11.18.08
If you can check this out, you’ll be doing well and doing good
Not the kind of economic / cultural harbinger you want to see going down: a great Bloomington, IN wine bar, Tutto Bene, a place I’ve played a few times and where I presented, with Jazz From Bloomington, our combination booksigning / Melvin Rhyne performance / Sunday brunch fundraiser, Barbecue at the Sunset Terrace, a little over a year ago.
Just got an e-mail from this week’s featured performer, Dennis Riggins, who says that the Widen family, which owns Tuto Bene, is deeming November make-or-break for booking live jazz. The door numbers just haven’t been sufficient to warrant it for a while. Dennis was practically begging poeple to turn out.
If you live in the area adn can go see his group, which is first rate, Wednesday evening, please do.
I’d go, but I have my own gig at the Chateau de Pic tasting room in Clarksville that evening.
Mr. Dings said,
November 18, 2008 at 1:31 am
Tragic, frightening and sad, what is happening economically. We’ve only just begun.
Bentnotesmanhisself said,
November 18, 2008 at 3:07 am
Ah, there’s the big question: are we still at the beginning of this curve?
Part of me still wants to believe that this is just another one of those ten-month recessions, that things have just about bottomed out, that we’ll all be seeing signs of uptick soon. Another part of me, though, says, “this is merely the snowball. Soon enough you’ll see it become an avalanche.”
Charred Leaf said,
November 20, 2008 at 12:30 am
Anything to say regarding the passing of Merl Saunders on October 24?
Bentnotesmanhisself said,
November 20, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Let me work on that, Leaf.
Mr. Dings said,
November 20, 2008 at 7:55 pm
If the past is prologue, there will be another “next big thing” that the masses will seize with fervor, wasting their collective efforts to individually grasp for that gold ring. For us fast becoming burdensome boomers it has been, in the order I witnessed the sad unfolding of greed, braggadocio and supreme selfishness (which you seem to trumpet here as traits becoming grown-ups): 1) in the early 70s the “my job pays better than yours” brag; 2) by the late 70s, “my new house is bigger than yours” brag; 3) by the early 80s, “my kid’s parochial school (formerly acheivable for the price of an affordable tithe) costs more than yours” brag; by the late 80s, when we were checking our IRA and 401K balances daily on-line, “my 401K will enable me to retire sooner than you” brag; by the early 90s, the “I got a brand new gas guzzling SUV that enables me to speed by you in a blizzard” brag; by the mid 90s, the “I’m hip to the internet dot.com boom” brag, similar to the “I’m a Day Trader” brag; by the early 00s, the “I’ve flipped 4 houses for 400% profit, kept a second for myself on the warm waters and am scouting out a third in the mountains for when it gets hot” brag along with the “my kid goes to an expensive private college at 40K per year and over half of it is paid by scholarship because he/she has hot test scores and they are majoring in genetic engineering.” By the mid 00s, “we’re going on a cruise to a hitherto unknown and unheard of exotic isle, dontcha just love to hate us?” brag. What next? Ahh the smell of whatever it was that used to be called money, because, now that it’s gone, in some circles it is said that it was never real in the first place. Onto the next big brag, I mean thing, even though it’s nothing, so they say, but light years away from the real nothingness seers have been saying for millennia is what it’s all about anyhow.
Bentnotesmanhisself said,
November 20, 2008 at 8:51 pm
You must run into a lot more bragging freaks than I do.
Mr. Dings said,
November 22, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Guess I do. I lived it like you. Obviously we drink from different glasses.
Mr. Dings said,
November 22, 2008 at 5:23 pm
Actually, it may be that you are a man among men, whereby the brag is done with knowing glances, knowing freedom is just another word for nothing left to need.
Mr. Dings said,
November 22, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Weep not for me, but the bell tolls for these, what happens when they put their hands out?
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/18/opinion/edbrooks.php
They will suffer lifestyle reversals. Over the past decade, millions of Americans have had unprecedented access to affordable luxuries. These indulgences were signs of upward mobility. But these affordable luxuries will no longer be so affordable. Suddenly, the door to the land of the upscale will slam shut for millions of Americans.
I know what you think of the NYT, but whattya think about David Brooks?