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Archives for November 11, 2003
TT: As others see us
Apropos of my recent posting on the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, I got this e-mail from Peggy McGlone, the arts news reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger:
NJPAC has brought millions of people to the city since it opened, and while it may not have changed the streetscape as much as some would like, it has changed people’s perceptions about Newark. And that’s no little feat.
The point you made about the small percentage of Manhattanites attending events at NJPAC speaks more to the parochial mindset of Manhattanites than it does to NJPAC’s marketing muscle. New Yorkers are lazy cultural snobs–mostly because they can be. They have an abundance of wonderful art down the street or across town…so they don’t have to get out and explore. I, on the other hand, regularly drive 75 miles from my Morris County home to see a play in Princeton or a concert or play in New Brunswick, etc. I agree that the Newark renaissance is slow–if it exists at all. That part of town, with the colleges and museums, should be far livelier than it is. But I also know the five-block walk from Penn station to the arts center, while depressing, is no worse than the stretch of 41st street from Port Authority to the NY Public Library.
I think the central theory of arts-going in NY is “If it’s not at Carnegie, it can’t be good,” followed by the corollary: “And if it is good, it will be at Carnegie soon.” What can NJPAC or any of the many other arts
organizations located in northern Jersey (the city’s sixth boro) do about that?
What struck me most forcibly about Ms. McGlone’s smart and funny note was her pointed comparison between the walk from Newark Penn Station to NJPAC and the walk from Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal to…any place at all, to tell the truth. That is a grubby part of town–though the difference, of course, is that the Disney-driven rehabilitation of Times Square has been a tremendous success, at least in the limited sense of cleaning up much of the neighborhood surrounding the Port Authority and making it safer and livelier. (And come to think of it, what’s so limited about that? I’d rather live in a Disneyfied neighborhood than do daily battle with hookers and pimps, if those are my only alternatives.) Newark, on the other hand, appears as yet to have derived no significant urban-renewal benefits from NJPAC, and since that was one of the major selling points in the drive to get the center built, the failure is all the more relevant.
I speak, by the way, as someone who recently had a modest stake in the future of Newark. I taught arts criticism for two years at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, and enjoyed it enormously. The students, most of whom came from New Jersey, were hard-working, determined, and fun (one of them wrote this), and not a one of them had been fitted out with silver spoon (A) in mouth (B). If they’re the future of Newark, there’s hope for the city.
As for the unwillingness of Manhattanites to boldly go to NJPAC, I’m not so sure it can be explained by our “parochial mindset” (though I’m not denying that such a thing exists!). We do, after all, go to Brooklyn’s BAM Opera House in fairly large numbers. One difference–perhaps the biggest one–is that BAM consciously markets itself as a presenter of “cutting-edge” arts events, whereas NJPAC is targeting a frankly suburban audience, albeit more multicultural than that pale label might suggest. This is why we don’t perceive upper New Jersey as the “sixth borough,” any more than we seek out cultural experiences in Staten Island. Sure, I’ve seen some cool things at NJPAC, but it’s not on my radar in the way that BAM is, and judging from its 2003-04 offerings, I wonder whether it needs to be.
Besides, most cool things really do make their way to Manhattan sooner or later. That’s why we live here (I sure as hell can’t think of any other good reasons). Not all, though–our performance spaces are slowly pricing themselves out of the dance market, for example, and I find myself going more and more often to Washington, D.C., to see companies that are bypassing New York because it costs too much to dance here. If NJPAC were to book those companies more than sporadically, I’d go see them regularly, and I wouldn’t be alone.
But, then, should NJPAC try to attract Manhattanites? Would it really be worth the trouble? That’s a different question, one that goes directly to the heart of the center’s mission, and one I can’t answer. All I know is that since NJPAC opened, I’ve seen fewer than half a dozen performances there, and given the incredibly high quality of the facility, that’s a puzzlement. I wish I felt the need to go there more often–but I don’t.
TT: Testing, 1, 2, 3…
You’ve no doubt read about Joan Kroc’s $200 million bequest to National Public Radio. Courtesy of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, this Boston Globe editorial suggesting what NPR should do with the money, including the following suggestion:
Bring back music and culture programming. NPR’s news reports are thoughtful and compelling. Its talk shows are topical and a nice way to bring listeners into conversations. And “Car Talk” is great entertainment. But occasionally all this talk is wearying. Balance could be provided by music shows and radio documentaries.
What’s going on outside the often overwhelmingly adolescent world of popular music? Who are the up-and-comers in jazz and classical music? NPR should take more time and programming space to offer answers. And whether radio documentaries are made in-house or by independent producers, documentaries transport listeners around the country and the world or back into history. And their fascinating use of sound gives the mind’s eye creative work to do.
Read the whole thing here. It speaks for itself (albeit stodgily and obviously, as you’d expect from the editorial page of the Globe), but I want to make one additional point. If National Public Radio doesn’t seize this opportunity to restore and revive the cultural programming that once made it genuinely “public” in its appeal, it will prove beyond doubt that it’s no longer a “public” radio network, but the purely commercial, ratings-driven talk-radio shop that many listeners reasonably suspect it of having become–and I don’t see that such an enterprise deserves to be subsidized by public monies. A radio network that does nothing more than follow the ratings should be required to live and die by them.
OGIC: Blogospheric conditions damp, salty
Responding to Old Hag‘s open call for tearjerkers (and what won’t the blogosphere do for the Old Hag, really?), Sarah Weinman brings up an old favorite, Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and gives an eloquent precis. I lent my copy of this book to a student years ago and haven’t seen it since–Sarah’s description explains why this says less about my student than about the book.
These words of Smart’s are scribbled into one of my journals, but I don’t know where they come from. My friend Elaine, who was the first to bring it, and Smart (and so much else) to my attention, may know:
What I’m making is a real place for language in my life since I must put up with it anyway. I want to be respected by those who are dead. I want to sing and make my soul occur.
And here’s one from By Grand Central Station:
He kissed my forehead driving along the coast in evening, and now, wherever I go, like the sword of Damocles, that greater never-to-be-given kiss hangs above my doomed head. He took my hand between the two shabby front seats of the Ford, and it was dark, and I was looking the other way, but now that hand casts everywhere an octopus shadow from which I can never escape. The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart: the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done.
And this one, which I like because, in a hothouse of a book, it is so overrun with vegetation. And so lyrical:
I love, love, love–, but he is also all things: the night, the resilient mornings, the tall poinsettias and hydrangeas, the lemon trees, the residential palms, the fruit and vegetables in gorgeous rows, the birds in the pepper-trees, the sun on the swimming pool.
You can still get a used copy of Rosemary Sullivan’s fine but now out-of-print biography of Smart. Weep away, kids. And Sarah, thanks for thinking of this.
OGIC: Things to do in Chi-town
If you are here in Chicago, and less beset by pesky deadlines than I am, you should definitely head up north to Evanston to see Chris Marker’s haunting short film La Jet