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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for January 26, 2005

TT: That’s all he wrote

January 26, 2005 by Terry Teachout

Sorry, no postings today. I wrote a three-thousand-word piece from scratch Tuesday morning, just returned from two sets at a nightclub, and have another deadline this afternoon and a Broadway preview tonight. For the moment, I’m somewhat more than lightly toasted.


I leave you in the caring hands of Our Girl. See you Thursday. Or Friday.

TT: Almanac

January 26, 2005 by Terry Teachout

“That was my favorite thing about playing England–all the girls looked like Brigitte Bardot, and all the guys looked like me.”


Paul Desmond (quoted in Marian McPartland’s Jazz World)

TT: Too much information

January 26, 2005 by Terry Teachout

I awoke a bit earlier than usual this morning, booted up my iBook, started my usual pre-breakfast surf of the Web, and suddenly it hit me…I soooo don’t want any information today, except (maybe) the weather. I don’t want to know the news, don’t want to be in touch, don’t want to read anybody’s opinion of anything, don’t care about the Oscar nominations, don’t want to consider the short-term implications of the demise of the C train, don’t give a damn about what’s happening outside my front door. If I could, I’d cancel all my appointments, take the phone off the hook, ignore all incoming mail (including snail mail), skip my afternoon deadline, correct no proofs, blow off tonight’s Broadway press preview, and spend the rest of the day and night in a state of elective mutism, communing with the contents of the Teachout Museum and listening to music about which I have no plans to write.


Alas, I can’t do most of those things, or even very many of them. I have to schedule my days off well in advance, then defend them vigilantly against all comers. This isn’t one of them. What’s more, the mounting intensity of my desire to batten down the hatches suggests to me that I’m in severe need of more than just a day off. The world is too much with me, and I need to hole up and hide out for at least two consecutive days, preferably somewhere else. I can’t hear myself thinking. I need some silence.


Like I said, none of that is on the menu, not immediately. But at least I can turn off the incoming information tap all day long, and that’s my plan.


Now let’s see if I stick to it.


(P.S. Read. Ponder. Shudder.)

OGIC: Fortune cookie

January 26, 2005 by Terry Teachout

“Gulley’s old father in this book is taken from life and I, as a boy playing with paint in school holidays, remember very well the feelings of pity and surprise with which I looked at a gilt-framed canvas which he had brought out to show me, and propped against an apple tree among the weeds and cabbage stalks of a Normandy farm garden. I have an idea that it had just come back to him, rejected by the Academy which ten years before had been glad to hang his works. I remember my discomfort, as I realized that this man of fifty or so was appealing for sympathy from me, a boy of sixteen; that there were tears in his eyes as he begged me to look at his beautiful work (‘the best thing I ever did’) and asked me what had happened to the world which had ceased to admire such real ‘true’ art, and allowed itself to be cheated by ‘daubers”‘who could neither draw nor glaze; who dared not attempt ‘finish.’


“I was myself in 1905 a devoted Impressionist, one of the ‘daubers.’ I thought that Impressionism was the only great and true art. I thought that the poor ruined broken-hearted man weeping before me in the sunlight of that squalid vegetable patch, was a pitiable failure, whose tragedy was very easily understood–he had no eye for colour, no respect for pigment, no talent, no right whatsoever to the name of artist.


“I don’t know even now what that man’s work was worth. I suspect from recollection that in these days it would be once more highly appreciated. For several schools have intervened, and having worked through Impressionism and Post Impressionism, the Fauves and the Cubists, we can look upon the late Victorians with a fresh eye and judge them, outside the passing fashion, for what they really were.”


Joyce Cary, 1951 prefatory essay to The Horse’s Mouth

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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