• Home
  • About
    • About Last Night
    • Terry Teachout
    • Contact
  • AJBlogCentral
  • ArtsJournal

About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

You are here: Home / 2005 / September / Archives for 5th

Archives for September 5, 2005

TT: Elsewhere

September 5, 2005 by Terry Teachout

At the moment I’m somewhere en route from Washington, D.C., to here. Yes, you’ll be hearing all about it in due course, but for now, content yourselves with this capsule version of my recent explorations in the blogosphere:


– By way of Conversational Reading, a fondly remembered excerpt from an interview with Vladimir Nabokov:

INTERVIEWER: And the function of the editor? Has one ever had literary advice to offer?


NABOKOV: By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor–which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet”!

(Hee hee hee.)


– Words to the wise from Jeff Jarvis:

There is no need to define “blog.” I doubt there ever was such a call to define “newspaper” or “television” or “radio” or “book”–or, for that matter, “telephone” or “instant messenger.” A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set definition. That’s why I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about conversation than content so far. I think it is equally tiresome and useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act. Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining “blog” is a fool’s errand.

I don’t entirely agree, but I agree a lot more now than I did a year and a half ago.


– Good news from Playbill:

A new film written and directed by playwright/screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan will likely begin filming in September.


Variety reports that Lonergan’s “Margaret” will be filmed in New York with Scott Rudin, Gary Gilbert and Sydney Pollack serving as producers. Anna Paquin has signed on to the project, and negotiations are currently underway with Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, J. Smith-Cameron and Jeannie Berlin.


“Margaret,” according to the industry paper, concerns “a Gotham teen, her actress mother and the girl who tries to make amends for her complicity in a terrible traffic accident.”


Lonergan’s stage plays include The Waverly Gallery, Lobby Hero and This Is Our Youth. He also wrote the screenplays for “Analyze This,” “You Can Count On Me,” “The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle” and “Gangs of New York.”

I can’t wait.


– Speaking of good playwrights, Mr. Superfluities is smart about why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? still makes Broadway audiences squirm:

Virginia Woolf, in its unforgiving portrait of the illusions that support a long-term relationship and the hostility and envy that give the American, educated, professional upper-middle-class its fuel, is a glance into a mirror. If you’re going to take your wife or girlfriend out for dinner and a show, you may be better off with something other than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Now that Broadway is an amusement park rather than the locus of an art form, it provides escape (even excellent, thoughtful, well-crafted examples of escape like Doubt), not inward-turning dissection….

– Mr. Alicublog (who really ought to meet Mr. Superfluities) goes to Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin and draws a similarly sharp-witted distinction about one of my favorite actresses:

In Being John Malkovitch Catherine Keener’s character is a delightful surprise; in Virgin the woman Keener plays is earthy, quirky, and sweet–that is, a compilation of descriptive terms for the Catherine Keener persona, all of which I adore, but which add up to considerably less than a character….

(The last movie I watched before the levees broke, by the way, was Living in Oblivion. Ooooh, is she ever good in that.)


– Speaking of movies, Lileks has fun with a film noir…


– …while Mr. Rifftides shows what George Balanchine and John Coltrane had in common.


– Ms. Killin’ Time Being Lazy just introduced me to Cat and Girl, a webcomic “drawn” by a twenty-six-year-old wit from Brooklyn. I smell a major addiction coming on, if not a print-media essay.


– Finally, Mr. Outer Life rhapsodizes as only he can on his Favorite Restaurant:

And that’s all it was to me, that place with the best pastrami sandwich, until a few years ago when it became so much more: My Favorite Restaurant. I remember the day well, it was lunch, on a Saturday, the crowd waiting for a table spilling out into the parking lot, as usual, and while waiting I read a newspaper review posted on the window. This deli, sandwiched between a tile store and a dive bar in a non-descript strip mall across from some tenements in the middle of the sort of dystopic suburban sprawl that causes your average New Urbanist to wail and gnash his teeth in despair, was, according to the critic, not only the best deli in the city, it was one of the best restaurants.


Now I know what you’re thinking, because it’s exactly what my wife thought, namely, that seeing it so highly-rated is what elevated my esteem for it, but that’s not quite the way it happened. No, I resolved, on reading that review, to branch out, to try something other than the Number One pastrami sandwich, for what struck me more than the review’s conclusion was the review’s long list of do-not-miss items, items I’d somehow managed to miss.


So I tried the matzo ball soup…

Where? Where? WHERE?

TT: Elsewhere

September 5, 2005 by Terry Teachout

At the moment I’m somewhere en route from Washington, D.C., to here. Yes, you’ll be hearing all about it in due course, but for now, content yourselves with this capsule version of my recent explorations in the blogosphere:


– By way of Conversational Reading, a fondly remembered excerpt from an interview with Vladimir Nabokov:

INTERVIEWER: And the function of the editor? Has one ever had literary advice to offer?


NABOKOV: By “editor” I suppose you mean proofreader. Among these I have known limpid creatures of limitless tact and tenderness who would discuss with me a semicolon as if it were a point of honor–which, indeed, a point of art often is. But I have also come across a few pompous avuncular brutes who would attempt to “make suggestions” which I countered with a thunderous “stet”!

(Hee hee hee.)


– Words to the wise from Jeff Jarvis:

There is no need to define “blog.” I doubt there ever was such a call to define “newspaper” or “television” or “radio” or “book”–or, for that matter, “telephone” or “instant messenger.” A blog is merely a tool that lets you do anything from change the world to share your shopping list. People will use it however they wish. And it is way too soon in the invention of uses for this tool to limit it with a set definition. That’s why I resist even calling it a medium; it is a means of sharing information and also of interacting: It’s more about conversation than content so far. I think it is equally tiresome and useless to argue about whether blogs are journalism, for journalism is not limited by the tool or medium or person used in the act. Blogs are whatever they want to be. Blogs are whatever we make them. Defining “blog” is a fool’s errand.

I don’t entirely agree, but I agree a lot more now than I did a year and a half ago.


– Good news from Playbill:

A new film written and directed by playwright/screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan will likely begin filming in September.


Variety reports that Lonergan’s “Margaret” will be filmed in New York with Scott Rudin, Gary Gilbert and Sydney Pollack serving as producers. Anna Paquin has signed on to the project, and negotiations are currently underway with Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, J. Smith-Cameron and Jeannie Berlin.


“Margaret,” according to the industry paper, concerns “a Gotham teen, her actress mother and the girl who tries to make amends for her complicity in a terrible traffic accident.”


Lonergan’s stage plays include The Waverly Gallery, Lobby Hero and This Is Our Youth. He also wrote the screenplays for “Analyze This,” “You Can Count On Me,” “The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle” and “Gangs of New York.”

I can’t wait.


– Speaking of good playwrights, Mr. Superfluities is smart about why Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? still makes Broadway audiences squirm:

Virginia Woolf, in its unforgiving portrait of the illusions that support a long-term relationship and the hostility and envy that give the American, educated, professional upper-middle-class its fuel, is a glance into a mirror. If you’re going to take your wife or girlfriend out for dinner and a show, you may be better off with something other than Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Now that Broadway is an amusement park rather than the locus of an art form, it provides escape (even excellent, thoughtful, well-crafted examples of escape like Doubt), not inward-turning dissection….

– Mr. Alicublog (who really ought to meet Mr. Superfluities) goes to Wedding Crashers and The 40-Year-Old Virgin and draws a similarly sharp-witted distinction about one of my favorite actresses:

In Being John Malkovitch Catherine Keener’s character is a delightful surprise; in Virgin the woman Keener plays is earthy, quirky, and sweet–that is, a compilation of descriptive terms for the Catherine Keener persona, all of which I adore, but which add up to considerably less than a character….

(The last movie I watched before the levees broke, by the way, was Living in Oblivion. Ooooh, is she ever good in that.)


– Speaking of movies, Lileks has fun with a film noir…


– …while Mr. Rifftides shows what George Balanchine and John Coltrane had in common.


– Ms. Killin’ Time Being Lazy just introduced me to Cat and Girl, a webcomic “drawn” by a twenty-six-year-old wit from Brooklyn. I smell a major addiction coming on, if not a print-media essay.


– Finally, Mr. Outer Life rhapsodizes as only he can on his Favorite Restaurant:

And that’s all it was to me, that place with the best pastrami sandwich, until a few years ago when it became so much more: My Favorite Restaurant. I remember the day well, it was lunch, on a Saturday, the crowd waiting for a table spilling out into the parking lot, as usual, and while waiting I read a newspaper review posted on the window. This deli, sandwiched between a tile store and a dive bar in a non-descript strip mall across from some tenements in the middle of the sort of dystopic suburban sprawl that causes your average New Urbanist to wail and gnash his teeth in despair, was, according to the critic, not only the best deli in the city, it was one of the best restaurants.


Now I know what you’re thinking, because it’s exactly what my wife thought, namely, that seeing it so highly-rated is what elevated my esteem for it, but that’s not quite the way it happened. No, I resolved, on reading that review, to branch out, to try something other than the Number One pastrami sandwich, for what struck me more than the review’s conclusion was the review’s long list of do-not-miss items, items I’d somehow managed to miss.


So I tried the matzo ball soup…

Where? Where? WHERE?

TT: Rerun

September 5, 2005 by Terry Teachout

July 2004:

No one who hasn’t written a book can know what it feels like to see it set up in type for the first time. Your own manuscript, however neatly printed it may be, simply isn’t the real thing. It’s homemade, and looks that way. You can edit it as painstakingly as you like, but you still don’t know what your words will sound like in your inner ear until you see the thing itself. It’s unnerving, half scary and half thrilling, to pull the proofs out of their package and start riffling through them, pretending to look for typos (and sometimes finding them) but mostly just gazing raptly at each page, feeling your half-forgotten sentences and paragraphs quiver to life….

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

TT: Rerun

September 5, 2005 by Terry Teachout

July 2004:

No one who hasn’t written a book can know what it feels like to see it set up in type for the first time. Your own manuscript, however neatly printed it may be, simply isn’t the real thing. It’s homemade, and looks that way. You can edit it as painstakingly as you like, but you still don’t know what your words will sound like in your inner ear until you see the thing itself. It’s unnerving, half scary and half thrilling, to pull the proofs out of their package and start riffling through them, pretending to look for typos (and sometimes finding them) but mostly just gazing raptly at each page, feeling your half-forgotten sentences and paragraphs quiver to life….

(If it’s new to you, read the whole thing here.)

TT: Number, please

September 5, 2005 by Terry Teachout

– Price paid in 1957 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30): $30,000


– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $203,881.98


(Source: Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir)

TT: Number, please

September 5, 2005 by Terry Teachout

– Price paid in 1957 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art for Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm (Number 30): $30,000


– The same amount in today’s dollars, courtesy of Inflation Calculator: $203,881.98


(Source: Irving Sandler, A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir)

TT: Almanac

September 5, 2005 by Terry Teachout

“Music that does not nourish you spiritually is not music, only aural sensations.”


David Diamond (quoted in Crisis, September 2005)

TT: Almanac

September 5, 2005 by Terry Teachout

“Music that does not nourish you spiritually is not music, only aural sensations.”


David Diamond (quoted in Crisis, September 2005)

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...]

Follow Us on TwitterFollow Us on RSSFollow Us on E-mail

@Terryteachout1

Tweets by TerryTeachout1

Archives

September 2005
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  
« Aug   Oct »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Just because: Gore Vidal talks about The Best Man
  • Verbal virtuosity
  • Jump-starting an arts revival
  • Replay: Alfred Hitchcock talks to Dick Cavett
  • Almanac: Tolstoy on happiness

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in