Archives for November 2003

But not out. It’s only a temporary thing–“it” being an angry swarm of deadlines that’s had me in solitary confinement all weekend. If I were a quarterback, this week would be a blitz, and I’m trying to do a little better than just throw the ball away. And I’m not yet quite out of danger of being sacked (strictly metaphorically speaking, I think). (Speaking of football, congratulations to the Edmonton Eskimos on winning the Canadian Football League’s storied Grey Cup, which, as Colby Cosh explains here, has it over the Lombardi Trophy for colorfully checkered history and sheer longevity: number XCI!)

I almost forgot to link to last week’s Washington Post appreciation of one of my favorite guilty pleasures, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee crime novels. I discovered McGee some years ago when a friend brought The Long Lavender Look to my sick bed. I was skeptical, but the only alternative was my course reading, which was probably Fredric Jameson or some such thing. And the epigraph caught my eye:

When I play with my cat, who knows but that she regards me more as a plaything than I do her? –Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The hook had grazed me. Twenty pages into the mystery proper, I was on the line for all twenty books in the series.

I even got Terry to read the McGee novels. He was not very impressed, but even his more discerning critical judgment was not enough to keep him from gobbling them up like so much buttered popcorn. Terry’s some fast reader; I think he gave over three or four days of his life to McGee, cursed me heartily, and moved on.

But I’ll never be done with McGee, and Jonathan Yardley’s piece gives a vivid sense of why this is. While the romanticized, impossible Travis “I bed at least one new girl every book, but I’m a highly principled gentleman” McGee may be a silly character (Parker would eat him for lunch), the plots of the novels give off the authentic whiff of mundane reality. They are Floridian through and through, revolving around prosaic real estate development schemes and small-time swindles. The book Yardley focuses on, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, is a very good choice. But you’re going to have to read all of them anyway, so why not take his advice and start at the beginning with The Deep Blue Good-By?

Felix Salmon, who knows infinitely more about blog-techy stuff than I, writes to suggest (rather emphatically) that Our Girl and I should “change [our] default settings on About Last Night and make links open in the same, not a new, window.” Felix has complicated reasons for making this suggestion, mostly relating to something called “tabbed browsing” about which I am deeply clueless.

It’d be easy enough to make the switch, but I’m not going to do it just because one (1) reader thinks it’d be a good idea. What say the rest of you? If you have an opinion, send it to us at “About Last Night” (with the phrase DEFAULT SETTING in the message field). OGIC and I will happily abide by your collective preference on this matter.

From Instapundit, who is referring to the Washington Post article about arts blogs which I discussed (and linked) here:

THE BLOGOSPHERE IS, LIKE, TOTALLY INBRED: Er, except that I haven’t ever heard of most of these blogs, which are nonetheless a big thing in their part of the sphere, I gather.

There are more things in the blogosphere, Jennifer Howard, than are dreamt of in your articles….

Er, you, too, Instapundit. For as this post reminds us, the “warbloggers” (i.e., the political bloggers who mostly sprang to life in the wake of 9/11) and the arts bloggers (i.e., Our Girl and I and all the other folks mentioned in Jennifer Howard’s article) don’t seem to overlap all that much. To be sure, there’s lots and lots more of them than there are of us. “About Last Night”‘s traffic has gone through the roof on the infrequent occasions when the warblogging sector of the blogosphere has taken note of our activities. But for the most part we arts bloggers go our own way quite happily, gradually building an audience of interested readers, some of whom also visit the warblogs (as I do) and some of whom don’t.

Meaning what? That many more people are interested in politics than art (surprise!). That it’s a big pool, with plenty of room for everybody. Above all, that the Web has the power to create and foster far-flung, widely dispersed “communities” of strangers with common interests–and to do it on the cheap.

Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, reported yesterday (in near-real time, no less!) on a speech given by Andrew Sullivan, one of the pioneer bloggers, to the Online News Association. Here are his notes:

What sets apart weblogs, [Sullivan] says, is economics: He talks about the economics of thoughtful journalism: The New Republic has never made money and loses more. The Nation doesn’t make money.

“And then I experienced blogging as an alternative. It staggers me to realize that last week, AndrewSullivan.com… is now reaching more people online than the magazine I used to edit, which is still losing… hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That’s a big deal… We haven’t just made the economics of journalism cheaper…. We haven’t just lowered the barriers to entry to journalism, we’ve completely revolutionized it.”

“The overhead is minimal and the reach is almost infinite.”

The fact that Andrew Sullivan is English may be relevant in this connection. In the U.S., journalism came over the past half-century to be viewed as a “profession”–something you can’t do without formal training and, preferably, an academic degree. In Europe, it’s something that can be and is done by any literate person for whatever reason–to make money, to help shape the cultural conversation, even just for fun.

I think the second model makes more sense, and also makes for better, livelier journalism. Most newspaper and magazine editors disagree, and prior to the emergence of the blogosphere, they ran things. Now they don’t. Which might just be the most important thing about blogs: they have brought about a wholesale revival of “amateur” journalism, in the very best sense of the word.

That’s the lead–not that Instapundit hasn’t heard of Maud, or that Jennifer Howard thinks TMFTML is too snarky. This is new. And it matters. And you’re here.

Two readers write, apropos of my recent postings about Joan Kroc’s $200 million legacy to NPR.

The first is Cinetrix’ ‘Fesser:

I confess that I am ambivalent about this $200m gift. It seems to me as if a huge gift to the central NPR will only accelerate the homogenization of public radio. At the left end of the dial, NPR is a behemoth that squeezes out marginally alternative radio, leaving only the raggedy fringe of college stations. The certitude of hearing “Car Talk” and Scott Simon from coast to coast, while pleasant for homesick Bostonians, for a few moments at least, does not really offer a serious alternative to commercial media. NPR, the national organization, may raise the bar, but they lower the ceiling. In essence, the problem in my eyes is the replacement of small p, small r public radio with NPR. The difference is like that between coffeehouses and Starbucks.

Also, the contretemps of a few years ago over Christopher Lydon’s “Connection” revealed that the talent at Boston’s WBUR was making serious, six-figure money. I am reluctant to brown-bag it for a week so that I can pay for one of Tom and Ray’s cufflinks. I support public radio by throwing a few bucks to my favorite music station when I can, and I don’t feel too
guilty about listening to NPR when I want news. In any event, given the constant sponsor plugs and contests to win Apple iPods, Toyota Prii, or Pat Metheny tickets, the absence of Paul Harvey is the only way to tell you are not listening to AM news radio.

As for the Kroc gift, given the source of the money, it seems as if it would have been more appropriate for her to throw some cash to an organization that is trying to do something about the obesity epidemic in this country.

My second correspondent hails from the suburbs of Philadelphia:

I see you say that you don’t listen to classical music on the radio. I would greatly miss it.

In and around Philadelphia and Trenton, Mercer County Community College’s WWFM “empire” provides a terrific classical service. It has a network of translators and smaller stations that stretch from north of Easton, Pa. to Cape May. Much of its music is locally programmed and often non-hackneyed (the other day, during the afternoon, I heard David Diamond’s Violin Concerto No. 2). From 12-3 pm and midnight-6 a.m. they use Peter van de Graaf from Chicago’s marvelous WFMT (the best arts station in the U.S.) and he is a joy. Sure, he plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Ravel’s La Valse and other greatest hits, but he also plays French baroque opera, 20th-century Dutch minimalism, Swedish chamber music and all kinds of unusual repertoire and off-the-beaten track tidbits (did you know that Beethoven wrote an Andante and Variations for Mandolin and Harpsichord? I didn’t until PvdG played it). Last night at 3 a.m. (I work nights, sleep days) he played an entire one-act Rossini comic opera–what a treat and a real discovery for me! No, I had no idea what was going on; my Italian is a tad rusty. But the joy and effervescent delight that is Rossini came through clearly and really made my night.

I have over 2,000 classical CDs and a fine system to play them on, and I do often play them. But the radio has a spontaneity and excitement that I enjoy and I would miss the discoveries–things I would never hear any other way. I feel sorry that such listening opportunities are not available in so many places–so many potential classical fans may never hear the music.

They certainly won’t on NPR, either. In Philadelphia, the NPR outlet loves talk so much it REPEATS shows. They play Fresh Air at 3 and then again at 7. They repeat All Things Considered’s first 1/2 hour 2 hours later. There’s no room for music, but they can run reruns? NPR and its partner in crime, PBS, should be ashamed for their total retreat from the fine arts. Keep hounding them about it!

These two e-mails are variations on the same theme, and very much to the point of what public radio ought to be about, at least in my opinion. The operative word is “non-commercial,” which brings us back to my original posting. Public radio runs on subsidies–some direct, some indirect, some voluntary, some not. But its claim to any kind of subsidy, whatever the source, arises from its non-commercial character. To the extent that NPR allows its programming to be driven by purely commercial considerations, it violates that tacit “agreement” with the public.

Two other points are worth noting. As the ‘Fesser notes, non-capitalized “public radio” augments the fast-shrinking diversity of broadcast content in America, while NPR’s increasing emphasis on centralized talk-driven programming diminishes it. And my Philadelphia correspondent makes a point that simply hadn’t occurred to me, which is that one of the most important reasons to listen to classical music on the radio is the element of surprise. My own life as a working critic provides plenty of that, but those who aren’t at concerts and other performances five and six nights a week are in a different boat. Alex Ross said much the same thing in another context a few weeks ago when he wrote
to chide me for undervaluing the significance of BAM as “a filter for those who are baffled by the sheer superfluity of choices out there” (and yes, Alex, I know I owe you an e-mail!).

It may be that my correspondents are I are kicking against the pricks–that the centralizing forces to which terrestrial radio is being subjected are irresistible. It may also be that Web-based “radio” is the long-term alternative to the encroaching homogenization of the airwaves. And it’s puzzling that none of us has heretofore suggested that possibility. The genius of the Web is that it lowers the overhead for individuality. Hence blogging, which is nothing if not individual. If I weren’t having so much fun blogging (and weren’t so damn busy writing for profit), I might well be tempted to launch a Web-based radio station of my own…but don’t ask me!

“What fascinates me about acting is when a beautiful talented actress can come on the stage and give a performance that makes your blood curdle with excitement and pleasure, yet she can make such a cracking pig of herself over where her dressing-room is or some such triviality, for which you hate her. Intelligent actors never do that, but then they’re seldom as good as the unintelligent ones. Acting is an instinct. A gift that is often given to people who are very silly as people. But as they come on to the stage, up goes the temperature.”

No

Jennifer Howard, a contributing editor of Washington Post Book World, has a piece in the Post‘s “Outlook” section in which she complains about the chumminess of the blogosphere, citing by name a number of arts blogs and bloggers, present company included:

Part of blogs’ usefulness as a cultural barometer is that they don’t automatically buy what the establishment says about Vida or Eggers or any other overhyped phenomenon, literary or otherwise. Bloggers know what they like and what they don’t like, and they aren’t afraid to tell you why. And they get to use bad words that will never see print inside a family newspaper. But to get to the good stuff, you have to wade through more and more self-congratulation and mutual admiration. Call it blogrolling….

Maybe the back-scratching started as revolutionary solidarity. Now it’s a popularity contest in which the value of information is confused with the cool quotient of the person spreading it. Late-night TV has Jay and Dave and Conan; the blogosphere has TMFTML and Old Hag and Choire, only unlike the gods of late night, the gods of the blogosphere really, really like each other–and say so every chance they get.

They’re not so nice to the less popular kids, often establishment-media types who get flogged out of all proportion to their op-ed offenses. The last few months, it’s been all the rage to paste Laura Miller, a critic with regular gigs for Salon.com and the New York Times. One of the kinder comments, this one from Cup of Chicha: “From the way she writes about contemporary short stories, it feels obvious she doesn’t read them.” Even if you’re not a fan of Miller’s, the attacks can get so nasty it starts to feel like bloggers pick on her not because they think she’s a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times….

If the ad hominem tactics made for a better read, I might not mind so much. Sure, it can be fun in a sick sort of way, like watching a bar fight while you nurse a beer in the corner. But more and more it gets in the way of what makes blogs useful to someone like me, and that’s information. After making my daily e-rounds, I feel more plugged into what’s going on–and ever more burned out on cronyism and negativity. Even if you rely on blogs for idiosyncratic takes on the news, even if you enjoy seeing sacred cows slaughtered, even if you believe, as I do, that the world needs the kind of Zorro-like cultural commentary they’re so good at, you start to wonder: Is this getting a little too personal?

Maybe that’s the point. In the blogosphere, everybody gets to be a critic.

Read the whole thing here.

Actually, Our Girl and I don’t do a lot of ad hominem brawling, but we do like to plug what’s going on elsewhere in the blogosphere, mainly because it’s still a very new invention about which more and more people are learning every day. That’s why we mention TMFTML
and Maud
and Cup of Chicha
and Old Hag
and Bookslut
and all the other interesting blogs that we read regularly–because we think they’re worth knowing about. “Coolness” and cronyism have nothing to do with it. We don’t party down nightly. I’ve met one of the aforementioned bloggers, once. Two of them I don’t even know by name.

In any case, the great thing about the blogosphere is that it’s an unusually pure example of an information market. People read “About Last Night” because they want to read it. If they don’t, they won’t. The same is true of all the other blogs. The ease with which you can visit a blog is part of what makes the blogosphere so competitive–and it’s not a zero-sum game, either. Anyone can play. It’s cheap and easy to set up a blog. To be a “popular kid,” all you have to do is jump in and be consistently interesting, and you’ll get noticed and mentioned and blogrolled very, very quickly. It doesn’t matter who you know or where you are. (Look what happened to Cup of Chicha.)

As for Laura Miller, I think maybe Ms. Howard is engaging in a teeny bit of snarkery herself when she suggests that “bloggers pick on her not because they think she’s a lousy critic but because she gets to sound off every other week in the New York Times.” I don’t have an opinion about Laura Miller–I don’t read her stuff–but if I felt the need to criticize her, it wouldn’t be because I resented the fact that she’s an “establishment-media type.” After all, so am I. Nor do I blog to be hip or cool or to kick sand in the faces of the “less popular kids,” whatever that means. I do it because I think blogging is an exciting and potentially significant development in arts journalism, and I want to be part of it. I’m excited by the immediacy and freshness and personal quality of blogs. I also like the bad words and knife fights, even if we don’t do that kind of stuff around here. I don’t own a shiv, and Our Girl is too sweet. (I don’t even think she knows some of those words TMFTML uses.)

Above all, blogging is fun. And that’s one thing I don’t get from Jennifer Howard’s eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we’re all having out here. “We” meaning TMFTML and Maud and Cup of Chicha and Old Hag and Bookslut and the thousands of nice people who visit us every day. It’s not a private party. There’s no secret handshake. All you have to do is click on a link. Or not. But we hope you do.

I very much like what Our Girl wrote about not letting herself get freaked out in advance by the reviews of Master and Commander (though now that they’re out, I’d say she doesn’t have much to get freaked out about).

In my own case, I’m trying to prepare myself not to get freaked out by the differences between the movie and the books. So far, I’ve only read one unfavorable review, by Christopher Hitchens, a reflexive contrarian who likes nothing better than to fly in the face of conventional wisdom, even when it’s right and he’s wrong. Yet it’s obvious that Hitchens knows Patrick O’Brian’s books extremely well, for he unhesitatingly put his finger on a key aspect of the film about which the trailer left me extremely suspicious: the way it portrays Stephen Maturin.

The summa of O’Brian’s genius was the invention of Dr. Stephen Maturin. He is the ship’s gifted surgeon, but he is also a scientist, an espionage agent for the Admiralty, a man of part Irish and part Catalan birth–and a revolutionary. He joins the British side, having earlier fought against it, because of his hatred for Bonaparte’s betrayal of the principles of 1789–principles that are perfectly obscure to bluff Capt. Jack Aubrey. Any cinematic adaptation of O’Brian must stand or fall by its success in representing this figure.

On this the film doesn’t even fall, let alone stand. It skips the whole project. As played by the admittedly handsome and intriguing Paul Bettany, Maturin is no more than a good doctor with finer feelings and a passion for natural history. At one point he is made to say in an English accent that he is Irish–but that’s the only hint we get. In the books, for example, he quarrels badly with Aubrey about Lord Nelson’s support for slavery. But here a superficial buddy movie is born out of one of the subtlest and richest and most paradoxical male relationships since Holmes and Watson.

I regret to say that all this sounds dangerously plausible to me. I’ve read the entire Aubrey-Maturin series several times and admire it greatly (if not uncritically), but I also think its virtues, which I tried to describe when I reviewed The Yellow Admiral (one of the later volumes in the series) for the New York Times Book Review, are of a sort not easily transferred to the screen, in part because they are embodied as much in conversation as in action:

Mr. O’Brian’s present popularity is to some extent a fad, but it is also justified. To say that his books are a cut above the average historical novel is to miss the point: Aubrey and Maturin are to Capt. Horatio Hornblower what Philip Marlowe is to Perry Mason….In the end, what makes the Aubrey-Maturin novels memorable is their moral gravity: rarely does one encounter in nominally popular fiction so Trollopian an understanding–and acceptance–of the divided nature of men’s souls. Mr. O’Brian does not deal in cardboard heroes, which is why the acts of heroism he describes make so powerful an impression. We read him for his plots; we reread him for his philosophy.

I hasten to point out, however, that this is all the more reason to try and forget about the books when watching the film. A faithful film adaptation of a novel of any considerable literary complexity can never be more than a species of illustration–a commentary at best, a comic book at worst. To watch it inevitably becomes a kind of game in which the viewer scores the film according to how many surface details the director gets right. Do the actors look the way they “ought” to? Are the sets convincing? Does the dialogue sound familiar? It’s a good game, but it has nothing to do with art.

The smarter approach, of course, is for the director to depart drastically from the source–to subject it to an imaginative transformation that gives the adaptation an independent life as a free-standing art object in its own right. (It’s easier to turn a great novel into a great opera than a great film.) But if you do that, you’re likely to lose a significant part of the pre-sold audience of loyal fans whose existence is the main reason why popular books get filmed in the first place. As far as they’re concerned, the more literal the adaptation, the better–and I, hardened aesthete though I am, can’t keep myself from feeling the same way. As Dr. Johnson might have put it, I rejoice to concur with the common reader, even though I know I shouldn’t.

Hence I’m of two minds about Master and Commander. I’m well aware that it won’t convey more than a fractional part of the subtleties of O’Brian’s novels, but I’m going to see it anyway, checklist in hand, hoping against hope that the images on the screen will at least approximate the ones in my head. And that’s why I envy OGIC her blissful ignorance. Unlike me, she’ll see the film for what it is and nothing more–and if she likes it enough, she might even feel moved to buy a copy of Master and Commander, the first novel in the series, and find out what Patrick O’Brian is really about. (Nudge, nudge.)

I reviewed Taboo, the new Rosie O’Donnell-produced musical about Boy George, and The Caretaker, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s revival of Harold Pinter’s 1960 play, in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

Taboo was terrible:

Rumors about the mind-boggling awfulness of “Taboo,” which opened last night, have been circulating for weeks. I wish I could say I ignored them, but such whispers often turn out to be all too true, and once again, the whisperers were right on the money. Not since “Urban Cowboy” has Broadway been littered with so much smoldering wreckage. If Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom had produced “Taboo” instead of “Springtime for Hitler,” they’d have stayed out of jail….

The Caretaker was really good:

Don’t be put off by Mr. Pinter’s reputation for inaccessibility (or the whiny anti-Americanism of his post-9/11 public statements). His school-of-Beckett style may have hardened into mannerism long ago, but “The Caretaker” is still fresh and fine, and this production, well acted by all three players and directed with deceptive clarity by David Jones, is a superior piece of work….

No link (gnashing of teeth), so to read the whole thing, including shorter reviews of two new off-Broadway shows, Fame on 42nd Street and Bright Ideas, do the usual. Extract dollar (A) from wallet (B), proceed to the nearest newsstand, buy today’s Journal, turn to the “Weekend Journal” section (on whose front page you’ll find me), and revel in the rest of our excellent arts coverage. Got that? Good.