Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
A 1931 newsreel of George Gershwin playing “I Got Rhythm” at the old Manhattan Theater (now the Ed Sullivan Theater) in New York. This is the only surviving sound film of Gershwin at the piano:
(This is the latest in a weekly series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Wednesday.)
“Europe is the unfinished negative of which America is the proof.”
Mary McCarthy, “America the Beautiful”
by ldemanski
Reading list for those attending the filmmaker’s Rogue Film School:
Required reading: Virgil’s “Georgics” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Suggested reading: The Warren Commission Report, Rabelais’ “Gargantua and Pantagruel”, “The Poetic Edda”, translated by Lee M. Hollander (in particular The Prophecy of the Seeress), Bernal Diaz del Castillo “True History of the Conquest of New Spain”.
Re-watching a couple of his documentaries over the weekend began thinking how it was too bad Herzog wasn’t tapped to create the Voyager’s message to aliens. One imagines a future army of extraterrestrials arriving on Earth speaking in Herzog: “What is this planet we find ourselves upon? Everything is pointing to a new world but we need to articulate what that might be…”
“America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”
John Updike, Problems
Mrs. T and I are traveling today, but there’s lots of new stuff in the right-hand column, so take a gander. (Or a goose.)
“Yesterday, the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America, and a greater perhaps never was nor will be decided among men.”
John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, July 3, 1776
Selena Hastings, The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham (Random House, $35). Actually, not much of the dirt in this tell-all biography of the author of Of Human Bondage (and, needless to say, The Letter) will come as a surprise to those familiar with Ted Morgan’s Maugham, published in 1980. But Hastings is a much better writer who had unrestricted access to previously unknown primary source material, and the result is a smart book that portrays its subject with a welcome combination of candor and sympathy (TT).
Punch Brothers, Antifogmatic (Nonesuch). The second album from mandolinist Chris Thile’s post-Nickel Creek quintet is a collection of original songs about love and its discontents. Like its predecessor, Antifogmatic is tantalizingly hard to pigeonhole. To call it “progressive bluegrass” makes a fair amount of sense but fails to convey the group’s rich yet coherent stylistic eclecticism. Why not settle for “incredibly hip acoustic music”? I’ll stand on that (TT).
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