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To one and all:
Here’s hoping you have a wonderful day, surrounded by family near and far, and friends old and new. Take a moment when you’re with them to really think upon all the things we have to be thankful for. It’s always more than you think.
Don’t eat too much!
Cheers!
This was a nice recent comment on the blog, from a reader (thanks!) named Rich, and I’ll say in advance that I couldn’t agree more:
Ron, I went to a concert recently which was a combination of the Air Force Band of Flight and the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra. I see both regularly and they are both great. Together they are even better. We have so much culture here in Dayton. I just saw Sinclair’s version of Hamlet. They Loft and Victoria Theatre both have great offerings as well.
Well said, and soooo true. I’ve in and out of town in recent weeks on vacation, and I have found that I’ve been really missing getting my regular normal dose of Miami Valley arts stuff. We did get to see the most recent Dayton Philharmonic concert, which was as magical as always; those guys really do a great job, and I’m always impressed by the way they sound like a symphony that would be welcome in a much larger city. But hey — we’ve got ‘em, and that’s all good.
A few weeks ago, I got out to First Friday in the downtown art galleries, and was pleased by a lot of what I saw — from offbeat, thoughtful performance art to deeply introspective landscapes, crisp new photography and a lot of fine painting from artists I hadn’t seen in a while. The galleries were lively and full; my promise to myself was to start attending those First Friday events with notebook in hand, and to not miss them from now on.
Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to get the time to make a second visit to the Dayton Art Institute to see the exhibit that’s visiting from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which focuses on the depiction of children in American art. It’s really less about kids than about the interesting maturation of styles and abilities that you can trace in American painting from the colonial era up to the early 20th century… and the fact that you can see great work by real masters like Homer and Sargent on display. It’s a good show, and one worth checking out.
Yep, Rich is onto something, and I really like hearing from fellow travelers who appreciate and enjoy and sample all of the offerings here and share what they’ve seen and heard.
We have lots of great culture in this fair city of ours… Which of it do you enjoy?
This is an interesting idea: celebrate John Milton’s big upcoming anniversary with an out-loud marathon reading of “Paradise Lost.”
Odd as the idea sounds, some colleges around the country are doing just that… This fun story describes one such…
Having recently reread “Paradise Lost” and really enjoyed it — like most of the books they made us read when we were younger, it really only works when you’re old enough to appreciate it — it’s occuring to me this might be a fun idea… Anybody game? I’ll read if you do….
There are times when talking about music is nearly as much fun as listening to music, and this week I had one of those times.
I wrote a few weeks ago about a new book, “1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die,” by Tom Moon, a music writer for NPR.org who’s contributed to every music mag from Rolling Stone to Blender, and who really knows his stuff. He gave a signing at Books & Co. at the Greene Thursday evening, and since the good folks at the store are kind enough to read my column, they invited me to introduce Tom and lead the Q&A-type conversation with him.
It was a lot of fun; we’re about the same age, and both remember the days when getting the music you wanted meant buying LPs in a record store, rather than downloading onto your laptop; a number of the people who came to hear him talk seemed similarly nostalgic for that long-ago era.
Moon’s book harkens back to it, too. He spent several years listening, interviewing and researching to compile his list, which he was careful not to describe as a “best-of” collection. Rather, he said, he pretended that he was writing for a blank-slate listener who was interested, smart and passionate, in the hopes of presenting a rundown of songs and albums in all genres, from doo-wop to zydeco, that will, as he put it, “inspire a lifetime of exploration.”
I remember well being just such a blank slate. Like Moon, I hit high school, one’s prime music years, in the mid-1970s, and I have fond memories of my teen-age toe-dipping into the world of rock and pop. Our music store was a dark, incense-hazy basement in Oberlin called The Down Under — a mysterious and magical place decorated with R. Crumb’s crazed-stoner artwork and incandescent posters from Cleveland concerts. You tripped over a stack of Scene magazines on the way down the stairs, and were greeted by row upon row of Peaches-crated albums through which a youngster could while away an entire afternoon flipping, flipping, flipping.
And while away I did. My friends and I pored over the colorful album jackets, comparing and discussing the fine points of the designs. We would drill into the backlists of bands and singers we had discovered belatedly, trying to fill in the gaps of our knowledge. We studied the comings and goings of sessionmen and supergroups, and argued about why and how one band was better than another.
Was “Exile on Main Street” better than “Sticky Fingers”? Were the Sex Pistols better than the Ramones? Did the Eagles go downhill after Bernie Leadon left the band, or actually hit their stride? Would Paul McCartney ever make an album we liked? Why did disco suck so much?
We’d pay attention to whatever was playing in the store and would probably buy it. We could always count on the opinions of the cool older guys behind the counter to know whether something was good or not. And we sampled, sampled, sampled.
Sigh. You grow up and things change, and course nothing later seems as golden as it did when you were a kid, experiencing it all for the first time. But Tom Moon made the interesting point that in a lot of ways, the changes in the music business don’t seem to have been all that good for music itself — and that the ways we learn about and absorb music today has become far less communal, an far less fun, than it once was.
ITunes, snazzy and utilitarian as it is, doesn’t give one the museum-like sense of gradual discovery that the now largely vanished neighborhood record store once provided. And the music stores that remain cater now to a faster, more impatient clientele who seem less into browsing than grabbing and moving on.
I don’t mean to be all old-guy misty over this, but I do miss the days when thinking and talking about music in an open forum, a gathering place for meeting and dialogue, was a big part of the experience of the music itself. I don’t think we have that anymore, and Tom Moon agreed. That’s why he wrote his book. I hope it helps.
This essay on the ways life has changed in bookstores really got me to thinking… I know that I read as much as ever, if not more, but that I really don’t spend time browsing in bookstores as much as I used to…
And I really miss it, now that I think upon the matter. Sunday afternoons would nearly always find me spending an hour or so at Books and Co.’s old Kettering store, meandering through the aisles with exploration and sampling the main thing that I was up to… Just to enjoy being around all the different books.
I don’t do it as much anymore, even though I’m still around books a lot. I wonder how I got away from this? Is it the time I spend online? Is it just getting busier in general? Is it that I’ve made a conscious decision to spend a while plowing through my own library to catch up with books I bought a while ago, that I never got around to reading?
Speaking of which, the Planned Parenthood book sale is wrapping up this afternoon at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds… Maybe I’ll have a chance to slip over are smell a bit of book dust, just like I used to do.
Now that the results are in and the transition has begun, most of the stories since Tuesday have focused on the political, global and economic implications of an Obama presidency. What hasn’t gotten much ink or consideration yet, however, is how the new administration will affect the shape and tone of our popular culture.
What got me thinking of this was a comment in Friday’s Wall Street Journal from Toni Morrison, the nation’s pre-eminent black writer, about her responses to the the election. She was asked if she could think of any literary figures who reminded her of Barack Obama and what he’s accomplished.
“No, there isn’t” one that came to mind, she said. “I think if Ralph Ellison was alive he would (change the title of) of his book to ‘The Visible Man.’ Usually the heroic but flawed figure, whether in politics or in literature, it’s sad and tragic even if they succeed for a moment. It doesn’t last. The only place you see black presidents is in movies and they’re always dealing with the end of the world.”
Well, we hope that won’t happen. But it does make one wonder how the ground-shifting novelty of America electing its first black president will play out in the realm of movies, music, TV and novels over the next few years.
It’s unavoidable that it will, somehow. Back when John F. Kennedy ascended, of course, the nation was transfixed by “Camelot.” Kennedy impersonators sprang up, fashions were affected, and JFK’s approximate likeness reigned in myriad Cold War films and novels long after he was gone.
Presidents always affect the culture around them, one way or another. Think how much protest music was written about and against the Vietnam War and the man who led it — tin soldiers and Nixon coming? Nixon’s weird image is so indelible it’s even being revived in Hollywood this season, in the new film “Frost/Nixon,” by Ron Howard. And this, right on the heels of Oliver Stone’s “W.,” which by most accounts was a surprisingly bland, even-handed take on a president whose presence on the world stage has been far more dramatic.
Sometimes, it’s merely the tone of the times, set by the president and his “bully pulpit,” that changes what we watch and read. Is it any accident, for instance, that the so-called torture-porn films that have raked in big bucks the last few years have grown popular during a time in which torture became official U.S. policy, for the first time in our history? A few years from now, regardless of how the president-elect chooses to deal with the threat of terrorism, does anybody think that rock-em-sock-em government-agent shows like “24,” in which everybody in the world seems out to get us, will remain as popular as they are today?
Who knows what will come next? Babies will named after the new president, sure, and no doubt the incoming First Lady’s business-like wardrobe will be featured on women’s magazine covers.
Will this be the time in which dramas that focus on intact middle-class black families finally break through into mainstream Hollywood green-lighting?
Will terrorism tales and war movies become more popular, or less?
Will rock and pop become less angry, disaffected and mean?
Will African-American characters move more freely in the hallways of fiction and TV narrative, without having to be written about merely because they are African-American?
We don’t know. Along with waiting to see how so many other things may change, we await word on all these things as well. One thing for sure: It’s going to be interesting, and entertaining.
Writer and editor Ron Rollins has covered entertainment and the Dayton arts scene for more than a decade.
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