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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

TT: Get a life–somewhere else

April 28, 2006 by Terry Teachout

Here’s a little taste of my next “Sightings” column, which appears biweekly in the “Pursuits” section of the Saturday Wall Street Journal:

If you’re an actor, New York is the perfect place to be a waiter. As anyone who lives here knows, the old joke is as true now as it ever was. Most New York artists do something else for a living, and wish they didn’t. Back when I worked in an inner-city bank from nine to five and played jazz after hours, the term for an artist’s rent-paying sideline was “day job.” Now, according to a playwright I know, it’s “slave job.” Either way, it’s no fun, and by most accounts it’s getting tougher. “Creative Workers Count,” a new study by the Freelancers Union that you can read by going to www.workingtoday.org, cites chapter and verse to prove the point….


It was, however, another passage in “Creative Workers Count” that made me sit up and think: “New York’s high concentration of creative professionals relative to other metropolitan areas gives the city a distinct competitive advantage in creative industries. But recent trends indicate that this competitive advantage may soon be threatened as creative workers relocate to cities, such as Portland, Oregon and Minneapolis/St. Paul, that offer a lower cost of living and developing creative centers.”


What’s so bad about that?

As always, there’s lots more where that came from. See for yourself–buy a copy of tomorrow’s Journal and look me up.

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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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