The Art Of Saying Nothing (And Getting Paid To Do It)

There's something in the water at New York newsrooms that turns good writers with sharp minds into addle-brained, insta-historians enamored with striking cultural commentary gold.

At the Times, it's quick-witted scribes like Maureen Dowd and Alessandra Stanley who weave observations about Desperate Housewives into some elaborate discussion of a zeitgeist that is apparent only to them. While you are reading their columns, you get caught up in their arguments ("Yeah, Tom Cruise's latest appearance on Oprah totally did have something to do with Jeremiah Wright!"), but when you're done reading, whatever point they've made dissolves in the brain like cotton candy on the tongue.

The cover story in this week's New York typifies this overthought, overwrought style. It's a 5,000-word article about the comment section of a Brooklyn real-estate blog.

That's right. Someone got paid a lot of money to sift through the comments left on a blog.

The extra coats of varnish on the cheap plywood of the story just keep coming, too. In order to beef up his bonbon of an article, the author dabbles in a little literary criticism of the blog's most notorious poster:

"In spreading his dire message, he favors colorful curses like “asshat” and “fucktard” as well as the enthusiastic application of exclamation!!!! marks!!!!!!!!! and the twitchy overuse of childish acronyms like ROTFLMMFAO (i.e., rolling on the floor laughing my motherfucking ass off)."

Illuminating.

The article is meant to set up this poster as the id of Brooklyn's real estate market, which is teeteering on the precipice of total chaos, but when all is said and done, the article misses its mark. Instead of being an eye-opening think piece with a clever hook, like so much of NY journalism, it's a lot of pricey ink with nothing to say.

Tin Pan Quicksand

Today saw 2 notable cartoons in the classical blogosphere. One was the latest installment in Soho the Dog's utterly brilliant Mahler & Strauss series.

The other was a much cruder diagram of sorts by Brian Sacawa, which was accompanied by a refreshing look at the abyssmal state of music publishing (No offense intended to your drawing skillz, BS!)

Brian's comical plight involving a simple arrangement of an open score and a one dollar bill is an excellent snapshot of the bizarro world which is music publishing. Toiling as we do in the least profitable end of the publishing spectrum, you'd think someone would make things easier for us.

To wit:

Last year, we noticed that a famous British composer had written a piece for solo trumpet, and we decided we wanted to perform it on our ARTSaha! festival (For the sake of all parties involved, let's call the composer Mark-Anthony Turnage).

As per usual, it took about 15 minutes to track down the appropriate representative on the publisher's website (Again, to keep this totally professional, let's call the firm...say...Boosey & Hawkes).

We sent an email query about the piece on April 18, 2007. At that point, ARTSaha! was five months hence. We felt we were Johnny on the spot, but having danced this polka so many times in the past, we should have known better.

We should have known that when we got an email the next day from a very nice B&H employee telling us that they did, in fact, sell An Aria (with Dancing) for £7.50, and asking if we would kindly email our billing/shipping information so they could send us the score, it was too good to be true. This was, after all, a relatively new score by a living composer. The days of song pluggers playing their wares in storefront windows are long gone.

Want new music these days? You better be prepared to suffer.

However, we really can't stress enough the politeness of this B&H representative. NYC had just been hit by a nor'easter, and he inquired about it, saying they'd heard the most dreadful things about it across the pond.

Well, life happened, and before we knew it, two months had passed and no Turnage in the mail. Then, quite strangely, we received a bill in the mail for the score. That seemed odd since our Boosey man seemed happy to conduct the transaction via email. He apologized for the invoice, and said, yes indeed, all he needed was an email with our info and the score would be printed in two weeks. He promised that at the latest the score would arrive by July 9. At that point, the festival would still be two months off, and we felt confident we could prepare the score in time.

July 9 came and went, and still no score. We began to feel that Mr. Turnage could have dictated the piece to us over the phone, and we'd have devised a more efficient delivery method. Another polite email to our man in London yielded another polite apology. Then a flurry of irritated emails to Boosey's Production Department ensued, on which we were cc'ed to insure we were noticing all the effort exerted on account of our order, which was, at this point, 13-1/2 weeks old.

Finally, a UPS tracking number was provided, and three days later on August 17, our very own copy of Turnage's piece was in hand. Our lead time for preparing this moderately difficult work had been whittled down from five months to three weeks; so, a performance proved impossible, especially since those three weeks are chock full of production work on the festival.

Undoubtedly, Mr. Turnage must be thrilled that his publisher is serving him so well.

There Must Be Some Way Out Of Here

About 2 or 3 times a year, someone cries foul about the New Music Reblog. Today, Gert from Mad Musings of Me called us 'nefarious thieves' and 'unscrupulous culprits'.

Before that, it was Charles Downey from Ionarts, who much more politely protested, "when you take the whole post -- images and text -- you are stealing my work and preventing people from coming to my site."

John Clare from Composing Thoughts also suggested the site was actually unlawful when he asked us to remove his blog from syndication.

All the New Music Reblog does is syndicate feeds from blogs about new music. What you see is what we get via RSS subscriptions.

Some people, like AC Douglas, and the NY Times' Artsbeat publish partial feeds, which give a one or two line teaser and link to the full post. Other folks, like Omniscient Mussel and Alex Ross publish their whole post in their feeds.

The Reblog mechanism receives all that information, and we look at it and republish posts that relate to the relatively loose concept of 'new music'.

If your entire blog is being published on the site, it is because you are sending that content to us in your feed. The solution is simplistic in the extreme. If you don't want your entire posts published, provide a partial feed, and of course, if that's not an option, we're happy to remove your feed from syndication.

Certainly no harm is meant with this simple little reblog site. Jeff created a wonderful clearinghouse for the myriad of voices who are paying attention to this small little sector of the arts. Our goal is not to steal any content from anyone, but rather to make it easier to find.

I Can't Believe I'm Not Bitter

Steve Smith, who singlehandedly made us buy tickets for Satyagraha, linked to Robert Reich's take on Bittergate, which is a hoot, because it steps into the same sinkhole Obama did.

It is all well and good for a liberal egghead to dig into the numbers, and Reich is very good at that, but what he and Obama fail to dispell in their protestations is the sense that they simply cannot grasp that people have a genuine attachment to guns, God and ethnic bias.

Liberals have an execrable instinct to explain away these attachments as some kind of dysfunction, induced by stimuli which their candidacy is meant to erase. To them, cultural conservatism is a disease to be cured.

Who cares if Reich takes the bait? Someone has to.

But Obama can't afford to go near this ever again. Just swallow the fact that you don't get Middle America, dude, and go back to sloganeering.

The more you try to sip a beer, bowl or talk your way out of this one, the more you look like a hapless member of the liberal elite.

That is pure, red meat to the GOP:

They Say 'Write What You Know'

And we know sci-fi.

Whenever people assemble a list like, '110 Best Books', there are going to be shortcuts a'plenty. The obligation to include certain important authors trumps any ability to do it properly, which leads to statements like this:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Philip K. Dick

Dick's masterpiece questions what it is that distinguishes us as human, as we follow Rick Deckard on his mission to 'retire' recalcitrant androids. Spawned Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.

Nice try, Telegraph, but you are confusing a great film with a decent book. It is far from the top of the PKD heap.

The rest of their sci-fi 'bests' features another inclusivity-induced lapse (can you spot it?):

Neuromancer - William Gibson
2001: A Space Odyssey - Arthur C. Clarke
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
1984 - George Orwell
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Jules Verne
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

That's right, it's Foundation, the ultimate bore if there ever were one. Again, the need to include sci-fi giants outweighs the need to pick their best writing.

And where's one of the most obvious contenders of them all? Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is by one of the all-time heavyweights in the field, an archetypal narrative, plus a halfway decent book to boot!

ANABlog Bashes MSM

A while back, one of our favorite bloggers, Marc Geelhoed, pined for a little Hunter S. Thompson in this campaign cycle. He pointed out that despite the wealth of material in this election, the media coverage has been downright eyeball glazing.

Nothing encapsulates that more than an appearance by the total limpdick that Rolling Stone has allowed to ape Thompson for the past few years. Matt Taibbi turns up every now and then on TV, which only reminds us that he's trying even harder than it seems when you read his columns. In person, he comes off as a reasonably-minded preppie, which makes the fire he breathes in print seem all that much more artificial. In private, he's probably not rabidly anti-Clinton or anti-GOP at all.

But Taibbi's not the only douchebag covering this election who likes to get hopped up on nothing harder than Red Bulls and toss grenades into their copy. Chris Matthews never met a boxing analogy he didn't like, and Keith Olbermann wants to be Edward R. Murrow so bad that it's surprising he doesn't broadcast Countdown in black and white.

Take today's big kerfuffle: The Pelosi Letter.

A bunch of Clinton donors didn't like what she had to say about superdelegates going with the popular vote; so, they wrote her a letter. Now, it is a perfectly ordinary letter from a group of donors to a politician asking her to bear their point of view in mind.

However, you wouldn't know that from the headlines, which have raised sensationalism to new lows:

'Top Clinton Backers Threaten Pelosi' (US News)

'Clinton backers warn Pelosi on superdelegate rift' (Reuters)

'Hillary Campaign Didn't Disavow Donor Letter To Pelosi' (TPM)

'Obama Camp Hammers Letter To Pelosi As "Inappropriate"' (TPM)

The coverage of this mundane little story typifies the media's default tone for every moment of this campaign. Other favorite headline verbs: 'bash', 'rip', 'slam', and 'slug'.

As Marc pointed out, this is all a very dim echo of Gonzo journalism, which got woven into the mainstream media so slowly and effortlessly that it's easy to forget how revolutionary it really was. Guys like Taibbi think littering their copy with f-bombs gussies it up enough to call it Gonzo, but what none of these pantywaists get is that Hunter actually had profound insights about the process.

These jerkwads are just ornamenting standard political beat stories with coarse language. Hunter used the vernacular to cut to the core of the matter:

"There is nothing in McGovern’s campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing. For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past. He is still naïve enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent—with a good voting record on “the issues”—is a natural man for the White House.

But this is stone bullshit. There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today: One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon)…and the other is to tap the massive, frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote. This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy."

Unlike McGovern, Obama understands perfectly well that he's taking Door Number Two in Hunter's scenario. Can't reach working class voters in Pennsylvania? Well, then push to register every last college student you can in the state!

And for those who still think that 'Yes We Can' and 'We are the Change that We've Been Waiting For' is about anything but Barack Obama's unbridled ego, Hunter has a bucket of cold water for them too:

"…a man on the scent of the White House is rarely rational. He is more like a beast in heat: a bull elk in the rut, crashing blindly through the timber in a fever for something to fuck. Anything! A cow, a calf, a mare—any flesh and blood beast with a hole in it. The bull elk is a very crafty animal for about fifty weeks of the year: his senses are so sharp that only an artful stalker can get within a thousand yards of him…but when the rut comes on, in the autumn, any geek with the sense to blow an elk-whistle can lure a bull elk right up to his car in ten minutes if he can drive within hearing range.

The dumb bastards lose all control of themselves when the rut comes on. Their eyes glaze over, their ears pack up with hot wax, and their loins get heavy with blood. Anything that sounds like a cow elk in heat will fuse the central nervous systems of every bull on the mountain. They will race through the timber like huge cannonballs, trampling small trees and scraping off bloody chunks of their own hair on the unyielding bark of the big ones. They behave like sharks in a feeding frenzy, attacking each other with all the demented violence of human drug dealers gone mad on their own wares.

A career politician finally smelling he White House is not much different from a bull elk in the rut. He will stop at nothing, trashing anything that gets in his way; and anything he can’t handle personally he will hire out—or, failing that, make a deal. It is a difficult syndrome for most people to understand, because few of us ever come close to the kind of Ultimate Power and Achievement that the White House represents to a career politician."

While Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 is far from necessary reading, it is still a bracing look into the political process, and when placed aside the impotent reportage of '08, it leaves us jonesing for some Gonzo.

Perhaps most indispensable of all, is the 'July' chapter, wherein a 28-year old Rick Stearns explains to Hunter how he and Gary Hart navigated the byzantine credential rules of the party to insure McGovern's nomination at the convention in Miami Beach.

The Democrats bring this shit on themselves with an unstinting devotion to fairness, which inevitably leaves its intended beneficiaries feeling royally screwed over. They've set up a system where neither Barack or Hillary can win the delegates necessary for the nomination.

So, eager young staffers on those campaigns ought to get a copy of Thompson's book and brush up on the art of maneuvering on the convention floor. It might just win their bull elk the White House.

Every Valley Shall Be Exschmalted

Two standout bloggers are Roger Bourland and AC Douglas. Roger is the chair of the music department at UCLA, and AC is apparently a caveman hacking away at his computer.

Both are prolific posters. Among many other things, Roger is particularly notable for digging up the most fascinating clips on YouTube, like this gem of First Call performing "Every Valley" from Handel's Messiah:



AC is most notable for his unrelenting vitriol. His response to this clip is indicative of his usual style:

"This is the sort of empty, simpleminded crap that results ineluctably from promoting and encouraging the blockheaded and perverse notion that there’s no meaningful distinction between popular and high culture nor should there be."

Apparently he's never sat through a church choir's performance of Handel. As this is Holy Week, and thousands of journeymen such as ourselves will be flogging these classics in countless churches across the country we feel duty-bound to point out that most of the jobs we do are hack work, and that it would be quite rare indeed to encounter vocalists as on pitch as these.

Does the arrangement suck? Yes. Is their wardrobe regrettable? Hell yes (but it was 1989).

But could you say the same of 'legit' performances of Handel? Most definitely.

In fact, the most meaningful distinction between this clip and the vast majority of Handel gigs we've ever played is that the vocal performances are better in the 'popular' version. Plenty of mediocre musicians try to distinguish themselves by taking on the repetoire of AC's 'high culture' and end up churning out simpleminded crap. So, perhaps that reinforces his point, but for our money, it just goes to show that there really is no difference. Good music is good music.

A Special Comment On Music History:

This morning's Overgrown Path took us to one of our favorite (and certainly the prevalent) view of music history.

Pliable always has the best junk, doesn't he? This is grade-A quality smack to get your morning started off right:

"music is a major contributor in building societies. It creates a direction in societies...

...music has lost its way since the nineteenth century. It has changed from earlier eras—the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic epochs (1600-1900)—to trends starting in early 1900's. These earlier eras spanning 300 years represent the pinnacle of classical music in the West and are based on higher principles and values. Composers such as Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Stockhausen composed music from a listener's perspective as if experimenting with noise.

When this chaotic music appeared, atomic bombs, communism and cold war also surfaced. He believes this chaotic music in no small way contributes to the chaos in modern times. Destructive political movements, such as communism, thrived by killing people in its own society.

Europe boasted excellent philosophers and scholars when classical principles were followed. When music lost its classical values, chaos developed in societies and so for 100 years, music has been struggling to find direction.

With all due respect to the oboist who spouted this stuff and other estimable minds like Alex Ross and Herman Hesse who buy into this narrative, this is an absolutely nonsensical view of music history.

Rather than being indebted to Donald Rumsfeld, this is the type of historical narrative one would expect Pollyanna to churn out. Nevertheless, it is such an overwhelmingly accepted view that it almost seems similarly naive to argue against it.

However, as another obnoxiously self-obsessed bloviator with a fondness for pointlessly elaborate sentence structure would put it, "Events insist". We'll happily continue to pop off against this historical perspective whenever we encounter it and poke a little fun at ourselves along the way.

Sweet Revenge in NYC

NYC eats well. The standard of eating here is so high that it overflows onto the streets, where some of the best food is to be had. But we pay through the nose for all this (and apparently, the sushi is killing us).

These places get hosed on costs day in and out, and they pass the expense on to us. Now, rents have gotten so out of hand that a stalwart like Tuscan Square is getting squeezed so hard that it's closing down. TS is reliably good but has always screamed 'overpriced' ($9 packaged sandwiches anyone?), and it appears no mark up is big enough to save this power lunch favorite at Rockefeller Center, despite its built-in clientele.

What's really out of hand, though, is all these goddamn cupcakes. The wholly unremarkable cupcakes from Magnolia have spread like demon seed and knockoff joints litter the cityscape. The latest growth of this cupcake kudzu is invading the old Vinyl Mania space on Carmine in the West Village, and though we wish them well, it always leaves us scratching our heads and wondering: Who is buying all these friggin' cupcakes, and why won't they stop?!