James Joyce fans unite, for Bloomsday is upon us. I couldn’t find any direct flights to Dublin from BTR, so I’m going to celebrate Leopold Bloom’s perambulations for the first time here in Baton Rouge. The Baton Rouge Gallery at City Park is hosting a celebration (.doc file) featuring LSU’s Joyce scholar starting at 6:30 pm (free admission) and then Culture Candy takes it late night with a fund-raiser at Red Star downtown, which kicks off at somewhere between 9:00 and 9:30. (more…)
I’ve followed horse racing since doing some work for a breeding consultant when I lived in New Mexico and have always wanted to be able to say that I saw a horse win the Triple Crown. Every year since then I’ve watched the Kentucky Derby, Preakness and Belmont and seen a number of horses come close to horse racings banner achievement. While I was alive the last time a horse won the Triple Crown, I was only two years old, so today’s opportunity to watch Big Brown, the most dominating thoroughbred race horse I’ve ever seen run, take his shot is an exciting one. I’m even missing the first few innings of LSU’s super regional game against UC-Irvine to see if Big Brown can repeat horse racing history. (more…)
Gorjus just emailed to announce that he’s completed his third edition of the Sandusky Review. It’s available for download as a pdf and you can mail-order physical copies for $5, which is a steal considering the time and work that he puts into these things. I’m getting ready to print a copy, blow off work, grab a cooler of Natural Light tall boys and head up Hwy 61 to read this thing the RIGHT way.*
More at PrettyFakes.
*Actual results may vary.
Wow, I’m about to match the Professor Fury record for non-posting days. April came and went with a whirlwind calendar so full that it’s taken a week plus to recover from all the running around. May looks like it’s going to be a lot slower, thankfully. My parents are coming to stay the weekend for Mother’s Day and to catch the last baseball game in LSU’s Alex Box stadium on Sunday, but amongst all that visiting I’ve got my sights set on the CD release party for Harlan on Saturday night at Chelsea’s. Harlan is one of the best bands out of Baton Rouge these days and seeing how they don’t get together to play very often and there are rumors of a certain key member’s possible move out of state, this is a show to catch for sure.
Only a few days after the publication of the article that I linked to in my last post and Baton Rouge is facing a pretty big community art crisis. It’s a rather lengthy play-by-play, so I’ll just link to The Advocate’s article on the matter. Wgo had told me about the school board meeting and I had planned to attend but just ended up watching the meeting on public access. I turned off the proceedings before the vote on the matter, thinking that there was no way that anyone could argue with the substitute motion that was filed. Alas, it only garnered a 5-5 vote, and so the Baton Rouge school board has cleared the way for the demolition for a student-built sculpture that is listed on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s inventory of American sculptures. Culture Candy sent out a call to action, where Wgo summarized the issue as such:
Culture emerges from community; and the various artworks and attitudes that comprise culture sustain and inform the very context in which they arise. Authentic art arises from authentic community, and this art in turn models authenticity to the community. Education is one of the more conspicuous of the means by which culture is communicated and sustained; it is certainly the most conspicuous guardian of a community’s intellectual health, and in a healthy community, this intellectual well-being includes the arts and humanities.
And this is why citizens who recognize the central role of culture in a healthy community must take notice when its school board votes to destroy a public sculpture on the Smithsonian list of monuments, a sculpture built by its young people through the process of education, an artwork that has authentically arisen in the community through the very process of acculturate that community. This is more than deeply troubling. The system by which the Baton Rouge community is educated has chosen to authorize the destruction of one of the few public displays of arts in education in this town. This is pathological; this is an animal eating its own heart in an attempt at sustenance.
I’m not sure what can be done or who is going to do it, but take a look at the full Culture Candy email for their immediate suggestions (I’ve reposted it here it because their site is down right now). If education, art and community are something you value in Baton Rouge, be on the lookout for ways to help out with this. I’ll post more as I know it.
My submission for the second issue of Culture Candy’s Sweet Tooth:
“The existence of a unified, art appreciating community brings with it the notion that there is some adhesive that binds the group together, a mutual concern or vision that provides the foundation and the impetus for further growth. Both here in Baton Rouge and in my previous home of Jackson, MS, the formulation and communication of this idea seems to have been the most major obstacle to overcome in art community growth. Beg, plead and cajole the larger community into taking a more active role in appreciating the arts and many of them are going to ask a very good, necessary and deceptively simple question: why? There are innumerable ways for us to answer that question, and such is the beauty of art: there are a myriad of avenues by which one can come to commune with and appreciate it. The challenge to us is to answer it in a way that communicates a real and concrete reason across the gulf of the disconnect between our art community and our larger one.”
Read the entire article.
