The State of the Arts

Did you watch the State of the Union address? Regardless if the person who holds the office got my vote or not (I'll keep that to myself), I watch with an open-mind to the policies laid out before our Congress and our nation. I believe a certain respect for the office of the presidency has diminished. I can at least give one hour-plus of my life in January to hear what our Commander in Chief has to say if I wish to be an engaged citizen. Read the speech here.

"If you want to make a difference in the life of our nation; if you want to make a difference in the life of a child -- become a teacher. Your country needs you," was President Barack Obama's call to the youth of our nation considering their career paths.

Long after leaving school, my thirst for knowledge hasn't diminished. With age, it seems to grow even stronger, and validates my long held belief education is lost and wasted on an ungrateful youth. What 18 year old can truly appreciate endless hours of studying?

Our teachers beyond the schoolroom may not be the traditional ones. They are the historical groups with non-paid volunteers, the authors of books toiling away for years on research, librarians, poets, singers, the bloggers typing away after a long day of homemaking duties or at work sharing their knowledge with the world. These are some of my teachers. Who are yours?

We can all serve as teachers, even in the non-traditional way. As Michael Stipe declares in R.E.M.'s Discoverer, "I have never felt so called."

I cheered silently from my home when President Obama stated rightfully,

"We need to teach our kids that it's not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair."

I also thought of this New York Times piece, small in length but large in deflation of spirit, regarding a group of Republican lawmakers calling for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

"Robert L. Lynch, president of Americans for the Arts, a lobbying group, said...that the arts provide 5.7 million jobs in the United States that generate about $30 billion in taxes, nearly $13 billion of which goes to the federal government. "If they're serious about jobs and they'e serious about income, they would invest more in the arts," Mr. Lynch said." Of course, according to our major news media, the only way to stimulate the economy is to go to the mall.

Arts never seem to be high on the national radar, but they are vital to our own continuing education as lifelong seekers of wisdom. With shrinking government budgets from townships all the way to the federal level, the private citizen will be called on to support the arts, even in some small way. Here's some of how I am supporting the arts.

Patronizing local plays. My sweetheart and I attended A.R. Gurney's humorous The Cocktail Hour put on by the Bergen County Players, which have been staging theatrical productions have been running since 1932. The matinee was a bargain at $16. We left wondering about our own families' hidden secrets.

Supporting public radio and television stations. One of my favorite radio programs is WFUV's The Big Broadcast, a 4-hour show of 1920s and 30s music Sunday evening that runs way past my bedtime. I enjoy the archives (two shows are listed) all week long, and they are largely available thanks to member-support. This year, I plan on become a long overdue member, and embarrassed to admit it took me this long.

Giving business to local book shops, and "voting" for the books themselves (no curling up this blustery winter with a gadget for me). I thrift and go to the library for most books since I'm budget minded and believe in communal sharing. But when I buy new (which I plan to do with As Always, Julia), I support my local, main street bookseller, Shaw's Book Shop in Westwood, New Jersey, where the owner knows me by name.

A lot of lip service is paid about small business among politicians of both parties in seemingly every State of the Union speech, and always draws loud applause, but chain stores and mall parking lots seem to be packed, while many small shops, main streets, and family farms struggle. All the applause in the world will do them no good unless we spend our dollar there.

Supporting upcoming, unsigned artists. I stumbled on Tuba Skinny busking at flea market in Woodstock, New York, and have fallen in love with their style of American 1920s and 30s music, an era I'm quite enamored with as of late. Their third cd, Garbage Man just arrived in the mail. See if Garbage Man won't have your toes tapping in no time.

You won't find them on MTV, which is too busy showing borderline child pornography programming with Skins in a destructive world of 17 going on 34, self-indulgent teenagers with million dollar sweet 16 parties, or that show which all descent New Jerseyans rue they ever heard of. Nor will they be on mainstream radio - much of what's on there wouldn't fit my standard for "artist." Although as my boyfriend likes to remind me, I'm no longer the "targeted demographic".



Donating to my Friends of the Library program. Libraries, such havens for knowledge seekers of all ages, have come under attack in the Great Recession.

For free (I've never had HBO through my cable package), my mind devoured the John Adams HBO miniseries (a definite recommend), in which he bemoaned his presidency would only be remembered for the Alien and Sedition Acts. Flash forward to 2011, and he's lucky to be remembered at all. I'm sure Snookie would have a higher name recognition.


Of course I'll be attending events with the Bergen County Historical Society. I'll bring you along too. Because I'd rather spend a Sunday with American royalty, not on my couch watching a bunch of miserable housewives, as numb to the world as their faces are after a session of Botox.

Endangered American Species: Language and Conversation

Dear readers,

I am writing this in a letter form. Remember those? I longingly do. And not e-mails - actual arrive in the mail, hand-written letters. Our second United States President, John Adams, and his wife Abigail exchanged 1,200, in what The New York Times remarked was "one of the most documented marriages in early American history" in its article on Joseph Ellis' "First Family, Abigail and John Adams." A more contemporary (although also no longer with the living) Julia Child has her letters featured in As Always, Julia: The Letters of Julia Child and Avis DeVoto, which is on my long "to read" list. Will it rekindle a love affair with letters? I wish, but doubtful.

I am writing to you mildly alarmed by this New York Times article (which notably published the same day as the John Adams article). It started out this way,

"Signs you're an old fogey: You still watch movies on a VCR, listen to vinyl records and shoot photos on film. And you enjoy using e-mail."

The topic: how companies like Facebook, in an attempt to reach an increasingly impatient younger generation are "responding with message services that are focused on immediate gratification."

The problem I see with immediate gratification - one is going to be endlessly dissatisfied, always looking for the next big thing. Isn't that the driver of our American consumer culture and what marketers want? There's always a better TV, better eReader, better car, better "thing" that will complete your life. The invisible forces want you constantly bored. No profits in using what we have.

Beyond the consumerism (imagine the true price of all these gadgets and services over a lifetime, not in a monthly view), the cost to our language and communication skills is immeasurable.

"We're going down a road where we're losing our skills to communicate with the written word," bemoaned Judith Kallos, an e-mail etiquette blogger and author in the article. Added, rightly so, Californian Mary Bird, 65, "I don't want to be one of those elders who castigate young people's form of communication. But the art of language, the beauty of language, is being lost."

CBS Nightly News ran this story about the American ignorance of other languages (even our current Commander in Chief admitted he doesn't speak another language and was embarrassed to say so). They noted the small but slightly growing study of Chinese among American schoolchildren (50,000 American children are studying Chinese, 200 million Chinese school children are studying English). Aside from our nation's abysmal attention to the arts and culture in our education system, I couldn't help wonder how can we embrace another language, when we're rapidly losing sight of the importance of our own?

Channeling John Adams and Julia Child. We need a piece of you in the 21st century.

E-mail, for today's youth, was described by James E. Katz, the director for the Center for Mobile Communications Studies at Rutgers University, as "painful...It doesn't suit their social intensity."

The technology-induced ADD epidemic that seems to be sweeping many of both the youth and adults of our nation is one I refuse to be caught up in. The next time you go out to eat at a restaurant, look around and note the people compulsively typing away on their gadgets. After a recent date night at the movies with my sweetheart, some people were busy checking e-mail as soon as the credits were rolling. My biggest interest at that moment was finding out if True Grit was filmed domestically or abroad (it was filmed in Texas and New Mexico, which I would have missed had I been texting or a looking at e-mail). My social skills, it seems, are not so "intense."

The great trap of all this constant connectivity is that work and personal time boundaries are erased and many seem to be unable to live in the moment. No Smart Phone for me, thank you. The more intimate connections (a conversation, a phone call, a long overdue cup of coffee with a friend) are lost. I don't need to know the "status" of what everyone is doing at every second of the day (ahem, Facebook, which you won't find me on).

I do want to have personal encounters with people and their ideas. Face to face engaging conversations, thoughtful articles and blog posts, the arts (literature, film, music, visual, dramatic) - things that stimulate my mind instead of dulling it, that's what interests me. And filling my daily world by celebrating the word - its beauty, power and magnificence. I hereby add "Word" to my list of favorite four-letter words.

Sincerely Yours,
Catherine (a proud Old Fogey as facetiously defined by The New York Times)