• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2004 / March / Archives for 17th

Archives for March 17, 2004

TT: O.K., one more thing

March 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

As of this moment, we’re being read in thirteen time zones.


And now I really am going to bed….

TT and OGIC: A nice round number

March 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Some time this morning, “About Last Night” will rack up its 250,000th page view since opening for business last July.


To all of you from both of us, our heartfelt thanks.

TT: Almanac

March 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

“‘This cat came out,’ said future country singer Bob Luman, still a seventeen-year-old high school student in Kilgore, Texas, ‘in red pants and a green coat and a pink shirt and socks, and he had this sneer on his face and he stood behind the mike for five minutes, I’ll bet, before he made a move. Then he hit his guitar a lick, and he broke two strings. Hell, I’d been playing ten years, and I hadn’t broken a total of two strings. So there he was, these two strings dangling, and he hadn’t done anything except break the strings yet, and these high school girls were screaming and fainting and running up to the stage, and then he started to move his hips real slow like he had a thing for his guitar….For the next nine days he played one-nighters around Kilgore, and after school every day me and my girl would get in the car and go wherever he was playing that night. That’s the last time I tried to sing like Webb Pierce or Lefty Frizzell.'”


Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

TT: New kid on the block

March 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Today’s New York Observer has a profile of Sam Tanenhaus:

“I’m very moderate by nature,” Sam Tanenhaus said by telephone from his home in Westchester, two days after The New York Times announced that he would be the next editor of its Book Review. “People with extreme views interest me, dramatically and narratively.”


The author of a very well-received 1997 biography of the journalist and eventual anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr. Tanenhaus has spent the past five years as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, largely chronicling conservatives and neoconservatives in the orbit of the Bush administration. And so liberals seem to think–or, perhaps, to fear–that the man taking over one of the country’s premier literary institutions is a conservative, while conservatives find him, as he said, more middle-of-the-road.


Affable, energetic but easygoing, well-respected by a broad swath of the intellectual community, possessing a healthy understanding of the ideological debates of the day but with no apparent dog in the race, Mr. Tanenhaus appears to fit The Times’ bill perfectly as a successor to Charles (Chip) McGrath, who has been itching to return to writing after nearly a decade in one of New York’s most prestigious–and thankless–jobs. Mr. Tanenhaus also happens to come equipped with an M.A. in English literature from Yale and a background in book publishing….


“Sam is neither conservative nor neoconservative,” summed up his friend Terry Teachout, the critic and blogger, who contributes to The Times Book Review. “He is an old-fashioned anti-communist Jewish liberal intellectual who still gets excited about Saul Bellow.”

Read the whole thing here.

TT: Otherwise engaged

March 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Nothing more forthcoming from me today, alas. I’ve got to spend the morning writing my Wall Street Journal drama column for Friday, then the afternoon and evening working on That Which Must Not Be Named (arrgh…but it’s going well). I might get weird and post something tonight, but more likely you’ll be in the hands of Our Girl.


I do want to report an experience from a half-hour ago (I’m writing this just after midnight). I went out to Brooklyn to see Edward Hall’s all-male production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and when I emerged from the subway, the trees between Central Park West and my doorway were all sheathed in ice and snow. The air seemed full of cold white light. What a lovely spectacle to behold after spending the evening in an enchanted forest!


And so to bed. See you when I see you.

OGIC: Save this show

March 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Apologies for my absence from this space today. I’m trying to put out a number of actual and potential small fires before hitting the road after work, destination Hometown. But I did get word of some new developments regarding “Arrested Development,” thanks to an alert reader. The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Fox is enhancing its efforts to find the audience the struggling show deserves. The most immediate impact of these efforts? “Arrested” will air tonight following “American Idol.” That’s 9:30 Eastern. Tune in, or set your VCRs and Tivos. Here’s some of what Joe Flint at the Journal had to say about the new push from Fox:

The freshest comedy on television this season is Fox’s “Arrested Development,” which follows the antics of the Bluths, a rich Southern California family. Patriarch George Sr. (Jeffrey Tambor, best known as Hank, the long-suffering sidekick on HBO’s “The Larry Sanders Show”) is behind bars for raiding the corporate coffers. Jason Bateman plays his second son Michael who is the only one with any sense of decency. When he’s not trying to rebuild the family’s real estate business he is fending off efforts to undermine him by his jealous older brother GOB (short for George Oscar Bluth), boozy mother Lucille and superficial sister Lindsay. The show is from Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s Imagine Television and the former child star turned movie mogul serves as executive producer as well as narrator of each episode. Mitch Hurwitz, a veteran sitcom producer whose career started as a writer on “The Golden Girls,” created “Arrested Development.”


Despite all the critical raves (The New York Times called it “sharply satirical,” Time said it’s the best new sitcom out there and USA Today said the program is “heaven-sent for anyone who has longed for something, anything, outside the comedy norm.”), “Arrested Development” is struggling. So far this season, it is averaging only 6.2 million viewers in its Sunday 9:30 p.m. time slot, according to Nielsen Media Research. It usually is dead last in those coveted 18-49 demographics as well.


Fortunately for the hardcore fans of the show, Fox isn’t ready to throw in the towel–yet. This week, in an effort to get the show sampled, Fox is putting “Arrested Development” behind its blockbuster “American Idol.” “Seinfeld’s” Julia Louis-Dreyfus is guest-starring in a two-part story as a blind attorney prosecuting George Bluth Sr. while bedding son Michael. Ms. Louis-Dreyfus joins an already impressive list of guest stars on the show including Heather Graham and Liza Minelli. Since these folks aren’t doing the show for ratings, clearly the program is already hitting a high note in the creative community. It was saluted recently by the Museum of TV & Radio’s annual festival that salutes the best of television, a rare honor for a freshman program.

The Julia Louis-Dreyfus gig starts tonight. Help rescue a terrific show from the fate of “Freaks and Geeks” and “My So-Called Life.”

TT: The wonders of the Web

March 17, 2004 by Terry Teachout

A reader who saw last Saturday’s posting on W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings wrote with staggering promptitude to tell me that this charming little film can be ordered on videocassette from an on-line store called Hot Rod Memories that sells, among other things, movies suitable for viewing at drive-in theaters. Remember those? I do.


This seemed too good to be true, but the price was right ($19.95 plus shipping), so I paid a visit to www.hotrodmemories.com, placed my order, and the package, glory be, arrived this morning. It’s an off-the-air, under-the-counter dub of decent quality: Burt Reynolds’ bright red shirt blossoms a bit on the screen, but the picture is otherwise adequate and the sound is good enough.


To do likewise, go here.

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

March 2004
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
« Feb   Apr »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Snapshot: FDR’s 1933 inauguration
  • Almanac: Ralph Ellison on power
  • Lookback: “Call me Bartleby”
  • Almanac: Thomas Fuller on memory
  • Just because: Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli plays Ravel

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in