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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 11, 2016

A visit to the memory hole

July 11, 2016 by Terry Teachout

ImageOne of my favorite bloggers reminds me that in December of 1969, Esquire invited twenty-five venerable celebrities to offer end-of-the-decade advice, most of it predictably platitudinous, to the magazine’s younger readers. Among the invitees, I rejoice greatly to report, was Louis Armstrong, who wrapped up his contribution to the symposium as follows:

Just want to say that music has no age. Most of your great composers—musicians—are elderly people, way up there in age—they will live forever. There’s no such thing as on the way out. As long as you are doing something interesting and good. You are in business as long as you are breathing. “Yeah.”

Very nice—and, as always, utterly characteristic.

What interests me more about the piece, though, is the list of contributors. In addition to Armstrong, it included:

Harry J. Anslinger
Avery Brundage
Lady Olave Baden-Powell
Cass Canfield
Maurice Chevalier
Buckminster Fuller
Lillian Gish
Rube Goldberg
Ernest Gruening
Lewis B. Hershey
Urho Kekkonen
Arthur Krock
Lotte Lehmann
Raymond Loewy
J.B. Rhine
Hyman G. Rickover
Norman Rockwell
Robb Sagendorph
Leverett Saltonstall
Ted Shawn
Edward Steichen
Leopold Stokowski
Harold C. Urey
King Vidor

My question is this: how many of those names do you recognize?

I knew twenty of them, but I’m sixty years old and passably well-informed, and Google and Wikipedia soon set me straight on Lady Baden-Powell and Messrs. Kekkonen, Rhine, Sagendorph, and Urey, all of whom struck me as quite worth remembering, though I’m not blushing at having come up short on their names. I couldn’t help but wonder, though, what the average score of a forty-year-old American would be—and how many more of Esquire’s now-deceased symposiasts will be totally forgotten ten years from today.

4630825_1_lRube Goldberg is already pretty far gone, enough so that it seems fair to call the still-common expression “Rube Goldberg machine” a stone-dead metaphor, while Maurice Chevalier, who used to be a name-above-the-title star, is now remembered by most people only for his appearance in Gigi. Will his name ring any bells at all come 2026? Or will he have gone the way of Lillian Gish and Hyman Rickover?

Posthumous fame is a fragile thing, of course, and now that the teaching of history has fallen to pieces, it grows more fragile still. I read last week that a fifth of all British teenagers believe Winston Churchill to have been a fictional character, whereas 47% believe that Eleanor Rigby was real. Needless to say, there is ever and always ample reason to despair, and my Despair-O-Meter came close to breaking last week for other, arguably better reasons. Still, anyone who thinks that Winston Churchill wasn’t a real person is, not to put too fine a point on it, an idiot—which suggests that we really are living in what Mike Judge calls an idiocracy.

All this notwithstanding, I continue to cling faithfully to the belief that most people will still know who Satchmo was come 2026. But I’m not sure how much of the rent I’d bet on it.

* * *

The trailer for Idiocracy:

Something for Nothing, a 1940 General Motors promotional film featuring Rube Goldberg:

Just because: Antony Tudor’s Continuo

July 11, 2016 by Terry Teachout

TV CAMERAContinuo, a ballet by Antony Tudor set to Pachelbel’s Canon and performed by the Paris Opera Ballet in 1985. The dancers are Sylvie Guillem, Laurent Hilaire, Isabelle Guérin, Manuel Legris, Clotilde Vayer, and Herve Dirmann. This ballet was made by Tudor in 1971 specifically for performance by students and smaller dance companies. It was commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts:

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

Almanac: Neil Postman on “idiocracy”

July 11, 2016 by Terry Teachout

INK BOTTLE“An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We are not likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of the Sakharovs and the Timmermans and the Walesas. We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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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