About Last Night

This is a big writing week for me: I have to finish four pieces (and two letters of reference) before I hit the road next Monday. I promise to keep blogging all the while, aided and abetted by OGIC and our wonderful correspondents (see below for yet another case in point), but don’t be surprised if the flow of soul around here isn’t quite as profuse as usual, O.K.? It’s merely a temporary pre-holiday aberration.

Incidentally, there’s a chance that Our Girl and I will both be blogging from Chicago for a few days early in January. Should that happen, we’ll go out of our way to cook up some exotic stunts for your amusement!

“The way to get the best out of instruction is to put oneself entirely in the hands of one’s instructor, and try to find out all about his method regardless of one’s own personality, keeping of course a secret ‘eppur si muove’ up one’s sleeve. Young students are much too obsessed with the idea of expressing their personalities. In the merest harmony exercises they insist on keeping all their clumsy progressions because that is what they ‘felt,’ forgetting that the art cannot mature unless the craft matures alongside with it.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams, “A Musical Autobiography”

A reader writes:

I’ve been mulling over your extensive posts about the cinematic experience. Two things struck me in recent days: your post of someone’s memories of the spectacle of live musical performance, and the post of someone’s complaints about how Hollywood success is measured, in which he/she comments that “movies are not communal experience.”

I’ve been a bit distressed about your opinions, not because I think you are wrong, but because I think you’re forgetting something. Yes, it is wasted energy crying about the shifts in technology and the marketplace. Yes, we should get over our nostalgia. Yes, it is possible to have great home
experiences of films.

But #1, the nature of films is changing as they are made for the home market—and this includes the blockbusters. Without captive audiences in a darkened theater, they are paced differently. Without giant screens, overly-filtered light begins to pass for cinematography, subtle camerawork and editing become less apparent and thus less likely to occur. Acting evolves in different directions to take account of the more intimate relationship between screen and audience. The advent of improved video (DVD for the moment) means that increasingly films are preserved digitally for the marketplace, not on film (more expensive). In other words, the character of the films themselves is different on television sets than they are in theaters, and this changes the very nature of how they are produced—which is one reason why you don’t remember a lot of tv movies as classics.

#2, going to cinema IS a communal experience. I don’t know what is wrong with your other correspondent, but if he/she missed all the people sitting around the theater, I’d assume blindness is the problem. Films made for the movie theater are made for collective audiences. They are screen tested with full audiences to understand how they will be received. Comedies in particular, but tear-jerkers too, have depended for their evolution not just on mass taste, but the presence of multiple tastes during viewing. Watching movies on tv is very different, and the venue absolutely affects the character of the productions, particularly over time. While many more people may watch, there is no sense to the maker of the film that he is creating an overwhelming experience for a discrete group of people.

#3, old movies on tv are reproductions. They were shot on film, not video or digital, and the translation is most often inadequate and always simply different. No flicker, no reflection of pure light into the retina, but an entirely different form of visual experience with completely different physiological and psychological implications. As Norma Desmond said, the pictures ARE getting smaller. Recordings are not the same as live performance in music, and video copies are not the same thing as original three-strip Technicolor. Period. It does make a difference, or you wouldn’t go to museums to see the posters in the shop. The reason why your correspondent who remembered his 3rd-tier orchestra in Belarus had such an extraordinary experience was because it was possible. He was listening to an original.

To sum up, movies are different on tv. Not worse, necessarily, but different. And something is absolutely lost in the transition, and to pretend otherwise is a crime against culture as surely as being a Luddite is. There is something tragic about the slow decline of an extraordinary cultural experience, cinema-going, which resulted (at its best) in art from the dross of commercialism. Would IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE and CASABLANCA and CITIZEN KANE be what they are without the filmmakers’ sense of the shared aspirations and values of their collective audience? Would Hitchcock’s films be as frightening as they are without his careful consideration of how he could drive people crazy with tension in a crowded room, without his certainty that multiple shrieks would amplify fear? For god’s sake, what about the feeling you get when an entire room full of people laughs with you at a joke that one and all get?

Cinema is our great accidental art form. It is both private and collective, both interior and public, and yet its contexts have always been driven by the marketplace, wherever we live. We will all have to get used to the changes, yes. But I can’t accept that all disappearing sensations, particularly those that come from art, should simply be let go with a brisk wave and tip of the hat.

I don’t disagree with a word of this letter–which, perhaps not surprisingly, came from a museum curator. And I’m especially struck by the beauty of the last paragraph, which is very much the sort of thing that would occur to a museum curator. I will miss all those things. I don’t want them to go away. I want to be able to see the great movies of the past in theaters, surrounded by enthralled audiences…and I expect the day is coming when I’ll have to go to museums to do that. In which case we should all be grateful to museums for preserving the “disappearing sensation” of watching movies in the dark, surrounded by a roomful of people who came to partake of that miraculous communal experience.

What I also appreciate about this letter is that it completely disentangles my expectations from my desires. One of the things I try to do on this blog is predict some of the ways in which art will be affected by technological changes–but those predictions aren’t necessarily endorsements. They are attempts at understanding.

I’ve quoted it before, but I want to mention again a remark made by Marshall McLuhan in 1966: “I am resolutely opposed to all innovation, all change, but I am determined to understand what’s happening, because I don’t choose just to sit and let the juggernaut roll over me.” I’m not quite that much of a neophobe, but I think I know how McLuhan felt, and what he meant. Much of the time, I wish the world could be exactly the way it was when I was young. Alas, it can’t even be the way it was this morning. I suppose the day will come when I decide to give up on the present and live in the past. Until then, I, too, am determined to understand what’s happening–and maybe even try to help shape it.

This is absolutely, positively not a political blog and never will be, but the most art-relevant story I read this weekend appeared in the Washington Post‘s “Outlook” section. It’s a piece by Everett Ehrlich, Bill Clinton’s undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs, on the economic reasons why the Internet is bringing about the decline of the two major political parties:

To an economist, the “trick” of the
Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually
zero. So…smaller information-gathering
costs mean smaller organizations. And that’s why the Internet has made
it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse
candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones….

Say you want to buy an appliance, or a vacation. You know
there are bargains out there, but it takes time and energy to find
them. That’s what economists call the “transaction cost” of a
purchase. This cost of acquiring information is everywhere: the time
it takes to call a friend or to learn something in a newspaper. Or the
time and resources it takes a company to find out where to find parts
and to make sure they show up at an assembly line on time.

Back when it cost a great deal to learn and know things — when
transaction costs were very high — big corporations had to solve the
problem of coordinating information, such as what customers wanted to
buy, what parts were being produced and shipped, how to make sure
prices covered costs, and so on. The advent of mass production and
similar “process” technologies let firms produce and sell things —
cars, steel, oil, chemicals, food — on a much larger scale, so there
was suddenly much more information to coordinate.

Companies solved this problem by creating massive bureaucratic
pyramids… Now, however, with internal communications networks and the speed of
the Internet, you don’t need a horde of people in a big pyramid to
handle all that information. Firms have become “flatter” and “faster,”
and the “networked” or “virtual” company has come into being — groups
of firms that use shared networks to behave as if they were part of
the same company….

Now anyone with a Web site and a server, a satellite
transponder and about $100 million can have — in a matter of months
— much of what the political parties have taken generations to build.
Technology, of course, has changed politics before. Television changed
the two parties, for example, but it didn’t make the parties obsolete.
In fact, in the day of Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy,
television strengthened the two-party duopoly (the economist’s term
for a shared monopoly), as only those two parties had the resources to
use it competitively.

But the Internet doesn’t reinforce the parties — instead, it
questions their very rationale. You don’t need a political party to
keep the ball rolling — you can have a virtual party do it just as
easily.

Read the whole thing here. Then think about how it applies to the myriad ways in which the Internet has already transformed the world of art, from the decline of the classical recording industry to eBay’s inadvertent creation of a worldwide “single market” for art auctions to the inauguration of artsjournal.com and its associated blogs.

I can’t say it often enough: The Web changes everything. Any artist who doesn’t understand that, and isn’t acting on the knowledge, is going to get left behind. Likewise any arts journalist. Even if economicspeak makes your eyes glaze over, read Everett Ehrlich’s piece (which is written in plain English, not jargon) and you’ll see exactly what I’m talking about. Believe me, your time will be well spent.

Fred Kaplan has a great story in this morning’s New York Times on why so many classic films have yet to show up on DVD:

Sometimes films are not on DVD for less Byzantine reasons. Older films especially are often in poor condition. The negative has deteriorated, if not vanished; existing prints are scratched or worse. Repairing the damage, and finding the best film and archival materials for bonus extras take much time and money.

A few years ago, only specialty houses like the boutique Criterion Collection bothered with the effort. Now many big studios are following its example.

In a recent industry survey by the Consumer Electronics Association, asking people what they liked best about DVD’s, “picture quality” was the highest-scoring reply, cited by 81 percent of respondents. Studios that may once have rushed a disc to market are now taking greater care, even at some expense. “The marketing people have told us that picture quality is a premium,” said MGM’s Mr. Grossman.

Paramount knows there’s demand for a DVD of “The African Queen,” but the studio is in no rush, letting its archivists search for better film materials.

Then again, the ascending power of the marketing departments works both ways. To boost profits, they encourage better-looking DVD’s. Yet for the same reason, they prevent many films from becoming DVD’s at all.

“A lot of old films, including some well-known old films, don’t sell in large volume,” Mr. Grossman said. “If you’re going to have to spend big money for restoration, and then you’ve got the costs of packaging and advertising, it’s a barely break-even proposition.”

Another video-distribution executive agreed: “Unless it’s `Casablanca’ or `Citizen Kane,’ the studios will sell 100 times more copies of a bad action film made three years ago than they’ll sell of a great film that they’ve dug out of the archive.”

(Read the whole thing here.)

Sigh. Of course we all knew that, but it’s still discouraging to hear, especially given the fact that none of the Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott Westerns have made it to DVD yet–and only one of them, Comanche Station, was transferred to videocassette. (Copies now sell for $90 and up.) These films are universally admired by critics, yet they never even turn up on TV. Would somebody at the Criterion Collection please get with the program? I guarantee that DVDs of Seven Men From Now, The Tall T, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome and Comanche Station would get plenty of ink, from me and plenty of other cinephiles.

P.S. My essay on the Boetticher-Scott films will appear in A Terry Teachout Reader–yet another reason to order your copy in advance!

“A further reason for my hatred of National Socialism and other ideologies is quite a primitive one. I have an aversion to killing people for the fun of it. What the fun is, I did not quite understand at the time, but in the intervening years the ample exploration of revolutionary consciousness has cast some light on this matter. The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one’s power, optimally by killing somebody–a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost.”

Eric Voegelin, Autobiographical Reflections

“Mens sana in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it. No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drink water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.”

A.J. Liebling, Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris

A reader writes:

I find the older I get, the less critical I become. As a young man, I held every new work up against the greats and naturally found it wanting. If asked, I would give the thing a thumbs-down. My stance was essentially dishonest, since some of the stuff I blew off gave me pleasure. Today, I’m far more willing to credit even a seriously flawed work for whatever satisfactions it has to offer. Along with that has come a greater willingness to judge a work on its own terms rather than my own. Perhaps my standards have declined. But I prefer to think that I’ve achieved a mature recognition that a thing doesn’t have to be great in order to be good (or at least to give pleasure). That proposition seems perfectly obvious, but it took me a while to apprehend it.

Anyway, I suspect from some of the things you’ve written that a similar process has been at work in you over the years. (I’ve definitely noticed it in certain other critics I’ve followed for a lot longer than you’ve been on the scene, such as John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann.) Am I right? Do you think this critical mellowing comes naturally with age or is there some other explanation? I’d be very interested in your views.

My correspondent is quite right, and it surprises me to admit it–or at least it used to. I was going to hold forth at length on this theme, and then I remembered that I already had. What follows is an essay called “First Time’s a Charm” that I wrote for Fi, the now-defunct audio magazine, back in 1999. It wasn’t widely read at the time and I forgot to include it in A Terry Teachout Reader, so I’ll reprint it here in lieu of a reply….

* * *

“I don’t understand acquired tastes,” a friend told me the other day. “Why would I want to learn to like something that tastes bad?” Though we were talking about sushi (I love it, she hates it), the conversation soon worked its way around to opera, an art form to which she believes herself hopelessly allergic. Granted, she is only 24 and has heard a grand total of three operas to date–Macbeth, The Rake’s Progress, and Orfeo et Euridice, none of them exactly mainstream–but she’s still certain that opera is not for her, and though I hope she changes her mind someday, I admire her certainty.

My first encounter with the slippery concept of acquired taste came during my undergraduate days, when it was widely taken for granted by the intelligentsia that Elliott Carter was a great composer and Tchaikovsky a lousy one. To be sure, everybody loved Tchaikovsky and nobody loved Carter, but that didn’t matter: in fact, it proved that everybody was wrong. The theory was that anything you liked at first hearing was too simple to be good–or, to put it another way, that there was an inverse relationship between quality and accessibility.

I bought into this theory at first, but then I had a revelation. It was a revelation on the installment plan, actually, for it occurred in stages, the first of which took place when I bought a copy of Peter Pears’ recording of Benjamin Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn, and Strings. This was in 1975, at which time I hadn’t yet heard a note of Britten’s music, not even The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. I don’t remember what moved me to buy that particular LP, since Britten was still in bad critical odor back then (though the worm was already starting to turn). Whatever the reason, I bought the record, took it back to my dorm room, put it on…and was overwhelmed. Suddenly I realized that I was listening to a masterpiece, and that was that: the intelligentsia didn’t matter anymore, at least when it came to Britten.

The second installment came a few years later, when the Juilliard Quartet came to Kansas City and performed the Schoenberg String Trio, which they were about to record for Columbia. By then, I was the program annotator for the concert society that brought the quartet to town, and I knocked myself out over that particular set of notes; I saw it as my mission in life to awaken the benighted music lovers of Kansas City to the delights of late Schoenberg. Though I no longer have a copy of the program, it isn’t hard to imagine what I wrote about the String Trio–it must have sounded exactly like Paul Griffiths raving about Milton Babbitt in the New York Times–but when I went to the concert, I didn’t hear what I expected to hear. Instead of music, I heard…nonsense. Suddenly I realized that I had talked myself into believing that Schoenberg was a great composer, ignoring the evidence of my ears, which had been telling me all along that serialism had as much to do with music as “Jabberwocky” has to with poetry. The spell was broken, and never again did I take serial music seriously.

The third and last installment came when I heard Eugene Ormandy’s 1960 recording with the Philadelphia Orchestra of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances. If Schoenberg was the household god of my undergraduate years, then Sergei Rachmaninoff was the antichrist, a composer played only by those poor grinds who slaved away in the downstairs practice rooms while the rest of us musical eggheads went about our more elevated business. Empty virtuosity! Notes without content! Syrupy sentimentalism! Or so I thought…only this time, I listened with my ears instead of my intellect, and suddenly I realized that this was a real piece of music, tough-minded and sardonic, and I was enthralled.

The lesson I learned from these three experiences was not quite as simple as you may think. Around the same time as my first encounter with the Britten Serenade, I had an instructive conversation with a wise old music critic to whom I blithely announced, apropos of nothing in particular, that I’d never much cared for Schumann. “That says more about you than it does about Schumann,” he replied mildly. By the time I’d picked myself up off the floor and pulled the arrow out of my forehead, I’d formulated a credo from which I have never deviated in the past two decades: trust your first impressions–but don’t be afraid to change your mind.

One of the most surprising things that has happened to me in recent years is that I now like far more music, as well as a wider range of interpretative styles, than I did as a young man. This is not at all what I expected to happen as I grew older. “I have devoted myself too much, I think, to Bach, to Mozart and to Liszt,” Ferruccio Busoni wrote to a colleague in 1922, when he was 56 years old. “I wish now that I could emancipate myself from them. Schumann is no use to me any more, Beethoven only with an effort and strict selection. Chopin has attracted and repelled me all my life; and I have heard his music too often–prostituted, profaned, vulgarized….I do not know what to choose for a new repertory!” When I first ran across this fascinating letter (Harold C. Schonberg quotes from it in The Great Pianists), I felt as if I were gazing into a crystal ball. I was certain that I, too, would become more and more intensely involved with less and less music, until the day came when I was left with a half-dozen supreme masterpieces to which I would return constantly in search of enlightenment.

Needless to say, it didn’t work out that way. Now that I stand on the brink of middle age, I find that I am more open as a listener than ever before, so much so that I even find myself enjoying pieces and performers that don’t naturally suit my taste or temperament. I used to dislike Ella Fitzgerald, for instance, but today I listen to her records with great pleasure, even though my reasons for disliking her haven’t changed. I still don’t think she had any feel for a lyric; I still don’t like the sound of her voice, which always struck me as pinched; I still think she skimmed lightly over the emotional content of the songs she sang. Yet none of that matters to me any more. Is she my favorite singer? No, not even close–but now I can appreciate the virtues of her singing, and that’s what matters.

Does this mean that I have somehow “acquired” a taste for Ella Fitzgerald’s singing? You could say so, but I prefer to think of it not as a conscious act of will but as a natural process of growth. It isn’t as if I sat around my apartment listening to Clap Hands, Here Comes Charlie! with furrowed brow, waiting for the sun to rise; it never bothered me that I didn’t like Ella, just as it didn’t embarrass me when I changed my mind about her. I simply accepted my taste for what it was–a matter of personal preference–and when it changed, I accepted that, too.

At the same time, I believe devoutly that criticism is not merely a matter of taste, that it is rooted in objective perceptions of fact; I also think that some critics are more perceptive than others, just as some pieces of music are better than others. I suppose it would be more stylish to put the word “better” in quotes, but the awful truth is that I unhesitatingly accept the existence of a meaningful standard of excellence in the arts. The art critic Clement Greenberg once shrewdly observed that all canons of excellence are provisional–but in saying so, he never meant to suggest that there is no such thing as excellence. This is part of what that wise old music critic was getting at when he told me in so many words that it didn’t much matter what I thought about Schumann: it is the responsibility of the listener to rise to the level of the great masterpieces. If you don’t like “Mondnacht,” it’s your fault, not Schumann’s.

How to reconcile these seemingly contradictory points of view? The answer lies in a subtle remark made by Kingsley Amis, who was both a great comic novelist and a passionate music lover: “All amateurs must he philistines part of the time. Must be: a greater sin is to be coerced into showing respect when little or none is felt.” I wish those two sentences could be carved in stone and set in the middle of Lincoln Center Plaza. In matters of taste, the most important thing is not to pretend. To go through the motions of “acquiring” a taste is very often to engage in an elaborate and protracted pretense, one that may well be not merely insincere but sometimes just plain wrong. I now know that I was wrong when I pretended to like the Schoenberg String Trio, and even more wrong when I pretended not to like Tchaikovsky.

As for my young friend who thinks she doesn’t like opera, that’s just fine with me. I plan to keep inviting her to the Met from time to time (La Traviata is next on the list), and I doubt she’ll turn me down, so long as I don’t insist that she pretend to enjoy herself. But should the day finally come that she decides to give up completely on opera, that’lI be fine, too. For who knows what might happen once she turns 40? She might just hear Der Rosenkavalier on the radio, and suddenly realize what she’d been missing all those years. That’s the wonderful thing about taste: it’s never too late to change your mind. I might even start liking Schoenberg again–after all, deafness runs in my family.