Among the Intellectualoids/Olympic Art
Stein, Benjamin J.
environment where social-economic distinctions actually were felt in practice, if not in theory, a failure in business, an associate of crooked politicians, he developed a touchiness about...
...This is not to say that the people here are philistines...
...The oversize title-page photo of A Centenary Remembrance shows us President Harry S. Truman speaking in Los Angeles...
...The private sector consists of one-acre plots of land which farming households are allowed to cultivate in their spare time either for their own consumption or for sale...
...Reading a newspaper here is considered a highly intellectual, almost daringly intellectual act...
...In fact, here in Los Angeles a novel means one of those things you find in little chrome racks We have changed o u r mailing label f o r m a t s t a r t i n g with the May 1984 issue...
...To be fair to the greatest Americahater since the Ayatoilet, it wasn't Andreas Papandreou who started the rot...
...The weather is perfect, and it is possible for almost anyone to earn a decent living here...
...The AS stands f o r American S p e c t a t o r . The month and year immediately following is y o u r exp i r a t i o n d a t e . AS SEP85 IN47401SAKEI"~;IeISK 3901 b I 3 KATH~YN BAKED BLCOMINGTON .! h 47401 We hope this will be helpful and save you some time...
...Thank god, Greek medals are as rare as pardons in Teheran, otherwise Greek pols would be making even worse fools of themselves...
...Take the case of Greece's greatest wrestler, Petros Galactopoulos, a silver medalist in Munich and a bronze one in Montreal, both medals won in Greco-Roman wrestling, a sport that has not changed at all since its inception 3,000 years ago...
...People come here to make it big in movies or records or real estate or restaurants or tax shelters or gourmet dog biscuits...
...His traditionalism made him appear more conservative than he really was, and he drew praise from millions of older people who had voted against him in 1948...
...Truman had an uncanny ability to transform the smallest criticism into a personal insult...
...Curiously, there is one sector of Soviet agriculture which has fared well despite bad weather...
...Upon his retirement Galactopoulos asked the ruling sports body to deliver on what had been promised him, i.e., a good pension and a lucrative coaching job...
...Greece held up a letter welcoming Spain's application to become a member of NATO THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 31...
...Four years ago, two Israeli golfers entered an international competition in Athens, but were refused entry when an Arab embassy complained...
...You do not even want to stop hustling around, making phone calls, making deals, making a name, making money...
...One suspects Truman would sympathize with the direction of Reagan's foreign policy and would find Mondale, Hart, and Jackson more appalling than appealing...
...I f reading a newspaper is considered an unusually marginal intellectual act, what can one say about II Teatro Piccole di Milano's performance of Harlequin: The Servant o f Two Masters...
...They will be in seventh heaven when Los Angeles gets the Royal Opera of Covent Garden and the Ballet Folklorico de Guadelajara...
...They love culture for its own sake...
...He never stopped hating his enemies and unnecessarily invented a few...
...His predecessor had saved Western Europe from Nazi domination...
...But as memories of the controversies with which he was associated faded into the _9 distance, many ordinary Americans found themselves identifying with and admiring him...
...For example, when I first moved here, eight glorious years ago, I often told new acquaintby Benjamin J. Stein ances that I was a writer...
...This explains why the Kremlin tolerates the private sector...
...Relatively open in his contempt for the big publishers, he also harbored an intense distrust of most working reporters and columnists...
...Yet this private sector provides about thrity-three percent of total agricultural output...
...You know, I love to read...
...My Taki Theodoracopulos is The American Spectator's European editor...
...On average, about 44 % of the cash and in-kind income of collective farm families is derived from private household plots...
...What will they think of a performance of Peter Grimes by the Royal Opera of Covent Garden...
...So I close the door to the pool house and I just sit there and read the newspaper for a couple of hours...
...The truth is that while the 400 performances are going on here, the city will be doing what it always does-spewing out mass culture, building itself ever higher and wider, making itself richer and more arrogant, not slowing down even at four in the morning...
...The true spirit of Los Angeles is not about contemplation of artistic creation...
...when he complained a statue erected in his honor was torn down...
...Of course, every city has pockets of guerrillas opposed to the dominant mode of the city, and Los Angeles is no exception...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS I OLYMPIC ART L e t me tell you about high culture in Los Angeles...
...G. Scot Hasted, Room D, Hillsdale College, Hillsdale, MI 49242...
...Novels by people like Doris Lessing or Cynthia Ozick or even Philip Roth are something else, maybe literature...
...But none of the glory of the city has to do with high culture...
...But for the summer of 1984, the sounds people will be listening to will not be opera or ballet, but the usual sounds of making it in the world center of ambition, sounds of cash registers and auto exhausts and applause and deep sighs...
...Not surprising, the Soviet government attributes this dismal performance, not to socialist mismanagement, but to over sixty-five consecutive years of "bad weather...
...Traditionally, Greek governments have lost little time in making their presence felt within Western groupings...
...The authorities simply tore up their visas and threw them out...
...Now the league is semipro, yet the government interferes openly, and at times, blatantly, as when two years ago it penalized an Athenian team four points in order to allow a Pireaus team to win the championship...
...If reading Philip Roth is likened to doing cultural topology, what is the performance by "Cricot 2," an ensemble company from Poland, of Wielopole, Wieiopole, a play which " . . . explores the hold of the past on the present...
...Not by a long shot...
...Here is a quick list: Under Papandreou Greece refused to associate itself with parts of the NATO communique on Poland (pro-government newspapers have called Solidarity a fascist group and Walesa a CIA agent...
...As far as I am concerned, it has the kindest, sweetest, most fun-loving people of any place I have ever lived...
...He defined liberalism as a concern for all the people and played the game, of interest group politics reluctantly and reservedly...
...Los Angeles is a wonderful place...
...environment where social-economic distinctions actually were felt in practice, if not in theory, a failure in business, an associate of crooked politicians, he developed a touchiness about himself and his own brood that verged on the paranoid...
...Since showing the city that you have made it is a major preoccupation, where is the point in sitting amidst a lot of other stiffs-none of whom has ever been in People--listening to a woman in armor scream her lungs out, even if the result is divine operatic glory that can make a listener have a peek at heaven...
...That way, they can tell their friends next day that they saw Godunov or Baryshnikov, just as if they had worn a Vuitton bag or a Cacharel blouse...
...He truly believed that the music critics who panned daughter Margaret's singing were indirectly attacking him...
...Since making yourself into a household word takes lots of concentration, how much thought can be spared a Manet oil...
...For a fuller selection, see Monte M. Poen, Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Unsent Letters of Harry S. Truman (Little, Brown, $10.95...
...This socialist paradise can no longer feed its own people, and must rely heavily on farmers in free nations like the United States to stave off famine...
...They are also allowed to have a cow, two pigs, and as many chickens as they want...
...In Santa Monica, in Pasadena, in old portions of Hancock Park, there are people who have either left the fray or never entered it...
...father quit in disgust...
...he saved it from Soviet domination...
...To find y o u r e x p i r a t i o n d a t e , look on the very first line o f y o u r magazine address label...
...But the government had changed by then and he was given neither...
...It will be a mass infusion of high culture into the high capital of mass culture...
...For example, if culture can be packaged in an upscale designer form, such as Gucci belts or Calvin Klein jeans, Angelenos will buy it and display it...
...Then there were the European Championships held in Athens in 1982...
...This summer, the magnificent city of Los Angeles will host an arts festival to precede and coincide with the Olympic Games...
...These were advertised as the "socialist" games (Papandreou having just come into power), and one of his ministers insisted on making a political speech during the opening ceremonies while hapless Olympic committee officials just stared straight ahead, powerless to interfere...
...seated on the platform behind him listening with rapt atten'A few of these can be found in Off the Record...
...Not only that, but once you have been acclimated to endless movement and effort you become literally addicted to the action...
...If not hustling and struggling to make, take, and display what they have taken and made, they are not really plugged into the guiding genius of the city...
...His personal files contain scores of angry unsent letters 6 that demonstrate a capability for sheer rage unhealthy in a public leader...
...Instinctively, he grasped one of the central truths of this century--that the totalitarianism of the Left was as reprehensible as that of the Right...
...Of course, I'm too busy to do much of it, but some weekends, I just have to read...
...Hillsdale College Hillsdale Michigan 49242 tion of it for its own sake, to put it mildly...
...POLITIQ UE INTERNATIONALE OLYMPIC BOSH by T a k i One of the funniest things I've heard since Gary Hartpenny was the renewed call by Constantine Karamanlis for the Olympic Games to be held permanently in Greece in order to rid them of political interference and commercialization...
...I personally think this makes us a poorer city, and maybe some day it will change...
...a German dance theater that will do an adaptation of The Rite (sic) o f Spring, featuring 400 pounds of dried leaves and a stage planted with live grass...
...That is no exaggeration...
...promoters say, the event will make Los Angeles the cultural center of the world this summer...
...In all, these plots account for only about three percent of the total farmland in the Soviet Union...
...and an exhibition of French Impressionists...
...In addition, there are many car washes located quite near to where I live...
...An intensely partisan Democrat, he was incapable of giving enthusiastic support to any Republican...
...Prone to describe himself as " a little left of center," he was an example of a currently endangered species--a liberal of the Vital Center...
...He learned early that human nature was mixed and that neither as politician nor as chief diplomat could he expect to function in an environment of moral purity...
...Truman went into retirement as an unpopular, discredited President...
...When Karamanlis came to power his state salary was revoked and he became a nonperson...
...I remember as long ago as 1973 when a ruling colonel ordered my father's team (Daddy was chairman and provider for a top team in the first division) to lose a match because it was important for a team from northern Greece to win...
...Will they care if Turandot is brought here or if a flea market is held in the same space...
...He possessed, indeed cultivated, a deep-rooted hatred of the press...
...Once the people in a hurry have gotten to where they want to be, they learn--as people here always do--that keeping yourself in the marquee lights is an endless struggle, that making sure you're the biggest builder in the Wilshire corridor is a lifetime job, that keeping the studios aware of your genius allows no retirement from the fray...
...For further information regarding the availability of a full series of these shod, informative essays, contact Mr...
...One can only shudder at the thought of how Greek politicians would behave during a Greece-hosted Olympic Games, with 600 million people around the world looking on via the idiot box...
...Take what's happened to Greek football, or soccer to be more precise...
...But he also most likely would consider Reagan a renegade too close to those he occasionally characterized as "gluttons of privilege...
...Thus, they will lavish attention and praise on the Olympic Arts Festival, but their feelings will not in any meaningful way represent the real feelings of this city...
...The Pireaus area has a strong Communist constituency, and a football victory diffused a politically dangerous all-out strike...
...So, despite socialist rhetoric to the contrary, even the Soviet Union must grudgingly concede the amazing productive power of workers left free to make their own choices and to keep or sell what they produce...
...Easy...
...When "democracy" was restored, teams once favored by the colonels were punished in the same manner by the "democrats...
...Among the several hundred events will be Shakespearean plays performed in Japanese Kabuki style...
...P a t r i c k Shanahan S u b s c r i p t i o n Manager THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 29 next to the checkout counter at the Safeway...
...Half-consciously, they came to realize that he was in magnified form a composite of all of them...
...Although his family drew hardly a tenth of the attention given the Roosevelts, he felt that they were subjected to a constant barrage of vilification...
...Specifically, it contributes 65 % of that country's potatoes, 40 % of its vegetables, 35 % of its milk and meat, and 50 % of its eggs...
...There will be 400 performances in all, ranging from Mozart operas to jazz to musical scores of movies to "performance a r t . " All in all, as the Benjamin J. Stein is a writer and producer in Hollywood...
...One who makes his assessment after observing the administration of Jimmy Carter, the current state of the Democratic party, and the failure of what is today called liberalism may wonder if Truman's country or his party will ever again do as well...
...In view of the fact that even a 12-and-under marbles tournament in Greece is likely to be politically interfered with, the Greek president's call gave me my biggest laugh since Gary Hartpenny tried to hire that Jackie Onassis look-alike to pose as his wife...
...It will be a magnificent testimony to human persistence and determination, but it will also be an irrelevant edifice, soon covered over by the vines and tendrils of the city that is too busy to pause and admire art, except when that art is about money or fame...
...Until recently the First Division League was supposedly amateur, but players negotiated contracts for enormous salaries with government approval...
...They expect to do their thing, to achieve their quest, more or less overnight...
...He understood that neither his country nor the world could be made perfect...
...Angelenos will consume culture if it is packaged properly, for they have a modest appreciaThe Kremlin's Dirty Little Secret auss,a was once known as the "breadbasket of Europe" due to the bountiful harvests of its fertile Ukraine region...
...Such is the politicization of all walks of life in Greece, that it would take volumes to chronicle all the times the state has interfered in the field of sport...
...And when a Greek female javelin thrower won a gold medal, the Greek minister of sport pushed aside the official who was supposed to award her the medal and dashed onto the field to do it himself...
...he sought simply to improve them...
...A historian writing in 1963 after eight years of Eisenhower and two of Kennedy probably would have commented condescendingly that the nation and the Democratic party could have done worse than Truman...
...Reading a novel by someone other than, say, Harold Robbins, is thought of as exotic almost beyond understanding...
...Even powerful college graduates who bring entire studios to heel have never heard of Puccini (a competitor of Gucci on Rodeo Drive, perhaps...
...Over and over I would get the same response: "Wow, that's really great...
...I'll limit myself to two further examples...
...Those people are genuinely interested in music, art, drama, and sculpture...
...performers who speak and act out their private fantasies...
...Needless to say, it isn't just football that is rotten to the core in Greek sport...
...Again, this is a great city, but it is all about motion, and not at all about contemplation...
...The Olympic Arts Festival will be like that opera house that Fitzcarraldo carried up the Amazon to the heart of the Brazilian jungle...
...In the end, the times in which we live determine our evaluations of historical figures...
...I love to read...
...It is the so-called "private sector...
...He never forgot a slight, real or imagined...
...tion is Ronald R. Reagan, second-rank matinee idol, actors' guild activist, liberal Democrat, and Southern California ADA stalwart...
...Since that requires constant motion, they do not have much leisure to sit through the Ninth Symphony and be moved by its majesty...
...But Angelenos would not care much about seeing a ballet by, say, the Stuttgart Ballet, even though it is a truly great company, because who at the office or at the health club has ever heard of Stuttgart...
...There are widows, coupon-clippers, perpet30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1984 ual students, artists who are not pitching scripts at Universal, schoolteachers genuinely inspired by The Magic Flute who never even go near a tax-sheltered offering...
...You see, Los Angeles is a city of people in a hurry...
...The football ruling body is appointed by none other than the Prime Minister and answers only to him...
...A similar thing happened to Christos Papanicolaou, a pole vaulter who set a world record at the 1969 European Championships--in Athens...
...In Los Angeles, entire sections of the population believe that classical music ranges from Carl Perkins to the Beatles...
...A product of the populistic rural Midwest, he distrusted big labor almost as much as big business...
...One cannot help but wonder how they would react to each other today...
...Papandreou, of course, has turned this practice into an art...
...a dramatization of the Vietnam war from a local theater company's point of view...
...Since the Revolution and the collectivization of the farms, however, agricultural output has been notoriously low...
...If a ballet group with a name star like Alexander Godunov or Baryshnikov passes through town they will flock to see it...
...I wish I could find a way to explain just how marginal to Los Angeles life this entire exercise will be, and how silly in the context of Southern California culture, but I do not think I can, any more than I could imagine typing enough words to fill up the black holes in space...
...It is about getting and spending, pure and simple...
...During the upheavals of the 1960s, he seemed to them a reassuring link with the past...
...But these people, while often fine individuals and good friends, are almost completely marginal to what the city is about...
...As bad as their agricultural situation is, it would be much worse in the absence of these little oases...
Vol. 17 • July 1984 • No. 7
