Archives for July 15, 2013

I started this blog on July 14, 2003, ten years ago. (This was the very first posting.)

Back then the word “blog” was still comparatively unfamiliar to the public at large, and there were, so far as I know, fewer than a dozen blogs that dealt solely or primarily with cultural matters, none of which was written by a critic who published regularly in the national media. Now there are far more than I can count.

Many, perhaps most of the artblogs that were launched in the early years of the twenty-first century have since fallen by the wayside, but “About Last Night” is still here. I’ve posted something–if only an almanac entry–every weekday for a decade. Sometimes it’s a burden, but mostly it’s a pleasure.

I tip my hat to Laura “Our Girl” Demanski and Carrie Frye, both of whom have shared this space with me in the past, much to my delight. Of late, alas, they’ve become too busy to blog (Laura is editing a magazine and Carrie is writing a book). When and if their lives change, they’ll be welcome back, and then some.

I don’t feel like going on at length about the tenth anniversary of “About Last Night” precisely because it is still here, a fixed point on the horizon of cyberspace. I do, however, want to point you to a few of my favorite postings. Some of them are about art, others about life, most about the intersection between the two. All are personal, most very much so. In time I hope to spin them, and others like them, into a book.

For the moment, though, I invite you to look back with me over a decade of uninterrupted blogging. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride:

• From 2003: Among the professionals and Kind of omnipresent

• From 2004: Nothing to do and A wedding

• From 2005: Time off for good behavior

• From 2006: In a strange land

• From 2007: Among the clouds and Sursum corda

• From 2008: Sacred to the memory

• From 2009: I shook hands with Piney Brown and How it felt

• From 2010: Lucky man and Night thoughts on Jack Benny

• From 2011: One is a wanderer and Time present and time past

• From 2012: Home from the sea and Beloved that pilgrimage

• From 2013: Blossoms in the breeze

A complete performance of the original version of George Balanchine’s Apollo, originally telecast on the CBC in 1960. The score is by Igor Stravinsky. The principal dancers are Jacques d’Amboise as Apollo, Jillana as Calliope, Francia Russell as Polyhymnia, and Diana Adams as Terpsichore:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday and Wednesday.)

“A writer–and, I believe, generally all persons–must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty Conversations with Borges