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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2004 / Archives for September 2004

Archives for September 2004

TT: Manifesto in a nutshell

September 29, 2004 by Terry Teachout

You will find in the flap copy for my new Balanchine book this sentence:

He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.

I wonder if that’s a dust-jacket first? It is for me, anyway: I locked up the flap copy for A Terry Teachout Reader too soon to mention “About Last Night.” At any rate, I think being a blogger is something to brag about (I also mention it on my business card). In for a penny….

TT: Almanac

September 28, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Lights are bright,

Pianos making music all the night,

And they pour champagne

Just like it was rain.

It’s a sight to see,

But I wonder what became of me.


Crowds go by,

That merry-making laughter in their eye,

And the laughter’s fine,

But I wonder what became of mine.


Life’s sweet as honey,

And yet it’s funny,

I get a feeling that I can’t analyze.

It’s like, well, maybe

Like when a baby

Sees a bubble burst before its eyes.


Oh, I’ve had my fling,

I’ve been around and seen most ev’rything,

But I can’t be gay

For along the way

Something went astray,

And I can’t explain,

It’s the same champagne,

It’s a sight to see,

But I wonder what became of me.


Johnny Mercer, “I Wonder What Became of Me”

TT: Let ’em eat acrylics

September 28, 2004 by Terry Teachout

From the New York Daily News, by way of our invaluable host, artsjournal.com:

Mayor Bloomberg had little sympathy yesterday for New Yorkers who find the new $20 admission to the Museum of Modern Art a bit steep.


“Some things people can afford, some things people can’t,” said Bloomberg, whose estimated personal fortune is $4.9 billion.


“MoMA is a private institution. It’s not a city institution. And they have a right to set their own pricing policies.”


Over the past five years, the city funneled $65 million in taxpayer money to help fund MoMA’s expansion.


Despite the taxpayers’ contribution, Bloomberg – who was in last week’s Forbes 400 list of richest Americans – said the city should not be involved in “pressuring” private groups about fees. Besides, he said, there are plenty to choose from. “If you can’t afford [admissions] at any one, you can go to another one,” he said.


Ed Skyler, Bloomberg’s press secretary, later offered a tamer response. “MoMA is a great institution, and it would be incredibly disappointing if this increase prevented people from enjoying it,” he said.


MoMA will reopen Nov. 20. The price of an adult ticket, which was $12, will now be $20. Ruth Kaplan, a spokeswoman for MoMA, noted that admission is free from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Fridays.

MoMA’s price hike, and its potential effects on the culture of museumgoing in America, will be discussed endlessly in the art world in the weeks and months to come, and rightly so. But I think we can all agree on one thing: Mayor Bloomberg just earned himself a swift kick in the crotch for his personal contribution to the ongoing debate. (Not in the head–that wouldn’t hurt him one bit.)


P.S. From the Floor has a thoughtful discussion of what the MoMA price hike might mean over the long haul. It’s definitely worth a look.

TT: Report from mid-air

September 28, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I’m still hacking away at those pre-Chicago deadlines (two down, three to go), but I’m also out and about. On Saturday I saw Paula Vogel’s The Oldest Profession, about which I’ll be writing in this Friday’s Wall Street Journal. Last night Supermaud and I finally caught up with Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry’s screen version of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which filled me full of half-formed notions I don’t have time to think through just yet (though I will, I will–be patient). Tonight I’ll be at New York City Opera for the opening of the company’s revival of Mark Morris’ wonderful staging of Rameau’s Plat

TT: Sinking in

September 27, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I’ve had the whole weekend to get used to looking at All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine. I’m still not used to it yet.


When you first get your hands on a copy of your newest book, the initial rush of excitement quickly gives way to anxiety. Is everything right? Strange and inexplicable things can go wrong with a book between the time you sign off on the second-pass proofs and the time it rolls off the presses. It’s been said that the very first thing an author invariably sees when he opens his latest book is a typographical error. In my case, this has yet to happen, but something did go wrong with the first printing of The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken, a comparatively small production glitch that nobody noticed but the managing editor and me, and though it was insignificant, it took me an hour or so to get over the shock. So I flipped quickly through All in the Dances to see if anything similar had happened, and once I established that the first printing was gremlin-free, I relaxed and reveled.


I’ve shown All in the Dances to everyone I’ve seen since it arrived via messenger last Friday afternoon, and their reactions have been identical to mine. It’s a beautiful piece of work, perfectly designed, invitingly small and slender, with dust-jacket photos that make you want to sit down, open it up, and start reading at once. Alas, I haven’t been able to oblige anybody yet, but Harcourt assures me that a box of author copies is headed my way.


Which reminds me: I dedicated All in the Dances to the thirty people I’ve taken to see their first Balanchine ballets in the seventeen years since I saw my first Balanchine ballet. One of them, Nancy LaMott, whom I took to A Midsummer Night’s Dream not long after we met, is no longer with us, but the others (including Our Girl in Chicago, who is making her second appearance to date on the dedication page of one of my books) are all alive, well, and in for a little surprise come November 1. Alas, it’s a double-edged surprise, for they’re going to have to buy their own copies. I know that’s kind of crass, but there’s nothing I can do about it: I only get twenty free copies, and I can’t very well give them away to some dedicatees and not others! I’m hoping that the thrill of seeing their names on the dedication page will make up for having to purchase a copy (which the proud author will happily sign, of course). And yes, I live in fear that I inadvertently left somebody out….


I should mention that Harcourt is already starting to arrange promotional appearances for All in the Dances. If you live in or near New York City, pencil me in for November 16, when I’ll be speaking at the Barnes & Noble on Union Square at 7:30 (the address is 33 E. 17th St.). I’m appearing jointly with Bob Gottlieb, whose Balanchine book
comes out the same week as mine, and Robert Greskovic, dance critic of The Wall Street Journal, will serve as moderator-interlocutor-referee. Do come–I think it’ll be fun.


Now I really have to get down to work. I wrote a 4,000-word essay for Commentary about Johnny Mercer over the weekend, and I have four more pieces due between now and Friday morning, when I fly to Chicago to visit Our Girl and see three plays and an opera. Blogging is likely to be sporadic as a result, though I don’t plan to vanish altogether–there’s too much stuff on my mind.


For the moment, though, I must attend to my drama column for this Friday’s Journal, so I’ll see you all later.

TT: Almanac

September 27, 2004 by Terry Teachout

“Show business is a bit like guys that say, ‘You know, that hooker really likes me.'”


Jay Leno (quoted in Bill Carter, The Late Shift)

TT: Encore

September 24, 2004 by Terry Teachout

I love what OGIC wrote just below, and it reminded me of one of my favorite quotations about literature, which comes at the very end of C.S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism. I’ve mentioned it before on this blog, but it seemed so relevant to what she said that I thought it worth repeating:

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.

What he said.

OGIC: The world as I found it

September 24, 2004 by Terry Teachout

Over at Elegant Variation today, Mark Sarvas has a self-searching little essay about the way his literary tastes are changing as he grows older. The spur for his ruminations was reading two very different books in succession–David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire–and discovering that the artistically conservative Hazzard did a whole lot more for him. On the verge of turning 40, Mark’s not so sure how he feels about this:

But the truth is I like things a little quieter, a little slower. I like to linger. I like to peer inside. I don’t necessarily mind books where nothing much happens; because in life, it’s often the case that nothing much happens. I find that for my taste–and it is not much more than a question of taste–I prefer the quiet truths. I was struck by Stephen Mitchelmore’s recent post on his splinters blog, where he said: “Is there anyone else who gets excited, instead, by very short novels that do not rely for effect on clinical mastery, faux-naivete, ‘very old-fashioned entertainment’ and/or bad faith?”

When I read that, I jumped up and down pointing at the screen, shouting, “Yes! Yes! Exactly!” (It’s worth pointing out that [John] Banville closes his review of The Great Fire with these words: “Yet when the narrative leaves love to one side and concerns itself with depicting a world and a time in chaos, it rises to heights far, far above the barren plain where most of contemporary fiction makes its tiny maneuvers.”)

Still, these leanings trouble me. I often ask myself what I would have made of cubism when it first appeared. I’m a great devotee of Picasso and Braque today but I recognize that it’s with all the benefits of hindsight. Or would I have embraced Jackson Pollock forty years after cubism, or would I have derided him as Jack the Dripper? I like to think I would have recognized genius for what it was but I’m just not certain. (When I played in a rock band, I used to promise myself that my outlook would always stay young; that I’d one day be the sort of parent who knew and listened to the same music as my kids. Perhaps the fact that I played in a band that exclusively covered the Beatles should have been seen as something of red flag, but it’s hard to be heard above youthful intransigence.)

I’ve recently noticed some shifts in my own reading tastes that seem to signal nothing so much as that I’m getting older. For me, though, it seems a matter of wanting windows where I used to want mirrors. I’ve read enough novels about people like me having experiences like mine. Now I want to find out about the rest of the world. Much like Sam Golden Rule Jones here, I want, these days, to find the world itself in a novel. It might not be going too far to say that I want information from my fiction, however much that makes it sound like I should be reading the newspaper.

If it’s any comfort to Mark at all, I think there’s a way to see an artist like Hazzard, however traditional her methods, as anything but conservative. I haven’t read The Great Fire yet; I’m saving it up for a moment when I need some surefire rapture. But what was so enthralling to me about Hazzard’s Transit of Venus was that it dared to try to be true–always a long shot. That sort of vision, and conviction to it, is a hook that postmodernism can make it easy for a writer to–rather conservatively–wriggle off of. So stop worrying, Mark, and have a liberally pleasurable birthday.

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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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