• 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 / 2011 / September / Archives for 6th

Archives for September 6, 2011

TT: Top of the barrel

September 6, 2011 by Terry Teachout

HILARY%20NAPPING%20AT%20SETH%20PETERSON.jpgOn Thursday Mrs. T and I returned home from a month-long stretch on the road. Most of it was pretty wonderful, especially our two-day visit to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Seth Peterson Cottage, at which I snapped this candid photo of Mrs. T sleeping on the couch. Not so the travel, which was grueling from start to finish, in part because there was so damned much of it, including two unplanned trips to Smalltown, U.S.A., to see my ailing mother (who is much improved, thank you).

In addition to the Peterson Cottage, the shows we saw, and the (frequently) fabulous meals we ate along the way, we stumbled across a brand-new independent bookstore-café that’s equally deserving of high praise. Arcadia Books is located in Spring Green, the small Wisconsin town that is home to American Players Theatre and Taliesin. It’s owned by James Bohnen, a stage director whose work I admire, and it’s the kind of shop of which serious readers dream. The space is handsome and the choice of books imaginative (I bought a copy of the New York Review Books edition of Murray Kempton’s Part of Our Time there). The food is good, too!

DISPLAY%20OF%20%2522POPS%2522%20AND%20%2522COMPOSED%2522.jpgI’m tickled to report, by the way, that my own Pops was on display next to Rosanne Cash’s Composed, a book of which I think highly. It was nice to be in such good company.
When you’re gone for a month, you’ve got a month’s worth of snail mail to open, and that’s what I spent Thursday night and Friday morning doing. Most of it was publicity-type stuff, most of which was a notch up from junk. I did, however, receive a package from the University of Chicago Press that delighted me, containing as it did my copies of Richard Stark’s Flashfire and Firebreak, to which I contributed an introduction of which I’m exceedingly proud.

If you haven’t yet jumped on the Stark/Parker bandwagon, I have good news, which is that the University of Chicago Press is giving away free copies of the e-book version of The Score, the fifth novel in the Parker series, throughout the month of September. You can download your copy by going to the U of C Parker page, and you can also order it directly from Amazon and Barnes & Noble. (If the $0 price hasn’t shown up yet on these sites, come back later today or tomorrow.)

Incidentally, Flashfire is about to be turned into a movie called Parker that will star Jason Statham, Jennifer Lopez, and Nick Nolte. Some of the Parker movies have been much better than others, so I’m hoping that this one, which will be directed by Taylor Hackford, is an improvement on its most recent predecessor.

WHAT%20A%20WONDERFUL%20WORLD.jpgIn addition to Flashfire and Firebreak, I also received an envelope from my theatrical agent that contained a check—the first money I’ve ever earned as a playwright. It was the advance payment for the premiere production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, which opens next Thursday in Orlando, Florida. It isn’t a big check, but it still means a lot to me. Not only is it a symbol of an achievement that I never envisioned, but I’m allowing myself to think of it as—maybe, just maybe—a down payment on the future. Here’s hoping, anyway….

TT: At last

September 6, 2011 by Terry Teachout

The trailer for Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited second film, out September 30 from Fox Searchlight:

TT: Almanac

September 6, 2011 by Terry Teachout

“A little artist has all the tragic unhappiness and the sorrows of a great artist and he is not a great artist.”
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

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

September 2011
M T W T F S S
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627282930  
« Aug   Oct »

An ArtsJournal Blog

Recent Posts

  • Verbal virtuosity
  • Jump-starting an arts revival
  • Replay: Alfred Hitchcock talks to Dick Cavett
  • Almanac: Tolstoy on happiness
  • Almanac: Ambrose Bierce on the President of the United States

Copyright © 2021 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in