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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC:

May 10, 2005 by Terry Teachout

I know it is far more fashionable these days to bash the ipod than to praise it. But I love mine, and I don’t use it in any of the ways that seem to be so obnoxious to people. The earbuds drive me crazy, and I find it unsettling in any case to walk down the street less than fully aware of my surroundings (I was never big on the Walkman either). So for the first year and a half of my pod ownership, I basically used it only in the car with an FM transmitter. This doesn’t work in the city, meaning that the only times I used my bauble were on road trips to Detroit, when, on top of playing my favorite music, it drowned out the whining of the cat in the box in the back. Then last Christmas I requested and received a neat little speaker system, thereby increasing my ipod use probably tenfold.


Until today, these were the only two ways I used the ipod with any regularity. Today, however, I found a third good use for it: to help me get through an unpleasant visit to the dentist on the occasion of my first filling in twenty years. In this context, I was well pleased with my toy. But my experience does raise the question: what’s the best music to have a tooth filled by?


I adopted a strategy of trial and error: I set the ipod to shuffle, positioned my thumb near the forward button, and resolved to skip or not skip songs according to the principle of utter impulsiveness. And I skipped almost everything, which may just have been nervous energy. But out of all the songs the shuffler served up, what most pleased me was music from Sufjan Stevens’s Greetings from Michigan, the Great Lakes State (thanks, Cinetrix). It soothed without stultifying, and was just the thing. Turns out, however, that today’s dental drills put their 1985 counterparts to shame, and the whole ordeal lasted barely long enough to be called an ordeal at all, or even to necessitate the services of the itranquilizer. Still good to know that Stevens does the trick, though.

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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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