• 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 / 2007 / Archives for April 2007

Archives for April 2007

TT: What goes around

April 18, 2007 by Terry Teachout

This is part of a piece I wrote for Crisis immediately after the Columbine massacre:

It is not enough simply to say that violent movies drive young men mad, since people have been killing other people on the silver screen ever since The Great Train Robbery. Nor is today’s violence uniquely explicit. When Lee Marvin hurls scalding coffee at Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat–and when, later on, you see her hideously scarred face–the effect is as shocking as anything in Pulp Fiction. Yet no one has suggested that such films permanently warped the psyches of Eisenhower-era children. Clearly, there is something fundamentally different about the way violence is presented in contemporary movies. But what?
As it happens, Marvin himself offered a partial but nonetheless compelling answer to that question. “When I play these roles of vicious men,” he told an interviewer, “I do things you shouldn’t do and I make you see that you shouldn’t do them.” Today, any actor or director who dared say such a thing would sound hopelessly naive, but Marvin had earned the right to speak plainly: an ex-Marine who was grievously wounded in combat in World War II, he knew that violence has consequences. Not so his jejune successors, in whose morally weightless films violence is an unreal presence and acts of butchery are no more consequential than Wile E. Coyote’s eternal pursuit of the Road-Runner. Automatic weapons are emptied blithely, BMWs driven off cliffs, handsomely coiffed heads blown to pieces–but there are no funerals, no weeping widows, no innocent bystanders imprisoned forever in wheelchairs because they happened to be standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I still feel that way.

TT: Pat Buckley, R.I.P.

April 18, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Pat Buckley died on Sunday. She is said to have been one of the models for the “social X-rays” portrayed in Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. I knew her slightly, but not as a New York socialite–I don’t move in those circles. Our acquaintance was of a different kind: Pat was the wife of William F. Buckley, Jr., whose National Review-related dinner parties she superintended. We met twenty years ago at one of those gatherings, an experience I wrote about for National Review Online‘s condolence page, which also contains links to various other tributes posted on NRO:

The first time I sat at Pat Buckley’s dinner table, I found her…well, more than a little bit intimidating. I was fresh out of the Midwest and had never met anyone quite like her. She seemed to have stepped out of a Louis Auchincloss novel. No sooner were we introduced than I started wondering whether my socks matched–but then she went out of her way to make me feel at ease, and before I knew it, I’d lost my heart. Was the elaborate hauteur of her public manner a game she played to amuse herself and her loved ones? I’ve no idea–I didn’t know her well enough–but to me she was never anything but charming, caring, and wonderfully kind, and I adored her. I can no more imagine a world without Pat than I can imagine a world without champagne.

Her New York Times obituary is here.

TT: Almanac

April 18, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“Those I’m not fond of have not, as a rule, considered ‘warmth’ my distinguishing quality. I never could serve myself up in the same sauce to friends & to acquaintances.”
Edith Wharton, letter to Mary Berenson (Oct. 17, 1920)

TT: Another prize gone wrong

April 17, 2007 by Terry Teachout

David Lindsay-Abaire’s Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer Prize for drama yesterday. Here’s part of what I wrote about it in The Wall Street Journal last year:
“It’s a family drama with punch lines, a genre that at best runs to glibness, and Mr. Lindsay-Abaire sweetens the loaf of his characters’ suffering with a double spoonful of sugar. Not that their plight is less than deadly serious. Becca and Howie are a nice suburban couple whose son was killed when he darted in front of a car. Izzy, Becca’s kid sister, is a spunky ne’er-do-well who suddenly finds herself pregnant without benefit of clergy. Nat, their mother, is no stranger to sorrow: her third child, a heroin addict, hung himself. All this might have been the stuff of domestic tragedy, but Rabbit Hole fails to scratch the surface of Becca’s decorous middle-class grief. Instead, we spend too much time chortling at Izzy’s haplessness and Nat’s tactlessness–and we’re never surprised by anything anyone says or does.
“Such are the comfortable, comforting ways of post-Oprah TV drama, and the familiar presence of Cynthia Nixon and Tyne Daly in the cast serves still further to make Rabbit Hole the kind of show you can see any day of the week in your very own living room….”
Go figure.
UPDATE: For the scoop on how Rabbit Hole won the Pulitzer, go here.

TT: Almanac

April 17, 2007 by Terry Teachout

“The use of the guillotine becomes an addiction.”
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

CD

April 16, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Russell Oberlin, Handel Arias (DGG). Arias from Messiah, Israel in Egypt, Rodelinda, Radamisto, and Muzio Seevola, sung by the most perfect countertenor voice ever to be overheard by a microphone. Precious little of Oberlin’s priceless recorded legacy has made it to CD, and this amazing 1959 album is among the most glittering jewels (TT).

BOOK

April 16, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts (W.W. Norton, $35). An uncategorizable, unputdownable, utterly frank nine-hundred-page stroll through the bloody history of modernity, in which James serves up pithy, quote-driven miniature essays about key and not-so-key figures ranging from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, skewering countless hypocrites along the way. A splendidly readable exercise in cultural reclamation (TT).

CD

April 16, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Songs of Ned Rorem (Other Minds). The fabulously rare 1964 Columbia LP of Rorem’s best songs, now on CD for the very first time. They’re all here: “Early in the Morning,” “My Papa’s Waltz,” “Visits to Saint Elizabeth’s,” “The Lordly Hudson,” and two dozen others, selected and accompanied by the composer and sung by Charles Bressler, Phyllis Curtin, Gianna d’Angelo, Donald Gramm, and Regina Sarfaty. Get this one right now (TT).

« Previous Page
Next Page »

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

April 2007
M T W T F S S
 1
2345678
9101112131415
16171819202122
23242526272829
30  
« Mar   May »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Terry Teachout, 65
  • Gripping musical melodrama
  • Replay: Somerset Maugham in 1965
  • Almanac: Somerset Maugham on sentimentality
  • Snapshot: Richard Strauss conducts Till Eulenspiegel

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in