1.
During the summer of 2014, a snake terrorized residents and visitors of Lake Hopatcong, the largest lake in New Jersey. A breathless report from CBS New York claimed the snake was a 20-foot boa constrictor, and quoted the local animal control officer’s warning: “What we’re afraid of is the animals, small dogs, cats, raccoons — and I would advise people not to put their baby in the lake.” As if he were warning campers in a low-budget horror film from the ’70s, the officer continued: “You don’t want to touch it. You don’t want to go towards it. You don’t want to threaten it. It’s not going to come at a person unless it’s threatened, cornered, caught — then, it will squeeze you to death.”
A spokesman for the state Department of Environmental Protection was more realistic: “There’s no evidence at all, any scientific evidence, of such a creature.” But I wanted to believe. I told my wife about the snake. We live near the lake. Sussex County is a collection of lakes, rivers, and state land: the Vermont of the metropolitan area. My family used to own a restaurant on Lake Hopatcong’s Bertrand Island, home to an amusement park until the early 1980s. We should go see the snake, I said. My wife rolled her eyes, and looked at our twin daughters, still infants. We weren’t going anywhere.
Greg Watry went to the lake; he covered the search for The New Jersey Herald, the local paper. Watry told me that a snake expert had “claimed the snake swam through his legs, avoiding capture.” The expert said it was an anaconda. Watry said the snake even inspired a parody Twitter account, @HopatcongBoa, the anonymous owner of which never broke character during an interview.
Unamused local officials claimed the attention was affecting summer tourism. The search was abandoned, but not before the phantom snake reached national news. David Letterman included the creature in his opening monologue, quipping “I am certain that this snake is the only one that wasn’t involved in the bridge closing,” referring to a September 2013 scheme to close Fort Lee access lanes on the George Washington Bridge. The closing created a traffic nightmare in an area used to daily slogs. Later dubbed “Bridgegate,” the plan was hatched by David Wildstein, director of interstate capital projects for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The position was created specifically for Wildstein, who was appointed by Christopher J. Christie, the governor of New Jersey.
I know the joke: all politicians are snakes. That doesn’t quite apply here. Chris Christie isn’t a snake. He’s a chimera.
2.
I can’t say that I loved my summer job for the Morris County Department of Elections, but it was a formative experience. I first registered as a Republican because everyone was a Republican in Morris County, N.J. Even the Democrats. Daily office visits from politicians — replete with handshakes, laughs, pats on the back, and promises — changed my naive view of politics. Americans lament the partisan politics of Republicans versus the Democrats, but my summer working in the election office taught me it is actually the politicians versus the citizens. The politicians almost always won.
The year before I worked there, the election office had an infamous visitor. Documentarian and gadfly Michael Moore had tried to run a ficus for New Jersey’s 11th congressional district. Unfortunately, the tree was not a registered voter, and could not be listed on the ballot.
Some say Florida is the strangest state in the union, but New Jersey is the weirdest. From Weird NJ magazine to Double Trouble State Park to the Jersey Devil, the Garden State is an amalgamation of the odd, the exaggerated, and the incomprehensible. I say this with love. Yet New Jersey’s labyrinthine highways and shadowing from Philadelphia and New York City have created a geographical and cultural experiment. New Jersey is a state of wealth adjacent to poverty, of manicured suburbs near pockmarked urban streets — both close to swamp-bordered industrial plants. A hybrid state, New Jersey is the perfect breeding ground for a chimera.
3.
“The Word in the desert / Is most attacked by voices of temptation, / The crying shadow in the funeral dance, / The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.” So ends a stanza of T.S. Eliot’s long poem, “The Four Quartets.” Homer’s Chimera in The Iliad was the first written incarnation of the beast. Samuel Butler translates this “savage monster…who was not a human being, but a goddess, for she had the head of a lion and the tail of a serpent, while her body was that of a goat, and she breathed forth flames of fire.” The original Chimera scourged the Lycians until it was killed by Bellerophon. Chimeras are impossibilities made real. Rather than bellowing about beasts, we now use the word chimera to describe duplicities. Illusions.
These illusions are appropriate for the Garden State. In an essay for The Millions, fellow staff writer Bill Morris wonders about The New Jersey Novel. He writes: “New Jersey’s lack of defining character traits — its facelessness, its rootlessness, its lukewarmness — make it an ideal portal to get inside the soul of a nation that becomes more faceless, rootless and generic — more soulless — by the day, a nation where regional signifiers have been sanded smooth by interstate highways, franchise restaurants, big box stores, shopping malls, subdivisions, all the strangling, interchangeable links of the corporate chains. In contemporary America, anomie is a moveable feast, and its template was exported from New Jersey.”
Morris references “To See Ourselves as Writers See Us,” Bruce Weber’s consideration of the literary state of the state for The New York Times. Writing in 1995, Weber notes a literary evolution in New Jersey. A place that “never had much resonance” in comparison to the literary West and South had found its day: “The rootlessness of contemporary life may well have its roots here.” Weber quotes Rutgers University professor Michael Aaron Rockland’s perception: “My whole notion of New Jersey is that we live in a never-never land, where we pretend we’re living on a farm. The real centers of New Jersey are these office parks in the middle of nowhere. Life is not bad in New Jersey, not bad at all, but what every writer writes about is our trying to find a center in our lives.” Writer Gary Krist, a native of Fort Lee, said New Jersey “was like the rest of the world, except it had New York right there to give it an inferiority complex.”
New Jersey sounds ripe for drama and bickering, which is exactly what transpired between Chris Christie and David Wildstein. When Wildstein’s lawyer claimed that evidence existed to link Christie and the Bridgegate lane closures, Christie’s office released an email to family and friends, with a litany of claims “As a 16-year-old kid, [Wildstein] sued over a local school board election…He was publicly accused by his high school social studies teacher of deceptive behavior…He had a controversial tenure as Mayor of Livingston…He was an anonymous blogger known as Wally Edge…He had a strange habit of registering web addresses for other people’s names without telling them.”
Christie’s missive cites a Bergen Record article by reporter Shawn Boburg for evidence of Wildstein’s “tumultuous” nature. Boburg’s prophetic 2012 article, published a year before Bridgegate, actually paints Wildstein and Christie as confidants rather than combatants. Citing “longtime employees” of the Port Authority, Boburg claims that Wildstein was handpicked as the “perfect instrument to help shake things up” at the agency. Not simply an obscure blogger, Wildstein was smart, witty, and possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of New Jersey’s convoluted political history.
Boburg’s sources explain that Wildstein “seems to serve as the administration’s eyes and ears within the byzantine agency.” He is described as “intimidating, hardworking, intelligent, private and fiercely loyal to the governor.” Wildstein has since pleaded guilty to his involvement in Bridgegate, and has agreed to testify against two now-indicted Christie insiders, Bill Baroni and Bridget Anne Kelly. U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman’s indictment is fascinating: the bridge access lanes were closed to punish Mark Sokolich, the Democratic mayor of Fort Lee, who had refused to endorse Christie for re-election. The lane closures and traffic congestion were purposefully planned for the first day of school. In a state desensitized to corruption and political revenge, this was unique: in order to punish a politician, Christie’s insiders punished citizens.
Governor Christie himself has not been indicted in relation to Bridgegate. He continues to claim innocence, even demanding that the press apologize to him — the same way he once said The Wall Street Journal would apologize to the now federally-implicated Wildstein and Baroni. In a December 2013 press conference, Christie quipped that he “worked the cones” during the lane closures; “I was actually the guy out there, in overalls and a hat.” When the traffic study was revealed to be a sham, Christie visited Fort Lee to personally apologize to the mayor. Matt Katz, who has been covering Christie for the past five years, and whose biography of the governor is forthcoming, has raised questions about Christie’s evolving claims about his knowledge of the lane closures. A native of the Bronx, Katz is a Christie sage; his fierce objectivity and respect for the governor’s political acumen make his observations all the more damning.
After Bridgegate first made news, Christie commissioned an internal investigation, led by noted New Jersey attorney Randy Mastro. Mastro’s law firm has billed the state’s taxpayers nearly $8 million. Christie has been claiming that the Mastro Report cleared him of any wrongdoing, but Katz is skeptical. He explains that although Mastro’s team conducted “hundreds of interviews” as part of the report, no transcripts or recordings have been released. Only a U.S. District Court judge’s ruling has forced the law firm to make those notes available as part of Baroni and Kelly’s federal trial. The investigation has become an illusion of an illusion: another performance.
The Daily Beast’s Olivia Nuzzi is by turns hilarious and prescient when writing about Christie. Unlike national reporters who fawn over Christie’s storytelling ability, Nuzzi skewers his claims. She knows Christie’s history. One example: during his 1994 run for freeholder in Morris County, Christie claimed his opponents were being investigated by the prosecutor’s office. During the television ad, Christie, seated next to his wife and infant son, says “I propose a strict code of ethical conduct for all elected officials.” His claim was a lie. He lost a defamation lawsuit, and his apology ran in a local newspaper.
Yet Nuzzi and Katz are only joined by a handful of other local reporters in their diligence. Chris Christie owns the state media. The Star Ledger, the largest newspaper in the state, endorsed Christie for governor twice. A left-leaning paper that shares Christie’s animus toward public-sector unions, The Star Ledger rescinded its second endorsement and has since gone on the offensive, calling Christie a “liar,” but the damage has been done. Christie doesn’t need New Jersey anymore. The Garden State’s media has given this chimera the light and attention needed for his next political metamorphosis.
4.
Slate’s John Dickerson has called Chris Christie a “performance artist,” but that title is a misnomer. The practical end of performance art is an extension of theater into the spheres of life; whether they practice stillness or subversion, performance artists do not use their art for mere service. Chris Christie is a politician. He is the prototypical politician. He wants to win. His every move and utterance is finely calibrated. His outbursts — telling a Hurricane Sandy activist to “sit down and shut up” or calling a former Navy SEAL an “idiot” — are not the slip-ups of an amateur; they are the myth-making of an intelligent, ambitious man.
Myths are necessary when reality is troubling. Only a chimera like Christie could run for president on his record. Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s, and Fitch — the three major credit rating forms — have, together, downgraded the state’s bond rating nine times during Christie’s tenure. Christie’s 2011 sweeping and signature reform of public worker health care and pension contributions was supposed to show his talent for bipartisan compromise, as well as his ability to break the backs of unions. While public workers increased their financial contributions, Christie’s lawyers recently argued that his own touchstone legislation, including the state’s pension funding, was unconstitutional. The state’s transportation fund is anemic. Christie’s presidential aspirations have caused him to be out of the state for nearly 40 percent of his second term — that absence has riled taxpayers, who have to foot the bill for his extensive security detail of state troopers. Not to mention his administration’s paltry settlement with Exxon Mobil over contamination at the company’s Bayway and Bayonne refineries.
While Lake Hopatcong visitors were afraid that a snake would eat their pets, Chris Christie traveled the state on a new round of town halls. Imagine a garrulous boxer in the round, with a microphone and adoring fans (Christie tends to hold town halls in areas that lean heavily Republican). As an actor, this is Christie’s element. Behind him: a banner that reads THE JERSEY COMEBACK HAS BEGUN. Taxpayers grimaced. The snake laughed.
5.
Dave Powell writes that despite our initial impression of chimeras as violent beasts, they “are commonly rendered as vulnerable: depicted in either playful or serene poses, in a state of dying or suffering defeat, or as simply nonaggressive.” The chimeras of ancient Egyptian art were, of course, strange, but not threatening. The presence of chimeric danger began with Greek depictions. Powell documents an interesting shift: contemporary chimeras are something else entirely. Thomas Grunfeld’s “Misfit (doberman/calf” shocked Powell: “it is not just that the (life-sized) sculpture is constructed from real hide and fur, but also that it is set in a subtly naturalistic, relaxed pose.” In order to understand this odd union of fear and sympathy, Powell calls upon Masahiro Mori’s “uncanny valley” theories. Our emotional reaction to an entity that resembles a human peaks “shortly before one reaches a completely human ‘look’…but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete.”
This melancholic strand to chimeric tales is captured well in “Chimera” by Karen Glenn. The narrator takes “rural roads deep into Nevada” to find a scientist’s creation: a sheep with a human heart. The narrator should recoil, but she can’t. She watches the sheep walk to her creator: “It’s something we all know— / how the heart keeps wanting, wanting / the unnameable, the impossible, yearning in the dark / like a sheep at night in a cold barn.”
Chris Christie’s emotional modulations have been described as operatic. He tells moving stories about the passing of his mother, his high-school years, his experiences as a prosecutor. Christie’s talent has never been a knack for policy; his gifts are of the thespian variety. His twists of truth are somehow endearing — until one feels the knife plunge into skin. Watch Christie during a one-on-one interview — his curious manner of focused but not unnerving eye contact and subsequent exhale before responses — and for a combative man, he seems rather vulnerable. Human. He is less the man you want to have a beer with, and more a man that you might confide in — until you see him jumping up and down in a luxury box with the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, or saying the teachers’ union uses students “like drug mules.” It could be argued that Christie’s emotional pivots are patently Sicilian, but they are absolutely New Jersey.
6.
In the end, what do we want from our politicians? Who among us believes that we are not being lied to? When it comes to politicians behaving oddly, Christie is the rule rather than the exception. I am fascinated by how people criticize Christie’s treatment of the media and then praise Hillary Clinton, whose evasion of reporters includes her quite literal roping of the media at recent events.
I have long since discarded any political affiliation. I am an equal-opportunity skeptic. While it might seem that we are surrounded with politicians, citizens remain legion. It is in the people I believe. “Renewal becomes impossible,” James Baldwin reminds, “if one supposes things to be constant that are not — safety, for example, or money or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope — the entire possibility — of freedom disappears.” Yet we return to the polls, the homes of these chimeras, for where else can we go? Although rare, the truly talented chimeras convince us anew. It is as when W.B. Yeats considers tragic theater: “into the places we have left empty we summon rhythm, balance, pattern, images that remind us of vast passions, the vagueness of past times, all the chimeras that haunt the edge of trance.”
As a public, we accept that we are lied to, but we need that lie to be sung — we want a narrative that we can hum. Chris Christie will likely not become the Republican nominee for president — conservatives neither trust nor like him — but his time in public office is a study in the power of the chimera. “Disbelief has eyes of different colors,” writes Bruce Bond in his own “Chimera” poem. In the political world of smoke, mirrors, and forced smiles, the chimera of Chris Christie is unique. His narrative, his performances, are an amalgamation of parts and poses — but if we look closely enough, we can see the ruptures between skin and soul, fiction and truth: “So dark, this ink, this emptiness between.”
Image Credit: Flickr/Gage Skidmore.
Normally, residencies are funded by a combination of public funding and private donors and foundations that support the arts. The nation’s oldest residency program is the MacDowell Colony, founded in the early 1900s by composer Edward MacDowell, who noted to his wife, a pianist, that in their summer location on their bucolic farm in New Hampshire, he produced better — and more — music. The MacDowell Colony was born out of the desire to share this experience, and various artists, including writers, visual artists, composers, and choreographers from all over the world travel to Peterborough, N.H., to sleep in communal quarters, eat wonderful food, and work without distraction in a studio out in the woods. Work that has come out of this one place has shaped the American cultural landscape — e.g., Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town there; over the years, the Colony has dispensed this gift of time and creativity to artists as varied as James Baldwin, Aaron Copland, and Meredith Monk. This gift is made possible in part by public funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ah, Mall of America… ! *Shudder*. It was 1995 and I had returned to the US, with First Wife, after 5 years in Europe, to get First Wife a Green Card. I had saved enough for us to live for about 18 months (staying at a friend’s house near Lake Calhoun) but, as it turned out, I *had* to get a job (any job) in order to get her the Green Card…
Cut to: Payless (emphasis on the first syllable) Shoe Source, in the Mall of America. Quite an adventure. The only thing more impressive than the fact that the M.o.A. is so big that it has its own weather (moisture in the upper atmosphere, under the roof, condenses and you get sun showers) is the weight- capacity of the elevators: it seemed as though the average American had gained an average of 150 pounds in the five years I’d been gone.
I was writing quite a lot, so I was an *unofficial writer in residence*, but, if polemic is a minor literature, polemic against the patrons of the Mall of America is even worse. I didn’t get my Muse back until First Wife got the Green Card and we escaped to Southern California, where she took (like a duck to Exxoned water) to the basest elements of So Cal life. I got *so* many (scars and) stories out of that… but… I digress…
It goes without saying that any piece of writing, coming out of a corporate sponsorship, that, miraculously, happened to be *actual Literature*… would not be deemed “appropriate” by the sponsors. Unless, of course, you’re talking about a corporate sponsorship in a hemisphere that doesn’t contain a shopping Mall so big that it has its own weather.
One of America’s greatest failings (beyond the transformation of its armed forces into the world’s most well-funded terrorist squad and utter inability to fathom universal healthcare) is its total disinterest in funding the arts, which is what every other Western nation does. The arts cannot be easily monetized like war, healthcare and now education, though, which is why bureaucrats mock its role in society. Pathetic.
“The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”
You could make a case for this aspect of the week as a sort of performance art opportunity, although my recollection is the Mall wants to exercise control over what the writer has to say for the big “almost real time” screen. So what this is not is a residency or a fellowship, and the copyright aspect is exploitative in the extreme. I have entertained doomed hopes that the Mall would reconsider its terms. If other prospective benefactors ( a word that, alas for me, inevitably conjures Mr Brocklehurst) are inclined to set up arts funding, I hope they will look to organizations like Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell etc for guidance.
For all the disdain directed toward the mall, with fair terms I believe this could be a great opportunity. So many public spaces (malls, train stations, hotel lobbies, public libraries) are ideal places to work and draw on the environment and fabulous people-watching opportunities to create. Look at the hordes of writers hunkered down in coffeehouses or applying for the Amtrak residency.
Thanks for writing this piece, I am going to click on through to your NEA article.
beamish13:
What facts do you have to back that up? What’s the evidence that in the US there’s less public and private non-profit support for the arts than in, say, Germany or the UK? Keep in mind that states and local municipalities have their own programs for funding the arts, that private non-profit and charitable institutions (McArthur, etc.) have gigantic budgets, and that a lot of funding is done through publicly-funded universities.The NEA is but a small fraction of support for the arts in the US. The US has hundreds of literary magazines, and practically all of them are publicly-funded in one way or another. How many does Sweden have, per capita? Got numbers?
Also, where’s the evidence that more money = better art? No, it’s not obvious or self-evident. One could argue that many young writers are stifled by too much support (e.g. MFA, followed by a writing residency) so that they don’t get to live life. As a result, their writing is sterile, solipsistic, limited. There are many young writers nowadays who have never had a real job precisely because there’s too much support.
“Also, where’s the evidence that more money = better art? No, it’s not obvious or self-evident. One could argue that many young writers are stifled by too much support (e.g. MFA, followed by a writing residency) so that they don’t get to live life.”
There’s a tricky balance to strike. Too much support (aka coddling) and decadence sets in. Too little or no support, on the other hand, means little or no writing gets done.
When I went through a phase of working long hours at physically-demanding jobs (eg house painting or deck-building), all I wanted to do, after getting home from work, every day, was eat directly out of a pot, read, pass out, groan up out of my dreams before the crack of dawn, stagger off to work, repeat. The first few months of that I was able to get writing done on the weekends, but, as I discovered, after more than a year of this routine, it’s as though the accumulated hours of back-breaking just pile up into a black mountain of bleakest Reality, looming derisively over the twee golden fantasy molehill of Writing. Any sane Writer, in these circumstances, starts questioning the point of the practise.
In other words, it’s not just the fantasy on the page that matters; the Writing Life itself requires a safe space in which to nurture the primary fantasy that Writing *matters*, that it’s a legitimate thing for an adult to do with her/his time. Especially in a pathologically materialist culture. A *bit* of support from the Government (in any concession to the notion that Culture is a serious pursuit) is both a necessary easing and a nod of assent.
I lived in Stockholm, for a while, at the turn of the century and I met some unknown Writers there who were supported by the Gov with the solicitousness you’d expect to be shown to scientists developing advanced weapons systems, which did wonders for those Writers’ self-confidence. This is especially important if the work being done by a Writer is not *commercial*; the so-called Free Market may indeed support the efforts of the (slick) commercial talent, but the Weirdos, experimenting with the Challenging and Difficult, definitely need subsidies from *somewhere*.
I never got (or applied for) grants/stipends/retreats but I moved to a city in a country where Literary Culture is still discussed and debated on prime time TV and where the rents/ groceries/ discos are cheap and one doesn’t feel a fool for Writing. Which is all I need, really. I have (Weirdo) readers and a sense of the usefulness and *sanity* of the practise. Perfect.
People expect “real Writers” to keep on writing, regardless, but I don’t think it usually happens that way. Youthful Enthusiasm catapults one onward to 20-something Inspiration and thence to 30-something Endurance shading to Sheer Cussedness… but then what?
If a few crumbs from Gov saves the endangered species of the talented, forty-something, Weirdo House Painter/ Writer, I’m all for it. Because *those* voices are going to be more interesting, as you point out, for having lived a bit.
By the way, I can’t get over the fact that a published novelist is writing sentences such as “This paradise for the mind is also free or minimal cost, they sometimes come with stipends for lost wages.” None of my eighth-grade tutees would dare send a sentence like that across my desk.
It’s really easy to rip on the “Megamall” – the jokes practically write themselves – but for lifelong Minnesotans like myself the mall we love to hate is an inextricable part of our lives. My father worked on the construction of the original mall; decades later I worked on another project there. Camp Snoopy, the original amusement park, was better than it needed to be; I’ve probably ridden the many iterations of the Log Flume more than any other ride at any other park. I’ve been to the mall for birthday parties, stoned-teenager movie viewings, a prom dinner (inexplicably), a crazy long night with my wife in the 4th floor bars; I’ve seen the wide-eyed wonder of my children as they gaze upon marine life at Underwater World; I’ve played hooky from work to build a stuffed animal with my oldest daughter on Toddler Tuesday; I’ve been baffled by the size of crowds on a random Tuesday morning in April. I remember the enormous Sam Goody and the memorabilia shop on the first floor (home to the most expensive retail space in the state) and the island-themed restaurant on the 3rd.
So, sure, the Mall is capitalism run amok – it doesn’t have its own weather (lol Steven) but it does have its own zip code. Yet the Mall has employed tens of thousands of people over the years. Hearty Minnesotans may sneer at the suckers who do their Christmas shopping there (so expensive) yet almost all of us have made a last-minute trip there (if you can’t find a gift at the Mall…) It is an incredibly diverse place, which makes it the premier place to practice the fine art of people-watching. It draws visitors from around the globe (Japan in particular, for reasons I haven’t quite nailed down), which is the only place in Minnesota that can claim that.
All of this is to say that there are GREAT stories to be written about the Mall. Some sort of “oral history” project would be fascinating. An hour of people-watching in the Rotunda or one of the food courts would provide inspiration for a terrific short story or three. The labyrinthine back-of-house areas – loading docks, mechanical spaces, administrative offices – would be a terrific setting for a murder mystery. It’s too bad the Mall folks are viewing this purely from the PR lens. By giving a solid writer a true residency, there’s no telling what would come out of it – but like the Mall itself, it could not avoid being interesting.
Toad!
I found the place lethally-tacky (and embodying everything wrong, and environmentally toxic, about the “Biggest is Bestest” approach), though maybe it became a domed Greenwich Village, c. 1966, after I left…
…but I *did* get one really useful experience out of it: riding to work one morning, I sat behind a couple who began chatting about what they’d do with the money if they won that week’s Bigass Lottery. It was a long ride, and by the end of it, the chat had become a vicious verbal punch-up, with the lady of the couple changing her seat, the two each then muttering solo, at opposite ends of the bus, for the rest of the ride. Because the gentleman had declared “If I won that money, I wouldn’t give *any* of it to *you*.”
Steve, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling it some sort of hidden paradise by any means – again, the vulgarities are so obvious they need not be mentioned. My only points were 1) the place is a major part of the culture of the region, like it or not; and 2) there are plenty of great stories to be told from there.
Toad!
Were you stationed out in Bloomington or closer to St Paul/ Mpls? If the latter (depending on your vintage; I bet these places are long gone) ever have a “Red Earth Breakfast” at the Seward Cafe? Or buy records at Positively Fourth Street (or OarFolkJokeOpus)? Feeling some guarded nostalgia…
It appears that Ms. Lee and, evidently, The Millions, just don’t get it. The problem with taxpayers funding NEA, NEH, and CPB is that these organizations ARE the “propaganda content factories” that Ms. Lee and, evidently, The Millions, are so concerned about. If they were not, already, off-the-chart-left-leaning, they would not be on the chopping block. The potential demise of taxpayer funding for NEA, NEH, and CPB has nothing to do with President Trump’s business acumen. It has everything to do with NEA, NEH, and CPB being the propaganda content factories the left.
Frank:
More broadly, the problem with taxpayers funding the arts is that once you fund something with your tax dollars, you feel (rightly) that you have the right to control it. Remember the “Jesus Piss” scandal in that museum in Brooklyn about a decade ago? The left whined about censorship and religious coercion, but the right had a valid point: what right do you have to offend me using my tax dollars? Use your own money to do so.
But the left doesn’t get that. It wants public funds AND the freedom to do with them what it wills. Tax dollars with no strings. And that doesn’t work.
“And that doesn’t work.”
Well, not under America’s current grid of guiding principles. This is an except from William Osborne’s “Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill”…
“As an American who has lived in Europe for the last 24 years, I see on a daily basis how different the American and European economic systems are, and how deeply this affects the ways they produce, market and perceive art. America advocates supply-side economics, small government and free trade – all reflecting a belief that societies should minimize government expenditure and maximize deregulated, privatized global capitalism. Corporate freedom is considered a direct and analogous extension of personal freedom. Europeans, by contrast, hold to mixed economies with large social and cultural programs. Governmental spending often equals about half the GNP. Europeans argue that an unmitigated capitalism creates an isomorphic, corporate-dominated society with reduced individual and social options. Americans insist that privatization and the marketplace provide greater efficiency than governments. These two economic systems have created something of a cultural divide between Europeans and Americans.
“Germany’s public arts funding, for example, allows the country to have 23 times more full-time symphony orchestras per capita than the United States, and approximately 28 times more full-time opera houses. [1] In Europe, publicly funded cultural institutions are used to educate young people and this helps to maintain a high level of interest in the arts. In America, arts education faces constant cutbacks, which helps reduce interest.
plus
“In its purest form, America’s neo-liberalism would suggest that cultural expression that doesn’t fit in the marketplace doesn’t belong at all. For the arts, the alternative has been to maintain a relatively marginalized existence supported by gifts from corporations, foundations and the wealthy. A system similar to a marginal and elitist cultural plutocracy evolves. This philosophy is almost diametrically opposed to the tradition of large public cultural funding found in most of Europe’s social democracies.”
http://www.osborne-conant.org/arts_funding.htm
This seems like a response to my earlier comment asking for evidence, not to my later one. My point remains: if you want taxpayers to support your art, you have to be willing to put up with the taxpayers regulating your art. Lee demands that tax dollars be taken from taxpayers and given to her, but she’d be the first to complain that the same taxpayers who gave her the money want her to do with it x rather than y.
“My point remains: if you want taxpayers to support your art, you have to be willing to put up with the taxpayers regulating your art. ”
Not sure why that should be axiomatic… if the tax payers *understand and value* Culture (in the sense of The Arts). If the TPs think Culture is just another grouping of commodities and/ or services, that’s a deeper problem than the lack of funding for it. And they often do. And it is. There’s more to Life than money and more to the notion of Value(s) than quid-pro-quo transactions, no?
Not that I want to go around and around on the topic (I know the ideological divide is unbridgeable in either direction), I just wanted to register another POV for the sake of any residual American Bohemians out there, in hiding, reading this, tremulously, in some attic with a secret entrance… (laugh)
Steven:
You’re babbling, and I’ve no idea what you’re saying. My point is very simple: those adults who want to live with their parents have to live by their parents’ rules, no matter how foolish these rules may be. Lee wants the public to fund her art, but she won’t have the public regulate or control her art. She wants to have it both ways. She can’t. So let her get a real job, or let her take that Mall of America residency.
This is why the right wants to cut the NEA: it’s not the money but the principle. Conservatives don’t want spoiled brats to take taxpayers’ money and then whine that their writing space isn’t quiet enough, especially when many of these conservatives are blue-collar workers who actually earn a living the hard way. If I were working in a factory 40 hours a week and then had to read Lee complaining about the inhumanity of having to clock in for a writing gig at a mall, I’d be calling my congressman immediately and ask him to axe the NEA.
Besides, all that whiny “I need a safe, quiet space, complete with a stipend, so I can write” nonsense. What delicate flowers these MFA kids are! Let them work for a living. I’m not saying they have to go all out Eugene O’Neill or George Orwell and eat the wallpaper, but it won’t hurt them to earn a buck.
Sorry, Liam. I tend to babble when I’m bored.
Liam,
Your arguments are boring and fatally unoriginal. You seem to belong to that group of people whose intellectual arsenal consists of about six buzzwords (such as “delicate flower”, “real job”, “safe space” – you forgot “snowflake” “politically correct” and “libtard”) which you rearrange to build whatever windmill it is you are chasing. This is why arts funding is necessary – critical, independent thought is important!
Liam, I didn’t want my tax dollars to support the war in Iraq, or the massive expansion of the prison system, but they were used for those things and will continue to be funneled into similarly morally bankrupt enterprises whether I like it or not. So I’m comfortable with you inadvertently funding a painting or a novel that offends your sensibilities to the tune of two cents a year.
Liam,
As a writer, please direct me to all this sweet free money you speak of. I want to never work again!
Oh, right. This is just bullshit you’re making up. Guess I’ll move back in with my fambly!
I’m sorry, toad, if my reasoning is not up to your standards, but perhaps you could still try to understand my point, which so far has cruised over your head: public arts funding does not lead to that independent thinking you’re dreaming of because it comes with very tight strings attached. And if I may return the favor, “give more money to the arts” is itself somewhat boring and unoriginal. Perhaps “This is how more money would make the arts better” would be more interesting and original, but I’ve yet to see anyone make it. Care to try?
Coulier: the free money I speak of is the money Lee wants the federal government to give her, the money that is supposed to save her from the horror of the mall residency.
anon: my sensibilities, you may be surprised to note, are very similar to yours. But you don’t fix one giant evil–military and war–by sniveling about a far smaller evil not getting bigger.
I urge all of you to take a look at the situation in Israel if you want to see what happens when artists clamor for state funding and the state says, “Here’s the money, and here are the strings. Knock yourselves out”. Google “Miri Regev” and you’ll see the NY Times article on the first page. This is exactly what you people are bringing us to: the arts serving the state and its wars, nationalism, racism, and militarism.
Liam
“public arts funding does not lead to that independent thinking you’re dreaming of because it comes with very tight strings attached.”
This is just demonstrably false. I don’t know how to help you better understand this. For an introductory list of artists who have benefited from public funding, I would start with reading this article, particularly the 3rd to last paragraph.
However, I think you would best benefit from a formal understanding of the NEA, specifically its grant program for writers. https://www.arts.gov/grants I suppose if submitting an application and, if selected, a few progress reports are “tight strings”, well, then, we have different definitions of “tight strings”.
toad:
The wind of condescension you keep breaking my way rings somewhat odorless when it comes from a commenter who consistently fails to understand what amounts to a very simple argument. No, the strings attached are not the application forms, but thanks for the informative link. Now take out that stick and read about Miri Regev and her attempt to subvert art to the service of nationalism, etc. It happens there and it could happen here, and it will if the NEA here is as strong (read: well-funded) as the Ministry of Culture is over there. Strings, see?
Liam,
So, let me get your “very simple argument”: the culture minister in a foreign country is a nationalist, which means if an analogous American cultural agency, which is .002% of the budget and on the chopping block, becomes too powerful (which it never has in its entire existence, no prominent politician has ever cared about, and no one is clamoring for anything different), the writers lucky enough to receive modest grants from this agency (who are by your own admission all lazy lefties) will be forced to churn out nationalist propaganda?
Are those winds ringing stinky yet?
Where did I say that all NEA grantees are lazy leftists? You’re incapable of arguing like an adult, so you make things up. You’re angry, so you shoot in all directions without reading the comments you’re responding to. I’m sorry, but your dispirited artist’s frustration is not my fault
Have a nice weekend.
“Let them work for a living”
“Earn a buck”
“Delicate flowers”
“Get a real job”
“Spoiled brats”
“Whine/whiny”
My childish point is that NEA funding, and taxes in general, do not work the way you claim they do, and that your “aggressive arts funding leads to increased militarism” white-hot take is not a danger to this country. Have a nice weekend.
You know, toad, I’m in such good mood this morning that I’m inclined to be nice even to you, and even after you’ve collected sentence fragments that were targeted at specific individuals and assigned them, on my behalf, to all NEA grantees.
Whatever. I woke up today and discovered in my mailbox a note that my play had been accepted for production, even though I wrote it over nights, with airport-grade earmuffs to combat ambient noise, and with the horror of the visual clutter of power lines staring at me from across the street. So on this lovely Saturday* morning, I say, can’t we all just get along?
Now, have a REALLY good weekend. I know I will.
* Us working people assign a special meaning to that day. Ask around.
I know a lot of people who work Saturdays; it’s not a special day. Liam, you romanticize too much.
Liam, congratulations! Do tell where and when we can see your play.
I must say, old chap, you are obsessed with work. You would be shocked to know that I, too, have a job. It’s really quite amazing, eh? Two people, with jobs. Not only that, I also manage to write in my free time, without a view, a thousand miles from NYC! It’s perfect! I don’t want or need any grants or residencies. I suppose the only difference between you and I is that I don’t expect a medal for it, and I don’t presume that my circumstances should apply to everyone else.
Anyway, I’m off to seek out some “workers” with whom to discuss the concept of “Saturday”. I’m humbled by how much I have to learn. Cheers!
@Steven Augustine
“A system similar to a marginal and elitist cultural plutocracy evolves.”
And where is it different? Osborne’s analysis makes for good paper and lousy policy, conflating as it does, artistic production with artistic performance.
More “full-time opera houses” by a factor of 28? Means what? That America, not Germany, is the home of “conspicuous consumption”? That “there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing” as long as it’s opera? Or, to the point, that the world is in paradigm shift as a result of the cultural influence of German opera? Soldiers laying down their weapons because of the the 21st century equivalent of the Ring Cycle?
We don’t even need to look at any statistics to see who’s going to hear all that opera performed in Die Muttersprache. We don’t even need to look.
It’s all capital, art-loving friends. The only difference: who’s laundering the funds. Britons launder theirs through the National Lotto – 40-billion pound sterling per annum to be sure St Martin-in-the-Fields never fails to perform Bach at Christmas. Germans put the squeeze on poor EU relations to make sure every province has an “opera”. And Americans do what they do and still manage to lead the entire world (save China, who, admit it, is pirating American production) in books published. Are any of these models – indirect public tax, direct public tax, hybrid – ideal? The question should be more pragmatic: where is the good writing coming from? The era-defining visuals? The groundbreaking sound?
***
Private residencies are a great thing, if you can lasso one, but the MoA residency sounds like a trainwreck. “The artist is given time to ‘social network'” and “scroll his work on a big screen in real time”? I live in the land of government funded art, and my experience is that THAT system attracts “artists” who are as adept at sniffing out grants as they are mediocre at “making art”. Liam has a point: you MAKE somebody contribute to support the arts, he’s going to assume some aspect, albeit tiny, of “the patron”. Under those conditions, the threat of self-censorship is ever lurking, and any artist who says it’s not at the back of his mind is fibbing.
@Il’ja
I’m not going to formulate a point-by-point rebuttal of an interrogation of someone else’s words (what’s in it for me?), the gist of those words being: a little more of America’s fiscal War Budget could and should go to support The Arts… I think it’s more useful to compare the America of the near, and almost-near, Past, to its Present, regarding the topic. Also, if we cast the net of this discussion too broadly (re: Capital, Capitalism, Capitalismitis and the CIA) we’ll ignite one of those raging off-piste fests, familiar from the days of yore (and is this topic/thread really worth that…?)
(sidebar: Liam only has a point to the extent that Reaganite Reactionaries like Liam cowed the NEA into being the shriveled organ it is today, but read the excerpt, below, for more on that…)
So, let’s focus on the controversial idea of Gov support for the Arts (however dirty the support-money is) and look back at the good old days, before the Reagan Revolution declared ketchup a vegetable and High Culture a drug in need of stricter regulation:
“The NEA was a fundamental part of democracy’s expansion. Its Literature Program had two distinct but overlapping goals: to sponsor more exciting, experimental writing and to democratize the field of literary production. The fellowship program, founded in 1967, was the most important means it used to achieve both of these aims. Agency administrators recognized that writing fiction or poetry requires resources—time, money, childcare, travel—that few citizens could afford.
“As poet and program director Carolyn Kizer put it, the fellowships to individual writers—totalling $205,000, roughly a quarter of the Literature Program’s budget in 1967—were designed to “buy time.” As Kizer’s words suggest, the NEA de-commodified time, granting it to writers who needed it most. Grant winners with dependents received more money than those without—this was especially important for women, who were often saddled with domestic work. Between 1967 and 1971, the NEA sent talent scouts around the country, looking for writers who might not have access to the traditional avenues for publication. “Discovery Grants” were awarded to these unknowns, including a young West Coast fiction writer and poet named Raymond Carver. With these efforts, the NEA reshaped literary production, transforming the conditions under which talented citizens lived and worked.
“These state-funded writers, many from marginalized populations, experimented with literary form. The inaugural class of fellowship winners, who received two-year grants in 1967, included two socialist-feminist fiction writers, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley. A former Young Communist, Olsen in particular revolutionized the writing and teaching of literature. Her fiction and essays about the American working class married unconventional, modernist form with radical leftist politics. In the years before and after she received the NEA grant, she clamored for revised university reading lists and increased financial support for women, writers of color, and members of the working class. She called these would-be writers the “silenced people” who, “consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life,” rarely had time to produce creative work. How much great writing, she asked, has been lost to history? The NEA shared Olsen’s concern with amplifying historically silenced voices, just as it shared her belief that these voices would speak—would write—in radical, resonant ways.
“For the NEA, this ambition led it to seek and support writers who lacked market appeal. In addition to granting fellowships to individual writers, the agency funded small, independent presses and avant-garde literary journals. When the agency compiled an anthology of American writing in 1968, it drew largely from the “little magazines,” literary journals that published work by young and unknown writers. One reviewer commented approvingly that the anthology mainly included “non-commercial” work, by fledging writers and by controversial figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). The NEA provided writers with several different ways of circumventing the literary marketplace, freeing them to write fiction and poetry that was difficult, politically radical, or both.
“Despite its penchant for niche literature, the agency flourished during the 1970s. The number of grants awarded increased each year, as did the money for each creative writing fellowship. By October 1977 the agency’s budget had increased from $2.5 million to nearly $124 million, thanks largely to the politicking of chair Nancy Hanks. During these same years, the government provided direct grants to some of the nation’s most contentious and innovative writers, including John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, and Ishmael Reed. The literary climate favored experimentation: the decade also saw the publication of Toni Morrison’s debut The Bluest Eye, a novel that used wordplay to critique racist standards of beauty, and the rise of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, an avant-garde, politically leftist movement that challenged the conventions of lyric poetry. Though the era had its share of battles (the deputy chair once had to visit the offices of forty-six members of Congress to explain why a seven-letter poem deserved $750 in public funds), the 1970s were a high point for the NEA and for experimental literature as well.”
So far so good… until the good times hit a wall when, essentially, during the ’80s and ’90s…
“the NEA met with increased resistance to its grant programs. The agency came under siege for funding (often indirectly) formally challenging, politically radical art by feminist, queer, and non-white Americans. With the support of fellow politicians from his own party, Republican Senator Jesse Helms launched a multi-year campaign against the NEA, charging it with funding “obscene” art by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Karen Finley. The controversies surrounding these artists as well as several performance artists prompted the agency to experiment with a short-lived loyalty oath. More importantly, these difficult years led to the elimination of all grants to individual artists—except for grants to writers. Today, the NEA still awards $950,000 in individual fellowships for fiction, poetry, and translation, all of which are drawn from diminished public funds.”
Even worse, in time:
“Castigated by the right for its irrelevance and indecency, scorned by the left for its cowardice in the face of prejudice and supposed philistinism, the NEA has lately turned to the market for guidance and started placing a few safer bets. In its first decades, the agency served as a literary bellwether, funding unknown writers, often at early stages in their careers. Though it still funds such writers, it also funds successful writers, who receive their NEA grant after winning major awards or writing bestsellers; such winners were more rare in the 1970s. Recent grant winners have included Jonathan Franzen, following the publication of his prize-winning and best-selling The Corrections; Cristina García, after she wrote the National Book Award nominee Dreaming in Cuban; and Jhumpa Lahiri, who, by the time she received her fellowship, had already won a Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies, a book that sold 15 million copies worldwide. Lesser-known writers still dominate the awards list, but the presence of writers like Franzen insure the agency against charges of idiosyncrasy.
“Money that goes to a best-selling writer is money diverted from the writers who need it most—young, marginalized, politically radical artists who may never find market success, or who may not even desire it. On the whole, today’s writers are less materially secure than those of previous generations. They are more likely to be saddled with student debt, from undergraduate as well as graduate education. They are less likely to find day jobs that provide enough income to pay off loans, never mind to support creative work. The “hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life” has only gotten harder today, when healthcare, housing, and other essentials have become unaffordable for many.”
******
The entire article is interesting reading. The main point being: things weren’t always this way (this awful way), and Gov support of The Arts, handled tastefully (without an eye to The Bottom Line), can be a very good thing. Yes, American Civilization was once so advanced that they could decouple the notion of State Sponsored Support for the Arts from the Philistine requirement that the supported Artist becomes, therefore, a hireling of some sort. The monies involved, after all, were just crumbs from the table.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/who-pays-writers-welfare-state-literature
PS “We don’t even need to look at any statistics to see who’s going to hear all that opera performed in Die Muttersprache.”
The last time I attended the Opera, here, in Berlin, at least half of the people in the audience were wearing jeans; maybe a third couldn’t have gotten into a mid-level nightclub in Chicago, the way they were dressed. Cultural differences.
“…at least half of the people in the audience were wearing jeans…”
When a ticket for Tannhäuser at the Berlin Opera goes from 53€ to 169€ the fact that half an audience is in jeans – dressing down or cheap signalling? – tells us, in comparison, very little.
What the left, (yes, I’m among it) doesn’t seem to grasp in this flareup over .01% of the budget comes across in both your cursory dismissal, i.e. “Cultural differences” and the article’s assumption that statements like “Money that goes to a best-selling writer is money diverted from the writers who need it most—young, marginalized, politically radical artists…” should just be accepted as fait accompli.
Who needs it most? What does a “politically radical” writer sound like in 2017? Is it the same as in 1980? Who determines this? Has the environment of private arts funding / retreats / etc. improved or worsened since Reagan et al. took the knife to it? A writer who leans to the right should just shut up? Put down the pen because this is not intended for you? The particular taxonomy of this is getting dangerously close to a course of events that I think we both agree is unacceptable. But the perception is out there that the Left is unaware of how shrill, how fascist, how bankrupt it has begun to sound exactly because of issues like this one.
To make this practical: WHICH of the following do you think Trump would appoint to head the NEA? Rush Limbaugh or Toni Morrison. And do you think that appointment would legitimize the work of the NEA? Would we be happier if he appointed Rush and then put $10B into the Agency?
We are in agreement. That a nation with a $14T budget should ignore, or worse, attempt to commoditize, the humanities is disgraceful. Where we disagree – I assume – is that the bourgeois-flavored models of arts funding in Europe’s social democracies provide much, if any kind of workable example to follow.
Clearly, anyone interested in seeing Opera cheaply in Berlin should consult me before consulting you, Il’ja; here’s one quick reference, slightly dated (2011):
“Deutsche Oper:
The West Berlin opera is a mammoth black box of acoustic wonder. Nosebleed seats are €14, and as the theater is much bigger than the other two, you may actually struggle to see everything from up there. Students under 30 get 50% off all tickets one week before the performance, and pay no more than €13.50 one hour before performance.
Extra cheapo tip: Sometimes your opera ticket doubles as a public transportation ticket from and to the theater, so check the fine print on the ticket. If you have Berlin Welcome Card, you also get 25% off certain tickets at all of the three operas.”
more recent info:
“If you are under 30 years old and are planning on seeing several productions during your visit, you should invest in a Classiccard, a wonderful scheme that costs 15 euros to sign up for an annual membership. It entitles you to the best available seats at any of the three opera houses and various other orchestras and musical groups (the Berlin Philharmonic is the notable exception) one hour before curtain at the evening box office for 10 euros (again, cash only). 1 ticket per Classiccard unless a special offer is on.”
“If you are sadly not 28 years old or under, you can still get into the Philharmonie either with a Podiumplatz, which is a seat on the onstage bleachers in back of the orchestra, or a Stehplatz, which is standing room. Of the two, the podium seats are easier to score, but they aren’t offered when a choir or extra-large / usual instrument ensemble is required. They go on sale at the beginning of the week for that weekend’s concert series (typically the same program will be given on Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and cost 16 euros.”
How much does it cost to see the “Hulk vs Thor vs Trump” movie in Manhattan…?
But, back to The Topic; here’s an article, from 2014, that doesn’t mention Opera:
“Culturally Impoverished: US NEA Spends 1/40th of What Germany Doles Out for Arts Per Capita”
“1. Germany: Germany’s cultural budget was approximately $1.63 billion USD in 2013. According to Ian Moss, research director of Fractured Atlas, Germany’s art funding in 2007 equated to roughly $20 per German citizen, which “dwarfs the 41 cents per red-blooded American provided by the NEA. What artist wouldn’t want to live there?” Moss told Huffington Post.”
http://www.alternet.org/culture/culturally-impoverished-us-nea-spends-140th-what-germany-doles-out-arts-capita
****
The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances are Expat Artists, enjoying the superior conditions, for Artists, over here.
Even my health insurance (which is *amazing*) is special health insurance for Artists; incredibly cheap, with access to absolutely topnotch care (our Daughter, who was born in a high-tech birthing salon hot tub, before we all spent the night in a private birthing suite, cost me no more than the equivalent of 200 dollars being born, including months of birthing classes and a follow-up house call from the doctor!). This is not an abstract or hypothetical debate, for me. I lived (all over) the US my first 30 years, and I’ve lived in several countries in the EU thereafter, and the reality of “State Sponsorship for the Arts” in the US has to be examined through the dirty lens of the US’ Gulag (or cattle farm) mentality when it comes to the 99%.
Not that creeping NeoLiberalization isn’t trying to degrade the rest of the West to the same Feudal standards….
But to circle back to the question of private sector funding for the Arts, and the M.o.A.’s generous (and typical) offer to some lucky Writer to be a sideshow attraction at one of Mammon’s bloodiest Colosseums for a working week…
““The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”
How could writing, produced under such conditions, be anything other than cat shit in a sealed baggie on a hissing radiator?