Tale of Two Cities

THE SPECTATOR USA

Tale of Two Cities

A split-screen vision of Seventies childhood returns

For people who, like me, were born in the troubled times of the Seventies, Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood were an educational crossroads. As we gazed into the cathode-ray tube for direction, each program led to a very different future. Sesame Street, now in its 50th season, remains unavoidable and familiar. Yet we’re captivated by the return of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the unpolished creation of Fred Rogers that aired from 1968 to 2001.

Last year, the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? became a surprise hit. This month sees the opening of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, a movie starring Tom Hanks as Rogers. Hanks has inherited Jimmy Stewart’s job as the ambassador of American nostalgia: who better for a feel-good triumph of simple truths over cynical sophistication? But the real Rogers was anything but simple. His lessons remain surprisingly tough — and might even have gotten tougher with time.

Back then, New York’s Channel Thirteen aired the two programs back to back as a tale of two cities. Sesame Street was a block party for the Great Society. ‘Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?’ went the infectious chorus. How could we avoid it? The progressive phantasmagoria of Sesame Street emerged from Carnegie and Ford Foundation grants. The most workshopped program in television history was designed as a childhood primer for Head Start, the youth corps of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. The best and the brightest minds in children’s entertainment deployed the cartoon characters and frenetic pace of commercial television for political ends.

While Sixties idealism was failing the American city, Jim Henson’s Muppets sold us the upside of urban decay: Big Bird nesting in the alley, Mr Snuffleupagus hiding in the garage, the mentally unstable Oscar the Grouch living in the trash can. Defeated by reality, Sesame Street became a lucrative global brand in a culture of diminishing expectations. In 1981, I appeared in two episodes as one of its neighborhood kids. My transition from the mean streets of the Upper West Side to the Sesame Street set in Astoria, Queens seemed perfectly natural. I was surprised only when I looked up and found that this ‘street’, unlike the Great Society’s budgets, had a ceiling.

Today, we all live on Sesame Street: Sesame Street progressivism is the default ideology of an achingly liberal society. The scripts may not be the best, but the visuals are still the brightest — especially now that HBO has gentrified the street. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is the world we have lost: grandparents, honest jobs and Sunday school teachers. Sesame Street opens with a Muppet parade,

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with a flyover shot of a model town. Sesame Street was invented by a ‘government of all the talents’, but Fred Rogers wrote the scripts and songs and operated all the puppets himself. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Rogers turned his Pittsburgh ‘neighborhood’ into his church in disguise, and ‘love thy neighbor’ and the doctrine of good works into encoded evangelism.

The opening sequence remains iconic. Walking from work to the modest home where we are waiting to meet him, Rogers opens his front door and proclaims, ‘It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.’ As he implores, ‘Won’t you be my neighbor?’ he changes into his sneakers, zips up his sweater and feeds his fish. Then Mr McFeely the delivery man brings the package that starts the episode’s discussion — a three-legged stool to assemble, or a video of a visit to a factory. A toy trolley arrives to take us to the ‘Neighborhood of Make-Believe’, its monarch King Friday XIII a ‘benevolent despot’ who ruled through chivalry and honor. When it returns, Rogers interprets what we saw. ‘It’s such a good feeling/ To know you’re alive’, he sings as he changes back into his work clothes and waves goodbye.

Eddie Murphy and Jim Carrey mocked Rogers’s earnest persona and square routine, but routine itself captivates in irregular times. Rogers takes us to the Pittsburgh Athletic Association and shows us how he swims a mile a day: ‘I made a promise to myself. And I keep my promises.’ His interactions with Officer Clemmons, who is black, and Jeff Erlanger, who is handicapped, became television landmarks for their common decency. His factory visits demonstrated the dignity of hard work; one of them made me decide to become a crayon maker. When deadlines loom, his expectations still rattle me: ‘You’ve got to do it/ Every little bit, you’ve got to do it, do it, do it, do it.’

Rogers’s ordinariness made him extraordinary, even compared to the ancien régime of Friday XIII. Rogers spoke up for manners over mayhem, diligence over distraction. He was ‘Mister’ to us, never ‘Fred’.

Over on Sesame Street, there was always some new sensation, like Stevie Wonder performing ‘Superstition’ while children gyrated on the fire escape. Elevating the mundane to the magisterial, Rogers offered no such illusions. His ideas have, like his local factories, been abandoned by contemporary America. His gospel of respect for neighbor and self was a tough love that now seems tougher than ever.

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is released on 22 November.

Two If by Sea

James Panero recounts a recent trip to Mystic, Connecticut, and offers his thoughts on “J. M. W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate” and other developments at the Mystic Seaport Museum.

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2019

Two If by Sea

On “J. M. W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate” at the Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Connecticut.

Sailing to Mystic Seaport is one of those prehistoric memories of my childhood that still inspires limbic delight. How primitive it all now seems: no cell phones or GPS, my father and I dead reckoning on our small cutter-rig Cape Dory. Down in the cabin, I measured the paper charts with a plexiglass navigational plotter. I turned the directional dials on the LORAN radio. Finally we reached the mouth of the Mystic River. We circled and honked our airhorn until the railroad and highway bridges rotated and lifted to let us through. When we tied up at the historic Seaport, a maritime town of preserved boats and buildings, the facility was just closing for the day. That was the best part about it. As transients staying overnight at the marina, we alone could still wander the Seaport village at all hours, past the cooperage, the ropewalk, the church, the tiny school, and the George H. Stone & Co. General Store, like Ishmael on his way to the Spouter-Inn. On my Walkman, I played a cassette tape of sea shanties. Here was the Age of Sail. We were living it.

From the Age of Sail—or at least its recreational variant—to the Age of Screen, the subsequent decades have not been altogether kind to Mystic Seaport. History has gone out of fashion, if you haven’t already heard. So has the sort of immersive history offered by institutions like the Seaport, founded in 1929, where reenactors forge iron, craft barrels, and caulk hulls in its historic structures. In our virtual present, real experience itself has grown suspect, foreign, even dangerous. As a teacher recently explained to me, many children today do not know what to do when their feet get wet. They really don’t know what to do when close-hauled in wine-dark seas. The sport of sailing has suffered. A large outdoor institution dedicated to our seafaring past has suffered especially.

Enter the “reimagined” Seaport. Since the turn of the millennium, the historic institution has proclaimed at least two “Strategic Plans.” The Seaport must be “repositioned.” It must “appeal to new audiences.” It must be “evolving and embracing contemporary culture.” It must be “rebranded.” It must be “relevant.” It all sounded, to me at least, quite alarming.

The Charles W. Morgan (middle), the last remaining American wooden whaling vessel, on the docks of Mystic Seaport. Photo: Mystic Seaport Museum.

Yet the distress calls have been a boon to the consultants, architects, and planners who now school around foundering institutions. One consequence has been the renaming of the Seaport, as it seems every “library” and “collection” and “institute” must be renamed these days, into a “museum.” And so we now have the “Mystic Seaport Museum.” Another consequence has been the construction of a new gallery, the Thompson Exhibition Building, to serve as a Kunsthalle for traveling shows and commissioned installations.

The proliferation of white-box galleries has largely become a blight on our cultural landscape. I suspect we will one day regret most of them, much like the benighted highways that slice through our urban centers, which are similarly designed for maximum throughput but have only invited further congestion. Contemporary art puts greater and greater impositions on its housing and display. Bigger galleries are built to contain it. Then new forms of art develop to overfill these gargantuan spaces.

Often this new art comes in the form of commissions designed to provoke commentary and commotion around some aspect of contemporaneity. At the Seaport we might soon see installations about swirling gyres, or modern-day pirates, or the rising seas. Or what about the history of the salt trade through large salt sculptures? That’s coming next year. You can almost figure it out yourself. The Seaport even brought in the impresario Nicholas R. Bell as its new curatorial director to crank up the institution’s popular reach, as he did at the Renwick in Washington, D.C., with immersive shows where “photography is encouraged.”

Museum leaders rarely lament these modern intrusions on their historic missions, buildings, and collections. Far from it—the “need” turns their hamster wheels. New buildings spur new fundraising that pays for more buildings and so on. What results are new brick-and-mortar (and glass-and-steel) billboards of perpetual presentness. I will never forget the director of one famous collection who proclaimed that her new Renzo Piano addition would finally let people know her institution was a museum. Of course, several generations of patrons managed to find their way there without Renzo. And of course, they still go there for the historic institution, not its mock-industrial appurtenance.

The Thompson Exhibition Building at the Mystic Seaport Museum. Photo: Mystic Seaport Museum.

Back at Mystic Seaport, maybe it’s the case of a stopped clock being right twice a day. Or maybe a favorable wind still blows over my beloved institution. Despite my dire predictions, through storm-tossed seas the Seaport has remarkably reached safe harbor. With a major exhibition of Turner watercolors on loan from the Tate, which opened here last month and remains on view through February, I might even say the institution has discovered a triumphant new world.1

Designed by Centerbrook Architects and Planners, the 14,000-square-foot Thompson Exhibition Building, which opened in 2016, is better than feared, even as it nevertheless presents a “distinct departure from the Museum’s traditional architecture.” Wood-framed in the shape of a hollow wave, the building references the Seaport’s collection of ship hulls in its fittings—although with its oversized patio and cavernous interior, the structure most resembles a mountaintop ski lodge. Stephen C. White, the Seaport’s president, says he wanted a building that would say, “Something’s happening here. Things are moving forward.” Such pathetic pleas aside, the museum sought a building that would be “good enough for Turner.” And here is Turner. There are also plans afoot to open up the Seaport’s extensive watercraft collection, with some eighty-seven boat designs, to public view. If this building boom ultimately leads to more open storage and more Turner, the results would be welcome indeed.

There is nothing quite like seeing a Turner, such as A Shipwreck in a Stormy Sea (ca. 1823–26), after just witnessing a reenactment of a nautical rescue by “breeches buoy,” as I did on my recent visit to the Seaport. The former United States Life-Saving Service, one of our government’s smartest creations, patrolled beaches day and night to rescue shipwrecked sailors. The breeches buoy was an ingenious system of ropes and pulleys that could be fired from a small cannon hauled down the beach from the lifesaving stations (which were themselves beautifully designed). Attached to the mast of a ship run aground, the buoy had a pair of shorts sewn to it that held passengers in place as they were hoisted ashore. Tens of thousands of lives were saved this way.

J. M. W. Turner, Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flaw Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves, 1846, Oil on canvas, Tate.

Through its artifacts and displays, the Seaport reveals the true challenges and terror of life at sea. Whaling ships like the Seaport’s prized Charles W. Morgan, the last remaining American wooden whaling vessel, were closer in experience to today’s floating oil rigs than to the romantic visions they might now inspire. They were factories at sea. American ships like the Morgan were the first to be able to harvest, process, and store whale oil, all without touching land, due to their set of shipboard try pots, which could render blubber while underway. “Voyaging in the Wake of the Whalers,” an ongoing and must-see exhibition at the Seaport, explains it all while matching a historic film of whaling with passages from Moby-Dick. Whalers (Boiling Blubber) Entangled in Flow Ice, Endeavouring to Extricate Themselves (1846), a stunning Turner painting at the center of this exhibition of watercolors, likewise shows those boilers firing away even as their ships sit stranded. Like a real-world Ahab, the American whaler was always determined.

While the watercolor exhibition is centered around a selection of maritime images, this is more than a “Turner and the Sea” show. The exhibition brings to America close to one hundred works from the Tate’s 1856 Turner Bequest, which ended up conveying just about everything the artist left behind, hook, line, and sinker, into Britain’s public trust. Selected out of some thirty thousand watercolors and sketches by the Tate’s David Blayney Brown, the exhibition presents the full arc of Turner’s astonishing fecundity. The artist began as a precise draftsman in such works as View of the Avon Gorge (1791), Durham Cathedral: The Interior, Looking East along the South Aisle (1797–98), and Holy Island Cathedral (ca. 1806–07). He ended up the atmospheric dreamer we famously know in such meditations as Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset (1840), Rain Falling over the Sea near Boulogne (1845), and Stormy Sea with Dolphins (ca. 1835–40).

J. M. W. Turner, Venice: Looking across the Lagoon at Sunset, 1840, Watercolor on paper, Tate.

The exhibition makes the compelling case that watercolor was the medium in which Turner developed and tested these stylistic innovations. An accompanying catalogue of revealing essays and interviews assembled by Bell (who will soon be leaving the Seaport) looks at how Turner began his career as a painter-like watercolorist and ended up a watercolorist-like painter. In resplendent works such as Venice: San Giorgio Maggiore—Early Morning (1819), we can see how Turner’s uncanny sense for luminosity on canvas first developed in the white ground of watercolor, as did his gauzy building-up of scrims and layers.

Water gives and it takes. In his 1950 book The Enchafèd Flood: or, The Romantic Iconography of the Sea, W. H. Auden writes that the sea represents “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse.” In his watercolors, Turner likewise mixed the waters of content and medium for his own deep dive into compositional disorder.

J. M. W. Turner, Arundel Castle, on the River Arun, ca. 1824, Watercolor on paper, Tate.

But Turner was not a pure abstractionist, despite the claims made by “Turner: Imagination and Reality,” Lawrence Gowing’s 1966 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that has long left us with an unfair retrospective view of Turner’s achievements. Nor was Turner a proto-Impressionist, an ultra-Romanticist, an anti-Industrialist, or whatever other school or cause he has been attached to. Turner began as an empiricist. As his compositions dissolved into formless shapes and blinding light, he became even more so, capturing a fuller vision of nineteenth-century life at the outer reaches of experience.

Born into the lower classes, through his own hard-driving career Turner maintained a respect for industry and the experiences of those who build, forge, sail, and render. His sense for awe reflected the real lives of hardworking people of the kind we still see at Mystic Seaport, which you can still reach by land or by sea.

1 “J. M. W. Turner: Watercolors from Tate” opened at Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, Connecticut, on October 5, 2019, and remains on view through February 23, 2020.

Should dead men leave no reviews?

THE NEW YORK POST, October 12, 2019

Should dead men leave no reviews?

My father was dead less than a month when I received a letter from his funeral home. The mail was hand-addressed. Another sympathy card, I thought, very nice. But no, rather than a note of condolence, the letter turned out to be something else I should have anticipated: a form asking me to “visit our Facebook page and leave a review. We appreciate your comments.”

Having never administered a father’s death and interment before, I frankly do not have much to go on when I consider death services. My dad’s ashes seemed properly cremated. His remains were returned to me in a sealed plastic box in a timely manner; this is all true.

But after paying out thousands of dollars, isn’t that all just standard funeral home procedure? Is there an emoji that represents my feelings toward this final transaction in the cycle of life? Would the crying face, the angry face, the wow face — or perhaps the heart — reflect my impression of a business that turned a small profit over my dad’s demise?

What is clear is that the standard “like” button would just not do. Services rendered over the burial of a parent require an escalated Facebook response.

Like death and taxes, requests for “feedback” have become the unavoidable consequence of just about any interaction. My inbox is now inundated daily with such demands.

“Share your thoughts,” begins one email, from my freelancer-payment system, about which I have no thoughts. “We’d like your feedback!” exclaims another, this one from L.L. Bean; here my online “shopping experience” consisted of purchasing a pair of rain boots, about which I have little to “share.”

“Reminder: James, We Value Your Feedback,” Delta Air Lines writes with increasing urgency after a flight to Chicago — following up on a similar missive I deliberately ignored just three days before. After a series of concerts, Carnegie Hall “invites” me to consider a “favorite memory” and “share your story on social media” about these special and all-too-rare evenings out with my wife.

Long ago I gave up ranking my occasional Uber trips on its scale of one to five stars. It was nothing personal. The drivers have always been hard workers who conveyed me successfully from Point A to Point B.

It’s just that once my trip is over I tend to focus on other things rather than adjudicate my transit experience. Could my lack of feedback be why my own passenger ranking hovers at 4.6 and why nearby cars seem to ignore my requests?

Fortunately, for now at least, I can still summon my local radio car service by telephone, no follow-up required.

“Feedback” has become the unrecompensed currency of the digital age. (China has recently implemented an Orwellian “social credit system” to rank every individual and business with a centralized score that will determine everything from jobs to schools to internet speeds.)

The largely automated requests have little to do with genuine interest in personal experience. These interactions are rather the coins in the fountain of our search engine algorithms.

They are the wishes of good fortune and the offerings of appeasement from the gods of Big Data. Look, they say in their piles at the bottom of the pool, other humans were here, and they did things just as you do things.

By now, we all know these numbers can lie. Maybe someone’s nephew loves to leave reviews for his uncle’s takeout? Or some tech titan found another buyer to slice and dice my every move into bits and bytes?

Still, as though I were inspecting a diamond through a loupe, like most anybody else, I now pore over these online results before making even the most mundane decisions. Why does this hotel have more stars than that one? Why should this coffee maker have a thousand more reviews than some other?

Having suffered a series of strokes, my father lived his life blissfully unaware of these demands on contemporary life. For over a decade he did not have an email address or even an internet connection. So I was the one to administer his online bill payments, contest his charges through chats and field hundreds of requests for comments, likes and testimonials.

After 87 loving, fruitful and honest years as a veteran, architect and parent, he chose to leave this bitter earth at just the right moment. He avoided the exit survey.