Archives for December 2003

As you know, I’m headed for Chicago tomorrow via an Amtrak sleeper, there to see plays for The Wall Street Journal and revel in the company of Our Girl in Chicago, whom I’ve known and adored for years and years, even though she insists on living in another city, damn her. I probably won’t be posting again until I get where I’m going. OGIC has been fearfully busy with her day job, which is why you haven’t heard from her lately, but I’m hoping that she’ll take up some of the slack in my temporary absence. Once I arrive at her place on Friday, I expect we’ll have at least a few amusing things to report, but don’t be surprised if nothing new turns up in this space for the next couple of days.

To all those who read us regularly, I send our affectionate and appreciative regards. Much to my surprise, “About Last Night” has become one of the most widely read arts blogs in the world. You have made us so. We thank you most humbly, and we promise to do our best to be as readable in 2004 as we were in 2003.

May the New Year bring you joy and love. May it bring us all peace. And should it fail on either count, may you find comfort in the blessed world of art.

Next year in Chicago!

“Nobody has suffered more from low spirits than I have done–so I feel for you. 1st. Live as well as you dare. 2nd. Go into the shower-bath with a small quantity of water at a temperature low enough to give you a slight sensation of cold, 75 degrees or 80 degrees. 3rd. Amusing books. 4th. Short views of human life–not further than dinner or tea. 5th. Be as busy as you can. 6th. See as much as you can of those friends who respect and like you. 8. Make no secret of low spirits to your friends, but talk of them freely–they are always worse for dignified concealment. 9th. Attend to the effects tea and coffee produce upon you. 10th. Compare your lot with that of other people. 11th. Don’t expect too much from human life–a sorry business at the best. 12th. Avoid poetry, dramatic representations (except comedy), music, serious novels, melancholy sentimental people, and everything likely to excite feeling or emotion not ending in active benevolence. 13th. Do good, and endeavour to please everybody of every degree. 14th. Be as much as you can in the open air without fatigue. 15th. Make the room where you commonly sit, gay and pleasant. 16th. Struggle by little and little against idleness. 17th. Don’t be too severe upon yourself, or underrate yourself, but do yourself justice. 18th. Keep good blazing fires. 19th. Be firm and constant in the exercise of rational religion.”

Sydney Smith, letter to Lady Georgiana Morpeth (1820)

A reader writes:

A small request, hmmm? Howzabout, on 12/31, you (pretty please with sugar on top) mention Milstein on the blog? Something like: “Today is the 100th birthday of the greatest violinist of the 20th century – Nathan Milstein. So, get out there and buy one of his albums today!” You could also put in a plug for your upcoming article on Milstein and Kaufman (heh, heh).

I’m delighted to oblige. The “Milstein” in question is Nathan Milstein, whose name is now remembered mainly by aging violin connoisseurs–Jascha Heifetz got much better press–but who was, if not the greatest violinist of the 20th century, certainly one of the half-dozen greatest ever to make recordings. He never became as big a celebrity as Heifetz because his playing wasn’t as idiosyncratic: his tone was lean and focused, his interpretations poised and patrician, not exactly restrained but not exhibitionistic, either.

Such a musician isn’t for everyone, any more than a singer like Nicolai Gedda or a painter like Vuillard suits all tastes. Milstein lacked that slight touch of vulgarity–the common touch, if you like–that so often helps to bridge the emotional gap between artist and audience. Yet those who responded to his playing did so passionately, and there were more than enough of them for Milstein to have a long and satisfying career. He even wrote a wonderful memoir, From Russia to the West, in which he speaks with occasionally hair-raising candor about colleagues and contemporaries (among them his good friend George Balanchine, whose personality Milstein evokes with remarkable vividness).

Milstein made a lot of records, and most of the best of them have been transferred to CD and are fairly easy to find. If you want to jump in head first, The Art of Nathan Milstein,
a budget-priced six-disc boxed set, contains a good-sized chunk of his working repertoire. If you’d rather start with a smaller taste, I recommend a CD that couples his early stereo recordings of the Tchaikovsky and Brahms concertos, available from amazon.com for the preposterously low price of $3.98. (Both performances are also included in The Art of Nathan Milstein.) You might also try his superb remake
of Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for unaccompanied violin–the best complete set ever recorded, as far as I’m concerned.

As my correspondent notes, I’m planning to publish an essay about Milstein and Louis Kaufman in Commentary some time in 2004. But why wait? At the very least, give that Tchaikovsky-Brahms CD a spin. I don’t promise to refund your money, but if you aren’t won over by Milstein’s soaring performance of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, I’ll be amazed.

“Everybody who lives in New York believes he’s here for some purpose, whether he does anything about it or not.”

Arlene Croce, Afterimages

Regular readers of this blog know that I’m afraid to fly, a mild but nonetheless persistent phobia that came calling from out of nowhere a few years ago and settled in for an extended visit. I’m gradually getting better at it, thanks in large part to the patient counsel of a psychotherapist (she’s the one who talked me into riding a roller coaster this past summer), and now I can fly with minimal discomfort so long as the plane doesn’t bump around too much.

Last night I flew from St. Louis, the city closest to Smalltown, U.S.A., to LaGuardia Airport. I try not to fly at night, but this time I decided to give it a go, and at the end of 45 anxious minutes spent pushing through a cold front, our smaller-than-usual jet popped out of the clouds and started its descent into the New York area. Suddenly the once-invisible earth below me was lit by a million glittering pinpoints of copper, gold, and chilly blue-white. Not for the first time, I wondered why no painter has ever taken for his subject what one sees from the window of an airplane. Surely Whistler would have known what to do with the lights of a city, just as Constable might have reveled in the spectacle of clouds seen from above. I remembered, too, that as much as I dislike flying, it allows me to gaze as long as I want at a sight that can be seen nowhere else.

The captain told us to look out the right-hand windows, and all at once they were filled with Manhattan. I thought of flying past the southern tip of my adopted island home on the Sunday after 9/11 (I always think of that terrible day whenever I fly back to New York), but the red-and-green Empire State Building swept the unwanted, unforgettable picture out of my head. The plane swooped and dipped, Manhattan vanished from view, and I found myself staring down at Riker’s Island, so close I could have tossed a bag of pretzels out the window and hit a guard tower. Then I was on the ground, my fears forgotten, almost home and happy to be.

I’ve lived in New York for the better part of two decades now, and you’d think I’d have gotten used to it. In a way, I suppose I have, but even now all it takes is a whiff of the unexpected and I catch myself boggling at that which the native New Yorker really does take for granted. As for my visits to Smalltown, U.S.A., they invariably leave me feeling like yesterday’s immigrant, marveling at things no small-town boy can ever really dismiss as commonplace, no matter how long he lives in the capital of the world.

My cab swept me across the Triborough Bridge and the Upper East Side, past the Guggenheim Museum and through Central Park, straight to the front door of my building. I trotted up the steps, unlocked the door to my apartment, and turned on all the lights. A quick look at the walls assured me that all my prints were present and accounted for: here an Avery, there a Marin, Frankenthaler over the couch, Wolf Kahn over the mantelpiece. I dropped my bags, locked the door, and sighed deeply. Once again I had made the impossible journey from Smalltown to New York, from home to home.

I’ll be spending Monday making my slow way from Smalltown, U.S.A., to the Upper West Side of New York. On Tuesday and Wednesday I’ll be back at my desk, writing and blogging and blogging and writing. I have a way cool adventure planned for Thursday: I’m taking an Amtrak sleeper from New York to Chicago, something I’ve always wanted to do (I love trains). I’ll be hanging out with Our Girl in Chicago and seeing plays for The Wall Street Journal all weekend, returning to New York via Amtrak on Monday.

Mail will be answered at some point in the interstices of all this activity.

See you Tuesday.

As I start to sift through all those blogs that went unread during my week in Smalltown, U.S.A., I’m digging up all sorts of interesting things. Here, for instance, is a revealing little ripple from Instapundit:

BLOGGERS DON’T NEED EDITORS OR PUBLISHERS: Strangely, this leads Editor and Publisher to dub bloggers “self-important.”

Self-important, self-sufficient. Whatever.

UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky emails: “I’d add ‘self-correcting’, with the emphasis on ‘correcting’. Can you recall the last time any newspaper issued a correction for factual errors on the editorial page? I can’t.”

Me, neither. And the thing we in the blogosphere have discovered that has yet to penetrate through the thick skulls of editorial-page editors is this: Self-correction is interesting. It’s one of the reasons why I like reading blogs, and why I like writing this one.

I know something about editorial pages. I worked on a good one for several years, and also wrote a biography of H.L. Mencken, who spent a sizable chunk of his career doing the same thing. As a result of his experience, Mencken had nothing but contempt but most editorial pages and editorial writers–you can find the details in The Skeptic–but he made a special point of printing any letter to the editor that attacked him personally.

OGIC and I get a lot of e-mail. Not only do we answer all of it, we post some of it, invariably to readable effect, because virtually none of it comes from cranks. It comes from smart people who read what we write and have smart things to say about it–sometimes amplifying what we’ve written, sometimes challenging it. And because neither one of us makes the mistake of assuming that we’re always right, we’re happy to keep the ball rolling by letting you show that we’re not.

The ease and immediacy with which blogs permit self-correction, public response, and further amplification is central to their appeal. Take another look at that Instapundit item: first he quotes from (and links to) a published article. Then he comments on it. Then, a little later, he receives and posts a comment on his comment. All this happened well within the space of what used to be called a “news cycle.” In fact, it probably happened inside of an hour–maybe even less. OGIC and I (usually) aren’t that quick on the draw with our e-mail, but the point is that we could be, given sufficient time. And once we do get on the stick and post what you have to say, it frequently results in a whole series of profitable exchanges involving all sorts of other people. What’s more, our referral log keeps us up to date about what other bloggers have to say about us, and when appropriate we pass that on, too.

Is this “self-important”? I don’t think so. If anything published in this space is important, it’s because you make it so, by reading it and responding to it and linking to it–a process that can take place not in a month or a week, but right now. Which is why blogging has caught on so quickly, and is becoming an increasingly significant part of the world of journalism: it’s fast, and anyone can do it. You don’t need a degree in journalism (nobody needs a degree in journalism), much less a printing press. To re-paraphrase the much-paraphrased words of A.J. Liebling, freedom of the press used to be for those who owned one. Now it’s for anyone with a computer, a modem, and something to say.

Take it from one who’s spent his entire adult life writing for and editing newspapers and magazines: except for politicians, journalists as a group are the most self-important people in the world. That’s why some of them are so horrified by blogging, and go out of their way to knock it. They don’t like the idea of a level playing field for opinion. They like it much better when theirs are the only opinions in play. And now they’re out of luck. As Rodgers and Hammerstein might have put it, ain’t that too damn bad.

Apropos of my recent exchange with Felix Salmon, my sister-in-law writes from three blocks away in Smalltown, U.S.A.:

You may assure your readers and Mr. Salmon that culture can be found in venues other than a radio broadcast from the Met that the midwestern Smalltown USA did not even know existed. SEMO [southeast Missouri] offers violin, piano, etc lessons to young children, (my nephew, age 4, takes violin lessons) The professor plays some classical music and has the children name the piece. Your own niece enjoys a variety of music without having been exposed to a radio broadcast. We sought out different events for her to see if she enjoyed them. SEMO also offers opportunities to listen to small classical and jazz concerts and see plays (even if they are only performed by students) and also brings various ballets in to perform at the Show Me Center [a local auditorium] from time to time. The Fox Theatre in St. Louis is 2 hours from us and offers a variety of cultural and general entertainment. We have played various radio stations that were never before accessible to us by using our computer. The cost is not as prohibitive as some like to believe – I worked ours into a cable package upgrade. It is only a matter of what it is worth to the individual user. I have even looked into the satellite radio receiver for your brother which would certainly be better quality than our computer speakers, but find that the expense is not worth it to us at this time.

I am sorry this is so long, but it irritates me that someone would imply that you are a snob and feel only that the affluent deserve opera (especially since your brother and I are neither affluent or elite).

My sister didn’t mention the St. Louis Symphony, Art Museum, and Opera Theater, which are also two hours away, or Smalltown’s own Little Theater, which has been active for something like a half-century–I performed in it when I was a teenager. Otherwise, I’d say she sums up cultural possibilities in Smalltown, U.S.A., pretty thoroughly.

Incidentally, my week with a dial-up connection has convinced me that the future of broadband is now, not because it’s anywhere near universal but because so many Web sites (including a number of bloggers in the right-hand column) have lately become all but impossible to use without it. I was a very late adopter–I actually launched “About Last Night” using dial-up, unlikely as it may sound–and it was only through a cable package that I made the big leap. I suspect that’s how most as-yet-unbroadbanded people will do the same thing.