All posts filed under: Random DJB Thoughts

This is where I put anything that is not easily categorized…

Celebrating 40 years of preservation

Published by

(Editor’s Note:  The following are excerpts from my keynote address at the 40th anniversary of Historic Staunton Foundation, delivered on Sunday, January 22, 2012.  To read the full address, go here.) Anniversaries are great times to reflect, celebrate, and resolve. I’d like to do all three with you this afternoon. Let’s begin with some reflection.  I’ve always enjoyed the movie It’s a Wonderful Life – for the dramatic (some might say cheesy) way it showed the impact people have on others and on their community.   And while I’m no Clarence Odbody, the guardian angel who showed Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey the transformation of Bedford Falls to Pottersville as if George had never lived, I would like for all of us to reflect on how Staunton might have developed if HSF were not formed 40 years ago. Let’s begin down at the Wharf – where generations of visitors initially saw Staunton as they stepped off a train. The first thing you would notice is that there isn’t any Wharf…for the buildings that make up that unique historic …

Claire Lynch: A wonderful songbird keeps singing

Published by

At one point in Monday night’s thoroughly satisfying concert by The Claire Lynch Band at the Institute of Musical Traditions, the band leader mentioned that she started in the music business 33 years ago.  It doesn’t seem that long ago when I heard her play at the Shenandoah Valley’s Oak Grove Music Festival, but in fact it may have been two decades since I saw her with the Front Porch String Band. Thirty-three years is a long time to be on the road, but Lynch and her band of hot young phenoms supported by veteran bass man Mark Schatz, had the energy and sound to more than satisfy the sold-out IMT crowd. Lynch has been an impressive band leader, prolific songwriter (truth-in-advertising: some co-penned in the past with my musical cousin, Hershey Reeves), and all-around pioneer in the acoustic music world…but she’s still most impressive as a singer. She showed us all time and again on Monday evening why she won the 2010 IBMA Female Singer of the Year award. Standouts from a wealth of …

Fiddle Heroes

Published by

I’ve always enjoyed Mark O’Connor’s 1992 album Heroes – a series of fiddle duets that O’Connor plays with his musical idols and mentors.  There’s great music on the album – from jazz to bluegrass, western swing to world music – and listeners can easily see the range of O’Connor’s interest and his amazing ability to play comfortably in any idiom. The players are – to put it simply – amazing.  Ponty, Grappelli, Clements, Zukerman, Gimble and more. So I was thrilled to stumble across this clip on YouTube of behind the scenes footage of the recording of this album. Take ten minutes, sit back, and soak up the amazing musicianship of a dozen top fiddlers of their day.  Then if you don’t know the album, find it on iTunes and download it.  You won’t be disappointed. More to come… DJB

2011 in review

Published by

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 18,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it. In 2011, there were 35 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 365 posts. There were 109 pictures uploaded. That’s about 2 pictures per week. The busiest day of the year was June 11th with 130 views. The most popular post that day was Celebrating Andrew. Thanks for continuing to read this blog. More to come (in 2012)… DJB

Every Three Seconds

Published by

Every Three Seconds. Three seconds may be  the amount of time it takes to bite into one of those juicy pears you received from Harry & David this holiday season.  The amount of time to pour a glass of wine. However, every three seconds someone in the world dies from factors related to extreme poverty. Perhaps three seconds could be the amount of time to decide to make a difference. Every Three Seconds is the name of a documentary film project by award-winning film director Daniel Karslake.  Candice and I met Dan at the home of our friends Tim Boggs and James Schwartz.  There we learned about his new film which… …profiles a number of individuals of different generations whose quest to feed their own hunger for fulfillment has inspired them to help meet the fundamental needs of others. Each has come to recognize that by giving, their hunger is satisfied in a way no amount of material reward could. Karslake is a gifted story-teller.  We were introduced to his work through the award-winning documentary …

Merry Christmas 2011

Published by

For a holiday filled with so many traditions, each year’s celebration of Christmas is different.  Some years the celebration revolves around visits with family.  In fact, so much of what I remember about Christmas from my childhood involves “visiting Mamaw and Papaw’s house” with a passel full of cousins and the accompanying aunts and uncles. But there are also years where other considerations over-shadow the holiday.  In 1997, mom was one week away from dying (she passed away on New Year’s day in 1998), while Candice’s father passed away on December 26, 2008.  In both instances we were able to be with our parents over the holiday season, but the focus was understandably elsewhere. This has been a quiet Christmas.  And that’s been fine. The quiet holiday can have its own special joys.  Some of the things I’ll recall from Christmas 2011 include: The joy of early gifts.  About 10 days ago, we visited the neurologist for a four-month check-up after Candice’s fall and the resulting seizures and severe concussion in late August.  To hear …

Acoustic Music Old and New

Published by

Airline travel has its occasional benefits. Earlier this week I had a trip to Boston booked on Jet Blue Airlines.  When I sat down in the seat, I glanced at the arm rest and thought, “Hot dog – Jet Blue is the airline with free XM radio!”  I whipped out my ear buds and settled in for 90 minutes of the XM station Bluegrass Junction. I love to listen to my own iPod playlist, but it also great fun to settle in to an airline seat or a rental car to catch XM radio’s bluegrass station.  Every time that happens I always end up hearing some great new music, and my Boston trip was no exception. On one leg of the trip, the station was featuring one of its staples:  a program entitled Track By Track where the DJ plays a full album by a featured artist who provides commentary along the way.  This week’s show featured the new Compass Records album Somewhere South of Crazy by the Southern songbird Dale Ann Bradley. Now I’ve …

Lowering the ole’ blood pressure

Published by

We’ve had a great deal of focus on doctors and health in our family over the past two months.  I’ll spare you the details.  But in recent weeks, I’ve taken to wondering if I should ask the doctors taking care of my wife to give me a blood pressure test while they’re handy. The knowledge that Candice was the focus of these visits kept me from going that far, but I have taken to sticking my arm into the testing machine at the local pharmacy, just to keep tabs. Blood pressure isn’t something I’ve had to worry about very much.  When I go in for physicals, the nurse will generally take my blood pressure, look at me, and say something like, “You’ve got terrific blood pressure.”  While not the picture of health, I’ve always been pleased I could rely on that number to turn out right where it should be. Candice, however, has begun to worry about my stress levels…adding to my worries that she’s now worrying.  And when I took a test at Rite …

World Series Game - October 25, 2019

Church of baseball: Part three

Published by

This post…to follow-on the last two and last evening’s crazy night of baseball…will be even shorter. Joe Posnanski wrote one of the best columns about last evening’s games, baseball and life, that I’ve read in a long time.  Do yourself a favor — pull up a chair and read it.* It begins with this thought: “Baseball, like life, revolves around anticlimax. That, in many ways, is the beauty of it. I realize that’s a hard thing to explain to someone who doesn’t love baseball. No, more than hard, it’s an impossible thing to explain, because many people want sports to be more than life. They follow sports to jolt them out of the steady rhythms of the shriek of alarm clocks, the monotony of morning meetings, the rush to get the kids to soccer practice by 4 p.m. They want sports to be bigger than life. What’s the point, otherwise? There is nothing in baseball as jarring as a blind-side hit, as jaw-dropping as a perfect alley-oop, as tense and heart-pounding as a breakaway. And …