Monday, November 18, 2013
Culture in NEO: Beginning of a blog
Culture in NEO: Beginning of a blog: OK, the weather can be a pest, and downhill skiing is not an option. But when it comes to theater, music or other arts (think museums!), we ...
Tale of two Franklins
I already mentioned the Franklin fiasco. For those who don't know about it, check the hyperlinks in my previous blog. To make things clear, this is the David Franklin, former CMA director and villain in chief after being run out of Cleveland by a justly hostile environment made of people who don't like what he did to one of our angels. But enough of this, there are pages of ink leaked from our pens elsewhere.
I noted another Franklin story that has not hit the web yet, but I think I will. I attended the pretty good Shostakovich-Beethoven mini-festival at Severance to note a new pattern: when Franz W-M is conducting, the first clarinet of the orchestra, Frank Cohen, is not playing. I noticed that he plays whenever our conductor in chief is out of town or indisposed.
Several interpretations come to mind. In a normal city with a normal musical environment and music critics, I would assume that the two have poorly matched schedules or a virus that infects one country at a time. The pendulum of sneezing and coughing may first hit Salzburg and Vienna, take a United flight to Cleveland, infect the woodwind player while the conductor is recuperating, and repeat the cycle at almost metronomic intervals. Why is this unlikely? Do your math....
Sunday, October 27, 2013
Beginning of a blog
OK, the weather can be a pest, and downhill skiing is not an option. But when it comes to theater, music or other arts (think museums!), we in NE Ohio are second to none. If you adjust the quantity and quality of arts and music in Cleveland by income, population and level of general education, you may find out that we are at the very top of the cultural pile. New York is obviously better, but after dividing by several million people and the income of folks living in (most parts of) Manhattan.....Unfortunately, we also have a propensity for scumbags or just plain mediocre folks. See below for the scummies, I will hit el mediocre musicale sometime soon.
All this culture, and yet we live in a state of ignorance; examples? Here you go: People here are never happy, they feel "blessed". At the stadium people pray for their team (man! And so they should!). And our beloved players often cross themselves when they score! The English language spans from a few folks with Oxonian or Shakespearean phrasing to the majority barking out tons of "like I said". Hell is heck, god is gosh. Why is hell a swear word? Why can't one say, at least, "I feel blessed because I am not in hell". And why is Hell often capitalized? What the Hell is going on with you guys? You can'st say "god" because it's an insult to deity, but you can do godly things in the settings of a football game?
The language changes, we google everything. That's great. But the use of what we are given back by Palo Alto is becoming a tragedy of errors. Part of this is sheer ignorance, you can blame the schools or the parents. But all this heck and all this gosh, no, this is US not the schools. We need to clean up our language and our brain from all the garbage of pseudo religion, fake respect (are first generation Kenyans in New York African-American? Does anyone outside of Princeton know where the Caucasus is? If people knew that Stalin was a true Caucasian, would this "definitional" nonsense go away?), good manners (May I help you? is nice, but when it becomes part of a job description I kind prefer What do you want?), more of the politically correct respect (can't crack a Jewish or African-American joke unless you want to get ostracized; but you can safely state that the Balkan population lives in a permanent state of war; that Iranians are part of a an Evil Empire), all this shows our homogenization, our cultural instability, dependence on cheap interpretation of religion. But we have, for those who want, tons of splendid concerts, museums, theaters. And I can stomach a lot of ghosh with a good Shosta!
Errata corrige
As soon as I published an almost optimistic blog on culture in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer comes to the rescue of the Mistake on the lake credence, as it happened last week with the David Franklin fiasco. The news agents that censured Rosenberg (the PD) also censured the news itself, first, and after this was made trivial by Cleveland's Scene, managed to write a most annoying and defensive editorial.
All this culture, and yet we live in a state of ignorance; examples? Here you go: People here are never happy, they feel "blessed". At the stadium people pray for their team (man! And so they should!). And our beloved players often cross themselves when they score! The English language spans from a few folks with Oxonian or Shakespearean phrasing to the majority barking out tons of "like I said". Hell is heck, god is gosh. Why is hell a swear word? Why can't one say, at least, "I feel blessed because I am not in hell". And why is Hell often capitalized? What the Hell is going on with you guys? You can'st say "god" because it's an insult to deity, but you can do godly things in the settings of a football game?
The language changes, we google everything. That's great. But the use of what we are given back by Palo Alto is becoming a tragedy of errors. Part of this is sheer ignorance, you can blame the schools or the parents. But all this heck and all this gosh, no, this is US not the schools. We need to clean up our language and our brain from all the garbage of pseudo religion, fake respect (are first generation Kenyans in New York African-American? Does anyone outside of Princeton know where the Caucasus is? If people knew that Stalin was a true Caucasian, would this "definitional" nonsense go away?), good manners (May I help you? is nice, but when it becomes part of a job description I kind prefer What do you want?), more of the politically correct respect (can't crack a Jewish or African-American joke unless you want to get ostracized; but you can safely state that the Balkan population lives in a permanent state of war; that Iranians are part of a an Evil Empire), all this shows our homogenization, our cultural instability, dependence on cheap interpretation of religion. But we have, for those who want, tons of splendid concerts, museums, theaters. And I can stomach a lot of ghosh with a good Shosta!
Errata corrige
As soon as I published an almost optimistic blog on culture in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer comes to the rescue of the Mistake on the lake credence, as it happened last week with the David Franklin fiasco. The news agents that censured Rosenberg (the PD) also censured the news itself, first, and after this was made trivial by Cleveland's Scene, managed to write a most annoying and defensive editorial.
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