Command Performance
Alexander, Jane
outs, let alone entered cyberspace. Stillman gives us a marvelous po~ait of a group of intelligent and sensitive people improvising their third decades in the job market. Three of them work...
...And there is Des, who is a wonderful creation...
...It is true that certain European countries TASAddress Changes Made Easy...
...Most aren't interested in keeping classical music or Elizabethan drama alive, and Jane Alexander's NEA recoils from such elitism...
...Until now, the same could be said of Disco...
...Still, art is an elastic term...
...N Dame lane Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics Jane Alexartder PublicAffairs ~322pages /$25 REVIEWED BY Philip Terzian y ou may recognize Jane Alexander, the stage and TV actress who always looks as if she is posing for an equestrian statue--as the horse, of course...
...Minor errors aboundSen...
...Rep...
...This being a Stillmanesque production, it is no surprise to discover at the end that this highly talkative bunch have been secretly maturing into solid bourgeoisie all along...
...Maxine Waters, she is full of bile on the subject of Republicans and their friends in the press...
...Name: {Please Print) Address: City: State: Zip: Date of change: VCAFRM...
...The narrator adds that "it's not as if we have so many decades that we can afford to go around trashing them for no very good reason...
...While I appreciate Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Johann Strauss, Jr., I also enjoy a Southern drawl, Nascar, the Allman Brothers, and barbecue...
...3. Return this form to us at the address listed below...
...He is among the most conservative Republicans in the Senate...
...He is the author of the $500 per child tax credit...
...I've always thought of the South as a second mother...
...Tom DeLay's brain, she declares, "could fit in an eggcup as far as I could tell...
...Jane Alexander left Washington deeply embittered, and in Command Performance, her memoir as "an actress in the theater of politics," she settles innumerable scores...
...the balance are reliant on the kindness of strangers...
...Another, Josh, works for the Manhattan district attorney and ends up busting the Club's owner for drugs and tax evasion...
...Strong stuff-- especially from someone who refers to Americans living overseas as "ex-patriots," and writes a lazy, repetitive, self-indulgent book...
...In the larger sense, however, she failed: The NEA budget shrank annually on her watch, and the value of the agency remains open to question...
...He would like to spend his life watching television and doing drugs and lands a job in the downtown club scene which is highly compatible with both pursuits...
...W hich is the central weakness of Command Performance: For all of her devotion to art--not to say her federal office in its service-- Jane Alexander has little idea what it constiThe American Spectator _9 October 200o 73 tutes, and the philistine's conviction that all art is of equal value...
...1. Please write },our new address in the space provided...
...The South is home and always will be...
...Jane Alexander came to Washington to resuscitate a federal agency that, as often happens, was founded on ideals but descended into squalor...
...In the late 195o's Father Ryan began to accept black youths (it was all-male until 197o ) who were denied access to white public schools, which were still segregated...
...From her standpoint, that was a vietory: She stood firm against barbarians in defense of art...
...Bumping into George Will in an elevator, she observes that his left arm is in a cast and thinks "all the while that if he had a cast on the other am~ also he might not be able to write...
...The pattern is followed in Jane Alexander's NEA...
...Which leaves us, in the end, back where we began...
...When she tires of laughing at adversaries less sophisticated than members of the Alexander family (her husband is producer of TV's "Law and Order"), she pads out her book with three incessant themes: her immersion in the stage, her lifelong devotion to left-wing political causes, and her passionate belief in the healing power of Art...
...But for PHILIP TERZIAN writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal...
...Box 655, Mr...
...With adroit dialogue, marvelous scene-painting and sharp character-sketching, Stillman has delivered an era that was not so long ago but seems to have sunk beneath the pavement like a lost Atlantis...
...In that sense, the NEA was a product of its times: The Johnson administration had unlimited faith in the talent of bureaucrats, and nothing but suspicion for the genius of the marketplace...
...It was originally opened as Nashville Catholic High School in 1925, graduated its first class in 1927 , and soon after the name was changed to Father Ryan High School...
...Today Father Ryan has 1,ooo students of both genders and several different colors...
...there is considerable evidence that it exists largely to endow mediocrity, or subsidize "performance artists" whose adolescent antics --smearing blood or chocolate syrup on a host of naked bodies-so agitates Republicans...
...Ted Kennedy, "the finest politician of them all," and the "thoughtful" Rep...
...Dickens and Thackeray would have had no complaints about the abundant novelistic material available on the dance floors of Studio, Heartbreak, and all those raffish music holes south of 14th Street...
...Everyone who went to college in the early seventies knows him...
...reasons not entirely evident to Miss Alexander, whose recurrent theme is her estrangement from politics, both have survived to this day...
...And while she is full of admiration for such culture-ridden legislators as Sen...
...They were, in fact, "the youngadult Wonder Years...
...My father, two uncles, and numerous cousins have also graduated from there...
...Sidney Yates, express their affection largely in fiscal terms: There is no evidence in Miss Alexander's account that Congressman Yates knows anything about art, but he knows what he likes, and he likes to spend public money...
...There is no sense that the NEA contributes to anything like distinction in the arts, which an educated public would readily discern...
...She complains, with a straight face, that the United States "is unique in the world in funding the arts with only ten percent of public money and ninety percent private money...
...Tim Penny is a cheap liberal...
...When Jane Alexander marshals artists to lobby for her agency, they are generally artists of problematic stature: Michael Bolton, Kenny G, Jon Secada, Melanie Griffith...
...Speaker Newt Gingrich "was in charge of an unruly mob of firebrands out for total revolution...
...After the Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, there was sentiment to abolish the arts endowment and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...The difficulty is that my attitude is shared by a distinct minority of Americans...
...She lived in Washington during the 196o's and 7o's, but is surprised to learn that most members of Congress have little interest in aesthetics, or harbor middlebrow tastes...
...As long as they could meet the entrance requirements, Catholic or not, they were accepted...
...1 Renew my subscription for or~e },ear (ten issues $34.95) _7 Payment encIosed "1 Bill me later -I At various times TAS rents its subscriber lists to other organizations...
...Three of them work for an old-fashioned publishing house that doesn't pay much but at least keeps lit their literary pilot lights...
...What is surprising is that people who should know better think culture is served by a middling federal agency whose products no one could possibly name...
...In Europe, subsidies for the arts also mean cash for institutions of distinction: symphony orchestras, famous museums, historic opera companies...
...So far as he is concerned, the early 198o's were a time of hard work and maximum productivity...
...But if Germany is anything to go by--and it is the country whose taxpayer-financed art I know best--it's a dubious investment...
...And although my father's family came from Italy and my mother's family from Piqna in western Ohio, barely over lOO years ago, both my parents and my paternal grandmother were born here, as was I. l appreciate my Southern heritage, while renouncing racism (as well as the antics of that faux Tennessean, A1 Gore, Jr...
...If you prefer that your name not be rented, please check here...
...Check out his voting record...
...David Boren, D-Okla., is identified as "another Republican but a great arts supporter"--and Command Performance is clogged with irrelevant detail: The entire text of her oath of office is reprinted, for example, and readers are kept abreast of her children's careers...
...The artists who profit most from government largesse are those whose talent is least conspicuous, and much of the "public art" produced for public spaces is appalling...
...It's elementary economics: Artists of ability succeed in the marketplace...
...She sees no difference, as it were, between John Singer Sargent and Sergeant Bilko...
...He has spent his professional life waiting for a climactic moment when he could say, "Book this clown...
...The problem, of course, is that Miss Alexander's understanding of art is so broad, so credulous, and so amusingly haphazard that her critical faculties are largely confined to politics...
...Tom Wolfe once complained that the hippie subculture did not produce a single good novel...
...The narrator is rightly annoyed that the 198o's are always referred to as the Decade of Greed...
...And fortunately for them, the Europeans are less inclined to agonize over the problem any democratic arts endowment faces: Recognizing and financing excellence requires discrimination...
...spend considerable sums commissioning public art, apart from architecture...
...and so achieves the most vocational satisfaction...
...2. Attach the mailing label from your most recent issue...
...Having paid little attention to the National Endowment for the Arts over the years, I was surprised to learn the extent to which it appears to be a credit union for incompetents, poetasters, and a second-rate avant-garde...
...And that is too bad, for public subsidy of the arts makes an interesting debate...
...STEPHEN g . ROSA Nashville, Tennessee Hot Rod Where did you get the idea that Senator Rod Grams was a "moderate at best" (On the Prowl, TAS, July/August 2oo0...
...WILLIAM a. COOPER Former Minnesota Republican Party Chair Minneapolis, Minnesota 74 October 2000 . The American Spectator...
...As well, it enjoys fine academic and athletic reputations...
...Morris, IL 61054-8(;84 1-800-524-3469 IMPORTANT: Allow six ~ eeks for addl~'ss change...
...Between 1993 and 1997 she took a detour from show business to serve as chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and while her tenure at the NEA was not her greatest performance, it was not entirely a failure, either...
...She is furious that President Clinton seldom dropped what he was doing to discuss things with her at the White House...
...Where do you guys get this stuff...
...It is no surprise that someone like Jane Alexander would be blind to the origins of America's artistic wealth: The freedom to create and nourish the arts in the absence of government intrusion or encouragement...
...That's all there is to it...
...Not even a rivulet of tepid prose issued from the typewriters of acid freaks...
...Just be sure to allow six weeks for your change to take effect, Mail to: Subscriber Service P.O...
...The vision of a benevolent government spreading seeds of creativity has long since been supplanted by the specter of a welfare office for performers...
...Those who take an interest in the arts, like the "gallant" Rep...
...While I understand the principled argument against governmentfinanced art, I have no problem with assistance for civic orchestras or Shakespeare companies...
...vN Correspondence (Continued from page ii) Father Ryan High School, named for Father Abram RyN1, the "Poet Laureate of the Confederacy" whose poetry begins and ends the article, in 1967...
Vol. 33 • October 2000 • No. 8
