When Bluegrass is Better than Ballet

...For one thing, there’s something pathetic about the phenomenon Trillin describes-to defend your city on the basis of its symphony and French restaurants is to buy the New York criteria and therefore to admit that you’re second rate, albeit in there trying...

...You Have to Have a Reason Certainly New Yorkers have done a lot to make this kind of reassurance necessary, by explaining to everyone who’ll listen why ‘ it’s really quite impossible for them to consider living anywhere else...

...Why can’t Kentuckians justify their existence through bluegrass music or horse racing or basketball, instead of trying to prove they’ve 46 got Culture...

...The references to opera and all-night laundromats might be a little strained, but they’re really just a shorthand wak.of saying that they like the way New York is, which is certainly an admirable sentiment...

...I’LL BET THEY DON’T WEAR SHOES IN KENTUCKY is the headline, and it’s followed, in smaller type, by: “You’re right...

...There must have been Huck Finns around in Washington Irving’s time, but it took decades for a great writer to be able to draw on such unclassy material...

...In these times of professional mobility, living somewhere just because you happen to have been born there isn’t enough-you have to have a reason...

...See, they can say to themselves, I’m not really missing much...

...Aesthetic Starvation’ By the early 20th century, England wasn’t the fixation it had been, but there was still the strong feeling that America hadn’t made it yet...

...Northeastern cities usually finish far down the list, and spacious, prosperous, warm, half-suburban towns are the big winners...

...Most important, we’re now ignoring the local customs and institutions that have always been the source of much of America’s greatest achievements, both in culture and in commerce...

...But there’s another of the people who place them...

...major civic advertiser is Kentucky, whose most recent ad shows a ballet dancer in a swanlike pose...

...In Washington, it inspires far more faith in the greatness of America to walk through the congressional office buildings and see the variety of local paraphernalia in reception rooms than to gaze on the marble expanse of the Kennedy Center...

...Hence they invent criteria of quality of urban life that only New York can meet, like opera, even if those criteria are a tiny part of their lives...

...It caught on with intellectuals in England, Europe, and Japan long before it did in America...

...It’s hard to say whether we’re missing something like jazz now, because most people don’t brag about indigenous music played in bars, as they should...

...Trillin makes a convincing case for the greatness of just the kind of food his local booster friends would try their damndest to steer him away from-the fried and the barbecued...

...Circuitous Means Even when traditional jazz was “discovered,” it was only through the most circuitous means...

...Hollywood was turning out great Westerns for years before American intellectuals, at the prodding of the French, realized that they were worth watching...

...The editor of the collection, Harold E. Steams, pretty much summed it up in his introduction: “. . . the most moving and pathetic fact in the social life of America today is emotional and aesthetic starvation...

...The targets varied over time...

...Quality of life indexes must have been invented by Californians and other Westerners who wanted a way of proving that their cities, not New York, should be everyone’s ideal...

...The present criteria don’t very accurately reflect the way people live-the way the houses in a town look, the way the streets are laid out, and the way people talk all have much more to do with that than the presence or absence of a ballet or the number of parks...

...Ten to one, he never visits a picture gallery or a sculpture exhibition, his taste in the theater is probably that of the tired business man, and what little reading he does is likely to be confined to trade papers, Snappy Stones, and best sellers...

...No wonder the kind of people who have gone to college in the East and then come back home have felt a burning shame at their hometowns’ cultural barrenness, and therefore tried valiantly to set up little enclaves of Culture...

...How many Americans would know the difference if it was profound...

...and more particularly it’s supposed to persuade the executives in New York who would be sent down to run those branches that it’s not all that bad out in the bush leagues-you can leave New York and still see the ballet...

...A city without an opera company or all-night laundromats or a dozen art-fiim houses or the Times just isn’t a livable place...

...When Kentuckians can brag about bluegrass instead of ballet, it won’t just make them feel better about themselves and their state-it will also make it much more likely that they’ll contribute something significant to American life, or recognize that they’re doing so already...

...It’s no wonder that the people in the hinterlands have become shell-shocked over the years, and scrambled to fall into some semblance of respectability...

...On the other hand, wrote Taylor, in a way this hardly mattered: “Suppose most American music is trivial and superficial...

...This is nothing new, of course...

...Some (like Sinclair Lewis) attacked Midwesterners and businessmen, others (like H. L. Mencken) the South, others (like Dwight Macdonald) “mass culture...

...A representative cultural document of the early 1920s is a collection of essays by young New Yorkers called Civilization in the United States, the thrust of which is that there isn’t any...

...The phenomenon of regional insecurity, or trying to prove yourself to tlie big boys of culture and commerce on their terms, is certainly nothing new in America...

...No wonder we have today 130 symphony orchestras in the United States...

...It goes back to the early days, when England occupied the position New York does now and the whole country, instead of just the outlands, had a severe case of cultural insecurity...

...That’s not really a bad thing...

...Sometimes these campaigns take the form of no-nonsense ads in The Wall Street Journal touting the city or state’s “favorable business climate” (that is, its low taxes and right-to-work laws), but at their most ambitious they’re in The New Yorker or The New York Times or Harper’s and devote themselves to proclaiming more abstract virtues...

...So just as the people in Kentucky have to convince themselves that it’s OK that they’re not in New York, the people in New York have to convince themselves that it really is great to be there...

...Only in the sixties, when it was dying, was jazz fully recognized “as art, as culture, as a truly-indigenous-American-contributionignored-all-these-years...

...Sometimes we wear ballet slippers...

...Midwesterners and Businessmen Since then, intellectuals in New York have begun to feel somewhat better about themselves, at least, but they’ve turned their fire on other elements of the country, giving them the treatment American intellectuals once got from the British...

...Irving wrote about America too, but it took essays in a distinctly non-American vein to knock the British critics dead and become, officially, a major figure-just as now it’s only when Des Moines has a symphony that it’s officially a city worthy of the name...

...The New Orleans city fathers tore down the neighborhood that housed the greatest of the old jazz dance halls to make room for a very large concrete “cultural center...

...We’re living in an age where if you’re a certain kind of ambitious professional and you’re not living in New York, it’s incumbent on you to give a reason why, to dispel the fear that there’s something wrong with you, that you’re really a second-rater...

...We have no heritages and traditions to which to cling except those that have already withered in our hands and tumed into dust...

...Deems Taylor, who contributed the chapter on music, chimed in that the American composer “is likely to be a much less interesting person than one’s iceman...

...No doubt educated Kentuckians are bemoaning the same kind of shortcomings in their state today...

...The United States’ first Famous Writer (as opposed to writerstatesman), Washington Irving, had to win his spurs by going to England and writing a series of genteel historical essays that began with sentences like, “I am somewhat of an antiquity hunter, and am fond of exploring London in quest of the relics of old times...

...In his new book, George Lewis, A Jazzman from New Orleans, Tom Bethel1 points out that jazz wasn’t written about seriously until the late thirties, and was first recorded and chronicled in detail in New Orleans in the forties by a Missourian expatriate named William Russell...

...Besides the abstract satisfaction of classifying places as they should be classified, there are good reasons for trying to find these proper criteria of local quality of life...

...What’s too bad is that more people in other places don’t invent criteria that only their towns can meet, rather than buying New York’s...

...we have ballet here too...

...In most American cities,” Calvin Trillin of The New Yorker wrote in his book American Fried, “a booster is likely to insist on defending the place to outsiders in terms of what he thinks of as the sophisticated standards of New York . . . . A visitor, particularly a visitor from the East, is invariably subjected to a 30-minute commercial about the improvement in the local philharmonic, a list of Broadway plays (well, musicals) that have been through in the past year, and some comment like Lwe happen to have an excellent French restaurant here now.’ ’’ A more recent spinoff standard of judging places, often opposite in result but equally misguided, is what might be called urban studies rationalism...

...The composer here lives in an atmosphere that is, at the worst, good-natured contempt . . . . In the minds of many of his compatriots [music] ranks only as an entertainment and a diversion, slightly above embroidery and unthinkably below baseball...

...Eccentrics working in garages are far more likely to produce genuinely useful innovations in business than are corporate regional offices...

...The Way People Talk I don’t mean to denigrate the importance of high culture or to endorse poverty and crime, but there must be some better way of sizing up the pleasures and displeasures of living in a particular place in America...

...But rarely was anything of value found out there...

...This involves figuring out a city’s “quality of life” through some complex mathematical formula, taking into account things like median per capita income, hospital beds per thousand, murder rate, and park space per hundred acres...

...Particular local customs and institutionsindigenous food or music or architecture or special events-have a great deal to do with defining a place but seldom turn up on the official scorecards...

...When Civilization in the United States was written, jazz was burgeoning in New Orleans, Memphis, Chicago, and New York-but Deems Taylor didn’t even mention it in his essay on American music, except for a couple of sneering references to “Negro music...

...Now the Nicholas Lemann is an editor of The Washington Monthly...

...The classic case of a local institution being ignored because it didn’t 48 meet the respectable standards of the time is jazz, which is now commonly called the only original American art form...

...We’re into a lot of things in Kentucky...

...Now the general purpose of this ad is to convince big corporations to open branches in Kentucky (“Profit Center U.S.A...

...Also, accepting standards that are the same everywhere imposes a uniformity and homogenization on a country whose diversity is a tremendous strength...

...When Bluegrass is Better than Ballet by Nicholas Lemann Every so often a local Chamber of Commerce will rear back, wind up, and start a national advertising campaign designed to attract business from elsewhere...

...Atlanta, for instance, ran a campaign a few years ago with the slogan THE NEXT GREAT AMERICAN CITY...

...So now the main standard for judging the worth of places in America is the New York Big Time standard: a city or state’s quality is measured according to how close it comes to New York in terms of Big Culture and, to a lesser extent, Big Business (Atlantans like to brag about the number of corporate regional offices located there...

...In a way, the New Yorkers are playing the same game as the Kentuckians...

...Hence Kentucky’s ads must have a reassuring effect on the kind of Kentuckians who read The New Yorker...

...We’re not all horse farms and tobacco and fried chicken...

...Throughout the twenties and thirties and forties, while traditional jazz was having its golden age in New Orleans, it was studiously avoided by the local gentry, who were no doubt putting their music-promoting energies into symphony fund drives...