I appeared Wednesday afternoon on Soundcheck, John Schaefer’s daily radio show about the arts in New York City. We chatted about the Teachout Reader, middlebrow culture, and the first anniversary of “About Last Night.” Alas, it slipped my mind that the show airs live each day on WNYC (it’s a good thing I got there early!), and so I forgot to post about it in advance of airtime.

If you’re curious, the program has already been archived, and you can listen to it by going here.

(The WNYC Web site, incidentally, describes me as a “serial blogger.” Stop me before I post again!)

You’d be surprised–or maybe not–by who reads “About Last Night.” Bob Brookmeyer, the composer and jazz trombonist about whom I’ve blogged on several occasions, wrote the other day to comment on my approving link to a posting in which artsjournal.com blogger Kyle Gann declared that “the entire body of serialist music produced nothing that will ever mean much to anyone beyond composers and new-musicians interested in its technical aspects.”

Says Brookmeyer:

2 cases in point put a dent in the “beyond my ken” reaction — Berg’s Violin Concerto (one of the most moving pieces I have ever heard) and Webern’s Symphony Op. 21, which I — at age 20 — declared “the only perfect music I have ever heard” — both of these date back to 1950, for me, and time has only increased my love and wonder at the beauty and clarity “organization” can bring to bear. Berg, who was always regarded as the connection to the past, was one of the most organized composers in history, yet much of his music sounds almost improvised. SOMETIMES the means justify the ends. Much the same, for me, with electronic music. It all depends on the composer.

I agree, at least in principle (though not about the Webern Symphony, which has never made sense to me except when used as a ballet score by George Balanchine). The Berg Violin Concerto, for instance, also strikes me as profoundly moving. It is, however, a very special case, a piece of serial music based on a tone row whose interlocking major and minor triads are manipulated by Berg to create quasi-tonal effects. I think its appeal is essentially theatrical, by which I mean it’s not so much pure music as a piece of “representational” art in which Berg uses the tension between tonality and atonality to portray an extra-musical emotional state. (He does the same thing in Wozzeck, though the fact that Wozzeck is an opera makes it more obvious.) That doesn’t mean the concerto isn’t beautiful, though. Brookmeyer is right: like every other variety of art, music is an essentially empirical operation to which theory is ultimately irrelevant. What works, works. The fact that most atonal music doesn’t work says something relevant about the fundamental problems of atonality–but that doesn’t make it impossible for a genius to compose a piece of atonal music that does. In art, all definitions are slippery, which is one of the things that makes it so miraculous.

(If you’ve never heard the Berg Violin Concerto, by the way, I’m especially fond of this recording.)

Another reader of “About Last Night,” Toni Bentley, rose to the bait I offered in a recent posting in which I announced that I’d finally bowed to her wishes and watched The Red Shoes. Not only was Toni delighted that I liked it so much, but she sent me a speech she gave at a recent West Coast screening of Michael Powell’s 1948 film.

Here’s part of what she said:

On a more personal note I would like to comment as a former classical ballet dancer on the depiction of the dance world as portrayed in this film as demanding, difficult, and frequently physically painful–all of which is accurate. What is perhaps even more revolutionary now than in 1948 is that this film, while not denying the hardships and sacrifices, actually extols them as the worthwhile price of achieving great art. The dance world continues today to receive criticism as being a profession that demands too much of its young aspirants for a career that is brief, badly paid, elitist, undemocratic, and can be abruptly ended with an injury in the blink of an eye. I cannot in all honesty tell you that any of these complaints are not true. But more often than not these are the complaints of those who don’t actually dance, but those who observe–and, perhaps, covet the stage. What I can say, from the other side of the footlights, is that the reward of achieving some measure of transcendent beauty for those of us who pursued it, and for our appreciative audiences, was worth every bloody toe and every drop of sweat. And besides, democracy has never had much to do with making great art.

The movie that you are about to see is that rare work that argues that art is not only important but possibly the most important thing in life. “The Red Shoes,” wrote Michael Powell in his autobiography, “is an insolent, haunting picture the way it takes for granted that nothing matters but art, and that art is something worth dying for.” Ballet, in its deft defiance of gravity itself, is the ultimate metaphor for this transcendence of our wretched mortality. In our time of much meaningless death and much bad and boring art, The Red Shoes, 56 years after its premiere, feels like a breath of fresh air–and a call to arms–for Dedication, Beauty and Passion of the kind that helps the rest of us find meaning in something that surpasses our mere mortal selves.

I couldn’t have put it better.

Between “About Last Night”‘s first anniversary
and my nomination
to the National Council on the Arts, our mailbox is bulging. Here are some e-letters that caught my eye:

– “Congratulations on your first anniversary as a blogger. I’ve more or
less been reading you from the beginning–I don’t think I caught on
right away, but once I figured out what you were up to, I went back
and caught up with the first two or three weeks I’d missed. I was interested to see that you’d spent a happy afternoon scrolling
through your About Last Night archives, not long after your post
about not keeping keepsakes, and tossing out most of your old print
clips. Is a dust-free, spatially invisible archive somehow different
for you from a drawer full of yellowed clippings? Personally, if my
scribblings are available online, I don’t bother with a printout, yet
I do still maintain a drawer of my older magazine articles and
increasingly brittle newspaper cuttings–just in case I need them for
quick reference, of course.”

Well, “About Last Night” archives itself automatically with no additional effort from me! As for the old newspaper clippings, I feel considerably lighter for having consigned them to the recycling bin–but check back with me once I finish transferring my entire CD library to my iBook, which at this rate should happen early in the 22nd century….

– “My heartfelt congratulations on your first anniversary in the
blogosphere. Hope you have many more. By the time I discovered your blog some about eight months ago, I had
been a long-time reader of your essays in Commentary. It was your piece
on David Helfgott — you were, I believe, the only critic not to have
been fooled by that spectacle and to have had the courage to say so —
that made me a permanent devotee. If your blog could have a sub-title, I would suggest:

What happened to Brie and Chablis?

Both Brie and Chablis used to be

The sort of thing everyone ate

When goat cheese and Napa Merlot

Weren’t purchased by those in the know,

And monkfish was thought of as bait.

And why did authorities ban

From restaurants all coq au vin?

And then disappeared sole meuni

“About Last Night,” the first artsjournal.com blog to go live, made its debut a year ago today. Go here to read what I posted on July 14, 2003.

I was, so far as I know, the first widely read print-media critic to launch a daily blog about the arts, and my single-handed assault on the blogosphere didn’t exactly trigger an avalanche of imitators (though the artsjournal.com blogroster now contains a number of other familiar faces, and Alex Ross of The New Yorker, much to my delight, recently started a blog of his own). Instead, something far more interesting and significant happened: the blogosphere invaded the print media. Several of the artbloggers listed in the “Sites to See” module of the right-hand column, many of whom started blogging before I did and most of whom were unknown before they started blogging, now write for newspapers and magazines. Yet they continue to blog as well. Why? Because blogging, which operates according to its own homegrown rules, has evolved into a brand-new style of journalism indigenous to the Web, one whose exciting blend of immediacy and informality has its own unique appeal to readers–and writers. I know I’m hooked.

A theologian I know once told me that technology is not merely neutral, but a positive good. I’m no Luddite, but I had trouble getting his point. Now, after a year of blogging, I understand it completely. Blogs are the 21st-century counterpart of the periodical essays of the eighteenth century, the Spectators and Ramblers and Idlers that supplied familiar essayists with what was then the ideal vehicle for their intensely personal reflections. Blogging stands in the sharpest possible contrast to the corporate journalism that exerted so powerful an effect on writing in the twentieth century. Instead of the homogenized semi-anonymity of a mass-circulation magazine, it offers writers the opportunity to practice the old-fashioned art of individual journalism, self-published, unmediated, and interactive. That’s a good example of what my theologian friend meant: the highest purpose of the Internet, a seemingly impersonal piece of postmodern technology, has turned out to be its unique ability to bring creatures of flesh and blood closer together.

I started “About Last Night” because I’d come to believe that the print media were losing interest in the fine arts. I suspected that serious arts journalism was destined to migrate to the Web, which is the perfect medium for cultural niche marketing, and it struck me that as an arts journalist, I might therefore do well to investigate its possibilities. At the same time, I never meant for this blog to be devoted to high art alone. Of the hundreds of thousands of words I’ve posted here to date, I think these might be the most important:

I don’t think The Long Goodbye is as good a book as The Great Gatsby, and I believe the difference between the two books is hugely important. But I also don’t think it’s absurd to compare them, and I probably re-read one as often as the other.

The point is that I accept the existence of hierarchies of quality without feeling oppressed by them. I have plenty of room in my life for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Chandler, for Aaron Copland and Louis Armstrong, for George Balanchine and Fred Astaire, and I love them all without confusing their relative merits, much less jumping to the conclusion that all merits are relative.

In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s part of what this blog is all about–a big part.

It sure is, and it still is.

To all of you who read “About Last Night” regularly, I want to express my deepest gratitude for your support. You are why I write this blog.

As for Our Girl in Chicago, who became my co-blogger last fall, I can’t say enough good things about her. “About Last Night” is a better blog–and infinitely more fun to write–because of her “additional dialogue.”

And to the other bloggers out there in the ‘sphere who have befriended and advised me, thanks for being so patient with a terminally unhip boomer who decided to get crazy and plunge head first into your brave new world. You’re teaching me a lot, every day.

Much else has happened to me in the year just past. I published a book, wrote another one, and had a third come out in paperback. The Teachout Museum, which started out as a couple of prints on my wall, became a serious and passionate pursuit, so much so that I’ll be giving a lecture about it next March at my favorite museum, the Phillips Collection (watch this space for details). I visited a Maine island, rode a roller coaster for the first time, consumed an enormous amount of art, and was investigated by the FBI. But of all the things I did, I suspect that starting this blog will prove in the not-so-long run to have been the most consequential. I’ve been present at the creation (well, almost) of a totally new journalistic medium, the first one to come along since the invention of TV, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

So I’ll close by thanking Doug McLennan, the mastermind of artsjournal.com, who called me up out of the blue one afternoon and said, “How’d you like to write a blog for me?” Three weeks later–one year ago today–“About Last Night” was born. Since then, it’s racked up more than 430,000 page views and is now being read in thirteen time zones around the world. That’s a start.

Blogging is a fugitive medium, which is at once its charm and its flaw. I’ve spun some of what I’ve written for “About Last Night” into print-media pieces (and vice versa), but most of it has disappeared into the ether. On the other hand, everything posted on this blog is electronically archived, and I recently spent a sunny afternoon trolling through my postings of the past year. Here are some that caught my eye:

– “In the words of one of the gazillion e-mails I’ve received since opening for business on Monday, ‘Do you realize that once you start blogging, you cease to have a life?’ That’s what a new blogger likes to hear at 1:18 in the morning as he wonders whether he remembered to put in all the serial commas.” (Alias terryteachout.com, July 16, 2003.)

– “I’ve come to feel that as a rule, the thing I do best is point people in the direction of that which and those whom I love. Let somebody else ice Piss Christ–I’d rather spend my remaining hours on earth telling you how beautiful The Open Window is, especially if you’ve never seen it before. In the long run, silence may be the most powerful form of negative criticism.” (Let’s drop the big one (and see what happens), August 6.)

– “If we think a house or painting or photograph or ballet is beautiful, we want it with us always. But the catch is that the more pieces of the past we succeed in preserving, the less space and time we have in which to display and contemplate the present. Too many lovers of art live exclusively in the past. I understand the temptation–I feel it myself–but it strikes me that we have an obligation to keep one eye fixed in the moment, and that becomes a lot harder to do when you’re pulling a long, long train of classics of which the new is merely the caboose. Needless to say, this is a problem without a solution. The only thing you can do is fiddle with the proportions and try to get them right, or at least righter.” (Going, going, September 25.)

– “Somebody (me, I guess) ought to write an essay about how jazz has come to be used as a cultural signifier in films, TV shows, and ads, an infallible indicator of upper-middle-class hipness. That’s part of the reason why a pathbreaking musical statement has become so ubiquitous–but not the biggest part. Kind of Blue, lest we forget, was always popular. It was a hit in 1959, too. Why? Because for all its undeniable radicalism, Kind of Blue is also accessible and memorable. You don’t have to know what modal improvisation is to revel in its spare, lucid textures. You don’t even have to know who Miles, Trane, Cannonball, and Bill Evans were. Yes, they’re doing astounding things–but they don’t hit you over the head with their innovations, or try to tie your ears in knots. The results are simple, beautiful, and new, and the last of these is not the first.” (Kind of omnipresent, October 21.)

– “Above all, blogging is fun. And that’s one thing I don’t get from Jennifer Howard’s eat-your-spinach account of life in the blogosphere: a sense of how much fun we’re all having out here.

Good times and bum times,

I’ve seen them all and, my dear,

I’m still here.

Plush velvet sometimes,

Sometimes just pretzels and beer,

But I’m here.

I’ve run the gamut,

A to Z.

Three cheers and dammit,

C’est la vie.

I got through all of last year

And I’m here.

Lord knows, at least I’ve been there,

And I’m here!

Look who’s here!

I’m still here!

Stephen Sondheim, “I’m Still Here” (from Follies)

But bear with me. The anniversary of About Last Night sneaked up on me. Most days, I would probably give a little start if you reminded me we weren’t always thus. I wasn’t here at the beginning, but I was loitering just behind the scenes, interested as hell but still occupying some sort of limbo between ardent blog reader and bona fide blogger (my personal anniversary, not counting guest blogging, comes in October). As Terry says below and Sarah echoes here, the last year has been an explosive one for culture blogging. It’s hard to imagine that when Terry started this site, I didn’t yet know about TMFTML, Maud, Cup of Chicha, or Old Hag. And Elegant Variation, Pullquote, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, Return of the Reluctant–essential daily reads that seem like permanent fixtures–didn’t exist. Golden Rule Jones was primarily a listings site. The cabal was not incorporated, not yet a splinter under Jennifer Howard’s skin. And the fact that I can’t remember the first time I noticed half these blogs is, I think, testament to the excellent openness of this world.

This landscape changes fast. About Last Night has itself undergone some semi-dramatic reinvention during the year of its existence. The two major changes: moving from a fixed daily posting to a looser, rolling schedule; and adding, ahem, a co-blogger. In retrospect, both of these seem natural if not inevitable developments, reflecting perhaps the two great distinguishing features of the technology: its instantaneity and the way it facilitates conversation and community. Michael Blowhard happened to reflect on the origins of his site this week, talking about how his and the now-retired Friedrich von B’s traditional opening salutations were a vestige of their early practice of simply blogging their email. Although Terry and I don’t often include the salutation here, much of our blogging is in that spirit, if not straight from our email. (Although our friendship began in person when I worked for his publisher, it was cemented through a robust email correspondence that began after I moved to Chicago.) Always a shy type, I sometimes still experience a paralyzing brand of stage fright when trying to put together a post; simply typing the words “Dear Terry” at the beginning of the draft is a reliable trick for shaking off my reticence and some of the stiff formality of my early drafts. So, a resounding yes to everything Terry said earlier today about the intensely personal nature of the medium. And, while I don’t think the irrelevance of the print media is quite nigh, I do love the way blogs have made stories in publications like the New York Times no longer the last word on a topic, but a starting point for discussion, dispute, elaboration, and amplification from every point of view.

None of these thoughts are particularly original, but today I’ll settle for being apropos. I second Terry’s thanks to Doug McLennan, all our blogger friends, and especially everyone who reads us. Coattails can be a beautiful thing, and I may have come in on Terry’s, but now you’re stuck with me!