In today’s Arizona Daily Star, Tucson Symphony concertmaster Stephen Moeckel declares his favorite dead musician to be “Jacqueline Dupree.” I assume Moeckel knows who he’s talking about, even if the reporter doesn’t. Hint to arts reporters who are out of their depth: If you haven’t heard of someone, even someone you should have heard of long before you got your assignment, double-check the name before you make a fool of yourself in print.
Responding to my post linking to explanations of radio and TV call letters, soon-to-depart KUAT-FM announcer Michael Dauphinais says, “I heard a story once about KNTU, named after North Texas State University. Seems that the school's name was later changed to University of North Texas … but for obvious reasons, the old call letters remained.”
Reminds me of that probably apocryphal old story about the proposed Sam Houston Institute of Technology …
Critic Greg Sandow, in preparation for a Juilliard course he teaches on music criticism, has posted an outline of what constitutes a solid review. I heartily agree with his points, and I commend the outline not only to students but also to working critics who just don’t get it.
You can find my own facetious guide to faking a classical-music review, inspired not by theory but by what I actually see practiced, here.
New York Magazine has an article about the history, and purportedly the future, of the New York Review of Books, the publication that has been rubbing ink onto the fingers of left-leaning American intellectuals since 1963. James Atlas’ article provides a nice account of where NYRB has been, with vivid if compact portraits of its three founders, but it’s rather helpless at forecasting what will happen now that longtime co-editor Barbara Epstein is gone (she died in June). Surviving editor Robert Silvers claims that everything will continue just as it has, and nobody dares to suggest that it may be time for change.
Atlas quotes Philip Nobile’s description of the magazine: “a literary magazine on the British nineteenth-century model, which would mix politics and literature in a tough but gentlemanly fashion.” This has been the magazine’s steady strength, as well as its chronic weakness.
I was an enthusiastic reader of the NYRB in the late ’80s and early ’90s, but I finally gave up on the publication about 10 years ago. I finally realized how unbearably clubby it really was—its detractors call it “The New York Review of Each Other’s Books”—and how irrelevant its anglophilic tendencies were to my own interests. It seemed that every issue would contain another long article about Henry James (who is more popular among British critics and scholars than American readers), another pointless and clumsily written piece by James Fenton, another “review” by some English armchair critic that amounted merely to a detailed plot summary of the novel at hand, including spoilers galore, and never a single word of analysis or context. Then there were the endless articles about what a genius Hannah Arendt had been, and how right-wingers were screwing up Israel, or displays of how knowledgable John Updike was about obscure American visual art. Even the once wickedly but subtly witty David Levine caricatures were becoming dull. And I grew increasingly furious every time I happened upon curious comma-less constructions involving the word “not” (“The cat was black not white”), and the ridiculous Britishism “take a decision” (from whom do you take it?).
Surely Robert Silvers doesn’t care in the least that I no longer read his magazine. But he, and especially the successors he seems in no hurry to appoint, should care about my reasons for not reading it if the New York Review of Books is to be anything more than a fusty vehicle for scholarly-press ads.
While I was doing an Internet search just now for something completely unrelated (information on the Warehouse District downtown, if you must know), I stumbled upon this great list of the origins of radio and TV call letters. KUAT's is one of the more straightforward: the UAT stands for University of Arizona, Tucson. (The call letters of broadcast stations west of the Mississippi begin with K, and those east of the Mississippi begin with W. Our list-maker, Tucsonan Barry Mishkind, doesn't explain this part as far as I can tell, but the K stands for Kaiser Steel, and the W for Westinghouse, the two companies that owned the most radio stations in the 1920s when the call-letter scheme was being systematized.)
During my vacation, I not only soaked up a great deal of Tuscan and Venetian scenery, drank too much wine, ate too much oily high-carb food, hiked up and down too many steep hilltown streets, and stared numbly at too much Gothic and Renaissance art; I managed to read six issues from my year-old-plus pile of New Yorkers. One item I thought may be of particular interest to you, assuming you didn’t read it in the summer of 2005 when it was fresh, is an insightful Alex Ross column on “how technology has transformed the sound of music”:
Music has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disk; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with ten thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people doing in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. In the future, … reproduction will replace production entirely. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.If you’re as far behind in your reading as I am, you can find the full article here.
James Reel's cranky consideration of the fine arts and public radio in Tucson and beyond.
