if metro would get its ass in gear

Anita Diamant's Last Days of Dogtown follows the inhabitants of a small town as it dwindles away. The surrounding cities get bigger and little Dogtown fades with each passing year. In the book, the neighboring town boasts more and more convenience as it grows. People no longer have the need to travel all the way to the big city to find what they need and they are drawn in from the country to the possibility of work in town. Diamant winds through the stories of these folks with finesse and honesty.

The birth and death of an area is a tricky thing. As I watch the suburbs of DC grow at an exponential rate I see that certain areas crop up as their own epicenters. This makes it unnecessary to go into the city, but no matter how developed they may get, they still lack the variety of arts that large cities offer. For me it is ingrained. The city is the center of all things. My family moved a lot as I was growing up and no matter where we landed my mother would drag us to the nearest city for any bit of culture she could find. It was she who made me comfortable at symphonies, theatre, and art galleries; and because she had an avid reader in me she steered me toward the classics as best she could (I did go through a major smut phase though - who knew that romance novels had soft core porn, and that they were right there in the public library?!)

There is quite a discussion raging at Theatre Ideas about offending the audience. If you really want to follow the whole thing you are going to have to make your way through several different blogs, but I think its worth it. Parabasis writes that theatre is not for the middle class, but for the educated (he says this with a lot more panache than I, and makes really good points). With the invention of film and television audiences had a new cheap form of entertainment and the cock fighting/bear baiting days of the stage changed forever. So is art for the masses? Frankly, I do not know a ton of people from the outlying suburbs who's parents educated them in the arts the way mine did. They feel no need to leave the comfort of their planned communities to experiment with the mysteries in the city. For example; a small epicenter, like Reston, Virginia, has an abundance of restaurants,shopping, movies, a couple community theatres, a few art galleries, and plenty of activities. They have insulated their suburban utopia and venturing out of it is messy and difficult.

This almost harkens back to the discourse we were having about Monsterism on BLOG! a while back in which I stated that we need to grow arts advocates. Trying to cultivate or should I say convert communities into patrons proves to be much harder to do, than educating them from youth to appreciate the arts. In today's educational arena math and science are the areas that parents push their kids into. Artists used to teach their craft to their children and apprenticeship was a norm. Now a life in the arts is not exactly the career choice of parents for their children. So I send out some major props to my teacher friends and those performing for the youngsters. Hopefully as the suburbs and exurbs and the way-the-hell-out-there-burbs continue to grow they will work to acquaint their students with the city life and all that it offers.