Archives for April 2005

My posting on Rupert Murdoch’s recent speech about new media and its implications for artists is starting to attract attention. In addition to links from such media-oriented sites as unmediated.org,
Jeff Jarvis at BuzzMachine, and Jay Rosen at PressThink, I’ve also been getting some very interesting mail. One reader, a Hollywood agent, wrote:

Am sending as many of my agents and clients as I can to your posting today, “Memo from Cassandra.” I’ve been on the reinvention bandwagon with actors since 1995. In my trade the great lie is that once you are on the merry-go-round you are on it forever. Untrue! I’ve witnessed career after career dry up because of the actor’s fear, masked by smugness, of change. Uncle Rupert put this incredible culture shift entirely into perspective. Bob Garfield pointed out similiar changes in television that warrant complete reinvention of the medium in a groundbreaking Advertising Age article just last week.

Funny how it’s just as difficult to sell the “reinvention” concept in ’05 as it was in ’95, especially to actors. It’s odd too that the artists who portray characters that represent and sometimes even create cultural shifts wouldn’t know a cultural shift if they fell over it.

Thank you for this.

My pleasure (though perhaps that’s not quite the right way to put it!). I mean to keep writing about this, by the way….

I’m six thousand words into the first chapter of Hotter Than That: A Life of Louis Armstrong (I’ve already written the eight-thousand-word prologue), and I’m so pleased at how well it’s going that I’m almost afraid to admit it. Writing The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken was agony in slow motion–sort of like spending a decade skinning yourself with a butter knife–and I wrote All in the Dances: A Brief Life of George Balanchine so quickly that the pain didn’t have time to register until the book was in production. Not so Hotter Than That, which is coming very easily. Your response to the snippet I posted the other day has been wonderfully encouraging, though the truth is that I haven’t needed a whole lot of encouraging, at least not this week: I can hardly wait to sit down at my iBook each morning. I especially like a comment that Our Girl passed on from her father, who told her, “The beginning of Terry’s book reads like a novel.” Yes!

I know it won’t always go this well, if only because my reviewing schedule often prevents me from getting any work done on the book for a week or two at a time. For the moment, though, I’m still in the land of bliss, and with a little bit of luck I’ll have the first chapter finished by Monday, after which I plan to blow town for a couple of desperately needed days of untheatrical, computer-free down time at my favorite undisclosed location. (I called yesterday to make a reservation. The manager, bless her, asked, “Where’ve you been all winter?”)

As for today, I’m planning to write four or five pages of Hotter Than That, hit a couple of galleries and have dinner with a friend, then come straight home and knock out another couple of pages before crashing. Another thrilling night in the life of a cosmopolitan drama critic? Maybe not, but I’ve got the muse sitting on my shoulder, and I intend to make the most of her presence before she flies away.

Have a nice weekend.

“The one infallible symptom of greatness is the capacity for double vision. They know that all absolutes are heretical but that one can only act in a given circumstance by assuming one. Knowing themselves, they are skeptical about human nature but not despairing; they know that they are weak but not helpless: perfection is impossible but one can be or do better worse. They are unconventional but not bohemian; it never occurs to them to think in terms of convention. Conscious of achievement and vocation they are conscious of how little depends on their free will and how much they are vehicles for powers they can never fully understand but to which they can listen. Objective about themselves with the objectivity of the truly humble, they often shock the conceited out of their wits: e.g. Goethe’s remark ‘What do the Germans want? Have they not me?’ Knowing that the only suffering that can be avoided is the attempt to escape from suffering, they are funny and enjoy life.”

W.H. Auden, “The Double Focus: Sandburg’s Lincoln” (Common Sense, March 1940)

Take a look at the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column and you’ll notice some drastic changes, mostly inspired by the fact that our roster of artblogs had grown unmanageably long.

As an experiment:

– We’ve broken the first section of the blogroll, formerly known as Artblogs, into seven different categories: Litblogs, Randomblogs (i.e., blogs that roam unpredictably across the cultural map), Schoolblogs (i.e., art-oriented blogs with a specifically academic slant), Screenblogs, Sightblogs (i.e., blogs about the visual arts), Soundblogs, and Stageblogs (i.e., blogs about theater and dance). If “About Last Night” were part of our roll, it’d be a Randomblog.

– The second section of the blogroll now contains three kinds of art-oriented non-blog sites: Artists, Critics, and Art Links.

– The third section is devoted to Other Blogs (i.e., interesting blogs that occasionally touch on artistic matters but are primarily about something else).

– The fourth, media-oriented section contains three categories: Media/Gossip, Radio (i.e., art-oriented sites maintained by radio stations or specific radio programs), and Print (i.e., art-oriented sites maintained by magazines and newspapers).

– Last is a section of miscellaneous Useful Sites.

Recent additions to the blogroll are followed by an asterisk (*).

Once again, this is an experiment, and thus subject to extensive tinkering. No doubt some blogs belong in categories other than the ones in which they’re presently found, and we’ll move them there sooner or later. In addition, we’ll keep on adding promising-looking blogs and sites on a trial basis as we stumble across them. (Don’t hesitate to tell us about anything you’d like to see on our blogroll.)

Above all, our hope is that subdividing “Sites to See” into a larger number of categories will help you use it more effectively. Conversely, our fear is that organizing the artblogs by subject matter will cut down on the frequency with which you explore blogs that might be slightly off your beaten path. Remember that the whole point of “About Last Night” is to encourage cultural cross-pollination. Keep that in mind as you troll up and down our blogroll.

Let us know what you think. We want “Sites to See” to be useful to you–and we read our mail.

Happy hunting.

UPDATE: OGIC just had a brainstorm, as a result of which we’ve changed “Randomblogs” to “Omniblogs.” Much better.

No matter what you think of Rupert Murdoch, you need to read the speech he gave yesterday to the American Society of Newspaper Editors. Jeff Jarvis has posted a fileted version, plus a link to the full text. Some pertinent excerpts:

We need to realize that the next generation of people accessing news and information, whether from newspapers or any other source, have a different set of expectations about the kind of news they will get, including when and how they will get it, where they will get it from, and who they will get it from….

What is happening right before us is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don’t want to rely on the morning paper for their up-to-date information. They don’t want to rely on a God-like figure from above to tell them what’s important. And to carry the religion analogy a bit further, they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.

Instead, they want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle….

In the face of this revolution, however, we’ve been slow to react. We’ve sat by and watched while our newspapers have gradually lost circulation. Where four out of every five Americans in 1964 read a paper every day, today, only half do. Among just younger readers, the numbers are even worse, as I’ve just shown….

There are a number of reasons for our inertness in the face of this advance. First, for centuries, newspapers as a medium enjoyed a virtual information monopoly

I’m in New York, writing about Louis Armstrong. OGIC is in Chicago, hacking away at a short stack of deadlines. If it’s fresh postings you want, go to the right-hand column, scroll down to “Sites to See,” and start clicking. If you can’t find something you like there, you don’t like enough stuff.

Later.

I had dinner earlier this evening with my friend and neighbor Paul Moravec, a composer whose music is mentioned not infrequently in this space. Something you may not know about Paul (other than that he does a terrific impersonation of John Lennon) is that he has a long history of clinical depression, by which I don’t mean occasional periods of moderate melancholy. As he explained in an interview earlier this year with the San Francisco Chronicle, he has “been suicidal, hospitalized twice for clinical depression and, 10 years ago, was treated with electroshock therapy.”

Fortunately, Paul not only survived but prevailed, and even managed to compose a remarkable piece of music, Mood Swings, that was directly inspired by his illness. Since winning the Pulitzer Prize last year, he’s started talking publicly about his successful struggle, and he mentioned at dinner that he’s been struck by the number of people who got in touch with him after reading his San Francisco Chronicle interview in order to tell him of their own experiences with depression. Unlikely as it may seem, many Americans continue to shy away from frank talk about mental illness, and Paul’s correspondents have been going out of their way to praise him for his candor.

Paul said something else that stuck in my mind. He told me that he was troubled by the fact that the word “depression” has come to be used more or less interchangeably to describe both persistent sadness and a form of mental illness so virulent as to be life-threatening. “What we need,” he added, “is a different word for clinical depression–a new word. One that has the same emotional impact as, say, leukemia.”

Deliberate attempts to alter established linguistic usage rarely get anywhere. As every blogger knows, newly coined words must be organically absorbed into the language by way of everyday usage. Some words, like blog itself, catch on quickly because of their simplicity and self-evident utility, whereas too-clever coinages like bleg remain on the fringes of common usage and in time are dropped and forgotten. Still, I think Paul has a point. Clinical depression really is a thing unto itself, qualitatively different from the milder mood disorders that are so frequently lumped together with it. Perhaps we do need a better word for clinical depression, something that more clearly suggests its devastating, incapacitating intensity.

Alas, I have no brilliant ideas, nor am I announcing a word-coining contest. Successful new words are not created by smart people sitting around a cybertable tossing out ideas. On the other hand, the Web is a never-ending demonstration of what has come to be known as the butterfly effect. As Edward Lorenz wrote in the 1963 paper in which he coined the phrase, “One meteorologist remarked that if the theory were correct, one flap of a seagull’s wings would be enough to alter the course of the weather forever.” Perhaps someday we’ll all be using an indelibly vivid word for clinical depression whose coinage can be traced back step by step to this posting, a not quite offhand flap of the wings of an interested party who just happened to have a blog….

“I have yet to meet a poetry-lover who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if, as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization, the collective values of which are so infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his phantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life. At the time however his adolescence is unpleasant enough. Unable to imagine a society in which he would feel at home, and warned by some mysterious instinct from running back for consolation to the gracious or terrifying figures of childhood, he turns away from the human to the non-human: homesick he will seek, not his mother, but mountains or autumn woods, friendless he will mutely observe the least shy of the wild animals, and the growing life within him will express itself in a devotion to music and thoughts upon mutability and death. Art for him will be something infinitely precious, pessimistic, and hostile to life. If it speaks of love, it must be love frustrated, for all success seems to him noisy and vulgar; if it moralizes, it must counsel a stoic resignation, for the world he knows is well content with itself and will not change.”

W.H. Auden, “A Literary Transference” (Southern Review, Summer 1940)