Archive for the ‘new yorker’ Category

Old Souls

Posted on: October 6th, 2010 by admin No Comments

I went to the Strand in search of Alec Wilder’s classic text American Popular Song. It wasn’t there. This has happened my last several trips to the store, which boasts eight miles of books. Eight miles of books, and still their collection is missing essential titles? It made me wonder if they were culling the herd in response to cataclysm within the literary ecosystem.

In its place I found I book I didn’t know I wanted. But now that I have bought it, I cherish it much more than the source of my original hunt. It’s Alec Wilder & His Friends, from 1974, and it’s a collection of New Yorker profiles by Whitney Balliett, who died three years ago.

These are portraits of—this is a term that has been applied to me more than once—old souls who “hold a common vision of life that has lately fallen low. They are highly moral people who have guarded their souls, who have, no matter how bad the going, refused to compromise. They have gone without jobs when fashion has turned against them, rather than demean themselves in shoddy ones. They have kept their spirits intact despite neglect, near-privation, and even semi-oblivion. These sterling people, in taking the high road, have bent their energies toward the endless polishing of their arts, and pre-eminence, no matter how tardy or circumscribed, has been their reward.”

A few—Tony Bennett, Blossom Dearie, Marian McPartland—were able to hang on long enough to enjoy an Indian summer of their careers. At the other end of the spectrum you have the much less known jazz pianist Marie Marcus. All of the subjects make for companionable reading.

I borrowed Balliett’s style for one section of my book From Square One. He sets up a scene and then lets his subject talk, often for pages at a time. The illusion is that there has been no mediation by an author. Of course just the opposite is true. Balliett has erased his questions and left the answers-as-monologue. The style seems old-fashioned today, and that no doubt has something to do with why I employed it.

Hopper: Painting the Loneliness on BBC Radio 4

Posted on: May 31st, 2010 by admin No Comments

There are many reasons to love BBC Radio.

I’m not talking about the World Service, which is how most Americans hear the Beeb on public radio over here. That’s boring. I’m talking about the domestic channels intended for listeners in the U.K. and which I hear over the Internet.

Radio 4 is the closest thing to NPR. During drive time, they air news programs akin to Morning Edition and All Things Considered. But the rest of the day and night, instead of filling the time with excruciating talk shows, they air weird kinds of stuff that used to be on the radio here but which disappeared long ago.

The quiz shows, such as I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, are old-fashioned and demented in the best possible way. I find the Shipping Forecast mesmerizing.

On Tuesday, June 1, my first piece for the BBC will air. Called Painting the Loneliness, it’s a half hour program about Edward Hopper’s iconic painting Nighthawks that I co-produced with Judith Kampfner. Half of it consists of documentary interviews – with New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, Whitney curator Barbara Haskell and author Gordon Theisen (who wrote a smart book about the painting). That material is interleaved with dramatic monologues. I imagined what was going through the minds of the figures in the painting. Playwright Michael Dowling wrote the script and acted, along with Jim Frangione and Sara Paul. I directed their performances “on location” at Haven Cafe and Bakery in Lenox, Massachusetts. (My BBC contact noted the “depth of the atmosphere” and noted how different it felt from standard sound effects.)

You can listen to the program when it streams live on Tuesday, 11:30am London time, (click here for live stream) or else on demand for the seven days following.

The New Rules of the Game

Posted on: May 7th, 2010 by admin No Comments

… according to Elowitz. (Will future generations consider him the Edmond Hoyle of new media?)

Ben Elowitz asserts in paidContent.org that “traditional ways of judging ‘quality’ in published content are now useless.” (Read it here.)

His message is more or less the opposite of what I’ve been telling my students at NYU’s Carter Journalism Institute, where I’m now wrapping up a three-year appointment as a visiting professor.

Because the master’s program there lasts three semesters, grad students finish at the end of the calendar year – coinciding in 2008 with massive RIFs at NPR and the New York Times. One of my best and brightest students showed up for our last class sighing, “This is a pretty bleak job market.”

I said, “No, this is way worse than a bad job market. This is a paradigm shift. Those jobs are never coming back.”

Then I delivered a more hopeful message: I thought of myself as a medieval monk whose job it is to keep ancient knowledge alive. That ancient knowledge has to do with things like professional standards, ethics. This was even reflected in the course title: The Medium Formerly Known as Radio. The task of our class was to reinvigorate traditional radio values in the new medium of the Web. My thinking was that someone would figure out how to monetize reporting in its new digital form, journalism would re-professionalize itself, and my students were going to bring about a Renaissance. Sooner rather than later, I hoped.

This wasn’t just a lame attempt to rub a salve over the deep gash they were feeling. After all, they and their families had just dumped untold tens of thousands of dollars on a degree that had almost no hope of landing them a job in their chosen field. Perhaps ever.

The belief underlying my pep talk was that there would always be an audience for vital information gathered and presented with impartiality and craftsmanship. Elowitz argues just the opposite.

Of course, I’m strongest in recounting the past over predicting the future, which is why I became a journalist rather than a fortune teller.

I’m reminded of the standard reply sent to readers who had written letters to the New Yorker magazine in its early days: “Dear Sir. You may be right. Sincerely, Wolcott Gibbs.”

I Just Can’t Imagine How It Would Be Possible

Posted on: June 30th, 2008 by admin 6 Comments

since skulls are so much harder than fingernails.

Now I REALLY Don’t Know How to Fill Out Those Forms

Posted on: March 19th, 2008 by admin 1 Comment

I’m referring to the forms that ask you to list your ethnicity. I usually put “Other,” just to push us one nanometer closer to a post-racial society. And now I read in The Rest Is Noise, by Alex Ross, a confusing description of the music scene in New York during the 1920s and 30s, when “Jewish, African-American, and even Caucasian composers were working shoulder to shoulder, trading ideas, borrowing themes, plundering the past, and feeding off the present.” Did I miss something?

Well That’s Odd

Posted on: December 18th, 2007 by admin 4 Comments

Just when I was starting to get used to bylines in the New Yorker magazine (yes, I know, I’m a little slow on the uptake), along comes an unsigned article. Why? Perhaps it has something to do with the unsettling subject matter: the plain truth, first revealed by D.T. Max in the Times Magazine in 1988, that what we love about Raymond Carver is really what we love about the editing skills of Gordon Lish.

The decision to write anonymously here seems especially freighted, less a mere throwback to the Shawn years and having something more to do with the nature of Lish’s initially invisible and essential influence.

The revelation was so powerful when it appeared nearly 20 years ago because it went to the heart of a gut-wrenching ethical dilemma: sure, we say we believe in the right of the artist to have final say over his or her own work, and yet the fact is, it was Lish who made Carver’s stories into the masterpieces that they are. Carver’s later stories, where he resisted editing, lack the same punch.

It will be instructive to go through the before-and-after exercise the magazine proposes by publishing “Beginners,” the story as Carver wrote it, before Lish turned it into “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” I promise to be open to the possibility that I will appreciate Carver’s original vision. It will be hard, but I hope to have my mind changed.

Those are the moments of transformation I wait for nowadays. Usually they follow a pattern: some assertion is made and then quickly overturned. Just a few months ago, I was walking down the street, thinking how I needed to admit I had little appreciation for Mozart’s music. Just putting it into words, unspoken as they were, prompted a compulsive three-day binge of listening to nothing but the andante from his “Jupiter” symphony.

Correction below, in comments.

Someone Had to Take the Fall

Posted on: September 20th, 2007 by admin 3 Comments

Alice Quinn is leaving her part-time job of 20 years as the poetry editor of the New Yorker.

Can it be a coincidence that her departure comes on the heels of the magazine’s decision to publish this poem by Joni Mitchell?

Yes, Exactly

Posted on: March 27th, 2007 by admin 7 Comments

You know the feeling. Every now and then, a writer captures something of the essence of who you are. You’re reading along and it hits you that this person understands a truth that has never before been identified in print.

Here is an example from David Owen’s “Shouts & Murmurs” piece in this week’s New Yorker, about being a 52-year-old man trying to pass for 45:

I received a somewhat humorous e-mail from someone I vaguely knew and reflexively deleted it, the way I used to, rather than almost deciding to forward it to fifteen or twenty other people under the subject line “GET A LOAD OF THIS!!!!!!”

Please understand that I am not being at all sarcastic when I say that he totally nailed it.

It’s easy to imagine the back-and-forth with the editor, who probably said, “Huh? What are you talking about?” And then, I hope, the writer said, “Please trust me on this.” If so, then the system worked.

I hope someday to understand Owen’s observation more deeply. At this point, he has merely pointed to the existence of a generational divide. He still has not shed light on why it is there.

In any event, thank you, David Owen. Perhaps my parents and my slightly older friends will finally understand why, when they forward “humor” to me, they might as well address it to blackhole@gmail.com.

And thank you, too, for alerting me to the apparently inevitable fate that awaits me.

Prose Gem of the Week

Posted on: September 14th, 2006 by admin 1 Comment

“The Olympic Stadium—a severe Greco-Roman construction with Fascist flourishes and corporate logos—was built for the 1936 Games and still looks very much as it did seventy years ago, when Jesse Owens outran the racial theories of his host.”

—from David Remnick’s profile of Bill Clinton in this week’s New Yorker.

NOW You Tell Me!

Posted on: June 1st, 2006 by admin 2 Comments

“Eventually, I began to have a recurring dream about the Apthorp—or, to be accurate, a recurring nightmare. I dreamed I had accidentally moved out of the building, realized it was the worst mistake of my life, and couldn’t get my lease back. I have had enough psychoanalysis to know not to take such dreams literally, but it’s nonetheless amazing to me that, when my unconscious mind searched for a symbol of what I would most hate to lose, it came up with my apartment.”

—Nora Ephron, in this week’s New Yorker magazine

Perhaps I should have tried psychoanalysis. It might have saved me lots of money in the long run. Even on the four-day-a-week plan.

To my detriment, I have always been somewhat literal-minded. I take people at their word. (We all know how that works out.) Same with the unconscious. In the mid-1990s, I had a recurring dream that I owned a home in the Berkshires. Being literal-minded, I figured if this is what my subconscious wants, why deny it?

Here’s the answer:

Ten years and tens of thousands of dollars later (the excavator dug up my yard to make way for a new septic system) I have learned the expensive way that even if you attain the object of your longing, the desire itself doesn’t go away. It just finds something else to attach itself to.

Right now I have dreams of a carefree, unencumbered existence.