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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for May 4, 2010

TT: Gone legit

May 4, 2010 by Terry Teachout

A reader writes:

I went this weekend to Trinity College in Hartford to see my daughter in the musical Nine. She is double majoring in music and theatre/dance. I thought you would be interested in knowing that your book Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong is one of her required textbooks in a course she is taking this semester, “American Popular Music.” In fact, she has a paper due on it soon.

I’ve been in textbooks before, but I’ve never been one. Cool.

TT: A peep into the past

May 4, 2010 by Terry Teachout

Readers of Brad Gooch’s recent biography of Flannery O’Connor will recall that he describes in the first chapter a 1932 Pathé newsreel in which the five-year-old O’Connor showed off a chicken that she had taught to walk backwards. The experience, she recalled years later in an essay called “King of the Birds,” “marked me for life.”
Sad to say, this newsreel has yet to make it to YouTube, but you can view it online by going here.
You will notice, incidentally, that the anonymous author of the program note for this clip, which is available on British Pathé’s Web site, clearly doesn’t know that the “Mary O’Connor” portrayed in the newsreel is the same person who grew up to be one of America’s greatest writers. O tempora!

TT: Almanac

May 4, 2010 by Terry Teachout

“Is Porky Pig, a cartoon, a movie ‘persona’? Of course he is. If Cary Grant is a ‘person’ in the movies, then so is Porky. Grant is an entity who appears only in the movies and doesn’t exist in real life. He was drawn up and created by a system that used Archibald Leach as its material. Porky Pig is similarly drawn up–it’s just that the raw material was pen and ink, not a guy from Bristol, England.”
Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine

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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