Archives for 2004

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.

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.

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.”

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.

For those of you who live elsewhere: it’s snowing in Manhattan. A lot. Did I mention that I have to go see a play in Brooklyn tonight?

All together now: arrgh.

“She stepped forward, kissed me and laid her head against my shoulder, leaning prudently forward to keep the rest of herself out of contact with the rest of me. Both of us sighed deeply. I felt as if I had just sat through a complete performance of La Traviata compressed into one and a half minutes.”

Kingsley Amis, Girl, 20

I usually write about theater in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, but I made a special guest appearance on this morning’s editorial page. The occasion was the opening of Embedded, Tim Robbins’ new play about Gulf War II, which he blames on the political philosopher Leo Strauss, quoting chapter and verse to prove his contention that the war was started for nefarious reasons by a cabal of Strauss’ neoconservative disciples in the Bush administration (including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz).

There’s just one little problem–the quote in question is totally bogus. And that’s not even the worst part:

Strauss’ complex political views are not easily reduced to speeches in a play, but Mr. Robbins has done his best by making one of his characters, a fellow named Pearly White and thus presumably modeled on Richard Perle (that being Mr. Robbins’ idea of cutting wit), spout the following lines: “Moral virtue has no application to the really intelligent man, the philosopher. In the words of Leo Strauss:

We’re having a major traffic surge as a result of Terry’s Wall Street Journal article about Tim Robbins, and our guess is that some of you are visiting for the first time, so welcome to “About Last Night,” a 24/7 blog hosted by artsjournal.com on which Terry Teachout writes about the arts in New York City and elsewhere, aided and abetted by the pseudonymous Our Girl in Chicago, who writes from…Chicago.

All our postings of the past seven days are visible in reverse chronological order on this page. Terry’s start with “TT,” Our Girl’s with “OGIC.” In addition, the entire contents of this site are archived chronologically and can be accessed by clicking “ALN Archives” at the top of the right-hand column.

You can read more about us, and about “About Last Night,” by going to the right-hand column and clicking in the appropriate places. You’ll also find various other toothsome features there, including our regularly updated Top Five list of things to see, hear, read and otherwise do, links to Terry’s most recent newspaper and magazine articles, and “Sites to See,” a list of links to other blogs and Web sites with art-related content. If you’re curious about the arty part of the blogosphere, you’ve come to the right site: “Sites to See” will point you in all sorts of interesting directions, and all roads lead back to “About Last Night.”

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The only other thing you need to know is that “About Last Night” is about all the arts, high, medium, and low: film, drama, painting, dance, fiction, TV, music of all kinds, whatever. Our interests are wide-ranging, and we think there are plenty of other people like us out there in cyberspace, plus still more who long to wander off their beaten paths but aren’t sure which way to turn.

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Welcome.