In this installment (see this “post”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/random-profiler-liebling-on-ch.php for an introduction to the “series”:http://emdashes.com/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=2&tag=Random%20Profiler&limit=20), the roulette wheel landed on Winthrop Sargeant’s 1978 “Profile”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1978/06/26/1978_06_26_047_TNY_CARDS_000326739 on Glynn Ross. This was very much the sort of Profile that I was hoping for when I started this project: an interesting subject previously unknown to me.
Ross was the director of the Seattle Opera starting in the 1960s, and he did a lot to popularize the form in the northwestern metropolis by using unconventional promotional techniques and generally being smart about his task. It was his policy to perform all operas in the original language and in English, an idea that shouldn’t be as rare as it apparently is. He was also very shrewd about attracting established stars to remote and (then) unfashionable Washington State for single productions. On this, Sargeant quotes Ross: “An artist wants four things: one, a chance to do something that requires the best of his abilities; two, the opportunity to grow by singing different roles; three, prestige; and four, a paycheck.”
Ross staged the first American production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle that didn’t take place at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, a production that helped establish Seattle as a major center of Wagner interest. He used colorful slogans directed at the new wave of youthful customers, such as “La Bohème: Six old-time hippies in Paris,” “Roméo et Juliette: Two kids in trouble, real trouble, with their families,” and (cue bad-pun grimace) “Get Ahead with Salome.” In 1971, just a couple years after it was written, the Seattle Opera was the first reputable opera house to stage The Who’s _Tommy,_ with Bette Midler in a leading role, a detail the magazine omits. (In a perfect world, we’d have some YouTube footage of that production!) In baseball, the analogous figure would be “Bill Veeck,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Veeck roughly.
Sargeant’s work here is a reminder of how conservative the form can sometimes be, which is not a criticism. The Profile starts by establishing the subject’s Profile-worthiness and then segues to the subject’s background, relying a good deal on lengthy quotation from the subject. It’s not “exciting,” but it does the job.
Reading the Profile, it’s difficult not to think of Peter Gelb, general manager of the Met since 2006 and a New Yorker Conference “attendee”:http://emdashes.com/2008/05/the-new-yorker-conference-is-q.php in 2008. Gelb has been phenomenally successful in finding new audiences for Met productions, and his main weapons have been the appearance of filmed versions of current productions in our nation’s multiplexes and fresh thinking on the nature of those productions, both in their selection and in the emphasis on accessability. A quick search at Google suggests that not too many people have suggested the parallels between Ross and Gelb, but they seem pretty obvious to me (not that I’d be aware of any other similar figures).

Isn’t it time for another Malcolm Gladwell post? A few weeks ago Tina Roth Eisenberg at my favorite design blog, “Swissmiss,”:swissmiss.typepad.com/ linked to this swell “video”:http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/video-gain-2008-gladwell of Gladwell discussing Fleetwood Mac and David Galenson’s ideas about creativity at AIGA’s GAIN Conference in October, the same month that the _The New Yorker_ ran Gladwell’s “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/10/20/081020fa_fact_gladwell about him.
Galenson is an economist who developed a theory of creativity that states that artistic innovators mostly come in two packages, of which the exemplars are Picasso and Cézanne. Picasso made his mark as a young man, and his pictorial brilliance seemed to come quite naturally; Cézanne’s success came much later in life, and his breakthroughs seemed the result of a great deal of sustained effort and slow experimentation. As far as I can tell, neither Galenson nor Fleetwood Mac is mentioned in “Outliers,”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0316017922/ref=sib_dp_srch_pop?v=search-inside&keywords=hedgehog&go.x=0&go.y=0&go=Go at least according to a search on Amazon’s OnlineReader (I have not obtained my own copy of the book yet), this even though the subject seems to fit in perfectly well with the book’s themes.
Then you have the interesting fact that, as Jason Kottke “pointed out”:http://www.kottke.org/08/08/old-masters-and-young-geniuses several months ago, this Galenson article was, according to _The New York Times,_ actually “rejected”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/15/business/15leonhardt.html?pagewanted=all by _The New Yorker_ in 2006, the first Gladwell pitch to receive the heave-ho. David Leonhardt’s article quotes Gladwell’s “editor” pooh-poohing Galenson’s spiel and asking Gladwell whether he is “crazy.” (What editor could this be? Surely not David Remnick?)
Galenson’s division of artists into blazing young “conceptual innovators” and older “experimental innovators” reminds me a bit of “The Hedgehog and the Fox,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox Isaiah Berlin’s famous appropriation of the ancient Greek poet Archilochus (admit it, you knew that this blog would eventually work Archilochus in somehow). Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”; Berlin’s idea was that Dostoevsky was a hedgehog and Tolstoy a fox who wished that he were a hedgehog. Somehow the conceptual innovators seem like hedgehogs to me, and experimental innovators like foxes. Galenson, by the way, does cite the hedgehog/fox pairing in his book “Old Masters and Young Geniuses”:http://books.google.com/books?id=aj43lvAIJIcC&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=galenson+hedgehog&source=web&ots=gEl9FVxIgR&sig=KP92wQybfyltDF-XeBMalDexxhg&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result#PPA181,M1.
There aren’t that many bands whose career arc is that similar to Fleetwood Mac, in my opinion (rock is a young person’s game), but it happens that my favorite band in the world, the “Wrens,”:http://www.wrens.com/ fits Galenson’s schema to a T. Their masterpiece, The Meadowlands, was four years in the making and came fully nine years after their debut. And it matches up with Galenson’s “experimental innovators”—the band tinkered so extensively with the tracks that the band forced themselves to destroy the master tapes as a way of committing to a truly final cut.
Another one that comes to mind is Pulp. Pulp’s breakout album was “His ‘N’ Hers,”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_%27n%27_Hers which came out in 1994; their first album came out in 1983, eleven years earlier. That’s quite an incubation. All of their good albums came after their tenth year in the business.
By the way: A few days before Christmas, Gladwell appeared on _The Charlie Rose Show,_ and the resultant “segment”:http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9855 features both Gladwell and Rose at their best. I also love the show’s new—I think—black website, which seems to reference the show’s trademark table-immersed-in-blackness aesthetic.

About a year ago I toyed with the idea of reading every single Profile that ever appeared in _The New Yorker,_ a project surely to be measured in decades rather than years. I didn’t get very far with that one. (I did read a few of the very first Profiles, mainly because they’re super short.)
As 2008 wanes and 2009 commences, I’ve downsized to a more manageable project. With the aid of a “random number generator,”:http://www.random.org/ I intend to read a randomly selected Profile every now and then. There are few undertakings that can’t be improved by the I Ching, I reckon, not that I’ve ever had occasion to use it.
I took the system out for a test drive last night, and it worked like a charm. The random number generator steered me to “1952” (represented by year “28” out of 84) and then to the number “1” Profile of that year (out of 19), which happens to be a three-parter by A. J. Liebling, dated January 5 to 19, on the immensely promising subject of Chicago.
It’s a complete disgrace.
I’m not familiar with the city at all, but a few times in my life I’ve encountered the trademark Chicago Boast, which I find only mildly irritating and mostly charming. Liebling seems to find in that tic an occasion for an all-out attack on the city. New York has its rivalries, with Chicago, with Boston, with Washington, with Los Angeles…. but frankly, this does not seem an outgrowth of any such dynamic, it seems purely personal—to wit, Liebling himself just powerfully disliked Chicago (where he lived for a year or so before writing the Profile).
Liebling relies strongly on the injudicious use of personal anecdote, most of which are chosen to point up the provincialism, insularity, paranoia, corruption etc. etc. that he finds so typical of the city. Liebling writes well, and he keeps it moving, but the articles feel like piling on. Right from the very first page, the exercise feels lazy.
A comparison with Christopher Rand’s 1966 “Profile”:http://emdashes.com/2008/07/the-405-and-the-bqe-both-mean.php of Los Angeles, published a mere fourteen years later, would, I think, serve as an object lesson of the maturity of the magazine during these years, primarily attributable, I would imagine, to the magazine’s editor starting in 1952, William Shawn. (Of course, it’s possible that the culture at large was maturing in certain ways as well.) On the other hand, Harold Ross had died in December; perhaps the issues that appeared over the next few weeks aren’t the best measure of anyone’s abilities.
So far, so good. We’ll see what randomness brings us next time.