{"id":341,"date":"2003-08-11T11:05:06","date_gmt":"2003-08-11T18:05:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/2003\/08\/drum_roll_please\/"},"modified":"2017-06-24T11:08:56","modified_gmt":"2017-06-24T15:08:56","slug":"drum_roll_please","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2003\/08\/drum_roll_please.html","title":{"rendered":"DRUM ROLL PLEASE . . ."},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a>The last time I looked, oh, about a month\u00a0ago, this column was called The Juice. I wrote it\u00a0for\u00a0over\u00a0a year at\u00a0MSNBC.com, where (my staff of thousands reminds me) it was that Website’s most popular daily\u00a0Weblog.<\/p>\n

(In the age of cyberspace, where visibility counts more than ever and mediagiants\u00a0aim to monopolize the Web,\u00a0a bit of independence at least\u00a0honors the founding ideals of the Internet.)<\/p>\n

BEFORE I BEGIN\u00a0…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Have an online\u00a0look at two things in\u00a0real time: the mounting cost of the war in Iraq<\/a> and what’s happening in Times Square<\/a>.\u00a0I would suggest there’s a direct\u00a0correlation: The higher the cost, the\u00a0glummer the tourists.<\/p>\n

Manhattan’s so-called crossroad of the\u00a0world looks pretty glum. Oppressive heat and rain may be a factor,\u00a0but take another look at that\u00a0running\u00a0total<\/a>. It’s climbing faster than you can count.\u00a0Would that put a smile on any sane citizen’s\u00a0face?<\/p>\n

The\u00a0folks who\u00a0posted\u00a0the scoreboard, Niko Matsakis and Elias Vlanton,\u00a0don’t say what the money would buy in terms\u00a0of arts and culture.\u00a0You can\u00a0see what\u00a0the board\u00a0shows, though, for other essentials: children’s health, pre-school, public education and\u00a0housing, college scholarships\u00a0and energy independence.<\/p>\n

Now have a look at\u00a0what\u00a0the war and occupation is costing your town or city<\/a>.\u00a0Then tell me why there’s no California recall for Gee Dubya.<\/p>\n

IN THE MEANTIME\u00a0…<\/strong><\/p>\n

A\u00a0majority of the Defense\u00a0Intelligence Agency’s engineering experts\u00a0are saying “the\u00a0most likely use for\u00a0two mysterious trailers\u00a0found in Iraq”<\/a> was indeed to produce hydrogen for weather\u00a0balloons\u00a0used as\u00a0targets in artillery practice and not (as the CIA and the DIA itself\u00a0claimed,\u00a0and as Gee Dubya annnounced to the world) to produce biological weapons.<\/p>\n

Well, Google unwittingly knew it all along —\u00a0thanks to Web wit Anthony Cox, who commandeered the site.\u00a0With apologies to readers\u00a0who’ve already seen this, go to Google<\/a>.\u00a0Type: weapons of mass\u00a0destruction<\/strong> (no quotation marks). Do NOT click Google\u00a0Search<\/strong>. <\/strong>Instead, click: I’m Feeling Lucky.<\/strong> Then read the whole\u00a0error message carefully.\u00a0If you’re one of those people who have no time for a couple of\u00a0clicks, you can go straight\u00a0to the error message<\/a>. But it does spoil some of the fun.<\/p>\n

[Since this item was posted, Google caught on and spoiled the “I’m feeling lucky” fun. But the error message<\/a> still works. Click the link. — JH]<\/p>\n

MUSIC FOR\u00a0 THE AGES<\/strong><\/p>\n

What’s come over the Wall Street Journal<\/a>? It always had a reputation for quirky front-page features about stuff you never dreamed of. But in the last month, it’s given front-page coverage to arts and culture.<\/p>\n

First there was the story about Bob Dylan lifting lines for his lyrics from a memoir about Japanese gangsters. Then there was the one about the history of combat art and soldiers who went to war in Iraq armed with\u00a0 easels. In between there was the front-pager about a stretched-out John Cage composition that will take, if all goes well, 639 years to perform. It gets my vote for most intriguing arts story of 2003 so far.<\/p>\n

Since the Journal is not online for anyone unwilling to pay a steep subscription fee — which is most of us — and since I haven’t seen the Cage tale referred to online anywhere else in English except for this Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial<\/a> (free registration required) and this two-year-old BBC account<\/a>, let me retell the basics.<\/p>\n

The performance actually began a few days before 9\/11 in “the forlorn eastern German city of Halberstadt … in a crumbling medieval church,” the Journal reported. “Each movement lasts 71 years. The shortest notes last six or seven months, the longest about 35 years. There’s an intermission in 2319.”<\/p>\n

If you missed the opening, you didn’t miss much because the music “begins with a rest, or silence” that lasted for the first 17 months until Feb. 5 of this year, when the first three notes sounded. “Within the church’s crude stonewalls,” the Journal reported, “a steady, unvarying\u00a0 chord can be heard 24 hours a day. Two more notes will be added in July 2004.”<\/p>\n

Cage wrote the work for a German organist, Gerd Zacher, who premiered it at a music festival in France. His performance lasted only 29 minutes. So it’s no surprise that Zacher disagrees with the tempo being used in Halberstadt.<\/p>\n

According to the Journal, although the ASLP tempo marking means “as slow as possible,” Gerd says Cage told him the work should be played like “a soft morning” and then “should be gone.”<\/p>\n

It’s not unusual for musicians to disagree about tempo markings. To this day, the greatest maestros haven’t definitively settled what tempi Mozart or Beethoven wanted for some of their works. But the friendly disagreeement over
\n“Organ2\/ASLP” has to be the most staggering conceivable.<\/p>\n

The reasons for stretching out the performance have less to do with music than with reconstructing an ancient organ to play it on and creating a tourist attraction in Halberstadt to help revive its economy. Whatever the reasons, who but a bunch of Cageans would have thought of a concert lasting six centuries?<\/p>\n

I myself relish the idea. But it’s funny how serious composers turned music into a philosophical game in a way that visual artists have only recently come to emulate (thanks to the minimalists and other postmodernists) and\u00a0 writers and dramatists never really did (Dadaists and Surrealists notwithstanding). Funny, and for most listeners, unfortunate.<\/p>\n

SHILLING FOR CELEBRITIES<\/strong> <\/p>\n

This morning the New York Post has a story headlined: Arnie does no favors for NBC<\/a>. While that may be true, on the evidence I saw the other day MSNBC.com does favors for\u00a0all celebrities, Arnie included, and for NBC, too.<\/p>\n

I took a\u00a0peek last Thursday at MSNBC.com\u00a0to see whether my poor opinion of the revised entertainment section held up.\u00a0It\u00a0no longer covers news of music or television or movies, as it sometimes tried\u00a0to do in earlier days. (Full disclosure: I used to run the section.)\u00a0It now covers news of celebrities in music, celebrities in television, celebrities in movies.<\/p>\n

In other words,\u00a0if there’s\u00a0no celebrity,\u00a0there is no\u00a0news. The section (and much of the front cover) has become\u00a0the equivalent of\u00a0a PR wire.\u00a0Here were the headlines for\u00a012 consecutive\u00a0news stories in the order posted by the entertainment section:<\/p>\n

Madonna<\/strong> goes global with children’s book
\nArnold<\/strong>‘s announcement big win for Leno
\nLange<\/strong> tours war-torn east Congo
\nLuring celebs<\/strong> with free cigarettes
\nMedia circus converges on Bryant<\/strong>
\nOmar Shariff<\/strong> struck Paris police
\nGary Coleman<\/strong> for California governor
\nScoop: Cameron Diaz<\/strong>‘s photographic past
\nJ.Lo<\/strong> standing by her man
\n“Six Flags says no to Marilyn Manson<\/strong>
\nFilm out of Mother\u00a0Teresa<\/strong> festival
\nHeather Locklear<\/strong> signs deal<\/p>\n

At least the\u00a0Scoop column is supposed to be about celebrities. What\u00a0excuse does MSNBC.com have for all those other entertainment features? That the news about war-torn east Congo is Jessica Lange taking a tour? That trivia about Madonna, Omar Shariff, J.Lo and Marilyn Manson rates\u00a0five separate\u00a0stories?<\/p>\n

Need I\u00a0mention MSNBC.com’s self-interest in trumpeting Arnold’s brass-ring\u00a0candidacy for California governor as a victory for the “Tonight” show with Jay Leno? Presumably, readers understand that NBC owns both the show and half of MSNBC.com. But disclosure of that\u00a0small fact, per Journalism 1.0 was nowhere in the “news” story. Nor was it in the three-paragraph\u00a0“news”\u00a0story that began: “NBC is back in business with Heather Locklear.”<\/p>\n

MSNBC.com’s celebrity-mongering is, of course, not unusual. This morning’s edition of USA Today quotes Andy Rooney on the\u00a0agenda he foresees for CBS’s “60 Minutes”<\/a>: “Everybody knows changes are in the wind.\u00a0Management wants changes. They have been pressing us to be more like ’48 Hours’ or ’60 Minutes II.’ Stories about J. Lo and that sort of thing.”<\/p>\n

I\u00a0wonder why\u00a0he\u00a0left out\u00a0“Dateline NBC.”<\/a>\u00a0Maybe he doesn’t watch that one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The last time I looked, oh, about a month\u00a0ago, this column was called The Juice. I wrote it\u00a0for\u00a0over\u00a0a year at\u00a0MSNBC.com, where (my staff of thousands reminds me) it was that Website’s most popular daily\u00a0Weblog. (In the age of cyberspace, where visibility counts more than ever and mediagiants\u00a0aim to monopolize the Web,\u00a0a bit of independence at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-341","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-5v","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26301,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/26301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}