The Late Starters Orchestra (15 page)

SHIRA

While I was going through changes as I approached sixty, Shira, eleven years younger than me, was going through her own.

Shira is one of those rare people who grow more and more striking with age. Relatives who apparently were underwhelmed when they first met her at our wedding often marvel at her beauty today. “When did she get so pretty?” they ask, as if talking about a child.

She was just twenty-two when we met, gamine-like, with chocolate brown eyes, raven black hair, an upturned nose, and the trim figure of a dancer. Shira is a raw force of nature, dark sometimes, sunny at others, smart all the time. The first time I met her, I knew this was it. I had found her. Or she found me.

Why was Shira uncomfortable with my LSO forays?

To understand her reaction, I had to go back to one of our very first dates. It was evening and we were sauntering, arm in arm, along Fifth Avenue when Shira mentioned tomatoes. “They're my favorite vegetable,” I said.

“They're a fruit.”

“A fruit? Are you kidding? Tomatoes are a vegetable.”

A good-natured fight ensued over this matter.

For younger readers, let me pause to explain that there was no Google in those days, no way to quickly check simple facts like the genus of a tomato. Oddly, though, I was experienced in disputes of this kind. When I was a young news clerk working the night shift, I'd often have to juggle calls from semidrunk patrons at a bar asking questions like, “Who won the 1956 World Series?” or “How many pounds are there in a ton?” In those days if you wanted the definitive answer—and you were tipsy—you called the
Times.

Making a call from a pay phone—no cell phones!—to my own newspaper for this purpose was out of the question, but there were bookstores. And some of them were open late at night.

“Let's go to Rizzoli and look in the dictionary under ‘tomato,' ” I suggested.

“No,” said Shira. “Rizzoli closes early. Scribner's is open.”

“We're right near Rizzoli,” I said. “I know it's open. Let's go.”

We walked to Rizzoli. It was closed. Shira tried, without success, to suppress a triumphant smile. I let go of her arm.

We walked to Scribner's. It was open. We headed for the reference section at the back of the mezzanine and pulled out the Webster's. She was right again. A tomato is a fruit.

“Ha!” she said gleefully.

I was perplexed. Didn't her mother tell her that men don't like to feel stupid? But Shira never played the ego-boosting game with me or anyone else. She presented herself as a contender, right from the start, a force to be reckoned with.

Her will is strong, very strong, yet, over the course of our marriage, it has been my needs that have determined our family's path. My career, first as a reporter and then as a professor, dictated how—and where—we'd lived. Each of these transitions could have been fraught with tension, but in each case, Shira diffused it by making the move into an adventure—and a joint project.

That was the pattern right from the beginning of our marriage. After our wedding we set off for three weeks of overseas travel, but we cut our honeymoon short because the
Times
asked me to come back to cover the opening of the United Nation's General Assembly.

Soon after the birth of our first child, Adam, the
Times
sent me to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a year to study religion at Harvard. Shira didn't simply “come along,” she began to write freelance articles for the
Times
bureau in Boston. Years later, when we sold our suburban home and moved into university housing in Manhattan, Shira took a job as a media specialist and discovered a new, if unexpected, professional calling. A few years later when I took a sabbatical to teach and do research in Israel, Shira came along, but not until she landed a book contract to write about the experience from her perspective. When, a few years later, I spent a semester in Oxford, England, Shira expanded her business. Her new business card read
SHIRA DICKER MEDIA INTERNATIONAL
and listed offices in New York, Oxford, and Jerusalem. That semester, she shuttled between all three cities.

Throughout our marriage, Shira and I have had a partnership that not merely included each other but celebrated, recognized, and prized each other. But, alas, music was not something we shared. Perhaps it had to do with our age gap. When we first met, Shira was a diehard fan of the Talking Heads and also loved the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Squeeze, Dire Straits, and other contemporary artists that made my ears hurt, with singers and groups like David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Duran Duran, Supertramp, even Madonna. She shared an apartment in Manhattan with a college friend and her Rastafarian boyfriend. One night I picked her up and she excitedly showed me an Elton John album—yes, an LP or long-playing vinyl record—and popped it on her turntable. Out of the speakers came “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” truly one of the worst songs ever written. I quickly suggested that we go out for the evening. “Let's go dancing!” Shira said. Surely my idea of hell, but there was no resisting her or her sense of adventure.

That was only the beginning of a happy, if exhausting, courtship and marriage. In our first apartment we got cable TV, I thought, so we could watch
Masterpiece
Th
eater
and that wonderful but boring
MacNeil/Lehrer Report
. But I would frequently come home to find the television blasting MTV, with Shira singing along at the top of her lungs and jumping on our bed.

She has a voracious musical appetite. Over the years she's had flirtations—and lessons—with many musical instruments, including piano, flute, and drums. She took voice lessons and discovered a newfound love for singing karaoke, so much so that anytime we passed a bar advertising
KARAOKE TONIGHT
she cast a longing glance in its direction while I tried to distract her. I joined her a few times, but decided that this was a pleasure she needed to experience with friends or by herself.

Though Shira enjoys classical music (she remembers spending a good part of her early years playing under the family's baby grand piano as her mother, an accomplished pianist, played Rachmaninoff), she is primarily a rocker girl. When she hears music, Shira moves, either on the dance floor or on the treadmill. It was one thing when I shared the cello with Judah, but when I went off on my own to LSO, something unnerved her.

It wasn't the “babes” at LSO. It was my obsession with my cello. I was putting it first. I was missing family events on Sunday afternoons and I was giving up the opportunity to be with Shira. Mr. J had called his gamba his mistress. Duke Ellington famously declared, “Music is my mistress, and she plays second to no one.”

Is that what it takes to succeed? To put your music before everything? Is that what it takes to be a
real
musician?

I realized that my music needed to better coexist with my marriage. I had to make room for Shira in my musical life.

PART FIVE

Old and New

Music remains above you: you are just striving to reach it. The better you become at it, the music moves higher, so it becomes unreachable.

—GREGOR PIATIGORSKY

M
y middle-aged musical obsession came at a transitional time not only in my married life but in my professional life. Here I was spending more and more time on this old instrument made of wood and wire, while journalism was going wireless and paperless. The journalism that I fell in love with as a young man—the newsroom of manual typewriters and rotary phones and chain-smoking, hard-drinking newsmen—was no more. I was hired as a copy boy at the
Times
in 1973 just as computers were being introduced to a newsroom that was still very much rooted in the old world. Automobile-size rolls of newsprint were hauled into the basement each morning, and each night the presses rumbled as they printed the newspaper the old fashioned way: on paper. Outside, newspaper handlers took the papers off the presses and loaded them onto dozens and dozens of trucks that delivered fresh copies of the
New York Times
around New York—and around the country.

All of that was eventually rendered obsolete by technology that made it possible to beam images of the paper from the roof of the building at Forty-third Street to printing centers around the country and around the world. Not far behind that technology was the introduction of the Internet. Now you didn't need a paper to know what was going on; all you needed was a computer terminal and, even later, just a cell phone.

American newspapers were at first intoxicated by the opportunity to capture these new online readers. They set up websites and poured their content for free into the webisphere, convinced that this would draw new readers to their traditional product and expand their advertising base. It didn't quite happen that way. In big cities and small cities, readers abandoned the print editions and read the news online at no cost. And, much to the publishers' chagrin, advertisers were not willing to support this new venture. They had found a million other ways to connect to readers on the Web.

There was a time when newspapers had a near monopoly on reaching the public. If you were a department store and were having a sale on shoes, you put an ad in the paper. If you were an airline and wanted to fill seats, you put in a print ad with the destinations and prices. If you were looking for a job you looked in the help-wanted pages. Same if you were looking to buy a house or a car or a litter of kittens. Same if you wanted to sell these and virtually any other items. With the Web, this was all gone.

The change had enormous implications for journalism. Newspapers closed. Staffs were trimmed. Washington bureaus and foreign offices that many newspapers maintained for decades were shuttered. No one wanted to wait for tomorrow's newspaper anymore. Armed with laptops and cell phones, people wanted information—and they wanted it now. And they wanted it for free.

Journalism schools like mine had to retool. They needed new equipment, new personnel, and new strategies to attract students and convince them that they would eventually find jobs. I am not a technology person. I got into journalism because I love to tell a story. Give me a pen and a pad and I am happy. I got into journalism because it enables me to meet new people and write about them. I got into journalism because I love the thrill of a deadline and the satisfaction of meeting it.

As technology exploded around me, I staked out a position at the School of Journalism as the traditionalist. I figured there were enough people who knew HTML and Flash and Web design and Twitter. I was going to continue teaching what I was convinced were the eternal verities of journalism: good writing, interviewing, storytelling, fairness, teamwork, integrity, ethics. Someone had to remind people of these, even as we rushed headlong into what was being called “new media.” And who better to do this than someone raised and reared in the old media, someone approaching sixty?

I was inspired by the words of the great conservative commentator and writer William F. Buckley, Jr., whose political philosophy I did not always agree with but who was unsurpassed in capturing ideas in words. In 1955, when Buckley started the
National Review,
he wrote that it “stands athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.”

I was determined to be the voice yelling, “Stop!” or at least, “Slow down!” as the digital onslaught arrived in America's journalism schools. I did this while some of my older teaching colleagues were setting up their Twitter and Facebook accounts.

As my birthday approached, I was teaching a class at Columbia that I had taught more than a dozen times before. It was called “Reporting and Writing 1” and it was the foundation course for everything at the school. I ran the class like a newsroom, with me as the editor in chief. The students were my staff and I instructed them on everything from interviewing and writing to news judgment and ethics. Each week, I would send them out around the city to cover news events and write feature stories. And I insisted that they stay current with news developments—and not only on the Internet. I asked them to buy a physical copy of the
New York Times,
something few in their generation did, and bring it to class on the days we met. I would use the paper to illustrate major topics in the news and trends in journalism, all the while ignoring the major trend, namely, that paper is dead.

This was a small class, with no more than sixteen students, and mine was one of numerous RW1 sections offered. In this particular year, I had six students who were designated as “new media concentrators.” In addition to the lessons they had from me about the basics, they spent many, many hours supplying websites with video and audio reports. The gold standard that year was something called audio slideshows—a product akin to a talking photo album—that were proliferating like mad on news sites. Clearly these were the skills students needed to succeed.

I loved teaching RW1. I had taken the same course nearly forty years earlier and it had a major impact on how I practiced my craft. Now, as the teacher, I wanted the same for these young people. Many of our students came from excellent undergraduate colleges and some had worked for a year or two in a variety of jobs. Most of them were bright and all of them were educable. Like most good teachers, I demanded their full attention and insisted that they come to class on time.

Week after week, my six “new media concentrators” were late to class. They would enter each time with the same excuse: “We had a new media class.” After three weeks of this, I erupted: “Fuck new media,” I shouted. “You did not come to this school to learn new media. You came to learn the traditions and standards of journalism. New media will soon become old media. What you need to learn is journalism!”

A few weeks later,
New York Magazine
ran an article on a so-called battle being played out at Columbia Journalism over technology. The headline was
COLUMBIA J-SCHOOL'S EXISTENTIAL CRISIS.
And you don't have to guess what side I was on. “‘Fuck new media,' the coordinator of the RWL program, Ari Goldman, said to his RW1 students on their first day of class, according to one student. Goldman, a former
Times
reporter and sixteen-year veteran RW1 professor, described new-media training as ‘playing with toys,' according to another student, and characterized the digital movement as ‘an experimentation in gadgetry.' ”

Aside from factual errors—I did not say it on the first day of class and I don't use words like
gadgetry
—I did say “Fuck new media,” and there was no living it down. The Web is an echo chamber and my comment was picked up by magazines, newspaper websites, and dozens of blogs. There were over seventy comments alone on the
New York Magazine
website, most of them condemning me and asking how Columbia University could continue to employ such an irrelevant professor. I was called a “dinosaur,” a Luddite, and worse. The embrace of the digital future was so complete that anyone who treasured the past was the enemy.

There was only one thing for me to do: I turned off my computer, went home, and played my cello.