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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

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Archives for July 21, 2020

Lookback: on identifying personally with movies

July 21, 2020 by Terry Teachout

From 2006:

Art doesn’t have to be true to life to be good, but when a work of art is true to your life, it strikes a special chord. On occasion music has this effect on me: I can think of any number of pieces that appear to embody my feelings about the world so precisely that I feel as though I might have written them. Much of Aaron Copland’s music has that effect on me, as does the streetlights-at-dusk melancholy of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat, Charles Mingus’ elegy for Lester Young.

My guess is that most people are more likely to respond in this way to works of art that make use of words, and in particular to movies, which at their best are capable of creating an impression of reality so total as to be overwhelming. For my part, though, I haven’t seen many movies that seemed true in any significant way to my personal experience. Only three spring to mind…

Read the whole thing here.

Almanac: C.S. Lewis on the amateur

July 21, 2020 by Terry Teachout

“That is why education seems, to me, so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure—if you like, for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative. You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal. All the others are professionals. They have no leisure and do not desire it. When the cow has finished eating, she chews the cud. When she has finished chewing, she sleeps. When she has finished sleeping, she eats again. She is a machine for turning grass into calves and milk—in other words, for producing more cows. The lion cannot stop hunting nor the beaver building dams nor the bee making honey. When God made the beasts dumb, He saved the world from infinite boredom for, if they could speak, they would, all of them, all day, talk nothing but shop.”

C.S. Lewis, “Our English Syllabus” (courtesy of Richard Zuelch)

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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