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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: New York time

February 17, 2005 by Terry Teachout

A reader passes on this quote from Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony and one of the artists I admire most:

For seventeen years, I lived in New York. It was a wonderful adventure, a great part of my life. But, after a while, it began to bother me that the whole purpose of living in those concrete canyons–the world of right angles–was all the cultural events that you could take in. That somehow seemed to put a lot of pressure on the cultural events. Unless you have attended three operas and five ballets and six new restaurants this week, you’re not keeping up. I found that people taking in these events weren’t thinking about them, but they were sure listing them. There was a lot of “have you seen this,” but not enough of “what was this like for you?” As I reach this advanced age [sixty], the luxury of having time to think, to savor it, has become important to me.

The quote was new to me, but the sentiment wasn’t. It’s something I think about often. (Well, fairly often.) New York is a cultural echo chamber, and it’s noisy inside. Especially if you do what I do for a living, you’re always aware that there’s exciting stuff going on every day, and you feel compelled to try to see and hear as much of it as you possibly can, since that’s the whole point of living here. Of course New York is full of wonderful people, too–I’ve never had so many good friends as I do right now–but we’re all here for the same reason, which is to be as close to the center of things as we can get. No doubt there are also plenty of hermits in Manhattan, but I tend not to run into them at intermission.


I don’t claim to be the most spiritual person in the world, but I’m very much aware of the dangers of living in a place that puts so many obstacles in the path of contemplation. Last year I posted an almanac entry by Santiago Ramon y Caj

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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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