What, When and Where

So the other day I raised the question of what to watch, movie-wise. As I was hoping she would, Just Muttering has weighed in with some suggested flicks to see, augmented by a comment suggesting “Collateral” and “Mystic River.”

Another DevraDoWrite reader, after concurring with the preach-to-the-choir quality of “An Inconvenient Truth” and adding “Besides, it wasn’t as good as the hype — though it was good and I’m very glad it was made and is getting exposure,” pointed me to an article in The Los Angeles Times that gives rise to the questions of where to watch, and when. John Horn’s August 8 article, “Far Removed From the Multiplex” includes the following:

With an array of devices at their fingertips, youths don’t always think of theaters as the place to see a flick.

For decades, the movie business has followed an inflexible formula: Produce features, show them first in theaters, release them on video, then broadcast them on television. But what Gale observed — and what a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll of teens and young adults has found — is that Hollywood’s rickety model is poised to be torn apart.

With an array of devices competing to fill their leisure time, today’s teens and young adults show diminishing interest in adhering to Hollywood tradition. They’re willing to watch brand-new movies at home rather than in theaters, are starting to use their PCs as their entertainment gateway and are slowly turning to their iPods and cell phones for video programming.

They still crave to be entertained, but not necessarily inside a movie theater.

Now you know that I’m tired of the “youth market” usurping all the resources, and I’m not likely to want to watch a movie on my cell phone or iPod, but there are some ramifications of this that might bode well for the grownups…and some that might not.

Chris Anderson is getting a lot of press these days about “The Long Tail” and how technology has altered the marketplace from one with limited physical storage/display space to one with unlimited virtual shelf space, lowering the cost of distribution and making viable gazillions of niche markets. That’s good news for those of us outside the mainstream. Do I feel badly for brick and mortar operations struggling to combat this? No. I remember a MBA marketing class I took at Fordham some decades ago, the gist of which was keep looking ahead because what works today will be old-hat tomorrow and someone else is already thinking about the next best thing. This is not news, it’s life…it’s evolution.

But potential downsides also lurk around every corner. Technology has fostered a “give it away” mentality about which I am truly conflicted. I like free stuff and I like the ideas behind “open source” — sharing and collaborating are good things. I also like surfing over to YouTube and watching cool videos. But shouldn’t people get paid for their work? Why should you (or I) be able to watch my dad play at Montreux with Petrucianni and Shorter for free while others paid to attend the show or buy the DVD, which in turn, at least theoretically, enabled the promoters to pay the artists.

I know one of the arguments — sometimes known as The Grateful Dead argument — is that free goodies have promotional value and can lead to greater sales or larger attendance at live shows. “Ticket sales have doubled,” is a frequent refrain. That may be true in the short run, but as already mentioned, consumers are beginning to change their where and when demands.

Earlier this week I read a press release announcing a deal between MSN(R) Videoand the JVC Jazz Festival (Newport R.I.) “to give jazz lovers the chance to catch this year’s great lineup online starting Sunday, Aug. 13, at http://video.msn.com/newportjazz . Whether fans attended the festival and want immediate access to their favorite performances again or couldn’t make it to Newport’s historic Fort Adams to experience the acts firsthand, MSN will offer them the “best seats in the house” for America’s oldest jazz festival.”

I haven’t investigated this yet, but I’m betting that this potentially vast increase in ‘attendance’ is not reflected in the fees being paid to the performers. Let’s hope that I’m wrong.

Another potential downside has to do with quality. Competition on non-economic grounds has given rise to the amateur, greatly skewed the signal-to-noise ratio, and proliferated a lot of garbage. Whether or not you believe that the audiences appreciate the difference (and I am not one who thinks we should aim for the lowest common denominator), the net result is also lowering the value of a professional’s work in the marketplace. This is not solely a product of technology (actors aren’t happy about reality TV either), but it doesn’t help.

Somewhere I read that the average book sells only 500 copies a year, and with that fact comes the advice that writers should not quit their day jobs. Needless to say I bristle at the notion that writing, painting, making music and such are not full-time jobs worthy of compensation. I might even argue that artists’ income should be in the same realm as that of doctors’ in that they are just as vital, if not more so, to our overall well-being.

A Heavy Heart

I don’t know the derivation of this expression denoting sadness, but feeling that sadness I’m not much in the mood to look it up right now. Regular readers know that I recently reconnected with my elementary school class and that I flew to NYC for a reunion a few weeks back. Two of our classmates, twins, live in Israel, so they were not at this dinner. They moved to Israel during our high school years and stayed on even after their parents returned to the U.S., marrying and raising their own families there. I have seen them a handful of times over the years and was delighted when our Yahoo group allowed them to connect with us even though so far away.

A few weeks after our NYC dinner, one of the twins came to NYC for a happy family event and a second dinner was held, one that I could not attend, though I did call to say hello to everyone while they were all together. That was last week, and two days later I was on a plane to Chicago, where I remained without access to email for three days. I did see the television news that night, and as I watched the escalating Middle East conflicts I found myself remembering an evening in October of 1973 when sitting in my unremarkable college freshman dorm room, I was trying to understand the Yom Kippur War (that was when Egypt and Syria invaded the Sinai and Golan Heights that had been captured by Israel during the Six-Day War six years earlier) and wondering if my friends were safe.

This time I was troubled for the world in general but not specifically worried for my friends. They are no longer in military service and they live in an area that has so far remained safe. But I was not thinking about their children and did not take “reserve duty” into account. My friends children are alive and well, but the lifelong best friend of one of the sons is not — Eyal, a young Israeli reservist in the Israel Defense Force was on his last patrol along the Israel-Lebanon border in a convoy of two Hummer jeeps when they were ambushed by Hezbollah. Two soldiers were abducted into Lebanon. Eyal was killed.

When the horrors of war take place so far away, even though we may see the gruesome details televised into our living rooms, it is too easy to remain emotionally removed. We don’t know these people, they are not we. But that is not true. They are ordinary people just like us, with friends and families and plans for the future. Eyal’s reserve assignment would have ended Wednesday afternoon and he had planned to visit his girlfriend that evening and meet up with his best friend the next day.

My classmate and his family caught the first flight home, arriving in time for the funeral. Afterwards my friend wrote: “Eyal was a member of our household, and was like a fourth son, and an “extra” brother for all of our three sons. His loss affects us all immeasurably.” No matter what side of a conflict you may support, and regardless of where these atrocities take place, the loss of ALL lives should weigh heavily on us all.

Missing In Action Again

Sorry to have gone missing. I could plead pity for my infected jaw and my week on antibiotics, true and painful, but not so much so as to stop me from reading and writing, much of which this past week had to do with my ongoing class reunion — we now have a yahoo group and the conversations are many and varied, ranging from “do you remember so-and-so?” to how to save the world.

One of the topics I raised was actually a question my dad recently asked me: why aren’t today’s young people protesting against the war and the government? I mentioned that not having any children I feel rather far removed from “today’s young people,” but then wondered in writing, “and why aren’t we [protesting]? Are we too old, too complacent, too disillusioned….?” (As youngsters we were extremely political and outspoken. Not only did we attend marches in Washington and rallys in Central Park, we staged ourown mini-marches outside of FAO Schwartz protesting the sale of war toys. “GI Joe Must Go!”)

In response to my question, one classmate, an educator, reported having “escorted and travelled with groups of college-aged folk to several of the anti-war demos in the last few years. The demonstrations are FULL of young people; but there are way, way too few people, period. They are also full of people of our parents’ generation — but sorely lacking in folk of our own.” We ‘talked’ about our physical limitations, family obligations, and responsibilities that preclude the risk of jail for civil disobedience. Many of us sign petitions and discuss politics via the Internet, but as one classmate opined “I think we’re wasting our time getting distracted by the internet, when we should be on the streets. The kids are waiting for us to lead them there, and to join them there. They are waiting for us to organize the demonstrations, while we’re waiting for them to do so.”

I was glad to hear that there is more activity than is on my radar screen. I think the media downplays the protests today, at least I don’t seem to be as aware of them. Or maybe it’s just that they seem much smaller. Or maybe more activity on the East Coast? I’ve seen the occasional Los Angeles news report of some protesters, usually in Westwood (near UCLA), but they show only a handful of people with placards and drivers honking in support as they pass by. [Of course this is not counting the two recent immigration rallys and marches, but that was predominantly the Latino community mobilizing themselves…which is also a good thing] There are small protests against all kinds of things (movies, for example), and the opposers somehow find it easy to dismiss — “oh, it’s just them, not important, no big deal.” Also, those big protests back then were news while today they seem passe, a relic of an idea from the past, an idea that did not work…

I tell myself that there are many things I would do if I were single…part truth, part excuse. My husband, even though he is not about to join any picket line, says that when the middle class really starts hurting, then there will be a true revolution and we will all take to the streets. He figures that by then he won’t be here. Quite honestly, I find myself hoping that I’m not either. (I know that’s selfish, and easier for me to say because I have no children.)

That being said, I am not sure that protests in the street are any more effective than Internet petitions. Votes used to equate to power, but if They are controlling the elections (whether by lying or lobbying, rigging results, or just employing scare tactics), then even our votes don’t count. It’s a power and money game, and those who don’t have either can’t play.

Correction: A friend wrote in: “freudian slip?!?: “I mentioned that having any children I feel rather far removed from “today’s young people,” but then wondered in writing, “and why aren’t we?” Hmmm, I reply. Grandma always said “haste makes waste.” In a hurry to post, I failed to edit. The above has been corrected acordingly.

	

Reunion

I mentioned making a quick trip to New York earlier this month. It was a last minute decision to attend a school reunion. The fact that is was an elementary school reunion seems to be of much amusement to my friends from recent years. It wasn’t until I noticed their amused or bewildered reaction that I realized, or rather remembered, just how unusual, and privileged, my early schooling was — privileged for two reasons, neither of which being that it was a private school. The first reason is the school’s philosophy, described today on their website as follows:

“Education at the School is experience-based, interdisciplinary, and collaborative. The emphasis is on educating the whole child — the entire emotional, social, physical, and intellectual being — while at the same time, the child’s integrity as learner, teacher, and classmate is valued and reinforced.”

The School for Children is a demonstration school for what is now known as the Bank Street College of Education. When it began in 1916 is was the Bureau of Educational Experiments, a research group founded by Lucy Sprague Mitchell. The group decided that they could best study child development, with the fewest restrictions, if they had their own school, so they started with a nursery school in 1918. Mitchell was not the only one with progressive ideas, a Dewey-esque learning by doing approach; her two colleagues, Caroline Pratt and Elisabeth Irwin also founded schools in Greenwich Village, City and Country School and Little Red Schoolhouse, respectively. And when BEE’s kids “graduated,” most continued their education at one of those schools.

In 1930 the school acquired and converted the old Fleishman’s yeast factory at 69 Bank Street, that was the building where we attended school, but it was not until the late 50s that they decided to start adding classes so that the oldest students could stay on…and so that they could continue to study us and train teachers in our classrooms. When we graduated from 8th grade we were only the third class to do so. We were 69 Bank Street’s Class of 69. We were a special group; I thought that then, and I still do.

The second privilege, likely a result of the first, is that my little class (class size was always small, about 18) was more like a family than a class, and that closeness became evident once again when we began to reconnect. Half of our class attended school together, grew up together, for nine, ten, and eleven years. Although most of us had not been in contact since our only prior reunion in 1994, and some had been out of touch since graduation, it was as if the intervening years melted away – the fondness of one another, the school, and I suppose our lost youth, coupled with curiosity, eroded any obstacles. Of course we are each closer to some than to others (as it was then, so it is still today), but if old sibling-like rivalries existed in the past, they are no longer evident and the strong bond forged in the 1960s remains today.

Soon after we graduated the school moved uptown, grew in size, and its attitudes changed with the times. Their focus shifted to their immediate operations and they lost track of and interest in their graduates. They even lost our records. We found that out when we organized our own reunion twelve years ago. Of course their interest peeked when someone told them of our 25th-year reunion and gave them addresses – suddenly they were interested…in our checkbooks.

Most of our teachers are gone now, a few retired or moved on to other careers, but many have died. They were the ones who, with guidance from the educators at the college, saw us through. We are happy to have also reconnected with Pearl Zeitz, our 7s teacher (we didn’t have “grades”), and Peter Sauer, our science teacher who came on board during our last two or three years because parents began to get nervous about how we would fare in “the real world.” And of those no longer with us there are a few who we miss and remember fondly: Hannah McElheny (6s), David Wickens (8s), Betty Crowell (9s), Muriel Morgan (10s and 13s), and Hugh McElheny (music). The educators who studied us are long gone, replaced by administrators and fundraisers. I’d like to think that Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Barbara Biber, Edna Shapiro, John Neimeyer, and others at the College, along with our teachers, would have wanted to know how we, their experiments, turned out. I think they’d all be pleased.

A Letter To The Editor

The following is a New York Times Letter To The Editor that did not run, but should have:

The grief and sorrow I, along with so many others, feel about Barbaro (A Broken Horse, May 22, 2006) is understandable, for an animal’s beauty, purity, courage, and dependency along with its bravery and stamina are qualities we all identify with. We can empathize and identify because as children we had the same qualities. When childhood goes well there is a beautiful outcome, a race well run. But when as children we are asked to perform without the amount of support and love necessary, we lose our footing and we identify with Barbaro, too. Expecting a three-year old thoroughbred to compete before his bones are well formed is like asking an unprepared child to meet life with values and equanimity. We emulate the spirit and we are overcome by tragedy of this horse who stands for us all. My question is why we find it so difficult to identify with the men and women whose lives we put on the line every second of every day whether they be soldiers, police, or fire fighters. And why we undervalue the teachers who valiantly try to educate our children. Things seem so out of proportion.
Jane S. Hall

It’s Our Own Fault

In response to yesterday’s Art & Commerce posting, this just in from a regular reader:

I can’t help but think that, in the words of the Pogo cartoon, “We have met the enemy and they is us.” Would we be subjected to this all-pervasive level of advertising if we, as a society/culture, were not so obsessed with consumption? It seems to me a bit like the proliferation of bad television, in that it is, ultimately, driven not only by our acceptance of it, but by the rewards we bestow upon the perpetrators (the more they advertise, the more we consume).

So does this mean I have to give up drinking Starbucks? And just when they’ve made it so convenient by opening a Starbucks stand inside of every Vons supermarket in the extended vicinity.

Art & Commerce

I’m not sure how I feel about Starbucks becoming a major cultural influence, but they are doing some interesting things.

Listening Library, Random House’s children’s audiobook imprint, and Starbucks Hear Music have teamed up to co-release two audiobook titles from the lauded and long-out-of-print Rabbit Ears Collection of celebrity-narrated recordings, which was acquired by Random House/Listening Library earlier this year. The Velveteen Rabbit and The Night Before Christmas, both read by Meryl Streep, and featuring music by George Winston and Mark O’Connor respectively, will each be available for a four-month stretch, exclusively, at Starbucks locations in the U.S. and online at www.starbucks.com/hearmusic. Following the initial exclusive period, the two selections will receive traditional retail distribution. The Velveteen Rabbit will debut in Starbucks outlets on August 29; The Night Before Christmas will hit the coffee giant’s shelves on November 7.

I am glad that these recordings are being re-issued, and I read that Listening Library is planning to re-launch all of the Rabbit Ears titles. Now I wonder if any of that would have come to pass had it not been for the Starbucks deal.

——–
Courtesy of The New York Times I read that commercials have come to Broadway.

No, to answer your question, there is nothing sacred. The advertisement, which is itself advertised as the world’s first live theatrical commercial, is a creation of Visit London, a tourist organization. There have already been performances of the live commercial on stages in Dublin and Hamburg, said Ken Kelling, Visit London’s communications director, and there is to be another on Friday in Pittsburgh. “They’re a captive audience,” Mr. Kelling said. “They can’t switch channels or change over or walk out once the thing is started.”

And they want us to pay $100+ for a ticket? I wonder what Terry Teachout will have to say about this.

Requesting Prayers

Pianist Hilton Ruiz is in a New Orleans hospital in a coma and the jazz grapevine has sent an email message telling people what has happened and asking for everyone’s prayers and healing thoughts.

“He has been in hospital five days now… that would be he went in on Friday, 19 May. He was punched hard in the face, all his face bones were broken, he collapsed, was taken in ambulance to hospital, on route he had cardiac arrest…..Hilton is in a coma, on life support in intensive care unit of a New Orleans hospital. The condition is extremely serious.”

If you are not a religious person and/or if you have never been seriously ill, a request for prayers may seem ridiculous to you. Personally, I do not subscribe to any organized religion, but I do believe that there are forces in the universe greater than us. Ten years ago, doctors told my family that I probably would not survive my cancer – I had a stage-four fast-growing carcinoma in the base of my tongue. Today I am cancer free. To what do I attribute my recovery? Any one or all of the following may have played a major role:

1. aggressive Western medical treatment (chemo and radiation)

2. visualization (as I lay in bed I would imagine little Pac-man-esque gremlins racing through my insides gobbling up cancer cells

3. love and support of family & friends

4. the American Indian medicine bag containing amulets and feathers and pretty stones lovingly made for me by Laura Lee, which hung on my bed throughout the ordeal

5. the prayer circle organized by Alice, my girlfriend in St. Louis

6. the nuns in a San Diego convent, praying for me at the request of Phil’s parents

No one knows for sure, even my doctors don’t take all the credit. What I do know is that I no longer question the power of one’s beliefs, and sending out some good thoughts just might help — it certainly can’t hurt.

Disturbing Documentary

Pianist Larry Goldings just sent me an email with a link to a very disturbing video documentary about 9/11. You can watch it online (though it is over an hour long), or you can download and watch at your leisure. I’ve only seen the first 13 1/2 minutes so far — it’s running as I post this — but I’d say it is worth checking out. It’s here on the Google film page. As Larry said, “It might change the way you view that day.”

Poetry & Music

April is National Poetry Month, but unless you are an avid poetry consumer, the celebration of this art form is likely to be eclipsed by other seasonal holidays. A poet and chapbook publisher in an article for the Boston Phoenix opined, “No wonder America’s National Poetry Month begins on April Fools’ Day!…Poetry is not now and never has been in America an art for the faint-hearted.” I wouldn’t characterize most Americans as faint-hearted, quite the contrary, but poetry does remain elusive to many. How many poems can you recite? (“Roses are red…” doesn’t count.) On the other hand, everyone sings songs.

When poet Dana Gioia became the Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts in 2003, he noted that the mission of the NEA is not only to “foster excellence in the arts, but to bring art to all Americans.” He knows that this is not an easy task. As he explained it to a Philadelphia newspaper, “…there’s a difference between entertainment and art. Entertainment provides a series of predictable pleasures. It allows an audience to enter and leave more or less the same. Art affords at least the possibility of transformation. So we need to make some room for art in this overwhelmingly successful entertainment world.”

That possibility for transformation is afforded by an artist’s ability to embody his or her own transformative experience in a work of art – be it a poem, song, painting, or other art form.

Jazz pianist Fred Hersch is no stranger to poetry, having at the age of 18 been moved by Walt Whitman’s works — that was in the mid 1970s. Nearly thirty years later, Fred re-read “When I Heard at the Close of the Day” and was inspired to embody it as an instrumental piece. That one composition led Fred to an entire album based on Whitman’s poems — the orchestrations are for an 8 piece ensemble plus singers. The words are important: “…so many touchstone lines…words that represent to me what is the best about America,” Fred explained in an interview on NPR’s Morning Edition two years ago.

Fred talks also about the universality and timelessness of the poems’ meanings. “If you don’t have love, it’s just a bunch of stuff on your resume.” Long-form jazz-based works often receive critical attention, sometimes acclaim, but seldom do they resonate as positively with the audience. Happily, reports are that Hersch’s Leaves Of Grass is a crowd pleaser. In March of last year a New York Times concert review by Ben Ratliff concluded as follows:

“I have often experienced audiences palpably losing interest in long-form jazz pieces well before the finish. This one brought a full house to its feet.”

And in February of this year, Nate Chinen, also writing for The New York Times, reported:

“Buoyed by the success of “Leaves of Grass,” which has become one of the best-selling titles in his catalog, Mr. Hersch has plunged into another large-scale cross-disciplinary work. “It’s a song cycle for the stage with the poet Mary Jo Salter,” he said recently by phone from the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where he was finishing a five-week residency. “The working title is ‘Hold Still!’ It’s a whole evening of about 18 songs loosely connected around the theme of photography.”

What is the secret alchemy that occurs when words are married to music? It might be said that music makes poetry more accessible to the average person, or that it touches the soul in ways that words alone cannot. This is not the first time I have pondered this question and a year or so ago I emailed my friend and noted arts critic Terry Teachout, asking him to comment on this question. [For those of you who may not yet know of Teachout, he is the drama critic of the Wall Street Journal and the music critic of Commentary, as well as contributor to publications such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, National Review, many other magazines and newspapers, and he blogs about the arts almost daily. He wrote back:

“When Igor Stravinsky saw the ballet that George Balanchine made out of his Movements for Piano and Orchestra, he said, ‘The performance was like a tour of a building for which I had drawn the plans but never explored the result.’ That must be what it feels like to have your words set to music by a good composer – it tells you something about your own writing that even you didn’t know.”

I wonder what Walt Whitman would have said upon hearing Hersch’s opus.