What? Market the Humanities? Make Their Study Job-Oriented? Oh, Stop!

Courtesy of my friend Susan Hefti of the 93rd Street Beautification Association, I was led to this story by Patricia Cohen in the Tuesday Times. I won't reiterate what the intellectual and philosophical rationale for offering humanities studies at universities is and has always been; my degree from NYU was in Liberal Arts with a concentration in theatre. But this paragraph kind of stunned me:

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency. Previous economic downturns have often led to decreased enrollment in the disciplines loosely grouped under the term “humanities” — which generally include languages, literature, the arts, history, cultural studies, philosophy and religion. Many in the field worry that in this current crisis those areas will be hit hardest.

And frankly, this paragraph later in the piece stunned me -- and is probably continuing to stun, if not threaten, the academic establishment that doesn't much live in the real world in the first place:

The study of the humanities evolved during the 20th century “to focus almost entirely on personal intellectual development,” said Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education. “But what we haven’t paid a lot of attention to is how students can put those abilities effectively to use in the world. We’ve created a disjunction between the liberal arts and sciences and our role as citizens and professionals.”

Yep, people needs jobs, people. And that doesn't always necessarily mean jobs in the academy where the academy's perpetuation is what is taught and learned and demonstrated. Sad to read this story, but amen.

Sphere: Related Content

The New York Times to the Atlantic: Kiss My Grey Pucker

Did Michael Hirschorn's article for The Atlantic on the fiscal disaster perhaps awaiting The New York Times hit some kind of nerve?

I blogged briefly about Hirschorn's article here -- and I'd really like to see the blogosphere, in particular the arts-centric blogo- and theatrosphere, begin kicking around how our community would be affected if the Times did fall into Chapter 11 and/or wound up operating on a Web-only model someday down the road. Does it thrill me? No, of course not -- I'm a traditionalist. I love the feel of a newspaper in my hand, of newsprint on my fingers. But Hirschorn carefully and, I think, daringly explores the Times abandoning print as a scenario. As for accuracy, well...

Hold on! says Catherine Mathis, senior vice president of corporate communications, who posted a letter on Romanesko attempting to refute Hirschorn. Here's the meat of the matter:

Your article refers to the paper's credit crisis (never mind the fact that the debt is at the corporate level). We disagree with that characterization. Here's our situation.

We have two revolving credit agreements.

These are agreements with banks that allow us to borrow up to $400 million under each agreement, or $800 million in total, whenever we need it. We repay what we have borrowed as cash comes in and the amount we can borrow is then replenished.

One of our agreements will expire in May 2009 and the other in June 2011.

As we have said publicly on more than one occasion, because we believe we need significantly less than the total $800 million available credit, we do not plan to replace the full $400 million that is expiring in May. There is no need to do so.

We have not already borrowed money against our building's value as your article states. Rather we are in the process of pursuing a sale-leaseback for up to $225 million for some of the space we own in our headquarters building.

The proposed transaction for our building gives us the right to buy back the space at the end of the lease. In the meantime, we would continue to occupy our headquarters. We plan to use the proceeds from the sale-leaseback to repay some of the long-term debt we currently have. So the sale-leaseback would not add to the debt of the company, but rather is a way to refinance some of our existing debt. We have chosen to pursue this form of transaction because it is one of the less expensive forms of borrowing in this difficult credit market.

While credit markets remain tight, we have been talking with lenders and, based on our conversations with them, we expect to get the financing to meet our obligations when they come due. And please remember, we continue to generate good cash flow from our operations.

With regard to the specific point made about the demise of the print edition of The Times in May, it may make for a good a story but it is poor analysis. We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years, a number that has increased by about a third over the past decade. They like reading the print edition and pay a substantial amount of money to do so. That's not to say they don't visit NYTimes.com or read our journalism on their mobile devices. They do. But they would be unhappy if they couldn’t pick up a print copy. And since it's profitable for us to print these copies, we will continue to do so.

Smackdown! Yes it is -- one that is starting to be examined by mainstream outlets focusing on media, such as Editor and Publisher and FishBowl NY.

Do check out, by the way, Felix Salmon's take-down of Hirschorn's piece at Conde Nast Portfolio.

Now the question: Who is right?

Personally, I think the most interesting commentary about Mathis' letter is on FishBowl:

Nothing earth shattering there. Though ("warranting" aside) one wonders why the Times felt the need to respond at all since it was pretty clear from the get that Hirschorn's piece was mostly intended to be a conversation starter — even in this uncertain environment no one really believes that the Times will cease printing in five months (even those of us who never see it in print!). What is also of particular interest is that they waited a week and then chose this forum. Or maybe this is all just evidence they are beginning to smart a little from all the doom-and-gloom coverage of late.

And then there is the tone of the Times' response — it's a bit tongue-in-cheek (similar to, dare we say it, a blog post!) and it's posted on a media website as opposed to say, being sent to The Atlantic to be printed in the next issue. The whole interaction in fact resembles exactly sort of back and forth posting and linking that is common in online world conversations.

What do you think?

Sphere: Related Content

Put These Together: Chapter 11, New York Times

I bet you're all just thrilled with my endless doom and gloom, especially when you see the titles of blog posts like "Put These Together: Chapter 11, New York Times."

But I read this article, by Michael Hirschorn, in The Atlantic, called End Times, and it's really quite sobering and provocative.

In essence, Hirschorn states his hypothesis in the first four graphs:

Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print—the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. The thinking goes that the existing brands—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting.

But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if The New York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

It’s certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400million in debt. With more than $1billion in debt already on the books, only $46million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good.

“As part of our analysis of our uses of cash, we are evaluating future financing arrangements,” the Times Company announced blandly in October, referring to the crunch it will face in May. “Based on the conversations we have had with lenders, we expect that we will be able to manage our debt and credit obligations as they mature.” This prompted Henry Blodget, whose Web site, Silicon Alley Insider, has offered the smartest ongoing analysis of the company’s travails, to write: “‘We expect that we will be able to manage’? Translation: There’s a possibility that we won’t be able to manage.”

Hirschorn does fine reporting here, but then he goes on to imagine a world without the Times, or at least a world without a print edition of the Times and/or a world in which the Times is bought by scavangers (he suggests everyone from Rupert Murdoch, naturally, to the folks at Google), "stripped for parts," and turned into a "content mill" to "goose" page views.

This paragraph in particular interested me because Hirschorn removes the specter of hundreds of journalists losing their jobs at the Times from the discussion -- it's a wise move because if you love the Times, you'll freeze in horror at the thought, and if you hate the Times, you'll have a bit of schadenfreude curling the corners of your mouth up into a smile. I belong to the former camp and the way he describes a post-Times world is just heartbreaking:

The collapse of daily print journalism will mean many things. For those of us old enough to still care about going out on a Sunday morning for our doorstop edition of The Times, it will mean the end of a certain kind of civilized ritual that has defined most of our adult lives. It will also mean the end of a certain kind of quasi-bohemian urban existence for the thousands of smart middle-class writers, journalists, and public intellectuals who have, until now, lived semi-charmed kinds of lives of the mind. And it will seriously damage the press’s ability to serve as a bulwark of democracy. Internet purists may maintain that the Web will throw up a new pro-am class of citizen journalists to fill the void, but for now, at least, there’s no online substitute for institutions that can marshal years of well-developed sourcing and reporting experience—not to mention the resources to, say, send journalists leapfrogging between Mumbai and Islamabad to decode the complexities of the India-Pakistan conflict.

There are, sitting in my parents house, photos of me at age 4 or 5, in a green jumpsuit and wearing my mother's glasses and pretending to read the Times. There are other photos of me, perhaps slightly older, sitting at a little stack table pretending to be doing the crossword. When I was a kid, especially as a teenager, some of my favorite memories of my mother's parents -- my grandfather in particular -- involving watching them finish the Sunday Times crossword in about an hour or so. The Times is a cultural, social and political institution is what Hirschorn seems to be saying, and certainly Americans have a gift for allowing its most precious institutions to fall into disuse and death.

Two more graphs from Hirschorn's story are worth pondering, as he makes a stab at trying to explain the Web-monetization problem in a way that makes sense, both in terms of the number of jobs a Web-only journalism product can support, and how utterly screwed up journalism has become financially as a result of the Web. First graph:

Most likely, the interim step for The Times and other newspapers will be to move to digital-only distribution (perhaps preserving the more profitable Sunday editions). Already, most readers of The Times are consuming it online. The Web site, nytimes.com, boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October, making it the fifth-ranked news site on the Internet in terms of total visitors. (The October numbers were boosted by interest in the election, but still …) The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping, and the Sunday print edition to 1.4 million (and also dropping). Print and Web metrics are not apples-to-apples, but it’s intuitively the case that the Web has extended The Times’ reach many times over.

And the second graph:

What would a post-print Times look like? Forced to make a Web-based strategy profitable, a reconstructed Web site could start mixing original reportage with Times-endorsed reporting from other outlets with straight-up aggregation. This would allow The Times to continue to impose its live-from-the-Upper-West-Side
brand on the world without having to literally cover every inch of it. In an optimistic scenario, the remaining reporters—now reporters-cum-bloggers, in many cases—could use their considerable savvy to mix their own reporting with that of others, giving us a more integrative, real-time view of the world unencumbered by the inefficiencies of the traditional journalistic form. Times readers might actually end up getting more exposure than they currently do to reporting resources scattered around the globe, and to areas and issues that are difficult to cover in a general-interest publication.

So what do we think are the chances this will come to pass? Let's discuss.

Sphere: Related Content

Robin Pogrebin of the Times, in Third Article of a Series, Piles On LPC Chair Robert Tierney

I am growing increasingly astonished at the breadth of reporting and sheer writing craft exhibited by New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin in her series of pieces on the state of landmarking in New York City, specifically the work (or lack of, if you will) of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

In Pogrebin's first story, "An Opaque and Lengthy Road to Landmark Status," the writer essentially dissects the Landmarks Preservation Commission's work -- or lack of work or efficiency, it would seem -- and lays a fair amount of the blame at the shuffling feet of LPC chair Robert B. Tierney, who has been keeping his chair lukewarm, Pogrebin writes, for five years. The article further tries to get to the root of what seem like extreme lassitude and laissez-faire-ness on Tierney's part, and how the cause of the preservation is being undermined in a widespread and thoroughly alarming way. In this first story (which I didn't realize was going to be part of a series at the time), I was particularly gobsmacked by this:

He’s a guy who’s had no demonstrable interest in historic preservation, who has the most important preservation job in New York City,” said Anthony C. Wood, author of “Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks" (Routledge, 2008), and a party to the suit.

In Pogrebin's second story, "Preservationists See Bulldozers Charging Through a Loophole," the story goes on -- it's all about how the sluggishness and ineffectualism of the LPC and Tierney act as permission slips for developers, who generally have the moral fiber of Gregory Rasputin, to demolish and cut corners and do all sorts of terrible things to our urban environment. Here is another particularly moving quote:

“In the middle of the night I’m out there at 2 in the morning, and they’re taking the cornices off,” said Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman who represents that part of the Upper West Side. “We’re calling the Buildings Department, we’re calling Landmarks. You get so beaten down by all of this. The developers know they can get away with that.”

Now comes Pogrebin's latest piece: "Preserving the City: Church and State," which deals with the LPC's effect on the demolition (or preservation) of religious structures. (Interestingly, this is an area I'm not sure quite what I think yet: Does the cause of preservation supercede the right to religious freedom? I think it may not.) Here's a great quote:

Among the religious buildings designated on his watch, Mr. Tierney noted, were the first Catholic churches to become landmarks in 28 years: St. Aloysius on West 132nd Street, known for its ornamental polychrome bands of brick and terra cotta, and the Church of All Saints on East 129th Street, an imposing Gothic Revival masterpiece with wheel clerestory windows. Both won landmark status last year.

But while preservationists applauded those designations, they said the commission bypassed even more important treasures like St. Thomas the Apostle Church in Harlem, completed in 1907 on West 118th Street near St. Nicholas Avenue. Known for its flamboyantly ornate neo-Gothic facade, fan-vaulted ceiling, spiky pinnacles and stained-glass windows, it was cited as one of the seven most important sites worth saving by the Preservation League of New York State.

"My community loves this church," Representative Charles B. Rangel wrote in a 2004 letter to Cardinal Edward M. Egan.

During years of pressure from Harlem advocates, the commission has declined to hold a hearing on St. Thomas, saying the building had already been significantly altered and its congregation was largely inactive.

Some preservationists and architectural historians accuse the commission and the New York archdiocese of grudgingly going along with the designations of All Saints and St. Aloysius in exchange for the omission of St. Thomas.

“This was their bargain,” said Michael Henry Adams, the author of “Harlem: Lost and Found” (Monacelli Press, 2001), a history of the neighborhood’s architecture. “To me it’s like the decision of Solomon.”

Read all three articles and answer this question: Should Tierney resign?

Sphere: Related Content

Will Robert B. Tierney, Chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, Exposed in the New York Times, Resign?

New York Times reporter Robin Pogrebin is back today with a powerful follow-up to her earlier piece that exposes how the painful, inexplicable and unforgivably slow pace of the work of the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission is damaging, often irrevocably, the cause of historic preservation in our precious, ever-threatened Gotham.

This new article, called "Preservationists See Bulldozers Charging Through a Loophole," is all about what happens as a result of the egregious, arguably immoral lassitude of LPC Chairman Robert B. Tierney -- who author Anthony C. Wood has called "a guy who’s had no demonstrable interest in historic preservation, who has the most important preservation job in New York City.” What happens? Here's what happens, according to Pogrebin:

Hours before the sun came up on a cool October morning in 2006, people living near the Dakota Stables on the Upper West Side were suddenly awakened by the sound of a jackhammer.

Soon word spread that a demolition crew was hacking away at the brick cornices of the stables, an 1894 Romanesque Revival building, on Amsterdam Avenue at 77th Street, that once housed horses and carriages but had long served as a parking garage.

In just four days the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was to hold a public hearing on pleas dating back 20 years to designate the low-rise building, with its round-arched windows and serpentine ornamentation, as a historic landmark.

But once the building’s distinctive features had been erased, the battle was lost. The commission went ahead with its hearing, but ultimately decided not to designate the structure because it had been irreparably changed. Today a 16-story luxury condominium designed by Robert A. M. Stern is rising on the site: the Related Companies is asking from $765,000 for a studio to $7 million or more for a five-bedroom unit in the building.

This is obviously outrageous, and Pogrebin provides multiple examples of how Tierney's evident, if well camoflaged, hostility to the cause of preservation is creating a culture of sneaking and lying and deceit and, for all we know, double-dealing. That Robert A. M. Stern, of all people, is participating in this rape of the New York City I love leaves me speechless. Can it be that Robert A. M. Stern is an ememy of all that is good in America?

And what are we going to go about this problem of the LPC's ineffectuality causing the systematic destruction of designation-worthy structures in New York City. Should Tierney, for example, admit to his ineptitude -- and his careless attitude toward the idea of preservation -- and step down? You'd think that such an emperor, devoid of clothes, might do so. But only if we protest.

To be fair, it's not as if Tierney does not present a vigorous defense:

“In the middle of the night I’m out there at 2 in the morning, and they’re taking the cornices off,” said Gale Brewer, a city councilwoman who represents that part of the Upper West Side. “We’re calling the Buildings Department, we’re calling Landmarks. You get so beaten down by all of this. The developers know they can get away with that.”

The number of pre-emptive demolitions across the city may be relatively small, but preservationists say the phenomenon is only one sign of problems with the city’s mechanism for protecting historic buildings.

“This administration is so excited about the new that it overlooks its obligation to protect the old,” said Anthony C. Wood, author of “Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks.”

In an interview Robert B. Tierney, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, called end-run alterations and demolitions “a terrible situation and a complete misuse of the process.”

He added that the commission was trying to address the issue. Before putting a property on the calendar for landmark consideration, for example, Mr. Tierney or the commission’s staff members meet with owners to explain the potential benefits of landmark designation —a federal tax credit for repairs or improvements, for example — in the hope of enlisting cooperation or even support.

“Owner consent is not required, but I strongly try to obtain it whenever possible,” Mr. Tierney said. “It helps the process going forward. It’s not a continually contentious relationship.”

But one must wonder just how vigorous Tierney is in his approach -- and take note of how Stern, whose work I absolutely worship, tries to wiggle out of responsibility for the unnecessary end to a sterling building:

In the case of Dakota Stables, some preservationists have accused the landmarks commission of deliberately dragging its heels. “The commission had no intention of designating Dakota Stables,” said Kate Wood, the executive director of Landmark West!, a preservation group. “They waited until it had been torn down. It was clearly too late for them to do anything meaningful.”

“It was all so carefully orchestrated,” she added. “It was politics. It was all just theater.”

But Mr. Tierney said he fought genuinely hard to have the case heard. “It was knock-down, drag-out time trying to do everything we could do to have a fair and open hearing on that building,” he said.

He also said he was “extremely unhappy with how the owners proceeded” on Dakota Stables and on Paterson Silks, yet added, “That’s two out of thousands — not to minimize them.”

Mr. Stern, the architect who designed the Harrison, the luxury condominiums replacing Dakota Stables, said the late-night demolition created “a controversial and awkward moment,” adding, “I don’t like to tear anything down if I don’t have to.”

And so I ask again: Should Chairman Tierney resign? And if not, what can he be doing faster and better? And how do we hold him to it?

Sphere: Related Content

New York Times Runs Expose on Landmarks Preservation Commission: Should Chairman Tierney Resign?

There is a great story in today's Times -- by one of its most dogged and thorough arts reporters, Robin Pogrebin -- on the maddeningly slow pace of the New York City Landmarks Commission's work. Anyone who has had anything remotely to do with preservationism in this town knows what this article is all about. It's tight and smart -- and it makes you wonder what next year's mayoral election is going to look like.

(I know, I know: no one is going to vote for or against Mayor Bloomberg on the basis on what his political appointee, commission head Robert B. Tierney, has or hasn't been doing during his five years as the chair of the LPC. But if you look at the news landscape lately, there have been a lot more articles focusing on city government, such as the pieces last week on how Bloomberg said the city couldn't afford the $400 rebates for homeowners and the City Council forced his people to admit that the mayor didn't have the legal authority to withhold their distribution.)

The question, meanwhile, as a result of Pogrebin's piece is whether Chairman Tierney should step down.

Highlights of the article:

A six-month examination of the commission’s operations by The New York Times reveals an overtaxed agency that has taken years to act on some proposed designations, even as soaring development pressures put historic buildings at risk. Its decision-making is often opaque, and its record-keeping on landmark-designation requests is so spotty that staff members are uncertain how many it rejects in a given year.

In dozens of interviews, residents who have proposed historic buildings or districts for consideration said they were often stonewalled by the commission, receiving formulaic responses or sometimes no response at all.

And there's this:

On some occasions the commission has taken so long to act that the building in question has been demolished or irretrievably altered.

And there's this:

“He’s a guy who’s had no demonstrable interest in historic preservation, who has the most important preservation job in New York City,” said Anthony C. Wood, author of “Preserving New York: Winning the Right to Protect a City’s Landmarks" (Routledge, 2008), and a party to the suit.

Also troubling to critics is the fact that the commission does not document the resolution of each nomination or even quantify how many it defers or rejects. Asked how many Requests for Evaluation they received in the last fiscal year, commission officials said they fielded roughly 200 in addition to nominations generated by the agency itself and its neighborhood surveys. They add that about one quarter never reach the commissioners (other than Mr. Tierney).

It's a great read. Let's hope for change. Yes we can.

Sphere: Related Content

Pen and Brush in Greenwich Village to be Erased?

According to today's New York Times, Pen and Brush, the Greenwich Village-based organization for women artists and writers, is actively looking to sell its historic East 10th Street townhouse.

Not everyone, the article says, is happy with the idea.

Sphere: Related Content

The Times Finds West Village Theatres Threatened; GVSHP Responds Belatedly

I was as taken aback as anyone this morning when I read the Times story headlined "Village Nonprofit Groups Say They Are Surprised by a Steep Rise in Rents." Who knew? Of course, the more I read Dan Levin's reportage, the angrier I became -- although at who, precisely, I became increasingly unsure. For one thing, Levin's reporting of the other side of the story -- the part in which Rockrose, the giant real estate conglomerate that is going to raise the rents of the Wings Theater and various and sundry small nonprofit through the roof for the express purpose of destroying them and contributing to the overcommercializatin of the West Village -- was, it seemed to me, a little bit thin. The story, by my count, is 959 words. Here is what Levin included as a quote from the Rockrose ruinators:

Patricia Dunphy, a vice president of Rockrose, said the nonprofit organizations knew an increase was coming because they were warned that their rents would be raised once the leases expired. “This was not a big surprise,” she said.

That's 38 words. Did Levin cross-examine Dunphy about anything else having to do with the story -- to respond, for example, to Jeffrey Horowitz, the founder of Theater for a New Audience who said that there "was no warning" about rent-raising and that Rockrose is "doing this in a way that is frankly brutal"? Well, sure, I suppose we can infer that's how Dunphy's comment came about -- but Horowitz is using strong language and Levin's reporting is letting Dunphy get away with a shrug. (Here's a link to a Queens Crap blogpost that illustrates just how brutal Rockrose can be -- bullying people out of their homes.)

Nor does Levin specifically ask Dunphy to respond to these three paragraphs:

Local elected officials have become involved in the dispute, hoping to find a way to allow the nonprofits to keep their spaces. The community board is pressuring the Empire State Development Corporation, which owns the property, to work out a compromise.

“These not-for-profits perform a lot of important services, and now they’re being priced out of the neighborhood they helped found,” said Brad Hoylman, the chairman of Community Board 2, which covers the area.

The development corporation and the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, have said they are meeting with both sides to find a solution. But it is unclear how much state officials can do, because Rockrose signed a 99-year lease with the state on the building in 1982, making the company the effective landlord.

Well, for example, what city-subsidized tax breaks does Rockrose receive -- or has received in the past? Did Levin ask Dunphy that question? Did Dunphy ask Quinn? I mean, he writes that it is "unclear how much state officials can do" (I thought Quinn and Hoylman were locals), but it is apparently that no one ever asks city officials whether there might be punishments for Rockrose down the road if it goes ahead and destroys these worthy nonprofits.

I mention GVSHP (Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation) in this post because I received this evening, right on time, an email from Andrew Berman, the organization's executive director. I'm not challenging GVSHP's right to raise the red flag on this -- and God knows the last time I used Andrew's name in a post, much less referred to his political ambitions, which are very well known in city circles -- I was summarily dressed down via email.

Anyway, here is the email that GVSHP sent out:

In recent years, a super-heated real-estate market has helped force out some of the most venerable theaters in Greenwich Village. GVSHP has been greatly disturbed by this trend, and has worked with preservationists, theater advocates, and elected officials to try to prevent the loss of individual theaters. We have also reached out to the City for assistance in addressing this ongoing problem.

Four more theaters in Greenwich Village, located in the Archives Building at Christopher and Greenwich Streets, are now threatened with the loss of their space as well (see the article in today's New York Times). When the Archives Building was converted by the Federal Government to residential use 20 years ago, a condition of that agreement was that some of the space in the building would go to non-profit groups at affordable rents. Now, that original agreement is expiring.

Small theaters are vital to Greenwich Village and New York City -- they add to the cultural vitality and dynamism of our city and our neighborhood, they are engines of economic development, tourism, and education, and they are an essential part of our history and character.

GVSHP has written to Mayor Bloomberg once again asking that he work with us and other concerned groups and individuals to help prevent the loss of theaters from the Village, their historic home.

HOW TO HELP:
Please write to Mayor Bloomberg, urging that the City help us to keep theaters in the Village --go to www.gvshp.org/VillageTheatersLtr.htm for a sample letter you can use.

Now, I support this, but for writing to the Mayor? Really? What does anyone expect the Mayor to do? To call Rockrose and stop them? To slap them on the wrist and say, "Now, silly, you leave those nice nonprofit theatres alone"? Wouldn't it make more sense to make life miserable for Rockrose directly? For example, here's Rockrose's website.

And you can call Patricia Dunphy at 212-375-1155. Register your outrage directly. After all, it is not that the Mayor doesn't care -- he's spent millions, after all, furnishing nonprofit arts groups across the city with his largesse, generally anonymously -- but he's just not the way to proceed with this. Perhaps the problem is that the righteous leaders of advocacy groups have to play nice with real estate interests in the event that they actually acquire electoral power.

In the meantime, kiss those four theatres -- and the other nonprofit groups -- goodbye. I love New York.

Sphere: Related Content

Jon Robin Baitz -- "JRB" -- Responds

What Mr. Baitz is doing home on a Saturday night, I don't know. Me, I'm getting over a cold and waiting for Ken to get home from Mexico. Flight delays, yadda yadda. Cognac helps cold. Mmm, me like-ee.

Anyway, to my shock, Mr. Baitz posted a response to my post inspired by Moxie's response to Rebeck's response to Baitz's response to Isherwood's story. So now, in the spirit of high-octane Ionesco, I am responding to Baitz's response to my response to Moxie's response to Rebeck's response to Baitz's response to Isherwood's story.

In the spirit of fairness, the response was posted anonymously. But at the end of the post, the person wrote "JRB," so I'm making a big scary leap here and assuming it was him. Of course, now I have a dilemma: do I write a mash note or mash his notes? Here goes:

Jon Robin Baitz writes:

"I remember Walter Kerr rather well, and you, sir, are the prisoner of a verbal machine. I would have thought we were "on the same side", which actually, we are -- you just don't realize it. And you seem to have given a lot of thought to this, which perhaps is flattering, but reveals a slew of predjudices mingled with..oh never mind. But go ahead and talk about 13 year old profiles -my point to Isherwood was simply that as smart as he is, there is a measure of venom which seems to me somewhat -- well - I shrug about it. Anyway, it was the timing of his piece also, and his apparent lack of understanding about the results of the WGA strike on many struggling writers. I know it's useless to respond to these things, but exactly what is it about reminding a critic from the paper of record to be mindful is offensive to you? It seems churlish . And again -- I would ask you to identify exactly where I claim to be one of the Times "victims"????I make no such claim. I am all for being slammed, but at least slam me for what I do write. As for Rich, he championed a lot of people, and he was cruel too. But I never had the sense that he was enduring a tenure as critic -- that's my point. Wow. JRB"

And you, sir, are a victim of your own…oh never mind, indeed. Look, please understand that someone might not reflexively agree with you, or agree with certain specific things you wrote or approaches you took or analyses you presented. And that verbal machine you refer to me being trapped inside—I mean, isn't that rather R.U.R. of you?—is cranked up because your own verbal machinery looped around a bit in your Huffington Post huff-and-puff; you yourself admitted you shouldn't have taken that swipe at Will Eno, for heaven's sake.

And yes, I will absolutely talk about 13-year-old profiles because you know perfectly well, Mr. Baitz, what an important moment that was to gay people, including yours very truly. You know perfectly well how everybody woke up and couldn’t believe the Times had at last done a lifestyle piece of substance on a prominent gay couple. Whatever you might think of that piece today, it was a direct, unmistakable signal of hope for many of us back in that weird, conservative-ascendent 1994 landscape; it was proof that the potential of public societal recognition existed for all of the rest of us. And you know perfectly well what that seal of approval, or endorsement, or whatever you’d want to call it, meant to your career as a result of being in the Times. When you attack the Times institutionally, therefore—and hey, who doesn’t, it’s the blogosphere’s blood sport—it’s really a little disingenuous on your part. That is, unless you're suggesting that the piece did not benefit you or your career at all or, in fact, injured it in some way, which I think most people would find hard to believe. In your response to my post, you wrote “But go ahead and talk about 13-year-old profiles” because what I wrote clearly stung. Sorry. But that wasn't a run-of-the-mill profile and you know it. So the Times has been good to you. That doesn't mean do a dance of hagiography, but it just seems to me that for people at your stage of the career game, things do tend to cut both ways when convenient.

Anyway, is Isherwood’s venom any more poisonous than that of anyone else at the Times? Do you honestly believe that a Brantley pan is less withering? Really? I mean, does the fact that John Simon was finally knocked down a few pegs and booted from New York magazine at all mitigate the fact that he was, and may forever be, the most poisonous snake of them all? Or are we back to the omnipotence of the Times again? (More on that anon.)

Yes, the timing of Isherwood’s piece was, shall we say, unfortunate, but are you suggesting he’s some renegade writer that the Times just publishes without second thought, without editorial oversight? Either way, here enters your criticism of the Times institutionally: if Isherwood's editors knew nothing of the piece, that's institutional neglect; if Isherwood's editors felt it was a good, strong, smart, timely piece for him to pen, I can see why that, too, might upset you. But then you’ve really got to hurl invective at the Times institutionally, and with more specificity and precision, not as a mere afterthought at the bottom of a rant-slash-essay.

I find nothing offensive about cautioning Isherwood to be mindful. What I find offensive -- more like sad -- is how you blithely dismiss all the other critics in New York City (of which I am one, but no one cares about that) as if their voices mean nothing, add nothing, do nothing. That’s old school thinking, and I’ll go to the mat on that one because, sir, the scene is fast changing -- and it has been changing for a long time. I won't blather on about this again because I did so in my earlier post. But that's what I believe. I think it's provable statistically, and I think it's being proved every day in the...ugh, awful word...zeitgeist.

Moreover, by dint of writing what you wrote, by dint of hurling curare-tipped arrows where you did, are you not conferring that power to the Times?

Moving on. You write,

“I would ask you to identify exactly where I claim to be one of the Times ‘victims’???? I make no such claim. I am all for being slammed, but at least slam me for what I do write,"

but this confuses me. Unless you're not an American playwright (I'm not referring to your birthplace), when you mention the struggle of American playwrights “against aging and monochromatic audiences, subscribers who arrive bleary and distracted, and jaded New Yorkers,” I assumed you would include yourself among the list of dramatists who must rally against such distressing demographic disasters. Yes, you do refer to the plight of the “serious young playwright,” but surely you’re not exempt from those same concerns, or are you?

You noted you “went to do my TV show so as to never have to worry about that problem” -- the problem being that Isherwood, et. al., needlessly complicate “the already tendentious struggle that playwrights face in trying to make a life in the theater." Surely we must believe, then, that you, too, have been victimized (strong word) by the Times' tyranny, or at least the icicles of Isherwood, as you see it.

At the end of the day, Mr. Baitz, I do realize that we largely agree. Indeed, I noted at the top of my post that I had been debating what to write in response to your Huffington huff-and-puff, if anything. You know, it also occurs to me that most New York playwrights, critics and writers aren’t exactly afforded the opportunities to contribute to venues such as the Huffington Post anyway, so perhaps that is where some of the “slew of prejudices” you smell are coming from. I'd be more inclined, however, not to call it a slew. It's more like a drip.

To cut to the chase: you’re Jon Robin Baitz. You knew full well that writing that post would get you attention, which it did; you knew full well that it would start dialogues and discussions and debates; artists of your provenance, recognition and acclaim ought to be doing such things. But then you have to be able to handle it when someone argues slightly different positions, and, as you noted, takes the time to sharpen the arguments. You’re flattered that I wrote my essay. To be honest, I’m flattered you responded to my post. Assuming you don't think I'm the enemy, I'd like someday to shake your hand.

With respect (for own commonalities and differences), LJ

Sphere: Related Content

Wanted: Eye Transplant for Isaac Butler, Who Has Been "Blinded by Hollywood"

Just read Isaac Butler's recent post on Brantley's review of Cyrano, specifically with regard to his grinning approval of Jennifer Garner's performance, and on Charles Isherwood's far more perplexing (in my view) piece on Hollywood invading Broadway or whatever it was.

While I'm having dinner with Le Butler this evening before we see Things We Want (yes, I'll be seen in public with Le Butler, and him with me, and hopefully we both emerge unscathed), I feel the need to do a post on his post (like he and I really need topics to cover as we break bread).

Personally, I didn't think Brantley (I love Isaac dubbing him B-Squared) was another case of the Times' chief drama critic slobbering over Hollywood royalty. In fact, I wish Brantley was more open to such stars -- he wasn't especially kind to Julia Roberts (undeservedly), he certainly wasn't kind at all to Julianne Moore (deservedly), and he seemed decidedly fixated on other issues beyond Claire Danes (weirdly) in Pygmalion -- like the performance of Jefferson Mays.

Given that I rarely express solid opinions about anything (!!), my vote on Garner would be to split the difference -- I thought she had glittering, transcendent moments as well as moments in which anyone else on that stage, including dead 19th century chorus girls, would have been far, far preferable. It was like Garner was constantly being tossed into the ocean and sometimes she remembered to swim -- kicking a lot, thrashing about, locating her natural buoyancy -- while at other times she seemed to drown faster than you can say "Titanic." Such vastly different sides of the same performance couldn't possibly be intentional; I attribute Garner's uneven work to a lack of attention from David Leveaux -- that's my gut instinct.

Isherwood's story, meanwhile, perplexed me more. Here's his lede and second graph:

Some repaving may need to be done on the metaphoric highway between Hollywood and Broadway. Most of the traffic used to be moving west, as actors who had earned their stripes — and a modicum of fame — onstage headed to California, where greater celebrity and greater money beckoned. In the past decade or so, however, the westward traffic has slowed considerably, while the lanes heading east are filling up.

Hollywood seems to home-grow most of its television and film stars now. It’s rare for an actor to leverage a significant stage career into solid movie stardom. Meanwhile established film or television actors who find themselves in a career lull after a few lackluster movies or a flop show, or maybe just with a summer or fall season free of commitments, streak east to Broadway every season to burnish their reputations.

To me, the lede suggests the article will consider the reversal of a trend -- that actors are no longer fleeing the wicked stage for the worry-free glories of pan-sexual Tinseltown but that the reverse is increasingly true. I expected to see not only Julia Roberts' name, but some others as well. Instead, the piece is really a Sunday critics' review of Pygmalion -- Danes and the revival is discussed in 11 full paragraphs, or more than half the piece. As for Isherwood's citation of Amy Ryan (or Steve Carrell in Richard III), um, who cares? It was as if Isherwood betrayed his stated thesis, or perhaps was attempting to locate a thesis by sort of scribbling in search of a subject. I think he has some interesting things to say about Claire, but what any of that has to do with the east-to-west pipeline becoming a west-to-east pipeline -- well, it just eludes me.

Discuss.

Sphere: Related Content

On Matt Wolf On Ben Brantley On Matt Wolf On Ben Brantley

Talk about meta. You've got Matt Wolf, a perfectly good critic, on the Guardian's blog blogging about tailing Ben Brantley of the New York Times who is tailing himself, in essence, by blogging about his trip to London on the Times' ArtsBeat blog -- 27 shows in 21 days, and suffering from food poisoning, thus preventing him, it seems, from checking out the 47th revival of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

But it does make me wonder about something...if it is so significant that Brantley is in London reporting on West End theater for American audiences, why aren't there prominent U.K. critics here doing the same thing for their readers? Does it say something that they, at the moment, are not?

Sphere: Related Content

Martin Denton Gets Dissin'-Ginia-s

Kudos to Martin Denton for his brief, modest but nonetheless appropriate takedown of Ginia Bellafante, who, in her review last week of Tom Crean: Antarctic Explorer, writes:

At two hours the play is certainly long enough to accommodate the inquiry, but Mr. Dooley indulges in narrative where he ought to supply analysis. (No one-man show should exceed 90 minutes unless the one man performing it is Will Ferrell or Jesus.)

But here's the thing...while Martin is good enough to acknowledge that Ginia is just being jocular, and while he is correct to make the point that the joke, such as it is, is insulting to the rather long list of solo performers whose pieces are more than 90 minutes and all the better for it, the real problem here is the Times' reliance on critics that they've pulled off of desks from elsewhere -- like Bellafante from, I hear, the fashion desk. She's unqualified to write theatre criticism -- or if she is, she should know better than to be so reductive and shallow and stupid.

In about an hour, I'm going to be heading into town to visit with the attendees at this month's Community Dish meeting, and this is what I'm talking about when it comes to the community thinking about how to act like a community to demand something better than low and crappy criticism such as this. Bellafante probably thinks she's writing good copy; hell, from the point of view of the average theatergoer reading the New York Times, I suppose it is good copy. But the Times is allowed to get away with employing unqualified and ignorant critics like Ginia because we, collectively, do nothing to raise an objection to it. And that's what I mean when I say that I think we have to take action.

I know, I know...what we can we do? We're powerless, right? We have no recourse, right? The Times is untouchable, right? I just don't believe that's true. What Martin has hit on is something very important. Or at least I think so.

Sphere: Related Content