“When I started to see the analyst, I had a powerful feeling of guilt about my whole situation, and could not believe it was right to eliminate this feeling. My talks with him put it into perspective, until I was nearer to accepting it. ‘In this life you pay for everything, for every happiness,’ he said.”
The Tongs and the Bones: The Memoirs of Lord Harewood
Archives for April 2014
Lookback: on hanging a new piece of art
From 2004:
It happens that I’ve just acquired a new piece for the Teachout Museum, a copy of Fairfield Porter’s Broadway, the 1971 color lithograph I chose at your recommendation to adorn the dust jacket of A Terry Teachout Reader. It hasn’t arrived yet, but I’ll have to shift some other pieces around when it does, so I opted to do a bit of preparatory puttering. Since I’m going to hang Broadway over the mantelpiece, the place of honor, I moved the Wolf Kahn monotype that currently occupies that space to a spot over the living-room closet. That’s where I’d hung my copy of William Bailey’s aquatint Piazza Rotunda, not very happily, so I took down the Porter poster that hangs over the door to my office and put Piazza Rotunda there.
No doubt all this sounds boring, perhaps even precious, but hanging the art you own is an inescapable part of owning it, and it’s surprising–astonishing, really–how completely the look and feel of my living room have been altered simply by switching a couple of prints….
Read the whole thing here.
Man at work
I did a fair amount of work on the blog this morning, updating the top-five and Out of the Past modules and pruning the “About Terry’s Play and Opera Libretti” and “About Terry’s Books” modules to make them more concise and easily navigable. If you’re curious, take a look at the right-hand column.
Almanac: Lord Harewood on criticism
“Every creative artist who goes before the public takes something private with him, something vulnerable that can be crushed and wounded.”
The Tongs and the Bones: The Memoirs of Lord Harewood
CD
Ray Charles, Brother Ray: The Genius (Frémeaux, three CDs). An exceptionally well-chosen, well-annotated, and wide-ranging French anthology of Charles’ 1949-1960 recordings, originally issued in 2011 and now available as an import, that puts his formidable musical achievements in crystal-clear historical perspective (TT).
FILM
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. This 1943 film by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is a complex, near-epic study of the English national character, cunningly disguised as a wartime propaganda flick. Roger Livesey is breathtakingly good as a quintessential “old boy” who can’t come to grips with how World War II has changed his beloved country. Colonel Blimp is one of David Mamet’s favorite movies, and when you see the Criterion Collection’s beautifully restored home-video version, you’ll understand why (TT).
MUSICAL
Rocky (Winter Garden, 1634 Broadway). Believe it or not–and it definitely surprised me–the musical version of Rocky turns out to be a very impressive show, staged with immense panache and soaring physicality by Alex Timbers. The performances are consistently strong and the score, by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, is generally good and occasionally outstanding. Absolutely not for bros only (TT).
BOOK
Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (Penguin, $29.95). A carefully researched, grippingly readable account of the military careers of Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler, all of whom volunteered to serve in World War II and made training and propaganda films about the war for the U.S. government–often placing their lives at risk to do so (TT).