Jacques Barzun is always worth your time, but a 100th birthday is even more worthwhile. (The exchange below is classic.)

Not everything that Barzun wrote struck me with equal force, and some years later, when I edited a compilation of his essays, I made so bold as to tinker with his style. The editorial process led to a spate of letters, highlighting our asynchronous temperaments. During one exchange, I suggested that the importance of what he was saying warranted heightened language. His reply came so fast that I thought he’d bounded across Central Park and put the letter in my mailbox himself. “You are a sky-high highbrow,” he wrote. “Me, I suspect highbrows (and low- and middle-) as I do all specialists, suspect them of making things too easy for themselves; and like women with a good figure who can afford to go braless, I go about brow-less.” Undeterred, I offered to rewrite the passages in question. My changes were acknowledged with fitting tribute. “To put it in a nice, friendly, unprejudiced way,” he responded, “your aim as shown in your rewritings of the ‘objectionable’ sentences strikes me as patronizing, smarmy, emetic!” My heart swells when I contemplate that exclamation point, as he seldom resorts to one.

Barzun always seemed to know everything you had ever read or thought about reading one day ... The charge against Barzun, accordingly, was that he spread himself too thin. "I think his natural reserve and the variegated subject matter have caused him to be taken less seriously by the intellectual crowd that runs literature departments and literary quarterlies."

Barzun, though, never intended to write for that crowd. Instead, as he put it in a letter to me, he wanted “to write for a quite different, less homogeneous group: academics in other departments than English, people with a non-professional interest in the arts (doctors who play music, lawyers who read philosophy) and a certain number of men and women in business and philanthropy, in foundations and newspapers or publishing houses.” In writing for a general audience, Barzun was taking sides in an old debate about the relationship between the intellectual writer and the reading public. It was a question not of how much the reading public could bear but of who constituted that public. When Dr. Johnson wrote, “I rejoice to concur with the common reader,” he could count on that reader to actually read or hear about his rejoicing. He was speaking, after all, about a relatively small number of educated Brits who owned businesses or property and could afford to buy books. When Barzun began writing, the size and diversity of the reading public discouraged such assumptions.

Age of Reason: Jacques Barzun at 100

If you haven't read (or finished) From Dawn to Decadence, you might want to get to work; Barzun is currently "putting the finishing touches" on his next book.

I did not actually meet Barzun until 1957 ... At that time Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling were teaching their famous graduate seminar on major works in the development of the modern mind. Admission to the Barzun-Trilling seminar, as it was known, entailed an interview with the two professors, which took place in Trilling’s Hamilton Hall office. This turned out to be genial, indeed conducted with a tone that suggested that in some sense we were equals, gentlemen and professionals, and serious about goals the three of us shared.

In that first interview I gained a distinct sense that what they wanted were seminar participants who not only would teach but had it in mind to write in a serious way, and to the extent possible be engaged in focused and shaping activity: No Waste Landers; no Bartleby the Scriveners; no William Steig figures curled up in protective boxes of sensibility.

The course met once a week in the evening. Each week, the two-hour session began with the consideration of an essay written by a member of the class. Clean copies had been put on reserve for the class to read. At the seminar the author received his own work back with written comments by Trilling and Barzun. Then the group discussed the essay. The pretensions of my first essay were annihilated, especially by Barzun. One result was that, as I rose from the dead, he was able to praise my second effort as publishable. There can be no doubt that other students found the intense criticism of Barzun and Trilling invaluable to their writing.

Jacques Barzun at 100 | The New Criterion

I have never met anyone who likes Putin as a person. One answer to the riddle of his electoral success is quite simple and quite sad. For virtually the first time in history, Russian citizens were given the primary instrument of political democracy: direct and competitive elections. But they do not know why they need this instrument or how to make use of it. Eleven hundred years of history have taught us only two possible relationships to authority, submission and revolt. The idea of peacefully replacing our ruler through a legal process is still a wild, alien thought for us. The powers-that-be are above the law and they're unchangeable by law. Overthrowing them is something we understand. But at the moment, we don't want to. We've had quite enough revolution.

Why Putin Wins

An ode to lost stigma.

It seems as if every commercial these days has a rock band in it. What was once the mark of utter uncoolness, a veritable byword of selling out, has become the norm. More than a decade ago we became inured to the most unlikely parings. Led Zeppelin in a Cadillac ad. The Clash shilling for Jaguar. Bob Dylan warbling for an accounting firm, or Victoria's Secret. An Iggy Pop song about a heroin-soaked demimonde accompanying scenes of blissful vacationers on a Caribbean cruise ship.

There is no longer even a debate, let alone a stigma.

UPDATE: See Current for a visual depiction of the equation.

How to Calculate Musical Sellouts

Can you imagine ... the horror, the horror of being denied floor seats for Kathy Griffin?

In its lawsuit against RMG, Ticketmaster essentially argues that the free market isn't all that free. In court filings last summer, Ticketmaster says that RMG's clients used bots to purchase, for example, 5 percent of the tickets to a Beastie Boys concert, and as much as 40 percent of the best floor seats to a show by comedian Kathy Griffin, denying the public a chance at these seats. Ticketmaster accused one broker of using the software to buy 45,000 tickets since 2003. Ticketmaster has since taken countermeasures to prevent such "assaults," but executives say automated buying still occurs.

Is the Ticket Biz Out of Line?

Screened at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, and now scheduled for release in January.

American Music: OFF THE RECORD features theorists Noam Chomsky and Douglas Rushkoff in an interrogation of the American music industry. The film covers a great deal of ground from the authenticity of live music to the circumvention of the corporate machine by indie distribution, to the demise of the privately owned music store.

Many musicians and musical acts are featured including Richard Thompson, James McMurtry, Rodney Crowell, Lizzie West, Sonic Youth, David Lindley, Mission of Burma, Watermelon Slim, David Allen Coe, Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Darden Smith, Carolyn Wonderland, The Mavericks, Bob Walkenhorst, The Alloy Orchestra, The Morells, Little Feat, Candy Coburn, Camper Van Beethoven, Cracker, Billy Joe Shaver, Pavlov's Dog, Chubby Carrier, Buckethead, Lee Roy Parnell, The Blasters, Country Joe McDonald, Eddie “DEVILBOY” Turner, Big Bill Morganfield (son of Muddy Waters), Chris Duarte, Eric Lindell, Bugs Henderson, Les Dudek, Rick Derringer, Commander Cody, The Elders, Hothouse Flowers, Room Full of Blues, Webb Wilder, Chris Scruggs, Hank Williams III, John Mooney, The Belairs, Wanda Jackson, Paul Thorn, Rev. Billy Wirtz, Kerry Livgren, Iron Butterfly, It’s a Beautiful Day, Canned Heat, Les Paul, Tommy Castro and The Bottle Rockets, Diunna Greenleaf, WAR, Roger Miller, and Lee Oskar.

Here's what the Arkansas Times had to say:

Come for the discussion on the corporatized world of music production and distribution, stay for the celebrities! Led by Noam Chomsky and Douglas Rushkoff, “American Music: Off the Record” takes viewers on a tour through the paradox of the “music industry” — the industrial production of an art form — and finds some disquieting facts. Along the way, we meet Mission of Burma, David Allan Coe, Sonic Youth and other musicians who have found their own, idiosyncratic ways through the sweatshop stage of the capitalistic arts.

American Music: Off the Record

"The paradigm in the music business has shifted, and as an artist and a businesswoman I have to move with that shift. For the first time in my career, the way that my music can reach my fans is unlimited."

That's what she said.

Madonna Moves On

Love at first sight is a myth, you see, and it all comes down to biology and narcissism.

... if you want any further evidence of how science kills music, listen to Simon Singh's excruciating rewrite of Katie Melua's already nauseating Nine Million Bicycles. You have been warned.

The passion killers

Oversized and overhyped, the world's biggest plane is here. Is the Airbus A380 the "most hideous airliner ever conceived?"

...

Granted, economy class on Emirates, or any of the other A380 buyers, is, how to put this, not the same as economy on Southwest or U.S. Airways, but steerage is steerage, and pity the poor slobs who, after crossing the ocean, have to march bleary-eyed through first or business class on their way out the door, glimpsing all they have missed, most of it now heaped on the floor: the full-size pillows and duvets; the champagne glasses and silver tea trays -- like a banquet room strewn with the remnants of orgy and feast.

Airbus Behemoth Leaves Room For Improvement

In the 1960s Marshall W. Nirenberg deciphered the genetic code, the combination of the A, T, G and C nucleotides that specify amino acids. So why do people think that Francis Crick did it?

The Forgotten Code Cracker