John: Post-tree

Doug: I hope you got some sleep and are dug out, as it were.
As for audiences: I agree, sheep-like behavior masking a lack of conviction is bad however it’s manifested, and if today it’s manifested as automatic standing ovations, we’re agin ’em.
As for my hippie roots: I was never a real hippie, whatever my parents thought. I was too busy studying (or not) for my Ph.D. orals, writing my dissertation, going to the opera and rock concerts, doing radio programs, seeking love (or its carnal equivalent) and dancing with Ann(a) Halprin, tho some of those latter activities shaded into hippiedom. I admired the 60’s, I was swimming in the Berkeley variant of hippie culture, and so of course it had an impact on my sensibility –a profound impact. Which I make clear throughout “Outsider,” capping it off with the final article. I was always more a sex-drugs-and-rock-&-roll hippie than the harder-edged political variant into which the Free Speech Movement morphed under the weight of Vietnam and which prevailed on the East Coast. Northern California — in music and dance especially — shaped my ideas about the arts more than the trappings of the hippie lifestyle, which even then I found a little suspicious. In particular, Ann’s ideas about dance and Lou Harrison’s music made their mark. And the sweeping optimism of so much of that time’s rock. We all feel nostalgic about our youth, but the conjunction of the 60’s and my own youth was pretty heady.
(See my introduction to a forthcoming University of California Press book about the San Franciso Tape Music Center and also, from what I’ve heard, Janice Ross’s forthcoming book about Halprin.)
In looking over my selections for “Outsider” (and some will be thrilled, others daunted to learn that there’s material there for another 10 or 20 books of equal length, not that the clamor from readers or publishers has as yet become deafening), I’m surprised by how much dance there is from my California days. Maybe I was stacking the deck since I am now (for another three weeks) a dance critic. Maybe I wanted to beef up my dance bona fides. But there ere other, better explanations. I was a classical music critic then, and classical critics were expected to do dance. But I took to dance: its tactility appealed as a source for writing, and I really loved a lot of it (and was dancing myself, in Ann’s hippie-ish, naked way). In Los Angeles my boss, Martin Bernheimer, felt he should cover the big touring ballet premieres, but otherwise I had a pretty free rein. Conversely in music, I got mostly second-tier concerts, which seemed less interesting when it came time to pick what would be in “Outsider.”
Changing the subject: In my introduction I try to explain why I called this compilation “Outsider,” which has seemed odd at the outset to a number of readers, given my sequence of insider jobs at big-ticket institutions like the LA Times, the NYTimes and Lincoln Center. I offer various reasons, but I’m curious about your take on the last one. Have you given much thought to the question of how distanced a critic should be to those he/she reviews? Clearly there are advantages to being friends with artists, hearing them discuss their work from the inside, trying as hard as possible to dig deep into the assumptions and technicalities of a scene, trying to claim ownership of an artist by becoming his/her champion. My metaphor for that is Hanslick playing chamber music with Brahms. But there are also advantages to holding oneself aloof, to knowing as much as possible about the art and the artist but maintaining an “objective” (in quotes because of the inherent absurdity of that aspiration), outsider stance and trying to serve the art and the readers and your own aesthetic as well as the artists. Where do you come down on this distinction?