Buena Vista Social Club

As with many things, I am way beyond the times on this, but finally saw part of it tonight. I missed most of the first hour, but got to see some of the wonderful performances and hear the music. I discovered that the salsa sound is the type of Latin music that I enjoy the most. I picked up my guitar and started improvising around the melodies. It's deceptively simple yet you can also make it as complex as you want. Interspersed with the concert footage is footage of what I presume is Havana. What a strange place it is - part of it looks like time stopped in 1957 and nothing has been done since. All the old 50's era cars on the road. I thought about the Cuban exiles and what I used to feel about them. I realize that a lot of the exiles were people who could afford to flee the country in advance of the revolution, but today I really felt a sadness for the people who had to leave their homeland, and I don't blame them for escaping to America. I hear the music that grew out of the culture before the revolution, and whether people are culturally poorer now than before in Cuba.

National Endowment for the Arts becomes more national, less elite

I heard an interview tonight with Dana Giola, the newest chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.

The NEA has been criticized a lot in the past - sometimes validly, other times not - as being an institution that funds art with a very limited appeal and in some cases art that offends a large majority of the US population. Giola's focus is the funding of art that appeals to a large portion of the population while not appealing to the lowest common demoninator. More importantly, his idea is to take art to parts of the US away from the large population and arts centers such as New York, Boston, Chicago, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Here's the link to the
Chairman's Forum at the NEA.