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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 chief culture critic of Commentary. more

ABOUT TERRY'S BOOKS 
Terry's latest book, Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong, will be published in December by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the U.S. and JR Books in England. One of his essays is included in Robert Gottlieb's Reading Dance, published last year by 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

MORE ABOUT "POPS" 
To read pre-publication reviews of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong--and to find out the answers to frequently asked questions about the book--click on the link. more

ABOUT TERRY'S OPERA 
Terry collaborated with Paul Moravec on The Letter, an operatic version of Somerset Maugham's 1927 play that was commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera in 2006 and opened there on July 25. To read his reports on the writing, production, premiere, and reception of The Letter, click on the link. more

TERRY'S TWITTERS 

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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 
Nellie McKay, Normal as Blueberry Pie: A Tribute to Doris Day (Verve). Nellie McKay, of all people, has recorded an album of pop standards--and it's a beaut. Her delicate alto-flute voice and tiptoe enunciation turn out to be ideally suited to the repertoire of Doris Day, who was a popular big-band singer before she moved to Hollywood and became a perky icon of Eisenhower-era American innocence. The fare ranges from light-footed swingers like "Dig It" to lyrical cameos like "I Remember You," and the instrumental arrangements, most of them by McKay herself, are engagingly quirky. Glints of irony twinkle here and there, but there's nothing sour or backhanded about Normal as Blueberry Pie (TT).

FOLIO 
Jane Wilson: Horizons (Merrell, $60). The first full-length study of Wilson's life and work, Horizons contains a penetrating biographical essay by Elizabeth Sussman, a wide-ranging interview by Justin Spring, and handsome reproductions of some ninety-odd paintings and works on paper. In recent years Wilson has specialized in all-but-abstract skyscapes whose canvas-filling bands of color and looming storm clouds are precisely poised between loose representation and abstract expressionism. Horizons puts these later paintings in perspective, illustrating the debt that Wilson owes not only to Mark Rothko but to Fairfield Porter. A long-overdue tribute to a superior artist greatly deserving of wider recognition (TT).

DVD 
On the Road with Charles Kuralt, Set 1 (three discs, out Oct. 27). Cynics should steer clear of this collection of "On the Road" pieces in which Kuralt, who spent thirteen years driving around America in a motor home, reported for The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite on whatever caught his eye along the way: a circus bandleader, a cymbal factory, a professional blower of soap bubbles. "I have attempted to keep 'relevance' and 'significance' entirely out of all the stories I send back," Kuralt wrote in A Life on the Road, his 1990 autobiography. He succeeded, much to the delight of a generation of TV viewers who loved the uncondescending sweetness with which he portrayed the quiet delights of life off the beaten path. I saw many of these pieces when they first aired in the Seventies, and I find it hard to watch them now without growing misty-eyed (TT).

BOOK 
David Kynaston, Austerity Britain: 1945-51 (Bloomsbury, $15.95 paper). What was England like in the chilly, near-penniless days after World War II? Most of us only know "austerity Britain" from its wry, distanced portrayals in the Ealing comedies, but David Kynaston has now given us a complex and persuasive portrait of life under postwar British socialism, a masterly piece of social history that succeeds in giving the American reader a clear understanding of how the English people responded to the daunting challenge of getting by on not nearly enough. Wholly engrossing, no matter what your political point of view may be (TT).

DVD 
The Last Days of Disco. The Criterion Collection has finally brought out a DVD of Whit Stillman's darkly witty 1998 film about the messy love lives of a group of young New Yorkers who frequent a club not unlike Studio 54. Yes, it's funny, and yes, it's an unsparing critique of contemporary American culture--one that's all the more effective for having been played for laughs. In light of Stillman's prolonged and inexplicable post-Disco silence, the reappearance on home video of the last and best installment of his indie-flick trilogy about the sexual revolution and its discontents is cause for rejoicing. What I'd really like is for him to make another movie, but since that doesn't seem to be in the cards, I'll settle for revisiting this one (TT).

Out of the Past

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

CD 
Jascha Heifetz Plays Korngold, Rózsa, and Waxman (RCA Victor Gold Seal). I keep telling people that Miklós Rózsa, who is best known for having scored such Hollywood films as Double Indemnity and Ben-Hur, was also a first-rate classical composer, but somehow the message never seems to seep through. Instead of preaching yet another a sermon, allow me instead to direct you to Jascha Heifetz's 1956 premiere recording of Rózsa's Violin Concerto. I once described Rózsa's music as "user-friendly Bartók," and that's not a bad way to sum up this masterly piece, whose musical language recalls the pungently folk-like modal coloration of Bartók but has an astringent romanticism all its own. Not surprisingly, Heifetz played it to the hilt, and this performance, handsomely accompanied by Walter Hendl and the Dallas Symphony, would be worth hearing even if the piece weren't so good. It's coupled, logically enough, with Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Heifetz-commissioned violin concerto and Franz Waxman's "Carmen" Fantasy. Absolutely not for music-movie buffs only! (TT).

DVD 
Breach. Is Chris Cooper our best character actor? That thought has occurred to me on more than one occasion, most recently after seeing him in Billy Ray's 2007 docudrama about Robert Hanssen, the FBI agent who spent two decades peddling government secrets to the KGB. Except for the soppy score, Breach is a tremendously involving film whose makers get everything right--but in the end it is Cooper's performance that turns a piece of well-crafted entertainment into something not unlike high art. Cooper's Hanssen is a study in self-loathing arrogance, a fanatical zealot with something unknowably wrong at the core. Somehow I doubt that the real-life Robert Hanssen was half so interesting as the one we meet in Breach So much the worse for real life (TT).

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