Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“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.”
Rumer Godden, In This House of Brede
Read the whole thing here.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…
Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World, is interviewed by John Lehmann on Monitor, originally telecast by the BBC on October 12, 1958:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“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’ve now reached the stage of being in two minds about whether one ought to be in two minds about things or not; and an infinite regress beckons.”
Ronald Knox, letter to an unnamed priest, July 1949 (quoted in Evelyn Waugh, The Life of the Right Reverend Ronald Knox)
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.
See you around.
The Escher String Quartet plays the first movement of Benjamin Britten’s First Quartet, composed in 1941:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)