Over at Vanity Fair, James Wolcott blogs about Laura Jacobs' article, Dogma & Diaghilev, which appears in the May issue of The New Criterian. Jacobs asks "How did we get to the point where just about every new classical dance
is meaningless?" and a little later suggests "I suppose George Balanchine deserves some blame." No doubt the folks over on BalletFart are wrinkling their noses like they just snorted their own bad smells.
Frankly, Haglund thinks much of the blame should be pointed at Lawrence Ferlinghetti for all the trouble he started with A Coney Island of the Mind back in 1958. We all loved that drivel so much. Oh, the "empty air of existence" and the "strung-out citizens in painted cars and they have strange license plates and engines that devour America." And then a few years later that guy and his Trout Fishing in America became all the rage. That book was about Nothing more than Seinfeld was about Nothing. But everyone had to have a copy of it and pretty soon the rage was all about being Nothing. Nothing was the coolest you could be. Nothing was Something. You see, if you acted like Nothing, people would act like you're Something, because they didn't want to look like they really were attracted to your Nothingness which they wanted to believe was Somethingness. But didn't we outgrow all that?
Seems not yet.