Book Review: Live the Good Life

Title: Live the Good Life

(Amazon has a page for the book, but doesn't have even a computer-generated image for it. Hmm. It wouldn't be fair to gank an image from another online bookseller. Let's see what Morguefile can do...here's an image from OgleEye tagged as "good life." If you click it should open the Amazon page for the book.)

Author: Wolf von Eckardt

Date: 1982

Publisher: American Council for the Arts

ISBN: 0-915400-24-3

Length: 129 pages

Illustrations: many black-and-white photos, some graphics

Quote: “Government involvement in the arts has been part of civilization since civilization began.”

Everybody has a vision of “the good life,” so when I saw yet another book describing yet another vision on sale, cheap, I picked it up. How would Von Eckardt define the good life?

Von Eckardt wants more art in the cities. He wants funding from private donors, and free contributions from struggling young artists, but he has no problem with government funding either; he thinks the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts should have been shoehorned onto Pennsylvania Avenue. “In…Mesopotamian, Babylonian, and Egyptian civilizations, church and state were the same and the creation of art was an integral part of the state religion,” he writes wistfully. “In the Athens of Pericles…[w]ealthy citizens were asked to ‘lead the chorus,’ that is, pay for the production of a play, an honor as compelling as paying taxes.”

He dreamed of the sort of totalitarian “planning” that would overrule the sinister forces of democracy, individualism, and frugality. “[M]any slums are being reclaimed…This does not mean that the center city will necessarily regain all of its lost population. That depends on whether the city will offer affordable housing. It would be unfortunate if the lack of effective regional planning were to force the new generation of suburbanites to settle on the suburban fringe…Unfortunately,w e have no tradition of national land use, let alone regional planning.”

Too many artists, Von Eckardt complains, sit around and wail that “they,” the government, don’t fund “us” the artists. “Artists…must urge, vote, pressure, coax, cajole, wheedle, and exhort the Muses into positions that allow them to whisper into the ears of planners, administrators, and politicians. The cause is not served by general complaints that artists need more support…We all hear enough about what society can do for the arts. We want to hear what the arts can do for society and for the things society happens to be particularly interested in at the moment.”

He wrote from Washington, D.C., the city to which I came during the year after this book was published. Plenty of people in Washington agreed with Von Eckardt. If they didn’t think artists should sell out to the “planners” and crank out the kind of propaganda art for which the old Soviet Union became infamous, well, they’d take their funding where they found it. They had no problem with the idea of their “creativity” being exploited for political purposes, or rewarded based on its usefulness for political purposes rather than on its merits, or funded by coercive taxation rather than by the kind of individual communication toward which creative artists struggle.

Results were, to put it charitably, mixed. There’s a lot of art and culture, free for the soaking up, in every part of Washington (and its suburb-towns). Perhaps the best way to assess Live the Good Life is to reflect on the extent to which that art and culture really gave Washingtonians “the good life.”

What leaps first to my mind is that a lot of it is indeed beautiful, and enjoyable. The newspapers that list even the semi-planned art, music, drama, dance, and handcrafts events that are available each weekend are thick papers. Of course it’s possible for Washingtonians to choose to spend a weekend at home, or out of town. (Washingtonians traditionally come from somewhere else, in order to earn money in Washington, and they traditionally consider it obligatory to use as many of the long weekends and mandatory holidays as possible for travelling, taking that money back home, and spreading it around.) It’s not, however, possible for Washingtonians to consider going out, look at the entertainment options available, and decide to stay home because nothing interesting is going on that weekend. The city (and suburbs) have certain obligations to the tourists. Those obligations include bringing art, music, etc., from every State and nation, and sharing it liberally—one might even say prodigally—with anyone who goes outside on a weekend. As a result Washingtonians are bombarded with far more art and culture than they can consume. A serious “planning” concern involves staging open-air concerts far enough apart that the bands don’t clash with one another.

What leaps to mind next is that the best of Washington’s art-and-culture is the least “planned.” I feel almost subversive in whispering that (tiny print, please) the Smithsonian Museums never were my very favorite places, and I don’t think I ever went to the Kennedy Center at all. Too much “planning,” staging, marketing, makes a mob scene, which does strange and unpleasant things to any artistic endeavor. The bigger an event is, the more widely publicized, the less pleasure it gives. I've enjoyed Smithsonian events but I suspect I would have enjoyed them more if they'd been smaller-scale and staged at Georgetown University.

Finally…from the artists’ own point of view, the idea of “downtown” as a place to visit, not a place to live, has much to recommend it. Humans do not thrive in densely populated areas. Artists, due to their need for creative solitude, suffer the effects of crowding more acutely than other people. When artists do work in crowded conditions, some of them do produce art that is good in a way, but what their work is good at communicating is depression, worry, angst, alienation, and hostility.  When artists produce the kind of art that people want to look at, listen to, read, dance to, or sing along with, they can indeed go into inner cities, and find inspiration in inner cities, but they work privately in spacious, wholesome places.

So, has Von Eckardt’s book any value? I think it has historic value. The arts don’t need to be heavily “planned” and subsidized into the service of a political party or movement, but it’s useful to be able to document the early stages of the current encroachment of “planners” on the arts and on other aspects of city and town life.

Wolf Von Eckardt no longer needs a dollar, but if you want a copy of this book, please send $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen. You can search this site for "A Fair Trade Book" to discover books by living authors that can be added to the package for the same $5 shipping charge; when that happens, we send 10% of the payment, typically $1, to the living author or a charity of his or her choice.

Endnote: Morguefile's new format is not conducive to finding web addresses for free pictures, but here's OgleEye's whole gallery:

https://morguefile.com/creative/OgleEye

Book Review: Jessi and the Awful Secret

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Jessi and the Awful Secret (Baby-Sitters Club #61)

Author: Ann M. Martin

Date: 1993

Publisher: Apple Scholastic

ISBN: 0-590-45663-6

Length: 139 pages

Quote: “The kids seemed so high-spirited and happy that I hadn’t thought of them as ‘underprivileged.’ Now something in the parents’ faces reminded me of that.”

When Madame Noelle decides her middle school ballet dancers need teaching experience, and assigns them to guide a few “underprivileged” younger children through a less formal dance class, Jessi notices that one of her classmates is anorexic. The girl’s parents, as well as Madame Noelle, have already noticed this before Jessi pushes herself to talk to Madame Noelle about it. Because this is a Baby-Sitters Club story, Jessi supplies just the extra push her classmate needs to start seeing a doctor and a psychiatrist.

There was a heavily publicized “epidemic” of anorexia during the early 1980s, when quite a few girls realized they could only ever look like victims of the fashions inspired by scraggy Princess Diana and scrawny Nancy Reagan, and imagined that a strict low-calorie diet would give a normal-shaped female that hatchet-faced skeletal look that would not look fat in pleated trousers and square-cut skirts. This was also the period when smarter girls stopped following the fashions and adopted styles that work better for more of us, as modelled by Barbara Bush and Sarah Ferguson. Nevertheless, insane crash-diet routines became a fad.

This was also the period when we were told that nobody ever just realized that crash-diet routines, where a girl starved herself down to the target weight or measurement and then immediately gained a few more pounds during the week when she started eating normally, were not going to give most of us the Diana Look. Genes are genes, jeans are jeans, and the only way to stop looking fat in early 1980s pleated-top, tapered-leg jeans was to resume wearing straight-cut jeans and consign the fashion police to everybody’s favorite tour destination in Michigan. However, this aspect of reality was consistently denied by the commercial media, who harped for years on the theme that anyone who had “got anorexia” was going to starve to death unless people bullied her or him to “get help.”

What really turned me off the writer Leslea Newman was not the memorably misleading Heather Has Two Mommies, which urged little children to deny the reality that if most of their friends “had two Mommies” the other one was an aunt or grandmother. It was an even more shallow and false novel, deservingly out of print and I don’t intend to link to it, in which a psychotherapist told a teenager with bulimia and anorexia, “I’ve never known anyone who got better all by herself.” Bosh. I had, when this wretched book was printed, known half a dozen. In fact I’d experimented with fasting and self-induced vomiting as weight control techniques, myself, and found that they didn’t work nearly as well as exercise did; I’ve remained top-heavy, not obese, and comfortable with my body shape ever since. And I’d never “talked to” anybody about it—not even the friends and relatives who’d talked about their experiments with me, from whom it was possible to learn that, the harder a girl recalled having dieted as a teenager, the fatter she was as an adult. (In fact, in 1982 I distinctly remember reading a Young Adult Novel where a coach told a young gymnast about self-induced vomiting for weight control, as still occasionally happened in real life--I've never seen another copy of that book, since, and wouldn't link to it if it were still available, but it existed.)

So I would have liked this BSC story better if Martin had faced up to what plenty of women had “come out” about by 1993. For one thing, if Jessi’s friend Mary had become anorexic because the fad for extreme dieting had survived in ballet school circles (which is possible), and only because of that, the realistic happy ending would have had her realizing that crash diets don’t work, in the same normal, casual, not-even-something-we-wanted-to-discuss-with-our-best-friends sort of way that thousands of girls and women did.

For another thing, by 1993 medical science was identifying a physical factor that contributed to the extreme cases of anorexia, which had required long-term medical care. If Mary had really needed help to quit crash-dieting, she would have been one of the children who had drunk “Vitamin D-3 enriched” milk by the quart, growing up; apparently excessive Vitamin D in the system may produce a primarily physical disgust with food, which sometimes made people (boys as well as girls, in or out of show business) persist in self-starvation and bulimia long after they’d lost more weight than anyone could possibly want to lose. In 1983 nobody had noticed this yet, but by 1993 doctors had.

But no. Jessi and the Awful Secret is just another story where, whether the anorexic character needs nutritional guidance or not, she has to be run through the psychotherapy process. Meanwhile Jessi and her ballet buddies spend a lot of time blathering about to what extent Balanchine’s unrealistic ideal of all ballet dancers looking just alike to the audience is likely to sabotage this one’s and that one’s “careers.”

I’d tell children reading this book that ballet is not, if it ever was, a “career.” It’s an interesting discipline to practice, but…nobody’s going to earn a living just dancing any more, if anybody ever did. Yes, there was Isadora Duncan. Was, back when “The Dance” had a degree of snob appeal it no longer has. And if you read her memoir you realize that one reason why “The Dance” lost its snob appeal was that the only way even the recognized queen of the art could make a “career” out of it was by depending on a succession of male admirers for money. Ballet is a delightful course of study that builds strength, grace, and discipline, but even if you have the body shape Balanchine favored, ballet is not going to be your career.

Anyway, Jessi and the Awful Secret is a Fair Trade Book, meaning that when you send $5 per book plus $5 per package to either address at the very bottom of the screen (add $1 per online payment, or pay the U.S. Post Office fee per offline payment), we send $1 per book sold to Martin or a charity of her choice. If you ordered eight BSC books, you'd send us $45 via postal order or $46 via Paypal, and we'd send Martin or her charity $8. You could also include books by other authors in the same package, whether you find reviews of them at this web site or not; while books are new we prefer to buy them new, since the purpose of this web site is to encourage living writers.

Cool Dance Video

Thanks to Elizabeth Barrette for sharing this cool, family-friendly dance video (hey, it worked on this computer, so it may work for yours too):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=LP3w-oJjH8I

I think what I like about this one is that the actual dance moves are easy; if you made this type of costumes for an elementary school drill team or Scout troop, they could do the dance.