Thinking Out Loud in Public

Alan Jacobs responds to Ross Douthat’s NYTimes question as to whether we can make pop culture great again with a blunt “Nope. Absolutely not.” His reason for this dour assessment is the “algorithmic culture,” which cannot be replaced by a more fragmented, individualized culture. Douthat sort of feels the same, bemoaning a film scene that is “completely fragmented, with forms of creativity that are all intensely niche, like the podcast-splintered marketplace of news consumption.” He looks at “Barbenheimer” as an example of two great pieces of film art being created at the same time and capturing the attention of the general public. Couldn’t that happen more?, he sighs.

Again, Jacobs brings the hammer down: “Great works of art can still be made,” Jacobs writes, “but if they are great their social status will be marginal at best; anyone capable of appreciating them will be hard put to find them. (It’s not impossible, mind you; but it’s not easy.) And many people who could in time make great work will be deterred and, reasonably enough, give up before they get started and work instead for hedge funds.” Bleak.

Jacobs’s suggestion echoes that of critic Lionel Trilling, who said, in a 1974 Commentary forum entitled “Culture at the Present Time,” when pressed by Norman Podhoretz’s question as to what the critic ought to do during a “bad time” like the 1970s, responds “You become historical-minded.” Podhoretz was outraged: he wanted Trilling to say critics ought to go on the attack; but Trilling was right, as is Jacobs, who says, “I’d bet a large sum of money that if you were to spend a year breaking bread with the dead, immersing yourself in the great works of the past, then at the end of that year the truth of my assessment would be obvious to you.” He then goes on to give us the good news, which is that there’s never been a better time to do this, considering all the online resources available to access the classics of past culture.

And there is a big part of me that enthusiastically agrees. Because the fact is that I just can’t find much to celebrate in popular culture these days, nor in my own area of expertise, the theater. Broadway is a bigger wasteland than it usually is, and the regional theaters across America are either collapsing or trying to remain afloat by becoming a pale reflection of Broadway. That four of the offerings of a season at the heavily-subsidized Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis are Dial M for Murder, ART, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Mousetrap is a clear indication that you’ve reached rock bottom. So personally I’ve followed Jacobs’s inclinations, revisiting the classics of theater, novels, philosophy, music, poetry, and visual art. And it’s been great, and that’s great for me as an arts consumer, but as Jacobs himself admits, it is pretty awful for the artists. And ultimately what is bad for the artists is bad for our culture, and what is bad for the culture is bad for our society. Heck, we have Trump because pop culture invented the wretched genre of “reality TV,” without which Trump would likely be sleeping under a bridge right now.

But I am reminded of the words of Margo Jones, arguably the founder of the regional theater movement, who argued in her inspiring 1965 book Theatre-in-the-Round that a commitment to the now is vitally important to the health of the theater:

I believe it is imperative in creating new resident professional companies to take a violent stand about the choice of plays. Personally I believe in the production of classics and new scripts, with emphasis on new scripts. Our theatre can never be stronger than the quality of its plays. We must, therefore, have a great number of good plays. The classics have proved their value through­out the history of the theatre, and I believe we should draw on them as great literature and great theatre. But if we produce only classics, we are in no way reflecting our own age. Our theatres must not only be professional, they must be contemporary as well. The most excellent seasons in New York are those which bring forth exciting new play-writing talent.

She goes on:

Too many people are saying, “I’ll do a new play if I can find a good one.” Certainly you must find a good one, but this attitude is not good enough. The plays can be found if you look hard enough. And if you take the vio­lent stand I have spoken about, you will feel obligated to search and search and search until the scripts are dis­covered. I have a belief that there is great writing in America today and that much of it has not yet been un­earthed.

In other words, quit being so damn passive. Is it hard to find great contemporary art in our fragmented, algorithmic culture? Sure. So what? Stop being like baby birds in the nest with their beaks wide open crying out for some Mama Bird to bring the worm of great art back and shove it down their little throats. Do some damn work! And when you find it, celebrate it–tell your friends, write on your blog. That’s what social media ought to be good for–telling the world. Yes, sure, read Eliot and Auden and Mann and Dostoevsky, AND look for today’s incarnations and bring them to the attention of the world.

Jones:

Great theatres have always had their playwrights. Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Ibsen—all these were men around whom theatrical companies were functioning. The Moscow Art Theatre had Chekhov; the Abbey Theatre had Yeats, Synge and O’Casey; the Provincetown had O’Neill; the Group had Odets. We must have our new play­wrights, and we will not have them unless we give them many outlets to see their plays produced. This is the best way in which they can learn to write better plays.

Great theaters were not created by doing productions of middle-brow hits of the past. And a great culture isn’t created that way either.

That said, young artists need to listen to Jacobs and spend considerable time “breaking bread with the dead.” Playwright Tony Kushner put it well back in 1997 when he said:

I travel around the country doing lectures…and I am generally tremendously impressed with the students I meet and talk with, and generally unimpressed with what they know, and among these impressive and impressively undereducated students the worst, I am sorry to say, are the arts majors. And it isn’t simply that they seem remarkably non-conversant with the pillars of Western thought, with the political struggles of the day, with what has been written up in the morning’s paper–these arts majors know shockingly little about the arts.

Forget literature. How many theater majors do you know who could tell you, at the drop of a hat, which plays are by Aeschylus, which by Sophocles and which by Euripides? Or the dates of any of those writers? How many undergraduate playwriting majors, for instance, know even a single sentence of ancient Greek, just to have the sound of it in their ears and the feel of it in their mouths? How many really know what iambic pentameter is? How about alexandrines? How about who wrote what in alexandrines? How many know the names of a single Chinese playwright, or play? Or of more than one or two African playwrights? How many have read Heiner Miller? Suzan-Lori Parks? How many have read more than one play by either of these writers? How many have never heard of them? How many know who Lessing was, or why we should care? How many have read, I mean really read and absorbed, The Poetics?_ The Short Organum_?

By not having even a nodding acquaintance with the tradition I refer to, I submit that my students are incapable of really understanding anything written for the stage in the West, and for that matter in much of the rest of the world, just as they are incapable of reading Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Kristeva, Judith Butler and a huge amount of literature and poetry. They have, in essence, been excluded from some of the best their civilization has produced, and are terribly susceptible, I would submit, to the worst it has to offer.

So yes, artists need to pry themselves away from Netflix and break bread with the dead. And then we consumers, and professors, and critics need to sing at the top of our voices whenever we find even a glimmer of greatness in a living artist.

Not that I think Ross Douthat would know a great work of art if it bit him in the ass…

I find that England, Ireland, and Scotland have a much greater amount of experimentation in how they make theater, whether it is where they perform, when they perform, how they perform, and how they relate to their audience. There also seems to be a certain cheekiness to British theater, perhaps thanks to Brecht and music hall, that didn’t quite make it to America (although the Actos of El Teatro Campesino). Hidden Track Theater seems to be an outgrowth of Augusto Boal’s ideas regarding Theatre of the Oppressed. Here’s a short video that shows them in action.

I hate the post-Fed-announcement hysteria that hits the stock market every time the Fed cuts interest rates.

There are few things better than a good rant, especially if it is about the internet. Well done!

phirephoenix.com/blog/2024…

“Christ’s rebuke of the Pharisees eager to stone the sinful may feel of little help today, living in a culture where the act of hurling stones—in cyber and public space—is the spiritual discipline by which we are relieved of our moral impurities. In a cosmic reversal of grace and sacrifice, it is by scapegoating and ostracism that we once again publicly secure our salvation.”

Robert L. Kehoe III “There Is Simply Too Much More to Think About” Hedgehog Review (Fall 2019)

“Our media make crisis chatter out of news and fill our minds with anxious phantoms of the real thing—a summit in Helsinki, a treaty in Egypt, a constitutional crisis in India, a vote in the UN, the financial collapse of New York. We can’t avoid being politicized (to use a word as murky as the condition it describes) because it is necessary after all to know what is going on. Worse yet, what is going on will not let us alone. Neither the facts nor the deformations, the insidious platitudes of the media (tormenting because the underlying realities are so huge and so terrible), can be screened out.”

Saul Bellow

Sound familiar?

So here’s a question I’d be interested in hearing you talk about: if we just stopped with social media, would that be enough to maintain our mental health? If we wrote on micro.blog but didn’t broadcast it, is it different? Why don’t we just write a private journal instead of being online? Why does the possibility of being read help? Is it wrong to read ebooks instead of traditional books because it is a screen? What about news – what would happen if we just stopped paying attention?

If Rushton is really calling that “ingratitude,", it should serve as an illustration as to why artists should steer clear of nonprofit status–board members inevitably decide they know how to run things. Just because you have money doesn’t mean you have artistic sense.

When you’re stepping outside the well-trodden path and trying to create something new, you often have to find inspiration outside of the discipline itself. I have found inspiration in unlikely places: books on local economics, environmentalism, small business practices, where I’ve found ideas that make me think about theater differently. A while back, for instance, I read Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. I remember being particularly intrigued by a segment entitled “One Size Fits All,” in which architecture and detergent became an apt metaphor for what has happened to the theater.

The authors discuss the Industrial Revolution’s underlying design assumption that “universal design solutions” (the titular one size fits all) could be implemented to improve the world. McDonough and Braungart use the examples of International Style architecture and mass-produced detergent to illustrate the flaw in this orientation. I think it is worth quoting at length in order to fully understand that what has happened to the arts is not an isolated and unique historical development that was “organic” and “natural,” but rather part of a larger social movement resulting of a particular way of relating to the world.

In architecture, their was the International Style developed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Groupius, and Le Corbusier:

“Their goals were social as well as aesthetic. They wanted to globally replace unsanitary and inequitable housing–fancy, ornate palaces for the rich; ugly, unhealthy places for the poor–with clean, minimalist, affordable buildings unencumbered by distinctions of wealth or class. Large sheets of glass, steel, and concrete and cheap transportation powered by fossil fuels, gave engineers and architects the tools for realizing this style anywhere in the world.”

However, the vision of the originators was debased by those who followed:

“Today the International Style has evolved into something less ambitious: a bland, uniform structure isolated from the particulars of place–from local culture, nature, energy, and material flows. Such buildings reflect little if any of a region’s distinctness or style…Buildings can look and work the same anywhere, in Reykjavik or Rangoon.”

Here’s an example of the International Style–the ugliest house ever:

Shifting to detergent, the authors write:

“Major soap manufacturers design one detergent for all parts of the United States or Europe, even though water qualities and community needs differ. For example, customers in places with soft water, like the Northwest, need only small amounts of detergent. Those where the water is hard, like the Southwest, need more. But detergents are designed so they will alther up, remove dirt, and kill germs efficiently the same way anywhere in the world – in hard, soft, urban, or spring water, in water that flows into fish-filled streams and water channeled to sewage treatment plants.”

In the interest of appealing to as large a market as possible, detergent is disconnected from its relationship to local conditions. Sound like anything you know? (Hell, to me it sounds like everything I know.)

By comping mass media and centralizing the “industry,” the “biz” (interesting words) in New York, the theater has fallen prey to exactly the same one-size-fits-all approach. Instead of visiting a theater being a unique experience seasoned with local flavor and served with pride of place–the theatrical equivalent of barbecue in Kansas City, gumbo in New Orleans, or kringle in Racine WI–theater is like going to a chain restaurant: once you’re inside the doors, you could be anywhere.

A sustainable theater should have a local flavor that comes from being marinated in the specific community. That might mean doing plays by playwrights who are part of the company, or developing a style of production that is unique, or having a company of performers and designers who live (or maybe even grew up) in the community, even just making the attendance experience non-generic.

None of this is difficult, nor does it require permission. It just requires a new orientation.

“Adaptive problems are embedded in social complexity, require behavior change, and are rife with unintended consequences. By way of contrast, technical problems (such as the polio virus) can be solved with a technical solution (the Salk vaccine) without having to disturb the underlying social structure, cultural norms, or behavior.”

The Power of Positive Deviance Richard Pascale, Jerry Sternin, Monique Sternin