Many years ago I shot a feature length motion picture in just over a week. In the time since then I have worked on many books, as publisher, coach, packager and author. Until a few days ago, I had always assumed that my movies would come and go, but books would be forever.

I’m beginning to think I got it backward.

The movie was called The Real Thing, and later one of its many distributors renamed it Teenager. I was working as Vice President of a little company that had been formed to operate movie theaters — National Cinema Corporation. The head of the company, Peter,  got the bright idea one day that we should go into the production part of the business. Since I was already on the payroll and I was also an experienced movie director, maybe I could make some inexpensive films that we could run in our own theaters.

Being young and eager, I said sure. We had a budget well under six figures, but I had many friends who were among the top technical people around. I wrote the film with my friend Alan Hodshire over the lengthy period of about two weeks. We crafted a story about a crazed, out-of-control film director who would risk anything to get “reality” of some kind. In this instance, he was shooting a biker movie, where the bikers ride into town and create mayhem, eventually heading off into the sunset with one of the town’s impressionable teenage girls. The plot shifts back and forth from inside the film-within-the-film to the wrap-around story of the director, and you can’t always tell which reality you’re in.

I then edited the film, inveigled my dear friend David Davis to write the score, and we found some extra money for a good-sized orchestra and pulled some other favors so we could mix the final version at Paramount. The film played in our own theaters for a few months (and elsewhere) and like most movies of the day went away. For many years, that was the last I thought about it.

Then a few decades later, my oldest son came across a VHS tape of the film under a new title, Teenager, and I soon screened it. Very intense for me to watch it again, each shot bringing back at almost the muscle-memory level the incredible physical effort of shooting an entire motion picture in just over week. As for the film itself? You know, some parts of it were still watchable if I do say so myself.

Dissolve to last month. The American Cinematheque in Los Angeles got a bug about finding and running The Real Thing. They called me, but I couldn’t find a 35mm. print. They were going to abandon the revival, but then they discovered a collector in Australia who just happened to have a print in Austin. A miracle.

So on May 6th, on one of the largest screens in Hollywood — the Egyptian Theater — The Real Thing, aka Teenager, is going to thrill, amuse, or more likely mildly distract an audience one more time. Then? Sky’s the limit. Maybe there’ll even be a Blu-Ray version one of these days.

And that’s what struck me. That incredibly inexpensive little movie that took me just a few months to create has ended up having a life much greater than I would have expected for most books I’ve worked on. Lots of books, including many important ones, really do disappear. Certainly they’re not going to be revived when you can hardly get brand new and really important books reviewed by the New York Times the first time around. Can it be that movies, most of which once seemed to be so ephemeral, and books, most of which seemed destined to last forever, have actually switched places?

What would that suggest to the young artist looking for the right medium? Does everything change when you realize that films have a tendency to never go away? Are people more likely to find your work on Netflix thirty years from now than on Amazon?

If you’re in L.A. week after next, I hope I’ll see you at the Egyptian. I’ll be the guy with the indelible big grin.

Frank Rich gets it right more often than not, and his column in the Times last Sunday swept the entire decade into a neat little dustpan and dumped it in the garbage. His insight is that Tiger Woods is truly the person of the decade, a fraud capping a decade of frauds that started with Enron, wound its way through a phony war, went broke with phony financiers, and concluded with a phony hero. Fortunately Rich ended with a spiritual and uplifting finale that, at least for me, had me singing on the way out of the theatre.

Actually, in the spirit of Rich’s phony decade, I lied about that last part. There was no happy conclusion to his piece. But it caused me to keep wondering — why are we so untethered? What happened to the basic judgment of a previously sensible people?

Authors swim in the memes of the times. If there are strong currents, we go with them and occasionally bring understanding to the great issues of the day. But when we are surrounded by eddy currents, we too find ourselves stuck in little currents, unable to find the great tide that, as Shakespeare said, “When taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Before the era when the New York Times was distributed to its printers around the country electronically, all of the papers were printed in and around Manhattan. On any Sunday, airplanes would leave New York, weather permitting, and the massive bundles would spread out across the country, bringing a measure of coherency to many of the major memes that flowed through the culture. At the very least, the Times provided a sensible, apparently complete view of what had happened in the past week. And it also provided an agenda for the near future.

Later, the roll-out of the Sunday Times became almost simultaneous and national. On the West Coast, that meant our Sundays could start earlier. We were even more in sync with New York. That phase has mysteriously eroded away with the onset of the Internet. That steady weekly pulse of the Sunday Times has given way to a continuous flow of information from an infinite number of sources. The Times as authority has been drowned out. No institution has taken its place.

We find ourselves in a new Wild Wild West, and, as predicted, the snake oil salesmen are having a grand time of it –those rubes will believe anything and buy anything. We might take some comfort in remembering what came next: newspapers arrived in those frontier towns, courageous reporters, editors and publishers began to shine a light on the forces of corruption and to rally public opinion on the side of good (sometimes.) The towns eventually hired sheriffs, and built jails. Judges rode the circuit and dispensed justice.

Fortunately, order will prevail over the current chaos. Visionary and courageous publishers in all media will invest mightily to make the most of the new opportunities. A New New York Times, either on the ashes of the old or a new enterprise altogether, will arise. Out of the sheer force of brilliant and persistent reporting, deep commentary, and visionary leadership, the nation will find its way once again. Memes will cohere, and authenticity will once again be the currency of the culture. That’s the way it’s going to be. Really. Trust me.

A Merry Christmas to all those celebrating, and Happy Holidays to all!

Why can’t little Tiffany learn to program? What happened to American genius for math? I’ve been wondering about this for a long time, but suddenly I saw the cause during the World Series last night.

Imagine a computer that runs on chewing tobacco. Shouldn’t be that hard — just picture your basic Major League Baseball manager, leaning on the dugout rail. He looks worried. Then he spits. That one.

Now, if you could look inside the heads of the two guys running the contenders in the World Series this week, you’d see a 3D array of numbers flying by. With every pitch, with every attempted steal, with every out, an entire universe of numbers inside the manager’s head is re-computed.

I had taken a hiatus from baseball for quite a while, but with two California teams in the playoffs my wife and I decided to get into the spirit. Although the Dodgers and the Angels have gone by the wayside, we’re completely hooked.

And having not watched television coverage of baseball for quite awhile, I suddenly realized why American’s math scores have gone in the toilet for the last ten years. Baseball is a game of numbers, of billions of statistics of the most arcane kinds which record everything that’s ever happened in professional baseball going back more than 100 years. The statistical history of baseball may be the single greatest resource of meaningful numbers on the planet, including the human genome. And probably a lot more important.

When I was a kid, and when Nate Silver (statistics genius) and Michael Lewis (Moneyball—basically about how understanding the numbers in baseball is more important than wads of cash for name players) were kids, everyone knew the batting averages of every player on the home team. We knew slugging percentages, on base percentages. We understood the implications of having a switch hitter deep in the lineup.

We knew that the catcher ran the defense — that only he knew what pitch he was signaling the pitcher to throw next, and that the catcher knew what the odds were a particular batter was going to pull or flare that pitch. We understood that the catcher’s job included subtle shifts of the outfield and infield almost all the time.

Raising my kids under the kind tutelage of Vin Scully, the dean of all baseball announcers, they learned that baseball was a deep game of complex strategies. The battle between pitcher and batter was just the simplest surface of what was actually going on. When Scully was calling a game, the video director would follow Scully’s cues. So if the real duel was about the shortstop sneaking up behind the runner at second for a pickoff play, the camera would constantly check back at second, because that’s where, according to Scully, that particular runner, point two six five percent of the time against lefties, could be picked off. Now, none of my guys has yet won a Nobel for science, but with that kind of rich, hands-on training, they could have easily won it if they had really wanted it.

Now to the current absolutely barren “coverage” of the playoffs and World Series. The video direction, and the announcers, cover the pitcher, pitch placement, and almost nothing else. We almost never see where the infield is set, and never where the outfielders are playing. What we do get is lots of shots of players spitting — the result of a long lens raking through the dugout, magnifying the effect, so half the time us TV viewers can’t tell if it’s raining or just a vast downpour of spit.

And what about that rich field of high definition screen real estate? So much space, so little information. We get a little box that shows the runners on base and the count on the batter, but nowhere do we get the batter’s NAME (unbelievable, actually) their average during the season, their average during the playoffs, or any of the dozens of bits and pieces that are running through the manager’s mind as he decides what to do next, pitch by pitch, out by out.

Baseball strategy really is something of a computer that runs on a chaw of tobacco. But with the current coverage that has dumbed the game down to only its most surface components, all little Tiffany gets to see, is the spit. Meanwhile, her innate genius for numbers is being cruelly starved.

Calling in those McKinsey folks to review your profit and loss numbers in the middle of the deepest recession since the 1930s is a little like having Dr. Kevorkian over to offer a second opinion.

“No, really, I’m feeling fine. Just a little touch of the flu.”

“Not at your age. You know, if you were a new publication, you might pull through. But Harold started you back in 1925. That’s a long, long haul for a weekly. But look on the bright side: it’s been a good run.”

When Si Newhouse decided that Gourmet was wearing a Do Not Resuscitate bracelet this week, a great many people were stunned. My wife even called Condé Nast to leave a message for Mr. Newhouse, but the switchboard said there was no way to leave a message for the boss. Maybe that’s the way it is when you’re the emperor. You can begin to feel as if you don’t need to listen to anyone, even your customers. And I guess that’s true.

That’s what bothers me. In the equation that McKinsey puts forth, if a magazine loses money for X period of time, no matter how brutal the overall business climate, you kill it. It’s just a product that failed. The stakeholders are the shareholders of the corporation, aren’t they?

I don’t think so. Enlightened business thinking holds that the stakeholders in a business actually form a broader constituency. For one, the customers have a stake in the organization. You invited them, encouraged them, brought them into a relationship. The employees are stakeholders, too, planning their lives and careers around the enterprise. There is the community that supported you, as well. That’s the food community, the New York publishing community, and the magazine distribution communit

We learn from Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times how Charles H. Townsend CEO of Condé Nast sees things. And just between us, if I was Elizabeth Hughes or whoever has P&L responsibility at the New Yorker, I would examine these quotes carefully, since someone might be saying them about me before too long. And then I might take a few moments to make sure I could find the exits in an emergency. You can’t be too careful.

So, New Yorker, ask yourself, could this be you? “In the economics of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, this would be a business decision balanced by the cultural reticence to part with iconic brands,” Charles H. Townsend, Condé Nast’s chief executive, said in an interview. “This economy is a completely different bag.” Feedbag? Trashbag? Bodybag? Just wondering.

Then there’s this thought from Suzanne M. Grimes, who oversees Every Day With Rachael Ray, among other brands, for the Reader’s Digest Association. (Ah, excuse me! EXCUSE ME! Didn’t Reader’s Digest go bankrupt last month? This is The N.Y. Times’s expert on where Gourmet went wrong?)

“Cooking is getting more democratic,” she said. “Food has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

Now if you’re at the New Yorker and not hiding under your desk, just play along with me here. It might strengthen you for the future. Just substitute the word thinking for cooking and you get this: “Thinking is getting more democratic,” someone might be saying someday. “Thinking has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

So if you’re in the thinking and not the cooking business, it could look bad for you, too.

Now try the same device with this farther down in the article:

It [food] has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Ms. Ray and the Food Network stars. Ms. Reichl is a celebrity in the food world, but of an elite type. She ‘is one of those icons in chief,’ said George Janson [advertising guy] But what harried cooks want now, it seems, is less a distant idol and more a pal.

So the New York Times obit for the New Yorker in a few months might read:

Thinking has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Twitter and Facebook. Those New Yorker writers like Malcolm Gladwell were celebrities in the thinking world, but of an elite type. Gladwell is one of those icons in chief. But what harried people want now, it seems, is a less distant idol and more a pal.

Hey Malcolm! How come you never call?

So if you ever have the chance to get Si Newhouse on the phone, or just happen to run into him at a party or at the opera or something, you might want to have a little chat about who you think are some of the stakeholders in the New Yorker. Just cause a racehorse tripped doesn’t mean you have to put it down.

My heartfelt condolences to Ruth Reichl and all the other employees and freelancers who made Gourmet Magazine the most-waited for package in our mailbox every month. We have been subscribers, with occasional time off, since the 60s, when few of us would venture to actually cook any of the insanely complex recipes.

Now, I wasn’t the actual subscriber to Gourmet. The person of record was my mate. At the time, I was very serious about being serious about everything and dwelling on food seemed to me to be about as distinctive an occupation for a serious person as thinking about sex. In my mind at the time, if everyone did it, i.e. eat food or have sex, then it was a lower activity compared to making movies and discussing Important Ideas.

In other words, Gourmet was pornography. Fortunately, over the years, it has remained pornography. What changed, I guess, was my feelings about food. I have always enjoyed good food, and now I can even talk about it for a few minutes without feeling guilty.

So now that S.I. Newhouse has protected his fragile billions by shutting down the principal source of pornography in our household, I am forced to ask myself, “What have we lost?”

For one thing, I will never undergo another challenge as I faced some years ago when I decided I would cook the Complete Gourmet Thanksgiving (We’ll call it CGT for short). That year was the year of the incredible boneless turkey. I needed to go to Chinatown in Los Angeles and buy a huge cleaver with which I would be able to decimate an uncooked turkey carcass, necessary for some brew that was part of the CGT. I also needed to buy the nastiest knife I have ever owned — a boning knife, necessary for removing the skeleton of the turkey before it was cooked and without its permission. The boning knife would turn on me several years later, inflicting the only major cut I have ever received cooking. Fortunately, I don’t cook that much. I still own the knife, but I keep my eye on it, of that you can be certain.

Now here’s the terrible part about that boned, stuffed, CGT turkey. Twenty guests. Out comes the turkey. Being sans bone, it cuts like a roast. Fast! Put said turkey on plates. Guests go silent in that creepy way they’ll do once in a while as they devour the main course. CGT turkey vanishes in 2 minutes flat. Two days work for two minutes of eating.

And worse, there were requests to make it again the next year, and the year after that. Not until I bought a smoker was I able to obliterate the CGT boneless turkey memory.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: I know I can go online and get recipes, and there are a lot of food blogs out there. But the fact is, I like my porn once a month and on shiny pages. I can’t believe a million subscribers wasn’t enough to keep Gourmet going. Is nothing sacred? And you Playboy readers: Lookout.

When I was involved with …and Ladies of the Club a few eons ago I received an offer for the audio rights for the book. This was to be a condensed version, since the book was more than 1000 pages long. I asked for a sample script from the audio producer, and it turned out to run some 75 pages. You had to laugh. Gone were the inner lives of the two principal characters. Gone was the story of the fifty years of the development of the U.S. from the Civil War to the Depression. Gone were the discussions of ideas. Left was the barest shell of the events of the novel. Anyone buying the tape would have been defrauded, believing they were about to hear anything that resembled this masterpiece. We declined the offer.

Screenplays are similar. No matter how long the original novel, a screenplay is, with few exceptions, not going to be longer than 125 pages. A screenplay is double-spaced, descriptive paragraphs honed down to nothing, and lots of space taken up by the character’s names before their speeches. Bob. (line break) “You know what I’m thinking?” (line break) Jim. (line break) “No. What?” (line break) Bob stirs the campfire. (line break) Bob. (line break) “There’s something out there in the dark.” (line break) In a screenplay, you’ve just eaten up almost half a page.

Which brings me to the umpteenth zillion obituary for the book that has ocurred ever since the new media arrived. That would be movies. Then radio. Then television. Now it’s the Kindle and iPhone. Books are perpetually finished. Who would ever read a book again once they’ve seen that Charlie Chaplin? I can’t imagine.

This morning it was Motoko Rich on the front page of The New York Times, shovel in hand, digging in the deep rich soil. The new book killer-app appears to be the vook, which is basically a book with some video content. Your reading stops. You click on the media, and you watch some video in which something occurs that isn’t even going to be in the print part of your experience. You go back to a little reading, eager for the setup for the next video. Is this incredible, or what?

The best part of an obituary like this is the low hanging fruit of killer quotes that, it appears, a great many publishing experts are willing to give. We are gathered, once again, around the grave of The Book As We Know It. Let’s see whose shovel can hold the most compost. A “reading expert” at Tufts, Maryanne Wolf, goes first. “Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?” Thwump! Dust to dust.

Next up is the novelist Jude Deveraux, who imagines going beyond video, all the way to smell. “I’d like to use all the senses.” If you liked Smellovision under your theater seat  in 1960, you’ll love Stinkoread. Thwump!

The book is almost gone from sight, but another publisher comes to the edge of the grave, shovel quivering unsteadily with its heavy load. Judith Curr has seen the future, and Everything You Have Ever Known Will Be Different. “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text,” she warns. Authors, everywhere: take note. It’s Naked Lunch all over again. Talk about your non-linear text!

Thwump! The book is finally buried.

But I’m not so sure. This thing about the end of the book reminds me a little of the theory of Peak Oil, which makes a powerful case that some time soon, maybe even this year, the discovery of new oil fields will decline, production will inexorably decrease, and by 2050 oil will finally be more expensive than Evian and Everything Will Be Different. Are we at Peak Book? Are we at the apex of that bell curve that started with Gutenberg 500 years ago, so that books might completely vanish in another 500 years? Maybe. But I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that the last perfume of Stinkoread will be a distant whiff long before then.

Tags? How about: death, death of books, death of books prematurely declared, death of publishing, death of thinking, kooks, schnooks and vooks

My mother was a live book reviewer in Cleveland, an activity that seems to have gone the way of the traveling magic lantern lecture tent show. Fortunately for Mom, the traffic lights in our community were exceedingly slow, and she always had a book by her side. We joked that she had completed War and Peace just by judicious use of her time at red lights.

Book reviewers were prime entertainment at women’s organizations until somewhere around the late 1960s, possibly replaced by book clubs where everyone was supposed to actually read the book for themselves. Until then, the job of the book reviewer was to bring the ideas in important books to life for a whole community, to put it into context, to enrich the listener. The expectation that most of the audience would rush out and purchase the book, as Oprah’s audience does today, was not there. With a good book reviewer, you didn’t need to do any stinking page turning yourself.

Oprah was broadcasting from Cleveland in those days. I wonder if she and my mom crossed paths.

Live book reviewers like my mom addressed one of the great challenges to living well – having that feeling that you’re living authentically and thoroughly in your times. To me, it would have been a terrible thing to have been living down the street from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in May, 1913 when Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps had its premiere, and not been part of the commotion. Or to have been on earth in the early 1960s and not heard I Want to Hold Your Hand on the radio. Or lived in Elizabethan England and never been to the Globe and seen a play by that Shakespeare fellow.

Knowing what’s going on, what new ideas are shaping the culture, in the arts, in technology, in ideas in general seems to me to be an essential part of really being alive, of getting all that life has to offer. The great challenge for me is in finding out how to ferret out what’s new and valuable.

In the early days of the Web, the rage was all about filters. The idea of filters dangled in front of us the promise that we would be able to customize our news sources, so we could “get the news we wanted.” And we could even join groups where everyone in the world interested in a topic could be a member. I, for one, joined a harpsichord builders listserv, and wore out my life-long passion for the harpsichord in a little under two months. Those were dark times. I even began to agree with George Bernard Shaw’s remark that a harpsichord sounded like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof. But I digress.

Still looking for filters, I joined a Linkedin innovation community. Turns out it’s just a bunch of innovation consultants trying to sell their services to each other. Good luck. New content: 4%. Recycled ideas: 96%.

It turns out that I don’t want filters. I want scouts. I want to know who those people are, with taste and smarts and reasonable critical faculties, who can find the surprises. Books I never would have found on my own. New genius composers living in Serbia. An avant-garde filmmaker in Finland.

In 1951 Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and W.H. Auden decided to become scouts for important new books. They felt the existing book clubs, namely The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild had lowered their original goals and now were pursuing the “safely popular.” Their new club, the Readers’ Subscription, had the goal of supplying readers with books of solid intellectual merit. Every four weeks their little flyer, The Griffin, offered their choices for main book and alternates, and before long they had some forty-thousand subscribers. The Club went through many changes, and I was a member until The Griffin suddenly started shrinking some five years ago. The Club was now a Doubleday Club, somewhere in the bowels of Random House, now a mere division of Bertelsmann Aktiengesellschaft, which had, ironically, grown from being primarily a printer of calendars to a book giant through the creation of their own book clubs in post war Germany.

The Readers’ Subscription was my favorite scout for important new books, and when it was put down, I thought I would be able to find a replacement for it on the Web, or somewhere. But that hasn’t happened. A group of really smart people need to do the work, and find a way to get paid for scouting, without creating a conflict of interest.

I’ll be scouting for better scouts, now that I know that’s what we need. Maybe it just comes down to more moms grabbing a paragraph of Tolstoy while waiting for that slow, slow, slow red light to turn green.

Oh to sing the joys of Sunday morning with the NY Times Book Review section, where we can discover which books are going to get their second Times review. This morning the winner was E.L. Doctorow’s novelistic treatment of the hoarding Collyer brothers, a story apparently of immense import to the editors of the Times. Our first indication that Doctorow was about to get a Full Friedman wasn’t Michiko Kakutani’s review in the daily Times on August 31st. No, it was the PR-generated almost completely coincidental At Home with E.L. Doctorow by Steven Kurtz that ran in the Times on September 2nd with a lovely photo revealing to our great relief that the Doctorow home, unlike the Collyers’, is incredibly neat.

For the last few years I have ever-so-slowly come to realize that if someone at the Times thinks your book ought to enter the zeitgeist, you get a second review — like the one that ran this morning with even more pictures of the Collyers’ dump. Thank you Michiko. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read about the hoarding brothers with that first review, or even the up-close story about Doctorow, but with that third review, you’ve hammered it home. I give up. No more reviews! I’ll buy the book!

Like hell.

Depending on your sources, there are 50 to 100,000 new mainstream books published in the U.S. each year. And since books are and have been for the last five centuries or so the primary way important new ideas enter and enrich our civilization, newspaper book editors function as one of the most important filters in our world. The NY Times is the overwhelmingly dominant force for news and information in our culture. The Senior Book Reviewer at the Times, then, is one of the most important gatekeepers in American culture, if not the most important.

That most powerful person is Michiko Kakutani, Senior Book Reviewer, followed by Sam Tanenhouse, Editor of the Sunday Book Review. Weirdly, they apparently never compare notes to see who is reviewing what since they have a duplicate review almost every week. Now this would not be so terrible, but the NY Times weekday edition only publishes about 312 book reviews a year. The Sunday Book Review does some 800, so between them they have 1100 slots for new books each year. One would reasonably think that reviewing some 40 to 50 books twice each year is kind of an insane waste of precious ink, not to mention zeitgeist space.

I went looking for the important books of 2008 to see if any got overlooked by the NY Times and its bizarre approach to its responsibilities. Of the NY Times’s own list of the Best Books of 2008, it seems they managed to review all of them. Not surprising. But how about The Economist’s Most Important books in 2008? Ignoring the rare book that would be of interest to Brits only (actually, there was only one — Britain Since 1918 by Marquand and it looks to me to be even more interesting than needing to know how those Collyers brothers managed to cram so much crap into their apartment 50 years ago) easily one-half of The Economist’s picks never passed the sniff test over at the NY Times. Americans were denied reviews of many of the most important books of the year, including Joseph Stiglitz’s and Linda Bilmes’s The Three Trillion Dollar War, Lawrence Freedman’s A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East, and even Henry Hitching’s delight about the development of English: The Secret Life of Words. That’s a serious loss to the culture. Does anybody else worry when the NY Times didn’t review at least half of the important books of 2008?

As an ex-publisher and as someone who has helped a number of people get successfully published, I have often told a cautionary tale of my experience on the fourth floor of the NY Times some twenty years ago. I was being interviewed by Timesman Ed McDowell about a book that was about to become a huge bestseller. When the interview was done, I asked if I could get a tour of the place. Eventually we came to a ten by ten foot square space, bounded on all four sides by a counter. Dumped into that forbidden space were boxes and envelopes containing fresh review copies of thousands of books. I asked McDowell who decides which of these thousands of books would get reviewed. He gave me the look one saves for idiots and finally explained that rarely do any of these books get looked at. “Occasionally, a reviewer will come by and fish one out, and sometimes even review it.” I was and am nauseated at the thought.

Which brings me conveniently to the Full Bruni which occurred from July to September just past. Turns out if you really want to get reviewed by the Times, it really helps if you are also employed by the Times. It began quietly enough on July 19, when the Times’s Magazine ran a much-promoted 7500 word piece by Frank Bruni (who was shifting from Food Editor to Magazine Contributor), “I Was A Baby Bulimic.” Wow! A shocking personal disgusting confession. I’m glad that’s the last we’re going to hear about that. Not so fast. On August 19, entirely by coincidence, the Sunday Book Review accompanied my banana pancakes with a gushing review of Bruni’s book, Born Round.

Two hits so far. But there’s always more. On August 29, The News of the Week in Review (that’s the section that tells us the most important stories in the whole world, no kidding) offered a front page story by Bruni, Parenting and Food: Eat Your Peas. Or Don’t. Whatever. Golly, I didn’t realize at first how important Bruni’s book was. I guess I’d better give in and buy it. But just to be sure no one missed it, the Times gave Bruni’s incredibly important book just one more review in the daily paper on August 25th.

Fortunately, the book was on the Times’s Bestseller list by September 3. Or they’d still be running weekly reviews and stories by Bruni and his over-fed childhood until all of us can just gag, too.

Nothing compares with Tom Friedman, who plays the Times as his personal Wurlitzer. When Tom has an idea, a Big Idea, the Times shakes with excitement and the World listens. Here’s how it starts, quietly, innocently: In a column from Mexico on April 1, 2004, Friedman waits until paragraph #4 before he slips it in. Just look at this remarkable level of craft at work: “Mexico’s problem, in a nutshell, is this: The world is flat — or at least getting flatter.” Here indeed is the master at work. Nothing uppercased, nothing to get too suspicious about. The world just happens to be flat (not yet Flat) – have you noticed? Friedman is launching a new meme. Stand by.

A few months later, on June 27, he breaks our hearts by shocking us with the news: “This is my last column for three months. I’m taking a sabbatical to finish (please note that word, finish) a book about geopolitics, called “The World Is Flat.”" Ohmygod. Flat has gone uppercase, and publishing will never be the same again.

Friedman goes silent for a lengthy period, but now the book is ready. The Times is stirred to life with a massive 5165 word piece in the Sunday Magazine by Friedman: “It’s a Flat World After All.” Is that thrilling, or what? And then on April 24 you could turn to the publishing stock exchange, ah, Bestseller List, and see The World is Flat on the list on April 24.

By this time, Friedman needed a review or reviews like Reagan needed more jellybeans. But the wheels were already in motion and there’s nothing harder to stop than a juggernaut. The first Official New York Times Review came on April 30 written by Joseph Stiglitz, no less, and just to be sure you got how important this book was, Fareed Zakaria cleaned up after the elephants with his Sunday Book Review piece on May 1, 2005. The Full Friedman had taken just over a year. Was it over? Yes, except for the weekly columns for the next year or so that couldn’t resist the regular “flat” observation every sentence or two.

Full disclosure: My recent book The Genius Machine — 11 Steps That Turn Raw Ideas Into Brilliance was, sadly, passed over by the Times just like tens of thousands of others. But I have published and produced many other books that were reviewed by the Times or have made the bestseller lists, so I’ve had my fair share.

I do have a modest request for Ms. Kakutani and the Times. America’s in trouble. Newspaper book reviewers are getting fired left and right. Retail stores that give us the chance to browse the New Fiction and New Non-Fiction tables are disappearing. The marketplace for ideas is weak and getting weaker.

We need to know about the truly important books that get published every week that actually might inform us and help us understand the world better. How about just one review maximum per book and just one feature story. (Okay, maybe an exception for J.K. Rowlings.) That would make some precious room for additional new voices and ideas. We desperately need them.

In the golden days of radio the great symphony orchestras of the world broadcast over short and long wave bands, creating pockets of listeners all over the globe. In isolated Japan in the 1940s the young composer Toru Takemitsu learned the ways of Western music from the Armed Forces radio network. In Maine, Charles Ives listened to the premiere of his 2nd Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein, over the radio.

When FM came in after the Second World War, sound quality improved, but the since the range of FM is limited to line-of-sight, those millions of listeners lucky enough to get an ionosphere bounce from New York to Vermont or Chicago to Colorado were left in silence. The advent of the long-playing record took the thrill and necessity away from live broadcasts, and radio audiences shrank.

Then came the golden age of television, with new operas commissioned for the medium, and Leonard Bernstein’s 53 Young People’s Concerts broadcast live to the entire nation. But with astonishing speed, the medium was subjected to raw market forces and the inexorable drive to the lowest common denominator. Television went from golden age to Newton Minnow’s “vast wasteland” in less than two decades.

Now we are in the early days of a new medium — high definition broadcasts over the Internet. The pioneer here is Sir Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic offering a complete season ticket for  €149, or single month passes to their Digital Concert Hall. The premiere concert August 28 was priced at a special €5, and you can still order it and watch it as many times as you want during any 48 hour period.

The overall experience was riveting. Video quality is superb, and the sound is good. First up was Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, something Sir Simon must have conducted a few thousand times in Birmingham for young audiences. This was an adult version, a chance for Berlin to show off their shimmering strings and brass, and warm reeds. A delight. Next was the premiere of a new work, Laterna Magica by Kaija Saariaho, a mysterious and exciting mélange of ear candy that benefited hugely by video. At one point we heard voices in a whisper, as if a chorus was behind the orchestra, but suddenly we could see that the voices were from anyone not busy playing at the moment. The players were a chorus for a few moments, a stunning surprise, effective, moving. A real treat was seeing the composer herself up on stage at the end, bravoed by audience and orchestra. We knew then that this was a performance that the composer herself had a hand in and we had heard it the way she wanted us to.

Before the final piece we created our own intermission by hitting ‘pause’ and took a little strudel break here in Tiburon while our server in Berlin cooled its heels. We then launched the final piece, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. This was a decidedly un-opiated performance, with Rattle and the Berliners going for warmth, and ensemble, leaving the madness for others to explore. Still, every moment kept our rapt attention. This can never be the same as a live experience, but it is deeply satisfying, authentic in its own way.

Quibbles: the sound. I’m guessing that the miking is a single Blumlein pair somewhere fairly far back in the hall, giving preference to that nice warm Berlin sound, but a loss of detail that in a record-only world might be barely okay. When the camera is hovering over a piano or celeste keyboard and you can’t for the life of you hear the instrument, you almost feel as if the whole ensemble is lip-synching. Orchestra balance is pretty good, but the double basses are considerably underbalanced and out of focus. My biggest complaint is lack of dynamics. Either someone’s got a heavy hand on the compressor, or the distant miking is the cause. Probably a little of both. Since Berlin offers viewers a choice of video definition, maybe they could do the same for audio. Compressed or not? Your choice.

Video direction: directors of all kinds generally adopt an imaginary proscenium and keep their camera angles consistently on one side of that proscenium. It keeps the audience from getting disoriented and woozy. The exception in orchestra protocol is the conductor camera, which does indeed jump across the proscenium line, and we all get used to it. In the Britten, the video director tried using the conductor camera for the first harp solo. Whoops! Suddenly the harpist appears to have gone from the left side of the orchestra to the right, and the shot shows the harpist looking from right to left toward the conductor. My wife almost had to leave the room for a few tense moments.

Over the entire concert, certain players and sections were not covered at all. The cellos were barely seen. There was no sense of the natural ensemble of the first desk string players, although there certainly was of the woodwinds. The director failed to let us know the complete forces on stage for any given piece, so in the Berlioz there’s a whole lot of percussion battery being deployed, but if you didn’t know what a bass drum sounded like, or a gong or cymbal, there was no visual cue to understand how important they were in driving a particular moment. And, not to be overly critical, but there didn’t seem to be deep knowledge of any of the scores driving the director’s choices. Coverage was a little more like what one might expect at a sporting event than a concert where everyone should know what’s going to happen next. The director did seem to have something of a jones for one back-of-the-section fiddler, though.

Sir Simon Rattle, judging by a lengthy interview that followed the concert, seems to be the driving force behind this magnificent venture, and he is to be congratulated for his leadership off the podium. And as for his day job, he is a musician’s conductor, never showboating for the sake of the audience, giving the orchestra the absolute minimum of what they need and sometimes even a little bit less, so that the ensemble really needs to listen to each other. This is serious, perfectionist, music making of the highest order.

The Berlin Philharmonic’s personality was consistent throughout the concert, and I’ll be eager to see and hear more of them in the coming months. They are a real ensemble, making a beautiful sound together, never forcing, always going to lushness. They present a fascinating contrast with the great American orchestra like Cleveland or the Met, where clarity, transparency and dynamics are prized. And Berlin is distinct from the British orchestras (we’ve been listening to a lot of Proms) which rely on a lot of enthusiasm and individual musicianship. And French orchestras? Maybe it’s like what Freud said of women: What do French orchestras really want? But I digress.

Are we at a new Golden Age of the arts with the arrival of a new media? The Web has shuffled the deck for everything else, from exchange of knowledge to shopping. I hope that the Digital Concert Hall will be remembered ten years from now as the brilliant beginning of a great cultural revolution that revolutionized the diffusion all the performing arts, and not as a shining example of a Golden Age that never reached fulfillment.

Eleven-thirty Saturday morning in Tiburon, California. The radios are on throughout the house. We’re listening to a live broadcast from London of Beethoven’s Fidelio, the 50th Proms concert of the season, with 26 left to go. The world’s largest music festival — thousands of performers, many world premieres, many of the world’s great orchestras. Of all the glories the Internet has given us, for me, this is the one I would part with last.

Cultural hegemony is a two-way street. American culture, particularly through our dominance of news, television shows, and Hollywood film, tend to suffocate local culture. In many parts of the world our cultural intrusions are resented. But we can’t help it. We hardly notice the local flora and fauna that disappears under our tread.

But if you are even somewhat concerned that you might live your life without hearing the music of this century’s Mozart or Stravinsky (or even knowing their name), then you might want to take a moment to find www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/ and try listening to the live stream. What are the resources of BBC Radio3? Five orchestras, spread around the nation. A full-time chorus. A young artists program that nurtures dozens of major performers each year. Grants to dozens of composers. An annual budget of more than $60 million, not including the orchestras and chorus budgets which are buried elsewhere in the greater BBC music and audio $330 million budget.

Normally the U.K./PST time shift would get us all the wrong programs at the wrong time, but here in California we are experiencing some of the most fortuitous asynchronicities. One of the U.K.’s most popular program, Sean Rafferty’s In Tune, runs during the evening drive time in the U.K. and breakfast time for us. For two hours every weekday great performers and musical figures from the world of classical (and much jazz and world music, too) who are coming to perform in the U.K. drop by the studio for a chat and often give a live performance, too. Many great Americans, too, from Renée Fleming to Kim Criswell are heard talking not just about what they’re doing in Europe, but also about the U.S. musical scene as well. If I dared, I would take an hour to shave.

In the era we can call Before Internet, or B.I. when BBC Radio3 could only be heard on shortwave in San Francisco, what was the state of classical music on the radio here? Wretched. Like almost all of the U.S., classical radio was in the final throes of a terrible death. One barely surviving station, then as now, spent most of its time boasting that at some point this coming afternoon you’re going to get a wonderful treat: a whole half hour of Classical Music uninterrupted! In the meantime let’s hear another very loud jingle for Safeway. The worst, and most unforgivable aspect of the local station, though, is the programming. Late Baroque to mid-classical, consisting mostly of a movement of this work, a snippet of that. I finally figured out who they were programming for: dental patients. It was music to be drilled by. The distracting pain theory at work: listen to this mind-numbingly bland music and the pain from that molar won’t seem so bad. Pachabel had found his final resting place in your root canal.

How about the sound quality of BBC over the Web? Are we listening on those tiny tinny speakers in our laptop? Not exactly. I have an external digital to analogue converter which feeds a little Landmark Electronics FM transmitter, creating our own mini-radio station that reaches several hundred yards. On ebay over the years I’ve bought a number of KLH Model 21 radios, one of the best-sounding radios ever made, and they’re all over the house so we can listen wherever we are. If you’re in the neighborhood, you too can tune in to Radio Sindell, 100.1 on your FM dial.

When we jump in the car we can tune to Radio Sindell, but by the time we’ve reached the end of the block, the BBC fades away, returning us to a different civilization. And it’s drill baby, drill.