Archives for 2003

Just a reminder that Our Girl and I are separately swamped with deadlines and other similarly pressing stuff. (I just finished writing my drama column for this Friday’s Wall Street Journal, and I’ll be tied up with the National Book Awards throughout most of Wednesday.) Good things are in the pipeline, but it may be a day or two before we can get them up on the page. Check this space for details. We’ll be back!

I was thinking about Crossfire, a 1947 film noir with a dream cast (Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan and Gloria Grahame, thank you very much), when a synapse fired in my brain and I finally remembered something I’d always meant to post.

I took down Lee Server’s Robert Mitchum: “Baby, I Don’t Care” from my bookshelf, turned to the chapter about Crossfire, and there it was–a wonderful little “found poem” that Server stumbled across in the screenplay. It’s a list of the film’s settings, compiled for the use of the production department:

Int. Cheap Rooming House

Ext. Police Station

Int. Hotel Washroom

Ext. Park Bench

Int. Hamburger Joint

Int. Moviehouse Balcony

Int. Bar

Int. Ginny’s Bedroom

Int. Street of Cheap Rooming Houses

Has there ever been a pithier summary of what makes film noir noir?

It might just be a slowish week here at “About Last Night.” Our Girl is up to her elegant neckline in life-related for-profit activity, and I’m kind of busy myself. Yesterday I saw a four-hour-long play. Today I’ll be writing a non-theater piece for the Wall Street Journal (can’t say more, details to follow). Tomorrow I write my drama column for Friday’s Journal (I saw two really good shows and a stinker). Wednesday will be totally devoted to the National Book Awards. I vote on the nonfiction prize in the morning, then I’ve got to run home, put on a black tie, and go to the Big Fancy Dinner that evening. On Thursday I plan to see Master and Commander, and I’ll be checking into a rest home the following morning. (Just kidding.)

The point is that postings this week may possibly be sporadic and/or erratic. Or not. You never can tell around this joint. At any rate, I posted quite a few items in the past couple of days, including the latest on the Great Blogosphere Contretemps, about which infinitely more below–the air is full of links–so there’s no shortage of stuff to read.

Which reminds me: if the Great Blogosphere Contretemps has brought you to “About Last Night” today for the very first time, go here to read an old posting explaining who we are and what we do. Alternatively, you can browse the right-hand column, starting at the top. Either way, all will be made manifest.

Contrary to any impression you may have gotten from the newspapers, we’re glad you stopped by. Please come again–and bring a friend.

P.S. To those who inquired, my Wall Street Journal piece about the Looney Tunes Golden Collection is finished but not yet published. I’ll let you know when it hits. (And yes, I do have some fresh Top Fives up my sleeve. All I have to do is write them and code them and post them and love them….)

P.P.S. To those of you who’ve been running into me at parties and asking who Our Girl is, she is beautiful and mysterious and wanted in at least seven countries. That is all you know and all you need to know.

P.P.P.S. Our Girl is finally getting her very own e-mailbox, possibly as soon as this week! Watch this space for details.

Reports of my innocence have been greatly exaggerated.

But not out. It’s only a temporary thing–“it” being an angry swarm of deadlines that’s had me in solitary confinement all weekend. If I were a quarterback, this week would be a blitz, and I’m trying to do a little better than just throw the ball away. And I’m not yet quite out of danger of being sacked (strictly metaphorically speaking, I think). (Speaking of football, congratulations to the Edmonton Eskimos on winning the Canadian Football League’s storied Grey Cup, which, as Colby Cosh explains here, has it over the Lombardi Trophy for colorfully checkered history and sheer longevity: number XCI!)

I almost forgot to link to last week’s Washington Post appreciation of one of my favorite guilty pleasures, John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee crime novels. I discovered McGee some years ago when a friend brought The Long Lavender Look to my sick bed. I was skeptical, but the only alternative was my course reading, which was probably Fredric Jameson or some such thing. And the epigraph caught my eye:

When I play with my cat, who knows but that she regards me more as a plaything than I do her? –Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

The hook had grazed me. Twenty pages into the mystery proper, I was on the line for all twenty books in the series.

I even got Terry to read the McGee novels. He was not very impressed, but even his more discerning critical judgment was not enough to keep him from gobbling them up like so much buttered popcorn. Terry’s some fast reader; I think he gave over three or four days of his life to McGee, cursed me heartily, and moved on.

But I’ll never be done with McGee, and Jonathan Yardley’s piece gives a vivid sense of why this is. While the romanticized, impossible Travis “I bed at least one new girl every book, but I’m a highly principled gentleman” McGee may be a silly character (Parker would eat him for lunch), the plots of the novels give off the authentic whiff of mundane reality. They are Floridian through and through, revolving around prosaic real estate development schemes and small-time swindles. The book Yardley focuses on, The Dreadful Lemon Sky, is a very good choice. But you’re going to have to read all of them anyway, so why not take his advice and start at the beginning with The Deep Blue Good-By?

Felix Salmon, who knows infinitely more about blog-techy stuff than I, writes to suggest (rather emphatically) that Our Girl and I should “change [our] default settings on About Last Night and make links open in the same, not a new, window.” Felix has complicated reasons for making this suggestion, mostly relating to something called “tabbed browsing” about which I am deeply clueless.

It’d be easy enough to make the switch, but I’m not going to do it just because one (1) reader thinks it’d be a good idea. What say the rest of you? If you have an opinion, send it to us at “About Last Night” (with the phrase DEFAULT SETTING in the message field). OGIC and I will happily abide by your collective preference on this matter.

From Instapundit, who is referring to the Washington Post article about arts blogs which I discussed (and linked) here:

THE BLOGOSPHERE IS, LIKE, TOTALLY INBRED: Er, except that I haven’t ever heard of most of these blogs, which are nonetheless a big thing in their part of the sphere, I gather.

There are more things in the blogosphere, Jennifer Howard, than are dreamt of in your articles….

Er, you, too, Instapundit. For as this post reminds us, the “warbloggers” (i.e., the political bloggers who mostly sprang to life in the wake of 9/11) and the arts bloggers (i.e., Our Girl and I and all the other folks mentioned in Jennifer Howard’s article) don’t seem to overlap all that much. To be sure, there’s lots and lots more of them than there are of us. “About Last Night”‘s traffic has gone through the roof on the infrequent occasions when the warblogging sector of the blogosphere has taken note of our activities. But for the most part we arts bloggers go our own way quite happily, gradually building an audience of interested readers, some of whom also visit the warblogs (as I do) and some of whom don’t.

Meaning what? That many more people are interested in politics than art (surprise!). That it’s a big pool, with plenty of room for everybody. Above all, that the Web has the power to create and foster far-flung, widely dispersed “communities” of strangers with common interests–and to do it on the cheap.

Jeff Jarvis, who blogs at BuzzMachine, reported yesterday (in near-real time, no less!) on a speech given by Andrew Sullivan, one of the pioneer bloggers, to the Online News Association. Here are his notes:

What sets apart weblogs, [Sullivan] says, is economics: He talks about the economics of thoughtful journalism: The New Republic has never made money and loses more. The Nation doesn’t make money.

“And then I experienced blogging as an alternative. It staggers me to realize that last week, AndrewSullivan.com… is now reaching more people online than the magazine I used to edit, which is still losing… hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. That’s a big deal… We haven’t just made the economics of journalism cheaper…. We haven’t just lowered the barriers to entry to journalism, we’ve completely revolutionized it.”

“The overhead is minimal and the reach is almost infinite.”

The fact that Andrew Sullivan is English may be relevant in this connection. In the U.S., journalism came over the past half-century to be viewed as a “profession”–something you can’t do without formal training and, preferably, an academic degree. In Europe, it’s something that can be and is done by any literate person for whatever reason–to make money, to help shape the cultural conversation, even just for fun.

I think the second model makes more sense, and also makes for better, livelier journalism. Most newspaper and magazine editors disagree, and prior to the emergence of the blogosphere, they ran things. Now they don’t. Which might just be the most important thing about blogs: they have brought about a wholesale revival of “amateur” journalism, in the very best sense of the word.

That’s the lead–not that Instapundit hasn’t heard of Maud, or that Jennifer Howard thinks TMFTML is too snarky. This is new. And it matters. And you’re here.

Two readers write, apropos of my recent postings about Joan Kroc’s $200 million legacy to NPR.

The first is Cinetrix’ ‘Fesser:

I confess that I am ambivalent about this $200m gift. It seems to me as if a huge gift to the central NPR will only accelerate the homogenization of public radio. At the left end of the dial, NPR is a behemoth that squeezes out marginally alternative radio, leaving only the raggedy fringe of college stations. The certitude of hearing “Car Talk” and Scott Simon from coast to coast, while pleasant for homesick Bostonians, for a few moments at least, does not really offer a serious alternative to commercial media. NPR, the national organization, may raise the bar, but they lower the ceiling. In essence, the problem in my eyes is the replacement of small p, small r public radio with NPR. The difference is like that between coffeehouses and Starbucks.

Also, the contretemps of a few years ago over Christopher Lydon’s “Connection” revealed that the talent at Boston’s WBUR was making serious, six-figure money. I am reluctant to brown-bag it for a week so that I can pay for one of Tom and Ray’s cufflinks. I support public radio by throwing a few bucks to my favorite music station when I can, and I don’t feel too
guilty about listening to NPR when I want news. In any event, given the constant sponsor plugs and contests to win Apple iPods, Toyota Prii, or Pat Metheny tickets, the absence of Paul Harvey is the only way to tell you are not listening to AM news radio.

As for the Kroc gift, given the source of the money, it seems as if it would have been more appropriate for her to throw some cash to an organization that is trying to do something about the obesity epidemic in this country.

My second correspondent hails from the suburbs of Philadelphia:

I see you say that you don’t listen to classical music on the radio. I would greatly miss it.

In and around Philadelphia and Trenton, Mercer County Community College’s WWFM “empire” provides a terrific classical service. It has a network of translators and smaller stations that stretch from north of Easton, Pa. to Cape May. Much of its music is locally programmed and often non-hackneyed (the other day, during the afternoon, I heard David Diamond’s Violin Concerto No. 2). From 12-3 pm and midnight-6 a.m. they use Peter van de Graaf from Chicago’s marvelous WFMT (the best arts station in the U.S.) and he is a joy. Sure, he plays Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata and Ravel’s La Valse and other greatest hits, but he also plays French baroque opera, 20th-century Dutch minimalism, Swedish chamber music and all kinds of unusual repertoire and off-the-beaten track tidbits (did you know that Beethoven wrote an Andante and Variations for Mandolin and Harpsichord? I didn’t until PvdG played it). Last night at 3 a.m. (I work nights, sleep days) he played an entire one-act Rossini comic opera–what a treat and a real discovery for me! No, I had no idea what was going on; my Italian is a tad rusty. But the joy and effervescent delight that is Rossini came through clearly and really made my night.

I have over 2,000 classical CDs and a fine system to play them on, and I do often play them. But the radio has a spontaneity and excitement that I enjoy and I would miss the discoveries–things I would never hear any other way. I feel sorry that such listening opportunities are not available in so many places–so many potential classical fans may never hear the music.

They certainly won’t on NPR, either. In Philadelphia, the NPR outlet loves talk so much it REPEATS shows. They play Fresh Air at 3 and then again at 7. They repeat All Things Considered’s first 1/2 hour 2 hours later. There’s no room for music, but they can run reruns? NPR and its partner in crime, PBS, should be ashamed for their total retreat from the fine arts. Keep hounding them about it!

These two e-mails are variations on the same theme, and very much to the point of what public radio ought to be about, at least in my opinion. The operative word is “non-commercial,” which brings us back to my original posting. Public radio runs on subsidies–some direct, some indirect, some voluntary, some not. But its claim to any kind of subsidy, whatever the source, arises from its non-commercial character. To the extent that NPR allows its programming to be driven by purely commercial considerations, it violates that tacit “agreement” with the public.

Two other points are worth noting. As the ‘Fesser notes, non-capitalized “public radio” augments the fast-shrinking diversity of broadcast content in America, while NPR’s increasing emphasis on centralized talk-driven programming diminishes it. And my Philadelphia correspondent makes a point that simply hadn’t occurred to me, which is that one of the most important reasons to listen to classical music on the radio is the element of surprise. My own life as a working critic provides plenty of that, but those who aren’t at concerts and other performances five and six nights a week are in a different boat. Alex Ross said much the same thing in another context a few weeks ago when he wrote
to chide me for undervaluing the significance of BAM as “a filter for those who are baffled by the sheer superfluity of choices out there” (and yes, Alex, I know I owe you an e-mail!).

It may be that my correspondents are I are kicking against the pricks–that the centralizing forces to which terrestrial radio is being subjected are irresistible. It may also be that Web-based “radio” is the long-term alternative to the encroaching homogenization of the airwaves. And it’s puzzling that none of us has heretofore suggested that possibility. The genius of the Web is that it lowers the overhead for individuality. Hence blogging, which is nothing if not individual. If I weren’t having so much fun blogging (and weren’t so damn busy writing for profit), I might well be tempted to launch a Web-based radio station of my own…but don’t ask me!