We watched the Peggy Lee news with disbelief.
She was a delight bringing humor into her delicious singing ("Is that all there is?")
But, you included "I can just hear Keith and Harry saying that "once the people care enough to buy intellectual goods then they will be of a higher quality."
Of course "once people care" they will demand higher quality. If the arts go out into the free market, it will produce caring people.
The problem is now that the arts have become a closed circle of grant seekers and the elite working by themselves and for themselves. When the arts are appreciated by a farm kid in a Minnesota winter blizzard - we will have made it.
I understand how you want the government to make things easier for artists, but I fear that may mean wonderful artistry may be lost because it didn't reach out to people everywhere, but was restricted to a relatively closed community.
But, you really have to start with that farm boy in Minnesota.
Harry
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray wrote:
Unless there is a small enough country with less than Imperialistic
ambitions, the normal flow from Democracy of any type in history has been to
a Dictator who will take the responsibility for governing off of the backs
of the people. There is a similar flow in the history of music. Music
begins simple and grows more dense as a style evolves. Changes happen
faster and faster in greater and greater density until complexity becomes
too great for anyone person to conquer at which point it searches for a
Master to finish it so that it can start all over again. We saw it in the
last century with the works of Elliot Carter and Pierre Boulez. In the
19th it was Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg. 18th with J.S. Bach in
the Baroque.
As changes happen more quickly the music actually slows down and grows more
thick or dense. The rebellion happened this time in commercial music's
dialogue with the Minimalists coming out of NYCity's Soho section. In the
1970s when this was beginning to emerge, politics intervened in the persons
of the late Samuel Lipman and Hilton Kramer whose Republican Conservative
politics extended into an extension of the Carter school of aesthetics
through the National Endowment of the Arts where Lipman was on the Board
during the Reagan era. Lipman published the first conservative
intellectual periodical the New Criterion while Hilton Kramer edited it.
Lipman was a coach of mine and a political antagonist. I enjoyed his
musicianship but his politics always seemed more stale than his artistic
side. The Art of the political right has been as reactionary as in any
other rigid state. It seems the longer you hold onto the slow, the thick
and the complicated the greater the need for a Hero Despot to change things.
Those who hold on become expert at manipulating numbers and flow charts that
essentially means that nothing changes until it collapses.
Consider the following article from yesterday's NYTimes. The writer
Perlstein is talking about public Intellectuals but the same argument has
been true for the art's for over a century. I can just hear Keith and
Harry saying that "once the people care enough to buy intellectual goods
then they will be of a higher quality." Or the point is that nobody wants
it or maybe "Intelligence in the West is dead!" Both points that I
obviously disagree with. I also finally got someone to talk about Posner
even if it was in the NYTimes. See how powerful we reservation folks
are? Ask for something on the Futurework list and it appears in the
NYTimes. (joke)
More seriously, the death of publishing is the birth of the Internet except
no one but the TV pundits gets paid. That is like comparing TV sitcoms to
Shakespeare. The problem is that modern commerce has turned everyone
from actors into audience or consumers who care little about doing most
things. Profession is not joy and fulfillment but drudgery and profit is
the only rational value. That was the meat that I threw out from Posner
but was met only with a deafening silence. Instead we got more stories
about global warming that no one knows about. It is always easier to
speak of the external. Maybe global warming begins in the head and really
means that we all have a fever. But the great songstress Peggy Lee who
taught us about fever with the purse of the lips and sway of her ample body
died yesterday.
Ray Evans Harrell, artistic director
The Magic Circle Opera Repertory Ensemble, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
January 22, 2002
Thinkers in Need of Publishers
By RICK PERLSTEIN
Every semester brings a new symposium, every season a new book, every Sunday
a new furrowed-brow disquisition. The topic is "public intellectuals" -
writers and thinkers who address a general audience on matters of broad
public concern - and the theme is decline. Russell Jacoby, who coined the
phrase, delivered the consensus judgment in the title of his 1987 book, "The
Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe": There are none
to speak of. And as Mr. Jacoby noted in the splashy 2000 edition,
"Happenings since its publication do not cause me to revise its main
points."
The old lament is now back under the elegiac title "Public Intellectuals: A
Study of Decline," a book by the federal judge Richard A. Posner, a senior
lecturer at the University of Chicago's law school. Why, the question runs,
are there no more public intellectuals?
Ever the gentlemen, both of these authors claim to indict impersonal forces:
for Russell Jacoby, the disappearance of cheap bohemian neighborhoods; for
Richard Posner, a technical failure in the intellectual- services
marketplace.
But in the final analysis both end up tacitly playing the same blame game.
Once giants roamed the earth: George Orwell and Dwight Macdonald, C. Wright
Mills and Lewis Mumford, Hannah Arendt and Lionel Trilling, smart people
writing for ordinary people, openly and unashamedly, on issues people care
about.
And now? Nothing save the gusts of postmodern academics and the ill-
informed bleats of publicity-hound law professors. The previous generations
of non-university intellectuals, the Jacoby-Posner story line goes, were
made of sterner moral stuff.
"A literate, indeed hungry public still exists," Mr. Jacoby writes in the
2000 edition of "The Last Intellectuals." "What is lacking is the will and
ability to address it."
I would like to interrupt this bit of rote programming. Where are all the
public intellectuals? A well- stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn
window could easily hit half a dozen.
In one direction: an author of two literary, daring and original travelogues
about life on the cusp between wilderness and civilization, who is also a
gifted miniaturist of the city à la Joseph Mitchell.
In another direction: an erudite and fearless muckraker whose freelance
exposés of international rogues and investigation of the corporate takeover
of American universities are but two achievements of a young career spent
writing on just about everything under the sun.
In still another direction: the editor of a searing (self-published)
magazine of media criticism, at work on a critical study on the history of
advertising. And a freelancer who has just come out with a rattling new
study on the depredations of the American prison system. And there are more
than a few impressive young literary critics and cultural reporters in my
neighborhood, too, one of whom also happens to be a smashingly effective
film critic.
These are just a few people I know. My Brooklyn neighborhood happens to be
unusually well stocked with but-for-the-name public intellectuals.
But they are plentiful in other cities: young men and women without
university affiliations, who rendezvous in barroom salons, are under 40,
practice exacting self-discipline and don't sell out. All can hold their own
with professors in one or more areas of expertise.
If you read widely you have read them, even the ones who have yet to find
much public success: in the dwindling numbers of newspaper book reviews, in
the corners of the Sunday paper labeled "Insight" or "Outlook"; in one of
the few quarterly magazines that still pay something or one of the few
magazines that publish writing on serious issues.
But are they equal to any from those golden generations - the Orwells,
Mumfords, Paul Goodmans? Are they great, or potentially great? To attempt an
answer would be foolish. For what is on display in most debates about public
intellectuals is nostalgia, and nostalgia is systematically cruel to the
present. We only remember those who pass the test of time: the stars.
Then, in our minds we remake the past in these lions' images. Here in the
unruly present, however, we are thrown back on nothing more than our
critical discernment to make judgments.
It's also hard to judge because it isn't fashionable to look for young
intellectual talent any more. People once believed there were notable
independent intellectuals because they were instructed to seek out and prize
them. "The most brilliant young critic of our day," trumpeted the cover of
Norman Podhoretz's first book, an anthology of essays that was published
when he was 33. There is no such trumpeting today, partly because there are
no such anthologies being published today. I can think of several brilliant
young critics who deserve them.
The story I'm telling is really one of extraordinary resilience and
willpower. Just try, as many young writers do, to support yourself writing
book reviews. You can still string together enough income for a rice-
and-beans year from what you can turn out in cultural essays for newspapers
and semi-prominent magazines: maybe 30 pieces, probably averaging about $400
each. You can even end up, after a few or more faithful years, with a
middle-class sinecure at some publication, perhaps with the perquisite of a
year's leave to write a book someday, maybe even to become some future
generation's intellectual giant from the good old days.
But the farm teams are folding. In the 90's, future household names were
writing regularly for magazines like Lingua Franca and Feedmag.com. Both
ceased publication last year, as did several book-review sections. Other
regular outlets have cut back precipitously - paying less, shutting out new
voices. Academia, once a potential solace, is out: at the professional
conferences these days new Ph.D.'s walk around with a kicked-in-the-teeth
look. The non-Ph.D.'s, of course, are not even in the game.
And still they write. That's the thing. The fact is that there are no "last
intellectuals." The will and ability to write smartly and well for a general
audience seems to be indomitable.
The intellectuals are there; the public need not feel starved; we need no
more jeremiads. What today's public intellectuals need are publishers, and
maybe a few publicists, too.
Rick Perlstein is author of "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the
Unmaking of the American Consensus."
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company | Privacy Information
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Hudson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2002 6:19 AM
Subject: Will Russia make it?
> Court bailiffs entered the studio of Russia's last remaining independent
> television station, TV6, last night in the middle of a talkshow, and
> literally pulled the plug.
>
> According to Russia's Press Minister, this action has been taken because
> TV6 was bankrupt and its closure, dramatic though it was, is the same as
> happens in Western countries. That's as may be, but some would say that it
> was the result of some oil oligarchs who were close to the Kremlin moving
> against other oligarchs who owned TV6 whose programmes were not afraid of
> openly criticising President Vladmir Putin's regime.
>
> Others say that it's nothing to do with that but is mainly a personal
> vendetta by Putin against Berezovsky, one of the main owners of TV6, a
> former oil oligarch who campaigned against Putin and who lives in Spain to
> avoid being arrested by the Russian police.
>
> TV6's anchorman, Yevgenny Kiselyov, has said that this has been the first
> step back to authoritarianism in the post-Soviet period. Russia's Press
> Minister has responded by shrugging his shoulders and saying that when
> TV6's broadcasting licence is auctioned on March 27, then Kiselyov and the
> rest of TV6's journalists and executives, can put in a bid.
>
> Because of their experience, the TV6 team will have no trouble finding
> financial support from Western capitalists. It remains to be seen whether
> they will be allowed to win the licence.
>
> It seems to me that this is going to be of exceptional importance to the
> future of Russia because the country has been dithering for ten years
> between going backwards into totalitarianism (its "natural" state, whether
> under communism or the Tsars) and forwards into Western-type capitalism. I
> don't think it can dither for too much longer. This TV6 case may be the
> flutter of the butterfly's wing that will swing the situation one way or
> the other.
>
> Keith Hudson
>
> __________________________________________________________
> "Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write
in
> order to discover if they have something to say." John D. Barrow
> _________________________________________________
> Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> _________________________________________________
>
******************************
Harry Pollard
Henry George School of LA
Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042
Tel: (818) 352-4141
Fax: (818) 353-2242
*******************************
