Rich Mintz  

As you may have noticed if you follow me on Twitter, I saw Into the Woods for the first time last night — the original filmed production with Bernadette Peters — and the original The Music Man last week, and I wanted to say something about the experience.

I am not and have never been a “theatre person.” Never acted (and I mean that almost literally; the last time I remember being in a play was in the sixth grade); never sang or danced; never even played a musical instrument, once I left off my piano lessons in junior high. In my family, my brother was the creative one. I’ve been to probably 40 musical and stage performances in my life (using the most expansive definition of both, i.e., including college and amateur productions), with one notable early example being the LA traveling production of A Chorus Line in 1977. That seems like a big number, but it really isn’t; people like Ryan Davis probably see 40 performances a year.

But that doesn’t mean I don’t understand or appreciate the arts. I do! And when I identify holes in my experience, I try to fill them. Which is how I ended up seeing two musicals — very, very different musicals — in two weeks.

The Music Man was innovative in context — syncopated and jazzy, for one thing — but it was recognizable as a standard elaboration of a traditional form. The book was sharp and bouncy, with dialogue ranking among the best in English.

Into the Woods, on the other hand, was dizzying and baroque, unresolved in places and repetitive in others, hard to listen to (musically and emotionally) and in places hard to follow, and seemingly deliberately so. I understand why Stephen Sondheim is a genius, but it’s a type of genius I see intellectually rather than experiencing emotionally. His voice is heavy. His music, at times, is hard to listen to, showy, not much fun. Of course I know that “fun” is not the point, or not the only one; but a show like Into the Woods is a product that you appreciate more when you’re in the mood to be pushed around and do hard work while you’re being pushed around. So I’m glad I saw it, and I understand the message, and I understand its greatness; but now I want to watch a lot of episodes of Absolutely Fabulous in a row.

Last week Mayor Bloomberg named five board members for the proposed World Trade Center Performing Arts Center, securing $155 million in funding before the December 31st deadline.

This will be a nice thing to have in the neighborhood, and I’m not griping, exactly; but even in New York, couldn’t a 1,000-seat theatre be built for a lot less than $155 million? That feels like an awful lot of money in tight times. (It’s roughly in the same range as the operating budget for twenty NYC public elementary schools.)

Michael and I went up to Providence again this weekend for WaterFire — what is this, our fourth time? fifth? — and it was as magical as ever. Watching a line of burning braziers over water in downtown Providence, in the middle of the Providence, Woonasquatucket, and Moshassuck rivers, while listening to music and watching costumed persons and passersby do their things, evokes millennia-old cultural memories of convening water and fire and music and ceremonial dress at occasions of public importance. WaterFire is one of the few cultural experiences I’ve had that speaks to people of all ages and social backgrounds — everyone just understands that coming down to the river to look at fire and smell smoke and listen to music is an emotionally meaningful thing to do. If you’re a human being, it’s accessible; even if you don’t “get art,” you get it.

WaterFire wouldn’t work in New York — everything in NYC gets too gigantic too fast, and everyone takes it too seriously, and besides you’d need cordons of policemen to keep hoodlums from dropping Pepsi cans full of gasoline onto a burning brazier from whatever the equivalent of the Steeple Street Bridge is. Providence is at just the right size (and inclined just the right way, with its sizable community of creative professionals and future professionals) to turn out a large crowd, week after week, of people who will treat WaterFire as something proprietary to the local public, worth partaking in and supporting and stewarding and respecting.

As guests of the Brazier Society (we won the raffle last season), we had the chance to ride slowly down the length of the installation in a small powerboat, with 6 other guests and a boatman, listening to the sounds and looking at the fire and the crowd, watching the other boats, observing the fuel boats as they kept the braziers stocked with fuel. Afterwards, I lit a lantern in Memorial Park (for a $5 donation) in furtherance of an important private wish of mine (no, I won’t tell), and we spent most of the next two hours walking up and down and around.

Now I”m home, but my hair still smells like woodsmoke and I’m still hearing the crackle of sparks, and I’m looking forward to my next lighting.

Lauren Sharpe, the New York Neo-Futurist, is making a short film every day in September as part of her Month By Day project.  (Follow her here.) Here’s last Friday’s:

september 2 from Lauren Sharpe on Vimeo.

And here’s yesterday’s:

september 9 from Lauren Sharpe on Vimeo.

I love this stuff! This is exactly the sort of creative project I wish I could make time for, and of course I can — anyone can. I just don’t. So I’m going to.

Beginning this weekend, I’m going to write a short informal essay about a place I remember, every day for a month. I won’t necessarily hit every day, and the point of this isn’t to punish me if I miss; it’s to give myself a gentle kick in the tailpipe not to miss a day whenever possible.

This sort of thing doesn’t take a whole lot of time; the value is in the habitual doing, not in the size or complexity or even (necessarily) quality. So watch for some short pieces about places, beginning real soon now.

Chad Bauman at Arena Stage was kind enough to offer me a ticket to the revival production of Okhahoma! on my recent trip down, and I happily accepted. I’d been to Arena Stage once or twice, years and years and years ago, but I hadn’t seen the new Mead Center for American Theater, the bright new complex they’d built around the theaters that opened this year.

I wasn’t disappointed. The soaring public space looks out on the sunny D.C. waterfront, an underappreciated part of the city, and it’s configured to provide several public “rooms” on different levels with different inside and outside views. One of them (atop one of the theaters) is used as a dining area for the restaurant, and don’t let the quick-service atmosphere and the plastic plates fool you: I had a superb meal of barbecued beef brisket, succotash, and mashed potatoes (inspired by Oklahoma!) and a glass of wine before the show.

As for the show itself: all the serious theater people I described this to said “what do you mean, ‘Oklahoma! in the round’?” But it worked really well. It’s not really round; the stage is square, with entrances from backstage at two opposing corners, a two-story set on a third corner, and the orchestra in the fourth corner, in an open gallery up a short flight of stairs. The two entrances are at grade, so it’s possible to enter from one corner and ride a bicycle diagonally across the stage and out the other corner (and Ado Annie did).

I knew all the songs, of course, but I’d never seen Oklahoma! performed start to finish. (Yeah, yeah, I know, “bad homosexual.”) What can I say? From the contemporary perspective, the plot feels thin, but apparently it was groundbreakingly “realist” when it premiered in 1943. (Think back to the schmaltz that the American theater was producing in the ’30s and ’20s, not to mention what the English theater was producing a few decades earlier, and that does make sense.) It was well staged and well cast, well sung and well danced (in the round!), and a good time was had by all. Ado Annie and Will Parker stole the show, as they were intended to, with Ali Hakim close behind.

And, incidentally, now I can’t stop thinking up sentences of the form “The ____ and the ____ should be friends.”

As I was reading the show notes, it struck me that the settlement of Oklahoma was an event roughly as recent in the minds of theatergoers in 1943 as, say, the JFK years would be in the premiere audience of a new show today. And I was born less than 2 years after JFK. That is, Oklahoma didn’t have the sepia cast of history to its first audience; it was more like a story of something that happened relatively recently, which their parents and grandparents lived through.

No photos of the theater interior or the show (not permitted), but here are some pictures I took in the complex.

I don’t really have a strong feeling one way or another about Thomas Kinkade, “Painter of Light,” the one-man art industry who’s the latest in a centuries-long tradition of profiting off the artistic insecurity of the middlebrow.  A lot of people have had a lot of things to say about him (e.g., Susan Orlean, and Susan Orlean again, and here’s the LA Times at length after Kinkade urinated on a Winnie-the-Pooh at Disneyland, allegedly defrauded gallery owners, and saw his business falter) over a lot of years. But I don’t mind him.

I mean, I wouldn’t have this crap in my house, but if it makes you happy, I don’t think it hurts anyone. And that goes whether you like it because you think it’s pretty, or because the Joneses down the street also have one, or because the Joneses can’t afford it. Or whatever.

But wow, is Jed Perl incensed! In this review of a new quasi-intellectual book on Kinkade, Perl keeps up the energy level for pages and pages and pages. Worth reading to be reminded that, in a world in which everything can be and has been commercialized, Art Still Matters.

I enjoyed Rebecca Mead’s story about vigentibillionairess Alice Walton, Walmart heiress and the world’s third wealthiest woman (one of her sisters is number two), and the Moshe Safdie-designed art museum she’s building in a ravine in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walton is not what you think of when you think of “billionaire” — she lives in a one-story house near Fort Worth, spends her time riding horses competitively, and (according to Mead) cooks dinner herself when she has guests over. She’s also a dedicated art collector, no mean watercolorist herself, and seems a genuinely interesting and thoughtful person.

From the story, I learned a lot about Alice Walton (whom I now think I like and respect), and a bit more about Bentonville than I knew before. I also learned (or, more properly, had reinforced) the preconceptions that Northeastern intellectuals have about Arkansas, a state where I spent several months a decade ago (working in Little Rock).

It’s strongly implied in Mead’s story that a lot of the New York intellectual snobs (let’s just call them NYISes for short) who encounter Alice Walton expect something other than the thoughtful, sophisticated, serious person she is. Some of this is because New Yorkers, as a rule, don’t take Walmart seriously (after all, it “just” sells things, and it only sells them in “flyover” places). But Walmart is one of the most interesting economic stories of the twentieth century, and whatever you think of the politics of big box stores, low-wage retail, etc., it’s hard to argue with the fact that Walmart has done more than any company other than (possibly) UPS to change the shape of manufacturing, logistics, and retail. (See also “invention of the shipping container.”)

Mead describes the Philadelphia art establishment as “appalled” at the fact that Walton almost managed to buy an Eakins out from under them (they scrambled to raise funds and “thwart” her), which is about as bald an example of cultural snobbery as you could invent. What, exactly, would be wrong with an Eakins moving from Philadelphia to a museum in Bentonville, which last time I checked is in Arkansas, which last time I checked has been a legitimate American state since 1836 and still is one?

Mead quoted the mayor of Bentonville as aspiring to a “Santa Fe-type city.” NYISes will laugh at that (as Mead surely knew), but why is it funny?  Bentonville is set in beautiful country, about as close to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Memphis as New York is to Boston, and it’s closer to Dallas and Fort Worth (where Walton lives) than Los Angeles is to San Francisco.  300,000 people live in the vicinity. Why shouldn’t they have a livable city — is it because of their accents? Is it because Sam Walton went into dry goods instead of auto manufacturing or peach orcharding?

I’ll write about this another time, but: I loved my six months in Arkansas. Friendly, thoughtful people; a tidy, attractive city (Little Rock) on a beautiful river in a gorgeous part of the country; healthy cultural life, civic engagement, energetic private investment in community amenities, symbolic public figures, a sense of purpose. You can even get an excellent espresso and a superb purple milkshake.

Some NYISes probably discount Walmart’s “dirty money,” but money is money, and as Mead accurately points out, plutocracy (typically of a much dirtier nature than Walmart’s) has been the engine behind virtually every significant accumulation of public culture in American (and — hello! — world) history. Walton isn’t buying up velvet Elvises or dogs playing poker; she’s a shrewd art buyer, assembling a serious collection of works of American art from a range of periods. Mead got Philippe de Montebello to say, on the record and for attribution, “I suspect it is going to be a substantial and fine collection of American art,” which is about as legitimating a comment as you could find.

Millions of Americans visit the Ozarks every year — on purpose, not because they can’t think of anywhere else to go. Arguably (and Walton would argue it), a new museum in Bentonville will do far more good for far more people than yet another new museum in Philadelphia or San Francisco. So best of luck to her.

Shelley Bernstein at the Brooklyn Museum has appealed for our help with a fascinating project: Historypin is building a localized database of historical photos, pinned to a map of the world, and they need our help marking the location where their historical Brooklyn photos were taken.  So be part of this crowdsourced project — take 30 seconds and look over these historical photos of Brooklyn and see if you can suggest a location for them.

Growing up in Los Angeles, San Diego (long known as “America’s Finest City,” but the first I heard of that in my life was Thursday evening from those a cappella singers you see at left) was a place we didn’t go to very often. There was the time we went to Vacation Village and my dad beached the rental sailboat in Mission Bay, and the time I drove down to Rosarito Beach in the 12th grade with a couple of friends in a vain attempt to convince ourselves we were wild American high school kids (I remember drinking a lot of Mirinda orange soda). And a couple of other short, unmemorable visits.  (On one of them, when I came from DC — which didn’t have Trader Joe’s yet in those days — a highlight was the Trader Joe’s in Hillcrest.)

But for the most part, San Diego was a place you went through on the way to Mexico, or stopped in for a couple of days without ever really experiencing much of the “placeness” of the place.

So this time, while in San Diego for the Americans for the Arts Convention, I wanted to do things differently. Obviously I enjoyed the trolley and the waterfront convention district. The Hilton Bayfront is one of the most functional and pleasant convention hotels I can remember anywhere, with wide corridors, logical crowd flow, and seating nooks everywhere next to (or just beyond) big bright windows. Things like “natural light” and “crowd flow” may seem unimportant, but they’re not — three days in a convention hotel can easily be marred by a confusing layout, low ceilings, or depressing casino-like interior spaces.  Someone told me this hotel is the “jewel of the convention district,” and it’s not surprising

The hotel and its grounds are set in a grand waterfront park, and they’re permeable at the edges, so it’s not exactly clear where the hotel ends and the public space begins; this has the effect of drawing the hotel and the community together, for the benefit of both. From the hotel and its environs, you can see: a soaring highway bridge to the south; the stunning Harbor Drive Pedestrian Bridge; a working railyard; a working port; and bright red trolleys passing at all hours. And, of course, there’s the bay, and the boats, and the sun and the palm trees, with the fragrance of jasmine everywhere. I’ve been worse places.

Around the edges of the convention, I took my rental car (and the trolley) and got out and about a few times. I saw the central-city entertainment core, Gaslamp and what they’re now calling the East Village, which are much more lively than I remember.  (I bought a bottle of artisanal gin at the excellent liquor store in the Gaslamp.) Petco Park (unlike many other cities’ intown baseball stadiums) really does seem to be the center of the action, and the “Park at the Park” (a public park in the mouth of the stadium that’s open every day) opens it into the community.

I stopped to talk to the manager of an arts center in the Gaslamp next to the Broken Yolk, which showcases and sells art and creative merchandise from the community.  (I bought the hot-pink rabbit-shaped iPod speaker seen at left.) He said that San Diego’s always had an arts community, but it’s been fragmented, and in the past 10 or 15 years it’s started to knit itself together.

All in all, culturally speaking, San Diego reminds me a lot of Charlotte, in that it’s a city with a large and culturally conservative (in the traditional sense, not the Christianist sense) middle class, a business elite that’s willing to invest and push the boundaries (sensibly), and a motivating sense of competition with larger cities that will capture its young people unless they work to keep it livable. Charlotte, on the whole, has been a cultural success over the past 20 years, becoming much more interesting, breaking new ground in infrastructure and public amenities, and it looks like San Diego has, too.

I could imagine myself living in San Diego, which is the highest compliment I can offer.  Really, a city that’s willing to turn half of its old railroad depot into a contemporary art museum is probably doing a whole lot of other things right, too.

While in town, I also got out to Barrio Logan, through the city, to the beach towns, and north along the shore.  In Barrio Logan, at Ryan Bros. Coffee, I had one of the best espressos I’ve ever had anywhere, rich with nuance and nuttiness, beside a polished wood bar they brought down from Paso Robles, where Jesse James used to drink at it.  Then I drove through the city (along the Cabrillo Freeway, a genuinely beautiful parkway) and north toward Los Angeles.

(Crossposted from the Americans for the Arts Blog.)

I’m in San Diego this week for the Americans for the Arts Convention, which kicked off at noon today with a welcome by president Bob Lynch and a keynote address by California social-activist legend Bobby Shriver.

This is my fourth Americans for the Arts event in two years. Heading for my first (the 2009 National Arts Marketing Project conference in Providence), I was afraid I’d feel out of place. If you know me, you know I’m not exactly shy, but I’ve always been a little scared of arts people. They tend to be so sure of themselves, and bubbling over with ideas, and I’m just, you know, a businessman — on the creative end of the spectrum for a businessman, to be sure, but nevertheless…

But I had no reason to worry.

One thing about arts people is that they love talking about ideas. And the ideas that might help them get more people to experience and enjoy art, or advocate for arts funding and education, or donate to support the arts in their own communities — well, those are the ideas they love talking about most of all. And it just so happens that those are the kinds of ideas we at Blue State Digital trade in, so everything worked out fine.

Another thing about arts people is that they remember you. Whether artist or arts administrator or community arts activist, they are fundamentally social people. They can’t help it. Every person they meet is a potential artsgoer or arts donor or arts voter or arts enjoyer, and they are passionate about the arts, and so they take every relationship seriously.  Plus, if they’re artists, they want you to LOVE THEIR ART and they will probably keep trying to get you to love it until you do. I still think of myself as on the fringe of the arts community, not in the center of it. But this community is delighted to embrace anyone who takes the arts seriously, and I certainly do, so I suppose I qualify. And as a result, each Americans for the Arts event I attend is more like a reunion with old friends.

And a third thing about arts people is — well, Lord have mercy, can they party!  The opening reception at last year’s Convention in Baltimore was mindblowing — good-natured and fun, food and drink, singers with a bang-up band, a dress-up table (there is a photo of me wearing a Maryland crab hat now floating around the Internet that dates from that party), and uncommonly social. No wallflowers in that kind of environment.

Plus, hello! Last year’s party was held IN A MUSEUM, and we’re not talking your grandmother’s museum, either — we’re talking the American Visionary Art Museum in Federal Hill, which, if you don’t know it — well, just click the link.  If your most entertaining old uncle (the one with the old locomotive in his garage) got together with the landscape designer who laid out your garden, and your mom’s hairdresser, and a six-year-old girl, and you gave them a million dollars and said “Make a museum,” they couldn’t come up with a more interesting one than this. The only thing it doesn’t have is unicorns, and if they see this blog post they’ll probably have some in there by tomorrow. Highly recommended, that museum. Highly recommended for all ages.  (Oh, and you should see the gift shop…)

Tonight’s opening reception is at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego — a different kind of museum, but then again San Diego is a different kind of place. From the leaked details I’m privy to, tonight’s party promises to be just as much fun.  Oops, look at the time — it’s almost time to wash my face, straighten my tie, slick back my hair, and catch the trolley.  See you at the party!