In addition to writing about theater and the other arts for a living, I also blog in this space purely for my pleasure. Here are ten of my favorite posts from the year almost past:
• February 27 “Victor 18255-A, the first jazz record, was cut in New York one hundred years ago yesterday, five years after the word ‘jazz’ first appeared in print.”
• February 20 “Don’t get me wrong: I’d like it if more politicians appreciated the role of the fine arts in American life. Nevertheless, I think it’s silly to expect them to appreciate art, much less to suppose that doing so would make them better people.”
• March 13 “That is how I will always remember Gary Burton, as a silver-haired septuagenarian playing with the sacred fire and total assurance of a young man with his whole life ahead of him. We should all go out like that.”
• March 20 “Marsden Hartley was a major American painter, to my mind a great one. Robert Hughes called him “the most brilliantly gifted of the early generation of American modernists,” a judgment with which I increasingly incline to agree. Yet his work has never come close to receiving its due.”
• June 13 “Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” turns fifty years old next month, and we’re still listening to it—and talking about it. I was eleven years old when Gentry’s most famous record was released, and I have the strongest possible memories of the haunting impression that it made on me. I couldn’t hear it often enough. I still find it haunting a half-century later, albeit for somewhat different reasons.”
• June 26 “Like many other major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal has started presenting special events for its subscribers. The editors approached me a few weeks ago about taking part in a theatrical event, a post-show talkback that I would moderate. When asked what show I thought might be most attractive to our readers, I suggested, among others, the Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter, which I had recently reviewed with unbridled enthusiasm. They liked the idea and promptly went to work.”
• October 9 “Mrs. T and I ate fresh corn on the cob and tomatoes for dinner for three nights in a row last week. My long-lost childhood self would have boggled at the thought of so unswerving a diet: I was moderately vegetable-aversive and also had a medium-sized tomato problem. It wasn’t until I met Mrs. T and started summering in rural Connecticut that I discovered the joys of dining on fresh vegetables bought at farm stands close to home.”
• November 1 “If you read this blog with any regularity, you know that Mrs. T and I have been profoundly happy throughout the decade we’ve spent together. Nevertheless, she is, as the saying goes, sick and tired of being sick and tired, which is why she’s ready to roll the dice and undergo a double lung transplant.”
• November 14 “Regular readers of this blog know that Giorgio Morandi is one of the modern artists whose work I love most. I’ve written about him often, most notably here and here, and I’ve long dreamed of owning one of his etchings, a medium of which he was a supreme master. Indeed, I actually dared to bid on a Morandi etching at Sotheby’s in 2003, an experience that left me feeling more or less the way I felt when, long ago, I foolishly sat in with my betters at a Kansas City jam session and got blown off the stand.”
• November 20 “I flew down to West Palm Beach two weeks ago, and we’ve been rehearsing Billy and Me, my new play, ever since. ”