Hear This, Because It Happened — Is Still Happening

A friend of mine, a lover of the arts, once confessed to me that she didn’t read the concert reviews in the newspapers – “because the concert already happened, didn’t it, and I wasn’t there, and the review can’t put me there, can it?” Well, my friend sees differently now – now that she’s a regular arts reviewer for one of the big-city daily newspapers.

For a piece in New York magazine Frank Rich recently read a week’s worth of the New York Times from 1964 in order to sketch the differences between the American present and the American past of half a century ago. His piece is worth a piece of commentary in its own right; and when, later this month, I relocate this site from Tumblr to Medium – a place more inviting of the swift and rangy personal essay – I’ll post such a piece as one of my first essays there.

One key change Rich didn’t mention in his piece is that whereas the media circa 1964 characteristically reported on things that had already happened, the media now report on things that are going to happen (fashion shows, record releases, movie openings) or are expected to happen.

With that in mind, two programs current on public radio home pages stand out. Three weeks – three whole weeks! – after Jennifer Gonnerman’s astonishing and appalling New Yorker story about an innocent teenager held captive for three years on Rikers Island, Leonard Lopate just devoted part of a program to it. Like the story in Gonnerman’s standout book Life on the Outside (which I had the privilege of editing), this is a story which, for the writer, involved going back further and further into the past, whether the history of the Rikers Island jails or the circumstances that led the young man, Kalief Browder of the Bronx, to spend most of his last seventeen months – what might have been his senior year of high school – in solitary confinement at Rikers while the gears of justice ground their way toward dismissal of the case against him. And this is a story which, for the reader, involves looking to the future – by following the developing story in the New York Times, which has devoted some hard-core reporting (singled out by the paper’s editor, Dean Baquet) and an editorial to the appalling conditions in New York’s offshore penal colony. If Rikers Island is reformed, it will be because of Gonnerman’s story.

The other program is the latest in NPR's regular broadcasts of the Berlin Philharmonic. Last month this ensemble took part in Peter Sellars’ dramatic staging of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion at the Park Avenue Armory. I was one of the “fortunate few” (as the New Yorker put it) who attended, and now I am among the doubly fortunate who, with the images from the production still vivid in my mind, can listen to a Berlin Philharmonic performance of the Passion on public radio, and, through the phenomenal combination of technology and memory, be there again.

I am going to listen tonight and post my review (if it can be called that) tomorrow, three whole weeks after the performance – soon enough, I hope, even as the culture circa 2014 reckons things.

This is what Pound had in mind when he called poetry news that stays news.

• 4 November 2014
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