Glad to be on the West Coast!

The better part of my life was spent along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in a region that, for at least a time, was known as “Megalopolis.” This amounted to a span that began in the north in the greater Boston area and extended down to the District of Columbia. One of the things I appreciated was that I could get to performing arts events across the entirety of that span through a single rail service.

The renamed arts center in the District of Columbia (photograph by Brendan Smialowski, provided by AFP and Getty Images, from an article in The Guardian)

That included attending concerts at the Kennedy Center and still being able to catch a train home that night. As a result, this morning I found myself more than a little depressed over the fact that the venue had become a political football. This is because Chuck Redd, who had been scheduled to give a Christmas Eve performance at that venue chose to cancel. His reason was that the venue had been renamed to The Donald Trump and John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

As might be expected, this did not go down well with the President of the Center, Richard Grenell. In a letter to Redd, he wrote:

Your decision to withdraw at the last moment – explicitly in response to the Center’s recent renaming, which honors President Trump’s extraordinary efforts to save this national treasure – is classic intolerance and very costly to a non-profit Arts institution.

Grenell continued that he would seek one million dollars in damages for a “political stunt.”

Personally, I feel that there is a great danger in politicization undermining the performing arts. It is one thing to reflect on episodes from the past through music, both vocal and instrumental; but taking on the “immediate present” is a delicate matter. Unless I am mistaken, my first encounter with this gambit came from a movie, rather than anything musical. Back in May of 2009, I wrote about the Adam Sandler movie You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, whose plot I summarized as follows:

We are on a (fictitious) street in New York that has been divided into an Israeli side and a Palestinian side, both represented by small, but at least moderately prosperous, businesses; and all of those businesses are being forced out by a (not-so-fictitious) character clearly modeled on Donald Trump.

This was long before Trump made his move into politics and had his television program The Apprentice; and, at the time, I found the humor pleasantly innocuous.

These days it feels as if nothing is innocuous any more. Every event, of course, has consequences. However, it seems as if the consequences tend to get more dire, suggesting that no event can be dismissed as casual any more. As a result, the risk of having to deal with a million dollars worth of legal damages no longer seems like an extreme outlier. For all I know, even writing this can have consequences, which is why I have tried to establish as neutral a position as I can manage!

As a result, I try to do my best to avoid politicization. Describing performances is a major undertaking in itself. Invoking opinion to reflect on those descriptions is often even more challenging. Nevertheless, I continue to enjoy acts of performance, whether they take place on the stages of venues only a few blocks from where I live or on the television screen. Most of those acts have nothing to do with politics, for which I am sincerely grateful!