Recently by John Rockwell

Here's a link from my Rockwell Matters blog about how the Internet, especially, perpetuates errors once made, all drawing in a perhaps excessively self-referential way from my own experience as observer, or victim, of such errors.

Here's a link to a Rockwell Matters blog entry in which I extol the virtues of a critic I've never met but who gives hope that quirky esoterica can thrive even in our most downscale print publications.

Criticism, that is. At least criticism for print outlets, if you still cherish the hope of earning a living out of it. It's hard to know what to make of the recent onslaught of firings and buyouts and forced transformations of staffers into freelancers. (See here for my musings in my own blog on Deborah Jowitt, the recently so transformed dance critic of the Village Voice.)

Yes, one can pin one's long-range hopes on the web, but that doesn't pay the rent today. One possible result of all this will be the inexorable evolution, or devolution, of criticism from a profession into an avocation. The old connotations of the word "amateur," meaning a lover of the arts, or a gentleman lover of the arts, will be reborn.

Perhaps this will have the advantage of winnowing the field to true arts lovers, as opposed to careerists. All kinds of people seem to find the time to post their thoughts on the web, without being limited to well-off idlers. Yet the class implications of this transition are disturbing. If the rich have the most time and energy to blog, then our view of the arts will be skewed. Or criticism will become the preserve of geriatric retirees. I speak from knowledge on all these points.

Oh, well. The arts will survive, and so will criticism, but maybe in a form hard to recognize from the perspective of newspaper criticism as we have known it over the last century.

While I'm linking away here, here's a more exotic site: Perlentaucher means "pearl diver" in German. It's like artsjournal, in that it offers daily links to important stories in the German and German-Swiss press (not Austrian, for some reason). German online editions contain fewer links than the English-language ones, and Perlentaucher has had to extricate itself from various legal challenges, so often stories are alluded to without links. But it's still pretty good, and offers insights into European events beyond Germany -- IF you read German. That's true for the daily "Heute in den Feuilletons." However, on Tuesdays they run a "Magazinrundschau," and that has links to weekly magazines from all over Europe and the U.S. (New Yorker, NY Times Magazine), so you can get stories from not only Germany but from France in French, England and the U.S. in English, and all over Eastern Europe. There's also a lot of other stuff about books, film, etc. Check it out.

For those -- like me -- still interested in what happens at what Bob Christgau just called "the New York newspaper that calls itself the Times," check out the late, unlamented Howell Raines's take on Rupert Murdoch's predatory intentions in Conde Nast's new Portfolio magazine.

Real writers, meaning book writers, seem by and large to get along with their editors, unless the editors are particularly egregious. Most writers I know seek out not just professional editors but every manner of friend and expert to vet their prose, point out errors and tweak their style. They think of writing as a dialogue, not just with their eventual readers among the general public but between them as id and ego and a necessary editorial super ego.

Me, maybe because I'm an only child or a journalist, knowing that whatever the faults of this particular piece there will be another the next day, or maybe because I'm an eogmaniac or simply insecure, have resisted editing. Not that resistance has done me much good. Bob Gottlieb, who ran Knopf in the early 80's and edited my first book, "All American Music," simply suggested that I beef up the specific musical analysis in each chapter by 20 or 30 per cent, as I saw fit. He was right, and I did it, on my own terms in myk own words. Then Bob Christgau volunteered to read the text line by line, which he did with his typical fierce exactness. I bridled occasionally, but I appreciated him, too.

I don't know about Sasha and Patti and Barack vs. Hililary (I'm wearing my Obama button as I peck) and reject vs. denounce. Nor do I know whether a response to someone else's entry should be entered as a new submission or a comment. But since we are all laboring under Doug's rule of one filing a week, I'll make this a new entry.

Which is in response to Jeff Weinstein's musings about conflicts of interest. When I was younger, I was a purist. Alfred Frankenstein was the much-respected classical music and art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle; just recently, Alex Ross quoted his wonderful, insightful review of the world premiere of Terry Riley's "In C" in his book. His support fostered the extraordinary Bay Area new music scene in the 50's and 60's. I personally owed Frankenstein an affectionate debt, since when I was 15 he gave me a generous hour of his time talking about a life in music criticism, how difficult it was, how rewarding it was.

Frankenstein wrote program notes for the SF Symphony. He so bought into the orchestra's ethos that he became a fierce defender of the then-music director Enrique Jorda when everyone else was attacking him. It was very hard to separate how such a perceptive critic could defend Jorda without factoring in his relationship with the symphony.

Eventually, Frankenstein was forced out as classical critic, but not becasue the paper considered his note-writing a conflict in itself. George Szell came to town and departed after one rehearsal, pleading illness. Frankenstein, at this point apparently delusional, wrote a page 1 open letter to Szell, urging him to affirm his confidence in Jorda and the orchestra since unfounded rumors were circulating that he was somehow dissatisfied. Szell, thus provoked, wrote back that in decades of guest-conducting he had never encountered a more dire situation in a major orchestra. So Frankenstein had to quit.

In my no doubt compromised maturity, I have lightened up a little. In Britain, where there are very few staff arts critics, writing program notes and even directing concert series and festivals while continuing as a critic is common. (I at least quit the Times forfour years while I founded and ran the Lincoln Center Festival.) The British scene is very clubby, but so was Vienna's in the late 19th century, and both towns produced a lot of good music. Joe Horowitz, another critic/adminsitrator, argues that critics who cut themselves off from the real world of their chosen art form are simply contributing to their own ignorance.

For me, the issue of the appearance of conflict is almost more important than conflict itself. By and large, I will take critics at their word when they say they can retain their objectivity despite professional and social entanglements. But such ties can still look bad from the outside. And in the increasingly fragile world of print journalism, struggling for credibiity and viability, an apparent conflict can be yet another excuse to cut loose yet another critic.

On Feb. 5 the New York Times ran an article by Gia Kourlas, a freelance dance critic, headlined "Bolshoi Director May Take Job at City Ballet." Alexei Ratmansky, a much-admired ballet choreographer, was giving up his position as artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow and was "in negotiations with New York City Ballet to become its resident choreographer," succeeding Christopher Wheeldon.

On Feb. 13 appeared another Times article, this one by Daniel J. Wakin, headlined "Bolshoi's Director Won't Join City Ballet." Ratmansky was still leaving the Bolshoi, but negotiations with City Ballet had collapsed because Ratmansky couldn't commit sufficient time to a residency, given his worldwide choreographic commitments.

So far, so legitimate. For me, however, the juxtaposition of the two articles recalled another Times article, this one by Robin Pogrebin dated April 27, 2006. It was called "Ciry Opera Plans New Hall With Ties to Lincoln Center." The New York City Opera, long dissatisfied with the New York State Theater and frustrated in its effort to join a proposed new cultural center at Ground Zero, had turned to a former Red Cross site near Lincoln Center. The implication was strong that a deal could be cut and the company would move, with added speculation about how the State Theater would fill the months left void when City Opera decamped.

Ten days later the deal fell apart, without explanation. No follow-up investagation of this collapse appeared in theTimes for two months. The paper ran no article on the subject until another Pogrebin piece appeared on July 4, which referred in passing to the reasons for the breakdown in negotiations and then looked forward to City Opera's problematic future.

Gee, I wish I had come up with a title like "Blood Sucking Geeks." Cool or what? That the entry was so feistily, fiercely smart was almost a bonus. Still trying to figure out this blog: does it make more sense to confine one's comments to arts journalism or to practice it here, like Bob did, by writing about something artistic? I can't say I've been knocked over by much I've seen here in Berlin, which doesn't shake my faith that this is a happening a world center for innovative arts: I either hit a lull or guessed wrong. One thing I would wish for German (European, really) stage directors, composers, writers, artists et al. is to throw off the weight of their past, at least a little. Not so much Nazism and such, but the entire load of Western civilization, which too many young artists seem compelled to consider or rebel against or radically re-interpret. Whatever they do, it's always there, sucking blood. Americans may be ignorant of the past, but that ignorance sometimes frees them to do truly original work.

I'm Berlin for three+ weeks, back Feb. 6. Two profoundly unoriginal thoughts:

There are a lot of arts, and arts journalism, in Berlin. Competing newspapers (like London is and New York used to be), and hence competing opinions at the newsstand. Whether German papers cover the little guys (and popular culture) as assiduously as does the NY Times, I don't know, but the London and Paris papers too focus on the big stuff. Had a meeting with Manuel Brug, who is music (and dance) critic of the Berliner Morgenpost AND Die Welt, a national paper. Just laid Barenboim low, an attack that I think appeared in artsjournal or musical america or some such. Bright, conservative, maybe a little bitchy.A distinguished veteran of German and Austrian cultural life had dismissed Brug as "repellent" at lunch just before my appointment with him, tho when I met him, he seemed decent enough. A lot of critics strike artists as repellent; some of them actually are repellent. Which doesn't entirely invalidate the profession. Last night I saw "Die Meistersinger" at the Deutsche Oper; good cast, good old Goetz Friedrich production; evoked the Nazis subtly without beating you over the head with them. Best performance in it was Markus Brueck as Beckmesser. Solid voice, fabulous, Chaplinesque physical comedian. Played him as a critic, not a Jew (character's original name, you'll recall, was Hans Lick). Repellent, maybe, but endearing.

My other thought, surprise surprise, has to do with the Internet. Confronted with the prospect of piling up 25 days worth of New York Timeses on my desk, my wife said: Why not just read it online? I had looked at the NYT online edition before, but never relied on it. Now I see no need to buy the "real" paper ever again, unless to provide our miniature dog a place to pee. As soon as Doug McLennan figures out how to tell the newspaper industry how to make serious money online, and hence to pay its repellent online critics real wages, print is dead. To the extent I feel nostalgic about that (and I don't, now, really), I retired just in time.