Archives for 2003

Click here to read what Greg Sandow wrote the other day about the experience of listening to Jean Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. Then go thou and do likewise. If you don’t have a recording, this is the best one. (I’m listening to it right now.) When you hear it, you’ll understand what Sibelius meant when he wrote, “God opens His door for a moment and His orchestra plays the Fifth Symphony.”

Thanks, Greg.

Dear OGIC:

I’m with you, almost completely. None of the artists you mentioned rings the bell for me, least of all Godard (whom I’ve always thought to be wildly overrated). As for Picasso, I said my say about him when I reviewed the Museum of Modern Art’s “Matisse Picasso” show for The Wall Street Journal:

In the visual arts, the race has always been between Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, and Picasso has always been the front-runner. Certainly Americans, with their puritan distrust of beauty, have typically favored his relentless experimentation to Matisse’s less obviously innovative stylistic pilgrimage. Even now, Picasso’s paintings look modern to the least tutored eye–you can’t help but come away from them secure in the knowledge that you’ve been challenged with a capital C–whereas it is perfectly possible to skate happily atop Matisse’s luscious, angst-free surfaces without feeling the slightest need to come to grips with the existential problem of…well, anything. (That’s why Picasso’s “Guernica,” which wears its antiwar message like a bumper sticker, is far better known than any Matisse painting. It’s modern art for modernists who don’t like art.)

Rarely has an artist done more harm to his own reputation than Matisse did when he declared that he wanted his work to serve as “a kind of cerebral sedative as relaxing in its ways as a comfortable armchair,” a remark as subtle and misleading as T.S. Eliot’s observation that Henry James had “a mind so fine no idea could violate it.” You have to think hard about it to understand how profound it is, just as you have to look hard at Matisse’s paintings to see how radically original they were, and are….

Picasso’s painting is the work of a spiritual contortionist who twists the visible world into angry patterns that betray his interior fury; Matisse, the disciplined sybarite, tells us instead of his joy.

My Dickens problem, on the other hand, vexes me. I know I’m missing something good, and can’t seem to find a way around it (whereas I’m perfectly happy to be deaf to whatever good there is in the music of Wagner). Maybe you can set me straight.

Obviously I now need to up the ante by making a confession of significantly higher voltage. So, um…well…how about this? I wouldn’t lose a bit of sleep if all the German paintings in the world vanished first thing tomorrow morning. Poof.

Top that, you piker.

Dear Terry:

In answer to your challenge issued here, I’ve sweated a bit, but I’m ready to come clean. And, by the way, Michael Blowhard’s original post is an excellent and useful reminder that we don’t have to bend our tastes to love everything of value. I’m sure you’ve noted all the interesting responses he’s been getting in his comments section. Some definite patterns have emerged (and things have gotten more than a little heated).

For writers, I’ll play my Virginia Woolf and William Blake cards.

Painters? Picasso, Renoir, Gauguin. Several years ago I might have said Monet, but the big show that passed through Chicago a while back reminded me that his paintings are not equivalent to their bland reproductions on a million coffee cups and mouse pads. But I might still cite his series paintings–making an exception for those enormous, very late water lilies.

Among filmmakers, I’ve seen a lot of Godard movies without chomping at the bit to see any of them again (well, maybe Breathless, but just for its iconicity). Films that fall into this category are harder for me to think of than anything else. It’s a seductive medium. And, more so than with other art forms, I tend to believe that if I don’t like a film, it’s just not that good. Can you make any sense of that?

On Dickens we’ll have to agree to disagree. Maybe we’re reading different Dickens, but that man makes me laugh out loud. When he is sharp, he is very, very good, but when he’s sentimental he’s horrid. For me, the former outweighs the latter.

Whack–back into your court!

I could change my mind, but I’m not planning to post anything new today, having been obsessively active yesterday. Instead, I’ve updated the “Teachout’s Top Five” and “Teachout Elsewhere” modules of the right-hand column (and yes, I know it took me long enough). Browse at your leisure. I’ll be back tomorrow.

Rumor has it that OGIC has something up her elegantly tailored sleeve, but I could be wrong. She never tells me anything! So I’ll know when you do….

“One speaks flatly, without thinking, of a Platonic or Aristotelian system, or of a Thomasic system, in spite of the fact that these thinkers would have raised their hands in horror at the idea that their empirical exploration of reality could ever result in a system. If anything was ever clear to a thinker like Plato, who knew to distinguish between the experiences of being and of not-being and acknowledged them both, it was that for better or for worse reality was not a system. If therefore one constructs a system, inevitably one has to falsify reality.”

Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections

When I was first getting started in professional journalism, every writer I knew dreamed of becoming a syndicated columnist. Back then, columns really did shape the political conversation, and to a lesser extent the cultural conversation as well (though the Eighties, lest we forget, were very political, to the point of virtually excluding art and culture from what got written about on op-ed pages).

I don’t think younger writers feel that way any more, and one sign of the sea change is the fact that you simply don’t see all that many younger syndicated columnists. I started to notice this as early as the Nineties, at a time when I shared the responsibility for editing a major op-ed page, that of the New York Daily News. We were constantly looking for new faces, but the syndicates weren’t offering any, and it never occurred to me that the problem might be a lack of interest on the part of younger journalists, much less a lack of interest on the part of young people in journalism.

Now we all know better. Of late, the only significant change in the op-ed scene has been the hiring of David Brooks by the New York Times, and Brooks isn’t a new face but a well-established writer of a certain age (mine). What’s more, I don’t get the impression that his column is causing all that much of a stir outside narrowly politico-journalistic circles. I don’t think that’s because of the quality of his work, either: I think it’s because op-ed pages in general are losing their traction. I may be wrong, but it’s not my impression that any newspaper columnist, syndicated or otherwise, is capable of stirring up any vast amount of talk nowadays.

You won’t be surprised to see where I’m heading: my guess is that the buzz in opinion journalism has shifted to the blogosphere, partly because it’s new and partly because it’s so much less rule-bound. You can say anything you want on a blog (though I’m sure the day is not far off when one of the big bloggers will get sued for libel, which will doubtless cool things off considerably). Just as important, you can say it right now, not next Tuesday. Needless to say, none of this is true on an op-ed page, or anywhere else in a newspaper, for that matter.

Sooner or later, existing newspapers will make themselves over in response to the challenge of the Web. Probably later, though, because they’re intensely bureaucratic institutions and thus are reflexively resistant to change. The New York Sun is an interesting case in point. It’s a daily paper of conservative hue that was started from scratch a couple of years ago in an attempt to provide an opinion-driven alternative to the New York Times. In this respect, it’s failed almost completely: the Sun‘s paid circulation remains trivially small next to that of the Times. Why, then, didn’t its founders simply do an end run around the insurmountable difficulties of launching a newspaper in New York and instead conceive of the Sun as the first on-line daily paper? That would have gotten them instant attention, not to mention slashing their overhead to pieces. Yet not only did the Sun stick to the old printed-paper model, but it has lagged consistently behind the Times in establishing a meaningful Web-based presence. (At first, the Sun didn’t have any Web site at all.)

The reason, I suspect, is that the Sun was launched by newspapermen who never gave any serious thought to making a complete a break with the traditions in which they were raised. The blogosphere, by contrast, is for the most part the creation of non-journalists and amateurs for whom such time-honored traditions carry no weight. Instead, it has arisen naturally from the organic properties of the Web.

I write for The Wall Street Journal, so you can take what I’m about to say with a stalactite of salt, but I think the Journal‘s Web site (which turns a profit) is the most potentially significant thing to happen to the newspaper business in decades. Yet the Journal is a quintessential establishment organ, the kind you’d assume would find it impossible to break with the past. That it has done so fascinates me. That no other newspaper has done so doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. Which is why I’m betting that the first successful on-line “paperless” daily paper will be started by some 25-year-old hotshot who’s never worked on a newspaper, and thus has nothing to unlearn.

As for the coming revolution in opinion journalism, it’s already happened. I like David Brooks (he’s an old friend), but I think maybe he got on the wrong boat. Not that I blame him in the least: after all, he gets paid for his opinions, which naturally matters to a family man. But for any writer who’s more interested in changing minds than making money, the blogosphere is the place to be.

Is it just me, or are any of you out there offended by the tone of the countless clever-clever op-eds, think pieces, and thumbsuckers of the past couple of days that have sought to “interpret” and pseudo-intellectualize the Michael Jackson story? Jackson’s arrest isn’t a Media Phenomenon, nor is it a sign of the times. It’s a news story about an alleged pedophile, one who has spent millions of dollars to keep himself out of jail. And I don’t give a good goddamn about the social significance of his mug shot, either. If he did what he’s said to have done, I want to see him in a jail cell, and once he’s there, my interest in him will be over and done with.

As for the interest of the mass media, my guess is that at some point fairly soon they’ll wake up and realize that the youthful target market after which they lust so desperately couldn’t care less about Michael Jackson. His arrest may be news, but his music is yesterday’s news, if not the day before. Big Media is so Eighties.

I was a small-town second-grader on November 22, 1963. My teacher, Jackie Grant, told the class that the president had been shot and killed, and then we all went home. For me, home was a block away from the classroom door, but my mother still drove to the school to pick me up, and my family spent much of the rest of the long weekend watching television. That much I remember, but I have no direct recollections of any of the TV images, except for this: I went to the kitchen to get a glass of milk just before Oswald was shot, and returned to the living room to find chaos on the screen.

That’s it. Not many memories, and no trauma at all. Which makes sense: I was born in 1956, the exact midway point of the baby boom, making me just too young to have been marked by the JFK assassination or to have served in Vietnam. In both of those respects, we younger baby boomers are more like Gen-Xers than our older brothers and sisters.

I described the difference, as I understand it, in a 1990 essay:

The line of eligibility for military service in Vietnam divides the baby boomers almost exactly in half. The older boomers, the ones who faced the dilemma of whether or not to serve in Vietnam, are the people you usually think about when you hear the term “baby boomers,” and Vietnam seems to have broken them. They were the ones who lost their nerve and were never heard from again. Were they victims of the damage the war did to America’s national self-image? Or was it that most of the boomers didn’t serve in Vietnam, that an entire generation of spoiled middle-class brats never had to undergo any kind of testing experience at all? I can’t tell you. But it’s clear beyond question that the older boomers, whatever their reasons, simply gave up somewhere down the line.

I didn’t include that essay (it’s called “A Farewell to Politics”) in A Terry Teachout Reader because I don’t think it’s held up very well. Among other things, I completely failed to predict Bill Clinton, or anyone like him. But I do think I was right to differentiate pre-1956 boomers from post-1956 boomers. The older ones were touched by the Kennedy assassination, while the younger ones merely remember it, and not very well, either.

Today, of course, We Are All Boomers Now, at least in the eyes of the Gen-Xers and their younger brothers and sisters. I have lots of friends in their thirties and several in their twenties, and for them, JFK is…history. Likewise Vietnam and LBJ and Nixon, and even Ronald Reagan. And, of course, the older boomers are history, too. Clinton was their last hurrah, the exemplary figure who summed up in his person and actions the ethos of the pre-1956 boomers. Even before he came along, I didn’t partake of that ethos, which may explain why I have so many younger friends.

For me, nostalgia is a powerful emotion (if it can properly be called an emotion), and many of the things for which I feel most intensely nostalgic took place in the Sixties. Yet I feel no nostalgia for The Sixties: The Decade, none whatsoever, no desire to hop in the time machine and check out all the things I was barely too young to have experienced at first hand. I’m much more interested in our current nicknameless decade, this astonishing age of anxiety and possibility, of terrorism and Two Americas and the Web.

As for John F. Kennedy, he doesn’t mean a thing to me. As I wrote earlier this year in a review of the latest Kennedy biography:

Once he was a young, glamorous president-martyr whose posthumous reputation was scrupulously tended by the journalists and intellectuals he had so assiduously courted while he was alive. Then a new generation of scholars born too late to be seduced by Kennedy’s charm took a closer look at his life and legacy, and discovered that the crown prince of Camelot was a reckless womanizer who installed a secret taping system in the Oval Office, was soft on civil rights and won the Pulitzer Prize for a book he hadn’t written.

And, needless to say, the victim of an assassin’s bullet, a dark day in American history that I barely remember. It’s…history.