Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers perform “Dinah” on a 1966 episode of ABC’s The Hollywood Palace:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“I have sometimes suspected that the only thing that holds no mystery is happiness, because it is its own justification.”
Jorge Luis Borges, “Unworthy”
Between the pandemic and my late wife’s final illness, my life has been changed utterly, in many ways almost beyond recognition. I can’t remember the last time I:
• Went to a classical concert or an operatic production
• Rode in a boat
• Bought a book in a brick-and-mortar bookstore
• Saw a movie in a theater
• Attended a rehearsal of anything
• Watched the sun set
• Felt at ease walking after dark in New York’s theater district
• Sat in a hot tub
• Visited an art gallery
• Heard jazz in a club
• Went to Washington, D.C., which I used to visit regularly to see shows and friends
• Played piano
• Took a vacation
• Read a weekly newsmagazine
• Shopped in a store for anything at all other than food or pharmaceutical supplies
• Ate a corn dog or a steak
One of these days….
“Psycho is one of his most interesting pictures because he had to make the picture very fast, with very primitive means. He had little money, and this picture tells very much about him. Not very good things. He is completely infantile, and I would like to know more—no, I don’t want to know—about his behaviour with, or, rather, against women. But this picture is very interesting.”
Ingmar Bergman, interviewed by John Simon (1970)
Thomas Quasthoff and Daniel Barenboim perform “Gute Nacht,” from Schubert’s Winterreise:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.”
Ecclesiastes 1:18 (King James version)
My annual Wall Street Journal column about the best theater of the year is out. Here’s an excerpt:
Read the whole thing here.In July, I resumed reviewing live theater after a protracted pandemic-related hiatus. First came a string of outdoor performances in New England. Then Broadway reopened in August, and the 2021-22 season got under way in earnest two months later. Now shows are opening on and off Broadway with gratifying regularity, all in front of masked audiences, though there’s no telling whether the spread of the new Omicron Covid-19 variant will shut down America’s theaters in weeks to come.
Whatever lies ahead, I saw plenty of memorable shows in 2021, some in the theater and at least as many via streaming video, which is now firmly established as an effective medium for the viewing of small-scale productions…
From 2003:
Read the whole thing here.Earlier this evening, three generations of family converged on my mother’s house in Smalltown, U.S.A., there to eat dessert and talk. We’d just dined together in the banquet room of the Grecian Steak House–the first time my mother’s family has ever eaten its collective Christmas dinner in a restaurant, or at any time other than on the night before Christmas. Things went surprisingly well, too, considering that we’d torn up a half-century’s worth of family tradition in one fell swoop. Two dozen of us crammed ourselves into the living room, desserts balanced on knees, and discussed in detail all the things that small-town families like to talk about whenever they get together. (More often than not, illness is the number-one topic, closely followed by restaurants.)
I don’t know how typically American my mother’s family is nowadays, though there was a time not so long ago when we would have seemed far more typical than we do now….
“You know what charm is: a way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question.”
Albert Camus, The Fall
“The Nancy LaMott Story,” a 1999 TV documentary about the cabaret singer, who died twenty-five years ago today:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)