I am myself familiar with the reviewing cliché, from both ends of the business, so I say deliberately that Updike’s scope is rather breathtaking (from Isaac Babel straight to James Thurber on successive pages), and I add that he seems almost incapable of writing badly. When I do not know the subject well — as in his finely illustrated art reviews of Bruegel, Dürer and Goya — I learn much from what Updike has to impart. When he considers an author I love, like Proust or Czeslaw Milosz, I often find myself appreciating familiar things in a new way. I enjoy the little feuilletons he appends, for example on the 10 greatest moments of the American libido.
Christopher Hitchens reviewing Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism by John Updike in The New York Times
Hitchens quotes the “highly affable preface” to the book which has Updike wondering if he’s not critical enough, or critical in the wrong directions. “Should he perhaps have been a little kinder to E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo and Norman Rush or (by implication) a fraction more harsh with Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Haruki Murakami?”
But it’s Updike’s calm and discursive attention to the details in Murakami’s second most recent novel, Kafka on the Shore, that provides a context for what can seem to be allegorical non-sequiturs in the Japanese novelist’s books. A man who might have come to life from the label of a Johnny Walker whisky bottle, and the fast food icon, Colonel Sanders are characters in Kafka on the Shore, and Updike muses on their mythological relevance.
In a prefatory chapter, Crow promises Kafka a “violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm,” with “hot, red blood.” He assures him, and the expectant reader, “Once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through. . . . But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.” At the center of this particular novelistic storm is the idea that our behavior in dreams can translate to live action; our dreams can be conduits back into waking reality. This notion, the learned Oshima tells Kafka, can be found in “The Tale of Genji,” the early-eleventh century Japanese classic by Lady Murasaki....Read in context, in the first section of Arthur Waley’s translation of “Genji,” the episode borders on the naturalistic. Within the tight, constrained circles of the imperial court, emotional violence bursts its bonds. ...
From the inarguable truth of the second observation the possibility of one’s spirit leaving one’s body could be plausibly deduced in a prescientific, preëlectric age when, Oshima points out, “the physical darkness outside and the inner darkness of the soul were mixed together, with no boundary separating the two.” In Murakami’s vision of our materialist, garishly illuminated age, however, the boundary between inner and outer darkness is traversed by grotesque figments borrowed from the world of commercial imagery: Johnnie Walker, with boots and top hat, manifests himself to the cat-loving simpleton Nakata as a mass murderer of stray felines, jocularly cutting open their furry abdomens and popping their still-beating hearts into his mouth, and Colonel Sanders, in his white suit and string tie, appears to Nakata’s companion, Hoshino, as a fast-talking pimp. The Colonel, questioned by the startled Hoshino about his nature, quotes another venerable text, Ueda Akinari’s “Tales of Moonlight and Rain”: “Shape I may take, converse I may, but neither god nor Buddha am I, rather an insensate being whose heart thus differs from that of man."…
In “Kafka on the Shore,” the skies unaccountably produce showers of sardines, mackerel, and leeches, and some unlucky people get stuck halfway in the spirit world and hence cast a faint shadow in this one. Japanese supernature, imported into contemporary America with animated cartoons, video games, and Yu-Gi-Oh cards, is luxuriant, lighthearted, and, by the standards of monotheism, undisciplined. The religious history of Japan since the introduction of Chinese culture in the fifth century A.D. and the arrival of Buddhism in the sixth has been a long lesson in the stubborn resilience and adaptability of the native cult of polytheistic nature worship called, to distinguish it from Buddhism, Shinto. Shinto, to quote the Encyclopædia Britannica, “has no founder, no official sacred scriptures, in the strict sense, and no fixed dogma.” Nor does it offer, as atypically surviving kamikaze pilots have proudly pointed out, an afterlife. It is based on kami, a ubiquitous word sometimes translated as “gods” or “spirits” but meaning, finally, anything felt worthy of reverence. One of Shinto’s belated theorists, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), defined kami as “anything whatsoever which was out of the ordinary.”
In a New York Times Essay Haruki Murakami reviews his own writing, describing the affinity he feels with jazz:
I had practiced the piano as a kid, and I could read enough music to pick out a simple melody, but I didn’t have the kind of technique it takes to become a professional musician. Inside my head, though, I did often feel as though something like my own music was swirling around in a rich, strong surge. I wondered if it might be possible for me to transfer that music into writing. That was how my style got started.
Whether in music or in fiction, the most basic thing is rhythm. Your style needs to have good, natural, steady rhythm, or people won’t keep reading your work. I learned the importance of rhythm from music — and mainly from jazz. Next comes melody — which, in literature, means the appropriate arrangement of the words to match the rhythm. If the way the words fit the rhythm is smooth and beautiful, you can’t ask for anything more. Next is harmony — the internal mental sounds that support the words. Then comes the part I like best: free improvisation. Through some special channel, the story comes welling out freely from inside. All I have to do is get into the flow. Finally comes what may be the most important thing: that high you experience upon completing a work — upon ending your “performance” and feeling you have succeeded in reaching a place that is new and meaningful. And if all goes well, you get to share that sense of elevation with your readers (your audience). That is a marvelous culmination that can be achieved in no other way.
Practically everything I know about writing, then, I learned from music. It may sound paradoxical to say so, but if I had not been so obsessed with music, I might not have become a novelist. Even now, almost 30 years later, I continue to learn a great deal about writing from good music. My style is as deeply influenced by Charlie Parker’s repeated freewheeling riffs, say, as by F. Scott Fitzgerald’s elegantly flowing prose. And I still take the quality of continual self-renewal in Miles Davis’s music as a literary model.
Lamb of God (Agnus Dei) by Francisco Zurbaran. The cover image for “Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
The Spiritual Journeys of L.A. Times and N.Y. Times Book Review Editors
Richard Bernstein had been Time’s first Bejing Bureau Chief, and Chief at bureaus in Paris and the United Nations, as well as a national cultural correspondent for the New York Times, before settling into a role he acknowledges as privileged and wonderful in the book reviewing department at the New York Times. He had reached the age of fifty without any significant hardships and his spiritual crisis came about through ennui, not hardship. He maintained his cultural and spiritual ties to Judaism but was absorbed by the pilgrimage made by an ancient Chinese Buddhist monk, who travelled into India and back to visit sites significant in the life of the Buddha.
In the year 629, a greatly revered Chinese Buddhist monk, Hsuan Tsang, set out across Asia in search of the Buddhist Truth, to settle what he called the “perplexities of my mind.” Nearly a millennium and a half later, Richard Bernstein retraces the monk’s steps: from the Tang dynasty capital at Xian through ancient Silk Road oases, over forbidding mountain passes to Tashkent, Samarkand, and the Amu-Darya River, across Pakistan to the holiest cities of India—and back.
Jacket blurb from Ultimate Journey by Richard Bernstein (2001)
In last Sunday’s Times he mused on why news of the uprisings by Buddhist monks in Burma has largely disappeared from the news, contrasting it with how Buddhist monks seized, and kept, the attention of the press during the Vietnam war.
Anybody old enough to remember the Vietnam War will remember that day in 1963: it was June 11 when newspapers around the world carried the shocking image of a 73 year-old monk named Thich Quang Duc sitting in the middle of a Saigon street and maintaining his rigidly erect lotus position even while his body was engulfed in flames.
It was an image that changed the United States and Vietnam forever, a stunning, shocking and, in its way, sublime protest against the heavy-handedness and tyrannical capriciousness of the regime led by Ngo Dinh Diem being supported with the blood of young American men. Among its consequences was the American decision a few months later to engineer a coup leading to Diem’s assassination, though the Buddhists continued to protest against later regimes as well, contributing to those governments’ weakness and instability.
A self-immolation that nobody knew about would have no effect, of course, but in South Vietnam a young American reporter for The Associated Press, Malcolm Browne, was on the scene that day, snapping away with the camera he always carried with him, winning a Pulitzer Prize and changing the course of history.
We know from William Prochnau’s excellent book of 1995, “Once Upon a Distant War,” that Mr. Browne was present at that historic moment because he had been tipped off in advance by the Buddhists’ clever and skillful press relations representative.
Jack Miles spent ten years (1960 - 1970) training at a Jesuit Seminary. He was literary editor of the Los Angeles Times from 1985 to 1991 then spent five years on the paper’s editorial board, writing editorials. His books God: A Biography and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God examine God and Jesus Christ as a literary figures. In May this year he lectured on the soul in modern literature at the Getty Center.
For imaginative reviewers, especially poets, no less than for scientists and a for few more far-sighted religious leaders, including, notably the Dalai Lama, recombinant DNA is our era’s understanding of soul. We are matter organized in a way that has both life and spirit as effects, so long as the organization can be prolonged or reproduced. In a remarkable way, this notion—with its distinction between the phenotype and the genotype—combines the Semitic assumption that as each man or woman has but one life to live with the Indic or karmic assumption that something is passed on that reflects experience passed on over many more lifetimes than one. That DNA is recombinant, its ultimate origin unrecoverably multiple and remote, seems particularly congenial to the belief in “co-dependent origination” associated with the Buddhist sage Nagarjuna.
To say this much is certainly not to claim that science is a religion or religion a surrogate. Yet, granting that there is no moral to the story of evolution, there are choices capable of moral construal as the human species becomes “evolution conscious of itself.” Evolution as such makes no moral judgements, in other words, but you may.
Pankaj Mishra’s Career Begins With Admiring Edmund Wilson’s Criticism
Pankaj Mishra is famous for having discovered Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things while working as an editor at Penguin Books in India. As well as writing his own books of fiction and non-fiction he reviews books for newspapers and magazines around the world. While gathering the courage to become a writer and looking for something to write about, he read the criticism of Edmund Wilson at a University library in Benares. He feels that his career properly began when he came to write for the New York Review of Books after meeting co-founder Barbara Epstein.
I first met Barbara Epstein in New Delhi in 1997. She had come to India to give a talk on Edmund Wilson, whom I had idolized since discovering his books in a neglected old library in the North Indian city of Benares. I never expected to meet anyone who had known Wilson; the young Americans I met in India had barely heard of him. Such youthful idealism as mine does not usually survive its encounter with reality. Yet Barbara’s graciousness, wit, and ironical intelligence more than matched my fantasies of the remote American world of Wilson.
In an obituary for her when she died last year, he wrote:
It was while working with her that I learned the most valuable lessons of our friendship. I began to see more clearly how literary and political journalism requires much more than the creation of harmonious and intellectually robust sentences; how it is linked inseparably to the cultivation of a moral and emotional intelligence; how it demands a reasonable and civil tone, a suspicion of abstractions untested by experience, a personal indifference to power, and, most importantly, a quiet but firm solidarity with the powerless.
A new collection of Wilson’s criticism was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times last weekend:
At his best, Wilson has a novelistic drive and intensity so hypnotic that you forget you’re reading criticism altogether. He once wrote of great novelists that they “must show us large social forces, or uncontrollable lines of destiny, or antagonistic impulses of the human spirit, struggling with one another,” and he did exactly that in “To the Finland Station,” his epic 1940 study of socialism and its founders. ...
An independent man of letters, Wilson mastered the difficult art of freelancing while writing for Vanity Fair, the New Republic and the New Yorker, his home base after World War II. Wilson approached his trade as a journalist: He would find a group of subjects or books that interested him and write up his findings in his articles and reviews. He didn’t compose his books so much as assemble them from this vast output, expanding and trimming his pieces where needed. His method, which he outlined in 1943, is still instructive (budding critics, take note!): “You have to learn to load solid matter into notices of ephemeral happenings; you have to develop a resourcefulness at pursuing a line of thought through pieces on miscellaneous and more or less fortuitous subjects; and you have to acquire a technique of slipping over on the routine of editors the deeper independent work which their over-anxious intentness on the fashions of the month or the week have conditioned them automatically to reject.”
Matthew Price. Los Angeles Times. November 4, 2007.
In 2005 in the New Yorker Louis Menand described the scope, and selectiveness, of Edmund Wilson’s interests:
Wilson had no interest in criticism as such. He wrote a few essays about the critical literature that had influenced him—Marxist and historical interpretation—but he paid little attention to the criticism being written by his contemporaries unless they were good writers themselves, in which case he read their criticism as a form of literature, which is how he preferred to read everything. He detested what he called “treatise-type” books—theoretical or social-scientific works—and avoided them, unless, again, they seemed to him to have literary or imaginative power. He read Marx but not Weber; he read Orwell but not Hannah Arendt. It was his practice, when he took up an author, to read the whole shelf: books, uncollected pieces, biographies, correspondence. When he lost patience with a book, he skipped around, and what he ignored he ignored without shame. “I have been bored by Hispanophiles,” he wrote in The New Yorker in 1965, “and I have also been bored by everything, with the exception of Spanish painting, that I have ever known about Spain. I have made a point of learning no Spanish, and I have never got through ‘Don Quixote.’ ” Though he wrote well-known essays on Dickens and on Henry James, he was uninterested in most Victorian fiction and didn’t bother to finish “Middlemarch.” He had a good knowledge of the theatre (he wrote a number of plays, and his first wife, Mary Blair, was in the Provincetown Players, Eugene O’Neill’s company); he had a selective knowledge of art, a very selective knowledge of classical music, and virtually no knowledge of the movies. He loathed the radio.
“A history of man’s ideas and imaginings in the setting of the conditions which have shaped them”: this was the way Wilson described his ambition in his first major book, “Axel’s Castle,” in 1931.
Louis Menand. Missionary: Edmund Wilson and American Culture. The New Yorker. August 8, 2005.
Gary Giddins and the Impossibility of a Negative Review
Gary Giddins has published two collections of jazz criticism drawn mostly from a column he used to write for the Village Voice: Visions of Jazz: The First Century and Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of its Second Century, and brings to his reviews elements of literary criticism.
To borrow Harold Bloom’s conceit, Armstrong invented the human in American music, supplanting the mechanics of ragtime and traditional polyphonic jazz as well as classical alloys (from Gottschalk to Dvorak to Gershwin) that attempted to create “serious” music from American folk sources, with a fluid, graceful, rhythmically unparalleled model on which a durable art grounded in individualism could flourish.
In Armstrong’s world, it was no longer sufficient to merely master the trumpet or saxophone; instead, jazz musicians adapted their instruments as extensions of themselves, making each solo as distinct as a signature or a fingerprint. At a 1966 concert on Randall’s Island, Edmund Hall and Pee Wee Russell played a duet, and I could scarcely believe they were playing the same instrument, so utterly distinctive was each man’s approach to the clarinet. By then I had learned, with immense satisfaction, that not only is character fate, but also style, timbre, and attack. Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Ben Webster, Bud Freeman and Herschel Evans all played tenor saxophone and were of similar age and background, yet announced themselves unconditionally in the space of a few notes. Nor was this generational: for the same could be said of their successors, tenor players like Dexter Gordon, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz, John Coltrane, Charlie Rouse, Wayne Shorter, Zoot Sims, Booker Ervin, and—here is the thing—many others. This apparently infinite well of personal expression quickened my fixation and deepened my resolve.
Gary Giddins. Introduction. Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of the Second Century.
And he explained at length how the changing fortunes of the recording and media businesses contributed to him rarely writing negative reviews.
The trade of writing about music hasn’t changed in the nearly 200 years since it became a journalistic sideline. The trick is still to find concrete images to describe and appraise non-verbal art and the feelings it engenders while sustaining one’s youthful ardor and openness—despite the mellowing or wisdom or crankiness or despair or revelation that comes with age. The death of jazz, movies, literature, and civilization is as confidently predicted as the end of the world and the second coming. Sidney Bechet, in his posthumous memoir, offered a more realistic credo: “You got to be in the sun to feel the sun. It’s that way with music, too.” It’s that way with everything. Criticism is often a battleground between empathy and disdain. A musician once complained that my work is too emotional. He’s right. Much as I admire the writing of categorical intellectuals, feeling is the only arbiter I completely trust. Like everyone else, I aspired to join William James’s tough-minded tribe—just as I determined to be one of those who, in Bertrand Russell’s dictum, braved the future rather than retreat to the past. It didn’t work out that way: As a critic, I am chiefly an enthusiast mired in the past and reliant on sensibility. This confession is not an apology, just fair warning to anyone who wandered out of the rain into these pages.
A vigorous art deserves and requires a disputatious criticism. Better to be wrongheaded and punitive from time to time than reliably soft, predictable, and accommodating. But with the eradication of antitrust laws, and the selling out of the FCC, not to mention the retailing of art to corporate interests (through an insidious extension of copyright protection of what amounts to perpetuity), jazz has all but disappeared from commercial TV and radio. I concluded some time ago that I could not justify using the space allotted me in the Village Voice or any other venues to caution readers against records they’ve never heard of. Much of my time was spent searching for performances and recordings I liked well enough to explore in essay form and that exemplified the art’s liveliness. As a result, enthusiasm became a safe harbour and disputation a matter of personal grousing, except once in a while, usually when covering festivals that guarantee excuses to pick nits.
Gary Giddins. Introduction. Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of the Second Century.
Language melts-down and contracts on new publishing platforms and mobile reading devices.
Photograph by Dayna Bateman who posts at Flickr as Suttonhoo
I read Fred Wilson’s blog on his life and venture capital investments because he seems like the guy who has the keys to the toolbox I want to have as a writer. I’m often thinking that I want to make everything more fluid and have services blend into one another. I want to be able to admire the photographs I’ve tagged as “favourites” in Flickr, drag highlight quote clouds out of the tag cloud that relates to the articles I’ve saved links to in de.licio.us, and paste pieces of audio and sound that I’ve saved in last.fm. This is the kind of thinking out loud that Fred Wilson does on his blog, illuminating the investments his Union Square Ventures makes. On the company’s website Andrew Parker explains what intrested the company in Tumblr, the site that aims to integrate these tasks into what he describes as a “clean lifestream.”
Aggregating these pieces of myself from across the web into one location in a simple, clean lifestream should be easy.
Furthermore, using many different web services to express myself online is not common usage; this is fringe behavior at best. Culling choice images, quotes, ideas, pages, video, and such from both one’s own life and from the internet should not involve registering for as many web services as the number of media formats one consumes. There is something broken about the way I express myself online when every time I want to post something I have to ask myself: “What tools should I use to best express myself? Does this image belong on Flickr on my blog (or both)? Should I Twitter this thought or does it require a full-fledged blog post to articulate well?” It would be far more ideal to just post a piece of media to express myself without worrying about the overhead of how I should post it, what title I should use, where does it fit the context of the data around it, etc…
Andrew Parker. Union Square Ventures.
He makes two important points about Tumblr’s appeal: that it’s simple, using Tumblr (which I’m experimenting with as a scrapbook to keep track of thoughts for future posts) is effortless, it has all the possibilities suggested by a blank page. And it’s beautiful.
Personal expression online should be simple, and, more importantly, it should be beautiful. We hear from Etsy sellers all the time that they use Etsy instead of a competitors because Etsy is beautiful, and they want to display their artwork on a site that has respect for aesthetics. The same is true of personal expression on Tumblr, Tumblr is beautiful, so it’s easy to make your random thoughts look good.
To clarify what I mean by “beautiful,” it’s not beautiful in a way that is distracting (like many beautiful, yet complicated, flash interfaces). Often times interfaces on web services are considered beautiful because they’re interesting and fun to play with (information visualization novelties like “tag clouds”), but these interface are not well-designed for simplicity. By contrast, the beauty in Tumblr is in its simplicity. Tumblr is well-designed because you don’t feel like there is an interface you’re working with at all… the interface melts away, and you simply get things done quickly, without error, and with gorgeous results.
Andrew Parker. Union Square Ventures
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EX 20 by Zatorski + Zatorski, who have translated the King James Edition of the bible into text message language.
Is the Language Beautiful?
The beauty of the language of the King James Edition of the Bible was unintentional. It was written in the common language of the day. This edition of the Bible was meant to be read out loud as well as silently, visually. We found it rich and literary with hindsight. Will this happen with the current text message language, will the messages of the spirit, beautiful in themselves, be a language we swoon over in time if the Bible is adapted to this language? asked the English artists Zatorski + Zatorski.
The words that make up the messages of our day are compressed for speed of writing and for their published economy, to condense how much space the words will take up on the small screen of a mobile device. A whole language that has a goofy edge has formed around the services and the verbs that describe their use: Tumblr, Flickr, Twitter (and tweeting), playing your music through last.fm is described as “scrobbling.”
Sony electronic book reader, Libri-E
But, still we write.
“One of the things that I’ve found through whatever loosey goosey reading of human history I’ve managed through my life, is that very little is really new. You know, the Internet, for the first 25 years of its existence, has been almost exclusively text based. And so [people] are writing with frequency unseen since the Victorian heyday of the British Empire, when there were three mail deliveries a day, and people wrote and communicated constantly. We went back to it. It wasn’t new. Very few things in the last 45 years have caused me to go ‘Whoa! That’s new!”
Jenny Holzer projects quotes from Samuel Beckett’s writing onto buildings in London.
Words, Like Art
A couple of weeks before the APEC conference started in Sydney mobile LCD screens started appearing on street corners. Outside the Town Hall one carried the test message “evacute to Darling Harbour”. I misread it as an artwork, a Jenny Holzer installation, until the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out that it was a typo for an evacuation warning.
Printed Matter, the New York bookstore specialising in artists books, has announced the arrival of “Words to be Looked At” by Liz Kotz, a survey of word based art.
“Language has been a primary element in visual art since the 1960s--whether in the form of printed texts, painted signs, words on the wall, or recorded speech. In Words to Be Looked At, Liz Kotz traces this practice to its beginnings, examining works of visual art, poetry, and experimental music created in and around New York City from 1958 to 1968. In many of these works, language has been reduced to an object nearly emptied of meaning. Robert Smithson described a 1967 exhibition at the Dwan Gallery as consisting of ‘Language to be Looked at and/or Things to be Read.’ Kotz considers the paradox of artists living in a time of social upheaval who used words but chose not to make statements with them.
“Kotz traces the proliferation of text in 1960s art to the use of words in musical notation and short performance scores. She makes two works the ‘bookends’ of her study: the ‘text score’ for John Cage’s legendary 1952 work 4’33"--written instructions directing a performer to remain silent during three arbitrarily determined time brackets-- and Andy Warhol’s notorious a: a novel--twenty-four hours of endless talk, taped and transcribed--published by Grove Press in 1968. Examining works by artists and poets including Vito Acconci, Carl Andre, George Brecht, Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth, Jackson Mac Low, and Lawrence Weiner, Kotz argues that the turn to language in 1960s art was a reaction to the development of new recording and transmission media: words took on a new materiality and urgency in the face of magnetic sound, videotape, and other emerging electronic technologies. Words to Be Looked At is generously illustrated, with images of many important and influential but little-known works.”
--from the publisher
Nicole Bengiveno for the New York Times
Moveable Type Installation in the lobby at The New York Times
An algorithm programmed by Ben Rubin and Rick Hansen pulls quotes and phrases from the archive of the New York Times, the print edition of the paper, and from the comments and blogs on the Times website, and displays them on screens in the foyer of the new building on 41st street.
Since The Times moved in June from its longtime home on West 43rd Street in Manhattan to its new, almost completed tower designed by Renzo Piano on Eighth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets, two men — an artist, Ben Rubin, and a statistician, Mark Hansen — have all but taken up residence in the building’s cavernous lobby, huddled most days around laptops and coffee cups on a folding table. Flanking them on two high walls are 560 small screens, 280 a wall, suspended in a grid pattern that looks at first glance like some kind of minimalist sculpture.
But then the screens, simple vacuum fluorescent displays of the kind used in alarm clocks and cash registers, come to life, spewing out along the walls streams of orphaned sentences and phrases that have appeared in The Times or, in many cases, that are appearing on the paper’s Web site at that instant.
They are fished from The Times databases by computerized algorithms that Mr. Rubin and Mr. Hansen have designed that parse the paper in strange ways, selecting, for example, only sentences from quotations that start with “you” or “I.” Or sentences ending in question marks. Or just the first, tightly choreographed sentences of obituaries.
The Battle for the Hearts and Wallets of Business Readers
the hunt for well-heeled readers of financial journalism
Wall Street Journal Content Folded into The Australian
When Rupert Murdoch’s offer for the Wall Street Journal was approved in August, the New York Times commented that: “Mr. Murdoch has talked of pumping money into The Journal, bolstering its coverage of national affairs and its European and Asian editions, which could pose a serious challenge to competitors like The Financial Times and The New York Times. That could mean losing money in the short run, something Mr. Murdoch has always been willing to do to attract readers and gain influence.” Murdoch has already started running Wall Street Journal print edition reports in a special section in his national newspaper, The Australian, and feeds from the Dow Jones newswire on The Australian’s website. On November 1, The Guardian noted that: The Australian is the only national broadsheet in Australia, and previously held a content syndication agreement with WSJ’s rival the Financial Times, which also publishes in Australia....
Mr Murdoch told the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco last month that he had plans to expand the WSJ beyond its roots, including using its content with the rest of News Corp’s properties.
“We have a lot of plans and a lot of ideas that need to be refined,” he said. “But I want to improve it in every way: in what it does now in finance to start with, but I also want to add more national and international news.”
In a report on the website of the Australian, the paper’s editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell said the WSJ deal marks “a new era of business journalism” for the title and underlines its “commitment to world class journalism.
Last week I noticed a lavish, luxurious new advertising campaign for the Australian, with massive full-colour glossy adsheets running up the centre of the escalators at the Martin Place railway station in Sydney’s CBD (where many financial companies have their national headquarters) and a full-colour glossy band around the paper saying that it’s content is now “broader”—whatever that means. I’m not in the habit of visiting The Australian’s website so I hadn’t noticed the slogan “the heart of Australia” running underneath the masthead online. This slogan used to be on the car numberplates of the Australian Capital Territory where Canberra, the seat of Australia’s government is located.
The leading source of financial news at the moment is the national Australian Financial Review, published by Fairfax, which also publishes the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age in Melbourne. The AFR relies on wire service reports from Bloomberg and print stories from The New York Times. Each Friday it publishes a liftout section based on The New York Times’s Sophisticated Traveller magazine. The AFR’s website has all of its content locked behind a subscription wall. The AFR courts luxury business advertising with several ultra-glossy stiff-paged colour magazine liftouts that market executive toys and trips, profile executives and illuminate fashionable management and sales strategies. The Australian publishes a similar luxury magazine, Wish, every month.
On September 17, a news release from Dow Jones announced that the Wall Street Journal will begin publishing a monthly glossy magazine, Pursuits, in September of 2008. The magazine will be delivered free to subscribers of the Wall Street Journal and the content will be freely available online.
Pursuits will build on the success of the Journal’s business of life franchise and will showcase the Journal’s lifestyle coverage for readers and the advertisers who want to reach its unique, affluent and influential audience.
“Pursuits will extend the Journal’s highly successful business of life franchise that began with the Weekend Journal and Personal Journal sections of the newspaper by offering unique access and insight through lifestyle reporting that only the Journal can provide,” said L. Gordon Crovitz, executive vice president, Dow Jones & Company and publisher, The Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal’s Wealth correspondent Robert Frank, the author of Richistan, will be involved, and “Pursuits will offer compelling journalism, vivid imagery and an unmatched guide to wealth, fashion, collecting and travel,” said Marcus W. Brauchli, managing editor, The Wall Street Journal. “The Wall Street Journal holds a unique passport into this intriguing world.”
This editorial ground may already have been lost to Conde Nast’s new magazine Portfolio, which launched in May and is edited by Joanne Lipman who was previously editor of the Weekend and Magazine sections of the WallStreet Journal. Portfolio is able to trade on the intellectual credibility of the New Yorker and the sex appeal and Hollywood glamour of Vanity Fair. And its articles are finely observed and engaging and its website rich with content. This may have something to do with the editorial direction, from culture into business rather than vice-versa. Along with the requisite fawning profiles (that leave a few fang marks, in the Vanity Fair style) of financial luminaries and design stories on yachts, there’s a sassy and witty examination of the finances of the porn industry being undermined by a user-generated social networking porn site, a look at how art houses arrive at valuations for auctions, and a feature on the global seed bank that’s filing away copies of the world’s food supplies in case of disaster. It echoes a New Yorker feature by John Seabrook on the same subject in August. In leiu of a complete online archive, the New Yorker has what amounts to a digital library card for features from back issues, and John Seabrook’s “Annals of Agriculture” is dryly condensed.
ANNALS OF AGRICULTURE about seeds, seed banks, and the genetic modification of crops. Writer accompanies Cary Fowler to the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry in St. Petersburg, Russia. Fowler, the director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, was in St. Petersburg to gather contributions for the world’s first global seed bank, which is being built in Svalbard, Norway and is scheduled to open in February, 2008. Briefly discusses the history of agriculture, which began about 8000 B. C. in Mesopotamia, and the preservation of seeds by early civilizations. Tells about Nikolai Vavilov, the founder of the Russian seed institute and the first man to think of creating a global seed bank. Vavilov fell afoul of Stalin and died in a Siberian labor camp. Writer mentions the destruction of the national seed banks of Iraq and Afghanistan during the U. S.-led invasions. Seed banks in countries such as Honduras and the Philippines have recently been lost to natural disasters. Most national agricultural banks contain the seeds of crops grown in that country. The American national seed bank is in Fort Collins, Colorado. Explains the basic principles of seed storage: low humidity and cold temperatures are essential. Tells about Fowler, who grew up in Memphis and became interested in seeds while working on a magazine article about the disappearance of family farms in the South. Describes his battle with two forms of cancer. Surviving cancer motivated Fowler to become more involved in seed preservation efforts because he believed he hadn’t contributed constructively to society. Writer describes the development of hybrid crops by companies such as Pioneer Hi-Bred, the first private seed company. By 1945, hybrid corn amounted to ninety per cent of the corn planted in the U. S. Tells about the green revolution, the process by which American-made hybrid seeds were sent around the world. While the hybrid crops allowed farmers to increase their yields, they also planted an American-style agrarian capitalism in developing nations. The backlash to the green revolution was led by writers and activists such as Pat Mooney and Jack Harlan, who warned that the adoption of hybrid seeds might cause traditional crop varieties to become extinct. Discusses the role played by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in negotiating international agreements regarding the sale and use of seeds. American agricultural corporations had successfully patented their hybrid seeds, many of which had been taken from developing countries, whose farmers were now forced to pay for the seeds they originally helped cultivate. Tells about the controversy over genetically modified organisms (G.M.O.s). Writer accompanies Fowler to Svalbard to inspect the site of the global seed vault, which is also where the Nordic Gene Bank is housed.
The Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT)
Americans’ perceptions of Iraq are molded by scenes of horrendous violence; few get to see the bravery and humanity of Iraqis living under hellish conditions.
So I wish millions could have watched the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF) present its 2007 Courage in Journalism award this week to six Iraqi women journalists who have risked their lives in the Baghdad bureau of McClatchy Newspapers. (Brave Mexican, Ethiopian and Zimbabwean women journalists were also honored.)
But the ceremonies could not be televised or photographed, because, if the Iraqi women’s faces were seen back home, they or their families could be targeted by terrorists for having worked with Americans. The husband, 5-year-old daughter, and mother-in-law of one of the women, Ban Adil Sarhan,
were shot dead for just that reason, and she is now living in America; another of the awardees is in hiding, and all are under threat.
I know all six because I work with the McClatchy bureau when I visit Baghdad (the McClatchy-Tribune wire distributes my column). So let me tell you a bit about Sahar Issa, who accepted the award for the group.
Sahar is a woman of immense dignity and composure, her English excellent and soft-spoken but with a quiet passion underneath. When I worked with her in Baghdad in June, I couldn’t comprehend how she persevered.
During this conflict she lost her son, who was caught in a cross-fire while riding his moped on the street. She also lost her brother. She struggles to care for her family in 110-degree heat with two hours of electricity a day and little water, waking at night to fan her children. Each day when they go to school, she worries they might not return.
Earlier this year she had to go to the morgue to find her nephew. Women are often sent to the morgue rather than men, because the men are in more danger. She, the boy’s mother, and an aunt had to search bare-handed through body parts to bring home the remains.
And yet, she decided during this war to work as a journalist, a profession that exposes her and her Iraqi colleagues to even greater peril, especially if they work with Americans. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 121 Iraq journalists have been killed on duty since 2003. Yasser Salihee, a member of the Baghdad bureau (then run by Knight Ridder) was killed in 2005.
I asked Sahar this week why she took the risk. “It means so much to me,” she replied quickly. “Not a lot of people in America know Iraqi society. It makes wrongdoing (against us) easier. We have to speak out ... to demonstrate to people who may affect decisions (about our lives) that we are human beings - that Ali is like John.”
Along with the rest of the McClatchy bureau’s Baghdad staff, Sahar writes the Inside Iraq blog (www.mcclatchydc.com/iraq). The feedback convinced her that Americans know little about Iraq. They don’t know, for example, that Iraq once led the Arab world in women’s education, before wars, international sanctions, and the American occupation set women back. Both she and her mother are university graduates. Those gains, she says, are now being reversed by religious parties.
She also wants Americans to understand that sectarian strife in Iraq is not really over religion - but over political power.
To correct such misconceptions, she is committed to journalism. “No one will do it for us,” she says. Is she frightened? “I am scared silly. I am at tremendous risk.” Her kids are proud of her, but when she left for America, her son said, “Mother, don’t be photographed.”
At the award ceremony in Washington, CNN’s Zain Verjee asked Sahar how she deals with fear. “Every day could be my last,” she said. “I try not to dwell on it. Living in fear has become quite commonplace in Iraq and not just for journalists. We go out to visit relatives, to school or the store, not knowing whether we’ll come back. I’ve been in situations on the way to work where I thought I had said my last prayer.”
What Sahar didn’t say is that the courage of Iraqi journalists - female and male - is crucial to American correspondents who depend on them to get to places where Americans can no longer go. “They are the backbone of the bureau, my eyes and ears when I can’t get out,” says Leila Fadel, theLebanese-American McClatchy bureau chief in Baghdad, and no mean example of courage herself. “They are our guide to the streets of Baghdad, and so often they never get recognized for what they do.”
Sahar wants to stay in Iraq, but other Iraqi journalists working with Americans are finding the danger is too great. It is shocking so few have been able to get asylum. America owes the brave journalists who have helped us every assistance. The IWMF should be congratulated for giving their
courage the attention it deserves. (You can read more about all six Iraqi women and the other honorees at http://www.iwmf.org/courage/awardees.php.)
___
ABOUT THE WRITER
Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia
Inquirer.
When I first started hearing reports on the protests by Burmese monks a couple of months ago Wayne Shorter’s musical portrait of the democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi came to mind. Not the sparkling stillness of the version on the 1997 album he made with Herbie Hancock but the version recorded live on a concert tour in 2001, released on an album called Footprints - Live. It’s played faster and louder and momentum has gathered around the tune’s strong, clear heart.
Burmanet reports that internet access has been cut off within Burma and a man has been jailed for speaking to the foreign media:
A spokesperson of the main opposition party, the National League for Democracy [Aung San Suu Kyi’s party], Nyan Win, who is also a lawyer, said that talking to the media is not illegal in Burma. However, there is also no real rule of law in Burma so people sometimes are sentenced to prison for talking to the media.
“The media gives information to people,” said Nyan Win. “Giving information to media means you are contributing to the good of society. If he was arrested for talking to the media, it is a big mistake.”
However, in Burma there are frequent reports of people arrested and sentenced to prison for giving information to foreign media and even for listening to foreign language news media, such as the BBC, VOA and Radio Free Asia.
In October, at the beginning of the recent series of protests by Burmese monks, which included marches past the house where Aung San Suu Kyi is being held under arrest, Pankaj Mishra wrote an opinion piece in the Guardian on the moral authority the monks inspire.
Certainly, the Burmese generals know the way the world works. Apparently isolated, they play shrewdly the game of international realpolitik, buying the silence of their two rising and needy neighbours, democratic India as well as authoritarian China, with oil, gas and timber. However, to such a ruthlessly amoral politics, based on purely rational self-interest, the moral and spiritual values of religion can and often do pose a challenge.
No doubt devotees of science and rationality will continue to call for a religion-free politics. But what the Burmese demonstrators prove is that, as Gandhi said, “those who think religion has nothing to do with politics understand neither religion nor politics”.
“I find it impossible to listen to music while writing, but I cannot imagine traveling or indeed almost doing anything else, without it. And nothing matches music’s ability to create specific moods, or briskly evoke places and times remote from me,” Pankaj Mishra said when compiling a playlist for the New York Times Book Review’s blog, Paper Cuts. On his list is music from jazz performers Billie Holiday, Dexter Gordon, Thelonius Monk and John Coltrane. Last week in The New York Times Pankaj Mishra reviewed a book about John Coltrane and the way that the personal hardships and spiritual yearnings that jazz musicians express in their music have become powerful symbols in struggles for freedom around the world.
His work became unofficially annexed by the civil rights movement: its sound alone has become a metaphor for dignified perseverance. His art, nearly up to the end, was not insular, and kept signifying different things for different people of different cultures and races. His ugliest music (to a certain way of thinking) is widely suspected of possessing beauty beyond the listener’s grasp, and the reverse goes for his prettiest music — that it is more properly understood as an expression of grave seriousness. There is more poetry written about him, I would guess, than about any other jazz musician. And his religious quests through Christianity, Buddhism, Kabbalah, and Sufism are now embedded, ex post facto, in his music. In pluralistic America, it has become hard not to hear Coltrane’s modal music — in which an improviser, freed from chordal movement, becomes free to explore — as a metaphor for a personal religious search.
Pankaj Mishra observes that John Coltrane’s later abstract compositions resembled the “scalar complexity of North Indian classical music more than anything in the Western tradition” and reports that Coltrane read widely, “from Aristotle to Krishnamurti, and borrowed from ancient Indian ragas as well as Western atonal music”.
Ratliff is too young to fall for the strident 1960s interpretation that Coltrane’s more maniacal music reflected black rage and frustration. Instead, he suggests, intelligently and persuasively, that Coltrane had, among other attributes, a “mystic’s keen sensitivity for the sublime, which runs like a secret river under American culture.” “Coltrane,” Ratliff writes, “was acutely self-possessed in his identity as an artist, at a time when a lot of celebrated American art had become seen as a kind of sanctuary, an escape from military conspiracies, war and television.”
Certainly Coltrane was serenely indifferent to the easier commercial and political temptations of the 1960s. It was after acquiring a mainstream audience with “My Favorite Things,” a big radio hit in 1961, that he expanded his experiments with modal music, which he then interrupted to record some beautifully melodic ballads. Anyone committed to confronting a white middle-class audience with the musical equivalent of Bobby Seale’s speeches wouldn’t have recorded “Lush Life” with Johnny Hartman or so wonderfully and definitively reconfigured “In a Sentimental Mood” with Duke Ellington.
Yet John Coltrane also reported clearly and unambiguously on that often explosive territory where religion and politics meet. His song, John Coltrane – Alabama, is a tribute to four young girls killed in the bombing of a Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.
In 1963 Martin Luther King decided to launch a non-violent assault on Birmingham, Alabama--the bastion of segregation. Within days 2,500 protesters swamped Birmingham jails. After ten days the authorities caved in. Birmingham was the civil rights movement’s biggest victory. The protests had a massive impact--there were 758 demonstrations against racism and 14,753 arrests in 186 US cities in the ten weeks that followed Birmingham, culminating in the historic march on Washington.
Coltrane never described himself as a political activist--he was a musician first and foremost. He was also a deeply religious person. But it was his deep-seated humanity that drew him towards the civil rights movement. In 1964 Coltrane played eight benefit concerts in support of King. He also recorded a number of tracks inspired by the struggle--’Reverend King’, ‘Backs against the Wall’ and his album Cosmic Music was dedicated to King. Events in Birmingham would also move him to write ‘Alabama’.
On the Sunday morning of 15 September 1963 a dozen sticks of dynamite were planted by white racists in the basement of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. At 10.45am the bomb went off, killing four young black girls aged between 11 and 14.
Coltrane wrote the song ‘Alabama’ in response to the bombing. He patterned his saxophone playing on Martin Luther King’s funeral speech. Midway through the song, mirroring the point where King transforms his mourning into a statement of renewed determination for the struggle against racism, Elvin Jones’s drumming rises from a whisper to a pounding rage. He wanted this crescendo to signify the rising of the civil rights movement.
Denzel Washington as Malcolm X in Spike Lee’s 1992 movie
Jazz Demands Action Now
Contemporary jazz musicians Terence Blanchard and Branford Marsalis wrote and performed music for the soundtrack of Spike Lee’s movie about Malcolm X and all three have commented upon and become involved with reporting on the way Hurricane Katrina broke the heart of New Orleans. Spike Lee made the documentary “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts”.
HBO: What was the thing that devastated you more than anything, about what happened in New Orleans?
Spike Lee: The thing that’s very hard for me, and I think’ll be hard for any filmmaker who has to ask difficult questions, especially when you’re asking people who’ve lost loved ones, is that, as a filmmaker and as a storyteller, it was my job, it was my duty to ask some difficult questions that I knew would stir up feelings...that would make people break down. Now, that was not my intention. But we have people talk about how their whole life has been changed.
So it’s very important that the audience, not just here in the United States but all over the world, hear these stories from these individuals, these witnesses, who saw the horror of what happened in New Orleans.
HBO: There were so many stories, and I’m sure even today you still hear stories that you haven’t heard that just horrify you. How did you decide which you were gonna go with?
Spike Lee: Well, when you choose the stories a lot of it depends who’s telling the story and who can convey that story. Everything you shoot cannot make it into the final film. So, myself along with my editor and producing partner Sam Pollock, we thought long and hard about what goes, and what stays.
Branford Marsalis, his father Ellis and brother Wynton are all jazz musicians and the family is from New Orleans. Terence Blanchard is also from New Orleans and he and Wynton Marsalis are featured in “When the Levees Broke”.
Musician Wynton Marsalis considers music to be central to the everyday lives of New Orleaneans, saying, “The reason music came from us is we had a lot of ceremonies that required music. We have produced great musicians in every type of form you can think of - jazz, blues. It’s all a part of people’s everyday lives.”
Fellow New Orleans native and jazz musician Terence Blanchard, a musician and composer on several of Lee’s films, including WHEN THE LEVEES BROKE, believes artists will find inspiration from Katrina. “Out of this experience there’s going to come some amazing music, because the musical culture of this city has never been driven by anything other than pure honesty and pure passion,” he notes. “And with the artists that are from this city, there’s going to be some amazing things that’s going to flourish as a result of this.”
HBO synopsis for “When the Levees Broke”.
Within a year Terence Blanchard had released “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina)” based upon the music that he wrote for Spike Lee’s documentary. And on the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina Branford Marsalis became the first guest editor of the jazz magazine, Downbeat, and reflected upon how the disaster had affected the musicians of the city. He asked the New Orleans Times Picayune writer Lolis Eric Elie to write about how the architecture of New Orleans has influenced the city’s music, in the way that the houses were built close together in New Orleans, allowing parades led by musicians to gather a big, fast “second line” following a wedding or a funeral.
“The term ‘second line’ is an evolving one. Years ago, brass bands accompained funeral processions in many parts of the country. New Orleans was different, though. After the traditional dirges accompanied the body and its mourners to the graveyard, we processed back to the church social hall with the sound of happy, dancing music. The family and the band, they were the official parts of the procession, the first line if you will. The second line was that group of folks who chose to join the procession as dancers and onlookers. Eventually the term second line was being applied not only to these people but to the dance they did and to the whole parade itself. In other parts of the country the tradition of lively music at funerals died out. Here it evolved and strengthened. These days, most second line parades are organized by social aid and pleasure clubs strictly for fun, not funerals. Still, one of the bumper stickers you see around town reads, “New Orleans: We put the ‘fun’ in funeral”.
Lolis Eric Elie. Downbeat. September, 2006
In May this year NPR reported that many of the marching bands in New Orleans are short on funds. One of the most successful bands to have come from this tradition, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, re-interpreted Marvin Gaye’s essay on the civil rights era, What’s Going On?, song for song, as a response to Hurricane Katrina and to raise money to help their local musical colleagues.
“It just made sense in light of all that happened with the storm,” says trumpeter Gregory Davis, who with fellow Dirty Dozen co-founders Roger Lewis (baritone and soprano sax), Kevin Harris (tenor sax) and Efrem Towns (trumpet, flugelhorn), make up the group’s core. “But even beyond that, to ask ‘What’s going on?’ in the world makes sense. What happened with 9/11, what happened with the tsunami, what happened with the earthquakes over in Iraq and Afghanistan, what’s happening with the so-called war. What’s really going on?”
“It’s a timely question,” adds Harris. “What the hell is going on? It’s been freaky out there. Bad enough when human beings are snapping at each other left and right, but when nature is drowning thousands of people with tsunamis and hurricanes and scourges? Things are changing, getting strange.”
I slept last night in a good hotel
I went shopping today for jewels
The wind rushed around in the dirty town
And the children let out from the schools
I was standing on a noisy corner
Waiting for the walking green
Across the street he stood
And he played real good
On his clarinet, for free
Now me I play for fortunes
And those velvet curtain calls
Ive got a black limousine
And two gentlemen
Escorting me to the halls
And I play if you have the money
Or if youre a friend to me
But the one man band
By the quick lunch stand
He was playing real good, for free
Joni Mitchell. “For Free.”
About five years ago Joni Mitchell explosively bowed out of the mainstream recording industry but not music itself, and her new album Shine seems to receive more press for the fact that it’s on the Starbucks recording label (which has had hits with albums by Ray Charles and Paul McCartney) than its content. The critics debate whether a multinational chain of coffee stores is more or less ethically bankrupt than the multinational entertainment conglomerates. Paul Sexton, writing in The Guardian in May wrote that Mitchell’s first venture with Starbucks was selecting some of her favorite jazz standards for a compilation album for them in the late 1990’s. “Her rebirth came about, improbably, when she asked her management if they could arrange for her to compile a CD for Starbucks’ Artist’s Choice series,” he writes. Mitchell ... “listened to everything I ever loved, to see if it held up, and much did. So I put together one that starts with Debussy, then takes a journey up through Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday and Miles Davis, and then Louis Jordan. That joyous music was conceived in such terrible times - and it was such a great relief to the culture at the time. That’s the trouble with now. Now we’ve got a horrible culture, horrible times and horrible music.” Sexton identified the ultimate hopefulness of Shine. “But Mitchell is determined that, concerned though she is about the state of the world, her return to recording does not come across as embittered heckling. It shouldn’t. Pieces such as “Shine” and “If” (inspired by Rudyard Kipling) emanate bruised but unbroken optimism, not to mention an absolute refusal to be musically classifiable: one moment she’s jazz, the next classical, then occasionally pop.”
Australian composer and music writer Andrew Ford, who is a skilled and warm interviewer on The Music Show on ABC Radio National, wrote a review of The Joni Mitchell Companion edited by Stacey Luftig, for the Sydney Morning Herald in 2001. He wrote that the difficulties Joni Mitchell has encountered in being taken seriously for her excursions into jazz may lie with how she was perceived early in her career when young women took her music deeply to heart in the way that they’d also embraced Sylvia Plath’s poetry. The soft and tender musical enthusiasms of these young women wouldn’t have extended to jazz. “But the female artists—Mitchell, Plath, and Elizabeth Smart, the author of Grand Central Station—explored human feelings with searing honesty, exposing their emotional nerve endings in a manner that would first have embarrassed then terrified most men,” Ford wrote. “And who was it that, for the most part went on to become music critics?”
On Court and Spark she recorded “Twisted”, Annie Ross’s famous verbalization of Wardell Grey’s saxophone solo, and she did it as though born to the jazz purple. Now she began to work regularly with jazz musicians such as John Guerin, Jaco Pastorius, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Don Alias and the Brecker Brothers. The climax of this period was her collaboration with the dying jazz great Charles Mingus. Taking a handful of Mingus’s instrumental compositions, Mitchell put her own words to them. For the most part, they’re rather wistful numbers (melodically and lyrically), but on “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines”, there’s a playfulness in Mitchell’s vocalese that reminds one of “Twisted”.
It was not, perhaps the wisest change of direction ever taken by a pop singer, since it disaffected precisely the two groups of people whose support was needed if the move into jazz were to succeed. On the one hand, and notwithstanding Mingus’s seeming approval of Mitchell, the jazz aficionados sneered, as jazz afficionados will. And of course on the other hand, the college girls were terribly disappointed. They had spent the early 1970’s memorising Joni’s songs, learning to play them on their retuned guitars and growing their hair. For their pains they were now being offered Wayne Shorter’s saxophone solos.
Andrew Ford. Sydney Morning Herald, 2001.
When he released River: The Joni Letters, an album of his interpretations of some Joni Mitchell songs recently Herbie Hancock told the Associated Press: “She has the courage to express what she really feels and believes in,” he said. “She’s not afraid to openly voice her viewpoint on the crises of the era ... and she does it in such a beautiful and imaginative way. ... And so as a humanitarian, Joni Mitchell really reflects her belief in the dignity of human life and its relationship to our environment.” He includes two instrumental pieces that he suggests link Joni Mitchell to jazz: “Solitude” from a Duke Ellington collaboration with Max Roach and Charles Mingus in 1962, and “Nefertiti” which Hancock and Wayne Shorter first played with Miles Davis in the 1960’s.
In February Joni Mitchell talked to David Yaffe of the New York Times about a ballet based around her songs, called The Fiddle and the Drum, that she was collaborating on with Canadian Jean Grande Maitre of the Alberta Ballet.
She thought about how the Maya calendar ends in 2012, about the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. What, she wondered, what do you write at the end of the world?
“I haven’t written in 10 years, and what’s coming out of me is all sociological and theological complaint,” she said while staring at the lighted end of an American Spirit cigarette. She sees herself as a proud heretic: “At first I thought I was going over new territory, but then I realized that many of the people who went over this territory were killed.”
“The Fiddle and the Drum” features two of her new songs: “If,” based on the Rudyard Kipling poem about war and stoicism (“Just about my favorite poem,” she says), and “If I Had a Heart, I’d Cry,” criticizing what she calls the current “holy war.” The rest of the ballet, named for a 1970 antiwar ballad from her second album, “Clouds,” is dominated by material from her ’80s and ’90s albums, which are more rhythmically charged (and hence better for dance) than her earlier work.
The backdrop is composed of stills from Ms. Mitchell’s mixed-media art exhibition. One night while she was flipping through “The Gold Diggers of 1937,” CNN and the History Channel on her ancient television (she is something of a Luddite and only recently got a decent stereo system), her screen went on the fritz, blurring images and turning everything a radioactive emerald. Faces melted away, and lines of bodies seeped into the frightening indistinctness of nightmare, as though the malfunctioning television were offering a metaphorical political commentary. She could no longer tell soldier from chorus girl, battle casualty from lover, the dancer from the dance.
