a fool in the forest

"What Did You Expect From an Opera? A Happy Ending?"

In our freshly dismal economy, no one in the Arts game is having any fun.  This morning's Los Angeles Times fronted a story on the dire straits of the region's arts institutions.  Among the most notable recent casualties and developments:

• Orange County's Opera Pacific has canceled the remainder of its 2008-2009 season, and after 22 seasons appears likely to disappear entirely.  As Tim Mangan reported in the OC Register, the company has eliminated virtually its entire staff and has placed its headquarters, "a large warehouse structure [with] almost 20,000 square feet of office, rehearsal, shop and storage space, " up for sale. 

On the Register Arts Blog, Tim suggests San Diego Opera, 70 miles south, as an alternative for opera-starved Orange Countyites.  I would counter with a reminder that Long Beach Opera is even closer and has a really interesting season coming up.  (Assuming, of course, that LBO survives when Opera Pacific has not.)

• Down the block from my office, the Pasadena Symphony and Pasadena Pops have been canceling performances and terminating executives right and left, all the while searching for a few spare millions to salvage their season.

• Meanwhile, in Manhattan, the New York Times reports this afternoon that the much anticipated (or in some circles dreaded) arrival of Gerald Mortier from Paris to take command of the perpetually struggling New York City Opera has come a-cropper over NYCO's inability to deliver the funding Mortier had been promised.  In proper Gallic style, Mortier was simultaneously gracious and insulting in announcing his decision to withdraw:

Speaking from his apartment in Ghent, Belgium, Mr. Mortier said he decided to resign when it became clear that the board would not give him the money needed to produce a meaningful slate of opera productions.  He said that from the start he had been promised a budget of $60 million, a number even mentioned in his contract.  But the board was prepared to approve only $36 million, he said, not much more than the basic fixed costs of running the company, leaving him little room for innovative productions. 

'I told them with the best will I can’t do that,' Mr. Mortier said. 'I cannot go to run a company that has less than the smallest company in France.'  Mr. Mortier is in the final year of running the Paris National Opera, which has a budget closer to $300 million. 'You don’t need me for that,' he said.

• No Age of Artistic Anxiety would be complete without a dollop of inexplicable government action, and our outbound President is there to do his part.  President Bush announced this week that he has appointed patriotic country singer Lee Greenwood to the National Arts Council:

Lee Greenwood's main claim to fame is writing and singing the hit patriotic hymn "God Bless the U.S.A."  Soon Greenwood's blessing will matter on the American arts scene -- at least the part interested in tapping into federal largess via grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.  Appointed by President Bush and confirmed by the Senate, the Nashville-based country singer is scheduled to be sworn in Nov. 17 as one of the 14 regular members of the National Council on the Arts.  Council members advise the NEA chairman, and their portfolio includes reviewing and making recommendations on applications for grants from the $145-million-a-year federal agency.  Greenwood will serve a six-year term. 

Greenwood will be the only Bush appointee to the Council whose term will last through the first Obama administration.  I suppose the President's choice of Greenwood makes at least as much sense as Governor Schwarzenegger's recent appointment of Bo Derek as a member of the California Horse Racing Board.  (What? Was Cloris Leachman unavailable?  For either position?)

~~~

Photo: "Tragedy on the [Paris] Opera" by Flickr! user bristley, used under Creative Commons license.
Post title courtesy of B. Bunny.

Music for Money, Symphonic Division[with special guest: Leopold!]

Gimme a country where I can be free;
Don't need the unions buryin' me.
Keep me in exile the rest of my days,
Burn me in hell, but as long as it pays:

Art for art's sake;
Money for God's sake . . . .

-- 10cc, "Art For Art's Sake" (1975)

Tim Cavanaugh, writing on the Opinion L.A. weblog earlier this week, posted an odd little item drawing on a 2005 survey that purported to identify the ten most financially successful orchestral composers.

George Gershwin, the sole American, heads up the list -- which is unsurprising but seems slightly unfair, given that his financial success was much more dependent on his masterful popular songs than on, say, the Concerto in F.  Italians are well represented (Verdi, Rossini, Puccini and Paganini all make it) as are Germans/Austrians (Johann Strauss, Handel, Haydn) and Russians (Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff).  The French are shut out.

Cavanaugh notes the survey not for aesthetic reasons but for the light it may shed on relations between free markets and classical music:

Why is this interesting (to me at any rate)?  Because longhair music is pretty much universally recognized as an art form that can't compete in an open market and must be supported through royal or (these days) public patronage.  Yet this list is remarkable for the lack of patronage its members enjoyed.  All but two of the composers on the list date to the industrial revolution or afterward, and the two who came earlier than that — Haydn and Handel — did plenty of lucrative for-profit work in Britain, which boasted the most liberal economy in Europe.  Verdi, Rossini and Puccini were all piece-work producers who were less interested in pleasing the royal ear than in filling up the house with paying customers.  Paganini and 'Waltz King' Strauss were expert self-promoters and brand builders, Rachmaninoff made much of his fortune on recordings and performances, and Gershwin made it to the top of the list strictly by producing music for a large popular audience.  I'm not sure he ever got a dime of public support.

More interesting to me than the libertarian economics is Cavanaugh's use of "longhair" to refer to Western classical music.  That was formerly a settled usage -- hifalutin' intellectuals had a reputation for flowing locks by the mid-19th century, and the term's specifically American use in connection with classical music seems to have originated in the 1930s -- but it fell out of fashion by the 1960's when long hair on men became a token of being one of Those Dirty Hippies who didn't much care for the classics but have since grown up and taken over the government.

So, harking back to that older usage, do I need any further excuse to offer up "Long-Haired Hare," a short documentary that takes us behind the scenes of Bugs Bunny's famous appearance with the Los Angeles Philharmonic during the 1948 Hollywood Bowl season?  No, indeed I do not:

Link-a-Dink Ado

Preparing for a whirlwind cross-country weekend -- to a conference in Florida and back again within 48 hours or so, no doubt to feel on my return as though I had yet to depart -- is as good an excuse as any to post a few otherwise unrelated links:

• I have added a pair of new or newish weblogs to the lists at the left.  Each is focused on music, art, culture, etc., in Los Angeles and environs, and each approaches the subject with a touch more focus and serious commitment than I bring to bear.

• Out West Arts first came to my attention at the beginning of the month with a post on unexpected tension and violence in the concert hall:
  

  This isn’t the first time that I’ve seen classical music produce this reaction.  Last year I saw a fist-fight break out in the same hall in a crowd overwhelmed with brotherhood after hearing Beethoven’s Ninth (also with Salonen) and two years ago I saw a man threaten to kill another over a slight the latter had made to the former’s wife in the lobby of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion during the intermission of Der Rosenkavalier, of all things.  Maybe a dwindling audience for classical music isn't such a bad thing if we can just select who specifically gets dwindled in the transaction.

  Since then OWA proprietor Brian has attended the 3-night version of the LA Philharmonic Tristan Project, his reactions moving from awestruck speechlessness through quoting a prototypically outré Peter Sellars program note before subsiding in a more voluble but no less awestruck final assessment. 

• I have the full-opera version of the Project on my own agenda for next Tuesday, and will no doubt post reactions here as part of my recovery regimen.  Meantime, I've been doing my homework by reading up on Tristan in Ernest Newman's classic text on The Wagner Operas.  It surprises me that this is the first time I have actually read that book, as my parents have had a copy on their bookshelf for literally as long as I can remember.

NPR's All Things Considered did a story on The Tristan Project last week.  I did not hear it, but the online version of the piece includes teensy-tiny streamable excerpts from Bill Viola's accompanying videos.

• FineArtsLA.com is a freshly launched project of "freelance writer and arch-dilettante Christian M. Chensvold," who is also a participant in Dandyism.net, a site devoted to precisely that. 

In the brief existence of FALA.com, the high point is unquestionably the long, salty interview with music critic Alan Rich, formerly of both Time and Newsweek (when High Art was still in their portfolio) --

AR: I was the last classical writer for Newsweek.  In 1987 I was in Houston covering the world premiere of John Adams’ 'Nixon in China.'  I filed my story, and got a phone call an hour later: They were killing it for a Bruce Springsteen feature.

-- and now of the LA Weekly.  Mr. Rich is at least as put out as I am over the excessive quantities of Puccini being programmed by LA Opera.

• John Crowley was already thinking about fictional ends of the world just in time for the writer's passing to give him cause to point up the artfulness of Kurt Vonnegut at his best:

I still insist students read 'Cat's Cradle' if they want to find out how to shape a story that is in effect over when it starts -- how to arrange the elements of a story that even its narrator knows the ending of. . . .   It was in a Vonnegut book that I first read that great humanist/atheist/ dunnoist paradox I live by:  The universe is a safe with a combination lock, and the combination of the lock is locked inside the safe.

• For your more folksy freaksy listening pleasure, via the POPTONES MP3 BLOG, the opening track from Relatively Clean Rivers, described by the Record Geek weblog as

  A very California record, this is full of lots of wide open spaces, jangly acoustic-guitar folk-rock tapestries, twangy, reverbed, Garcia-like electric leads, reedy vocal harmonies, and extended songs that achieve a stoned, dreamy feel....  I've read that only 500 copies were originally made and [leader Phil] Pearlman 'distributed' many of those just by discreetly depositing them around college campuses and record stores unannounced.

  A loose-limbed sublimity prevails:

• Relatively Clean Rivers - Easy Ride [MP3 link]

From the same source, for those who prefer the ridiculous to the sublime, might I recommend erstwhile gentleman's gentleman and Winnie-the-Pooh narrator Sebastian Cabot's recitation of "Like a Rolling Stone"?  How did that feel, Mr. Zimmerman?

Whatever your tastes, enjoy your week's end.

Why I Will Never Again Speak Ill of Harvard

One never knows what will turn up in the referrer logs, and this afternoon delivers a real treat.

Professor Harry S. [Terry] Martin III, who teaches the Art Law Seminar at, ahem, the Harvard Law School, maintains a list of Art/Law links and has graciously included this weblog among them.  (It is an interesting list for anyone interested in the interaction of art and law.  There are a number of sites linked that I have not previously encountered, and at which I will certainly be taking a look in short order.)

The link is certainly welcome, but I must confess that Professor Martin has given this Fool rather more credit than is strictly deserved.  Share my blushes at his description (emphasis added):

A fool in the forest - Influential blog among lawyers and cultural enthusiasts emphasizing art and culture with occasional law notes

Mercy! 

Of course, the professor doesn't specify that I'm a good influence . . . .

Buzz Cuts and Bedrooms and Byrne

The weekend is upon us, and that is as good an excuse as any to look at music forthcoming from two tuneful laborers in relative obscurity mentioned here previously:

The Singleman Affair

In a January post about his band Hummingbiird, I mentioned Chicago musician Dan Schneider in his role as "The Singleman Affair" and the fact of his recent signing to the UK Poptones label.  [The good folk at Poptones even saw fit to quote that post on the label's site.  I bear no ill will over their not quite getting the name of this weblog right.]

I checked back this week on the upcoming release of the Singleman Affair album -- it's due out on July 17 -- and found another reason to look forward to it.  Originally posted in mid-March on the Poptones site, here is an airy, echoing and altogether effective recording of The Singleman Affair covering a classic Tim Buckley tune:

• The Singleman Affair - Buzzin' Fly [Tim Buckley cover] [MP3 link]

Bedroom Walls

Back in March of 2004, I praised the "Romanticore" stylings of Los Angeles' own Bedroom Walls; later that year I recommended the band's now-unavailable EP, "A Species of Idleness."  Many moons later, the band's second full-length release, All Good Dreamers Pass This Way, is scheduled to come out next week.  (I've gone ahead and preordered a copy for myself.) 

All Good Dreamers... is mostly new material but also includes one of the highlights of the Walls' self-released first album ("Do the Buildings and Cops Make You Smile?"), some longstanding fixtures of the Walls repertoire hitherto not issued in studio versions ("In Anticipation of Your Suicide" and "Who's Been Driving Around for Days" were both included in the band's on-air KCRW performance in December 2003) and one of the "bonus" tracks from the "Idleness" EP, the woozily affectionate "Hello Mrs. Jones."

When I last mentioned Bedroom Walls, I quoted a lyric about being "stuck inside with your books and your sad songs."  The line comes from "Your Idea of a Holiday," a song that I quite like and that the band has since seen fit to make available for download on their MP3 page and that also follows this next punctuation mark:

• Bedroom Walls - Your Idea of a Holiday [MP3 link]

Bonus Think Piece
[That's a subject sub-heading, not the name of a band.]

Increasingly, I purchase Popular Music by download rather than physical CD, and my major recurring complaint with downloadable music is the absence of the sort of supporting information and graphical goodies that are incorporated in physical packaging: LP sleeves and CD insert booklets and the like.  No less an eminence than David Byrne has some thoughts on the subject in his online journal.  Excerpts:

There are those who mourn the vanishing of the nice big cardboard packages that vinyl came in.  The format allowed fairly large images, credits, and photos.  The usual assumption is that much of this imagery, like music videos, is a reflection of, and extension of, the music creator’s sensibility.  As if the packaging and the videos were usually under the direct control of the author.  This is absurd. . . .

. . . Our sense of the author and the music being represented and embodied graphically is imaginary.  We see the music and its package as all of a piece.  This of course is what good packaging does. Salty snacks and washing detergents are sold mostly based on their brightly colored packaging.  Most people don’t make this assumption about books — we don’t assume that the cover of a book is a visual representation of the writing, as imagined by the author, but with music we sometimes do make this leap.  Hence the love of LP sleeves… and even CD booklets.

I imagine that record companies in the 60s realized that selling to a new market — one that saw itself as hip beyond the generic record sleeves then prevalent, a new demographic who saw itself as outside and distinct from the mainstream — would require some new approaches to design.  They, the record companies, realized that to make a credible product for this reluctant market the inclusion of the bizarre and funky imagery made by their graphic pals was probably essential.  In addition, the music artists themselves began to demand control over their own sleeves, when they realized that they could.

The post goes on for quite a bit beyond that, covering a broad range of related subjects, and ends with quite an optimistic view of the expansive 'packaging' possibilities of the downloadable future.  [Link via Coolfer.]

• Bonus Bonus: Another thoughtful Byrne post from earlier in the month on photography, expectations of privacy in public places, importing imagery from one medium to another and, above all, how "the law changes what people create."

Enjoy the weekend.

Alfred the Butler Tends to His Gardner

"The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne"

    -- Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowles, ln. 1

Matthew Perpetua's FLUXBLOG is usually a pretty-darned-good MP3 weblog, but Matthew recently took a moment to indulge his fondness for The Art of the Comic with a nod [here] to

[Michael Allred's] brilliant 'Batman A-Go-Go!,' an ambitious story that makes a strong case for the upbeat, flamboyant Batman of the 60s over the dreary, oppressive Batman of the past twenty years.  The story is as much about Batman's cultural evolution as it is about Allred's pro-joy philosophy of art.  He totally nails it on this page [also accessible by clicking the excerpted detail at right], as Alfred Pennyworth challenges the popular notion that the only valid depiction of reality in art is ugly and relentlessly negative.

The treat here, for me, is the notion that Stately Wayne Manor contains, if only in the butler's private library, a copy of the late John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, an imperfect but worthy book that I make it a point to revisit every few years.  Gardner was last mentioned here in connection with the operatic adaptation of his novel, Grendel; I have held Gardner's writing in high regard since I first read that book over 30 years ago.

On Moral Fiction is frequently criticized by people who have never read it, not unlike Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind (though Gardner's book has never sold remotely the number of copies as Bloom's).  Gardner held strong opinions and, as strongly opinionated persons will, not always with basis in fact. 

A good portion of the book is taken up with clouting various of Gardner's contemporaries in the fiction game about the head and shoulders for their sins.  Many of those writers are hardly heard of anymore -- meaning either that Gardner was right or that he was wasting his time critiquing minor practitioners.  Of the writers who still appear on the lit'ry radar, Gardner got it wrong as often as he got it right.  Broad swaths of his critique of John Barth are unjustified, to take a prominent example, and he is much too harsh on Thomas Pynchon.  His essential premise, however, was sound and while it may not be the only commendable way in which to approach the writing of fiction, it is certainly one of the most commendable.

As Gardner acknowledged at the time, he let himself in for no end of trouble when he elected to incorporate the M-word -- "MORAL" -- into his title.  Well before the book was first published in 1979, "morality" had come to be seen as the province of prudes and self-important puritanical sorts, and any number of well-read readers had developed a near-allergic reaction to the very idea that the moral and the immoral were worth identifying and separating from one another.  Gardner never held a brief for puritanism (despite his own chronic inability to write a credible sex scene).  His notion of The Moral had more in common with The True and The Beautiful than with Conventional Right Thinking or Good Behavior.  (Alfred's comic-book synopsis above is a major oversimplification.)

In a long posthumously published interview with The Paris Review, downloadable [38 pages, in PDF format] from this page, Gardner gave one of his better thumbnail statements of what he was on about:

INTERVIEWER:   
You've recently had essays appear on the subject of what you call 'moral fiction' and 'moral criticism.'  Some readers might have trouble with the word 'moral.'  Could you explain what you mean by 'moral?'  The word, as you've acknowledged, has pejorative implications these days.

GARDNER: 
I know.  It shouldn't.  I certainly don't mean fiction that preaches.  I'm talking mainly -- though not exclusively -- about works of fiction that are moral in their process.  That is to say, the way they work is moral.  Good works of fiction study values by testing them in imagined/real situations, testing them hard, being absolutely fair to both sides.  The real moral writer is the opposite of the minister, the preacher, the rabbi.  Insofar as he can, the preacher tries to keep religion as it always was, outlawing contraceptives or whatever; his job is conservative.  The writer's job on the other hand, is to be radically open to persuasion.  He should, if possible, not be committed to one side more than the other  -- which is simply to say that he wants to affirm life, not sneer at it -- but he has to be absolutely fair, understanding the moral limits of his partisanship.  His affirmation has to be earned.  If he favors the cop, he must understand the arguments for life on the side of the robber.

INTERVIEWER: 
What would be 'immoral' fiction?

GARDNER: 
Mainly, fiction goes immoral when it stops being fair, when it stops trusting the laboratory experiment.  You lie about characters, you make people do what you want them to do.  This is characteristic of most hot-shot writers around now.  I would agree with people who get nervous around the word 'morality,' because usually the people who shout 'immoral' are those who want to censor things, or think that all bathroom scenes or bedroom scenes or whatever are wicked.  That kind of morality is life-denying, evil.  But I do think morality is a real thing that's worth talking about....

[Gardner completists will want to visit the John C. Gardner Appreciation Page, which includes a reproduction of a business card he used while a Visiting Professor at the University of Detroit in the early '70s -- "medievalist, novelist, banjoist, lyric and epic poet - consultant on all subjects" -- and an annotated map [PDF] of Batavia, New York, Gardner's birthplace and the setting for The Sunlight Dialogues, which appears to have fallen out of print.]

In On Moral Fiction, the one of his contemporaries for whom Gardner reserved the most praise was John Fowles, who died earlier this month at the age of 79.  Alan Sullivan's post was the first to bring Fowles' passing to my attention; a good collection of Fowlesian links can be found, naturally, at The Elegant Variation.  Most of the obituaries for Fowles focus on The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman (which gives the obituarists the added bonus of another opportunity to drop a curtsy to Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter, who wrote the screenplay for the film version), but Gardner favored Daniel Martin, which was just being published at the same time as On Moral Fiction.  Daniel Martin was Fowles' attempt -- successful in my view -- at the old-fashioned Serious Novel of Character and Ideas, and is notable for the excellence of its descriptions of nature and for the lengths to which Fowles goes, without ever resorting to cheap plot trickery, to keep his two principal characters out of one another's beds until very near the end of its pages.  Daniel Martin's opening sentence would be a good summation of the goal of Gardner's "moral" writer:

WHOLE SIGHT; OR ALL THE REST IS DESOLATION.

Les Femmes Savantes

I'm looking for a hard headed woman,
One who will make me do my best,
And if I find my hard headed woman
I know the rest of my life will be blessed -- yes, yes, yes.

-- Cat Stevens [Yusuf Islam]

The DRUDGE REPORT linked a story this morning from The Independent, profiling one of the suspected London bombers -- that story is here for those who are interested -- and reproduced the paper's front page, shown at right. 

This weblog is likely not your primary source for news concerning the Global War on Terror -- if it is, you are setting yourself up for disappointment -- but it is a not-infrequent source of items concerning Camille Paglia.  (E.g., the concluding item here.)  And there she is, friends, high atop Page 1 of today's Independent, taking issue with BBC Radio 4's recent "Greatest Philosopher" poll -- in which Karl Marx tops such relative lightweights as Hume, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and some dusty Greeks of No Importance -- for producing an all-male outcome.  Professor Paglia is prepared to correct the Beeb's error with her own list of "Ten great female philosophers: The thinking woman's women". 

Being Professor Paglia, of course, she can't resist some overarching commentary on the state of the discipline:

It has become tiresome to constantly blame every blip in women's lives on sexism and discrimination by men.  Today's lack of major female philosophers is not due to lack of talent but to the collapse of philosophy.  Philosophy as traditionally practiced may be a dead genre.  This is the age of the internet in which we are constantly flooded by information in fragments.  Each person at the computer is embarked on a quest for and fabrication of his or her identity.  The web mimics human neurology, and it is fundamentally altering young people's brains.  The web, for good or ill, is instantaneous.  Philosophy belongs to a vanished age of much slower and rhetorically formal inquiry.

Today's philosophers are now antiquarians.

Classical Glass [updated]

I did not become aware until after the fact that Canyonlands National Park, at a far remove from any of the parts that we managed to visit last week, includes The Great Gallery in Horseshoe Canyon, where one can find the mysterious fellows pictured to the right.  They and the entire Canyonlands region -- including the Goosenecks of the San Juan River, inadvertently omitted from yesterday's inventory -- feature prominently in Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass' 1983 Koyaanisqatsi, which turned up as the subject of a post by AC Douglas while I was out. 

The Alex Ross New Yorker piece on film music to which ACD links is terrific.  In addition to the Koyaanisqatsi discussion, it includes an appreciation of Michael Giacchino's score for ABC Television's Lost, a score that demonstrates how much can be done with a very few notes when they are just the right ones.  Giacchino's range as a composer of dramatic music is impressive: he also contributed the best James Bond score never used in a Bond movie to Brad Bird/Pixar's The Incredibles, which should rank high on any list of that film's seemingly innumerable pleasures.

ACD offers Ross' essay -- I suspect he would offer much of Ross' work, including his weblog, The Rest Is Noise -- in refutation to "all those mutterings and auguries of doom I read recently in Big Media about the death of the professional arts critic in our new technology-created, democratic journalistic era in which anyone with access to the Internet can be an arts critic . . . ."  (I hopped atop that particular hobby-horse, as expressed rather sloppily by the Los Angeles Times, here.) 

The problem is not that top-notch professional arts critics have disappeared -- Alex Ross is only one of a comfortingly long list of examples of professionals writing regularly and strongly, even for major publications, on arts-related subjects -- as it is that their influence on the larger populace appears to have diminished.  The perception that "critics don't matter," whether right or wrong, drives publishing decisions and in many cases has led to cutbacks in the space allotted to those critics, no matter how talented they may be, or limitations on the type of writing they are asked to contribute.  When is the last time anyone (other than perhaps Robert Hughes on the visual arts) published well-written, erudite criticism in Time magazine, for instance, a publication that formerly at least maintained the appearance that it was making an effort to provide something other than celebrity puffery in the "back of the book"?  The New Yorker, despite being more interested in politics these days than in the arts, flouts the trend somewhat, but do any of the New Yorker critics of today "make a difference" in the way that, say, Pauline Kael and Penelope Gilliat did with their film writing in the 70s?  Probably not, except to the already converted, e.g., those who already care a good deal about the sort of music that Ross writes about and who actively follow his writing because they know in advance that he will deliver the goods more often than not.  So, as good as Alex Ross is and as prominent a platform as the New Yorker provides for him, I am not so convinced as ACD that this single example entirely debunks the general grumping over the Sorry Lot of Professional Critics.

And in any case, those Canyonlands sure are impressive.  As is Koyaanisqatsi.

~~~

UPDATE [06/23/05]: No sooner did I invoke Robert Hughes above as an example of "well-written, erudite criticism" than up popped a case in point: a fine Hughes piece in the Guardian on the new Richard Serra installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao.  Hughes takes as his premise the modest suggestion that Serra is "not only the best sculptor alive, but the only great one at work anywhere in the early 21st century", and proceeds to support that assertion along these lines:

Now 65, Serra has embarked on a magnificent, productive maturity.  Put in the simplest terms - ones that Serra might find too simple, but never mind - his achievement has been to give fabricated steel the power and density, the emotional address to the human body, the sense of empathy and urgency and liberation, that once belonged only to bronze and stone, but now no longer does.  He has achieved a very deep synthesis, and it may not matter whether others follow him.  Once you are in the enormous Guggenheim gallery which these sculptures fill, once you are absorbed in their space and pacing out their convolutions, you feel suddenly free - far from the dead zone of mass-media quotation, released from all that vulgar, tedious postmodernist litter and twitter, from the creepy posturings, tired bad-boy claptrap and squalid sanctimony that characterise PoMo and BritArt.  It is quite a good feeling - rather like the old days, one's inner fogey is tempted to say.  The work is as new as new could be, but when you are experiencing it you may also think of an 18th-century definition of the spirit of classical sculpture: 'A noble inwardness,' wrote Johann Winckelmann, 'a calm grandeur.'  Eine edle Einfalt, eine stille Grösse.  Without the white gods, of course.

Elsewhere, Hughes cites Saint-Gaudens and Rodin, Bernini and Louis XIV, and an unnamed Greek philosopher.  He even offers some high-art gossip concerning Serra and Bilbao's architect Frank Gehry (which I hope does not offend ACD, a known and serious Gehry partisan):

The gallery [Serra's installation] occupies is the biggest in the museum - a vast room, some 430 ft long by 80 ft wide.  Paintings hung in it before, and they usually looked diminished by Gehry's architecture - sometimes to the point of silliness or near-invisibility.  But Serra's work dominates Gehry's space like a rhinoceros in a parlour.  (There's said to be considerable animosity between the two men; if that's so, one certainly knows, in this case, who the winner is.)

Above all, Hughes has the technical skills and the gift for tactile language (also apparent in Alex Ross) to make the reader "see" Serra's work, and to instill the desire to see Serra's work:

***The space inside, the gap between the walls, narrows, widens, breathes in and out (if you can speak of massive iron "breathing", which in Serra's work you can) and eventually rewards you with an inner chamber, from which you have to follow the same route out.  At all points these constructions are open to the upper air, the gallery roof (and hence the architecture of the gallery) or the sky.  But you can see out of them only by looking up, which doesn't really help you locate yourself.  You would think it would be claustrophobic, terrifying, to be in the narrow curving slot between these giant planes, to be unable to see what lies ahead.  Indeed, the fear of being crushed like a bug on an anvil has always been present in responses to Serra's work, a bass vibrato at the edge of consciousness.  But you have to trust him, or lose the work in its entirety.  There is just no way of experiencing these pieces by looking from the outside, or in photos, or on video: the initial view of them from the balcony above the Arcelor gallery is impressively dramatic, yet it's the merest pipe-opener to what unfolds close up and at floor level.

Lovely.  Read the whole thing, whether you are interested in Serra, interested in fine critical writing or, better yet, interested in both.  (Link via ArtsJournal.)

P.S.,  I had thought for a moment that I might draw a full-circle connection between Richard Serra and Philip Glass.  Alas, my memory tricked me: the documentary film for which Glass composed his North Star pieces back in 1977 -- the first Glass music I ever heard -- was not about Serra, but instead about another sculptor, Mark di Suvero.

[Incidental and deeply pointless music trivia: the title piece from "North Star" was later appropriated and worked into the finale of "Platinum" by, of all people, Mike "Tubular Bells" Oldfield.  Odd.]

Whoosh! Swish! Zap!

Too many shadows, whispering voices
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what?
How much have you got?
Have you got it, do you get it, if so, how often?
Which do you choose, the hard or soft option?

        -- Pet Shop Boys, "West End Girls"

~~~

Snipped and saved nearly a week ago, from a much longer piece by Michael Blowhard:

* * * As far as the media go, we're living in a very different state than people were only a few decades ago.  We no longer have three or four TV stations, but hundreds.  We no longer share top 40 radio; we can tune into tons of segmented music markets instead.  We no longer rely on a couple of dozen magazines, but are able to easily access hundreds and hundreds of publications, whether on paper or online.  Not to mention the web's infinite other temptations, and not to mention the kinds of design developments (spinning imagery, lotsa color, dancing typefaces, etc) that we like to keep track of on this blog.

This new media environment is great in one sense -- it's a media cornucopia!  But this new media environment also seems to play a hard-to-deny role in a lot of conditions many of us may not be crazy about: decreased reading, increased inability to think straight, kids who are jaded about everything by the time they're 12, the sexualizing of children, the degradation of culture generally.

An example: computers have enabled filmmakers to soup up movies.  The kind of movie rhetoric -- the kind of imagery and sound -- being presented to us in theaters these days is much richer than it was just a few decades back.  The imagery is so much swoopier and the sonics are so much ka-thumpier that many kids raised on these movies seem unable to see anything going on whatsoever in older movies.  They don't know what they're meant to be watching or listening to; old movies, however great, just seem dull to them.  Yet few people (aside, presumably, from such media-battered kids) would make the case that we're living in an era of good movies.

Jon Hastings, who appears to have returned to more active posting at The Forager Blog, nicely synthesizes M. Blowhard's commentary with other recent "too many choices" items from around the cultural weblogging neighborhood.  I'd offer to do the job myself, but I must be going . . . .

No Meme Is An Island [Updated] [Twice]

This pesky little parlor game -- often referred to in the literature as "The Stick" -- has been circulating like a dubious sawbuck on a rotisserie for something like two months now -- a Technorati search for one of its distinctive terms (the crush on a fictional character) yields more than 2300 results -- but it did not come to me until it was referred by Our Lady of Longhorns, Cowtown Pattie.   I'm not really one for such party tricks, especially being such a late comer to the project, but I was also raised with good manners and so cannot say "no" when a proper lady poses a question.  So . . . here we go:

1. You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?

A.S Byatt's Possession: A Romance. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll fall in love all over again in your choice of eras, you'll drink your fill of Victorian poetry pastiche and faerie tales, it climaxes in a storm in a graveyard, and there is even an heroic solicitor in it.  Who could ask for more?

2. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

You bet I have.  Josh Corey, responding to this question over a month ago,  mentioned Emma Thompson as Beatrice in Kenneth Branagh's film of Much Ado About Nothing.  Ms. Thompson is a near-perfect embodiment of that character, as was Kathleen Widdoes in the less well known 1973 New York Shakespeare Festival version (opposite young Sam Waterston's Benedick).  Those performances are merely the fleshing out of a fictional person I have been stuck on since I first encountered her.  While I dote on Shakespeare's Beatrice, Dante's Beatrice would be out of the question: there is probably a special circle reserved for anyone who would presume to a "crush" on her.  Other examples of crushworthy fictions: Anne Elliot in Persuasion, Jennet Jordemayne in The Lady's Not for Burning, Cyrano de Bergerac's Roxanne (who doesn't deserve it, so perhaps I'm just feeling sympathetic to Cyrano's own plight).  And many more! 

Chris Lott got the answer to this one exactly right:

If you haven’t [had a crush on a fictional character], then you either need to start reading books that don’t have any pictures . . . or give up on the enterprise altogether.  Maybe reading’s just not for you.  Double points off if you’ve only had crushes on television and/or movie characters.

3. The last book you bought was...?

Ordered but not yet received: Jack Gilbert's Refusing Heaven.

Pre-ordered simultaneously: Mark Helprin's forthcoming Freddy and Fredericka.

4. The last book you read was...?

Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities, but it doesn't really count because I only read it so that I could discuss it with my son who has to read it for a college course.

On my own initiative, the last book I completed was Gene Wolfe's The Wizard.

5. What are you currently reading?

Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn.

6. Five books you would take to a desert island...

• Every participant seems to opt for either the Bible or a collected Shakespeare as Choice #1, and I'm no different.  Shakespeare it is.  I would opt for A.L. Rowse's out of print Annotated Shakespeare, but each one has his or her favorite edition.

• A good edition of the collected English poetry of John Donne, because the spectrum from sacred to profane shines within it; also, he wrote that poem about not being an island, which would be good to read whilst being on an island.

• Moby-Dick, because it really does contain nearly as much as the aforementioned Shakespeare, and because the whale is nearly as large as an island;

• I'm stuck on a desert island, so I also select Robinson Crusoe, for the obvious reason that it is about being on a desert island and because a fictional character -- the butler, Gabriel Betteridge, in Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone -- recommends it in terms that are hard to resist:

Such a book as Robinson Crusoe never was written, and never will be written again.  I have tried that book for years - generally in combination with a pipe of tobacco - and I have found it my friend in need in all the necessities of this mortal life.  When my spirits are bad - Robinson Crusoe.  When I want advice - Robinson Crusoe.  In past times, when my wife plagued me; in present times, when I have had a drop too much - Robinson Crusoe.  I have worn out six stout Robinson Crusoes with hard work in my service.  On my lady's last birthday she gave me a seventh.  I took a drop too much on the strength of it; and Robinson Crusoe set me right again.

[Quote found conveniently in this First Things article -- "The Strange Shipwreck of Robinson Crusoe" -- which emphasizes how little most folk know these days of the True Spiritual Nature of the Crusoe.]

• I am stymied in committing to a fifth choice: something visual [The Art Book, perhaps]?  Something humorous, such as Thurber?   Another long novel?  The pressure's too much; I can't commit.

7. Who are you passing this stick on to and why?

I bequeath and bestow this here Stick upon the following, in perpetuity or until such time as they bid this stick pass from them:

• To escapegrace, because she is Los Angeles' newest culturally interesting weblogiste, freshly transplanted from New York, and because each and every one of you should click through immediately and give her your attention;

• Jointly and severally, to Evan Schaeffer and David Giacalone, because not nearly enough lawyers have participated thus far -- and what a wonderful world it would be if more lawyers spent time on frivolous pursuits such as this one; and, of course,

• To my best chum Rick at Futurballa, because we share whenever possible and because, even though he's answered most of the questions already, no one has officially asked him to play, until just now.

My work here is done, citizens.

~~~

UPDATE [05/10/05]:  The moving Stick writes and having writ moves on.  Here are links to the responses of those to whom I passed it along:

• escapegrace [a responce just as interesting and eclectic as I suspected it woudl be]

• Evan Schaeffer [who -- tsk, tsk -- doesn't acknowledge the source from which the Stick came to him, but who earns further points with me for taking John Cheever's collected stories along to the island]

• Futurballa [Rick fetches the Stick for the second time.]

David, meanwhile, assures me through back channels that he is giving it a lot of thought; I can't hardly wait.

UPDATE 2 [5/14/05]: His disclaimers in the comments below notwithstanding, David Giacalone has done his duty and posted his responses.  As a bonus, there is Topless Shakespeare content, but I think it's safe for work.  [I'll be watching for that first Google hit looking for "topless Shakespeare."  Thanks for the opportunity, David!]