STRAIGHT UP | Jan Herman

The last time I looked, oh, about a month ago, this column was called The Juice. I wrote it for over a year at MSNBC.com, where (my staff of thousands reminds me) it was that Website's most popular daily Weblog.

Bidding for greater freedom, fame and fortune, I'm now calling it Straight Up and posting it here. (In the age of cyberspace, where visibility counts more than ever and media giants aim to monopolize the Web, a bit of independence at least honors the founding ideals of the Internet.)

Before I begin ...

Have an online look at two things in real time: the mounting cost of the war in Iraq and what's happening in Times Square. I would suggest there's a direct correlation: The higher the cost, the glummer the tourists.

Manhattan's so-called crossroad of the world looks pretty glum. Oppressive heat and rain may be a factor, but take another look at that running total. It's climbing faster than you can count. Would that put a smile on any sane citizen's face?

The folks who posted the scoreboard, Niko Matsakis and Elias Vlanton, don't say what the money would buy in terms of arts and culture. You can see what the board shows, though, for other essentials: children's health, pre-school, public education and housing, college scholarships and energy independence.

Now have a look (use the drop-down menu) at what the war and occupation is costing your town or city. Then tell me why there's no California recall for Gee Dubya.

In the meantime ...

A majority of the Defense Intelligence Agency's engineering experts are saying "the most likely use for two mysterious trailers found in Iraq" was indeed to produce hydrogen for weather balloons used as targets in artillery practice and not (as the CIA and the DIA itself claimed, and as Gee Dubya annnounced to the world) to produce biological weapons.

Well, Google unwittingly knew it all along -- thanks to Web wit Anthony Cox, who commandeered the site. With apologies to readers who've already seen this, go to Google. Type: weapons of mass destruction (no quotation marks). Do NOT click Google Search. Instead, click: I’m Feeling Lucky. Then read the whole error message carefully. If you’re one of those people who have no time for a couple of clicks, you can go straight to the error message. But it does spoil some of the fun.

Music for the ages

What's come over The Wall Street Journal? It always had a reputation for quirky front-page features about stuff you never dreamed of. But in the last month, it's given front-page coverage to arts and culture.

First there was the story about Bob Dylan lifting lines for his lyrics from a memoir about Japanese gangsters. Then there was the one about the history of combat art and soldiers who went to war in Iraq armed with easels. In between there was the front-pager about a stretched-out John Cage composition that will take, if all goes well, 639 years to perform. It gets my vote for most intriguing arts story of 2003 so far.

Since the Journal is not online for anyone unwilling to pay a steep subscription fee -- which is most of us -- and since I haven't seen the Cage tale referred to online anywhere else in English except for this Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorial(free registration required) and this two-year-old BBC account, let me retell the basics:

The performance actually began a few days before 9/11 in "the forlorn eastern German city of Halberstadt ... in a crumbling medieval church," the Journal reported. "Each movement lasts 71 years. The shortest notes last six or seven months, the longest about 35 years. There's an intermission in 2319."

If you missed the opening of the concert, you didn't miss much because the music "begins with a rest, or silence" that lasted for the first 17 months until Feb. 5 of this year, when the first three notes sounded. "Within the church's crude stonewalls," the Journal reported, "a steady, unvarying chord can be heard 24 hours a day. Two more notes will be added in July 2004."

Cage wrote the work for a German organist, Gerd Zacher, who premiered it at a music festival in France. His performance lasted only 29 minutes. So it's no surprise that Zacher disagrees with the tempo being used in Halberstadt. According to the Journal, although the ASLP tempo marking means "as slow as possible," Gerd says Cage told him the work should be played like "a soft morning" and then "should be gone."

It's not unusual for musicians to disagree about tempo markings. To this day, the greatest maestros haven't definitively settled what tempi Mozart or Beethoven wanted for some of their works. But the friendly disagreeement over "Organ2/ASLP" has to be the most staggering conceivable.

The reasons for stretching out the performance have less to do with music than with reconstructing an ancient organ to play it on and creating a tourist attraction in Halberstadt to help revive its economy. Whatever the reasons, who but a bunch of Cageans would have thought of a concert lasting six centuries?

I myself relish the idea. But it's funny how serious composers turned music into a philosophical game in a way that visual artists have only recently come to emulate (thanks to the minimalists and other postmodernists) and writers and dramatists never really did (Dadaists and Surrealists notwithstanding). Funny, and for most listeners, unfortunate.

Shilling for celebrities and NBC

Yesterday morning the New York Post had a story headlined: Arnie does no favors for NBC. While that may be true, on the evidence I saw the other day MSNBC.com does favors for all celebrities, Arnie included, and for NBC, too.

I took a peek last Thursday at MSNBC.com to see whether my poor opinion of the revised entertainment section held up. It no longer covers news of music or television or movies, as it sometimes tried to do in earlier days. (Full disclosure: I used to run the section.) It now covers news of celebrities in music, celebrities in television, celebrities in movies.

In other words, if there's no celebrity, there is no news. The section (and much of the front cover) has become the equivalent of a PR wire. Here were the headlines for 12 consecutive news stories in the order posted by the entertainment section:

1. "Madonna goes global with children's book"
2. "Arnold's announcement big win for Leno"
3. "Lange tours war-torn east Congo"
4. "Luring celebs with free cigarettes"
5. "Media circus converges on Bryant"
6. "Omar Shariff struck Paris police"
7. "Gary Coleman for California governor"
8. Scoop: "Cameron Diaz's photographic past"
9. "J.Lo standing by her man"
10. "Six Flags says no to Marilyn Manson"
11. "Film out of Mother Teresa festival"
12. "Heather Locklear signs deal"

At least the Scoop column is supposed to be about celebrities. What excuse does MSNBC.com have for all those other entertainment features? That the news about war-torn east Congo is Jessica Lange taking a tour? That trivia about Madonna, Omar Shariff, J.Lo and Marilyn Manson rates five separate stories?

Need I mention MSNBC.com's self-interest in trumpeting Arnold's brass-ring candidacy for California governor as a victory for the "Tonight" show with Jay Leno? Presumably, readers understand that NBC owns both the show and half of MSNBC.com. But disclosure of that small fact, per Journalism 1.0, was nowhere in the "news" story. Nor was it in the three-paragraph "news" story that began: "NBC is back in business with Heather Locklear."

MSNBC.com's celebrity-mongering is, of course, not unusual. This morning's edition of USA Today quotes Andy Rooney on the agenda he foresees for CBS's "60 Minutes": "Everybody knows changes are in the wind. Management wants changes. They have been pressing us to be more like '48 Hours' or '60 Minutes II.' Stories about J. Lo and that sort of thing.''

I wonder why he left out "Dateline NBC." Maybe he doesn't watch that one.

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