No doubt about it, I want a new rear-view mirror. If I’m not mistaken, mine’s very much on the fritz. Looking back, it appears 2008 has sown a bad seed or two and how Humpty Dumpty gets put back together is anyone’s guess.
In the meantime, however, one of our most important food sources is about to be wheeled into intensive care. The arts, when we need them most, need life support. Funding is drying up at an alarming rate for the nonprofits that have been nurturing us all these years and, with no bailout talks on the horizon, they’re looking more and more to the grass roots for support.
Try to imagine negotiating the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without the ongoing mental-health therapies made available by the Park City Performing Arts Foundation, the Park City Film Series, Mountain Town Stages, the Egyptian Theater, KPCW, and the rest of our local cultural mainstays. That’s how the Dark Ages started.
This sad state of affairs hit me square between the eyes when I gazed back upon this past year’s greatest hits, as I often do during this time frame, and realized how dependent I have become for sustenance upon live music, dance, theater, films, independent bookshops, libraries, galleries, and fine arts of every stripe.
And not for a minute would I forget Summit (and Wasatch) County’s saloon industry and its ongoing contribution to the performing arts some of it even on stage.
Many are the local bands that scratch for survival during much healthier artistic environments and if their access to venues is put in jeopardy by lack of patronage, well, the rest of us are just going to have to pick up the slack. Supporting our local pickers is just one way we have of giving back, not to mention the fact that it satisfies more than one thirst.
Not that my end-of-year column has ever adopted a best-of list format, but it must be admitted that favorite books, CD releases, concerts, stage productions, and the like seem to always find print in this particular space-time. It’s a way of celebrating the right brain intuitive and creative sides of the human condition.
So that said, bookwise, 2008 was like lifting weights. By that I mean most every book I packed around had girth. “Modernism: The Lure of Heresy” by Peter Gay certainly couldn’t have passed a random pee-test for steroids. Yet I lugged it from screening to screening at the Sundance Film Festival in order to lend a bit of elasticity to the normally quite-rigid mindset of the waiting lines.
Being the obsessive sort, the narrative usually dealt with in one book often begets a follow up when it comes to selecting another. I recall a Hemingway period back in 1999 that wrapped around his 100th birthday and darn near lasted until his 101st.
This year, “Modernism” led to “Republic of Dreams – Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia, 1910-1960,” “Harlem Speaks” a history of the Harlem Renaissance that came with a CD, “From Greenwich Village to Taos,” and “Literary Pilgrims The Santa Fe and Taos Writers’ Colonies.” So I get hung up! It keeps me out of trouble and in a quite comfortable “denial” brain space.
The most moving piece I encountered this year, however, is one I just finished the other day. A historical novel, with an accent on the historical, by ex-Navy Seal, counter-terrorism consultant, and screenwriter Chuck Pfarrer, “Killing Che” dealt, as you might imagine, with the hunting down and elimination of Marxist rebel Che Guevara in the mountains of Bolivia back in 1967.
It’s not surprising he had trouble jump-starting a new revolution in Latin America, what with being sold out by old comrade Fidel Castro’s government in Cuba and the CIA, KGB, and the mostly stumbling Bolivians hot on his trail. A riveting read and, also, high art! I love to talk like that.
Now, with those books out of the way, I finally get a chance to enter upon one of the more darkly creative mindscapes of American letters. That would be “Confessions of a Barbarian,” the heretofore uncharted journals of one Edward Abbey. Talk about terra incognita. You can’t get there from here.
Beginning with Journal Four, the first three having been destroyed by flooding, we are allowed entrée to Abbey’s thoughts from late 1951 through March of 1989 (Journal Twenty), the month he left us to become one with his beloved desert.
Paring down the entries and manning the selection helm for publication fell to longtime Abbey cohort Dave Petersen. Of moderate girth, actually fairly portly for a paperback, it appears that this will be my companion through Sundance 2009.
So I suppose the moral of this story is simply that we should be feeding our souls and brains during these tough times by supporting those who sacrifice to bring us the arts, performance or otherwise. And while waiting for the next film or act to get underway, we may as well read a bit and support the publishing industry. Now, more than ever, we’re in need of enlightenment!
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and a free-lance writer with a background in commercial and community radio, among other pursuits. He has been a columnist and feature writer for various Park City publications going back to 1973.