All posts filed under: Random DJB Thoughts

Sitting In With Off the Wagon

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Earlier this week, fellow preservationist and bluegrass lover David Price came up at the National Preservation Conference and invited me to sit in with his band, Off the Wagon, when they played the Southern Regional Reception on Thursday evening. I jumped on the wagon! Off the Wagon is a good young bluegrass band in Nashville (the next night they were playing at the world-famous Station Inn).  So as you can see from the photos, I enjoyed the chance to sing and play Sitting On Top of the World. Twas in the spring, one sunny day, My good gal left me, Lord, she went away, And now she’s gone, but I don’t worry, “Cause I’m sitting on top of the world. The band helped cover my mistakes (and my lapses in memory) and I had a great time.  Lots of friends and colleagues from our Southern Regional Office and beyond had a chance to enjoy it as well. I’ve inserted a video of Off the Wagon – without the interloper – playing New Camptown Races. Enjoy. …

Sleep is Overrated When You’ve Got Music to Fuel the Soul

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At the end of a busy first day at the National Preservation Conference in Nashville, I took off to the Grand Ole Opry House with about 20 close friends for the taping of a PBS special celebrating 40 Years of Rounder Records.  (Look for the show on March 10, 2010.)  While it started late and ended even later, it was an amazing evening of music. Here’s just a few highlights: Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas playing that great accordion-driven dance music from Louisiana, where the “crawfish got soul and the alligators got the blues.”  My accordion-playing friend Jim Harrington would have loved it.  As my colleague and seatmate  Caroline Barker said, “If I could move my feet like Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas I’d be a dancer instead of a preservationist (perhaps).” Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn singing and playing Keys to the Kingdom.  I heard them do the tune at Merlefest, but it was even better in the controlled setting of the Opry House.  Then Bela and Jerry Douglas played a duet …

Union Station: A Personal History and a Preservation Success Story

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Having just arrived in Nashville for the 2009 National Preservation Conference, I find myself in the lobby of the Union Station Hotel waiting for a room and for my meetings to begin.  That left me time to think…which can be dangerous. Union Station is a Nashville landmark.  It is a beautiful old pile of a building and the lobby (see photo) is stunning.  But I think it is a landmark and was – in the end – saved from the wrecking ball because it has so many personal connections to people in Middle Tennessee.  Take me, for instance. My parents were part of the post-war (WWII) marriage boom that begat the well-documented baby boom.  Both were from the small town of Franklin, located about 20 miles from Nashville.  My father had just graduated from Vanderbilt and he and my mom were married in the First Baptist Church in Franklin.  Before beginning his life-long career with the Tennessee Valley Authority, my father and his new bride had a honeymoon to take. Luckily, they had relatives (my …

Moved by Santiago Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum

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Oh my…what a building, what a sculpture, what a space, what an experience!  The power of place indeed. Just two weeks after seeing his bridges in Dublin, I had the opportunity to visit the Santiago Calatrava-designed Milwaukee Museum of Art today.  I had seen the building on a drive-by a few years ago, but this was my first time to see it both inside and out.  The internet is awash with both images and verbiage about this wonderful space.  I’ll only quote the dean of the school of architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (and a member, along with our host, of the selection committee for the building) who told our tour group today, “We got Calatrava when he was unknown and yet at the peak of his creative powers – sort of like the early Beatles, before they became superstars and started adding too many orchestrations.“ What you’ll see below is a series of photos showing the “flapping” of the beautiful white wings (really a sunscreen)  from open to close.  Extraordinary as that sounds, …

Why Do You Hate Your Knife?…

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…and other tidbits of cultural commentary from an American in Ireland. On our second night in Dublin we were enjoying a wonderful dinner in the historic Tailors Hall headquarters of An Taisce, the National Trust for Ireland.  I had the pleasure of sitting between the An Taisce past-president and a board member born in that far-away Irish town of Knoxville, Tennessee.  (His wife is Irish and as a software engineer he had the freedom to work from home.)  It was a delightful evening filled with laughter from the witty conversation.  I was on my best behavior, so I was surprised when all of a sudden my Irish seatmate – a distinguished botanist – turns to me and says, “Why do you hate your knife?” In typical American fashion, I was using my knife and fork to cut my food then placing the knife on the side of the plate while switching the fork to my right hand to eat.  She proceeded to give me a lesson on “eating Irish style” so that the fork stayed …

Santiago Calatrava’s Dublin Bridges (And More) By Dawn’s Early Light

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I am blessed with two talented children who teach me so much every day.  Claire has an imaginative and artistic eye that she uses to great effect in her photography of buildings and landscapes.  Andrew has been fascinated by architecture since he was a toddler and stood in our hall to carefully run his hand over the curved beaded siding on our wall.  As a preservationist and father, I love talking with them about their passions. So when Andrew texted me on Friday morning to say, “Dad, there are two Santiago Calatrava-designed bridges in Dublin,” I knew they must be special.  I wanted to see them not only based on Andrew’s message, but because I had seen the Spanish-born Calatrava’s Milwaukee Art Museum (a building I’ll be in again in a few weeks) and was intrigued as to  how he handled his designs in this city of bridges. To make a long story short, I left in dawn’s early light this morning and went on a 1 1/2 hour walk, beginning at Calatrava’s James Joyce …

An Afternoon of Dublin Cathedrals

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I arrived in downtown Dublin mid-morning local time with the better part of the day free before my meetings began for the International National Trusts Organisation (INTO).  We’re here because An Taisce, the National Trust for Ireland, is hosting the 13th International Conference of National Trusts. So with the city’s two cathedrals located just steps from my hotel, I awoke from a short nap and headed out to explore these great historic landmarks.  (And as I’m writing this, my connection with the cathedrals continue, as I’m listening to the late afternoon peal of 19 bells from the Christ Church bell tower.) Christ Church Cathedral (pictured at the top of the post) was my first stop.  This is the Anglican-Episcopalian cathedral of the Church of Ireland and it dates from 1030, when Viking Dublin’s first cathedral was built on the site.  The current building took its present shape in 1180, and was extensively remodeled in the 1870s. It is a beautiful fall day in Dublin, so the light was streaming into the building through the stained …

All the King’s Men…and the Health Care Debate

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On Saturday of our vacation it rained hard all day as the remnants of Hurricane Bill sent showers our way.  With no opportunity for biking or canoeing, Candice and I pulled out the 1949 Academy Award winning movie All the King’s Men starring Broderick Crawford and settled in for an afternoon with Willie Stark, Sadie Burke, and Jack Burden. I had a high school English teacher who loved Southern literature, so my first introduction to this powerful Robert Penn Warren novel came early in life.  I’ve read it on several occasions since then but it has been a long time since I’ve revisited the tale of political idealism gone wrong.  Seeing the movie – which won Best Movie, a Best Actor award for Crawford and a Best Supporting Actress award for Mercedes McCambridge as Sadie Burke – was a timely reminder that demagoguery is part of the American experience and not something new as part of the current health care debate. Willie has many memorable lines in the movie.  One that I’ve always remembered is …

Good Roots Music On the Web

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Even on vacation I can’t spend all my time enjoying the beauty of the river.  So I went online this morning and came across one new roots music blog and was reminded of another old favorite.  I thought I’d share them with you. The new find is called Fiddlefreak Folk Music Blog, written by a musician and artist on the west coast named Stuart Mason.  I found his recent post on singer-songwriter Sarah Jarosz to be a great introduction to someone who seems worth checking out – just as his blog promised.  Visit the site and see if you find some new music that’s worth exploring. The old favorite is the website No Depression, which is the online version of the late and lamented magazine of the same name.  (The title is taken from the 1930s Carter Family tune, They’ll Be No Depression in Heaven, which could be just as appropriate in 2009.)   No Depression was a great magazine covering the broad area called Americana, alt-country, or roots music.  That tradition is bravely carried …

Summer Reading – 2009 Version

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Last August I wrote a blog on summer reading lists, where I opined that summers are for checking out lighter topics than war, death and other such critical issues. But this summer I’ve back-tracked a bit on that perspective.  Perhaps it is the reality of the economy.  Perhaps it was the good reviews.  But in any case, I began my time off this summer with In Fed We Trust:  Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic. David Wessel’s insightful look at how the Federal Reserve responded to the recession and Great Panic of 2007-2009 is informative, sobering – and a very good read.  Wessel is the economics editor for the The Wall Street Journal and writes with clarity and urgency.  It is all here – the rescue of Bear Stearns, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, and the government moves to take over AIG and Fannie Mae.  And the story is as fresh as today’s headlines.  For those of us who are not economics majors, this is a great introduction to understanding one part of the …