Archives for January 2004

First Captain Kangaroo, now Jack Paar. I guess this is what it means to be middle-aged, huh?

UPDATE: Tom Shales filed a first-rate appreciation of Paar on deadline for the Washington Post. Read it here.

I’m getting swamped with spam and suspicious-looking e-mail today, no doubt because of the virus that’s currently going around the Web. So if you should feel like sending me (or OGIC) an e-mail:

(1) Be sure to include a subject header, preferably one obviously relevant to this blog. I am deleting unopened all e-mail with nonexistent or inexplicable subject headers.

(2) No attachments, please, at least not for now.

(3) No, I don’t need a penis enlarger.

Thanks.

No more blogging today, alas. I have two deadlines-for-money, one of them frighteningly pressing, followed by a night at the ballet, and Our Girl is tied up in double knots.

Eat what’s here. We’ll put more in the dish tomorrow.

P.S. All sorts of folks in the right-hand column and elsewhere have been checking in with their own lists of comfort reading (or, in Maud’s case, discomfort). We’ll post a readers’ guide later in the week. Or you could just work your way down “Sites to See,” one cool blog at a time, and find out what you’ve been missing.

Lileks has a way of tossing off a trenchant little nugget of arts criticism right in the middle of a Bleat about something completely different. Like yesterday:

People talk about the golden age of television (grainy, overexposed hard-to-watch kinetescopes of big braying vaudevillians in drag) or the golden age of sitcoms (Mary Tyler Moore, All in the Family) and I suppose that’s correct. But TV today is better than TV ever was. There was never a show like “The Wire.” There was never anything as brutal and knowing as “The Office.” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” would have made no sense in 1967. It makes perfect sense today.

For the most part–with some exceptions–I think he’s right. But the exceptions are important, and worth remembering. It’s true that the Golden Age of Television was mostly Milton Berle and low-budget westerns and mysteries. But it was also Ernie Kovacs, An Evening With Fred Astaire, No

“Life grows more equable as one grows older; not less interesting, but I hope a little more impersonal. An old man ought to be sad. I don’t know whether I shall be when the wind is west and the sky clear.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, March 22, 1892

I just this minute got back from the Village Vanguard, where I heard a special one-night-only old-fashioned “battle of the bands” in which the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra (which plays there every Monday night) squared off against Bob Brookmeyer‘s Europe-based New Art Orchestra, in town for the annual International Association for Jazz Education conference. Only there wasn’t any battle, not really. The Vanguarders were on their mettle tonight, but Bob Brookmeyer is no ordinary bandleader.

He is–just to start with–the greatest living composer of music for big band. I don’t call it “jazz” because Brookmeyer’s music, though it’s certainly jazz, is in certain important ways something else as well. He is one of the very few jazz composers to have mastered large-scale form, and his pieces have an organic wholeness and flow usually found only in classical music. He is also a superlative valve trombonist whose blunt, burry tone and no-nonsense solos are as recognizable as the face of a friend. He leads the New Art Orchestra with the lucid gestures of a first-class symphony conductor (think Fritz Reiner, not Leonard Bernstein). As for the band itself, I don’t know when I’ve heard better ensemble playing from any group, regardless of idiom. These guys crackle and burn–elegantly.

Brookmeyer and the Vanguard go back a long way. “I’ve spent more time in this place than in some of my previous marriages,” he said wryly at the start of the first set. In fact, he put in a memorable stretch as music director of the Vanguard band starting in 1978, after Thad Jones moved to Europe, and did some of his best composing and arranging for the group (which returned the compliment tonight by playing his celebrated version of Hoagy Carmichael’s “Skylark”). But his earlier efforts, impressive though they remain, don’t hold a candle to what he’s writing now. At 74, Brookmeyer has pared away the thorny dissonances of his middle-period style. His music is simpler, more linear, unequivocally tonal–and full of joy. It’s the sort of development one sometimes runs across in the work of major artists as they grow older and strip their art down to the barest of essentials. That’s what happened to Matisse and Bartók in their old age, and it’s what’s happening to Brookmeyer now.

I’ll have to put my thoughts in better order tomorrow morning in order to write about the Brookmeyer band for my “Second City” column in this Sunday’s Washington Post. I hope that what I write will profit from a good night’s sleep and a bit of reflection. But I also wanted to post a few lines tonight, while I’m still bubbling over with the excitement that comes from having heard the kind of performance that reminds us critics of why we do what we do. And no matter how well my column turns out, it won’t be any more to the point than the one-line note scribbled on a cocktail napkin that a musician friend passed to me midway through the first set: “Colors are flooding down the walls.” That’s just what it sounded like.

A reader writes, apropos of my posting
on crowds at the Art Institute of Chicago’s “Manet and the Sea”:

An ex-student of mine is now a senior staffer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I ran into
him at the catastrophically crowded Da Vinci drawing show of last spring,
having just come from the much better crowd-managed blockbuster at MOMA
Queens. I none-too-gently asked him how the Met could have done such a
ruinous job of anticipating and managing the Leonardo mania. His theory:
Philippe [i.e., Philippe de Montebello, director of the Met] wanted it that way.

According to this gentleman, Philippe thought
it looked bad for the museum that the Jackie O fashion display should be
the
most crowded show of recent times, much more popular than the epic Vermeer
show alongside at the same time. It was thus in the Director’s interest
that an exhibit of “fine” art should also give the Met that appearance of
all the world wanting to see what it had to show. Crowds, publicity,
buzz,
all this for a hundred tiny pieces of paper from a long-dead Italian (when
was the last blockbuster drawing show?) – this at least was his theory.
Had
it been more managed, the appearance of popular frenzy would have been
much
less dramatic, his thinking went.

Whether true or not, the fact is the Leonardo show was the most egregious
example in my experience of body count burying art. The Met made it even
worse by encouraging the use of magnifying glasses, thus ensuring even
more
battles for the one favored viewing position that would end up blocking
everyone else. As you know, the Met hasn’t ticketed a blockbuster in
years,
and whatever we might think of the phenomenon itself, a ticketed
blockbuster
(assuming a reasonable allotment of tickets per hour) sure beats a
free-for-all.

That’s why I blog. How can I top a letter like this? The Italians have a saying: Si non e vero, e ben trovato (roughly, “If it’s not true, it ought to be”). Whether or not de Montebello really had such considerations in mind, consciously or otherwise, who can doubt that the Blockbuster Mentality permeates and contaminates the thinking of all similarly placed museum executives?

Once again, I’m not saying that All Blockbusters Are Bad. I am, however, saying something less clear-cut but more important: Bigger Isn’t Better. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, and the difference matters–a lot.

A reader writes:

I’ve been thinking about how you describe blogging and the Internet as the future of arts journalism. As a neophyte arts journalist who wants to make more money, I’m wondering: if what you say is true, how will arts journalists earn a living?

Short, easy, theoretically funny answer: don’t ask.

Serious answer:

(1) Most committed bloggers hope they’ll eventually find a way to make money off their blogs, whether by advertising or tip jars or fund-raising drives or premium-content subscription models or…whatever. That’s not quite as na