¶ Matins: Christopher Kimball, of Cook’s Illustrated, weighs in on the demise of Gourmet. 

¶ Lauds: It doesn’t get more interesting than this: the Gershwin Estate has engaged Beach Boy Brian Wilson to complete fragments left unfinished at George Gershwin’s death in 1937 — just a few years before Mr Wilson, now 67, was born.

¶ Prime: We hate to sound overenthusiastic, but Robert Cringely’s thoughts about PAID CONTENT make a thrilling read.

¶ Tierce: After a long absence, we return to the Astor Trial for the final word: Guilty.

¶ Sext: Maggie Smith has a shaky conversation with Tim Teeman, at TimesOnline.

¶ Nones: A long but very enlightening read, at The Economist, about organized crime in  China — and how hard it can be to distinguish gangs from officials.

¶ Vespers: Lydia Kiesling, at The Millions, reads harried William Manchester’s The Death of a President, and decides that plus c’est la même chose.

¶ Compline: Thanks to Neiman Marcus, a mere $200K will buy you dinner with an illustrious round table —  certainly, even under the cirumstances, a more polite and less intoxicated group of wits.

Bon weekend à tous!

Oremus…

§ Matins. For the most part, his piece is not about food, but about professionalism in the Age of Google.

The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertising marketplace, one ruled by a million instant pundits, where an anonymous Twitter comment might be seen to pack more resonance and useful content than an article that reflects a lifetime of experience, experts are not created from the top down but from the bottom up. They can no longer be coronated; their voices have to be deemed essential to the lives of their customers. That leaves, I think, little room for the thoughtful, considered editorial with which Gourmet delighted its readers for almost seven decades.

To survive, those of us who believe that inexperience rarely leads to wisdom need to swim against the tide, better define our brands, prove our worth, ask to be paid for what we do, and refuse to climb aboard this ship of fools, the one where everyone has an equal voice.

Hear, hear, &c. We certainly commend Mr Kimball’s determination to avoid a dependency on advertising revenues — nothing strikes us as more ridiculous than new-media fixation with new kinds of advertising.

And we agree that training is important, too. But training where, exactly. There were few blogging internships when the Editor was a wee lad. In our view, Gourmet embodied an authority that is no longer widely respected. Widely cherished, perhaps. But we know too many readers who treated Gourmet as a kind of Vogue — a book of reveries.

The editorial authority of Gourmet was dissipated decades ago, and not least by its refusal to follow upstarts such as Bon Appétit, which focused far more resolutely on serving actual meals. It was the kind of authority that the Editor’s late mother-in-law exercised when she advised her daughter to ask to see the hotel room before agreeing to occupy it — at the Crillon (with humiliating consequences). It was a voice of authority that few young people had any interest in or reason for listening to.

We think that it’s sweet of Mr Kimball to write such an eloquent obituary for a quasi-competitor. But he is more to be commended for establishing an authoritative voice for the future, at Cook’s Illustrated.

§ Lauds. Can anyone think of such a project of completion, other than The Romance of the Rose?

Gershwin, who collaborated on most of his hit songs with his lyricist brother, Ira, stretched music of the day far beyond the compact pop song of Tin Pan Alley to more ambitious compositions incorporating elements of jazz and the classics, including “Rhapsody,” “An American in Paris” and the opera “Porgy and Bess.” He died of a brain tumor in Los Angeles at age 38 while working on a movie musical.

Wilson was one of the prime forces behind the expansion of pop music’s boundaries in the mid-’60s, taking the Beach Boys well beyond the frothy songs about surf, cars and girls. That culminated in the group’s 1966 album “Pet Sounds” and its planned follow-up, “Smile.” But “Smile” was shelved because of dissension within the band and lack of record company support, contributing to a psychological breakdown Wilson suffered in 1967. In 1999, he started on a career renaissance that led to the belated completion of “Smile” in 2004. 

§ Prime. In one paragraph, Mr Cringely back-flipped our thinking, with head-clearing results.

Every publisher wants to make money. The six ways to make money in publishing are: 1) selling the product outright, whether it is a book in a bookstore, a magazine on a newsstand, or a pay-per-view TV show; 2) selling subscriptions; 3) selling ads; 4) selling a combination of subscriptions and ads; 5) syndicating content – selling it for use by other publishers, or; 6) giving the thing away for free to support a live tour or event of some sort to which people in many cities and countries will buy expensive tickets.  The Internet era has supposedly taught us that almost nobody is willing to pay for a subscription so that limits publishers to ads, syndication, or touring/events – none of which appear to generate enough revenue to pay for the kind of lunches publishers like to eat, hence the fading print and broadcast industries.

We confess to being guilty of confusing “paid content” with “subscriptions.” Mr Cringely promises to tell us why he think Apple’s Tablet model isn’t good enough to make selling e-texts (as distinct from i-tunes and so forth) commercially viable.

§ Tierce. Although there is reason to believe that the conviction will be overturned on appeal, the verdict is a landmark for the burgeoning field of Elder Abuse.

In his closing statement, Joel J. Seidemann, an assistant district attorney, read from the Book of Psalms: “Do not cast me away when I am old. Do not forsake me when my strength is gone.”

He added, “It has been said that a society is judged based upon how it treats its elderly,” and asked jurors to hold Mr. Marshall “accountable for stealing from and defrauding a great philanthropist, a great New Yorker and human being in the sunset of her life.”

The trouble is, the defendant is pretty elderly himself — 85 years old. While we are happy with the verdict, we hope that the sentence will be minimal to nil: now that it has been decided that the sort of behavior that Mr Marshall indulged in is wrong, it’s important to remember how murky these affairs have been in real life. Anything greater than a token punishment for Tony Marshall reeks of ex post facto incrimination.

§ Sext. Dame Maggie is recovering from chemotherapy for breast cancer. No fun when you’re 74.

Smith must see some kind of future for herself? “I don’t think there’s a lot of it, because of my age — there just isn’t. It’s all been. I’ve no idea what there will be.” Illness has changed her, then. “Very much so. I think it’s the age I was when it happened. It knocks you sideways. It takes you longer to recover, you’re not so resilient, and I am fearful of the amount of energy one needs to be in a film or a play. It is up to me, I ought to do more exercise, I used to do a lot of walking. But my energy is coming back. I’m going to Africa with friends soon.”

She pauses. “Ageing isn’t the nicest thing. You end up feeling like you couldn’t go to Los Angeles because [she stretches the skin of her face] it hasn’t been put in the right place. They put old people away somewhere.” As for love, Smith shakes her head: “I’d rather be on my own and remember what I had, which was pretty special.”

She needs to get Alan Bennett to write her a role, I say. “I know. It’s pointless,” she says, laughing. “I’ve already shouted at him a lot.”

§ Nones. We grew up thinking that the Communist Party erased all Chinese traditions. It’s still interesting to trip over examples to the contrary.

The centre is not afraid to push any problems back out to the provinces. An obvious one is the stream of petitioners who head to Beijing to visit government offices to seek redress for abuses of power in their hometowns, an imperial tradition that the Communist Party has, through gritted teeth, maintained. Very few justice-seekers get more than a cursory hearing. Many are rounded up in Beijing by police despatched from their hometowns, sometimes tipped off by central-government officials. They are often held for a few days in unofficial detention in guesthouses known as “black jails”, then sent back to their provinces. The centre appears to lose little by such high-handedness. Outside Beijing a bizarre belief persists: if only victims of official abuse can make their grievances known at the very highest level of the leadership, justice will prevail.

In the past couple of years central-government tolerance of whingers from the provinces has been strained almost to breaking point by its fears of instability during huge public events: the Olympic games in August 2008 and this year’s National Day celebrations. In the build-up to both, petitioners have been summarily packed off home.

In our view, the Party and the gangs will get along just fine — as long as they get along. And as long as there is only one über-gang.

§ Vespers. We like the fact that Mad Men was a springboard for Ms Kiesling’s interest in the Kennedy assassination — before the inevitable episode, that is.

Like many people, I’ve got Mad Men fever.  That may have been one of the reasons I felt compelled to read this book; it’s got that attractive reek of cigarettes and hair pomade.  The book, as far as research and writing style, is a perfect snapshot of a time, which is what everyone says about Mad Men.  Except this book is like, real, and Mad Men is a television show.  Where Mad Men has a man playing Conrad Hilton, Manchester’s book features the authentic young Bill Moyers, and Walter Cronkite saying “This is Walter Cronkite, and you’re a goddamned idiot.”  For someone who missed this period of history, it’s fascinating.  I’m sure it holds a different appeal for the people who didn’t.

We didn’t miss it, in fact. Like everybody else, we remember where we were, and how we found out. But we have never really understood why we weren’t at all surprised. It was a wonder that we experienced again on 9/11: how remarkable it is — miraculous, really —  that this sort of thing doesn’t happen more often.

§ Compline. The Editor reminds us of the Spalding Gray charity auction, his one and only orgasm-with-a-paddle. It only cost — well, low four figures. Kathleen was furious, but she did have a ball taking Mr Gray to dinner.

The Editor stayed up in Connecticut that night, and so has no close encounters with celebrity under his belt. (The one thing that you must know about Kathleen is that there are no celebrities in her world, not even, anymore, at this point, Sir Paul. Not even!) But if he had the money to buy this dinner party, he would send a polite note to each of the guests in advance, pointing out the URL of his workaday life, and begging them to offer constructive criticism. In short, he would not bask in their wit. He would put them to work.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
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