Archives for 2004

Like Greg Sandow, I urge you to read Alex Ross’ New Yorker essay about classical music:

The Web site ArtsJournal features a media file with the deliberately ridiculous name Death of Classical Music Archive, whose articles recycle a familiar litany of problems: record companies are curtailing their classical divisions; orchestras are facing deficits; the music is barely taught in public schools, almost invisible on television, ignored or mocked by Hollywood. But the same story could have been written ten years ago or twenty. If this be death, the record is skipping. A complete version of the Death of Classical Music Archive would go back to the fourteenth century, when the sensuous melodies of ars nova were thought to signal the end of civilization.

The classical audience is assumed to be a moribund crowd of the old, the white, the rich, and the bored. Statistics provided by the National Endowment for the Arts suggest that the situation is not quite so dire. Yes, the audience is older than that for any other art–the median age is forty-nine–but it is not the wealthiest. Musicals, plays, ballet, and museums all get larger slices of the $50,000-or-more income pie (as does the ESPN channel, for that matter). If you want to see an in-your-face, Swiss-bank-account display of wealth, go look at the millionaires sitting in the skyboxes at a Billy Joel show, if security lets you. Nor is the classical audience aging any faster than the rest of America. The music may not be a juggernaut, but it is a major world. American orchestras sell around thirty million tickets each year. Brilliant new talents are thronging the scene; the musicians of the august Berlin Philharmonic are, on average, a generation younger than the Rolling Stones.

The music is always dying, ever-ending. It is an ageless diva on a non-stop farewell tour, coming around for one absolutely final appearance. It is hard to name because it never really existed to begin with–not in the sense that it stemmed from a single time or place. It has no genealogy, no ethnicity: leading composers of today hail from China, Estonia, Argentina, Queens. The music is simply whatever composers create–a long string of written-down works to which various performing traditions have become attached. It encompasses the high, the low, empire, underground, dance, prayer, silence, noise. Composers are genius parasites; they feed voraciously on the song matter of their time in order to engender something new. They have gone through a rough stretch in the past hundred years, facing external obstacles (Hitler and Stalin were amateur music critics) as well as problems of their own invention (“Why doesn’t anyone like our beautiful twelve-tone music?”). But they may be on the verge of an improbable renaissance, and the music may take a form that no one today would recognize. For now, it is like the “sunken cathedral” that Debussy depicts in one of his Preludes–a city that chants beneath the waves….

Read the whole thing here. Now.

I don’t have time to write about it at present, and probably won’t for a few days to come, but I intend to do so as soon as I can. In the meantime, please take a look at what Alex has to say.

The Oscars have lost 22 million viewers since 1998. So what are the show’s producers going to do about it? The Wall Street Journal (no link) reveals the brilliant plan:

– “ABC has asked writers on its prime-time series to weave the Oscars into their story lines. In an episode of ‘It’s All Relative,’ for example, one character will get mad at another who breaks the remote control, spoiling plans to watch the Oscars.”

– “In addition, characters on three ABC daytime soaps–‘General Hospital,’ ‘One Life to Live’ and ‘All My Children’–will talk about the awards show, saying they plan to watch the Sunday telecast or attend an Oscar party. They will stop short of saying they are watching on ABC because the network figured that was obvious.”

– “For the ceremony itself, [producer Joe] Roth says he is building the Oscars as a comedy show, employing an army of writers to churn out one liners.”

– “And he is promising an appearance by Best Actor nominee Sean Penn, a no-show at the Globes.”

– “Marketing the show under the slogan ‘Expect the Unexpected,’ Mr. Roth says he hopes to foster the kind of spontaneity exhibited last year, when Best Actor winner Adrien Brody passionately embraced presenter Halle Berry on stage. But that ‘Unexpected’ slogan may be slightly misleading….Following the controversy over Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime stunt, ABC has imposed a five-second delay on the telecast, meaning it will review comments and images before they are broadcast and could censor them” (emphasis added).

Would somebody come over here and break my remote, please? I don’t think I’ll be able to stand the suspense.

Bookslut didn’t like what I had to say over the weekend about link-poaching. That’s putting it mildly. Too bad, but you should read what she has to say, too.

Oh, and Jessa…thanks for the link.

UPDATE: Our Site Meter is jumping! In the blogosphere, at any rate, there is no bad publicity. (And with reference to this posting, I should certainly add that I didn’t have any of my fellow artsjournal.com bloggers in mind, as I suspect is now abundantly clear.)

An American blogging from Sweden at MemeFirst
writes:

Yet another belated New Yorker, delivered to Sweden on donkeyback, I’m sure it was, and yet again I couldn’t shake the feeling this institution is going through a spate of mediocre issues: A 34-year old student collects lost gloves on the Upper West Side? The diary of a neurotic webstalker with a boring target? A Shouts & Murmurs that is spectacularly unfunny in its exploration of “Instructions to everything”?

These stories wouldn’t make it into the blogs I read, I thought. Wow. Maybe it’s not that The New Yorker is getting much worse, but that New York blogs are getting much better. Eurotrash
is far funnier than Shouts and Murmurs; Gothamist
and Gawker
are better at trendspotting than Talk of the Town; Maud Newton‘s got her finger on the literary world’s pulse like none other; Felix, Terry Teachout
and Michael at 2 Blowhards
have got the New York arts scene covered — to name just a very few of the stars in the New York blog firmament. The New Yorker still holds the crown for long articles and fiction, but for much longer?

Can New York bloggers please all just stand back for a minute, look at what you have wrought, and pat yourselves collectively on the back? This has got to be New York’s most impressive literary renaissance since the Beat writers, and the snarkiest since the Algonquin Round Table held sway (and begat The New Yorker). Have there ever been so many New Yorkers writing as well as today, within a community that approaches a meritocracy?

For expat New Yorkers everywhere, you are a godsend. I kiss you.

Well, shucks. Glad to be of service. You can save the kiss for Our Girl, though….

Says James Tata:

I recently talked to an avid reader, a woman in her fifties who, to my alarm, said that for years she simply refused to read any book written by a man, especially fiction told from the point of view of female characters. A few months ago I tried reading Susanna Moore’s In the Cut and gave up halfway through because of the book’s relentless misandry, but I couldn’t imagine refusing to read books written by women. Where would I be as a reader without having read Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Alice Munro, Virginia Woolf, Susan Cheever, Amy Bloom, Marilynne Robinson, Louise Erdrich, Cynthia Ozick, Flannery O’Connor…on and on and on? As for writers depicting characters of the other sex, have there ever been any male characters better drawn than Middlemarch‘s Lydgate, Casaubon, Ladislaw, Vincy? If writers are forced by political considerations to write only from their own narrow experience, we as readers will be left with having to choose from among solipsistic memoirs–in fact, the very books I continue to see more and more of on the new books tables of the chain stores….

Read the whole thing here.

I go to a lot of performances of every kind, and since my job as drama critic of The Wall Street Journal obliges me to cover all Broadway openings, I don’t spend nearly enough time wandering off the beaten path. I wish I did. Especially when it comes to theater, New York is full of good things that don’t get enough attention, and I’m always happy whenever I have a chance to see one of them. Fortunately, I have theatrical friends who keep me informed about such shows, and one of them steered me last Friday to a production of As You Like It that took place in deepest Queens–Astoria, to be exact, a neighborhood richly populated with Greek restaurants.

The play was produced by the Astoria Performing Arts Center, which obviously doesn’t have any money, since it was staged in the round on the floor of a basketball court in a church gymnasium. The audience was small, the set nonexistent, the dress modern, the d

“I do not know if others are like myself, but I am conscious that I cannot contemplate beauty long. For me no poet made a falser statement than Keats when he wrote the first line of ‘Endymion.’ When the thing of beauty has given me the magic of its sensation my mind quickly wanders; I listen with incredulity to the persons who tell me that they can look with rapture for hours at a view or a picture. Beauty is an ecstasy; it is as simple as hunger. There is really nothing to be said about it. It is like the perfume of a rose: you can smell it and that is all: that is why the criticism of art, except in so far as it is unconcerned with beauty and therefore with art, is tiresome. All the critic can tell you with regard to Titian’s Entombment of Christ, perhaps of all the pictures in the world that which has most pure beauty, is to go and look at it. What else he has to say is history, or biography, or what not. But people add other qualities to beauty–sublimity, human interest, tenderness, love–because beauty does not long content them. Beauty is perfect, and perfection (such is human nature) holds our attention but a little while. The mathematician who after seeing Ph

…is the impending arrival of the first finished copies of A Terry Teachout Reader, which will be arriving in my mailbox later this week. No, it doesn’t go on sale until May, but you can place an advance order for your very own copy by clicking here.