Archives for 2003

Here’s a trayful of food for thought from the Blogosphere Cafeteria.

From Eve Tushnet:

Anyone who is or feels herself radically opposed to the currents of the day is liable to feel that her own account of her life is “unrealistic.” Her perspective is not realist. Her perspective is fantastic, outside, genre.

“Realism” only works for people whose worldviews are already accepted as realistic. The rest of us must make do with genre.

From BuzzMachine:

In this age of transparency — of constant cable news and C-Span’s unblinking eye and instant online wire reports and mobile alerts and full transcripts online and more video here and weblog links to coverage everywhere and automated Google news searches and, in sum, the commoditization of news — the role of the newsman has utterly changed … but that news hasn’t caught up to the newsmen yet.

It used to be, we depended on them to tell us what is happening (and some prided themselves on doing it better than others). Those days are over. Toast. “What happened” is the commodity; we can find out what happened anywhere anytime….

We can all see all the news and judge for ourselves what’s news and what isn’t, what’s real and what isn’t, what’s important and what isn’t, and often what’s true and what isn’t.

Do reporters and editors still have a role in the news we can all see (as opposed to the news they dig up)? Don’t know yet, do we?

From Household Opera:

I finished grading a round of papers only to discover a documentable plagiarism case. I hate having to deal with that kind of thing. I hate having to give the stern “You’re looking at an F on the assignment, a very unpleasant meeting with the dean of students, and academic probation” lecture. Even more than that, I hate it when these cases disrupt my usual working assumption that we’re all adults and I don’t have to yell at anyone for intellectual dishonesty….

From Mixolydian Mode:

I hate most familiar Christmas music. Some of the carols are very good, but when there’s no escape from them they cease to be a pleasure. Other tunes aren’t so good; has there ever been a more Orwellian song than “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”?

God bless us, every one.

Fellow blogger Sarah Weinman writes:

Don’t know why it took me so long to read your piece about The Producers, but I agree wholeheartedly, and I enjoyed it immensely when I saw the original cast
back in June of 2001, I think, or at least 2 months after opening night, when Lane/Broderick et al were still relatively fresh in the roles.

I love musicals, and have ever since I was a child. I grew up on the stuff. But I’m decidedly uninterested in those made after about, oh, 1970 or so (and that includes most of Sondheim’s works), because so much
has been sacrificed in the name of glitzy production values, “Broadway voices” that aren’t even based on the style of old, and good, solid songwriting instead of this over-the-top stuff that Lloyd Webber and his
followers seem to specialize in. And that’s not bringing up the Disney adaptations or the rock-opera productions.

So I’m a complete reactionary and I’m proud of it, which was why I enjoyed THE PRODUCERS–it’s a throwback to those earlier days, when the jokes were broad, the sensibility all over the place, and the pace
absolutely madcap. Would it hold up if it had opened, say, in the 1950s? I doubt it. Compared to the way things are now, it’s wonderful. Compared to even some of the failures and flops of decades past, it probably would have been killed by the critics. Context is everything.

I always thought THE PRODUCERS was an anomaly. Was very glad it was a hit, but I didn’t see it inspiring a return to old-fashioned type musicals. It’s just too expensive to put such things on. So I’ll be sorry to see the show go, but I’m glad I saw it near the beginning, when there was much enthusiasm in the air.

Thanks, Sarah. Well said.

Here’s Cup of Chicha (welcome back to the blogosphere, ma’am) on Sylvia:

Films are very likely to fail if they are about any one of these three subjects: a writer, depression, a real person.

Read the whole thing here. And now I’ve really got to go write a piece for money….

I’m triple-booked today (a deadline, a recording session, a press preview), so this is the last you’ll be hearing from me until Wednesday. Our Girl is also enmeshed in life-related activities, though I’m hoping she’ll poke her head in at some point in the next couple of days.

Fortunately, I posted a really alarmingly large amount of stuff on Sunday and Monday, in addition to a couple of first-thing-in-the-morning items today, and I suspect in any case that most of you were elsewhere (turkey sandwiches, hangovers) while I was busily blogging away. As I used to say to a now-deceased cat who liked fresh food in the middle of the night, “Eat what’s there.”

Later.

“‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you are at the stage when you think Swinburne is the greatest poet who ever lived. But you won’t think that for ever. He is a damned good poet at his best. For the moment at a certain epoch of one’s life he’s like Wagner’s music, he annihilates everything else. Have you ever heard Wagner’s music?’

“C. shook his head.

“‘Well, you’ll have to some day, I suppose. You must get through it like measles. Don’t go to it here; they can’t do it. It’s poisonous, neurotic stuff, and it’s all wrong; but you’ll have to experience the disease. Don’t think I’m saying you’re wrong to like what you like. You’re young, that’s the great thing, and I’m not, and the young are often right in admiring what they do admire. It’s a great thing they should admire anything. When people get older they see nothing in Shelley or Swinburne; the colours seem to have faded out of these things, but they haven’t really. The colours are there, only they are too dry and too crusted to see them.'”

Maurice Baring, C

A reader writes, apropos of yesterday’s exchange about American orchestras:

Regarding your comments (and your correspondent’s) about the opening of minds to symphonic music, I think you might have overlooked a crucial element: instrument lessons. Or rather, the lack of them in American schooling. Take a survey of a group of symphony-goers, and you’ll find that one had some violin in school. Another still plays amateur piano. Another might have had a clarinet thrust upon her in junior high. While they never became professional musicians themselves, the instruction they received helped them unlock the secrets of music. Knowing something of what it takes to play a viola part, they can appreciate and admire those who do it brilliantly.

It’s a sad fact that music appreciation–that very optimistic style of teaching which consists in playing recordings of works and telling students why they’re great–doesn’t stick. It takes more than one hearing and a definition of sonata form, and even sympathetic
and awe-struck description of Beethoven’s deafness, to overcome the forbidding nature of a 45-minute work, especially in this era of ambient music and 3-minute songs. A mind can’t merely be open to music; it needs to be shaped to the music, through the rigors of practice and performance.

Where has the instrumental instruction gone? It’s a victim of budget cuts, at least in the public schools. It’s gone from the cultural landscape, too. A piano is no longer an essential item in a cultured household, and the very idea of aspiring to a cultured household is embarrassingly affected to some.

Not every member of a concert audience is an ex-trumpeter or fiddler, to be sure. But a good number are, and they bring their spouses and infect their
friends with their enthusiasm.

In short, it’s hopeless trying to get people into concert halls by telling them why they need to attend concerts. Love of complex, demanding music has to be engendered from an early age, and that takes the kind of involvement that music lessons entail.

Well…yes and no. Mostly yes, at least up to a point, and I speak as one who actually learned how to play violin in the public schools of a very small Missouri town–but, then, I was the one who wanted to learn. To be sure, the larger culture was encouraging me: I grew up in the middlebrow age of aspiration, at a time when the ideal of the “cultured household” was still taken with the highest possible seriousness. I saw classical music performed on network TV as a boy, which made me want to learn an instrument, and my public school system made that possible. Many of the links have been removed from that cultural chain in the past quarter-century, with dire results. Still, the initial impulse came from within me, in substantial part because of those selfsame music-appreciation classes about whose efficacy my correspondent is so skeptical. Mere exposure rang the bell, and my own budding interest did the rest.

The good news is that people can develop a serious interest in classical music, or any other “complex, demanding” art form, no matter how old they are. I’ve seen it happen time and again. For this reason, I’m not nearly as pessimistic as my correspondent, who seems to think that if you don’t get inoculated with classical music in childhood, you can’t learn to love it as an adult. On the other hand, I strongly agree that learning a musical instrument as a child puts you way ahead of the game, and the decline of our public-school music programs has made an uphill battle steeper than ever.

I also agree that “it’s hopeless trying to get people into concert halls by telling them why they need to attend concerts.” Would that it were more widely understood that high art is good for you–not in the fallacious “Mozart-effect” sense, but in the far more profound sense of soulcraft. Alas, that uplifting notion has largely vanished from American culture. In matters of high art, we must start from zero: we actually have to make the case that listening to operas by Mozart and Verdi and looking at ballets by Balanchine and Tudor are pleasurable experiences.

Fortunately, the strongest card in our hands is that we’re telling the truth, an amazing and miraculous fact that it’s never too late to discover, even if you’ve never held a clarinet or stood at a barre or wielded a paintbrush. High art is many things, but above all–before anything else–it’s fun. And I think it’s possible to make that clear without distorting the experience of art out of all recognition. That’s what I try to do in writing about the arts, here and elsewhere: I try to communicate the overflowing enthusiasm and excitement I feel every time I come into the presence of good art. Any arts journalist who doesn’t do that is part of the problem.

I apologize for my recent absence from this space while I’ve been on the road, spending time with family, and under the weather, in various combinations. I’m back in Chicago now, easing back into things slowly, and catching up on my reading. To wit:

Is it just me, or does it seem as though you can’t blink these days for fear of missing something new and fascinating at 2 Blowhards? Today it is a guest posting by Michael’s friend Maureen, who describes her friendship with a blind man who is acutely sensitive to visual beauty of all kinds. Here’s a taste:

One of the things that I liked best about our friendship was that it seemed to transcend the superficial. At least, or so it seemed at first, we were free from the appearance game.

Aha! Not quite. I soon began to learn that this accomplished man also had a serious eye, so to speak, for beauty–female pulchritude, to be exact. I learned that Jacek had been making numerous inquiries about my appearance. He wanted to know every detail about me, although he already knew quite a few–body type is easy to determine when you walk with a blind person, and he had gotten to know my personality extremely well. Yet he wanted more. The “aesthetics” of Maureen were important to him. Mind you, this was someone who had never seen a human face.

As they say, read the whole thing.

I’ve also been having some fun exploring John & Belle Have a Blog. John has been fisking defenders of Bad Academic Writing, talking up the unfairly neglected Robert Louis Stevenson, and examining his affinity for Stephen King:

I have so much affection for Stephen King on account of countless pleasant hours spent reading his first, second, third, fourth and fifth rate fat novels. He’s a novelist I feel was my friend in junior high. I feel his influence seep through other writers–Neil Gaiman, for example. Whose first, second, third, fourth and fifth rate products I greatly enjoy. It makes me smile to feel King’s influence spread. When I hear he won a prize I feel like I heard a friend won a prize. It hardly occurs to me to ask whether he deserves it.

My own impulse to defend King from the recent attacks directed at him on the occasion of his National Book Award does, I’ll admit, stem from the same sort of youthful affection. But it is helped along immeasurably by the smug certainty in some quarters that King’s popularity or genre proves his literary unworthiness. And I simply think that he is a good writer (far better, ironically, than any of the other popular novelists he endorsed at the NBA dinner).

“There are some things too dreadful to be revealed, and it is even more dreadful how, in spite of our better instincts, we long to know about them.”

Barbara Pym, Excellent Women