There was no better place to celebrate the current Golden Age of TV—anyone seriously doubt that one is under way?—than at the Festival’s early-morn “Outside the Box” panel, which included the creative forces behind House, M.D. (David Shore), The Wire and Homicide (David Simon), Deadwood and NYPD Blue (David Milch), Weeds (Jenji Kohan), and Battlestar Galactica (Ronald D. Moore).
The panel mostly agreed on the following givens: TV stations want to make money, and it’s good to tell your story and not the demographically dictated story that the higher-ups want you to tell. Halfway through, in full-on Crazy Uncle mode, Al Swearengen, er, Sipowicz, I mean Milch began calling spades spades (and I’ll allow the metaphoricity only if pressed), and it took the combined efforts of the rest of the panel to parry with the behemoth suddenly in their midst. A born thrower of bombs (and not only of the F kind), Milch goosed the audience with his story of a discussion years ago, when the prospect of a black man and a white woman holding hands on the air was still shocking to the network contemplating such a scene. Milch’s solution? Have the man place his penis on the woman’s shoulder, natch. The show duly fired him. The kicker? “That was the last note I ever took.” I bet!
Even more provocatively, Milch brought up the high ratio of Jews not only in show business but also on that very stage (four out of five, by a show of hands). Milch’s thesis being that Jews are well-positioned to be outsiders to the process while also passing for insiders, a tactic often denied African Americans or Asian Americans, for example. But his real point was that the bohemian/suit divide the rest of the panelists were selling was only so much pap. The suits are not looking for art, and they don’t pay for it; they’re looking for people who can give their audience the expected fare with perhaps a small edge or twist to it. For their part, so Milch, every move the so-called artists on the stage make is governed in part by commercial considerations. Better to be candid and abandon the artiste pose.

At times Milch’s positions seemed reductionist, as when he reminded David Simon that the only reason HBO is interested in The Wire is because it wants black viewers. That may be true—what’s wrong with that?—but does that mean that HBO’s frequent mention of the tidal wave of critical accolades directed Simon’s way does not also exist? It’s just as useful for HBO to be able to say it has “the best show in the history of television” (or whatever formulation however many critics have by now driven into the ground), no matter how tiny the actual audience is, a sad fact Simon mordantly referenced several times.
I’ve grown to admire Simon’s mature and ingrained modesty, groundedness, high standards. He’s famous for ripping network fare to shreds in interviews (as in this Fresh Air interview), so it wasn’t surprising that he defended HBO with vigor. It was inspiring to hear his reel off the only people whose criticisms Simon would take seriously: the cops, lawyers, city officials, judges, etc. of Baltimore and similar rust-belt cities. Those people are in a position to say: “You got it all wrong.” He doesn’t care what the rest of us think at all. I love that.
Ronald Moore spoke perceptively about the network’s preference for for one-offs over longer plot arcs, the latter a decided strength of Battlestar Galactica. BG touches on subjects like suicide bombings and therefore, albeit metaphorically, Iraq. Networks always seem to want shows to present and resolve a major social issue in 45 minutes. Since Moore himself doesn’t know how to solve Iraq, it’s more rewarding to present the complexity of the issues rather than pretending that the conventions of televised drama provide that answer.
Asked about product placement, Kohan and Simon were quick to point out that objections in the other direction often arise after the script is written. In Season 4 of the The Wire, gangs of drug-dealing teens realize that the powerful electric nail guns at Home Depot (or the show’s fictional facsimile) are far cheaper than automatic weapons and just as useful for puncturing cartilage. Similarly, in Weeds, one drug dealer purchases seven quiet Priuses—advantageous when sneaking up on “mothafuckas,” an advantage that had not yet occurred to the rest of us.

—Martin Schneider

The Washington Post account of the Judd Apatow event.
An excellent Huffington Post review of the evening with Junot Díaz and Annie Proulx.
Nice tag-team coverage of several events by the Columbia Spectator, for which Emily once reviewed the debut issue of Allure, among other things.
The New York Observer calls two people conversing a “tiff.”
More sensible coverage of the Salman Rushdie and Orhan Pamuk event, plus a brief mention of George Saunders.
Enthusiast thinks the Voice‘s Rose Jacobs is mistaken (and presumably never saw our take.)
This writer notes much cursing at the Apatow event (she should have heard David Milch.)
An exhaustive and worthwhile account of the Mike Mignola, Jonathan Lethem, &c. comics event.
Is On Chesil Beach a novel? Not his problem, says Ian McEwan.
—Martin Schneider

The “Parkour New York” event with David Belle happened at the same time as the Master Class on Profile Writing. I scurried over to Javits Plaza as soon as I could, hoping for a hyperactive last few minutes. By the time I got there, the event was more or less over. As the picture below demonstrates, the location was exceedingly well chosen.
I was due at the Joan Weill Center to see Alex Ross, but I took a few minutes to mill about (and dodge the occasional hurtling body). As it happened, some fellow was in the process of taking an arm’s-length self-portrait with Belle; I intervened and took a more standard posed shot from a few feet away.
Then Belle wordlessly (I think he does not speak English) called for a group photo to commemorate the event. If you ever see any such picture (I’ll be sure to post it if I do), I’m in there somewhere, certain to prompt in the other participants the pressing question, “Who the hell is that guy?”

Fortunately, Jason Kottke was there and therefore is able to provide a much fuller report than I can.
—Martin Schneider

Sunday’s Master Class on profile writing with Mark Singer and Susan Orlean was the best event I saw all weekend. The talk was structured basically as Singer grilling Orlean, in a friendly way, on the process of writing profiles, while Orlean would occasionally turn the tables. As the have been friends for decades, their shared references made it a powerfully informative, probing, and intimate session. The two writers were both so genuinely curious about the other’s process, it was as if the audience were not there at all. It was a truly remarkable session.
What follows is a more or less unstructured selection of observations and quotations.
It was fascinating to observe the many things Singer and Orlean have in common (curiosity, thoroughness, mad typing skills) while approaching very similar projects quite differently. Orlean is warm and seeks emotional connection with her subjects; Singer is more detached, calling his a “deadpan approach.”
Singer prefers to do exhaustive research before meeting the subject; Orlean prefers to learn about the subject in a more haphazard way. Singer made a great point about questions, saying that you should never ask a subject for information that you could acquire independently. In other words, don’t ask “Where were you born?”—ask what it felt like to grow up in Sheboygan. The former is publicly available; the latter is what you’re hired to find out. Orlean saw this differently; as she said, “I write a profile the same way I would go about making a friend,” and you would certainly ask a budding friend where she was born.
More than you would think, a lot of the process of writing these profiles occurs before it’s even agreed that there will be a profile at all. There’s a great deal of negotiating with the subject about access, and many profiles never end up happening at all. Some of Singer’s more interesting stories had to do with unwritten profiles. Since profiles at that stage are so amorphous, the process, later too, is necessarily infused with self-doubt—is this a subject? why would people read this? What am I doing here? And so on.
To counter this, a good profilist needs a compensating sense of worth: As Orlean said, “You have to have the confidence to say, as a writer, that somehow the choices you make are, in and of themselves, justifiable.” A simple and yet elusive point—as the example of a profile she did for Esquire about “the typical ten-year-old boy” demonstrates. She had to assume, on some level, that she was, of necessity, capable of “proving” to the reader that this material worth reading. “I love seducing readers,” she said, starting with a subject that seems of doubtful interest and then winning the skeptic over. She observed that Tina Brown, someone who would normally suggest very well-known people for profile subjects, could never really understand how Orlean achieved her effects (the two women have an abiding friendship nonetheless).
On the subject of editors, both writers were unabashed in their praise—indeed, awe—of David Remnick’s reportorial skills. As Singer said, “He is so good that he can spend a week in Israel and write a ten-thousand-word piece on the flight home,” a process for which the two panelists and most of their colleagues presumably would need far longer, on both the data collection and production sides. That had come up as a tangent on the subject of notes—both Singer and Orlean take copious notes, but Orlean insisted that the writer should be able to tell the story of the piece entirely out of her head, as it were. Until you’ve gotten immersed to that extent, you’re not ready to write. She compared the process to that of telling an anecdote at the dinner table. If you say, “I heard about this car that got stolen, but the owner’s dog was still inside,” your dinner-mates will likely not wrest the floor from you anytime soon. The same dynamic is in play with a successful profile. (That anecdote was the basis for an actual profile Orlean wrote, by the way.)
Orlean raised the question of tape recorders. Singer said that he has used them but hates them, “because then you have to listen to it.” As many people do, he detests transcribing as well as the sound of his own voice. Rather surprisingly, to me anyway, Singer likes to bring his laptop along as often as possible, and will often transcribe conversation with his subjects on the spot. Singer said the best course he ever took was typing, and Orlean laughingly bragged that she types exceedingly well, even better than the well-known Meryl Streep incarnation of her .
I did not know that Orlean did profiles for Rolling Stone for a long time. She explained that the material for a Rolling Stone profile is usually gathered an hour or less, in a hotel room with the subject, a process so truncated that the writer must, of necessity, invest random utterances and actions with absurd significance. (Singer: “The best approach in those situatons is just to shoot yourself before the interview.”) In addition, “nut grafs” are a Rolling Stone requirement: “The Fugees are important right now because …” At The New Yorker, unsurprisingly, things are different. Writers are encouraged to come up with a form and approach that fit the material, even if it means spending weeks with the subject. Singer said that the process is often so attenuated that subjects frequently question whether he is competent, wondering how on earth anyone could ever make a living this way. Orlean offered that she is always grateful that she can spend three weeks not apparently accomplishing much while she gets a sense of the subject at hand.
On the subject of form, Singer referred to his “cinematic” understanding of content, which leads him to use “scenes” to help him structure the material. As he said, “You have to have a really great reason to abandon chronology,” something that Orlean does more often than most. Singer observed that it is very difficult to write profiles about very funny people. There is a constant temptation to reproduce shtick, which never comes off nearly as good in print; such pieces are always threatened by a “you had to be there” quality that is death to a good profile.
Orlean once did a kind of mental tally of the geographical origins of New Yorker employees, concluding that the staff was “overwhelmingly midwestern” (I pass on the information in the interests of sociology). Singer and Orlean agreed that in a city like New York, many good profiles arise out of a kind of restless, pavement-pounding inquisitiveness. See an odd shop? (Orlean’s example was a shop specializing in ceiling fans.) Talk up the proprietor, you’ll likely discover a hidden expert in some arcane subject: “Everybody’s more intensely whoever they are in New York.”
I could easily go on for another ten paragraphs, but I won’t. Clearly, this material fascinates me in a big way. I’ve read a great many profiles in my time, and now I have at least an inkling of how they are put together. For that I am thankful. —Martin Schneider

Alex Ross called his late-Sunday presentation, “The Rest Is Noise: A Multimedia Tour of Twentieth-century Music,” an “improvement” on his book, as he would be able to supplement the points in his narrative with musical excerpts, so that we could actually hear examples of composers’ work along the way.
Make no mistake about it: Ross’s presentation was fabulously successful by almost any set of criteria. Simply put, it’s difficult to imagine a human being better suited to the project of explaining the tortuous path of what we might call “serious” music in the years following 1900 to a lay audience. (I can already hear the objections to that word piling up.) If Ross has any plans to reproduce his presentation elsewhere, I highly recommend catching it; it is an experience sure to benefit any enthusiast of any kind of music. If you enjoy the intentional arrangement of aural tones to achieve an effect in the listener, you will probably enjoy this. Further, it is profoundly inspiring to see the high degrees of passion, engagement, expertise, and erudition that Ross brings to the subject.
I combine fairly low affinity for what is called contemporary music (or classical music for that matter) with a high degree of exposure. Staying in the twentieth century only, I’ve seen operas by Janáček, Korngold, Strauss, Glass, Prokofiev, Harbison, Berg, and Britten, and maybe a couple others I can’t think of right now. In all honesty, most of them had a kind of “Isn’t that impressive!” impact on me without really getting me where I live.
All of which either makes me Ross’s ideal audience member or the worst one imaginable—possibly both. For my part, I got a lot out of the presentation. Ross said that his goal was to “defeat any preconceptions” about twentieth-century music, and there’s no doubt he succeeded in that. To take two examples at random, he was able to present both the forbidding and supposedly melody-free clangor of atonal music and the barren-sounding prospect of minimalism in a way that both was memorable and piqued the interest.
Anyway, enough of my yakking. Whaddaya say? Let’s boogie! —Martin Schneider