“‘Isn’t it sad,’ he said, ‘that writers who, in their youth, break their backs to escape the bourgeoisie, end up by imitating them—at least the wealthy ones.’”
Siegfried Sassoon (quoted in S.N. Behrman, People in a Diary: A Memoir)
I wrote about film regularly between 1998 and 2005, and at the end of that time I drew up a double-barreled list of the movies I’d reviewed that I liked best. These were the top twenty….
“A Conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright: Sixty Years of Living Architecture,” originally telecast by NBC on May 17, 1953 on Wisdom, a series of interviews with notable figures in the arts, politics, and the humanities. The interviewer is Hugh Downs:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“Penny’s eyes, too, kept straying to the window; the window of the outer office looked northeast over London, and, sitting at her desk, Penny could see far over the roofs to the thin green skyline of Hampstead and Highgate. A new office block hid the turrets and towers of Westminster, but the campanile of the cathedral could be seen overtopped by one of the new office buildings. Something happened to people’s minds when man learned to build offices higher than spires, thought Penny.”
National Review has published a symposium in its latest issue called What We Love About America. The thirty-one contributors include Richard Brookhiser, Joseph Epstein, Mark Helprin, Megan McArdle, Lance Morrow, John Podhoretz, Kevin Williamson, and—yes—me. My piece is called “Western Movies”:
Taken together, the best Hollywood westerns come as close as anything ever has to comprising America’s creation myth, a tale of brave men and women who rode toward Monument Valley to make better lives for themselves and their children. Of course we all know it wasn’t as clear-cut as that, which is what makes their story mythic: It’s what we want to believe about American history. But if it isn’t all true, neither is it all false…
“I think we are to God, if there is such a thing, like a microscopic cell in the left toenail of Garry Kasparov in the middle of a chess match. That cell has as much awareness of what Kasparov’s doing as we do of God’s activities. We like to presume we know about the universe, but we don’t know what we’re talking about. We have finite minds, and we’re dealing with something called infinity. The most one can hope for is to live a good life and try to leave things a little better than he found them.”
Artie Shaw (quoted in Gene Lees, “Artie Shaw: The Anchorite”)
I forgot to mention it on Monday, but I just started a two-week holiday from my duties as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal. As regular readers of this blog know well, Mrs. T and I have just been through the wringer, and I’m sorely in need of a respite from playgoing and caregiving.
To this end, an old friend of ours is spending the week at our apartment in New York, looking after Mrs. T’s needs, while I hole up at our place in Connecticut and (as Jake Gittes says in Chinatown) do as little as possible. I’ll be spending the next two nights at a harborside hotel on Long Island Sound of which I am inordinately fond, and on Saturday I’ll return to New York—but not to the Journal. I figure that a full week of absolute rest, followed by an additional week without shows or deadlines, will be enough to restore at least some of my equilibrium.
I will, as always, continue to post the usual daily blog items during my absence—they’re done well in advance—and I’ll also be looking in on Twitter and Facebook from time to time. Mostly, though, I plan to sleep late, read books, watch movies, and sit in a hot tub. So don’t look for reviews until after Labor Day: there won’t be any.
