Pittsfield, Far Away

Go, Pittsfield! In its biggest splash yet, the city was featured in the Travel section of last Sunday's Times. Leave it to the Times, though, to homogenize such a varied place. Every neighborhood or city that's featured in this part of the Travel section -- called "Surfacing" -- ends up sounding exactly the same, whether it's in rural Massachusetts, a gritty part of L.A. or south Delhi, India. (When Hauz Khas Village in Delhi appeared earlier this year, my friend who lives there [and whose girlfriend was in one of the photos] wrote me to say that he didn't realize Delhi sounded so much like Budapest or Brooklyn.)

Each profile, without fail, includes some combination of a coffee house, a stylish ethnic restaurant where you can order small plates, an art gallery, bartenders with thick beards and cool glasses, people selling you something they made in their garage, and a park that doubles as a warehouse. Not that any of these are inherently objectionable as individual places, but it's squarely disappointing to realize that 21st-century leisure can be so easily boxed and sold. What was once meant to be intriguing is now rather familiar. I suppose this is also a byproduct of trying to capture a place's spirit via four stores and a quick write-up.

Pittsfield, of almost any U.S. destination to leap into this profile, shouldn't be susceptible to this. The city's combinations of buildings, people, industry, struggle, charm and delight are wonderfully distinct, and no fuzzy portrayal in the Times will change this. In the Times, the city comes out looking relatively uniform, but Pittsfield can shrug it off. Hopefully, the publicity at least entices more people to go and realize there's a lot more than the Times suggests. The city deserves the larger profile.

Above is a photo from Third Thursdays, the summertime monthly stroll in Pittsfield, when North Street, downtown's main drag, closes to cars and everyone enjoys themselves in the great Berkshires air.

Farewell, R.E.M.

As I've written in these pages before, R.E.M.'s 1992 album, "Automatic for the People," is surprisingly challenging -- little about it says pop. In fact, most of it asks for contemplation and maturity, which are two characteristics that don't readily lend themselves to selling millions of records. And yet, the record did just that, and R.E.M. deserves credit for it.

Accomplishing such a feat places R.E.M. somewhere on the family tree of the 1960s' great popular art, at least when basing it on the definition in Louis Menand's recent New Yorker essay about the midcentury critic Dwight Macdonald. The art was "smart and enjoyable, and it made money, too," Menand writes, describing what is commonly known as the middlebrow. Macdonald apparently detested it, but he came of age in an era when the middlebrow didn't exist -- what was popular was no good and what was avant-garde was too unapproachable. I think we're in a similar era today and R.E.M., particularly "Automatic for the People," is one of the last vestiges of a time when you could be both good and popular. (Other holdouts were "OK Computer" and "The Sopranos.") Sure, plenty of good and esoteric artists, writers, musicians, playwrights, etc, receive lots of attention and make more money today because of the Internet, but the cultural fragmentation that results from the Internet also sets the ceiling much lower. This is disappointing: The middlebrow is a powerful uniting force that shouldn't be ignored. What's so bad about the widely available being of a high quality?

R.E.M.'s members said last week they wanted to retire on their own terms, before they became irrelevant. Teasing them for this -- because they haven't released a monumental record in maybe 20 years or a very good one in 12 years -- misses the point. First, they've never had embarrassing moments parading on stage like, most infamously, the Rolling Stones do when they tour. Second and more importantly, R.E.M. has taught you can mine meaningful, confusing, intriguing territory all while figuring out how to make it appealing. This is a delicate trick to turn. Very few artists do it, nearly all wish they could, and R.E.M. has.

Above is the track "New Orleans Instrumental No. 1." No one in 2011 would be bold enough to put such a sweet two-minute instrumental in the middle of a record and still plan it would sell millions. Respect is due.

Red Sox, Meet the Mets

Boston's sports fans are notoriously hyperbolic and wildly spoiled during the past 10 years, so as much as I like following sports, I take such great pleasure when one of the four major teams here collapses. Cue the Red Sox, whose September is eerily reminiscent of the 2007 and 2008 versions the Mets: The team had a nine-game lead for the wild card on Sept. 3, led the A.L. East shortly before that, and were all but guaranteed to qualify for the playoffs, until they couldn't stop losing. After tonight's loss, they're only two games ahead of Tampa Bay for the wild card, with all of their momentum heading in the completely wrong direction. Even if they make the playoffs, it's hard to imagine them winning a series.

Rooting for the Mets is a perennial exercise in frustration, where little goes as planned. This once used to be true of Sox fandom, when the team was best known for its 80-plus years without winning the World Series and repeated catastrophic collapses. But since about 1998, the Sox have actually been quite good, with above-average records, multiple playoff appearances and baseball history's longest consecutive streak of sellouts. This month has been a total reversal: injuries have left the starting rotation embarrassingly thin; the bullpen is managed on the philosophy that everyone is removed at the first sign of trouble and pitchers barely last more than two-thirds of an inning; when the hitting is good, the pitching isn't and vice versa; and the losses come in breathtakingly disappointing ways. Maybe there's some good in this, though -- everyone needs to experience the bottom of the cycle sometimes, if only to truly appreciate what it means to be on top.

Boston fans, especially those under 30 (and I'm in this age bracket), have generally forgotten this because their teams have been so successful. It's hard to believe, but the Patriots, the paragon of football franchises, have actually lasted the longest of any of the city's franchises without a title -- their last Super Bowl victory was in 2005. This makes the Patriots' nascent season intriguing to me. As much attention and praise as they receive, they now have a slight hint of the underdog and a stronger one of urgency. The offense has been spectacular in the first two games, adding to the thrill they've often created the past several years.

Tom Brady has grown on me over the years: Once beloved for winning so many championships, he's now moderately derided (if not openly mocked) for his supermodel wife, elegant lifestyle, long hair, the time he spends with his family, and the great regular seasons but underwhelming playoffs he's had in recent years. Usually, I wouldn't be totally comfortable with this combination, either. But Brady plays against type and challenges the conventional wisdom of sportswriters and fans so well: His game says, Why can't you be aggressive and slightly feminine at the same time? Why can't you spend time with your family and excel on the field? Why can't your personality and private life change as you age without compromising your passion for your profession? Why would we demand of a sports star what we wouldn't demand of ourselves?

Tennis, Under The Lights

Novak Djokovic might've capped one of the best seasons ever in men's tennis on Monday by winning the U.S. Open, but my favorite moment of the tournament came last Thursday, when Andy Roddick upset David Ferrer in the fourth round:

After two consecutive days of downpours, canceling all the tennis scheduled to be played, Roddick and Ferrer were supposed to play on the second-largest court when water started seeping up through the surface. An hour of blowdrying and mopping the court was ineffective, so two of the circuit's top-20 players then moved to Court 13, on the periphery of the USTA's tennis grounds -- something like if Wilco were scheduled to play the Wang Theatre but then had to move to All Asia because the sound system sputtered. The Times photographed Ferrer and Roddick walking the grounds, surrounded by security guards, as fans rushed by them to grab a seat at the court, which had about one-twentieth the capacity of where they were supposed to play. Then, when they played, a viewer tried to scale the fence while Roddick served, a baby cried, and rock music from the concourse's speakers washed over the court. Roddick won in four sets.

I criticize New York often, but its dizzying pulse makes the U.S. Open so wonderful: The city puts the tennis on the hardest hard courts, in the midst of late August's sticky humidity, under the lights and low-flying planes, surrounded by noise, Flushing and an addictive throb. No other sporting venue takes a game and transforms its identity like New York does to the Open. The players were even particularly testy this year at the post-match press conferences (because of the tournament's poor administration during the rain): Rafael Nadal suggested players form a union! Los tenistas unidos jamas seran vencidos!

The Times' sportswriters focused on the ridiculousness of the fortnight -- the circus, the packed schedules, the poor planning, the outbursts, the overshadowed quality of the tennis on the court. But this ambiance has an appeal all its own. Tennis' gentility combines with a sneer that runs from Jackson Pollock to the Velvet Underground to the 7 train to create something thrilling that Wimbledon, for all its charming grass, just can't replicate.

Above are Roddick and Ferrer disbelievingly inspecting the court with tournament officials.

Since Everyone Else Is Remembering

On a self-absorbed blog like this one, writing on Sept. 11, 2011, about anything but the World Trade Center attacks seems mistaken. Some of my intersections with the 10th anniversary today are: the compelling interviews I heard on "This American Life"; a co-worker's friend telling me at the supermarket that she was planning to make a patriotic pudding for desert -- vanilla pudding, with strawberries and blueberries (considering this was in Harvest Co-op in JP, she was likely being ironic); a former classmate's appearance in an ABC News story because he was interviewed in 2001 by them while in 8th grade and the channel was revisiting people; and Facebook urging me to "like" "being American."

I suppose all that I'll add is I vividly remember the first plane struck while I was in the shower at Dana Basement, my freshman year at Swarthmore. When I left the bathroom, a junior who lived on my hall told me and I was struck with disbelief. I went to the dining hall for breakfast and told the few people with whom I ate. It was very strange news to relay. One class still happened shortly after, perhaps because on one of the country's most liberal campuses, in suburban Philadelphia, the meaning hadn't yet fully registered. I spent the whole afternoon watching the TV with the rest of the dorm, feeling lonely.

My Storm Is The Storm

Hurricane Irene didn't create much damage in Boston two weekends ago, nor as much as was originally expected in New York. (I remember one 30-minute period where the wind was strong and the windows rattled, but aside from what looks like a lot of pencil shavings on my Subaru, not much happened in my neighborhood.) As a result, by mid-day Sunday, before the storm had finished passing through the Northeast, plenty of pundits, from veterans like Howard Kurtz to simpletons like Michael Graham, had declared Irene to be the biggest media fabrication in recent memory.

In the end, the storm was actually quite powerful and destructive: About 55 people died, a few million lost power, parts of metro New York were flooded for days, and much of upstate New York and Vermont was ravaged. That the country's most populous corridor, from D.C. to Boston, was in Irene's direct path and potentially subject to a serious natural disaster merited plenty of advance coverage. The Northeast has a serious hurricane only about once every 20 years, so many are underprepared. (And that Irene came only several days after an earthquake was certainly bizarre.) Now, I don't have cable so I didn't see the widely described hysteria of local TV reporters and the Weather Channel, but considering the aftermath, maybe the coverage was underdone. Sure, it would've been a lot worse had Battery Park City fallen back into the harbor, but the consequences were serious.

The wild fluctuations in coverage highlight two telling phenomena about the early 21st century. First, as has been written many times before, the need to be out in front of a story is now more important than the need to be accurate -- setting the trend with an opinion or prediction is valued more than doing so with facts. Kurtz and Graham look foolish for anointing themselves right and everyone wrong when they're cast with the latter now too for writing before thinking. Second and somewhat related, Graham and everyone on Twitter and Facebook griping about the hurricane that wasn't miss the greater context. The storm wasn't bad for them, so, they conclude, it must not have been bad anywhere. Navel gazing isn't anything new, but when you can broadcast what's inside your navel to anyone you like as often as you like, it becomes carelessly myopic.

The damage Hurricane Irene inflicted on Vermont is certainly the storm's most disappointing result. Whole towns were isolated because their roads became too ripped to travel; vibrant downtowns had several feet of standing water; small rivers rushed over their banks, destroying farmland and dairy farms; covered bridges were torn off their foundations. Vermont is a special place with a very self-sufficient personality, but it also has a lot of industry, namely farming, where the margins are thin and the product unable to sustain such a monumental blow during the summer. In addition, the construction season only lasts into about late October, so the damage will be evident for many months. The state deserves all the help it can get.

Update: Local media pundit Dan Kennedy argues the same as I, though with less opining about the 21st century, here.