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Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for April 29, 2015

Six thousand times

April 29, 2015 by Terry Teachout

David Letterman is about to retire after thirty-three years as a late-night TV host, and he’s marked the occasion by giving a genuinely revealing interview to the New York Times:

I’m awash in melancholia. Over the weekend, I was talking to my son, and I said, “Harry, we’ve done like over 6,000 shows.” And he said, [high-pitched child’s voice] “That’s creepy.” And I thought, well, in a way, he’s right. It is creepy….I’ll miss it, desperately.

My guess is that he’ll miss it more than we’ll miss him. I remember when Letterman was still fresh and original—quite startlingly so—but that was a long, long time ago. Now he’s sixty-eight years old, and he’s outlived the conventions that he used to mock, as well as the new ones that he helped to create. Indeed, he’s come very close to outliving network TV itself.

letterman_internal_crowdFor that we should, I suppose, feel nostalgic, but I find it impossible to feel any sentiment at the fast-approaching departure from the scene of a public personality whose stock-in-trade has always been the unfelt snarkery that I call “Irony Lite.” Aside from everything else, I don’t associate him with what I think of as my youth: I was already out of college and earning a living when he launched Late Night with David Letterman in 1982.

What now strikes me most forcibly about his retirement is the very thing for which his own son twitted him. As I wrote in this space apropos of Johnny Carson’s death in 2005, Letterman has

devoted most of his adult life to that most ephemeral of endeavors, hosting a late-night talk show….I wonder what [Carson] thought of his life’s work? Or how he felt about having lived long enough to disappear into the memory hole? At least he had the dignity to vanish completely, retreating into private life instead of trying to hang on to celebrity by his fingernails. Perhaps he knew how little it means to have once been famous.

Perhaps David Letterman knows that, too. For in the end, having done six thousand episodes of a late-night talk show scarcely comes to more than having showed up for work six thousand times in a row. And while it is no small thing to have earned your living honestly, all that matters in the end is what you did with the living you earned.

Knowing nothing of Letterman’s private life, I can’t express an informed opinion about the latter question. Yet I can’t help but think of The Unknown Citizen, W.H. Auden’s sharp-toothed elegy for a machine-age American who “served the Greater Community” with robotic exactitude: Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:/Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. (That’s real irony.)

I note with interest that the word “proud” is nowhere to be found in Letterman’s New York Times interview. Is that significant, or merely characteristic? Maybe it’s just honest.

Snapshot: Andy Warhol talks about pop art

April 29, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAAndy Warhol talks about the pop-art phenomenon in a 1965 CBC profile:

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

Almanac: Murray Kempton on journalism and journalists

April 29, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“Journalism itself is the most sacred cow in journalism’s barn.”

Murray Kempton, dust-jacket blurb for Richard Pollak’s Stop the Presses, I Want to Get Off!

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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