A few nights back I stayed up late, reading this interview with "journalist" Janet Malcolm.

Let me present a backhanded insult about Alex Ross. (Which is to say, a compliment.) Here's the thing that pisses me off about the guy.

Of late I have been endeavoring to understand dance. A review of Mark Morris's "Socrates" at BAM helped me some with its inclusion of a quote about...butts.

"The art world, which used to be a community, is now part of the world wide visual culture industry, which includes film, fashion, television, and advertising, and works overtime to trample down the boundaries that used to keep them separate."

"The only recent photograph of him (taken many years ago) is of him wearing a furious face as he fends off an intruding cameraman." Indeed. His name is J.D. Salinger, and now he's dead.

Today's take on the Community Function is via late 19th century France & The New Yorker. The title was "Van Gogh's Ear: The Christmas Eve that changed modern art." In fact, though, the piece is about the isolation & collaboration & community artists have saught, lost & found in our modern era.

Tickets went on sale last week for The New Yorker festival, the annual roundelay of uber-cultured readings, panels, concerts & events which -- much like The New Yorker itself -- are perhaps a bit too self-consciously about Culture with a capital C rather than about the culture (lower case c) that they are presenting.