About Last Night

Our Girl in Chicago is on to something when she recalls (see below) how moving to Chicago taught her that New York’s cultural snobbishness is “precisely a form of provincialism, and one that was all the more invidious for being called sophistication.” Amen to that.

As regular visitors to the right-hand column know, I write a monthly wrapup of the arts in New York City for the Sunday Washington Post. It’s called “Second City.” I gave it that name in order to tease my adopted town about its chronic self-centeredness. It’s absolutely true that more artistic activity takes place here than in any other American city, but that doesn’t mean New York has a monopoly on important art, much less interesting art. Tyler Green, one of our fellow artsjournal.com bloggers, was listening to OGIC and me on the radio last night, and e-mailed afterward to tell us that he’d been struck recently by the vitality of the Los Angeles contemporary art scene–not just in and of itself, but by comparison with the state of the visual arts in Manhattan. And I wrote a piece about George Balanchine last year for The Yale Review (it’ll be in A Terry Teachout Reader) in which I made the following observation:

New York-based balletomanes who view with alarm the continuing decline of New York City Ballet need to start getting used to the notion that the city long known as “the dance capital of the world” may well be on the verge of becoming no more than primus inter pares in the increasingly decentralized world of post-Balanchine ballet.

Last year, the U.S. State Department asked me to write an essay for on-line distribution to other countries about the state of the arts in America. In that essay (on which I drew for the introduction to the Teachout Reader), one of the things I talked about was what I called “the ‘deprovincialization’ of America’s regional performing-arts groups.” I don’t discuss that nearly often enough on this blog. It looks like Our Girl–and you–will be doing it for me this week. Good.

P.S. Welcome back, OGIC. You were much missed last week.

A bit nervous? A bit nervous?! Look, remember that student in your college classes who locked eyes on the text in front of her when there was any danger of being called on? Who visibly blanched when the teacher so much as leaned in her general direction? Who had four different outfits the color of the classroom walls, the better to camouflage herself? That student was me.

I couldn’t speak in class in high school. I couldn’t speak in class in college. I couldn’t speak in class in graduate school. For a few years there, I taught some college courses and, lo and behold, I could speak in class. Necessity will make you do the damnedest things, and I daresay I spoke pretty well in the courses I taught. But for some moments in the studio at WBEZ tonight, that intervening experience fled, and I felt every bit the shy, quiet, scared mouse of old. I was surprised, to put it mildly, to find that some of that old resistance had stuck around.

Terry and our gracious, resourceful host Edward Lifson helped exorcise those ghosts and got me through the rough patches of this, my very first radio broadcast. I felt warmed up by the second half of the show, and was able to express some of the things I had wanted to say. By the time our time was up, it was much as each of them had promised beforehand–I was surprised and sorry to see the hour run out, and full of thoughts that would never get voiced. But the beauty of this medium is that what doesn’t get voiced can always get blogged.

Over the next few days I’ll post some further thoughts on the whole interesting question the WBEZ series Should I Stay or Should I Go? raised about the dilemma of artists in Chicago. One of the more startling moments tonight was hearing read back to me all the factoids I jotted down about myself a few months ago, when Terry first invited me to co-blog. One of these noted my attraction to what I called the “medium-hot centers” of the world, a category in which I implicitly included Chicago. When I uttered that phrase in October, I didn’t think too much about it, but participating in WBEZ’s good series this week made me do some of that thinking belatedly. In the makeshift case for Chicago I tried to put together tonight, the idea of medium hotness was central, if unstated.

So what does it mean to be medium-hot? What’s the attraction of “medium”? Here’s one way of describing what I find so liberating about the scene and atmosphere here, especially in comparison with the only other place I’ve ever lived, and the place every city compares itself to, New York. This departs from something John Updike says in his brief preface to the recently published collection of his early stories, pointed out to me by the perspicacious OFOB [Our Friend On the Block, a recurring character here who is encouraged to recur more!]. Updike talks about the difficulty he had writing fiction in New York City, and his inevitable “flight from Manhattan,” where he found too little ordinary life going on for his purposes. Updike felt he couldn’t thrive there as a writer, and speaks of wanting to be somewhere where he could immerse himself in the ordinary, and find the extraordinary therein. This was how he conceived of his particular task as a writer, and New York was the wrong setting for that project. Reading this got me thinking that what I love about this city, big and richly varied as you could wish it, but not superlative and not the default destination that New York is, is how from moment to moment it offers you a choice between the ordinary and extraordinary. You can move from one to the other kind of experience more or less at will. Sometimes in New York City, in my experience and Updike’s, you could get stuck in the extraordinary, and get very tired.

To a great degree, of course, this comes down to questions of individual temperament, which brings us back to where this post started. Yet aside from such considerations, I can’t help remembering that one thing I actively wanted to get away from when I left New York ten years ago was the casual assumption, not universally held but not in short supply either, that everything of import was of bicoastal, and mainly east-coast, origin. It felt suffocating. For all our back-and-forth tonight about just how immune Chicago is or isn’t to accusations of provincialism, part of what I feel I escaped by coming here was precisely a form of provincialism, and one that was all the more invidious for being called sophistication.

And that’s not all! Look for more on this topic in the coming days–and please e-mail me with your thoughts, whether you’re in Chicago, New York, or a different place altogether. This conversation started by our new friends at WBEZ seems to me one worth carrying on.

P.S. It’s nice to be back.

One last reminder: Our Girl and I will be making our joint broadcast debut tonight (opposite the Super Bowl) on WBEZ-FM, Chicago’s public radio station. If you don’t live in Chicago, you can still hear us on line. For information on when, where, and how to tune us in, go here.

No more blogging from me until tomorrow. I overdid it yesterday and need to spend Sunday working on my Balanchine book (though I’ll probably update some of the modules in the right-hand column before day is done). Besides, I think Our Girl is just about done with her blog-inhibiting for-profit labors and will be ready to rock this week, if not today.

See you on the radio!

UPDATE: If you need a reason to listen to us instead of watching the Super Bowl, go here.

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.