Archives for June 2005

I’m off again, this time to the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, where I’ll be seeing five plays in three days and (presumably) eating some grits. Our Girl will post the daily almanac and my regular Friday-morning drama-column teaser by remote control from her top-secret headquarters in Chicago, but otherwise I’ll be incommunicado until Monday. Any additional postings that materialize between now and then are strictly her doing.

Have a nice weekend!

I was taking a much-needed nap yesterday afternoon and missed an important milestone in the history of “About Last Night”: we received our one millionth page view since going live on July 14, 2003.

To all of you who’ve visited us in the past two years, many thanks. The pleasure is ours.

Well, I did it: I bought another piece of art, a 1965 hard ground etching and drypoint by Richard Diebenkorn. You can see it by going here, and you can find out more about Diebenkorn here.

Please don’t tease me too much! I’ve loved Diebenkorn’s work for years, and I never thought I’d be able to afford a prize specimen like this one (his “Ocean Park” color lithographs and aquatints are already way over my financial head, alas). Then I ran across #32 last week on the Web site of a Seattle gallery and struck a mutually satisfactory deal with the very nice owner. Now it’s en route to the Teachout Museum, where it will be well and truly cherished.

I know, I know, where am I going to hang the damn thing? Er, ask me later–I’ll figure something out. I guess that makes me a real art collector, huh?

If you follow media news at all closely, you’ve read about the Los Angeles Times editorial page’s abortive experiment with creating wikitorials. I knew it was doomed from the start, as did everyone who knows anything about how new media work, and I’d planned to post something about it at some point. Now Jeff Jarvis has done it for me.

Here’s the gist:

Here is the Times’ worst mistake and its most predictable: They think everything is about them. I’ve sat in meetings with newspaper editors who earnestly think that the best use of internet interactivity is to let the people talk about what they have written, to discuss them, to keep them in the spotlight they built for themselves. There is no bigger institutional ego than a newspaper’s. Presidents and popes get humbled more often than editors. Well, at least they used to.

No, guys, the best use of a wiki would have been to have the public create wikis to share their knowledge and viewpoints with you. I don’t know what the big issues are in LA, but here in New York, it might work better just to open the gates to watch people create pro and con wikis on the Olympics and a new Manhattan stadium and 10 ways to improve the schools….

But even that is an exhibition of media ego. For the truth is, if people wanted to do that, they could go to any number of places and do it on their own. They don’t need newspapers to give them technology. And they certainly do not need newspapers to tell them what to talk about.

If newspapers would just listen–and use this technology to do that–they’d find that the people don’t want to talk about what the editors talk about. And they certainly don’t want to talk about the editors.

Let’s take it up a notch:

What this really points toward is the death of the editorial page. Why the hell do we need editorials anymore? In their day, they were the voice–the bully pulpit, as Rupert Murdoch says–of one person: the publisher, the guy who had the ultimate conch, the printing press. We, the people, never said we gave a damn what he thought, but we had no choice but to listen. And so over the years, he convinced himself that we cared. What if we don’t?

The truth is that an editorial is just another blog post written by one person witih one viewpoint. Here’s a case where you can’t argue that it makes a difference having a journalism degree and a newsroom. Editorialists and columnists get to read the same stuff we do and they put on their pants and opinions just the way we do. So why should they have rights to the mountaintop? Who died and made them Moses? Let the people speak….

I couldn’t agree more, nor could I have put it better–and I spent several years writing editorials for a major metropolitan newspaper, the New York Daily News. It was a great job and I’m glad I did it, but those days are soooo over.

If you haven’t looked at my Commentary essay on artblogging, let me point you to this paragraph:

When newspapers do become obsolete–which will happen sooner rather than later–it will be because their functions have been taken over by a variety of web-based media that can do them better. (Blogs, for example, are already superseding op-ed pages.) A few existing papers will rise to the challenge and transform themselves into online publications, reconceived in such a way as to take advantage of the unique properties of the web. Most, however, will not, since established institutions rarely if ever transform themselves, least of all in response to external threats to their survival. Instead, they are replaced by new institutions that spring up in response to those same threats, seeing them as opportunities for long-overdue change.

The Times just made my point for me–unintentionally.

– A fact checker for Vanity Fair sent me the following e-mail yesterday:

I can’t get a line on this quote by H.L. Mencken, if indeed that’s what it is. In referring to Dixie, Mencken apparently said it was “the hook-worm and incest belt of Anglo-Saxondom.” Have you heard this? If not, do you have any suggestions on where next I should look?

As I mentioned last month, I’ve been getting queries like this ever since The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken was published. The funny thing is that the quotes in question always turn out to be phony, usually obviously so. This one looked phony, too, but it did have a slightly cracked ring of plausibility, as if it were an imperfectly remembered version of something Mencken had really said. What made me suspicious was that Mencken’s verbal humor usually arises from elegant variation: I had no trouble imagining his having coined the phrase “hook-worm belt,” but I couldn’t see him settling for so commonplace a word as incest. (His preferred euphemism for homosexuality, for instance, was “non-Euclidean sex.”)

I rolled up my sleeves and started Googling, and within a matter of seconds I’d found the answer, courtesy of Michael D. Goldhaber, a religion columnist for the Dallas Morning News:

The first use of “belt” to describe a region, identified by the Oxford English Dictionary, was by the poet Robert Southey in 1810: “A level belt of ice which bound…the waters of the sleeping Ocean round.” By Mencken’s time, the phrases Cotton Belt and Corn Belt were so widely spoken on this side of the Atlantic that he thought the locution was American.

“I began experimenting with various Belts in 1924 or thereabout,” Mencken later wrote, “the Hookworm Belt, the Hog-and-Hominy Belt, the Total Immersion Belt, and so on.” Also the “Mail-order Belt.” “Finally,” Mencken continued, “I settled on the Bible Belt.”

Of course I knew he’d coined the phrase “Bible Belt,” but I didn’t know that “Hookworm Belt” had been an earlier version of that indelible expression. And incest, as I’d suspected, had nothing to do with it.

Once a scholar, always a scholar….

– A reader writes:

On a topic related to a music recommendation you made to me, I bought Jim Hall and Ron Carter’s Alone Together some time ago. It is as good as you said. Hall’s lines are beautiful, flowing, yet genuinely inventive and surprising. However, the only reason I know that is that I sat myself down in a dark room and really listened carefully. I don’t know what it is with me, but unless I concentrate, jazz guitar seems to reach into my brain and trip the “no critical thinking allowed” switch. I took a car trip the other day–pleasant country driving, usually ideal for listening carefully to music. I had on a mix of Hall, Grant Green, Kenny Burrell. Beautiful music, nice drive, no distractions. But I went for long stretches with no awareness of who was playing, no memory of what the songs were. Wouldn’t happen to me with piano or sax players. With guitar it’s just pure pleasure, non-cognitive. Don’t understand it, really.

I’m fascinated by this problem, though I’m not entirely sure it is a problem. (What’s wrong with pure pleasure?) Nevertheless, I thought it interesting enough to pass on to all of you out there in the ‘sphere for further reflection.

By the way, Alone Together is one of the most beautiful records ever made. If you’ve never heard it, go here (or download it from iMusic). You won’t be even slightly sorry.

“The hushed distillation of a Keaton silent draws you in in singular ways. I will never forget, after having seen each of his independent films over and over, the disconcerting thrill of hearing Buster talk. It was a 1937 short. He entered a room whistling; then he spoke. His voice scratched my ears. It was deeper, huskier–not at all the voice I had heard in my head, which, I realized, was modeled (in a cheerfully narcissistic way) after my own internal monologue. But that’s the point, the solipsistic strength of silence–something takes place inside: we cast ourselves into the film, we make it ours. And as is often pointed out, that interior work is half the fun. Think of the 500 brides thundering after Keaton at the end of Seven Chances. As the poet Charles Simic put it, ‘All of us who saw the movie can still hear the sound of their feet.'”

Edward McPherson, Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat

I had to file my Wall Street Journal drama column a day earlier than usual, and as a result I find I’m plumb tuckered and all written out. Sorry! I’ll post more (and more originally) if and when inspiration strikes, but don’t be surprised if I stand mute until Wednesday or Thursday. And yes, I know, I always end up posting three times as much as usual whenever I announce that I’m not planning to write anything, but this time I think I might mean it, maybe….

A few choice tidbits gleaned from the blogosphere:

– Mr. Alicublog rides my hobbyhorse, even though he mounts it from the other side:

The thing that makes a piece of work worthwhile is the mystery, but that doesn’t mean an inspired fauve who doesn’t know what he’s doing can put it over without skills. (Usually.) The talented, trained people who get that thing on the stage or the page or the screen must be good with their tools, but they must also be working to realize the mystery, whether they would think to say so or, as with some hard-bitten old magicians, would rather portray themselves as clock-punchers trying to keep up their pay grade. You see the total absorption of great craftsmen at work: is it all for the money, do you think? Anyone who has worked on a production of any kind knows what it feels like when magic is being made–or failing to be made. Audiences know it too….

This is where ideologically-minded critics go wrong. They aren’t at all interested in the mystery. When I read their poli-sci reviews, I can see that they’re trying to assess the impact of the work in question–as if it were a social program or an economic stimulus package–on something they are pleased to call The Culture. In that sense, their work is indeed technical, and they often know their own grim metrics very well. But it has nothing to do with humility, or mystery, or art.

What he said.

– My favorite blogger-of-the-moment, Ms. in the wings, has posted “seventeen ways of looking for the beautiful.” Here are three:

1. As evident in the clean lines of modernist design or Renaissance counterpoint, I prefer the simple and austere to over-populated, messy masses.

2. Complexity is most intriguing when it juxtaposes the simple.

3. I prefer solving mysteries to being lectured by the head detective….

– Ms. Household Opera tries her hand at the I-am-ridiculous game:

George Herbert perhaps no, John Donne yes

John Milton no, Andrew Marvell yes

John Dryden no, Aphra Behn yes

Alexander Pope yes, Jonathan Swift very definitely yes

William Wordsworth no, Lord Byron yes….

Correct on all counts, I’d say.

– Lileks and I are watching the same early-morning TV shows:

Last night on “What’s My Line,” the guest was a young man who signed in as “Tom Eagleton.” Could it be? It was. His line was “District Attorney for St. Louis,” and he was 27. (The episode aired in 1957, I think.) Right from the Jack Webb line of lawmen, too–square head, flat hair, G-man stare, thin tie, a smile that was rare but genuine. He was followed by Mamie Van Doren, a breathy va-va-va-voomer who performed the odd facial alphabet of the 50s sex siren–the moue, the wink, the coquettish smile, the wide eyes, the teasing glance. And she ran through the sequence again and again, a performance completely disconnected from the questions. It was like watching a prototype Sexbot stuck in an programming loop. She really was from another era–a time when the sex stars had hips like oven doors, hair the color of astronaut suits, brains the size of ant thoraxes, and a life of giddy leisure that revolved around small, portable dogs, beefy Pepsodent morons, pink convertibles, and the purchase of ceramic cat statuary with long necks. A bratwurst to Paris Hilton’s Slim Jim….

– Mr. Something Old, Nothing New and I have the same favorite recording of Carmen.

– Finally, I’ll be blogrolling this shortly, but you need to read it now if you write a blog or are thinking of starting one. No exceptions. Now.