First Weblog

When will Lewis H. Lapham Learn to Count?

Michael:

I just don’t know how Lewis H. Lapham does it. By “it,” I mean, act as the editor of a magazine. Let me give some small examples from his latest screed, um, essay in the April 2003 issue of Harper’s Magazine:

His essay is entitled “Cause for Dissent: Ten Questions for the Bush Regime [emphasis added.]” It has ten numbered sections. Oddly, however, at least three of the sections contain no questions. As best I can tell, having gone over the essay roughly four times, there are only eight questions in the text, one section having two. Still, it ain’t ten.

The essay is advertised to page-flipping readers via large type excerpts. These excerpts turn out not to be excerpts, exactly. The differences are telling:

Large Type Excerpt: Tyranny never has much trouble drumming up prompt agreement. Democracy stands in need of as many questions as its citizens can ask.

Actual Copy: Tyranny never has much troubled drumming up the smiles of prompt agreement, but a democracy stands in need of as many questions as its citizens can ask of their own stupidity and fear. [emphasis added]

Did some vestigal commercial sense persuade Mr. Lapham to shift the wording to avoid alienating the legions of the stupid and fearful who actually shell out for his magazine? Or was he—gasp—edited by someone else?

The essay is utterly without a central thought, other than Mr. Lapham’s constant whine that he knows better than the Bush Administration, goddammit, and if the American people were so f---ing stupid as to elect George W. Bush then they should get smarter and vote for Lewis H. Lapham next time around. His individual points are, however, as follows:

Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to fall for Bush Administration agitprop about the risk posed by Saddam Hussein. Secretary of State Powell can wave little jars of pseudo-anthrax around all he wants to, but Lewis H. Lapham is not going to accept any proof of Saddam’s bad intentions short of, one presumes, a video tape of Saddam personally infecting Americans with anthrax.

Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to believe Bush Administration rhetoric about its own “moral clarity” and “principled resolve.” He noticed right away that the Bush Administration does not appear to be ready to invade North Korea, explaining this failure of moral courage on the fact that Pyongyang has 3 nuclear weapons and Baghdad none (hopefully). Living, as he does, in a wonderful world untroubled by practicality, Lewis H. Lapham can spot a moral evasion like the “Koren Exception” when he sees one, by God, and he’s not going to pass over it in silence.

Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to take seriously the Bush Administration’s public resolve to not live in fear. He notes that the Bush Administration has issued many warnings of terrorism—which Lewis H. Lapham is smart enough to realize, could make people afraid. Obviously, according to Citizen Lapham, the real purpose of these warnings is to prevent smart guys like him from asking penetrating questions, although the exact manner in which the warnings have silenced penetrating questioners (like him) is not spelled out.

Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to be lulled to sleep by slogans and sound-bites. Lapham the All-Wise knows in his heart that the Bush Administration is full of messianic lunatics eager to actually do something about the Middle East—the Arab part, that is, not the Israeli part (where they should be focusing, as everyone knows.) Unfortunately, Lewis H. Lapham is also too smart not to notice that most Americans are pretty much as dumb as posts, and thus vulnerable to slogans and sound bites. This pains Lewis H. Lapham deeply, and even makes him come close to telling the average American slob that he deserves what he’s about to get before he remembers how elitist that would sound.

Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to take the Bush administration’s haughty attitude lying down. He spots right away that senior administration officials are often “petulant and openly contemptuous of opinions not their own…” Lewis H. Lapham is, regretfully, not smart enough to remember the slogan “it takes one to know one.”

Lewis H. Lapham is so smart he believes that 9-11 caused an “immense surge of pro-American feeling everywhere in the world...” [emphasis added]. (Maybe he watched a different TV station than I did, although come to think of it he is on record as refusing to watch TV or use the Internet.) He is also way too smart to miss how the Bush Administration has squandered this whole, incredibly-valuable pro-American feeling “asset.” Presumably, doing nothing about terrorism (as Lewis H. Lapham appears to advocate in his very intellectually lazy rant) would have preserved this “asset.” No doubt, if we could only be lucky enough to suffer a whole series of terrorist incidents, the world's pro-American feeling would swell to such a fever pitch and our "asset" attain such value that (those of us left alive) could retire.

Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to think that anything can actually be done about terrorism. This is because of the unavoidable fact that doing anything (other than, presumably, ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on terms highly gratifying to the Palestinians and then performing a great deal of bowing and scraping toward the Islamic world) could irritate at least some individuals in the Middle East and thus increase support for Osama Bin Laden! Lewis H. Lapham knows, in his infinite wisdom, that the way to deal with fanatical, murderous enemies is to avoid giving them the slightest offense.

Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to miss the fact that any erosion of anyone’s civil rights under any conditions whatever is a much bigger threat to our free society than mere crazies who want to kill us. He also knows that his freedom is worth far more than our safety.

Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to think that the Bush Administration has any reason for invading Iraq other than laziness. How does he know this? Because it's obviously so much easier to invade another country than to fix an America defaced by “hungry children…crowded prisons, and…corporate thieves.” (I must say, I missed the whole Enron-Iraq connection before now, but it's all so clear now.)

Lewis H. Lapham is way too smart to practice solidarity in time of war. As Lapham the Great notes:

[d]emocracy proceeds from a more adventurous premise, its structure akin to a suspension bridge rather than to an Egyptian pyramid…

I guess that particular image just proves that Lewis H. Lapham is too smart to be permitted to edit his own essay, huh?

Cheers,

Friedrich

Department of Male and Female Relations

Michael:

I’d like to nominate Kim Cattrall for an award, Most Flamboyant Gesture in Ending a Relationship. The relationship in question is with her 3rd husband, Mark Levinson (the co-author of Ms. Cattrall’s recent book, “Satisfaction: The Art of the Female Orgasm.”)

A couple of days ago I happened to glance at the March 17 copy of People Magazine, in which the two are described as “taking a break.” As the story reports:

Why? “No exact reason,” says a friend. “No one is dating anyone else. It just happens.”

This story of a relatively amicable split was belied the next morning, however, when I was standing in line at the checkout counter of my local 7-11 and caught a glimpse of the cover of FHM (“For Him Magazine”) for April. Who is posing in just a shirt and a pair of underwear? You guessed it, Ms. Cattrall.

Before and After

But the best part is the quote on the cover from Ms. Cattrall:

I prefer younger men.

Ouch! I have no idea what really went on here, but based purely on the available evidence it looks like Mr. Levinson must have done something really, really bad.

I don't know about you, but I've been dumped once or twice with a certain amount of flair (granted, a quality that is easier to appreciate with the distance of a few years.) Anybody out there got a good dramatic-gesture-in-the-context-of-a-breakup story?

Cheers,

Friedrich

New Magazines

Friedrich --

Do you follow the style magazines? I don't mean the fashion magazines, I mean the style magazines. I do, though I sometimes wonder why. I guess that I simply enjoying keeping up with what people are doing with magazines.

And what I find myself mostly buying these days are examples of a new breed of style magazine. I wonder if you’ve run across them. Hard to describe; I don’t know if the genre has a semi-official name yet. Style, fashion, art, celebrity -- but, frankly, old fart that I am, I can’t tell what their subject matter really is, and I can’t tell what it is they’re selling. There seems to be nothing at the core. There’s little or no information in them, the writing is drivel (and next-to-unreadable anyway, what with the text being Quarked way over to the side, reduced in size and made sans-serif -- it isn’t writing, it’s decor). There’s no gear on sale. There seems to be nothing graspable there.

Which seems to be the point: style, look and attitude. These magazines seem to be all about edgy media values. Period. There’s a fair amount of art-school-style semi-nudity, fashion and performance-art self-consciousness, and new-look models hoping to make it big. But they’re a long way from a Maxim or a Stuff. This is alternative product, and part of what’s bewildering about them is the combination of grunge and uptown-quality production values.

For some reason, nearly all of them have one-word titles: Zink, Flaunt. Trace. Contents. And they’re often quite spendid, as lavishly and sumptuously produced as art books. They also make me think of those legendary custom-made art-thing magazines that were financed by rich people for about five issues back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and whose titles escape me at the moment.

The big diff between them and traditional art-and-word-centric publications is their value-set, which derives from the media. Whoosh. Fwoof. Kapow. They’re as consciously designed and constructed as art things, and in a way, that’s about as good a description as I can come up with: they’re media-derived abstract magazine experiences, Quark and Photoshop extravaganzas put together (as far as I can tell) by recent art-and-design grads.

The thing about Quark and Photoshop is that they enable you to compose a magazine in a non-linear way; designers actually speak about “constructing” pages, layouts, passages, entire issues. These magazines take that approach as far as any I’ve run across. The individual pieces are subordinated to the larger digital-media page-flipping experience. They’re disappointing -- nonexistent, really -- in terms of content. But why be square: Content, that’s so 20th century. No, they’re all about media effects. A lot of lavish paper, gorgeous models all shiney and full of ‘tude, photographs blown up so that the bigness is the point, and the whole put together to create (this seems to be the point) an abstract media-magazine experience. It’s all about look, feel, rhythm and effects. It’s as though the raw material is the Fwoof and the Whoosh.

And as look-and-feel effects experiences they’re pretty incredible. I’m amazed by the skill, the talent, the beauty. (Unfortunately, I’m too old for it ever to mean much to me emotionally. Such is life, I guess. Or at least aging....) Flipping through these mags, I’m thunderstruck by the extreme precision and lavishness of the production. You can sense the photos being tweaked to the point where the printer can’t register anything more fine-grained; you can sense Quark being pushed to an extreme.

It’s all about rhythm and digital effects, in other words; like many of today’s big Hollywood extravaganzas, they’re exercises in showing off the digital-effects cosmos. Which reminds me of an observation a record-producer friend once made. “Kids aren’t interested in tunes anymore,” he said. “They come to me instead with a rhythm track and a bunch of Dolby effects, and they basically want to lay the effects down on top of the rhythms.”

Look at the spread I’ve scanned and included below. (It’s a thumbnail, so be sure to click on it for a better view.) It’s from a recent issue of Zink; apologies to the photographer, whose name I’ve misplaced. A basic question: what is this spread presenting? A product? A girl? Fashion? My sense is that what’s being presented (or “sold”) is quite simply what I think of as Media-Fwoof. You open this spread and go, Whoah! And that’s what its about. Perhaps I’m missing something. If so, can you fill me in?

From Zink: Fwoof!

Is there any Blowhardish larger significance to be found here? Maybe in the replacement of art-and-reading values with media values. Maybe, as a friend who’s in the ad biz often says, in the fact that that we’re living in an art director’s universe. Maybe in the banal observation that the visual is pushing aside the verbal, and that impact is pushing aside thought, let alone reflection. I find it interesting that some portion of the population has developed such a hearty appetite for media experiences that they’ve developed a refined appreciation for them, as well terrific skill in creating them. There are minds, talents and personalities that live entirely in the digital world and live there very happily and have no perspective on it whatsoever. Who'd have imagined?

I do sometimes wonder what’ll happen to old notions of craft. In the past, because of the way the various media offered much more in the way of resistance, chances are you had to spend a lot of time in a field before you could mount your ideas in any way. The good side to this system was that you usually developed technical skills and (possibly) some character seasoning and depth by the time you were able to present anything. The bad side was that it could be a laborious and discouraging process; a lot of people simply gave up and left the field. The good side of the new digital tools is that they’re so available and responsive that anyone can create a handsome media thing based on the slightest whim. The bad side is that most of the ideas and values that are finding expression are so ludicrously infantile -- adolescent at best. A question: how does anyone raised on adolescent media values and surrounded by such groovy and seductive new tools ever make the leap from media values to art values?

My personal reactions? For what they’re worth...

Square, logo-centric and art-centric person that I am, I look through these magazines feeling as though the verbal and thinking sides of my brain (however lame) have been chopped off and left to bleed to death, while the media side of my brain (however tiny) gets a thorough pumping and stroking. I flip through these mags feeling like a happy, dazed, and inarticulate edgy idiot.

These magazines have no traditional magazine interest to me at all. It used to be that the packaging (the graphics, the presentation, etc) was there to enhance and/or sell the content. These magazines have abandoned content, and what used to be thought of as packaging has become central. (Another way of looking at this: there used to be a line between the values of the editorial parts of a magazine and the values embodied by the ads. The line has disappeared, and ad values have taken totally over.) Once I shift over to viewing them as composed media experiences, I can find them quite amazing. They’re like erotic art-school reveries, and they seem to take place in some parallel world where edgy media values are valued for their own sake. (There’s something almost pornographic about the way every design decision is offered up for delectation.) Cool, though it means nothing to me.

And I admit to a little jealousy. Back in the late ‘70s, when we were rude youth and imagined ourselves to be defiant up and comers, punk kids had to make do with Xerox machines and staplers. Our idiotic adolescent ideas simply couldn’t be realized in this sumptuous way. Wouldn’t it have been fun to have Macs?

That said, I have very little appetite for abstract media experiences, and tend to be rather shocked by people whose souls seem possessed by the love of media experiences. Personally, I don’t exist in order to be blown away by electronic dazzle, and I just don’t crave having my buttons pushed. It makes me feel like my mind is being micro-waved to cinders.

But who cares about my taste? I’m such a fuddy-duddy, I guess; I turn to art, writing and thought to get away from media values, which I associate with work. When I want pleasure of any deep sort, I want something with a basis on matter, substance, and history.

Hey, here’s a way of looking at these magazines: they are to traditional magazines what the buildings Herbert Muschamp champions are to traditional architecture. They’re ecstatic, talented, and symptomatic of the era -- pure design brilliance for its own sake. Harmless enough when it comes in the form of a magazine. A building has to be lived with, but a magazine can be left on the rack.

Veteran observer of the biz that I am, I can’t help wondering how long these magazines will last. Whose money is behind them? (The words “trust fund” and “Euro-sleaze” come to mind, don’t ask why.) And who the hell buys them? As with many digital-era media things, after you buy one you can’t imagine buying subsequent issues; they seem to burn themselves up as you go through them. My best guess is that while these titles won’t be around for long, we’ll be seeing what they represent in terms of approach and style percolating through the general culture in the near future.

Do you have any appetite for edgy and abstract digital-media experiences per se?

Best,

Michael

How Happy Are You?

Michael

Are you happy? Are you satisfied? If you told me: “yes” or “very” should I believe you?

Obviously, there are a lot of, ahem, philosophical issues raised by such “subjective” measures of happiness. However, blithely ignoring all of them, Ronald F. Inglehart of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Hans-Dieter Klingemann of the Social Science Center in Berlin apparently conducted tens of thousands of personal interviews around the world (personally?) in the mid-1990s and devised a “subjective quality of life” map, which is reproduced in the November issue of Scientific American. Although the map, for reasons left unexplained, does not include Siberia, the Middle East, most of Africa, and Southeast Asia, I thought you’d like to know a few of the highlights:

1. Disneyland is not the Happiest Place on Earth. Apparently, that distinction belongs to Iceland. (Having taken a good look at several “Miss Iceland” contestants at international beauty pageants, I can see how that might be the case. As I understand it, Iceland has a "Miss Universe" for every 90,000 inhabitants.)

Happiest Men on Earth?

2. While the U.S. reports itself to be marginally less happy than Scandinavia, Ireland, and Switzerland, it is either marginally or significantly more happy with its lot than is the rest of Europe or Japan.

3. The least happy country reported is the Ukraine, where people either appear to be downright sunk in misery, or, possibly, highly amused at the thought of lying to the good professors.

4. The biggest surprise is Canada, which only squeaks in ahead of Germany and is a good bit behind the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Does this demonstrate a true “happiness gap” (as in, “Man the barricades, a horde of disaffected Canadians is headed south across the border!”) or is this some sort of low self-esteem issue for the Canadians? Perhaps they don’t feel they deserve happiness when their dollar is worth only around 67 American cents.

I have only one question. Every time I’ve ever asked a woman this question, it usually entailed a two-to-three hour conversation to discover how she really felt. Do you think the professors stuck with it long enough to really find out?

Cheers,

Friedrich

The Church of PBS

Friedrich --

Stephen Foster: Death by documentary

"Major funding for this program was provided by Sominex...."

Well, not really, but just as well. You have to take your hat off to PBS. Has there ever been an organization more expert at taking juicy subjects and turning them into the purest tedium? I mean, aside from textbook-publishing corporations. (Two exceptions noted: the Michael Pack/Richard Brookhiser documentary about George Washington, website here; and "The Commanding Heights," from the Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw account of the battle between market forces and faith in government, watchable online -- bless the web -- here.)

I should be a perfect PBS audience member. I'm in a facts-not-fiction phase; I'm devouring history books, reading them at night and listening to them on audiobook during commutes. I’m amazed by how passionate and immediate history can be in the hands of the right writers and thinkers. Why wasn't I able to pay attention back in high school and college? Have I changed? Have I simply discovered the writers who suit my tastes and interests?

So, full of hope, I record PBS documentary after PBS documentary. What could be more alluring than a video presentation of real lives and true stories? You can watch in the company of your sweetie! You can talk about what you're learning as you watch! In fact, it's always a challenge to get The Wife, as addicted as ever to fantasy and make-believe, to settle down in front of a documentary. But sometimes I do succeed...

And we almost never make it through. I've tried the Ken Burns shows; they were gruesomely difficult to endure. I'm pleased that many people watched and enjoyed his series on jazz, for instance, but only because I root for jazz. There were wonderful facts and footage there to be discovered. But why did the series have to be so long, so solemn, and so slow?

This evening the Wife and I sat down to watch the PBS "American Experience" hour on Stephen Foster (link here). Within 15 minutes we were both fighting sleep.

How do they do it? It's as though the people behind these shows are determined to kill all interest in history, or at least my interest in history. I watch the shows wondering who the producers are: grown-up versions of those kids who loved 8th-grade social studies class? And who then went on to major in that vapid field, American Studies?

What a dull exercise in earnest civic uplift the Stephen Foster show was. It might have been put together by a committee of progressive junior-high teachers who like to encourage debate on such topics as "What is America?", and who, no matter what the question, always come up with the same answer: black/white race relations.

Stephen Foster was an important and interesting figure, and I'm sure there are viewers who got something out of the show. But the people who make these documentaries seem terrified of immediacy, and are so devoted to imposing a worthy-nonprofit reading on everything they touch that they won’t let a subject’s own pulse take over. They annex the subject to their own crusade.

As a media guy with OK media-biz antennae, what I find myself observing when watching these shows is less the ostensible subject and more what I picture going on behind the scenes -- the agonies of "consensus vision," in other words. While the footage about Stephen Foster goes by like a lazy river, what dances in my mind is images of fights over turf and ideals, images of careerism disguised as moral worthiness, images of ex-hippies still indignant at authority, images of lives crisscrossed with ambition and moral righteousness.

There was Stephen Foster up on the screen, but hopelessly buried under layers of bureaucratic battles, petty moral and career rivalries, futile attempts to get everyone on the same page, an infinity of small resentments -- the whole tedious, snake-eating-its-tail drama of good intentions. The show was smoothly-enough done; PBS seems able to crank out this American-Studies drivel by the yard. But nothing ever seems to be at stake -- nothing that has to do with Stephen Foster, in any case. Instead, what we get is Stephen Foster, the P.C.-Commemorative Edition.

What is it that makes these shows seem so preserved in arts-administrator amber? For readers who have ambitions to make it in the world of PBS documentaries, 2blowhards herewith offers a partial catalog of put-your-audience-asleep filmmaking tropes. Read, imitate, and make a good career for yourself in public television:

• Shots of sunsets.
  
• Shots of water.
  
• Shots of empty Colonial-Williamsburg-style interiors.
  
• Shots of nothing in particular framed by leafy trees.
  
• Tracking shots over old piano keyboards.
  
• Slow zooms back from old sepia photographs -- repeat this move endlessly.
  
• Nothing-in-particular passages from letters, to be read in nothing-in-particular "period" tones.
  
• Period songs, to be performed in a prissily nostalgic style.
  
• For background music, lean heavily on the plink-plonk of a lonely solo piano, or the pulseless noodlings of a ruminative guitar. If you really want to knock 'em unconscious, have a banjo player pluck a few strings really, really slowly.

What seems key is to gut the subject matter of all vitality. Stephen Foster was quite a character. He was turned on as a kid by black and minstrel music, he had the skills of a classical musician, he was one of the first Americans to try to make a go of it as a professional artist, he had huge hits and became a national celebrity, he lost it all, he turned to booze, and he died before the age of 40. He was a proto-pop star, for god's sake. And the music and performance tradition he often worked with, minstrelsy, while it makes us ultra-uneasy today, has the kind of fascination (and diciness) that the history of rock and roll does.

Gosh: material that'd work well given the "A&E Biography" treatment. Heck, what his life is really like is a 19th century episode of "VH-1 Behind the Music" or "The E! True Hollywood Story."

Can't have that on public television!

So let's talk vaguely about "home," and let's frame his life as an American tragedy -- America's so hard on its poor, poor artists, after all. Let's slow the pace 'way down, make only a couple of glancing references to the zippiness and dynamism of his era, and keep everything at a museum-installation distance. And, memo to everyone involved: let's be sure to deliver a rigid, one-note view of the minstrel tradition. In other words, let's take everything in our subject matter that might have a little vulgar life and crush that life right out. Push instead a tone of vaguely idealistic, pained moral anguish.

Phew. Now we've got ourselves a PBS documentary.

Do the PBS history documentaries deliver anything more than those broadcast by A&E, Discovery, and the History Channel? As far I can tell, what we're meant to take as value-added is the cloak of high ideals and good intentions -- which, as far as I'm concerned, comes at the cost of lifelessness, tedium, slow pacing, imposed P.C. interpretations, and a from-dullsville style...

A digression: it occurs to me that the point of view that informs these PBS projects is the same one that has been used at universities to undermine the traditional canon. Yet isn't what's being created with pieces like the American Experience series a de facto new canon?

Can we conclude from this that what the canon battles have been about hasn't been whether or not a canon is a good thing, but instead about whose canon should prevail? Political battles, in other words. If that's so, it seems fair to ask: why should this side's point of view be funded with public money? It's also amusing, if a little sad, that the same people who used to complain about the stuffiness of official history are now making this kind of thing: not quite so stuffy, perhaps, but perhaps even more boring (as well as equally misleading, if in different ways).

I’ve been pretty happy with many of the A&E, etc., history documentaries I've watched. They aren't ideal; I'd prefer to be given a more vivid sense of what a subject meant in the context of its own time. But they're generally snappy; they're more open-minded than the PBS shows; and, praise the lord, they don't force you to peer at their subject matter through the same mournful, sepia, reverent, slow-motion lens.

When I calm down, I find it worth noting that, with such shows as the American Experience series and the Ken Burns epics, PBS has hit on a product that works for some audiences. Even if that doesn't have to be respected, it may still be worth thinking about. I'd love to know more about the shows' fans, for instance. Who are they? What is it about the shows that they enjoy and don't enjoy? I wonder if for some of them the leisurely pacing makes a nice contrast to the rat-tat-tat of commercial TV.

Which leads to my basic objection to the PBS approach -- that it mixes up thoughtfulness with religion. The art critic Robert Hughes once observed that America has almost no tradition of intellectual entertainment. I suspect that part of what he was taking into account was the corny way Americans picture thoughtfulness and education -- as matters of hushed rumination and deep, unanswerable questions; of leaning back in a leather chair and thinking big, melancholy thoughts along the high-school-essay lines of "What is it to be an American?"

Why not instead, Hughes was asking, be alert and crisp; why not instead make connections and keep on the move? (Hughes' own series have been models of this kind of first-class intellectual entertainment.) But the typical PBS history documentary doesn't move with the quickness of alert consciousness and searching thought, and it doesn't tear through the veils either. Intead, it dresses its subject in more and new veils, and then lights candles before the spectacle it has helped create.

We're being sold religion in the guise of history and thought, in other words. The PBS history documentaries are almost all selling the same embalmed gospel: America, her sins and possible redemption, all of it delivered with a tragic-yet-yearning tone, and often with something called "art" or "race relations" placed at the heart of the tale. (Watching these shows, it can sometimes seem as though nothing in America ever happened that wasn’t conditioned by black-white race relations. Even admitting that black-white questions are important in the biography of Stephen Foster, that's still an insult to lots of events, and lots of individuals.)

So I take PBS to be something rather like a church: a factory devoted to generating funding for itself by creating products that appeal both to people’s legitimate interests and to their spiritual neediness. Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, though once again I wonder what the government is doing lending support to such an endeavor.

I don't know if I can face more such PBS tedium. Over the years, I've taped a bunch of PBS shows on good topics, and there on the shelf the tapes still sit. I'd love to know more about their subject matter, but I know in advance what the shows are going to deliver: yet more mournful piano and guitar music, yet more shots of sunsets and water, yet more sepia photographs, and yet more earnest academics denouncing racism -- more brain-dead hours in someone else's church.

For much of the Stephen Foster show the Wife and I were only able to keep awake by playing little games. Let's see, PBS stands for Public Broadcasting System, right? What else might it stand for? The Wife won when she came up with Preposterously Boring and Snoozy.

Best,

Michael

Free Reads -- Steve Sailer

Friedrich --

I love checking in on the protean Steve Sailer (here). He writes enlighteningly about evolutionary biology, he writes sensible political commentary, and he writes smart, brave, always-worth-wrestling-with things about race and immigration. (A standout piece on whether or not the concept of race has any validity is here.)

In addition to all that, he's a movie critic who takes a distinctive approach to thinking about movies, treating their business and popular history not in the usual way (as gossip and matter for facile sociology) but as evidence of what works and what doesn't in the art form. It's a kind of evo-bio approach to writing about the arts -- let's see more of that. He even manages to get off the occasional good, yet informative, anti-P.C. crack, as he does in a review (here) of the Navajos-in-WW2 thriller "Windtalkers."

Sample passage:

The screenwriters...are so terrified of being accused of stereotyping Native Americans that they portray the Navajo with no particular traits. Look, you can't "celebrate diversity" unless you show some diversity. In reality, the Navajo are fascinating. They are possibly the most economically dynamic of all tribes. They were originally invaders from Canada who arrived in the Southwest not long before the conquistadors. Acquiring sheep from white people, they prudently shifted from hunting and gathering to herding, weaving, and crafts manufacturing. While the rest of the Native American population was in catastrophic decline due to European diseases, weapons and alcohol, the Navajo exploded in numbers, much to the distress of their neighbors and rivals, the more conservative Hopi tribe.

You won't find that kind of thing in Film Comment.

Best,

Michael

Short Stuff

Michael

Going through the Wall Street Journal of October 14, I noticed the following, er, "Dog-Bites-Man" headlines:

-TNT Tells Operators That Its Higher Fees Are Worth the Price

-Global Aids Fund Issues Appeals for More Money

-Worldcom’s Ex-Controller Pleads Guilty

-Do Predatory Lending Laws Curb Mortgages?

-China May Free Political Prisoner Ahead of Summit

I'm just guessing that Sunday might have been a slow news day.

Cheers,

Friedrich

Short Stuff

Michael

Two headlines from the NY Times of October 5:

Jury Sets Punitive Damages at $28 Billion for Smoker
I understand about the dangers of second-hand smoke, but it still seems a bit excessive.

I.R.S. Offers Deals on Tax Shelters
In a down market, you gotta do what it takes to move the merchandise.

Cheers,

Friedrich

Magazine Culture

Michael

2Blowhards has scored another triumph of investigative reporting. Owing to a wrongly directed fax, we’ve got the behind-the-scenes scoop on Lewis Lapham’s latest screed:

Lewis H. Lapham
Editor, Harper’s Magazine

Darling Lewis,

I just read your fabulous essay, “The Road to Babylon—Searching for targets in Iraq.” Loved it, simply loved it! As usual, you’re just too good for the American public!

However, a few words of advice if you want to get it published someplace other than, well, you know, Harper’s. Not that there is anything wrong with Harper’s, darling, you know I read it cover to cover each month, but remember how the magazine world snickers when you write the lead article in a magazine that you edit. I mean, even Tina Brown never did that! And, as long as I’m being terribly frank, you need to do something about the circulation of Harper’s—more people would read your work if you published it in the Piscataway Penny Saver! So, while I would never dare to edit you from the purely artistic point of view, I jotted a few notes of some eensy-weensy things you might want to do if you’re serious about getting published in a magazine with a real subscriber base for a change:

1)Try getting to the point a tad quicker. You’re saying the invasion of Iraq is a bad idea, but you’re 900 words into your piece before you mention the first actual reason it’s bad.

2)Lose the extended comparison with the Athenian invasion of Sicily. I mean, people might get confused and remember Patton’s invasion of Sicily—which went rather well, you recall, during World War II. And it pushes your word total to over 3,500 words—in other magazines, darling, they have advertising and have to watch how long their articles are! Really!

3) You don’t provide much substance on many of your main points. You describe Bush’s invasion plan as being

“[a]gainst every precedent in international law, in violation of the United Nations Charter, and without consent of the American Congress.”

I mean, we’ve all read lots of op-ed pieces that don’t agree with you, darling, and I think you’re going to have argue these points a bit, don’t you?

4) Some of your arguments, are, well—I don’t know how else to put this, darling—a bit shrill. I think you might want to rethink the sentences starting:

Even if one discounts the devastation of Baghdad as a minor and scarcely noticeable loss, what is to prevent the conflagration likely to erupt in the nearby countries of Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran once the U.S. Air Force has lit up the entire Muslim world with the putrifying fires of civil and religious war? Who prevents Ariel Sharon from upgrading with nuclear weapons the Israeli program of ‘preemptive assassination,’ and, in the relatively sizable footprint of an oil price marked up to $50 or $70 a barrel, what happens to the economies of London, Paris and New York?

5) You might be a bit less personal about Bush, dear. Your first paragraph contains the line:

“…who was I to deny him his demagogue’s right to issue harebrained threats?”

Your second paragraph includes the sentence:

When asked by worried friends and acquaintances whether the President was borrowing his geopolitical theory from the diaries of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, I assured them that the President didn’t have the patience to read more than two or three pages of a Tom Clancy novel.

The third paragraph goes on with

The spectacle of the American government making preparations for an invasion of Iraq suggested that maybe the Bush Administration was, in fact, stupid enough to call down air strikes on the last four paragraphs of one of the Pentagon’s apocalyptic briefing papers.

It seems like you still might be a bit, well, peeved about the Florida situation. Maybe it’s time you moved on, dear.

6) There are a few points where you might be accused of, well, inconsistency, darling. For example, your sentence:

Count through the list of foreign adventures since our hurried departure from Vietnam in April 1975, and we proceed, in random and unseemly sequence, to the exit from Iran and the flight from Lebanon, the pointless assault on Panama, the shutting down of the Gulf War without decisive victory, the abandonment of the Kurds in northern Iraq, the escape from Somalia, the refusal to intrude upon the killings in Rwanda or the Balkans.”

I mean, weren’t you glad we got out of Vietnam? I seem to remember you were at the time. And we got very involved with the killings in the Balkans, didn’t we? Don’t we still have troops there? And, er, if it was a bad thing to fail to pursue decisive victory in the Gulf War and to abandon the Kurds in northern Iraq, wouldn’t invading Iraq now be, well a good thing? Maybe you should just leave it all out, the article is too long anyway.

Well, just a few little changes and I’m sure we can place it somewhere fabulous, darling.

Your loving agent,

[Suppressed on advice from legal counsel]

Apparently Lapham refused to make any changes, and ended up running the piece--you guessed it--in the October issue of Harper's Magazine, where you can read all 3500+ words of it on newsstands now.

Cheers,

Friedrich

Maybe We Need a Sports Page

Michael

My wife is a fanatical tennis player, and as a result we have lots of tennis-oriented publications laying around, none of which have ever brought even a twitch to my lips while reading them (chiefly, I admit, in the bathroom.) As a result, I was stunned to pick up a rag called Inside Tennis and discover, well, humor. In particular, the "Short Shots" column, also oddly known as the IT Notebook. One example:

Justin Time: Just as our spirits were getting soggy due to all the mid-tournament rain [at the U.S. Open], Justin (low ranking, high entertainment value) Gimelstob came on the air to analyze how he defeated Edwin Kempes, No. 249 in the world. A yoga kind of guy, Gimelstob referred to himself as a "peaceful warrior" (think New Age writer Dan Millman) and confided that he sweats more than most human beings because of his "Jewish nerves." Gimelstob admitted, "The mainstay of my game is significant prayer," and added that "hitting a triple-bouncer to the net post is never a good strategy...[in fact], my game plan then was to sweat on the court and hope Kempes falls on a wet spot." Time and time again, Gimelstob referred to Brad Gilbert's curious forehand (e.g., "I greased that point and 'Gilberted' my way through.") Then Justin admitted, "I was one point from sick manic depression." When he started to cramp, he joked with the trainer, pleading, "Bring out the good stuff--the stuff the Spaniards use." Ultimately, Gimelstob admitted, "Like many things in my life that go wrong, I just blame my parents."

Justin the Great

If Gimelstob decides to hang up his racquet, I'd like to offer him a spot on our blog. Are you with me on this?

Cheers,

Friedrich

Women's Mags

Friedrich --

The magazine industry is going through what many say is its worst period in decades. All sectors are suffering -- except one.

According to the Economist (online, but subscription only), the women's glossies are not just thriving but booming. Why? Two reasons. The first is that, in a gloomy era, advertisers seem to prefer seeing their ads run next to pretty pictures rather than downbeat stories. The other, and larger, reason is that, despite the recession, American women continue to buy and spend as enthusiastically as ever.

Sample passage:

Certain items, such as luxury watches, cars or mobile telephones, seem to be as content nestling next to articles entitled "I'm a monster in bed" or "The truth behind the Britney backlash" as they once were amid stories on corporate strategy.

You go, girls!

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 10

Friedrich --

The Friday New York Times includes two arts sections, one about movies and theater, the other about what the newspaper calls the "fine arts." The headlines today in both show the paper's usual light touch.

In the performing arts section:

* Revival Works a Transformation
* Maazel Shows His Firm Hand From the Start

In the fine arts section:

* The Face (and Soul) Of Africa
* A Tower of Dentists Wears a Golden Crown

Boogie down!

I'll admit that that "dentists" touch is a nice, if bewildering, one. The tone of the story, though, disappoints. It concerns the history behind a monumental old Brooklyn landmark, the Williamsburgh Savings building, and it has a characteristic Times tone: semi-camp, semi-whimsical, a little bratty. "The basilicalike banking hall remains a pretty awe-inspiring place to fill out a deposit slip." Good gosheroonie! And so much for history and grandeur.

Hmm, the Times never seems to use that tone for discussions of modernist buildings. I wonder why not?

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 9

Friedrich --

Headlines from the front page of today's NYTimes' Arts section:

* China is Warming to Hollywood's Glow
* Not All Sunshine for Teensy Set's Troubador
* Decades After Their Pop Hits, 2 Singers Show What Else They Have
* An Uphill Effort for World Harmony

Who knew being interested in the arts could be such a burden?

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 8

Friedrich --

In case you enjoyed yourself too much over the weekend, Monday's NYTimes Arts section is here to wave an admonishing finger at you. Two of its front-page headlines:

* Advice and Songs on Death Row, but No Easy Answers
* A Cairo Storyteller With Time to Dream

I don't know about yours, but my sense of fun just deserted me.

Best,

Michael

If I Were an Editor 5

Friedrich --

If I were the editor of a book-review section, I'd provide coverage and reviews of the usual, but also of visual books, pop fiction, joke books, self-help, and more. I'd also make a point of running profiles of and interviews with the many non-author people who help make the world of readin'-and-writin' what it is: designers, editors, artists, agents, booksellers....

It's bewildering that "books coverage" limits itself to the small cast of characters it does.

Best,

Michael

Media Overload

Friedrich --

The book I finished last night I got free; the audiobook I listened to this morning also came free.

That's one of the upsides to working in an arty corner of the media world -- free stuff. One of the downsides is: too damn much free stuff. Keeping up with the product, even from a mere housekeeping point of view, can clog your brain, swamp your desk, and make you forget what you really enjoy, as well as how you'd really like to spend your time.

Let's see... Before me right now are invites to movie screenings: "Spirited Away" (Japanimation -- don't think so); "Moonlight Mile" (Dustin Hoffman and Susan Sarandon -- hmmmmmm, nope); and "Ballistics: Ecks vs. Sever" (spy thriller rated R not for sex but violence -- puhleeze). Into the circular file.

There, my head's clear again.

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 7

Friedrich --

Headlines from the front page of today's NYT "Weekend" (ie., popular arts) section:

* Mob Life Resumes, Darker by the Day
* Tragedy Kindles Dance of Hope

Phew. I'd almost forgotten what a heavy burden the arts are meant to be.

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 6

Friedrich --

More headlines from the NYTimes' Arts section that'll set your pulse racing with anticipation. On the front page:

* Journey Back From the Abyss in Beijing (about a Chinese director who has made a movie about his own struggle giving up a drug addiction)
* Poet Turned Antic Architect Keeps Exploring Inner Space

And inside:

* Zurich Theater Director Becomes a Public Issue (subheaded "A shrinking audience, a firing, a petition of protest" -- be still, my heart!)

When did the arts become a branch of the social services industry?

Best,

Michael

If I Were an Editor 4

Friedrich --

I've said it before, and you can be sure I'll say it again: if I were an editor, I'd be doing a much more aggressive job of covering immigration than most publications are doing. (Jeez, are bigtime editors just not listening to me?) The topic is on people's minds, the walls preventing discussion are starting to crumble, the foolish old dichotomy of pro vs. anti is falling apart -- yet mainstream outlets are by and large ignoring the subject.

Spiked Online (formerly LM, or Living Marxism, magazine) to their credit -- because they're very pro open borders -- runs a good piece by Anthony Browne about why he thinks immigration should be slowed in Britain, here.

Excerpt:

Having resorted to intellectual dishonesty to hoodwink readers into thinking that immigration is at a lower level than it is, the pro-immigrationists tried another tactic: smear the opposition.

Best,

Michael

If I Were an Editor 3

Friedrich --

If I were an editor, I'd run lots of pieces about the impact of evolutionary biology (and evo-psych) on thinking about the arts. I'd do more than that; I'd go out of my way to use the evo-bio crowd as standard sources for quotes and thoughts about the arts. It's where the best, or at least most useful, new thinking about the arts is coming from.

Structuralism? Deconstruction? Postmodernism? They're, like, so five minutes ago. And thank god for that.

Best,

Michael

Columnist Shootout

Friedrich --

After much enjoyably self-important mulling and musing, I’ve decided that the best journalistic essayists now writing are John Derbyshire, Theodore Dalrymple, Mark Steyn, and Robert Fulford.

Do you know their work? In case you don't, here are examples of each of them in fine form:

Mark Steyn, here.

Theodore Dalyrymple, here.

John Derbyshire, here.

Robert Fulford, here.

Civilized, provocative, stylish and brainy, each one.

Do you marvel, as I do, at the inability of Americans to enjoy examples of what they disagree with? It seems terribly difficult for an American to read or hear something he disagrees with and yet enjoy it. Why, do you suppose?

Years ago, I spent a while writing for an English magazine. What a treat. There may be much to be said against the English, but in their favor is the fact that many seem to have no trouble enjoying provocation as a form of intellectual entertainment. It's a ritual and a game: the writer takes an extreme stance, the reader cheers or is annoyed by the point of view, but applauds the presentation if and when it strikes him as well done. In fact, without sufficient provocation the English reader seems bored.

Americans, on the other hand, are often earnest beyond belief. If we don’t agree we go ballistic, in one way or another. Big-city types, I find, often go (ponderously, savagely) on the personal attack. Small-city and backwater Americans tend to feel hurt or enraged; they often look like they’re going to cry.

I wonder if this is because we're so hopelessly mixed-up about sophistication. We either revere it and identify with it (the big city), or it ticks us off and makes us feel like we're being looked down on by snobs (mid-America).

In any case: ah, for the chance to enjoy both sides of a debate. But maybe I'm perverse. Most people seem to want to root for a team; I usually find myself rooting for the game. (After all, it's not as though my opinion is going to effect the result.)

Culture partisan that I am, I find myself wondering plaintively why there aren’t people writing (commenting, etc.) at a similarly high level in the arts. Though Steyn does write well about the theater, and Fulford checks in with the occasional good piece about cultural matters…

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 5

Friedrich --

Another enticing front-page-of-the-NYTimes-arts-section headline:

* "London Stage, a Social Mirror"

Well, I'm sure curious to find out more!

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 4

Friedrich --

The Times shows its usual lighthearted, companionable touch with arts coverage today. The two headlines on the front page of the Arts section:

*"The Information Age Processes a Tragedy"
*"Music Rivalry and Revelry Both Serving Irish Culture"

Inside, fans get to read "Singing About Frustration, Some Strain, No Self-Pity," and "A Midnight Rendezvous With bin Laden."

The arts as a grim burden -- that'll draw in the crowds.

Best,

Michael

If I Were an Editor 1

Friedrich --

If I were editing a mainstream news publication, I'd be running lots of coverage of immigration topics right now. The subject couldn't be more timely, what with anxiety about airplanes, Muslims, borders, Mexicans, etc.

It's bizarre that the topic doesn't get covered regularly and widely all the time. Who, how many, on what basis? What kind of effect are they having on the country? Shouldn't such questions be openly and easily discussed? (If controlling the borders isn't one of the half-dozen main things a government should be responsible for, I don't know what is.) Making it next-to-impossible to discuss immigration rationally has been another victory for the Left's thought-police.

Say, you don't think that political bias on the part of news people (along the lines of "thinking about, let alone raising the topic of, immigration"="being anti-immigrant"=racist) has had anything to do with the fact that immigration gets so little coverage, do you? But, heck, maybe it's just an innocent oversight; maybe journalists just aren't as smart, perceptive, and tuned-in as I am.

If you're in a mood for some freewheeling, feisty thinking about immigration, I know of a couple of sites worth exploring. Are you man enough to wrestle with Steve Sailer, here? Let alone the Vdare crowd, here?

Sorry to report that I waited too long to see "The Scarlet Diva." Its run lasted less than a week here in NYC. What's happened to the cult movie audience?

Best,

Michael

War on PBS

Friedrich --

Do you watch PBS? I haven't much in years. "Mystery" series, evenings at the Pops, fundraisers, "Three Tenors"-style concerts, solemn battle-oppression P.C. documentaries about atrocities, feel-good P.C. documentaries about ethnic groups -- who watches this stuff? And why should tax dollars go to paying for it?

I choose an evening's PBS programming at random from this week's schedule:
*Nightly Business
*NewsHours with Jim Lehrer
*Evening at Pops
*A documentary, "Growing Up Global"
*A documenary about four nuns raped in killed in El Salvador

The boring worthiness of it all. Plus the always-nagging question: is any of this something that can't be gotten from commercial channels?

Although, in fairness, I did enjoy PBS's recent Richard Brookhiser documentary about George Washington. (David Gergan interviews Brookhiser here.) And, in fairness too, I could be as easily rid of HBO -- an ongoing stream of all the dumb movies I'm happy to avoid -- as PBS. But HBO's part of my cable-modem package.

Let's see: if we de-fund PBS now, no one would notice. What's your favored plan for upgrading the legal system?

Sometime soon: I declare war -- in the name of the arts -- on the NEA.

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 3

Friedrich --

The arts, ever under siege -- at least according to the New York Times's "Arts" section. Two of the section's front-page headlines today:

* "Water and Woe For the Czechs' Cultural Gems"
* "Radio City and the Rockettes Reach a Labor Agreement"

How would the arts survive at all in this vicious world if it weren't for the Times?

Best,

Michael

Times passes, art changes

Friedrich --

I just killed a little time reading a magazine cover story (by Joe Morgenstern) from 1970 about Barbra Streisand. (Not someone I'm prone to think much about.) It was lovely -- evocative, intelligent, knowledgeable about acting, movies and music while being modest about how much can really be said about how and why something works and something else doesn't. Brainy, unpretentious, and full of feeling. A civilized pleasure.

Darn it, what happened to all that? I get depressed from time to time by the fact that the art, media and entertainment worlds have changed so much from what they were when I got interested in them. These days I'm often not just uninterested in them, I recoil from them. They seem like (almost) completely different creatures from what they once were, all about product, packaging, business, effects, personalities -- pure aggression, in other words, with the only alternatives seeming to be, yawn, politics or a kind of dreary, attitude-copping self-expression.

Who cares? Generally speaking, not me. "I might as well have gotten an MBA," is what tends to run through my brain at such (unfortunately not-rare) moments.

Is this unique to the last 30 years? Was there that dramatic a sea change in the nature of art-and-entertainment during the previous couple of decades? Am I just getting old and running out of gas?

Best,

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines 2

Friedrich --

The NYTimes Arts section today goes four-for-four -- all, repeat all, of the headlines on the front page of the section are self-serious protest classics:

1. "It's Gloves-Off Time for an Angry Arthur Miller"
2. "Not Just Singing, but Soul-Baring Too"
3. "Party for Zora Neale Hurston, Obscure No More"
4. "Actors in Ellis Island Show Vote, 7 to 1, to Join Union"

...I was thinking of making some comments here about the Times' vision of of what art is (apparently a civil-rights fist shaken, in the name of justice and self-expression, in the face of oppression), and about how, if that's what art really were, I'd have no big interest in it. But I'll spare you.

Best

Michael

Times Arts Frownlines I

Friedrich --

One of the few reasons I still look at the NYTimes is because I'm so fond of the way the newspaper tries to turn the arts into a day-to-day matter of intense social concern. The effort it must take to continue strong-arming readers in this way! Here's the frownline, er, headline of one of today's leading arts articles:

"Young Musicians Granted a Respite From War's Curses."

Gotta love it!

But maybe the editors are cynical and are just playing to their audience. Maybe the editors have a macro key on their keyboards that spits this stuff out, endlessly recombining such words as "oppression," "youth," "spirit," "war," and "protest."

Best,

Michael