Today’s Images piece, in The Washington Post, is about celebrity, celebrity scandal, and the fall of Tiger Woods. It looks as if I’ll be on MSNBC tomorrow morning, around 8:30 a.m., to natter on about this subject.
January 20, 2010
Talking about Haiti…
The Haiti story touched a nerve, it seems. I spent some time with two journalists from Canal+ today, for a segment which airs in France on Sunday. And tomorrow morning, I’ll be on NPR’s Tell Me More, around 9 a.m
January 19, 2010
Haiti and the Media
My story on the images coming out of Haiti led to an invitation to discuss news coverage of the catastrophe on The Takeaway, a morning radio news and call-in program based in New York. I was joined by Natalie Hopkinson, who wrote a sharp piece on the meaning and use of words such as “looting” in the context of a socially-devastating natural disaster. You can listen here. One caveat: Since I started forcing myself to watch more of the television coverage of the tragedy, I feel the need to say that once again I think newspapers such as the The Washington Post and The New York Times are in a very different league from what is available on the networks and cable. I find much of the televised coverage unbearably narcissistic, saccharine and self-aggrandizing, and that raises very different questions than the boundaries of privacy and photojournalism I discussed on Saturday.
January 18, 2010
Watching Latrobe
WETA will premiere a new documentary about the great, but often neglected architect Benjamin Latrobe, tomorrow evening. I wrote about Latrobe’s masterpiece, the Baltimore Basilica, after it was renovated in 2006. The film is a good primer on what the producers call “America’s First Architect.”
January 16, 2010
Thinking About Haiti
Since the war in Iraq began, I’ve been looking at and writing about media images of death and destruction. The images coming out of Haiti strike me as more graphic than most newspapers have been willing to print in the past decade. I ponder why in today’s Washington Post.
November 27, 2009
The American Saturnalia
The first shopping day of the Christmas season is upon us, with the usual crowds, the frantic sales and the inevitable parking nightmare. Even the name—Black Friday—suggests that Americans are deeply ambivalent about this strange shopping holiday. But is it, perhaps, the most American day of the year? A spectacle of commerce and crowds, consumerism and credit cards, a day structured like a poll (vote with your pocketbook) on the state of the American economy? Is Black Friday the perfect and most fabulously self-reflective, narcissistic American holiday we’ve invented?
Every December, we regret the increasing commercialization of Christmas, as if we’re slipping further and further from some ideal understanding of the holiday (last seen in a Dickens story or film by Frank Capra?). But let’s be hardheaded and pragmatic about the facts. Christmas isn’t devolving from some Christian fantasy of love and regeneration. That ship has left the harbor. No, it’s evolving into the perfect, five-week spectacle of Americana, with all our best American gadgets and gizmos on display, with all of our basic habits of the heart—desire, acquisitiveness, competition—perfectly exercised. Black Friday is the first day of the American Saturnalia, a festival of capitalism and technology and American self-love all rolled into one.
November 27, 2009
Thanks
In late November, the shade grows quickly over the landscape in the hills behind Albuquerque. From about 3 p.m. on, the shadows surge longer and longer, and if you’re hiking on the backside of the Sandia Mountains, it’s a chiaroscuro drama. But sometimes, as you walk up a gentle canyon, you come over a rise and there’s a pristine shaft of light glowing on the trees just above your head. If you could stretch your frame a few feet higher you might dip your hand in the sunset. We live in light and dark, we communicate between them. To see them both at the same time is…to be embodied, to feel sadness and joy, to appreciate. Something.
November 21, 2009
Bush Builds a Library
Designs for the new George W. Bush library and presidential conference center were unveiled last month. The architect is the Dean of the Yale School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern. Of Stern’s proposed design, I write:
Is it a great building? Robert Stern doesn’t design great buildings, at least in the sense of buildings that are bold and memorable, that carry on the dialectic and drama of the grand tradition of architecture. His work is a pause in that tradition, a bracket within the forward-driving discourse of architectural history. They are buildings for people who have grown tired of architecture with a capital A.
But Stern’s work, in retrospect, often seems like the ideal solution to a particular problem. In this case, there are two problems that have been well solved. The first is the difficulty of characterizing Bush in architecture without parody or aggrandizement. What other style would have worked? Brutalism? A glass box? A neoclassical pile in the Washington style? Bush was so full of contradictions, so seemingly hostile to the very things that define most important architects — intellectual sophistication, metaphorical games, aesthetic refinement — that it’s hard to imagine a more meaningful building ever fitting him comfortably.
The second problem I mention is the larger issue of whether presidents should be in the business raising the kind of money it takes to build these living sepulchers. I’m not sure it’s good for democracy.
November 21, 2009
Newspapers and Museums: The Same Dilemma
I’m personally allergic to historical reenactments and most forms of interactive history telling. I think all too many museums and historical sites grasp at straws, technically and aesthetically, when they try to recreate the way history is told. But I acknowledge the problem of falling attendance, reduced engagement and the side effects for the history business of living in an over-entertained, over-stimulated, over-busy society.
The comparison between the newspaper business and the history business is telling. Even the attendance figures at a place like Colonial Williamsburg are eerily familiar to the subscription numbers of major newspapers. They peaked at an annual high of 1 million in the 1980s, and have dwindled to about 700,000 recently, a downward curve remarkably similar to that of a large metropolitan daily. Who have they lost? Essentially the same people that newspapers are losing. And on what do they pin their hopes? In many cases it’s technological innovation that is just emerging but has yet to reveal its real impact (subscriptions on Kindle? iPhone aps that turn the museum into an enhanced reality zone?).
I spent a lovely day at Williamsburg earlier this month, and wrote up some the changes that are happening there, in the guise of a story about their most recent addition (the first major reconstruction in more than fifty years) to the storied Duke of Gloucester Street. Williamsburg has the deep pockets to think this through, so their innovations will be closely studied by many less well-endowed museums. I wish them luck.
November 15, 2009
Create Christmas Memories, Now!
I dropped i
nto a place called National Harbor this afternoon. It is a large convention center, entertainment and hotel district created ex nihilo just a few years ago on the banks of the Potomac River south of Washington, DC. They were putting up the Christmas decorations, including a large Christmas tree made of a conical metal frame onto which patches of greenery were being attached rather like thatching a roof. The tree wasn’t even half finished, so you could see plainly that the whole thing is hollow.
Inside the main convention center hotel a sign announced upcoming Christmas events, with this odd bit of advertising text: “Create your family holiday memories today.”
“Create your memories” is an odd locution. We tend to think our memories are made automatically, that they follow as inevitably on experience as echoes follow noise. To be sure, at some level, we “create” our own memories, both by choosing which experiences we have, and through whatever process in our brains memories are physically forged. But the expression “create your memories” seems too active a way of putting it, and it seems to leave out a step, as if we forge our memories directly, without actually having the experiences upon which memories are based.
The phrase suggests that we create memories rather like we take snapshots, and I think this is why the phrase troubles me. Taking snapshots is a very good way of not having experiences, of sending the data of what we see directly to the digital memory bank without any particular engagement with the reality in which we’re present.
There’s one very big advantage to conceiving of memory this way. It cuts memory free from experience, which is often disappointing, and sometimes downright sad or miserable. If we can create our memories directly, without much reference to the actual experience, then perhaps we can move directly from anticipation of pleasure to the memory of pleasure. The middle, the pleasure or experience itself, is quietly moved out of the picture. And that’s a good thing if what was actually experienced wasn’t, in fact, very pleasurable.
This is what “experience”-based places such as National Harbor are meant to do. They are not actually places to experience much at all, but they are filled with mildly pleasurable stimuli that look good in snapshots and sound great when you “remember” them to people at home (the fountains, the beach, the wharf!). They are places to create memories, not places to be, or dwell, or think, or have adventures and take risks. Christmas is to holidays what National Harbor is to architecture. It is not a meaningful event in itself, but a time to “create memories,” take pictures, file away burnished narratives and tales of Christmas past.
