Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“John, you don’t want the train. The train’s Amtrak, am I right?”
“So?”
“And Amtrak’s the government, right?”
“And?”
“And the government’s Republicans right now, right?”
“Yeah?”
“And Republicans don’t believe in maintenance,” Andy explained. “Cause it costs money.”
“Well,” Dortmunder said, “I can’t wait for the Democrats to get back in.”
“Wouldn’t help,” Andy said. “The Democrats don’t know how to run a business. Forget Amtrak.”
Donald E. Westlake, What’s the Worst That Could Happen?
From 2007:
I’ve watched a Senate session from the press gallery and visited the White House a couple of times, but I’d never before seen the Supreme Court in action. It’s quite a show. I suppose you can get used to anything—Dostoyevsky certainly thought so—but I’m sure it would take a good many visits before I stopped feeling awestruck when the clerk cries “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” and the nine justices step from behind the red curtains and take their seats at the bench….
Read the whole thing here.
“Actuality sometimes plays into the hands of art.”
Anthony Burgess, Earthly Powers
Thomas Beecham and the Chicago Symphony perform Haydn’s Symphony No. 102 and Mozart’s “Prague” Symphony. This concert was originally telecast on March 13, 1960:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“The larger revelation of the transcendent gifts of Mozart is a crying need in our present condition of dubious culture and civilisation. His spirit, more than that of any other composer, is made of that stuff which can provide the most telling and efficacious antidote to the chaotic thought and action of a blatant age.”
Thomas Beecham, program note, 1937 (quoted in John Lucas, Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music)
The original theatrical trailer for The Heiress, William Wyler’s 1949 screen version of the 1947 stage adaptation by Ruth and Augustus Goetz of Henry James’ Washington Square, starring Olivia de Havilland, Montgomery Clift, and Ralph Richardson:
(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Then the mixture was to be stirred to the tune of perpetual motion and served, under pain of being rejected with disgust, with the time-honoured bread-sauce of the happy ending.”
Henry James, preface to Theatricals: Second Series
Twelve years ago I ate my Thanksgiving dinner at Good Enough to Eat and pretended to be content in my singleton’s solitude, refusing to admit that my heart was sick in more ways than one. Three weeks later I called an ambulance for myself, and the woman who is now my beloved wife showed up in my hospital room two days later. We’ve been together ever since—but today we’re fifteen hundred miles apart.
Mrs. T is up in Vermont with her family. As for me, I’m dining with Bill Hayes and Sue Ellen Beryl, the married couple who jointly run Palm Beach Dramaworks, where Billy and Me will be opening two weeks from now. To be sure, Bill and Sue Ellen are far more than mere colleagues: I love them both dearly, and will take much comfort in sharing their family’s dinner. But it’s been a long time, longer than I can remember, since Mrs. T and I were last apart on Thanksgiving, and to say that I miss her is to greatly understate the case.
I am one of those fortunate sons who had a happy childhood full of warmly remembered holidays, and who for that reason have come to find those same holidays increasingly difficult in middle age. As I wrote in this space after my mother died in 2012:
Most of us outlive our parents, and once we do, the winter holidays become, among many other things, a reminder of what we’ve lost. Perhaps those who had unhappy childhoods feel differently, but when I was a boy, the holidays were always a time of shadowless delight. Throughout my youth and long past it, my mother’s family, which was both large and close, gathered at my grandmother’s house to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve at groaning tables full of savory goodies. Now those days are gone.
What makes this difficult season tolerable, as I wrote in 2012, is “the strong and enduring joy that Mrs. T and I, against all odds, have found in one another in the middle of our lives. We have much to be thankful for, and we know it.” That, of course, makes it harder still for me to be so far away from my life’s companion, though it also heightens my already-intense awareness of the great good fortune that brought the two of us together in an indifferent universe where chance is in the saddle and rides mankind. The fact that we are physically separated today does not weaken in the least the tie that binds us.
For this—forever—much thanks.