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August 2008
Ah, Emily…
Cool new book out on one of our favorites, Emily Dickinson…
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Getting wet with the Ohio Players
A big, big pat on the back for everybody who was at the Fraze Friday night:
The fans who stuck it out during an hour of steady downpour before the Ohio Players took the stage, ducking for cover and stay as dry as possible;
The same fans who happily, calmly sat in their seats while the Fraze underwent post-shower moisture problems with the sound system for about another hour;
The engineers who worked hard to fix said problems;
The Fraze staff who helped keep thing upbeat and orderly;
The guy down in the middle seats someplace who kept leading that “Fiiiiiiiire!” chant from time to time;
And the Ohio Players themselves, who finally, about 10:20 PM, took the Fraze stage for the first time in their long careers and turned in a brisk, lively, heartfelt house-party of a performance for the hometown crowd that kept funking along till nearly midnight and sent everybody home damp and happy.
I had never seen the Players live, and had always wanted to…. Heck, I remember hearing “Funky Worm” when I was a high school freshman, thinking that I had NEVER ruite heard anything like it before….
And “Fire”? One of the greatest pop songs of all time, period. Written right here in Dayton, Ohio, folks.
Four original members kept the show going with well-chosen newer members who fit right in and made the sound feel right. They still have plenty of funk, spunk and soul, and know how to rock out (horns included) at just the right time. Hoo-ah! A good show, all in all, even though the lateness and circumstances forced the band to race through some of their stuff. Not a prob.
Glad we stuck around…
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Off to NeverNeverLand!
Well, I finally made it to Disney World.
I had put it off. Avoided the place, for the most part. The last time I was there was the week Nixon resigned, when I was 14, and for years I’d had more distinct memories of our family racing back to the hotel at night to watch Walter Cronkite narrating the unfolding national drama than I did of Cinderella’s castle. Geeky, sure, but I was already a news junkie.
Later in life, Disney World just never emerged high on the list of places my wife and I had on the top-of-mind vacation list. When my parents offered to take our kids when they were little, that was cool with us; we stayed home and enjoyed the quiet, pretty sure we weren’t missing much.
If it sounds as though I’m carrying some Disney grudge, that’s not the case. I’m a big fan of the classic cartoons and have seen them all lots of times. Pixar? Geniuses. “Wonderful World of Color”? Grew up on it. Generally speaking, I like most of the entertainment product that carries the Disney brand.
It’s just that the theme park, and the whole idea of it, just didn’t interest me. Why go see a fake German biergarten, I figured, when there’s a whole country full of the real thing that’s a lot more interesting? And not that much more expensive to enjoy? Of course, this couldn’t last. When my folks announced they were gathering the whole family together for their 50th anniversary and that Disney World was the place, I knew my snobbish disdain of “It’s a Small, Small World” would have to come to an end. And after four very fun days, Mousketeers, I’m happy to admit it: I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Within a few hours of strolling Epcot and the Magic Kingdom, I was lulled by it all. I was hooked. It’s a great place and a fun vacation — which I know many of you already know, from the weird looks I got from friends when they heard I hadn’t ever taken my own kids there. Bad dad me.
I offer, then, a few stray thoughts and observations, fresh from the Disney front, for anybody who’s been:
— It’s a family place, but I don’t think most very young children can really enjoy it; the park is a pure sensory overload, even for an adult. For a 3-year-old, it’s probably like a jolt of LSD. Most of the little kids we saw were crying. Perfect age would be 10, I’d think.
— Reminder: Florida in August is hot.
— They took out the E-ticket attraction I remember best: The submarine ride! Guess there’s not much call these days for “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” Oh, well.
— As a manager, I found myself musing about how well-run the place is. How do they keep every lightbulb lit? How do they keep it so impeccably clean? How do they staff the Moroccan restaurant with real Moroccans? How do they keep security so invisible?
— The one glitch: Restaurant billing via those credit-card “keys” you buy. It was screwed up for our entire group. Oh, well.
— I most enjoyed the Animal Kingdom. It felt less fakey than the rest of the park, and best achieved the illusion of reality. Of course, the animals could have been animatronic … I guess …
— Bush sounded better in the Hall of Presidents than he does in real life.
— Major nit: This isn’t the park’s fault, but we were amazed by the number of nonwalkers on scooters. They gum up the traffic flow and slow down the bus system. Sorry, save your angry e-mail on this one; legitimate disabilities are one thing, but morbid overeating that puts you in a vehicle that runs over my foot does not count. America: Walk more!
Finally, even though I liked Disney World quite a lot, I left the park feeling a little sad for Mickey Mouse. He’s all over, from signs to coffee mugs, and he’s one of the most recognizable icons in the world. But have you seen him on the big or small screen lately? Oddly, Disney has gradually de-emphasized Mickey’s place in its entertainment offerings, with only a smattering of mostly insignificant appearances for the little guy since the 1970s. It’s a shame, but from a pure marketing standpoint, I wonder why Disney wouldn’t want to keep refreshing its biggest character for new generations to learn and respond to.
And don’t get me started on Donald …
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Trans-Siberian Orchestra: Can they be stopped???
This just in from the folks at the Nutter Center… CAN ANYONE PREVENT THIS???
Winter’s Hottest Annual Arena Rock Attraction to Visit Dayton on Sunday, Jan. 4
One of the biggest arena attractions in rock music, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra (TSO), will once again take to the road this holiday season for what will be another monumental tour, more than 90 cities coast-to-coast in a nine-week period. Locally, 104.7 WTUE, Mix 107.7 and Lite 99.9 present Trans-Siberian Orchestra at E.J. Nutter Center on Sunday, Jan. 4 at 3 p.m. & 7:30 p.m.
Tickets ($58.50, $48.50, $38.50) for the show go on-sale Monday, Sept. 8 at 10 a.m. via Livenation.com, E.J. Nutter Center ticket office, Ticketmaster or charge-by-phone at (937) 228-2323.
I’m just askin’.
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The greatest recordings ever?
Hmmmm… could be…
My friend Bruce Miller sent along this link to an NPR story on a new book that lists 1,000 all-time essential recordings… I’ll have to pick it up…
Music! Lists! As Bruce pointed out, two of my favorite things.
Listen up!
BTW, what’s YOUR favorite recording of all time? I’ll start with “Born To Run.”
Discuss!
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A lousy movie summer for minorities
Caught John Ridley on NPR this morning, with this insightful blog entry on the near-total lack of minority faces in this summer’s movie offerings. Read it… it’s quite food for thought.
He’s right, though; as I think back on it, there were no movies by major black stars this summer that I can think of, other than Will Smith.
Ridley did leave off Morgan Freeman in “The Dark Knight,” but the only other black character I can remember in that movie was wearing an orange prison jumpsuit….
It still seemed like a pretty white summer, all things considered…
Thoughts, anyone?
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And she’s beautiful, too…
Just what we’ve been waiting for: Vanity Fair does one of its signature profiles on the most interesting woman in the world, Carla Bruni.
Thanks!
It’s long, but well worth the read.
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New CD from The Hold Steady
Ahoy, kids! The disc du jour:
rock
The Hold Steady
STAY POSITIVE
The kids who are listening to the Hold Steady are probably too young to remember that back in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, a spate of Springsteen-influenced groups spun off from his sudden popularization of the Jersey sound: bar-band energy, retro-rock hooks, long-form lyrical storytelling, gruff vocals and lots of keyboard marked everybody from Bon Jovi to Southside Johnny and the Jukes. Oh yeah, and at least one mention per album of a making out under a boardwalk.
The Hold Steady, from Brooklyn, are working the very same turf long after even Bruce himself has moved onto different sorts of stuff, and they’re doing it without even a trace of the irony one expects from guys this young who play it straight-faced with classic-rock forms these days.
“Stay Positive,” the band’s fourth album since starting up in 2004, has the whole shtick down pat, from the songs about aging mill towns to the organ riffing a la Danny Federici, circa 1978. The gruff voice comes from singer Craig Finn, who unabashedly credits his influences; good for him.
Despite the honesty, though, what is the difference between sincere homage and shameless ripoff? Dunno about you, but I don’t think the aforementioned lack of irony helps. Grade: C+
iPod picks: “Stay Positive,” “Navy Sheets.”
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Worth note
A nifty quote I stumbled across in my morning surfing. It’s from English theologian Bishop Joseph Butler:
“Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.”
Indeed. Don’t most of us find ourselves at least a bit guilty of automatically drawing comparisons between people, things and events in order to, we believe, better understand them? If Butler is more correct, he has something to say, I think, about our traditional notions of “context” and applying it to the matter at hand, which we often do by looking outside the situation itself — perhaps improperly, or unhelpfully, so.
Anyway, just a Sunday morning thought. Happy contextualizing to you!
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X-Fest: Leave the kiddies at home, please
Got a call the other day from a reader who recalled a column I wrote a few years ago about X-Fest, the big hard-rock festival that happens every September at the Montgomery County Fairgrounds, and she had a question:
Should she let her 16-year-old daughter go?
“I haven’t gone, obviously,” she said. “And she really, really wants to go. Her dad is leaning toward no, and I’m leaning toward yes, but I don’t know what goes on there. What do you think?”
First, I was reluctant to say; I joke with friends that the only parenting advice I ever give is: “Remember, after two they outnumber you.” But she beseeched, and I gave in.
She had questions: Could her daughter get hurt? Was it an aggressive crowd?
I had questions back: Did she consider her daughter mature and reliable? Yes and yes. Did they have a trusting relationship? Yes. Did she trust the friends she’d be with? Yes.
In that case, I suggested her daughter would be fine. But I added the caveat that X-Fest — with all its mosh-pitting, drunkenness and, um, bead-trading — won’t scar any kid for life, but is still very much an adult event. This year’s, by the way, is Sept. 14.
Mom seemed satisfied, but it occurred to me that there are probably a lot of parents in her shoes: unsure whether it’s appropriate for their teens to attend an event that they themselves have no experience with.
Obviously, plenty of parents have utterly no concerns about letting their kids do whatever the kids want, without regard to such things as age-appropriateness, and I figure this whole conversation is lost on them. I also realize that any teenagers reading this have already pegged me as an old-fart loser who has no business weighing in on an event they enjoy. Oh, well.
In fact, however, I enjoy X-fest, too, and I go most years with the same group of middle-aged friends. Why? Well, in recent years, it hasn’t been so much for the music, which tends toward the samey, angry muck that marks most hard rock these days. We go, honestly, because the event is all the things that make it completely inappropriate for anybody younger than 16, and for most people younger than 18: It’s raunchy, sweaty, dusty, beer-drenched, ear-splitting, crowd-jostling fun in the sun — a day of the sort of utter, hedonistic forgetfulness that one can achieve only at a large, outdoor rock festival. I don’t have the time or vacation days to drive to Lollapalooza or South by Southwest; in a third-tier market like Dayton, you get X-Fest. So, OK.
There are things about it I really like: local bands getting a shot on a big stage; watching the NFL in the rowdy side tent; the crowd surfers slithering across a sea of hands; the Marine recruiters egging kids on to do more pull-ups; the endless variety of T-shirts and tattoos; the fact that most everybody is unfailingly polite and easygoing; and, yes, the massive clang and crash of the music, even if it isn’t the stuff I listen to all the time.
The 13-year-olds who do? Let ’em listen to it at home on the radio for a few more years, before you send them to hang out with a few thousand badly behaving old folks. Frankly, we can have more fun if they aren’t around.
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Give me semicolons or give me death
Well, punctuation fans (and I KNOW you’re out there…) we have yet another article on the apparent demise and near death of that most venerable and yet unappreciated of punctuation marks, and my favorite … Ladies and Gentlemen! I present: The Semicolon! He’s just here for this week only, folks!
Seriously, why do people pick on this thing? It’s so useful! So full of grace! So able to grant a bit of breathing room between complete thoughts! So subtle! So sublime!
My sense is that most people just don’t know how to use it, and so they knock it. Typical.
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The Springsteen Gospel
Pretty wise and interesting take on the Boss and his message, from NPR. Thanks to my friend Bruce Miller for sending along…
Cool stuff; never quite listened to Springsteen this way, but I like it.
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New Miley Cyrus: Um, I guess
The pop disc du jour, kidlets…
Miley Cyrus BREAKOUT
Miley, Miley, Miley! As everybody who even remotely pays attention to these things knows, it’s alllllllllllllll about Miley these days. After all the hype and humdrum that’s attached itself to her in the last year or two (or however long it’s been; it seems like at least a year or two…), we get our first chance with “Breakout” to hear what an album by the singer herself sounds like without the encumbrance and artifice of her hypermanufactured alterego.
And is the difference all that pronounced? Once you’ve sold yourself as something and someone else, does it matter who you really turn out to be, once you claim to actually be yourself? Does it matter? Will anyone care? Well, on her way to No. 1 chart-topping, little Miley has managed in her own weird way to offer us such existential pop-cultural musings far beyond anything ever offered by Patty Duke, Hayley Mills or any of her is-she/isn’t-she/who-is-she-anyway precursors.
That’s partly because of the overwhelming size of the business that’s sprung up about her, partly because of the awful supervelocity of today’s pop trends as they arc from buzz to flameout, and partly because even after all that, we still have managed to get the sneaking sense that this young singer might just have a smidgen of actual, by-gosh talent. And that’s always worth consideration. Especially nowadays, when it seems to be in such short radio supply.
The positive evidence on that score, based on the frankly so-so results to be heard on “Breakout,” tend to come on the slower songs when Cyrus does that thing so hard for somebody of her tender age to do: Take a deep breath, chill out, and really think about what they’re doing. On songs like “Bottom of the Ocean” and the equally thoughtful breakup tune “Goodbye,” there is a lot more to Cyrus than one gets on the hopped-up emo-pop of the predictable, and predictably popular “7 Things,” a silly litany of diary droppings aimed squarely at teenage girls who still write their boyfriends’ names on the covers of their school notebooks and dot their i’s with little heart.
Which is OK, because they need hit songs, too, but one wonders at reviews by older listeners that suggest the Miley Cyrus on “Breakout” is somehow more mature or wiser than the Miley Cyrus who was just recently Hannah Montana, on an album that is mostly about cell phones, text messages, first dates and driveway breakups. Cyrus does earn grown-up points, I guess, on a save-the-earth song, “Wake Up America,” that notes, “Everything you do matters.” It’s a from-the-mouths-of-babes message that ought to be taken to heart regardless of one’s age. Still, it doesn’t make up for the God-awfully point-missing cover of “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” nor does it do much to keep us from thinking: Miley, dear — make as many albums as you can now, while they’re buying, and save all the money you can.
Grade: B-
iPod picks: “Breakout,” “These Four Walls,” “Bottom Of the Ocean.”
— Ron Rollins
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Orville was the problem, too
Good point or two raised in this New Yorker article on patents, and how they can also hold progress up, as much as move it forward… Our very own Orville Wright doesn’t look so good here. Food for thought…
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An interesting new DAI show
This just in from the Dayton Art Institute… looks like one worth stopping by for. Here’s the press release, just arrived:
Visitors to The Dayton Art Institute will enjoy a.muse, a special exhibition of art created by 67 of The Dayton Art Institute’s current instructors and students, ranging in age from 5 to 65. Works of art include jewelry, mosaics, sculptures, paintings and drawings. All of the student work was created in classes held at the museum in 2007 and 2008.
a.muse is sponsored in part by the Joan W. McCoy Memorial Art Fund. Joan W. McCoy was a practicing artist throughout her lifetime and worked full-time for seven years as The Dayton Art Institute’s first docent. She became a docent after receiving her Art History degree from Wooster College. As the museum’s first docent, McCoy was in charge of tour information and training and supervising volunteer guides. She also attended the University of Dayton, obtaining a teaching degree in art, and years later received a Master’s degree in Art Education at Wright State University.
McCoy was a high school art teacher and taught for 30 years at Wayne High School in Huber Heights. She was also an active member of the Dayton Society of Painters and Sculptors, the Fairborn Art Association, the Western Ohio Watercolor Society, the Ohio Watercolor Society, and the Dayton Traveling Brushes. McCoy’s works appeared in many shows throughout the area and she won numerous awards for her painting and ceramics.
a.muse is on view at The Dayton Art Institute from August 9 to November 16, 2008. Admission is free.
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No cars on Fifth Street? Hmmmm…
Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you could stroll the Oregon District’s main thoroughfare without a care in the world, sampling the food, fun and arts delights to be had there without having to duck and dodge from the cars that barrel through?
Hmmmm… Sounds like a great way to perk up customer traffic along Fifth Street in a place that is seeing an influx of new galleries and other businesses, and which might be able to really flourish given the right boost in creative thinking.
I ran across this post from Bill Pote on his thoughtful Mostmetro.com blog, a site devoted to Dayton city-planning issues. He suggests turning Oregon’s stretch of Fifth Street into a “car-free zone” as some other cities are doing, at least on weekends. See what he says.
I like this idea, at least to give it a try … why not this fall, to see if it gets any traction and improves business in the district? The business owners and restaurateurs in that area are a smart lot who work together on lots of issues affecting their neighborhood, and it’s easy to imagine them banding together quickly on something like this, just to see how it goes.
What’ve we got to lose?
(Pote, by the way, is one of the “creative catalysts” who is working the new DaytonCreate group to find ways to make Dayton a more lively, livable, vibrant place. He is working with a subgroup that is looking for ways to fill empty downtown spaces with arts-type groups, incubator-style. By way of full disclosure, I’m part of the DaytonCreate group, too; I’m helping head up a new arts group called Film Dayton, which is trying to promote filmmaking and film audience here. You can find out more about what we’re doing at DaytonCreate.org.)
What do you think of Bill’s car-free Fifth Street idea?
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Dayton’s image and dying cities
The old saying goes that it’s all about “location, location, location.” True, but it’s also very much about image, image, image.
The image of our fair city was front-page news in the DDN this week when Forbes magazine cooked up a list of the 10 “fastest-dying” U.S. cities. Quicker than you can say “rust-belt rehash,” sure enough greater Dayton made the list along with Scranton, Flint, Youngstown and six other old, post-manufacturing towns. Yawn.
Coincidentally, this week Dayton City Hall unveiled its new branding campaign, designed to lure or keep smart, young, creative professional types. That’s a demographic that lots of cities crave these days, so much that one wonders if there are indeed enough them anywhere in the world to fulfill all the needs of all the urban strategists who want them. Maybe they should rent themselves out.
The city did some things right with the new brand — mercifully avoiding any mention of airplanes (yawn again), and instead designing a rough-edged, rubber-stamp logo that boldly states, “Dayton Patented: Originals Wanted.” With luck, we’ll see it soon on everything from T-shirts to billboards and slick magazine ads.
Maybe an ad in Forbes would be smart?
What bothers me the most about Forbes’ list is not that it was mean-spirited or that it made me feel defensive on behalf of the place where I choose, happily, to live. It’s that it was so remarkably short-sighted for such a well-regarded publication. To wit: Cities rarely actually die.
Think about it. In modern times, large cities do not simply dwindle to disappearance. It doesn’t happen.
In ancient times, sure. Famine, warfare and various acts of God did kill cities, and in more recent times smaller towns which sprang up solely for the purpose of exploiting, say, a gold rush, might indeed dry up and blow away. But I’m at a loss to think of any large American city in the last 200 years that has actually vanished.
Of course cities change, but change is not death. They grow and contract, as fortunes evolve. Some places do seem to take smarter advantage of the hands they’re dealt — Portland and Seattle come to mind. But Dallas, Phoenix and Miami aren’t thriving while Cleveland shrivels because their leaders are necessarily better; it’s because they are benefiting from economic megatrends that favor cities where they happen to be located. Once abundant drinking water becomes as important as sunshine and cheap labor are today, those trends will change.
And then their cities can pay for clever image campaigns that they hope will paper over some of their faults — necessity being the mother of invention, as another old saying goes.
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Paris for President? Heck, why not?
Well, as a co-worker said this morning, “You know, her energy policy actually sounded pretty good.”
“Aw, come on … she didn’t really write that,” another said.
Said I: “Wait a sec — you don’t think McCain or Obama wrote theirs either, do you?”
If cleverness is something we wish we had in a president, she has my vote. Today, at least.
Wonder if she’ll turn out to be a flip-flopper?
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Why I wish I’d taken Econ 101
Ack. Dammit. It all makes so much sense now.
Well, sorta.
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Who needs the humanities? Well, you do.
This is long and dense, but it’s worth reading if you like to think.
Onward and upward!
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RIP “Moon” Mullins
I don’t mean to turn this week’s blog entries into a parade of obituaries or homages, but I must take note of a very important local arts personality whose passing will leave a big gap in the history of our area’s contributions to popular music.
Those contributions, of course, are deep and wide, as local music lovers know. We gave the world most of the great 1970s funk music it ever heard; we contributed huge chunks of the mid-90s altrock revolution with GBV, the Breeders, and other bands whose influence extended beyond Dayton; we gave the bluegrass world the Allen brothers and their invention of the “high lonesome” style of singing that marks that genre to this day… There is more, but that’s a good start for a city our size…
And we also are the region that gave a home and workplace to Paul “Moon” Mullins, who died this week … and whose departure leads us right back to that very same bluegrass that we mentioned before.
Mullins was one of the guys who helped popularize and promote the bluegrass that sprung up in our region as Appalachians moved into SW Ohio and began playing the music of their home states in bars and clubs from Springfield to Middletown … working by day in the steel plants and car factories, and spending their rather wild nights in the honky-tonks that spread all through this part of the state, they made bluegrass the music of this region in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s … in large part fuelled by Mullins’ playing of it on radio stations that legitimized and affirmed a great American sound and took it to all corners of the region.
In that atmosphere, Dayton’s contributions to the genre by the Allens, the Hot Mud Family and other great bands had a nurturing field in which to grow. Mullins and his son, Joe, ended up bringing their family love of bluegrass to WBZI-AM in Xenia, where Joe still runs things and still gets his old-time music on the airwaves. I interviewed his father for a story on SW Ohio’s bluegrass history a few years ago, and he loved to tell tales about how the songs and artists he loved shaped the history and heart of the region where he made his home for so long.
R.I.P. Mr. Mullins… We’ll spin a record for you, or two, and let our hearts soar at the banjo’s plunk, in your honor. Thanks for all you did.
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Revisit the Air Show!
Just got this press release from the Library, for an event promoting a great new foto book on Dayton Air Shows past by two friends of mine … Ty Greenlees, one of our great DDN photographers, and Tim Gaffney, the retired aviation writer who covered them for years… This is a terrific book.
Here’s the event:
Revisit more than 20 years of Ohio’s biggest annual aviation event with the creators of the book The Dayton Air Show: A Photographic Celebration. Newspaper reporter Timothy Gaffney and photographer Ty Greenlees have covered the air show together for many years, and compiled their stories and photographs into this commemorative book. They will discuss the book and their years of air show experiences at the Dayton Metro Library on Saturday, Aug. 16, at 1:00 p.m. The library is located at 215 E. Third Street in downtown Dayton.
Ty Greenlees is an award-winning photojournalist for the Dayton Daily News and a licensed pilot with airplane and helicopter ratings. He has photographed the Dayton Air Show as a journalist since 1985, and privately since childhood. Tim Gaffney is a professional writer, author of 12 books, and a licensed private pilot. He was the aviation writer for the Dayton Daily News from 1985 until his retirement in 2006. He is now a Vectren Dayton Air Show trustee.
Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the program, which is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Dayton Metro Library’s Community Relations office at 496-8901.
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RIP Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Just heard that Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn, the great voice of anti-Soviet outrage and dissent, has died at the age of 89.
Here’s the story from the NY Times…
There are few books that made as much of an impression on my young mind as “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” which I read in a junior high English class about the literature of repression. Our teacher also had us read Orwell, Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” and Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” and wanted us to see how governments could hurt people as much as help them… A good lesson to learn at that age. “Denisovich” was the easiest to read, but the most disturbing, of the lot. It’s stuck with me ever since.
When Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago” came out in the 1970s, it was all the rage in my liberal college town among my teachers and the parents of my college prof friends, whom I overheard discussing it at length; they were stunned and moved by its descriptions of the horrors of the Soviet political prison system, and when I dipped into the massive books in college, I understood why.
Here’s to one of the great minds, great voices and great brave hearts of our modern era… It is just, proper and fitting that he outlived the awful regime he helped bring down by his honesty, bravery and writing. You wonder about the power of words? Of language, and writing? Wonder not. Solzhenitsyn didn’t. Thank goodness.
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How Shakespeare jolts your brain
We all know that reading and watching Shakespeare takes a bit of extra effort, and we all have our varying opinions on whether that effort is worth it; ask a sophomore student in English class or a 50-year-old theater lover for their opinions on that, and compare what you get.
But interestingly, this piece in the Literary Review from the UK says that scientists have studied the way in which paying attention to the nuances and flow of the Bard’s speech and writing will actually make both of those people smarter, just from sticking with it. Turns out that the way he wrote actually keeps your brain on a higher alert for the little linguistic surprises buried inside the sentences…
The same could likely be said for Mozart or Halo, I suppose, both of which have their supporters in the “doing it makes you smarter” debates… But Shakespeare gets my vote.
Read on, Macduff…
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A lame X-Fest lineup and other stuff
Hot, hot, hot — the July just past was a busy, interesting month on the local arts scene.
Pick up Sunday’s paper and you’ll find out who the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra has hired as its next chief executive. More on that next week….
Speaking of the DPO, the organization ended up taking back what it claimed was an out-of-context comment on its willingness to someday play in Columbus, given the fabulously stupid implosion of that city’s symphony. Granted that it might not be a wise move, or the best thing to have said while the CSO’s fans are still smarting, but hey — I think it sounds like a wild and crazy idea. And I mean that in a good way. Let ‘em see what the Gem City has to offer.
Wright State University has announced that it’s raising more than $20 million to expand and improve its Creative Arts Center, thus providing a better home for its terrific visual and performing arts programs. One thing that should get a big, big boost is its film program, a top-drawer asset that operates from low-rent facilities and could really flourish, given the money and the chance.
The Dayton Band Playoffs are up and running again at Canal Street Tavern. To stay on top of the always-lively competition, check out ActiveDayton.com and listen in who’s performing. Too bad Stump had to forfeit; they were my favorite…
The folks who run the Big Read have picked the three books we all get to vote on, to decide what the community reads together next spring. Visit DaytonDailyNews.com/bigread to cast your vote.
Wish we’d gotten to vote on the lineup for WXEG-FM’s latest X-Fest lineup. Disappointingly, it’s largely a rehash of recent past lineups. It’ll still be a fun day in the sun, I guess, but come on.
If you’re looking for a way to see what’s going on in the local artists’ studios, the best way would be to visit the Dayton Visual Arts Center’s 17th annual Open Members’ Show, running through Aug. 21 at the gallery, 118 N. Jefferson St. You’ll see 196 widely varied pieces, all from local artists, ranging from sculptures and mobiles to paintings, drawings and collages — a great way to be reminded of the talent in our town. Heck — it’s almost good enough to take your mind off the X-Fest lineup.
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Who is Leon Czolgosz????
This is a fun press release from the folks at Yahoo.com, having to do with the top “who is” searches on the site.
My question: Who’s asking about Leon Czolgosz? And don’t most folks know Barack Obama by now?
Here’s the release.
There’s a growing trend in searches on Yahoo!- we found that searches for “who is” followed by a name of a celebrity are popping up. The list is as long and varied as it is hilarious, from reality TV stars, to historical figures and (seemingly) household names.
See if your readers can pick out who all of the below names are - we’ve even included an “answer key” afterwards, in case they need a hint.
Top “Who Is” Searches on Yahoo!
Who is T. Boone Pickens
Who is Tyler Perry
Who is Tila Tequila
Who is Jane Austen
Who is John Galt
Who is Barack Obama
Who is Ed Hardy
Who is Leon Czolgosz
Who is Kim Kardashian
Who is Wendy Williams
Who is Samantha Ronson
Who is Aristotle
Who is Phoebe Price
Who is David Gates
Who is Nelson Mandela
Who is Mike Jones
Who is Minka Kelly
Who is Val Emmich
Who is Megan Fox
Who is Andy Dick
Answer Key:
Business and Oil Man
Filmmaker
Reality TV Star
Author
Character in Atlas Shrugged
U.S. Presidential Candidate
Artist
Assassin of President McKinley
Reality TV Star
Radio Host
Music DJ
Philosopher
Actress
Musician
Former President of South Africa
Rapper
Actress
Musician
Actress
Comedian
