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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 5, 2006

TT: Back in the saddle

April 5, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Somewhat to my surprise I find that I’ve written the first 1,500 words of the fourth chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong. As you may recall, I wasn’t planning on doing any work yesterday, but when you’re hot, you’re hot, so I guess I’ll lay off the blog for another day or two and keep pumping it out.


In the meantime, here’s a little taste of the day’s work:

Harlem in 1924 was as much an arena for sexual opportunism as it was a center of cultural ferment. Duke Ellington euphemistically described it as “a very colorful place….an attraction like Chinatown was in San Francisco.” Some well-heeled Manhattanites treated it more like Storyville East, and some Harlemites were more than glad to oblige them. Carl Van Vechten, who would celebrate Harlem two years later in his controversial novel Nigger Heaven, was already bringing parties of nightclubbers there, both to revel in the black entertainment and, as often as not, to troll for sex. Though he was a true believer in the Harlem Renaissance, Van Vechten was also a gay man in search of adventure, and there was no lack of it in Harlem, no matter what your tastes might encompass. Langston Hughes would later write sardonically of how “thousands of whites came to Harlem night after night, thinking the Negroes loved to have them there, and firmly believing that all Harlemites left their houses at sundown to sing and dance in cabarets, because most of the whites saw nothing but the cabarets, not the houses….The ordinary Negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance. And if they had, it hadn’t raised their wages any. As for all those white folks in the speakeasies and night clubs of Harlem–well, maybe a colored man could find some place to have a drink that the tourists hadn’t yet discovered.”

Once again, later.

TT: Almanac

April 5, 2006 by Terry Teachout

“He was perhaps a cynic, and his withers were unwrung at many of the misfortunes that affect men, but he had a peculiar feeling for youth, perhaps because it promised so much and lasted too short a time, and it seemed to him that there was in the bitterness it experience when reality breaks upon its illusions somehting more pathetic than in many graver ills.”


W. Somerset Maugham, The Narrow Corner

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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