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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 A Cluster of Sunlight: The Life of Louis Armstrong, which will be published by Harcourt in the fall of 2009. One of his essays is included in Robert Gottlieb's Reading Dance, just out from Pantheon. He contributed an essay to Coudal Partners' Field-Tested Books (as did OGIC) and 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)
Scene stealing (I)
Scene stealing (II)
Becoming an artist
In one piece
Among the brethren
By the clock
Size matters

SEE TERRY TALK 
To watch Terry's wsj.com review of Billy Elliot, go here.

Archive  5412 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).

GALLERY 
Frankenthaler at Eighty: Six Decades (Knoedler & Company, 19 E. 70, up through Jan. 10). Nine large-scale canvases and works on paper painted between 1957 and 2002 by America's foremost abstractionist. A superb miniature retrospective that concisely sums up Helen Frankenthaler's creative achievement (TT).

DVD 
Budd Boetticher: The Collector's Choice (Sony, five discs). At long last, the five Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott Westerns made between 1957 and 1960 have made it to DVD. (Seven Men From Now, the first film in the series, was released in 2005.) Three of these stark, laconic moral tales, The Tall T, Ride Lonesome, and Comanche Station, rank high on the short list of great postwar Westerns, while Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone, though not in the same league, are definitely worth seeing. Also included is A Man Can Do That, Bruce Ricker's Boetticher documentary. Essential viewing for film buffs (TT).

CD 
Dennis Brain: The Horn Player (EMI, four CDs). This specially priced box set contains most of the commercial recordings of the great British horn player whose death in a 1957 car accident deprived the world of one of its most prodigally gifted instrumentalists. Brain's celebrated studio performances of the concertos of Mozart, Richard Strauss, and Paul Hindemith are all here, together with a generous helping of chamber music, including the exquisitely played versions of Dukas Villanelle and the Schumann Adagio and Allegro that he recorded with Gerald Moore in 1952. If you've never heard Brain's horn playing, prepare yourself to experience a miracle of suavity and grace (TT).

MUSEUM 
Giorgio Morandi, 1890-1964 (Metropolitan Museum, 1000 Fifth Ave., up through Dec. 14). It's too crowded, too noisy, and poorly hung, but the Met's Morandi exhibition, the first ever to come to the United States, is still a major event, a retrospective of one hundred and ten paintings and works on paper by one of the greatest and least sufficiently appreciated still-life painters of the twentieth century. Unless you take the trouble to go to Bologna's Museo Morandi, it's unlikely that you'll ever get another chance to see this many Morandis at one time, so pick an off hour, pack a set of earplugs, and dive in (TT).

BOOK 
Joseph Epstein, Fred Astaire (Yale, $22). The latest addition to Yale's "Icons of America" series is a 198-page tribute to America's greatest dancer by one of America's best essayists. Witty, thoughtful, concentrated, and astute, Fred Astaire goes a long way toward conveying the essential quality of an intensely private man who only seems to have come fully to life in the studio. Unlike most commentators, Epstein also pays proper attention to Astaire's singing, but most of the book is devoted to his dancing--and, no less interestingly, the persona he projected in his films and TV appearances. After Arlene Croce's indispensable 1974 monograph on the Astaire-Rogers films, this is the Fred Astaire book to have if you're only having two (TT).

Out of the Past

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

BOOK 
Karen Wilkin, Giorgio Morandi (Rizzoli, $35). If you want to get up to speed on Morandi, this lavishly illustrated monograph, published in 1998, is the place to start. The most lucid and sensible of present-day art critics, Wilkin explains with perfect clarity why the Italian painter's soft-spoken, deceptively repetitive tabletop microcosms rank among the greatest achievements of twentieth-century art. Look first, then read--then look again (TT).

CD 
Louis Jordan and His Tympani Five (JSP, five CDs). After Fats Waller, Louis Jordan was the great exponent of good-time small-group jazz whose entertainment value cunningly concealed its musical sophistication. A superb alto saxophonist who had a knack for singing (and picking) comic songs, Jordan put together a "jump band" so appealing that it was successfully marketed to blacks and whites alike, in the process leaving an indelible stamp on both R&B and early white rock and roll. This budget-priced, gorgeously remastered five-CD box set contains all 131 of the recordings Jordan and his combo cut for Decca between 1938 and 1950, not a few of which topped the charts. Like Waller's recordings, they never fail to hit the spot--especially after a long, tiring day at the office. Listen to them in tandem with John Chilton's excellent 1994 biography of Jordan (TT).

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