Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Miami City Ballet performs George Balanchine’s Square Dance, choreographed in 1957 to the music of Corelli and Vivaldi. This performance was originally telecast on PBS in 2012:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)
“Altogether without malice, indeed with the kindliest anxiety, older people often seemed to feel that, just so long as they implied that you were today improved, you would not mind hearing, and might profit by the reminder, that once when you were younger you were everyone’s laughing stock.”
James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust
Barry Shabaka Henley, the star of the Court Theatre’s upcoming Chicago production of Satchmo at the Waldorf, talks about why he decided to appear in my play:
Performances start on Thursday. To order tickets or for more information, go here.
UPDATE: Chris Jones, the drama critic of the Chicago Tribune, included Satchmo at the Waldorf in his top-10 list of “especially promising” shows. Read the whole thing here.
From 2006:
I’m a childless singleton who spends most of his nights on the town and hasn’t held a nine-to-five job for years. You might mistake me for a wastrel if I didn’t work so hard, and you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know me fairly well.
It is, I suppose, an odd life, and it doesn’t always please me. Sometimes I wish I had a job that I could put behind me at day’s end, or that I were comfortably ensconced in a nice suburban ranch house with a loving wife and a child or two. This dissatisfaction has grown more marked in recent years, though never overwhelmingly so: I know how lucky I am, and how well my catch-as-catch-can lifestyle suits my temperament. The trouble is that it isn’t nearly so well suited to the diminished energies of old age, and more and more I wonder whether I may have doomed myself to the fearful fate of Aesop’s grasshopper, who fell on lean times when he finally outlived his good luck….
Read the whole thing here.
“‘When you get to be my age,’ he said, ‘you have a feeling, and the vainest feeling in the world, that you’d give a lot to have known some of the things you know now when you were young. You wouldn’t have listened to them. But that doesn’t stop you from wanting to tell younger people about them.’”
James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust
Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) describes his upcoming fight with Sonny Liston, accompanied on the piano by Liberace, as seen on a 1964 episode of The Jack Paar Program:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)
“Bailey might not have great intelligence or abilities, but his whole aim, thought and study was that of the born leader—to look out for himself; and he did it with that born-leader’s confidence and intensity that draws along the ordinary uncertain man, who soon confuses his own interest and his own safety with that of the leader.”
James Gould Cozzens, The Just and the Unjust
Merle Travis sings “Nine Pound Hammer” on TV in 1951:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.)