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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

OGIC: Blame it on Spam

February 9, 2007 by Terry Teachout

It’s come to my attention (thanks, Dad) that I’ve let my OGIC mailbox fill to overflowing again, and this in a week when I threw out a question to the webosphere. I’ve cleared some space now and long to hear from you, so if you wrote and had your message bounce back, please, please send again!

OGIC: Not to be missed

February 8, 2007 by Terry Teachout

From The House Next Door comes word that Charles Burnett’s wondrous 1977 shoestring-budget film Killer of Sheep will be distributed to theaters for the first time ever this spring. It’s been seven or eight years since I was lucky enough to see Burnett’s haunting masterpiece, which was selected for the National Film Registry in 1990, part of its second crop of inducted titles. The film’s distributor, Milestone Films, describes it this way:

Charles Burnett

TT: So you want to see a show?

February 8, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Courtesy of Our Girl, who is managing the blog in my absence, here

TT: Almanac

February 8, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Now I shall speak of evil as none has

Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;

The white-hosed moron torturing a black

Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;

Primitivist folk masks, progressive schools;

Music in supermarkets, swimming pools;

Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,

Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.


Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (courtesy of Anecdotal Evidence)

OGIC: Spring and all

February 8, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Two matching takes on spring, which seems in this city, this week, impossible

TT: Almanac

February 7, 2007 by Terry Teachout

OGIC: Amuse-bouche and a promise

February 7, 2007 by Terry Teachout

This post begins identically to almost every non-business email I write lately: “Long time no talk to. My fault entirely.”


Oh, I’m bad, here and there. And believe me, I do suffer for my sins. I miss the heady days when email was new and almost exclusively a mode of diarizing and dishing to friends both far and near (sometimes across the very room) and I had oodles of energy for long, sprawling, lovingly composed e-epistles. Terry and I, cementing over the internet what was still a nascent friendship, wrote to each other what seem, in retrospect, like chapters of autobiographies. Doubtless those few years are the best documented of my life, even if the documentation now exists only in files on Zip disks, and me without a working Zip drive.


Back to the less thoroughly chronicled here and now, however. I owe you some blogging, big time. And I plan on honoring my debt this evening and tomorrow. In the meantime, I couldn

TT: Another landmark

February 6, 2007 by Terry Teachout

Today is my fifty-first birthday, an occasion I didn

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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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