The hoopla over the final episodes of Frasier and Friends reminded me that it’s been a long time since I’ve watched any TV series at all regularly. I stopped following The Sopranos after 9/11, and no subsequent program has replaced it in my affections. Our Girl got me interested in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but I saw most of that show in large chunks, not week by week. These days, the only thing I watch on TV is movies.

I’m sure this says more about me than it does about television, though I do think it says something about television. In one of the essays reprinted in A Terry Teachout Reader, “The Myth of

As I returned home last night from seeing (and hearing) the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Bad Plus give the premiere of Violet Cavern, Morris’ new dance, at the BAM Opera House, I thought–not for the first time–that I really couldn’t live anywhere but New York. Fortunately, I know better, and sometimes I don’t even need to be reminded.

When I first got the idea for “About Last Night” some four or five years ago, I had a rather different venture in mind than the one you see before you now. I was rooting around for foundation support with which to launch an arts blog in collaboration with an existing print-media magazine, a venture to which I proposed to devote roughly a third of my time (and for which I would have been paid accordingly). It would have started out as a solo effort, but the original plan was for “About Last Night” to gradually take on other writers, developing over time into a full-fledged Web-based magazine on the arts in America. Accordingly, part of the money I sought was earmarked for a travel budget that would have made it possible for me to report on performances in cities other than New York.

A funny thing happened on the way to this pipe dream–several funny things, in fact. The one I least expected was that blogging would evolve in a completely different direction, in the process supplanting the conventional magazine model with which so many people who were then getting interested in the Web were then obsessed. For better and worse, individual blogs appear to be the way of the near future, though I also suspect that Web-based “newspapers” will soon start to become major media players. Still, I think the idea of a travel budget made and continues to make sense, not least because serious arts coverage in traditional media outlets is fast drying up. Time was when the weekly newsmagazines used to send their staff critics (and yes, they had staff critics) to performances all over the country. I got in on the tail end of that corporate largesse during my brief tenure as the classical music and dance critic of Time, but even then it was painfully obvious that truly national arts coverage was in the process of withering away, at Time and elsewhere.

This is bad news precisely because New York City and the arts are not consubstantial. It’s true that many of the good things that happen in the provinces–and I don’t use that term pejoratively–eventually make their way to Manhattan and its environs. But there are plenty of exceptions, enough that it would be perfectly possible for me to get out of town fifty-two weeks a year and see something fine each week.

The good news is that I do manage to get out of town with some regularity, frequently to Washington, D.C., and occasionally to other places as well. Earlier this year, for instance, I went to Washington specifically to see the Phillips Collection‘s Milton Avery retrospective, an important show that never left home. The Phillips was the first museum to acquire Avery’s paintings, and by the time of Duncan Phillips’ death it owned a dozen-odd oils and works on paper, to my knowledge the largest single cache of Averys in any museum in the world. It showed them all in “Discovering Milton Avery,” together with works owned by the violinist Louis Kaufman, the very first person ever to buy an Avery painting, plus a sprinkling of pieces from other institutions. “Discovering Milton Avery” didn’t quite add up to a full-scale blockbuster retrospective, but in a way it was even better–more concentrated and personal–and speaking as the happy owner of an Avery drypoint, I can assure you that I found it as exciting as any museum show I’ve seen in ages.

Not long before my visit to the Phillips, I contrived to fly down to Raleigh, N.C., again for a specific purpose: I wanted to watch Carolina Ballet dance Robert Weiss’s staged version of Handel’s Messiah, a ballet about which I’d been hearing good things for the past couple of years but had never previously been able to see. I departed for Raleigh two days after turning in the manuscript of my George Balanchine biography–a nice coincidence, since Weiss danced for Balanchine at New York City Ballet–and even though I was desperately busy, I was able to stay in town long enough to see two complete performances of Messiah in a single day. I’m glad I did. I’ve been writing enthusiastically about Weiss’ dances ever since he founded Carolina Ballet in 1997, but I think it’s possible that his Messiah is the best thing he’s done to date, which is saying something. It’s a masterly fusion of storytelling and abstraction (the first part is set in a London cathedral, while the last section is a plotless “white ballet”

“So few authors have brains enough or literary gift enough to keep their own end up in journalism that I am tempted to define ‘journalism’ as ‘a term of contempt applied by writers who are not read to writers who are.'”

“Before interviewing Gamelin I knew that I would have to document myself on his views, his past, and enough of his technical background and jargon to make him feel that I knew what he was talking about. The preparation is the same whether you are going to interview a diplomat, a jockey, or an ichthyologist. From the man’s past you learn what questions are likely to stimulate a response; after he gets going you say just enough to let him know you appreciate what he is saying and to make him want to talk more. Everybody with any sense talks a kind of shorthand; if you make a man stop to explain everything he will soon quit on you, like a horse that you alternately spur and curb. It is all in one of Sam Langford’s principles of prize fighting: ‘Make him lead.’ Only instead of countering to your subject’s chin you keep him leading. Once I asked Sam what he did when the other man wouldn’t lead, and he said, ‘I run him out of the ring.’ This is a recourse not open to the interviewer.”

After all of my foaming at the mouth a few months ago about Shirley Hazzard’s amazing novel named after the phenomenon, it would be downright churlish of me not to note today’s nonfictional Transit of Venus.

Sigh. Just as I was getting ready to dive back into blogging last week, I was felled by an evil bug not unlike the one that took Terry out a couple of weeks ago. I spent the entire weekend trying to sleep it off, missing out on brunch, damn it all, with The Elegant Variation, who was in town doing a bang-up job covering Book Expo. The bug is still hanging around. Posting from my corner will resume this week, but I’ll be easing myself back in one toe at a time [hack, cough].

I had a moderately busy weekend:

Over the weekend I treated myself to a used copy of Rupert Hart Davis’ Catalogue of the Caricatures of Max Beerbohm, a book I’ve always wanted to own but never got around to buying. Now that I’m the proud owner of a Beerbohm caricature, it struck me that the time had also come to add Max’s catalogue raisonné to my art library—and to find out what, if anything, it had to say about the latest addition to the Teachout Museum. I wasn’t disappointed. Sure enough, my Max is duly listed on page 69: