inspiration – Anna Wahrman

The future of journalism in practice

December 21, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

The New York Times turned the February avalanche at Tunnel Creek in Washington State into a completely absorbing multimedia experience. I was both spellbound and delighted by the video, audio, maps, photos, GIFs and most of all words, which all added up to an engaging, vital storytelling experience.

The gripping tale of the exciting lead-up to, feelings of dread about, and inevitable tragic end to the ski outing could have been told singularly by the Times. Only the Times (or a news organization of similar stature) could spend six months reporting a story that, according to the end credits “involved interviews with every survivor, the families of the deceased, first responders at Tunnel Creek, officials at Stevens Pass and snow-science experts” as well as reports from police, the medical examiner and 911 calls. Sixteen names in addition to John Branch’s (the writer) are listed in the credits (byline seems an even more outdated term than usual on this piece).

The article honors the victims and their families, approaches the survivors gracefully and tactfully, and serves as a cautionary tale to adventurers. And it fires up journalists and others who admire the well-reported, well-structured feature, a story form that has fallen out of favor in the era of pageviews, soundbites and 140-character updates. It’s as well written as anything I’ve read in the genre, including Jon Krakauer’s stuff, and it sets a new bar for multiformat journalism.

And it might even make money: Notice at the end, there’s a call-out to buy an e-book version of the article on Byliner.

For those of us who wring our hands about the death of print and the future of journalism, it’s nothing short of inspirational.

My Barbra obsession, then and always

October 10, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

In honor of the Barbra Streisand “Back to Brooklyn” concert tonight (and the preshow fans’ dinner, and the postshow fans’ drinks outing…), I’m posting my recent contribution to Alison Waldman‘s new book, Barbra Memories. She used my essay as one of dozens included in the book (click for full size).

It is posted below in its original form.

I was 10 when I saw Yentl on a rollaway VHS player in Sunday school at my synagogue in Toledo, Ohio.

Her voice was so pretty, she was so strong, and she was Jewish, just like me! Thus began my raging, decades-long obsession with Barbra Streisand.

In short order, my dad sought out 12-inch records for me from the local library and garage sales: Funny Girl (the movie), The Barbra Streisand Album and My Name Is Barbra. I was as entranced by her voice as I was by the pictures of her on the covers. Though I had fallen for her in Yentl, it was those early albums that cemented the fascination. Her voice was like no other I’d heard before: gorgeous, playful, resonant, full of personality. I’m quite certain I didn’t understand the ennui of “Cry Me a River” or the irony of her version of “Happy Days Are Here Again.” I’m sure I didn’t know the heartbreak of “My Man.” All I knew was that her voice — brassy, belty, zippy — spoke to me on a level I’d never experienced before. It was like she was singing to me. I was transfixed. I was moved. I was obsessed.

I continued the pursuit. When I was 13 I checked out the biography Streisand: The Woman and the Legend from the Wood County Library and read it passionately. The book portrayed her as bold and brash, confident and a little weird (boldly dropping the extra A?!). I ate it up. Every fact of her life spoke to me on a deep level. She was born one day before my mother, both in Brooklyn, NY. Somehow this transmogrified in my mind as though Barbra was my real mother — they must have been born in the same hospital, so maybe my mother was switched with her, and so I’m really Barbra’s daughter…? It all made sense in my adolescent mind.

There was more. She played clubs in the ’60s New York’s Greenwich Village; my grandfather owned a bar in the ’60s in the Village! Did they ever meet; did she ever go there?! I read other biographies. I bought tapes. I borrowed CDs. I rented bad sex farces. I also rented great love stories. I was transfixed when she was onscreen. She was like me — but talented! And that voice, that voice…

I developed a highly attuned sense of Barbra; I took her on as a role model and a hero. I shook my head at the Jon Peters years. I was dismayed by the press’s portrayal of her as an inflexible haranguer. I admired her unwavering support of liberal causes. I cheered her unrelenting quest for perfection in all things. And I marveled at her undisputed artistic achievement.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the peak years of my Barbra obsession coincided with the time I was developing my sense of self, the age when one is most influenced by and impressed with idols of all kinds. The summer before college, I even forced my teenage friends to watch Yentl and was positively dismayed when they shrugged her off as a middle-aged woman who didn’t remotely carry off the conceit of playing a girl pretending to be a boy. But this didn’t stop my adoration, nor did it prevent me from forcing my freshman-year roommate to listen to The Concert night and day.

But hero worship often ends. It ends roughly about the same time you start to realize it’s not the drinking that kills you, it’s the daylong recovery instead of the hour-long one. You’ve grown up and grown past it — or at least I did.

I found criticisms where I used to find only abject adulation. I thought Barbra’s new material was overproduced, overorchestrated. Big-voiced, belting Barbra, backed by a 60-piece orchestra, can be uplifting and life affirming (for example, “A Piece of Sky”). Intimate, lush Barbra can be smooth and inviting (“Speak Low,” “Lazy Afternoon”); pop Barbra can be upbeat and fun (“Stoney End,” “Guilty”). Sweet Barbra can be lovely and enchanting (“Evergreen”); jazzy Barbra can swing and dip (“Cornet Man”). But where was the simple bass-drum-piano accompaniment that let her voice be the star? The funky approach and unexpectedly off (but somehow perfect) pronunciations that showcased her talent in her early years had been replaced with sappy life lessons, bombastically produced. She was different. Or maybe I was.

When she toured in 1994, I couldn’t afford tickets (I was only 17 and still in high school, after all). I vowed that if she ever toured again, I would go no matter what. Thankfully that came to pass in 2000 (the “Final Tour”!) and again in 2006. Despite the fact that I’d grown up a bit — and, I thought, grown past my obsession — in both instances, I was moved to tears (during the “Yentl Medley” and “Down With Love,” respectively). And I expect to be bawling my eyes out again this time. Her unique take on the lyrics and surprising phrasing can still stop me in my tracks and give me goose bumps. Quite simply, she moves me. I don’t know how, exactly, she will move me this time, but I know that she will. How could she not? She’s been a precious and well-loved (and -respected, and -esteemed) part of my life since I was a child — since before I was able to put the emotions she made me feel into words like this.

Put simply, I am grateful for the many gifts she has been blessed with and with which she has, in turn, blessed me. Occasionally, on moments like this, when she’s on stage and in strong voice, I let myself feel that gratitude, let myself be transported back to my teenage bedroom, back to that classroom in shul — the one by the rabbi’s office, with the red carpet and the rollaway VCR — where I was first mesmerized and charmed by her voice, her look, her charisma, her authenticity, her talent.

Being busy and the fetishization of the offline

July 3, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

I noticed an interesting juxtaposition in two articles I’ve recently read about the intersection of “real life” and those we live online.

The first argues that “being busy” is an artificial creation or, as Tim Kreider puts it, “a hedge against emptiness.”

[People are] busy because of their own ambition or drive or anxiety, because they’re addicted to busyness and dread what they might have to face in its absence. Almost everyone I know is busy. They feel anxious and guilty when they aren’t either working or doing something to promote their work.

He says that busyness is “something we collectively force one another to do,” and he goes on at length about how he hates being busy (“Every morning my in-box was full of e-mails asking me to do things I did not want to do or presenting me with problems that I now had to solve”) and has instead taken to an “undisclosed location” to focus and write.

Here I am largely unmolested by obligations. There is no TV. To check e-mail I have to drive to the library. I go a week at a time without seeing anyone I know. I’ve remembered about buttercups, stink bugs and the stars. I read. And I’m finally getting some real writing done for the first time in months. It’s hard to find anything to say about life without immersing yourself in the world, but it’s also just about impossible to figure out what it might be, or how best to say it, without getting the hell out of it again. …The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration.”

The piece has some really lovely passages, and I consider it a romantic idealization of what life can and should be. That’s why I’m anxious — it’s my surroundings! Who doesn’t want to drop out every once in a while and just be with nature, man? And this guy is doing it! He’s so right.

Then I read this piece by Nathan Jurgenson. In it, he argues that, in fact, the only reason we feel peaceful and like we’re actually accomplishing something when we’re offline is that it’s in direct relief to being online.

The ease of digital distraction has made us appreciate solitude with a new intensity. One of our new hobbies is patting ourselves on the back by demonstrating how much we don’t go on Facebook. People boast about not having a profile. We have started to congratulate ourselves for keeping our phones in our pockets and fetishizing the offline as something more real to be nostalgic for. …Maintaining the fiction of the collective loss of the offline for everyone else is merely an attempt to construct their own personal time-outs as more special, as allowing them to rise above those social forces of distraction that have ensnared the masses.

Take that, guy who just bragged about his personal time-outs!

“The clear distinction between the on and offline, between human and technology,” Jurgenson writes, “is queered beyond tenability”:

It’s not real unless it’s on Google; pics or it didn’t happen. We aren’t friends until we are Facebook friends. We have come to understand more and more of our lives through the logic of digital connection. Social media is more than something we log into; it is something we carry within us. We can’t log off.

This piece also gets a lot of things right, and I consider it, as I did the Kreider article, to be a romantic idealization, this time of our lives online.

They key is to somehow find a happy medium. It’s not moving to rural France, and it’s not constantly taking pictures of the things and places you’re seeing instead of experiencing them. It’s somewhere in between, and that, to me, is the challenge of the technological times in which we live.

Remembering Nora Ephron

June 27, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

When Harry Met Sally… is well within in my top five movies of all time. I don’t think this is just because it hit me at the exact right age (movies are much more influential when you see them as a teen, don’t you think?). It’s not because it covered new territory (there were other New York-based romantic comedies, and arguably the movie is merely a woman’s spin on a Woody Allen film). But the territory it did cover was done in a such a completely new way, with such a different and fresh perspective. And when that is done well, it can be transcendent. With the Nora Ephron-penned When Harry Met Sally…, that’s exactly what happened.

I obviously didn’t know Ms. Ephron personally. But her impact on my life was significant nonetheless. She made New York seem so glamorous and smart. Between this movie and The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, which was on TV around the same time, I thought the Upper West Side was the home of the most intelligent, wry, interesting women on earth, people who constantly had quips, comebacks and dinner parties. I didn’t dare admit to imagining I’d someday be in their midst.

Truthfully, I enjoyed You’ve Got Mail and Sleepless in Seattle as much as the next guy, but I found her to be a fairly self-indulgent director, mostly in terms of editing, not dialogue. (I think the reason WHMS is so sharp is because of the crisp direction from Rob Reiner, who keeps the pace moving. Same for Mike Nichols’s direction of Heartburn. Compare those to her other movies’ draggy last half-hours, and all the parts of Julie and Julia when Meryl Streep wasn’t onscreen.)

But, oh, her writing. Her perspective was singular and trend-setting. I absolutely loved her take on things, her biting wit, her approach to life. Hell, I even saw Imaginary Friends on Broadway (and I even came back after intermission). The woman set the bar. She upped the ante. She changed the game. She did all of those cliches, including Ginger dancing backward, and she did it with panache.

Seems I’m not the only one she charmed. The articles and obituaries I’ve read today make her sound like a pretty amazing friend and mom, as well as a talented screenwriter, essayist, director and all the rest. I saw her do a Q&A with Gail Collins at the 92nd Street Y a couple of years ago, and she made everyone in the audience feel like we were gathered around her kitchen table. She was a gifted woman. A breed apart in terms of language, observation and truth-telling. I feel for her family. I can’t believe she’s gone; they must be out of their minds with disbelief.

In remembrance, I thought I’d cobble together some of the amazing dialogue from this incredible movie. I’m not providing context for these and they are in no particular order. Taken together, they show just how much richness was in that screenplay. I consider it her opus. She will be missed.

You’re right, you’re right. I know you’re right.

(I don’t even know how many times my friend Molly and I have said this to each other over the years.)

It’s amazing. You look like a normal person but actually you are the angel of death.

I had these days-of-the-week underpants. He was all suspicious. Where was Sunday? Where had I left Sunday? And I told him, and he didn’t believe me. (Harry: What?!) They don’t make Sunday. (Harry: Why not?) Because of God.

You’re the worst kind; you’re high maintenance but you think you’re low maintenance.

Draw something resembling anything. (Later) “Baby talk”? That’s not a saying. (Harry: Oh, but “baby fish mouth” is sweeping the nation?)

You don’t always have to express every emotion you’re having every moment you’re having it.

You’re saying I’m having sex with these men without my knowledge?

Waiter, there is too much pepper on my paprikash. But I would be proud to partake of your pecan pie.

No, no, you did not have great sex with Sheldon. A Sheldon can do your income taxes. If you need a root canal, Sheldon’s your man.

I’d like the pie heated and I don’t want the ice cream on top, I want it on the side, and I’d like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it, if not, then no ice cream, just whipped cream, but only if it’s real; if it’s out of the can, then nothing. (Waitress: Not even the pie?) Sally Albright: No, I want the pie, but then not heated.

Is one of us supposed to be a dog in this scenario? (Harry: Yes.) Who is the dog? (Harry: You are.) I am?! I am the dog. I am the dog.

(Again, Molly and I spent countless hours with this dialogue. In fact, he is the dog. To him, it’s been seven years. That makes him the dog! Much debated!)

The fact that you’re not answering leads me to believe you’re either: A) not at home; B) home but don’t want to talk to me; or C) home, desperately want to talk to me, but trapped under something heavy. If it’s either A) or C), please call me back.

Everybody thinks they have good taste and a sense of humor.

No one has ever quoted me back to me before.

When I buy a new book, I read the last page first. That way, in case I die before I finish, I know how it ends. That, my friend, is a dark side.

No, no, no, I drove him away! And I’m gonna be 40! (Harry: When?) Sally: Someday!

Someone is staring at you in Personal Growth.

I thought he was crossing the room to talk to my friend Maxine, because people were always crossing rooms to talk to Maxine.

I’m Ben Small, of the Coney Island Smalls.

This stupid, wagon wheel, Roy Rogers, garage sale coffee table!

Musicals: Life on a higher plane

May 29, 2012 Anna Wahrman Leave a comment

Whenever I meet someone who hates musicals, or claims not to “get” them, I try to explain why I have the opposite feeling. It’s a silly exercise, because ultimately it’s pointless to try to put words to art, but nonetheless I do defend musical theater. What I usually say is something along the lines of: “Musicals take words and feelings to another plane; when you’ve taken spoken feelings as far as you can go with them, they must pour over into song.”

The example I usually cite is “Maria” from West Side Story. Tony has just fallen in love at first sight with Maria and he starts talking: “Maria.” He repeats the name and it soon takes him over until he can speak it no more and it has elevated itself to necessarily being sung: “Maria! I’ve just met a girl named Maria!” And he’s up there on stage, live, letting it out, right in front of you! (Added bonus: This song also contains one of my all-time favorite musical passages, “Say it loud and there’s music playing/Say it soft and it’s almost like praying.”)

Allowing oneself to be captivated by musical theater — to give yourself over to its implausibility, its suspension of disbelief, its distinct storytelling — is, to me, a favorable personality trait. If the person I’m speaking to understands this example and the broader context, we can be friends. If not, I’m sorry, but it was nice to meet you.

So it took my breath away — in that way if does when you feel another person has precisely captured the thoughts in your own mind and set it forth into the world in better phrasing than you could ever conceive of — to read this graf from Scott Brown’s essay on Broadway songwriting in last week’s New York magazine:

“A true musical is the fissile power of internal contradiction gone critical. It’s the disciplined, rigorous release of madness from the molten core of the human soul, apportioned in meter, disciplined (barely) in song.”

Precisely.

Precisely why I must walk home after a great Broadway show, my heart beating fast, my legs moving quickly, my soul have been affirmed and elevated. Precisely the reason why Smash‘s actual musical numbers invigorate me and their karaoke song covers make me cringe and roll my eyes. (Same goes for all the jukebox musicals so popular today.) Precisely why Audra McDonald caused me to spontaneously cry during Porgy and Bess (and that’s just the most recent time — it happens a lot.)

They don’t all have to ballads, by the way: I love fun, zippy songs that tell or help unfurl a story, too. But they must communicate from that heightened place, the place where only musicals can go, and where those who understand can be transported.

The online addendum to that essay, which is mostly about the state of today’s musical songwriting, by the way, is a slideshow featuring theater folk and their suggestions for how to improve the lot of current theater. All worth a read, but the one that spoke to me most was James Nicola, who said, “I also think a common problem is a lack of good book-writing — a thankless job, so it doesn’t attract maybe the best or most accomplished dramatic writers because of how unappreciated the work is. In a musical, even the most amazing song can fizzle without the proper set-up from the book writer.”

I saw February House at the Public over the weekend, and I really loved it. The songs were alternately moving, funny, humane and devastating, and altogether well done, showing a lot of promise. The book, on the other hand, could use some work, and I hope the producers spiff it up before it goes on to its next life on Broadway.

But nonetheless I walked out of the theater ready to take on the world, invigorated and thrilled. Because even when it’s not the perfect combination of music, lyrics, book, cast and production, it can still be transformative and life-affirming and pulse-quickening when it’s good. That’s the best of musical theater. That feeling is one of the best gifts art can give us.