauspicious in different ways, bind together the fates of three families in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany. How could it have taken me this long to discover Bedford? Why isn't a writer with her observational powers, slicing wit, and historical grasp--a woman whose work no less a cutting edge than Dorothy Parker found "almost terrifyingly brilliant"--better known? The curious can start with A Legacy, whose certainties and mysteries stand in perfect balance (OGIC).

FILM 
The Trouble With Harry. Most of Alfred Hitchcock's movies are funny--that's part of what makes them so jolting--but this one is a not-so-straight black comedy about a group of people in a small Vermont town who stumble across a corpse in the woods and can't decide what to do with it. Shirley MacLaine made her screen debut in this 1955 film, and the rest of the ensemble cast includes such familiar faces as John Forsythe, Edmund Gwenn, Mildred Natwick, and Jerry Mathers--yes, that Jerry Mathers. Eisenhower-era audiences didn't buy the premise of John Michael Hayes' screenplay, and even now The Trouble with Harry is probably the least well known of Hitchcock's middle-period major-studio pictures. Might its fey, off-center humor make it ripe for revival today? See for yourself, and be sure to note Bernard Herrmann's droll score (his first for Hitchcock) and the gorgeously autumnal cinematography of Robert Burks (TT).

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