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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for June 22, 2015

Twitter, in four sentences

June 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

argument5• How dare you talk about A when B is infinitely more important?

• If I disagree with you, you’re almost certainly arguing in bad faith and probably evil as well.

• You are personally responsible, in toto and in perpetuity, for everything that your friends, colleagues, and/or ancestors have ever said, done, or thought.

• Sentences #2 and #3 do not apply to me.

Last trump

June 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Having attained an age when I find it increasingly difficult to retrieve names with the effortless ease of my youth, I’m fascinated by the persistence, vividness, and exactitude of my earliest memories, many of which have to do either with music or with things I saw on television as a boy.

6a00d83451c29169e201676215e7dd970b-300wiHere’s a double-barreled example. On September 21, 1963, my family watched the chaotic debut episode of The Jerry Lewis Show, a two-hour-long live prime-time talk-and-variety show for whose forty-week season Lewis was reportedly paid a cool $8 million—at the time, the highest salary ever paid to a TV performer. The series, a legendary fiasco, was canceled after thirteen weeks. (You can read all about it here.) So far as I know, the first episode was never rerun, meaning that I only saw it once. Even so, I clearly recall that Lewis sang a song that night called “Think Pink.” Not only did the refrain lodge permanently in my mind, but I remembered that it was in the key of F major.

Such, at any rate, was my memory—and now, thanks to the queer miracle that is YouTube, I’m in a position to check its accuracy. Scroll forward to 12:45 and you can see and hear “Think Pink” for yourself:

You’ll have to take my word for it, but my recollection of the refrain is note-for-note accurate…and sure enough, it’s in F major.

Why on earth would so trivial a ditty have made so deep an impression on me fifty-two years ago? I can only suppose that childhood memory functions in much the same way as the capacity for language acquisition: once heard, never forgotten.

Whatever the reason, it makes me tremble to imagine the unwanted pieces of pop-culture flotsam and jetsam that will clutter my consciousness on my deathbed. I’d like to think that my head will be full of Das Lied von der Erde or the slow movement of the Schubert Cello Quintet as the Distinguished Thing approaches—but it’s probably just as likely, and far more humbling, that my final thoughts will be of “Think Pink.”

Just because: Fats Waller sings “Ain’t Misbehavin’”

June 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAFats Waller sings and plays “Ain’t Misbehavin’” in Stormy Weather, directed by Andrew L. Stone and released in 1943. The band includes Benny Carter on trumpet, Slam Stewart on bass, and Zutty Singleton on drums. Also seen briefly in this scene are Lena Horne and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson:

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

Visit from a gaggle of fractious critics

June 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

Theater-Talk-round-logo-13At long last, here’s an online video of Theater Talk’s 2015 Broadway end-of-season critics’ panel, featuring Ben Brantley of the New York Times, Peter Marks of the Washington Post, John Simon of the Westchester Guardian, and me. The hosts are Susan Haskins and Michael Riedel. The shows that we discussed on the telecast, which was taped last month, are Skylight, Fun Home, Finding Neverland, On the Twentieth Century, and Something Rotten!:

Almanac: Thomas Berger on self-hating cultures

June 22, 2015 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“My feeling that not just America but the West is finished is based on a conviction that when a civilization becomes obsessed with its deficiencies, it is degenerating.”

Thomas Berger, letter to Zulfikar Ghose (Jan. 28, 1971)

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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