Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
In today’s New York Observer, Robert Gottlieb holds forth on New York City Ballet’s Balanchine-related festivities. It’s a must.
(My own preliminary thoughts on “Balanchine 100” can be found in my “Second City” column for this Sunday’s Washington Post, which will be linked to this page as soon as it goes on line.)
I just snagged two inexpensive but deeply satisfying pieces of art via eBay, an undated Arnold Friedman lithograph of a female nude and a 1962 pastel landscape by Jane Wilson. I’m not exactly sure where I’m going to hang them, but I’ll figure out something. (The links, by the way, aren’t to photos of the actual pieces–they’re just to give you a taste of the artists in question.)
Incidentally, I’d like to put out an all-points bulletin to art-savvy readers of this site: I’m interested in acquiring a pastel still-life by Arnold Friedman, if I can do so without bending my wallet too far out of shape. A beauty was auctioned on line back in December, but I didn’t find out about it until the day after the hammer fell (for a price that was well within my means, arrgh). Should any of you know where such a thing might be found, kindly drop me an e.
This
just goes to show what happens when you pal around with a problem drinker.
“The Skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates and researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks he has found.”
Miguel de Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies
Some of you will recall that I was in Chicago a few weeks ago, visiting the shockingly beautiful Our Girl, admiring her Eames chair, and covering three new plays for The Wall Street Journal. I went there and came back to New York via Amtrak sleeper, and I wrote up the experience in a short essay published on the Arts & Leisure page of this morning’s Journal:
I grew up dreaming of long-distance trains. They were in the songs I loved (“I took a trip on a train/And I thought about you”) and the movies I watched (“I tipped the steward $5 to seat you here if you should come in”). Their tracks criss-crossed the main street of the small Missouri town where I spent my childhood, and their braying whistles cleaved the night air as they carried sleeping strangers to places I’d never been.
Alas, the highways and airlines were killing off passenger trains long before I figured out exactly what Cary Grant wanted to do to Eva Marie Saint on the Twentieth Century Limited. By the time I was old enough to travel alone, I took it for granted that I’d never spend a night in a sleeper car, watching the world rumble by. So when the Department of Homeland Security raised America’s alert status from yellow to orange a few days before I had to fly from New York to Chicago to look at plays, it struck me that this might well be my last chance to satisfy a longtime craving. I tore up my plane ticket, paid a visit to www.amtrak.com, booked a Viewliner Standard Bedroom on the Lake Shore Limited, and prepared to find out what I’d been missing all these years….
No link, blast and damn it, so if you’re not covered with 10 inches of snow, do pick up today’s Journal and take a gander. I’m kind of pleased with the way this one came out.
I got back from the ballet at Lincoln Center about an hour ago. Barely. We’re getting a lot of snow in Manhattan, and it doesn’t look like it’ll be going anywhere any time soon, either.
I’m supposed to be lunching tomorrow with a blogger in the right-hand column, but at this point I’d say it’s no better than even money that she makes it to the Upper West Side. Should she bag me, I plan to stay right here and blog (after sleeping in, of course).
Memo to anybody who wants me to write anything today: no.
I just returned from Good Enough to Eat, my Upper West Side hangout, where I lunched with Sarah Weinman, whose blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, is one of my daily stopovers. Being Canadian, she was unfazed by our 10-inch snowfall (and polite enough not to mention my widely reported infirmity), and we chatted up a storm about life in the blogosphere. She went out drinking with Mr. TMFTML last night, but was largely unaffected by the ordeal, notwithstanding a certain hint of puce around the gills.
If you haven’t visited Sarah’s litblog, do. It’s v. smart.
(Incidentally, the streets and sidewalks of Manhattan are almost completely clear of snow this afternoon. That’s one reason why I love New York–we gripe about everything, but we don’t let it stop us from doing anything.)
A reader writes, apropos of my piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:
I love the stuff about the trains. I had the good fortune to take a train to New York (not a sleeper, alas, but from Wilmington that would have been just plain silly!) with my mother when I was very, very young. My father usually drove us to New York. I have no idea why we took the train on this one occasion, and without my Dad, but the memory is incredibly vivid for me and fills me with the most incredible nostalgia.