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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for October 29, 2003

TT: Uuuuuuuh, gimme a break!

October 29, 2003 by Terry Teachout

This blog probably belongs to Our Girl for the rest of the day (I’ve got a review to write and a bunch of appointments on top of that), but I did want to leave you with something to chew on before I vanished up the spout.


It is, incidentally, tough to type when you have a great big bandage on one of your fingers, not to mention a missing “U” key (which I won’t have time to get fixed definitively until I hit my last deadline tomorrow afternoon). I don’t recommend it. Nevertheless, I’m doing my best, all for you.

TT: Almanac

October 29, 2003 by Terry Teachout

“Music has an enormous advantage: it can, without mentioning anything, say everything.”


Ilya Ehrenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn’ (quoted in Solomon Volkov’s Shostakovich and Stalin, forthcoming in April from Knopf)

TT: Mailbag (and an aggressive suggestion)

October 29, 2003 by Terry Teachout

A reader writes:

Thanks for plugging John Marin
so aggressively…frankly, from inside the museum world it seems as if his marginalization is a function of his having done his major work on paper. Museum curators are typically departmentalized by media so that American paintings specialists will often deride works on paper (as opposed to larger works or those on canvas) as comparatively minor.

I was fascinated to hear from this correspondent, who is a curator at a well-known Eastern museum. I’d always wondered whether there was a bias in the museum biz against “small” artists, a label that could easily be attached to Marin, who left behind no large-format paintings and (as now seems clear in retrospective) did his major work in watercolor rather than oil. Sure sounds like it.


Another reader writes, apropos of Lileks’ recent posting on Fantasia and the rise of digital animation, a theme in which this blog has also taken an interest:

I’m of two minds regarding the changes in animation and animation tools: on one hand, I know the medium in which one works affects the work itself, often in nearly imperceivable ways — when I hand-write a first draft I produce a slightly different style of prose than when I type straight into the computer — and on the other hand, I have a gut sense that a tool is just a tool and after many revisions the initial effects of the medium become less important than the core of the content. In the case of animated movies, I believe the quality of the story and the skills of the animators have a greater impact than the means by which the movie was made.


Last Thursday’s “Wall Street Journal” included an article (“Disney Decides It Must Draw Artists Into the Computer Age,” by Bruce Orwall) about Disney’s conversion to computer-generated animation that addresses the issue from the traditional animators point of view. I will not be surprised if the conversion to CG tools is beneficial to Disney in unexpected ways: The studio’s problems may have more to do with stagnation, and forcing themselves to learn new tools and develop new processes may shake things up enough to allow creativity to happen. Glen Keane’s comment that he feels “like about 30 years ago, when I was first at Disney just learning” seems like as a good sign, don’t you think?

Yes, I do, and I’m encouraged by the optimism of this letter, though I’m not quite convinced by the comparison between writing on a computer and animating on one. There’s a difference between the former (in which the hand merely transfers pure symbols from the writer’s brain to the “support” of a computer screen) and the latter (in which the “symbols” are of interest in their own right rather than because of what they stand for). But I incline to agree that “a tool is just a tool,” and I think it’s perfectly possible that digital animation can aspire to the warmth and imagination of hand-drawn animation. Maybe. I hope.


Which reminds me to remind you that The Looney Tunes Golden Collection, the new four-DVD set of classic Warner Bros. cartoons–all of them created with nary a computer in sight–is now officially on sale. My copy arrived in the mail yesterday from amazon.com, and I had to pry myself away from it to get to the theater on time for the press preview of Wicked, which opens tomorrow and about which more Friday.


I’ll be writing about the Golden Collection in the Wall Street Journal, too, perhaps as early as next week, so I don’t want to jump my own gun, but I can tell you this: IT’S FANTASTIC. Go get one.

TT: I’m a boy!

October 29, 2003 by Terry Teachout

Dear OGIC:


The Gender Genie thinks I’m female when I write for The Wall Street Journal and male when I write for Commentary.


Discuss.

Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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