About Last Night

Our Girl checked in, finally. No, she didn’t expire from an overdose of bad hockey logos, she’s just temporarily overpressed with for-profit activity. (We do not blog to live, we live to blog.)

I’ll hold the fort while OGIC clears her desk, and in the meantime, she sends her love to you all….

Dear OGIC:

Yes, that’s a still from Next Stop Wonderland, the film that taught me to love Hope Davis (not that I needed more than about 10 seconds’ worth of persuading). As my beloved Brazilian friends have since taught me, she is the very essence of saudade.

(For the musical equivalent of same, click here and purchase the most beautiful CD imaginable. If Hope Davis could sing, this is how she’d sound.)

And what is this…er, horse hockey about my not liking ice hockey? Art it ain’t, but way cool all the same. Besides, you promised to take me to a game, remember?

I’d spank you for your impertinence, but I’m too busy laughing at those awful logos. Besides, I just this second woke up, and must now turn instantly to the task of reviewing four different shows for this Friday’s Journal. In reverse chronological order of my having seen them, they are: Taboo, the Boy George-Rosie O’Donnell spectacular (which I saw last night), Bright Ideas, Fame on 42nd Street, and the revival of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. All in one column, yikes. It’s like the straight line of a bad Broadway joke: what do Taboo and The Caretaker have in common. I dunno, what do Taboo and The Caretaker have in common? (Insert punch line here.) Rimshot. Isolated titters.

I’ll be done circa noon, unless my head explodes, at which time I’ll turn to the task of blogging in earnest. See you then.

P.S. No show tonight! I may hang with a musician friend who claims never to have seen High Fidelity or Casablanca. That can be fixed….

A reader writes, apropos of my recent suggestion (made in passing) that “the printed book [will give] way…to the hand-held electronic book-reading device”:

I have a Handspring Treo 90 handheld, and I use it in about equal measure for tweaking manuscripts in progress and for reading books in various electronic formats. With a little memory chip plugged in, it’s got 128 Mb of capacity, which holds, well, a LOT of nearly-purely-text books. Literally hundreds of them, particularly since some of the “books” are short stories and essays rather than novels or non-fiction volumes.

This is absolutely wonderful for taking with me when I leave the house. I’ve got all my lists of, for instance, books and music people like you recommend that I want to look into, and my notes about which volumes I have in series I want to complete, and the clothing sizes and color tastes of people I buy gifts for. And I’ve got all these great books: lightweight entertainment, scholarly works, references, public-domain classics, a bit of this and that. The handheld goes in a pocket, is rugged, and runs many, many hours on a battery charge. I can pull it out and read a few pages while waiting for the bus, while waiting in
checkout lines, while in the bathroom, and so on. On nice spring and autumn days, I sometimes take the handheld and my iPod and go out for a walk to the local park, where I can kick back with good music and good reading and very little to keep track of.

Some e-book formats, like those from iSilo, Palm Digital Media, and MobiPocket, allow for extensive annotation and bookmarking, all done with electronic attachments to the file for a book that leave the
original undisturbed. This can be really handy when doing reference-intensive research on volumes that I wouldn’t want to mark up physical copies of, and I can compactly save all my notes for later reference without clutter.

I regard this not as competition for my printed books but as an additional alternative. No e-book format I’m aware of could do justice to something like Full Moon, the glorious collection of Apollo mission
photographs of the Moon, or a good museum exhibit catalog, or for that matter natural history books like Walking With Dinosaurs and the Time-Life series. Whenever photographs and diagrams matter, print is the way to go. E-books operate effectively only in the realm of text. Nor do e-books offer a replacement for the satisfactions of a well-made old book, or a classy contemporary edition. For that matter, it’s hard to
autograph an e-book, unless it has Palm Digital Media’s provision for that.

So: e-books are handy when I’m concerned only with text, when I want to take a lot of text in a very compact way, and when I want to mark up heavily. The upshot for me of having a growing library of e-books is that I can take better care of my printed volumes and focus a bit more on buying print with an eye toward quality, since I’ve got this option for uses where aesthetics matter less.

One reader’s views, anyway.

This is the most vivid account I’ve ever seen of the experience of using a hand-held e-book reader. The thing about it that I find most provocative, however, is my correspondent’s suggestion that e-books will not replace “the satisfactions of a well-made old book, or a classy contemporary edition.”

I’ve never collected books qua books, precisely because I feared acquiring an expensive addiction, but I do love a handsome volume, and I’ve always been fussy about the design of my own books. (I’m really excited about A Terry Teachout Reader, by the way–Yale has done a fantastic job on it, inside and out.)

At the same time, I’m not at all sure that I wouldn’t be perfectly content to ditch the text-only books in my library and replace them with e-books. Naturally we’re not talking about art books, and I imagine I’d also want to hang on to my uniform edition of Henry James…but maybe not. As I said in the posting to which my reader is referring, I’m interested in essences, not their embodiments, and even though I’m a hopeless typeface junkie, there’s never been any doubt in my mind that it’s the words that matter. (Besides, it’s my understanding that you can read an e-book in any typeface you want, so long as it’s loaded onto the reader. Think of the unlimited possibilities for aesthetic tinkering!)

Perhaps the bottom line is that I’m open, at least in theory, to the possibility of abandoning the book-as-art-object, just as I’ve already taken the first step toward abandoning the album-as-art-object. Other people may not be so open to either possibility. I have a number of over-50 friends who say they don’t read “About Last Night” because they “can’t” read text on a screen–which means, of course, that they find it inconvenient. Not me. I don’t read books on my iBook, but I do read virtually all magazine and newspaper articles that way, as well as the blogs that now occupy a fast-growing part of my reading time. It would never occur to me to print out an article (or a blog entry) and read it in the bathtub. Bathtubs are for biographies.

Which reminds me of the informal industry-wide test of the viability of e-book readers: when somebody makes a reader that you can hold in one hand easily and drop in the tub without incident, the major publishers will start getting interested. I think that’s just about right–and I think they’re bound to get interested sooner or later, probably sooner, the same way the record companies have finally figured out that on-line music is here to stay.

Yes, the printed book is a beautiful object, “elegant” in both the aesthetic and mathematical senses, and its invention was a pivotal moment in the history of Western culture. But it is also a technology–a means, not an end.

This is stretching the definition of “arts” pretty damn thin, but it polled well with the test audience. And so here, without further ado…hey, Terry, look over there!…are the worst hockey logos ever (thanks to Hockey Pundits for the link).

Terry likes Hope a lot, hockey not so much. Alas.

I think that picture of her is from Next Stop Wonderland, where she gives a delightfully hard performance. Sharp as some very sharp tacks. Those jokers who answer the ad don’t even know what hits ’em.

Don’t ask questions, just go here. Now.

Apropos of my recent posting on the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, I got this e-mail from Peggy McGlone, the arts news reporter for the Newark Star-Ledger:

NJPAC has brought millions of people to the city since it opened, and while it may not have changed the streetscape as much as some would like, it has changed people’s perceptions about Newark. And that’s no little feat.

The point you made about the small percentage of Manhattanites attending events at NJPAC speaks more to the parochial mindset of Manhattanites than it does to NJPAC’s marketing muscle. New Yorkers are lazy cultural snobs–mostly because they can be. They have an abundance of wonderful art down the street or across town…so they don’t have to get out and explore. I, on the other hand, regularly drive 75 miles from my Morris County home to see a play in Princeton or a concert or play in New Brunswick, etc. I agree that the Newark renaissance is slow–if it exists at all. That part of town, with the colleges and museums, should be far livelier than it is. But I also know the five-block walk from Penn station to the arts center, while depressing, is no worse than the stretch of 41st street from Port Authority to the NY Public Library.

I think the central theory of arts-going in NY is “If it’s not at Carnegie, it can’t be good,” followed by the corollary: “And if it is good, it will be at Carnegie soon.” What can NJPAC or any of the many other arts
organizations located in northern Jersey (the city’s sixth boro) do about that?

What struck me most forcibly about Ms. McGlone’s smart and funny note was her pointed comparison between the walk from Newark Penn Station to NJPAC and the walk from Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal to…any place at all, to tell the truth. That is a grubby part of town–though the difference, of course, is that the Disney-driven rehabilitation of Times Square has been a tremendous success, at least in the limited sense of cleaning up much of the neighborhood surrounding the Port Authority and making it safer and livelier. (And come to think of it, what’s so limited about that? I’d rather live in a Disneyfied neighborhood than do daily battle with hookers and pimps, if those are my only alternatives.) Newark, on the other hand, appears as yet to have derived no significant urban-renewal benefits from NJPAC, and since that was one of the major selling points in the drive to get the center built, the failure is all the more relevant.

I speak, by the way, as someone who recently had a modest stake in the future of Newark. I taught arts criticism for two years at the Newark campus of Rutgers University, and enjoyed it enormously. The students, most of whom came from New Jersey, were hard-working, determined, and fun (one of them wrote this), and not a one of them had been fitted out with silver spoon (A) in mouth (B). If they’re the future of Newark, there’s hope for the city.

As for the unwillingness of Manhattanites to boldly go to NJPAC, I’m not so sure it can be explained by our “parochial mindset” (though I’m not denying that such a thing exists!). We do, after all, go to Brooklyn’s BAM Opera House in fairly large numbers. One difference–perhaps the biggest one–is that BAM consciously markets itself as a presenter of “cutting-edge” arts events, whereas NJPAC is targeting a frankly suburban audience, albeit more multicultural than that pale label might suggest. This is why we don’t perceive upper New Jersey as the “sixth borough,” any more than we seek out cultural experiences in Staten Island. Sure, I’ve seen some cool things at NJPAC, but it’s not on my radar in the way that BAM is, and judging from its 2003-04 offerings, I wonder whether it needs to be.

Besides, most cool things really do make their way to Manhattan sooner or later. That’s why we live here (I sure as hell can’t think of any other good reasons). Not all, though–our performance spaces are slowly pricing themselves out of the dance market, for example, and I find myself going more and more often to Washington, D.C., to see companies that are bypassing New York because it costs too much to dance here. If NJPAC were to book those companies more than sporadically, I’d go see them regularly, and I wouldn’t be alone.

But, then, should NJPAC try to attract Manhattanites? Would it really be worth the trouble? That’s a different question, one that goes directly to the heart of the center’s mission, and one I can’t answer. All I know is that since NJPAC opened, I’ve seen fewer than half a dozen performances there, and given the incredibly high quality of the facility, that’s a puzzlement. I wish I felt the need to go there more often–but I don’t.

You’ve no doubt read about Joan Kroc’s $200 million bequest to National Public Radio. Courtesy of artsjournal.com, our invaluable host, this Boston Globe editorial suggesting what NPR should do with the money, including the following suggestion:

Bring back music and culture programming. NPR’s news reports are thoughtful and compelling. Its talk shows are topical and a nice way to bring listeners into conversations. And “Car Talk” is great entertainment. But occasionally all this talk is wearying. Balance could be provided by music shows and radio documentaries.

What’s going on outside the often overwhelmingly adolescent world of popular music? Who are the up-and-comers in jazz and classical music? NPR should take more time and programming space to offer answers. And whether radio documentaries are made in-house or by independent producers, documentaries transport listeners around the country and the world or back into history. And their fascinating use of sound gives the mind’s eye creative work to do.

Read the whole thing here. It speaks for itself (albeit stodgily and obviously, as you’d expect from the editorial page of the Globe), but I want to make one additional point. If National Public Radio doesn’t seize this opportunity to restore and revive the cultural programming that once made it genuinely “public” in its appeal, it will prove beyond doubt that it’s no longer a “public” radio network, but the purely commercial, ratings-driven talk-radio shop that many listeners reasonably suspect it of having become–and I don’t see that such an enterprise deserves to be subsidized by public monies. A radio network that does nothing more than follow the ratings should be required to live and die by them.

Responding to Old Hag‘s open call for tearjerkers (and what won’t the blogosphere do for the Old Hag, really?), Sarah Weinman brings up an old favorite, Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, and gives an eloquent precis. I lent my copy of this book to a student years ago and haven’t seen it since–Sarah’s description explains why this says less about my student than about the book.

These words of Smart’s are scribbled into one of my journals, but I don’t know where they come from. My friend Elaine, who was the first to bring it, and Smart (and so much else) to my attention, may know:

What I’m making is a real place for language in my life since I must put up with it anyway. I want to be respected by those who are dead. I want to sing and make my soul occur.

And here’s one from By Grand Central Station:

He kissed my forehead driving along the coast in evening, and now, wherever I go, like the sword of Damocles, that greater never-to-be-given kiss hangs above my doomed head. He took my hand between the two shabby front seats of the Ford, and it was dark, and I was looking the other way, but now that hand casts everywhere an octopus shadow from which I can never escape. The tremendous gentleness of that moment smothers me under; all through the night it is centaurs hoofed and galloping over my heart: the poison has got into my blood. I stand on the edge of the cliff, but the future is already done.

And this one, which I like because, in a hothouse of a book, it is so overrun with vegetation. And so lyrical:

I love, love, love–, but he is also all things: the night, the resilient mornings, the tall poinsettias and hydrangeas, the lemon trees, the residential palms, the fruit and vegetables in gorgeous rows, the birds in the pepper-trees, the sun on the swimming pool.

You can still get a used copy of Rosemary Sullivan’s fine but now out-of-print biography of Smart. Weep away, kids. And Sarah, thanks for thinking of this.