Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Jack Mangan interviews Frank Lloyd Wright on board the SS America on a 1950 episode of Ship’s Reporter:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“He’s writing a paper that contradicts all old Lambard’s conclusions, and I’m helping by toning down his adjectives and putting in deprecatory footnotes. I mean, Lambard may be a perverse old idiot, but it’s more dignified not to say so in so many words. A bland and deadly courtesy is more devastating, don’t you think?
Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night
“To slave, to devote oneself, to have the highest imaginable sense of duty—these were excellent things, things of great merit. Merit—solid worth: it was unavailing against the sudden flash and bang, the inexplicable manifestation of talent. People did not easily forgive it that to you, not to them, had the gift been given.”
William Haggard, Slow Burner
The Golden Gate Quartet sings “The General Jumped at Dawn” in Hollywood Canteen, directed by Delmer Daves and released in 1944:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)
“There is but one step from the Academy to the Fad.”
Samuel Butler, Samuel Butler’s Notebooks
From 2008:
Read the whole thing here.One of the books that I brought along with me to read was Some Buried Caesar, the sixth of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe novels, published in 1939. In it Archie Goodwin makes the following remark about Lily Rowan, his on-again-off-again girlfriend: “I was wondering which would be more satisfactory, to slap her and then kiss her, or to kiss her and then slap her.”
I must have read the book a dozen times over the years, but never until now had that line caught my eye. Suddenly a coin dropped in my head and I remembered another line…
“The only cure for contempt is countercontempt.”
H.L. Mencken, Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks
Louis Prima and Keely Smith perform a medley of “Just a Gigolo” and “I Ain’t Got Nobody” on TV in 1959:
(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)