Dear Jeremy Eichler: This is what Teresa Wakim looks like

For future reference.

Sometimes the disinterest with which the Globe arts staff views its hometown is almost embarrassing.

Just a few weeks ago, a seemingly ignorant Jeffrey Gantz innocently gave away the big reveal at the core of the Huntington's Our Town.  And in today's paper, Jeremy Eichler actually reviews a performance that wasn't there, in last night's Handel and Haydn rendering of Purcell's The Indian Queen.

Eichler gives the concert a good notice (a surprise, as he has often sniffed at H&H), and I'd agree in general with his assessment - you should go see the last performance, at Sanders Theatre this Sunday.

The odd thing about the review, however, is that it praises a singer who wasn't there. The lovely and talented Teresa Wakim (at left) is a mainstay of Boston's vocal scene - indeed, she is one of its leading sopranos, whom I've reviewed or mentioned 15 times in the last four years. She has sung at Handel and Haydn, Boston Baroque, Blue Heron - in fact almost everywhere.

Alas, illness prevented her from singing at Handel and Haydn last night.   But Jeremy Eichler seems to think she did anyway!  In his review, he announces that "Teresa Wakim sang with crystalline tone and graceful musicality."  So apparently poor Ms. Wakim was warbling with crystalline tone through a bout with the flu.

An honest mistake, you say, easily explained by his not reading (or not receiving) a program insert? Not really - although that probably contributed to the flub.  For Wakim was actually replaced by three different members of the Handel and Haydn chorus - Sonja Tengblad, Jessica Cooper and Brenna Wells, all accomplished singers in their own rights, took over the various solos she would have sung.

So did Eichler somehow not notice that three different ladies marched downstage at various times to take over Wakim's duties at different junctures? Did only one of them impress him? Or did he think they were all named Teresa Wakim?  Enquiring minds want to know!

Sigh.  I don't know what's more depressing: that Jeremy Eichler is so out of touch with our classical music scene that he doesn't know who Teresa Wakim is (which would basically be like my not knowing who Karen MacDonald is) - or that he was so disconnected from the performance in front of him that he never scanned it against the cast list in the program.

All I can say - Teresa, you sound even better when you're actually singing!

So get well soon, my dear!

Boston Globe print edition reaches out to its three remaining readers

Does the Onion read my blog? Possibly. God knows this parody of the Globe's audience profiling could have been lifted directly from the Hub Review's pages! Although just btw, I've actually changed my mind about the long-predicted demise of dead-tree media like the Globe. With the iPad and other devices becoming so popular, the transition from print to - well, not the Web, but some sort of app-driven, licensed "cloud," with a valid revenue model attached - seems a lot more possible than it once did.

Totally off-topic, as well as off-color, but -

The Boston Globe has finally given us a reason for its continued existence. And the story is here.

Be sure to read all 319 comments.

Life after The Globe

First things first: today's announcement does not mean that the Boston Globe is closing. Clearly the threat from the Times to shutter the paper is merely a move to force concessions from its unions, concessions which they undoubtedly will grant, given their members' chances of employability elsewhere.

But of course the deeper question of the paper's viability remains; it seems unlikely that even major concessions from the unions can fully close an $85 million gap (the amount the paper will reportedly lose this year). Indeed, today's announcement is actually most disturbing in that it seems locked in an outdated mode of belt-tightening, which can only staunch, but not stop, the coming red ink. I would have been much happier to see a break-out, transformational announcement around the paper's actual flagship, boston.com, than I was to see the threat of yet another round of cost cuts (for an interesting discussion of the paper's web/print options, check out Dan Kennedy).

Still, it seems that some kind of line has been crossed, even if (and when) the unions sign on the dotted line; the arrival of a web-only Globe seems at least a little bit closer. And certainly if the Globe does not capitalize on its boston.com opportunity, other groups will, especially in the cultural sphere. (ArtsBoston, for instance, will soon be rolling out an improved website, with links to bloggers and other features.) But even a "web Globe" will have to accommodate itself to the central fact of Internet publishing: revenues are much lower on the Intertubes, far too low to accommodate the paper's current salary structure. In short, boston.com, if it is to cover the breadth and depth of the local cultural scene, must survive on a skeletal staff, and will have to rely on a wide range of web contributors at little or no pay. This, of course, would mean complicating, and at times contradicting, the Globe's current liberal, suburban "voice," but that's not necessarily a bad thing - and it may be necessary to keep a central publicity umbrella up and running to maintain the viability of many local arts organizations (which are themselves already struggling in this economy). The good news, of course, is that the reviews and discussions on our cultural blogs are of at least as high a quality as those currently published in our paper of record (as many commentators have noted). Whether said paper's management can admit and accept that, of course, is another story.

So which is it . . .

Today the Globe continues its on-going promotion of the BSO with a front-page article about how the Symphony is dropping ticket prices for the under-40 crowd to just $20 (this after a huge write-up on the BSO in the Sunday Arts section two weekends ago). Now, I don't want to get snarky about this, because of course I support making classical music accessible to everyone (except old poor people, that is).

But I have to ask - isn't the BSO actually the least stressed arts organization in town? (With the possible exception of the MFA?) After all, it's got the largest endowment of any American orchestra (once assessed at $300 million, but probably worth somewhat less now, like everyone's). It would seem that their money troubles should be last on the list of local arts sob stories. Of course one could argue that the Globe is forced to write constantly about the BSO because that's the only local classical musical organization its subscribers have ever heard of; they're essentially "the Red Sox of classical music," as a friend of mine once put it. Or is the salient issue the rather large amount of advertising the BSO buys in the Globe? (Trust me, the current correspondence between advertising pages and critical attention will only grow - and it will ripple right through the pseudo-blogs like The Exhibitionist and HubArts, that cling to the Globe like pilot fish to a dying shark - and therefore evince the same bizarre double taste, for the Kinks and late European modernism!).

Okay, the world was ever thus, I know. But I do wish our local paper of record could keep its story straight. For years, the word from the Globe has been that James Levine's opera-queen-moderne programming was Exciting and Important because it was drawing in younger listeners (with the likes of Schoenberg and Elliott Carter!). Only now, apparently, not so much. Indeed, the Globe's coverage of Levine's tenure has long been, well, kind of schizophrenic - pretty much relentless praise of very expensive, who-asked-for-this epics like The Trojans and Moses and Aaron (which were really only programmed because they were rarities Levine hadn't conducted very often), combined with a continuous stream of lesser news items about cuts in staffing (even on stage!) and struggling subscription rates. Of course, it was quite easy to square this circle, even though the Globe never did it - the BSO had bought a ridiculously expensive New York brand in an attempt to look "world class," and the price tag kept going up, even as the paying public's interest in said brand's 1960's-era musical taste steadily declined.

On the plus side, yes, the orchestra began playing with much greater sensitivity and coherence; under Levine, they often sound superb. (His rehearsals are long and demanding, and it shows.) It may look like carping to wonder whether this is "enough," but, given his price tag, it must be pointed out that Levine didn't really build a "Boston sound" here; he merely gave Boston's power brokers some New York cachet. Levine clearly saw the BSO as an adjunct of his brand, a kind of franchise built on the same exquisite musicianship that he brought to the Met. Under Levine, the BSO's goal has been something like a dinner at the most expensive eatery in New York, and the Globe's critics have been more than content to simply describe the many scrumptious sauces the maestro has dished up.

Meanwhile, for me, the news has been elsewhere for awhile now, because to be frank, there's a certain underlying vacuum in intellectual originality at the BSO. For is music really only about the superbness of its execution? To be blunt, despite all the blather about "new music," Levine seems frozen in a certain period; at the BSO, the political and intellectual ferments of the 80's and 90's don't seem to have really happened. Indeed, oddly enough, much of the early music I hear locally actually sounds more timely than what I hear at the BSO. This is, to be fair, partly because the rarefied late-modern repertory Levine has tried to favor simply hasn't reached any kind of cultural critical mass; there's really nothing new to say or think about Moses and Aaron, for instance, because it's never going to be done often enough to build a sense of dialogue with the culture.

Hence there's simply a livelier conversation going on outside the walls of Symphony Hall than there is inside; Opera Boston often programs more interesting fare than Levine does, Handel and Haydn regularly brings in specialists with more original takes on Beethoven and Mozart, the Boston Philharmonic is usually more rousing, local choral groups are far more adventurous than the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, and Celebrity Series often pulls in bigger stars. Hell, these days even the Ballet has more intellectual content. Outside the BSO, I find himself thinking, and laughing, and gasping in surprise; inside the BSO, I often find myself impressed, but that's it. And let's be honest: if you want to hear cutting-edge Mozart, or the latest interpretations of Bach or Handel or Haydn, or the very newest new music, you don't go to the BSO. And that covers a lot of "classical music." The Symphony still does the late Romantic and early modern repertory better than anyone; and therefore they have a nice big endowment to keep up that commitment. Meanwhile the other groups cited above are dealing with at least the BSO's level of money trouble. So if the Globe wants to preserve a living classical tradition in this city, it has to begin to look beyond the doors of Symphony Hall.

Chronicle of a death foretold (cont.)

A day of reckoning is fast approaching for the New York Times, owner of the Boston Globe (and other local properties). The Gray Lady is facing hundreds of millions of dollars of debt coming due in May, but has only about $50 million in cash on hand. It's already mortgaging its brand-new building in Manhattan, but most observers feel that will hardly generate enough money upfront, given the downward spiral of the paper's other revenues, to pull it all the way out of the hole. In the meantime, however, the paper has announced a new financial patch: ads will now be appearing on its front page, at a special premium price (the Globe will soon follow suit, reports the Herald - which itself has had front-page ads for some time).

There are other possible rescues for the Times: a white knight like Rupert Murdoch, for instance (!) could swoop down and purchase it (due to its low stock price, the whole company is technically available for not much more than $1 billion, but its non-voting stock might never be for sale, given who owns it). Still, even if that scenario came to pass, it's almost certain that sometime soon the Times will either sell the Globe and its other local properties at fire-sale prices, or will cut their operations back to the bone, or will attempt to transfer their operations entirely to a web-based platform (intriguingly, the Herald may prove viable in print for some time longer).

Meanwhile, in a very thoughtful and timely piece on the Atlantic website, Michael Hirschorn blogs about the once and future Times, and lays out a nice survey of "possible futures". Like me, he sees the Gray Lady surviving as a kind of Huffington Post-style website featuring star reporter-bloggers. The only problem with this model is that most folks-in-the-know estimate web revenues could only cover about 20% of the organization's current labor costs. Hirschorn argues this could merely mean the Times would be stripped back to its star reporters and columnists, which would not entirely be a bad thing (good-bye, style section!).

He doesn't, however, ponder the even more draconian reductions that would be required to make the Globe viable online. Simply put, the Globe has very few stars that a large readership would pay in advance to read. I can imagine a core of Bostonians would be willing to pay for an investigative reporting team, and perhaps a sports section, but it's hard to believe the web version of the Globe could afford many full-time cultural writers - and in a (fairly likely) model in which the Times retained the Globe as a "local" online version of itself, it's hard to understand why they wouldn't simply push their own movie and TV critics through the digital pipeline to Boston.

I think at a minimum this would mean the loss of many of the Globe's full-time, career critics - the ones who get a weekly pay check and benefits. There will still no doubt be reviews on the online version of the Globe, but they will largely come from fee-based contributors (as I imagine Jenna Scherer is at the Herald). This means, I think, that some sort of shake-out will soon take place - older writers with others skills or connections (and families to support) will seek work elsewhere. This doesn't mean, of course, that there will be a terrible decline in the writing at the Globe; Scherer does okay - at least as well as Kennedy or Byrne - and there are probably more smart kids like her willing to go to a show and cough up 400 words for $100.

But it does mean, I think, that there will be a major shake-up in the tiny world of publicity and reviewing in this town. The hierarchy will definitely be under stress; it may for a time even disappear. Hierarchies, of course, always re-appear - indeed, the web is in general an engine of centralization, not diversification, so expect an eventual web hierarchy with even sharper slopes than the old print one. But how will the hierarchy re-constitute itself? The lack of a daily print edition of the Globe - and the reduction of the print edition to Sunday is, I think, inevitable - will immediately undermine the paper's aura of educated-middlebrow hegemony; somehow the fact that its reviews will be buried in blogs like the Exhibitionist (and this one) will, I believe, be a great leveler in the popular mind. Perhaps some other media institution will move into that vacuum - WBUR may re-invigorate its arts web page (we've already begun hearing more from Ed Siegel), or WGBH may step up to the plate. Who knows? But soon theatres and performing arts organizations will have to negotiate a shifting media landscape along with the economic stresses of the recession.

Department of Gutless Wonders

It has leaked out in the local blogosphere that the Boston Globe canned the above Doonesbury comic yesterday, apparently out of fear that Obama wouldn't actually win the presidential election. (Or was it that they thought its mild joke was too "controversial"?)

Sigh. Now do you understand how I feel about that pathetic paper?

So - who won the drama contest?

Is it just me, or does it seem to you that even minor press stories in this town play out in a very strange way? Take the tiny tempest kicked up by the Herald's Tai Irwin, who pointed out that the Globe hadn't covered the Massachusetts Drama Guild Finals, even though it was one of the sponsors of the event. Geoff Edgers, of the Globe's Exhibitionist blog, apologized for the gap, but only posted one image - of the event's "alternate" winners (he did link to the event site). Now he's posted again about the event - publishing a long letter from the organization's chair, explaining that the group understood it wouldn't be covered by the paper, since the publicity "would appear as self-promotion for the Globe" (uh - isn't that the idea behind all such sponsorships?).

So the Festival officials couldn't be happier about the fact that they didn't get any publicity (after all, they "highly value the longstanding relationship with the Boston Globe"). And Geoff has had his say. Everyone's ass is covered, but in the meantime, nobody's actually published the winners of the contest! So I thought I would.

And without further ado, the winners are:


Westford Academy
Dancing at Lughnasa


Nauset High School
The Laramie Project

Alternate Winner:


Weston High School
Painting Provenance

The full list of awards is here.

Congratulations, guys, and keep up the good work!

Jocks:16; Drama Jocks:0

Tai Irwin's Boston Herald blog takes the Globe to task for ignoring the high school drama festival that the Globe itself sponsored. Money quote:

. . . you’d probably assume that the paper would cover the event and report on the winners – but you’d be wrong. Instead, on Sunday morning we got sixteen pages of the state’s top athletes, all professionally photographed . . . The message is very clear . . . once again it’s sports that matter most, even to the exclusion of intellectual and artistic activities. What a great thing to tell our kids, over and over again. Never mind the brain pursuits – the science fairs and business/educational coops, and never mind the arts, dance, music, drama. The thing that is going to solve all our problems and nurture all our values best is sports. Me, I love sports, team and individual, youth and lifetime. But here’s the great mistake – psst, they really don’t matter that much and we’ve created a monster, telling every kid that the regional soccer game they have to make next weekend is life or death. Truth is that the overwhelming majority of high school athletes are mediocre in the grand scheme of things, won’t be going to the Olympics and are just having fun. Just having fun. JUST HAVING FUN. But you would never know it from the glorifying of Sunday’s Globe.

The Paulettes bury Kubrick - again!

Will it never end? Will the Paulettes never give up on Stanley Kubrick? You'd have thought they'd gotten their last shots in with Eyes Wide Shut - when even the director's death did little to dissuade Pauline Kael, with her trademark class, from calling his final work "a piece of shit" while her acolytes piled on.

But you know, it's a funny thing about genius - it's hard to keep a good one down. Eyes Wide Shut was slowly rehabilitated, after several major magazines ridiculed the dim film-critic consensus (an unheard-of event, right there). Kubrick boxed sets began to be issued with striking regularity. A gigantic coffee-table tome, The Stanley Kubrick Archives, was published. Hollywood's most successful director, Steven Spielberg, completed Kubrick's unfinished A.I. - again, unheard-of (can The Aryan Papers be too far off?).

But the endurance of the Kubrick legend, needless to say, rankled the Paulettes (as Pauline Kael's critical followers are known). After all, they bet big against him. Big. Kael herself called him a pornographer in print and intimated that he was a racist. And just how valid could her criticism be if it was utterly opposed to the film artist with possibly the greatest legacy since World War II?

For make no mistake: of Kubrick's thirteen feature films, five are masterpieces (Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, and of course, 2001: A Space Odyssey - that's Kubrick directing on its famous centrifuge set, above) three more are flawed but fascinating (Lolita, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut), and one is a sumptuous failure with many brilliant moments (Barry Lyndon). It's an incredible oeuvre - one of the best of the century. No wonder there are endless re-issues of the boxed set (which always lacks, unfortunately, Paths of Glory).

But I suppose, with each re-issue, we'll have to endure another ritual as well - let's call it The Paulettes' Revenge. Mark Feeney of the Boston Globe seems to have taken on the duty of the current roasting in last Sunday's edition, so welcome to yet another episode of (drum roll, please) "Tom Garvey Bitch-Slaps the Globe Critic." And without further ado . . .

Feeney begins his hatchet job with - what else? - an interview with Robert Altman. Ah, yes, Robert Altman - remember him? The director of one masterpiece (Nashville), five or six more very interesting films (M*A*S*H, Images, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, and The Player), and then some thirty more movies that are either mediocre or outright suck? Yeah, him. The guy with the bleached-out, "stoned" camerawork, the muddy soundtracks, the sketchy bohemian stance, and the none-too-subtle mix of malice and misogyny? The guy who was unrelentingly brutal to his characters, and who stripped his actresses naked as often as he possibly could? Yeah, him. That wild party animal!

Unsurprisingly, Feeney informs us, he once interviewed Altman on Kubrick, and guess what: Altman didn't think much of him. Surprise, surprise. As Feeney puts it: "Kubrick was the anti-Altman: not actor-friendly, not improvisational, not prolific, neither slapdash nor shaggy."

No, not prolific - just always interesting. And what's this "not actor-friendly" b.s.? Kubrick's "not actor-friendly" because he clashed with Shelley Duvall on the set of The Shining? Please. Few directors have produced more indelible performances: Kubrick's direction gave us Laurence Olivier and Charles Laughton in Spartacus; James Mason, Shelley Winters and Peter Sellers in Lolita; the entire cast of Dr. Strangelove; Douglas Rain in 2001; Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange (above left); R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket; Nicole Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut, and a host of brilliant character performances in almost all his films (even Barry Lyndon includes wonderful performances by Leonard Rossiter, Godfrey Quigley and others). By way of comparison, there are fine performances in early Altman, yes, but one gropes for anything great from his actors after Three Women (and sorry, Altman was never more inept than he was with the sterling British cast of Gosford Park). Indeed, only the ensemble of M*A*S*H achieved anything like the cultural impact of the acting in half of Kubrick's movies.

Actually, Feeney's smart enough to realize he can't make his case against Kubrick on artistic terms - there are just too many highlights to disguise. (And he doesn't even dare to bring up Kubrick's imagery or his soundtracks, because here the gap between Kubrick and just about everybody else is something like a chasm.) So he forgoes art for politics. He just doesn't like Kubrick - and neither should you. Kubrick was pretentious. He was a control freak. He "thrilled to the idea of total authority." He was a dictator - just like some of his villains! And worst of all, no punk band has ever named themselves after him. (I'm not kidding, Feeney really said that - he also says Kubrick's movies "flirt with turning into musicals"!)

Uh-huh. And can you say "beside the point"? Good. Now think about it. Let's take that "pretentious" claim - it's true: Kubrick was pretentious. Some great artists are not pretentious; but others are. Shakespeare, perhaps the greatest artist in any genre, was not pretentious. Mozart was not pretentious. But Beethoven was pretentious. Wagner was pretentious. Matisse was not pretentious; Picasso was pretentious. So by Feeney's logic, you really shouldn't like Beethoven or Picasso.



And how about that "anti-improvisational" claim - only someone who isn't familiar with Kubrick's work history could ever make it. Kubrick was improvisatory on a grand scale, often changing artistic course in mid-production and abandoning early decisions in flights of inspiration. Can you believe that Dr. Strangelove was originally planned as a suspense drama, and that Kubrick entirely re-wrote it with Terry Southern in his limo on the way to the studio? Or that Kubrick commissioned an entire score for 2001, recorded it at great expense, then trashed it for the tracks he'd been listening to in production (he pulled this trick again with The Shining)? That Malcolm McDowell improvised "Singin' in the Rain" in A Clockwork Orange? Ditto much of Jack Nicholson's performance in The Shining - and R. Lee Ermey's famous rants in Full Metal Jacket (above)? In short, very few directors have improvised quite as much as Stanley Kubrick - or taken such risky chances.

Of course Kubrick was - or rather, became - highly self-conscious, as is the case with many wildly successful artists. His work process became even more labored, as he felt the weight of living up to his past successes. (His many takes, while rather coldly administered, could also be seen as an opportunity for actor exploration, not directorial control; surely anyone can see that.) Always a loner, he also became more isolated after terrorist threats against his family during the making of Barry Lyndon. Eventually, it's true, he was something of a recluse.

But hold on a minute - isn't this also the maverick artist's dream? Kubrick held onto an astonishing level of control over his projects through the very methods that Feeney decries - obsessive attention to detail, isolation, and cold calculation. If Altman had had those attributes, perhaps his career wouldn't have gone into a tailspin after the failures of bombs like Buffalo Bill, and H.E.A.L.T.H. Maybe we'd have three or four more great Altman movies, instead of twenty crummy ones. Of course there were places Kubrick went that Altman could never go: Altman was never capable of the operatic synthesis that was Kubrick's highest goal - those moments in which sound, image, and drama coalesce into a resonance that only cinema can manage (as in Eyes Wide Shut, above). To the end of his days, Altman essentially directed his films as if they were television (where he began his career); when his scripts were good, the movies were good, and when the scripts were bad, well . . . the movies were, too. But hey, they were great parties, right? What's most poignant about Altman is that he never realized that if you commit yourself to going with the flow, and conjure a constant atmosphere of give-and-take and compromise, then you wind up with, well, movies that are compromised, too.


Seriously, could Altman ever match this image? Or idea?

So can we begin to decouple the bohemian stance from the artistic product? Can we admit that if you run your set like a party, you wind up with Dr. T. and the Women? Can the Paulettes ever just say, "Kubrick's movies are paced too slowly, but they're worth the time and trouble"? And can they stop saying that Kubrick was a pornographer, a racist, a control freak, or as Feeney says, "almost lunatic"? (And can we please drop the junior-high-level observation that HAL is "the most interesting character in 2001"? That's the point, kids.)

In other words, can the Paulettes move on?