CLEVELAND (February 23, 2010) Walt Campbell, CEO of Campbell Artist Management (representing Susan Weber), attended the 22nd International Folk Alliance Conference in Memphis, TN in February. The conference affords performers and music business professionals an opportunity to network, update their knowledge of technical and economic changes in the industry, and showcase new and established talent.
 

Why do boys and girls in schools I visit want to help me pack up when I’m finished telling lavish tales? You know, stories that take us places. There’s a certain reverence to the kids’ soft gestures as they stow my props and paraphernalia. Their desire to lend their service to the magic touches me.

The story goes that when young Bob Dylan asked his Newport audience, ‘does anyone have an E harmonica?’ a cacophony of well-aimed mouth harps flung from pockets hit the stage around him. Late last week, the elder Bard of Hibbing brought this home.

I witnessed my first Bob Dylan concert at Canton’s Memorial Civic Center Thursday night. Never underestimate the power of witness.  In the course of 14 songs and three encores, I was in a state of squeaky clean, ‘I thought this didn’t happen ‘til the life hereafter’ grace.  

Tell me how this happened to a lyrics lover who didn’t understand a single word of the show. My brain was not particularly involved in the night’s proceedings, except for a punch drunk awareness that what I never thought possible was happening then. In a wooden stadium seat on a wet November night in downtown Canton, I was unconditionally sated by a work of art.

If any member of the band had called out in need of anything I had to give, my feet would have levitated me to within throwing range. No question. So this is the sublime power of art. Ever since my visit to the great beyond made manifest by six elegant maestros, I’ve heard a sleek internal beauty ask the best I have to offer.

The children understand agape.

Elsewhere I’ve tracked the rational act of making this video.  Here you’ll find the visceral exposé. 

I’ve been Paul Fresty’s friend since our paths crossed in a songwriter circle many moons back.  Suddenly last summer, my imperious muse bade me go see Paul’s Beatles cover band (Revolution Pie) perform for a crowd of groovers and shakers.  Beatlemania was palpable as the stars, settling over the lovers of magic like a sweet dream.  My hand knew not whither to aim the lens in the midst of this wide angle lovefest.

What you see here, to the sound of one fine band and its devotees, is how one of those Beatles tunes moved me.  To film it.  To seek out images worthy of its joy.  To combine, revise, revisit, refine - and finally send it all up to the webiverse for you and your fond friends. 

Anyone who’s edited video knows you floss your ears many times with the audio tracks in play.  Thanks to Revolution Pie, mine was a happy duty.  As for the visuals, well, what better excuse than classic McCartney-Lennon to delve for the best in humanity?

Beethoven composed elegance, vast and beautiful.  Listeners of the day had to warm to his passionate scores.  Because they did, his masterpieces live on.

With songwriting, brevity is key.  Gone are the days when the bards preserved whole histories through song.  People don’t stick around for that sort of thing.  We have books now, and Google.

Having just read such a book, filled with storied minutia about how print and broadcast media (dying life forms?) came to be, I’m charmed by the author’s élan.  The LA Times, CBS and Time, Inc. are the protagonists of David Halberstam’s gripping saga, The Powers That Be.  Power, politics and greed disregard justice or conscience and repeatedly give short shrift to a citizen’s need to know.  It’s the old story of democracy dashed on the rocks of the bottom line.  But the details, like notes in a Beethoven sonata, make the story live.

The book is a worthy, time consuming read.  Mr. Halberstam melds a composer’s lush ethos with a songwriter’s cut to the chase in segments like this:

Reporters and editors were at their best when motivated by instincts of social conscience, and belief in justice.  But those very instincts, given the curious value system in America, often made them stars.  It was heady stuff, this new touch of the bitch goddess.
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

Our best instinct leading to our worst inclination: hardly a new phenomenon.  Ironically, it was the ever increasing reach of the media that magnified celebrity, goading even its best reporters and editors to follow fame’s fancy, to the detriment of honest reportage.

The Powers That Be predates Facebook, Youtube and the like.  Today’s web media give the impression that all of us have a shot at the spotlight, robbing the bitch goddess of her six inch nails.  Surely the saintly blogger can be trusted to honor truth?

Maybe someday, when we, the new journalist-citizenry, yearn to ride herd on our own rude hubris.

Most of the available footage for Wide Open is from a stationary camera.  When I zoom in to vary the perspective, I like the graininess of the close ups.  So I decide to go for the black and white, jittery look of old footage.  Think CBGBs in the 70's.

Behind the scenes at Cleveland’s Museum of Natural History are cavernous rooms of shelves and cabinets packed with our past, meticulously catalogued and preserved for our future.  The public sees only the tip.

Robert Wright says there’s hope for the world.  In The Evolution of God, he documents progress through time: how we conceive of divinity, and how our views of God influence our actions.

Whereas her otherwise quiet daughter took to banging on stratocasters and the like in her advancing years, Mom practiced her silent arts to the end.  Photos I’ve sent up to Flickr find her quilting, painting, cultivating, decorating, writing, refurbishing and making gravy with a silent hand.

Just off a stretch of travel, I’ve been looking through blue shades at my next steps, wondering.  Today - a day with no one to meet, greet, plan with or consult - I decided to move into the muddy lake, accept the inertia of this place, rather than push at the blues with logic or chin ups.  I thought I’d occupy my hands with these old photos of the multi talented artist, my mom.

What struck me (very softly) was the way the day turned into a peaceful class room, my mama the head mistress.  Look at this, she said.  This is a life, too.  Where you write, but never publish.  You paint canvasses, doll houses, furniture and landscapes, without review.  Make dresses for daughters, blankets for sons and slowly grow wealthy on art.

David Halberstam tells a funny story about two Los Angeles Times titans of the last century, Dorothy (Buff) and Norman Chandler.  Among other honors, wife and husband each had a pavilion in their name.  The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.  The Norman Chandler Pavilion.

A few months after that ceremony Jack Benny was at a function and saw Norman and Buff walking toward him and turned to a friend and said, ‘Here they come, Mr. and Mrs. Pavilion.’
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be

Mom loved Jack Benny and she would have loved that story.  Because neither she nor my father have garnered a dedicated pavilion.  But most of the shots of Mom doing art were taken by Dad (whose name is Art) doing Art. He carried her easel and brushes to the field where her artist friends gathered to paint yet another Ohio barn.  He lugged her framed canvasses to art shows and engineered the various rug braiding and quilt basting logistics.  He was the artist’s husband and nary was heard a discouraging word from him.

I once felt overlooked when Dad sent around an email of his favorite memories; most had to do with far flung place like Israel, where my sister’s family lives.  I was the nearby daughter who shared holidays and modest outings with the folks.  But today my mother reminds me of another side of things.  She has me weeping over my own small sight.  Bent over quilts and paints and cooking pots she’s fed us all on the simple act of creation that prospers for the sake of doing, nothing more.  She focused on the present unparalleled moment with a mind and will that nobody, save her true fans, will care to brag about.  No press releases.  No headlines.  No buzz no razzle dazzle.

Just Jane, doing Jane.  And Art, doing Art.

‘I used to be a cynic.  Now I just listen to music.’

George, expat New Yorker and retiree, is a regular at the Hendersonville outdoor pool.

Belly deep in the glossy blue, he listens in as we survey the lanes and overanalyze our options.

‘What do you want to know?’ George asks us, two new lap swimmers on deck.  Then, after pointing out the obvious (pick a line and stick to it), he turns to philosophy.

‘I’ve solved problems a lot harder than that,’ he says, a hint of mockery in his voice.

‘And what are they?’ I ask him, curious.

‘You don’t want to hear my problems!’ he laughs.  That’s when he comes out with his cynicism to music line.

‘I try to strike a balance between hope and cynicism,’ he says.  ‘People tell me, “It’s easy for you to be hopeful - you have a place to live, plenty to eat - but if you lived in Dafur, then what?”  And they’re right.  With so much in my favor, I can’t get too pompous about hope.  So when my son asks me what I’ve figured out after living all these years, I say, “I used to be a cynic.  Now I just listen to music.”’

‘What do you like?’ I ask, interested.

‘Mozart, Beethoven - ah, beautiful.  Other things, too.  Last night I was listening to Schubert - you know, he only lived to about 30 - I was thinking, I bet if he’d lived longer, he would have written things on a par with Mozart or Beethoven.’

Is music innate?  Are humans the only species equipped to make it? 

Look no further than Youtube for some pretty convincing anecdotal evidence.  So eight million people discovered this tiny celebrity before I did.  My grin is just as wide. 

Watch her gears lock into beats she hears in her head; the toddler's grasp of Hey Jude gives credence to the humans-wired-for-music scenario.

Then there's the research.  Oliver Sacks, author of Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain, says certain brain regions are wired specifically to process music.

One would have to look for aspects of music which have no equivalent in speech. This certainly seems to be true of the regular beat or pulse. Speech has its own rhythm, but it doesn't have the fixed metrical quality of music. There's spontaneous synchronization with rhythm in all human beings, even in childhood. You tap with it, nod with it, and even if you don't, the motor parts of your brain move with it. There's an auditory/motor correlation in human beings not found in any other animal.
Oliver Sacks, Wired