Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Barry smashes Shirley’s dolly, Shirley’s eyes are crossed with hate,
Comrades plot a Comrade’s downfall “in the interests of the state.”
Not my vegetarian dinner, not my lime-juice minus gin,
Quite can drown a faint conviction that we may be born in Sin.
Sir John Betjeman, “Huxley Hall”
The BBC has started to make available on its Web site material from its sound archives, which are–to put it mildly–voluminous. What’s there is fairly random, but there are some stunners, including excerpts from a famous 1960 TV interview with Evelyn Waugh. I’d read about this interview (which figures prominently in all of Waugh’s biographies), but never seen or heard it. If you have a RealAudio player, you can listen by going here.
From this page, you can easily find your way to other BBC recordings of such noted figures as Kingsley Amis, W.H. Auden, Aaron Copland, Vladimir Nabokov, George Bernard Shaw, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Virginia Woolf, and W.B. Yeats (along with some rather more ephemeral types). I hope more such material will be posted on the BBC Web site in due course–most especially Max Beerbohm’s broadcasts from the Thirties and Forties, which I’ve never heard.
(I am, by the way, a great fan of spoken-word recordings by famous people whose voices you’d never guess were recorded, and will be glad to tell the readers of “About Last Night” about any especially choice Web-based tidbits whose URLs you care to pass on.)
1. It’s almost impossible to explain what a blog is to someone who’s never seen one. That’s the mark of a true innovation.
2. I know very few people over fifty, and scarcely any over sixty, who “get” blogging.
3. Blogs without links aren’t blogs. Blogs without blogrolls aren’t blogs. Blogs without mailboxes aren’t blogs.
4. The blogosphere is a pure market–but one in which no money changes hands. If you can afford the bandwidth and your ego is strong enough, it doesn’t matter whether anybody wants to read what you have to say. But the more you care about how many people are reading your blog, the more your blogging will be shaped by their approval, whether you get paid or not.
5. Politicians and celebrities rarely make good bloggers. They’re not interested enough in what other people are thinking.
6. Blogging puts professionals and amateurs on an even footing. That’s why so many professional writers dislike and distrust it.
7. The whole point of a blog is that its author controls its content. That’s why no major newspaper will ever be successful at running in-house blogs: the editors won’t allow it. The smart ones will encourage their best writers to blog on their own time–and at their own risk. The dumb ones will refuse to let any of their writers blog, on or off the job.
8. For now, blogs presuppose the existence of the print media. That will probably always be the case–but over time, the print media will become increasingly less important to the blogosphere.
9. Within a decade, blogs will replace op-ed pages.
10. Blogs will be to the 21st century what little magazines were to the 20th century. Their influence will be disproportionate to their circulation.
11. Blogs are what online magazines were supposed to be.
12. Art blogging will never be as popular as war blogging. More people care about politics than the arts.
13. Blogging is inherently undemocratic in one important way: it privileges literacy. Like e-mail, it is dividing the world into two unequal classes: people who feel comfortable expressing themselves through the written word and people who don’t.
14. If you want to be noticed, you have to blog every day.
15. An impersonal blog is a contradiction in terms.
Here’s the official statement by NFL Executive Vice President Joe Browne regarding the Super Bowl halftime show, at which Justin Timberlake bared Janet Jackson’s breast on live TV:
We were extremely disappointed by elements of the MTV-produced Halftime show. They were totally inconsistent with assurances our office was given about the show. It’s unlikely that MTV will produce another Super Bowl halftime.
And what, pray tell, were they expecting? No
I just got back from the Upper West Side studio (on Central Park West, no less) where I conversed on the air with Our Girl in Chicago, who was speaking from (no points for guessing) Chicago. We chatted with Edward Lifson of WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s public radio station, about the state of the arts in Chicago, taking a few calls from various art-loving types who had better things to do than watch the Super Bowl. We even managed to get in a plug for Chicago arts blogger Golden Rule Jones!
Needless to say, OGIC and I talk on the phone two or three times a week, but it felt very different to be talking to her from a radio studio halfway across the continent, hearing her voice over headphones. She confesses to having been a bit nervous, which hardly surprises me–I mean, I didn’t have to make my radio debut in front of a live microphone–but the whole thing ended up being great fun, and proved what I’ve always suspected, which is that my co-blogger has a radio voice as lovely as the rest of her.
I expect you’ll be hearing rather more from Our Girl and rather less from me this week–I’ve been blogging to excess and not writing nearly enough for money, aside from which I have to spend three or four nights in aisle seats between now and next Monday. I’ll poke my head in from time to time, but I’m sure she’ll keep you more than sufficiently amused.
New stuff in the right-hand column:
(1) A link to my February “Second City” column, just out in today’s Washington Post.
(2) Some fresh Top Fives.
Plus the previously announced remodeling of “Sites to See,” which has already acquired a few additional entries since last we spoke.
Check it all out.