Archives for November 5, 2003

“About Last Night” set a record yesterday: Our Girl and I racked up 2,900 page views, most of them courtesy of Lileks
and The Corner, for which much thanks. We also picked up a link late last night from BuzzMachine which will doubtless keep our Site Meter bouncing (and which you should read–Jeff Jarvis has a very interesting take on my posting about The Reagans).

The bottom line is that Tuesday ended up being our biggest day yet–bigger even than the never-to-be-forgotten day that Instapundit linked to one of our postings. We’re still kind of dazed, but mostly just delighted.

To repeat what I said yesterday: if this is your first visit to “About Last Night,” click here to read a recent posting explaining what we’re all about.

If, on the other hand, you’re an old-timer, well, come on in, the blogging’s fine! I’m going to be tied up for most of today (I’ve got to finish a piece about The Looney Tunes Golden Collection for The Wall Street Journal, then it’s off to see a play), but OGIC tells me she has some stuff up her sleeve. In any case, we won’t let you go hungry.

Oh, yes–it’s still absolutely O.K. to tell all your friends about www.terryteachout.com. Why stop at 2,900? This could be the start of something…well, bigger.

P.S. Andrew Sullivan got into the act shortly after midnight. This joint is going to rock today….

A reader writes:

I can’t be so sanguine about the demise of the album as you are. Yes, recordings were originally short one-offs, but the LP represented a real breakthrough in that it organized the individual tracks in a way that allowed them to speak to one another, and thus increase their impact. A bad song, when thoughtfully integrated into a good album, can be marvelous (e.g. “Within You Without You” on Sgt. Pepper). I don’t think I’m being purely reactionary about this; there is a real beauty to a well-ordered series of songs that will necessarily fall by the wayside if we lose the album as it is now constructed.

To strike a more reactionary tone, I do worry about the ability of people to maintain interest over time. A couple of years ago, the studio (I don’t know which one) sent “Almost Famous” back because it went over their mandatory 2 hour time limit. The resulting cut was a lesser film by any standard (other than brevity), but that didn’t seem to matter; the important thing was that the American viewer wouldn’t have to sit through an overly-long movie (it ended up clocking in at 2:02, so they fudged a little). Unfortunately, I fear that they know their audience well. Reducing the duration of the units of our music would only exacerbate the attention span problem.

Let me suggest a middle road between albums and pay-per-downloads. Perhaps what we will see is the return of the single as a discreet item (or, in this case, series of ones and zeros), but with the continued existence of the album as well. This way artists wouldn’t feel the need to record filler when they only have one good idea, they would simply release the song individually. This could be a good thing. Remember, “Yesterday” and “Strawberry Fields Forever” originally apepared as singles. Then, when a big idea strikes them, they can record a whole album, and even allow fans to only be download it as a whole. It would immediately be pirated on a per-song basis, of course, but it would at least be initially concieved and marketed as an album, thus preserving the integrity of their vision.

I hope I’m right. I would hate to think of future composers being forced to create in snippets.

I actually think something like the two-tier plan my reader envisions is bound to happen. In fact, it’s on the verge of happening already, as individual artists start marketing music through their own Web sites (about which more later–I know about some interesting new sites-in-the-making).

But I do want to take gentle issue with my correspondent’s use of the word sanguine to describe the way I feel about the prospect of life without records. I’m not saying that the album-as-art-object is a bad thing. On the contrary, I’m passionately attached to more than a few such objects (including the ones I mentioned in my original posting). I simply don’t think this kind of mass-produced art object will long survive the transition to a fully digitized, Web-based recorded-music economy.

People often take for granted that I approve of the cultural trends I describe in essays like “Life Without Records.” Sometimes I do, sometimes not. Most often I don’t know what to think about them–yet. The only thing I’m sure of is that they won’t go away, which is why I’m more interested in describing them than judging them. We live in the midst of a blur of onrushing technologies, each pulling its individual train of unintended consequences. I’d much rather try to puzzle out the possible effects of these technologies than complain in advance of having fully experienced them. If anything, I’m temperamentally disposed to be a Luddite, but I absolutely refuse to let myself succumb to that pointless temptation. To be a Luddite, after all, is to renounce all possibility of shaping technology-driven cultural change. I started “About Last Night” for the exact opposite reason: I wanted to try to use a new technology in order to help sustain and enrich the great tradition of Western art.

Early in the life of this blog, I posted an almanac entry by Marshall McLuhan which (allowing for a certain amount of poetic exaggeration) sums up the way I try to look at technological change. It’s worth repeating:

I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening, because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.

Neither do I.

P.S. Another reader writes:

I’m enjoying this whole topic of the demise of the record, even as I mourn its passing. While I know the folly of remaining in the ostrich position, I have to side with those who would hate to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Even before I tried my hand at recording, I always loved the concept of an album being a collection of material, like a painting or an opera or a good meal. It’s part of the challenge of translating the live performance – making the shape and serving it all up so the listener can enjoy a fuller experience, if that makes sense. kd lang’s Drag album, or the pairing of a specific singer with a special musician or group of players, Peggy Lee’s Mirrors — hell, even Dark Side of the Moon and such. I can’t imagine Bitches Brew as a single. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent too many hours of pleasure listening to recordings alone in a car. Maybe not – a friend just called me and said that he had spent the evening listening to my last CD and felt like it was like an hour of good conversation. So go figure.

(This e-mail comes from one of my favorite singers, by the way.)

Courtesy of City Comforts comes the following news:

The only gas station ever designed and built by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright, a 1958 building in Cloquet, Minn., is on the market.

The building’s owners, the McKinney family of Cloquet, put the still-operating station up for sale in August. So far, no potential buyers have come forward. The McKinneys are asking $725,000 for the property, which was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985….

“The building is at risk because no protective easements exist for it,” says Ron Scherubel, executive director of the Chicago-based Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy, which has listed the structure for sale on its Web site. “Of course, we’d like to see it stay as intact as possible. In the best-case scenario, someone would buy it and keep using it as a gas station. The next-best-case scenario would involve a good adaptive reuse.”…

The station has a glass-walled observation lounge, skylights over the service bays, a copper cantilevered canopy that juts out over the front of the building, and a futuristic tower perched on its top. In Wright’s original design, the gasoline hoses were designed to come out of the roof, a feature the local fire department subsequently vetoed. The structure cost $75,000 to build–almost three times more than an average late-1950s service station.

Click here for the full story, including a way cool photo.

After D.B.C. Pierre’s Vernon God Little won the Booker Prize last month, book review editors across the country picked up their phones (O.K., so they probably sent email, but that doesn’t suggest nearly as dramatic a split-screen image). Pierre’s novel is a dark comedy about the aftermath of a Columbine-like school shooting. A couple of weeks ago the wave of new reviews started breaking, the earliest ones appreciative but distinctly lacking ardor, as though people were unmoved by the book but hesitant to gainsay the Booker committee.

Now the reviews are turning plainly negative. Today everyone will be talking about Michiko Kakutani’s takedown of the book in the New York Times. A small taste: “In trying to score a lot of obvious points off a lot of obvious targets, Mr. Pierre may have won the Booker Prize and ratified some ugly stereotypes of Americans, but he hasn’t written a terribly convincing or compelling novel.” But Kakutani was anticipated in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week, in a review whose lifetime as free web content may be about to expire, so be warned. John Freeman gave the novel’s inventiveness its due, but wondered whether it was this quality as much as the scorching of life in these United States that earned it the nod from the Booker judges:

Vernon God Little might be the most vicious satire of American life to come out of Britain since Martin Amis’ 1984 Money. Set in a small Texas town at the center of a media circus, the book places an astute, if needling, finger on the scary collusion between entertainment and law enforcement in American culture….

Still, in spite of its linguistic daring-do, Vernon God Little is less a satire than it is a burlesque. It ignores the emotional strafing such high school massacres leave in their wake in order to make a point about the way the media–and Americans’ susceptibility to the media–warp the moral contract.

What grates even more about Vernon God Little is that to make these points, it twists itself into a pretzel of unbelievable plotting and gross generalization. None of the characters, including Vernon, earns our sympathy. They are uniformly cruel and crass to one another.

Writers are entitled to their bleakness, and satire demands license. But when books go so far over the top, their insights become easy to dismiss. The acclaim that Vernon Little God received abroad shows us that learned Brits are happy to see America reflected in a funhouse mirror.

And at Amazon, an Australian reader who loves the book groups it with the (by many accounts also fictional) work of Michael Moore, clucking, “This, and Stupid White Men, should be compulsory reading for all Americans.”

I’ve picked up the novel a few times without getting very far, so I can’t responsibly comment on its literary merits. One tic I have noticed is the awkward insertion of self-consciously literary language into Vernon’s crude vernacular. For example, “My buddy, who once did the best David Letterman impression you ever saw, has been abducted by glandular acids.” As far as I can tell, the incongruity of this typical sentence serves to shore up the distance between Pierre and his material, with the narrator stuck uncomfortably in between. In other words, the writing usually seems pretentious. The effect reminds me of American Beauty, a very different work, but one whose writer and director looked down on their poor, soulless suburban subjects from empyrean heights of sophistication and general superiority.

But there I go reviewing a book I haven’t read, when I wanted simply to point out the political alertness of this latest wave of reviews. Is it possible that Pierre’s critique of Texas and America told the Booker committee what they wanted to hear, and thus helped him win the award? I’d say it’s likely. Prize competitions never take place in a vacuum, nor are books written in one. Judges unavoidably will be influenced not only by the intrinsic merits of the books they read, but also by their own world views; some will be better at suppressing this kind of influence than others. It’s not exactly scandalous if this year’s Booker selection was as much a political statement as a literary one. But it is pretty sad, and will take some of the bang out of the whole shebang next year.

UPDATE: On the other hand, Maud likes the novel. Maud trumps Michiko any day.

You should check out DVD Journal regularly, but if you don’t, here’s some video-related news:

(1) The Rules of the Game streets Jan. 20 from the Criterion Collection (but Notorious goes out of print Dec. 31, arrgh).

(2) Out this week: High Sierra and To Have and Have Not.

P.S. The wicked smart Cinetrix, who blogs at Pullquote, is a hoot on what it was like to try and buy a copy of To Have and Have Not from a clerk who’d never heard of Humphrey Bogart.

Dear Household Opera: OGIC, who introduced me to the pleasures of Edward Gorey once upon a time (and is a fanatical Gorey collector herself), will be pleased by this paragraph in your latest posting:

See Edward Gorey’s L’Heure Bleue, possibly his most beautiful book, which includes dialogue such as “I should like a parsley sandwich,” “To the best of my knowledge they are no longer in season,” and “More is happening out there than we are aware of.” “It is possibly due to some unknown direful circumstance.”

(Incidentally, why in hell won’t somebody reprint The Lavender Leotard, or, Going a Lot to the New York City Ballet?)

Dear Cup of Chicha: OGIC and I really want to see that “little karate-victory-dance” you do when your site turns up on another blogroll. Could you please post a photograph? Or–better yet–a drawing?

Dear God of the Machine: You’d be surprised (or maybe not) at the high number of older-than-40 people who’ve told me that they hate the word “blog” and wish somebody would come up with a better one. After much prayer and reflection, though, I’ve decided that you’re right:

Neologisms for old things come and go, but a blog is a new thing, and with new things first out of the gate nearly always wins. In diction wars you have to pick your battles carefully. If you must complain, complain about something that drains meaning from the language. For years I objected to the coalescence of “amazing,” “awesome,” “remarkable,” and “phenomenal,” as if English were short on synonyms for “good.” This battle was worth fighting because it was over shades of meaning; there is no English word with the precise meaning of “amazing” except “amazing.” But popular usage has bulldozed me…

What’s wrong with “blog” anyway? It is short. It is more or less Anglo-Saxon. It lends itself easily to back-formations for writing a blog (no ugly “-ize” required) and for the author of one, not to mention felicitious derivatives like “blogrolling” and less felicitious but still useful ones like “blogosphere.” The dispute over whether the verb is transitive will sort itself out in time. “Blog” reminds me a great deal of one of the best neologisms of the 20th century, “blurb,” coined by Gelett “I never saw a purple cow” Burgess. It rolls off the tongue less easily, and lacks its onomatopoeic qualities, but has all of its other virtues.

Blog it is. Here endeth the lesson.

Dear Reflections in D Minor: Speaking of neologisms, I know just what you mean:

It’s funny how sometimes this whole Internet thing seems more like real life than real “real life.” And there’s another possible topic for a future post. Why do we talk of “real life” as if life online is not just as real? I sometimes use the term “realspace” to refer to that which is not cyberspace and I’ve seen the word “meatspace” which is more accurate but sort of icky. We need some new words.

OGIC and I are very old friends, but we haven’t seen each other in the flesh for a year–yet we “meet” each day in cyberspace. It isn’t quite as good as dinner and a movie, but it beats nothing all to hell.

Dear Lileks: We may be semi-highbrows around this shop, but I quite liked what you wrote about Norman Rockwell this morning:

I love Klee, but it’s just Klee. I’m not inclined to hang on the wall that SatEvePost cover of the grinning tomboy with the black eye, but if I was asked to write a story about it, I could give you 9000 words. Somehow this makes it bad art.

Go figure.

Dear Eve Tushnet: You must be the first blogger in the known universe to have worked Cat Power and Christ into the same posting. I’m agog.

Dear Asymmetrical Information: Welcome back. About time.

And, finally:

Dear Minor Fall, Major Lift: From now on, we’re spelling it “underwhlemed,” too. It’s better that way.

Web-based reasons to put off till tomorrow what you could have done today:

As noted by Terry earlier, Amanda at Household Opera is quoting Edward Gorey, which should always be encouraged. Now I know where my next fortune cookie is coming from.

Cinetrix, whom we can’t seem to stop linking to, is brave. She’s also sick, which will not do. Get on the case, ‘Fesser.

Jessica Harbour is full of good advice for participants in National Novel Writing Month, which I kind of wish I were doing, now that it is safely too late to start. NaNoWriMo’s FAQs include the following:

Did you know there is a group in Vancouver that writes novels in a weekend?

Yes, and they are fools. Everyone knows that any deep and lasting work of art takes an entire month to make.

How do you pronounce NaNoWriMo?

NAN-no WRY-Mo.

Oh. I’ve been saying it NAN-no WREE-Mo.

That’s ok too.

Can I write one word 50,000 times?

No. Well… No.

Can anyone participate in NaNoWriMo?

No. People who take their writing very seriously should go elsewhere. Everyone else, though, is warmly welcomed.

Oh well, maybe next year.

Dear OGIC:

Ever since this site began, our traffic has been significantly lower in the Mountain Time Zone than anywhere else in the continental U.S.

Discuss.