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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for December 17, 2008

TT: Fully freshened

December 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Check out the top-five and “Out of the Past” modules of the right-hand column, where you’ll find lots of interesting new stuff–just in time for Christmas!

BOOK

December 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (Yale, $35). New from the author of Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, the first book-length study of how France’s culturati coped with the German occupation. The answer is in the title. Virtually all French artists played ball with the Nazis in one way or another, and some of the greatest (including the incomparable pianist Alfred Cortot) did their bidding with foul alacrity. Spotts’ book is insufficiently detailed and lacks full source notes, but the story it tells is both true and compelling–as well as depressing. Anyone naïve enough to think of artists as a nobler breed should read it and weep (TT).

TT: Snapshot

December 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

Ida Lupino sings “One for My Baby” and “Again” in Jean Negulesco’s Road House (1948):

TT: Almanac

December 17, 2008 by Terry Teachout

“‘Well, I like a lot of talk in a book, and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. And another thing-I kind of like to figure out what the guy’s thinking by what he says. I like some description too,’ he went on. ‘I like to know what color a thing is, how it smells and maybe how it looks, and maybe how a guy feels about it–but not too much of that.'”
John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday

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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