Culture Moves

Maybe I think about this because I grew up in the West, where space is vast and the insinuations of culture are perhaps even more poignant because there is so much that is not culture around you: looming mountains, wide prairies--those places where there are things out there that can and will eat you.

Yet culture gained a foothold out there. Any town that boomed spent capitol on culture--usually an opera house--because it signified civilization, and because there were people with money to buy tickets to hear Jenny Lind sing or Oscar Wilde speak.

Culture moved with fiddlers and church choirs and ragtime piano players and jazz musicians and it changed the people and places it came in contact with in Sedalia and Kansas City and San Francisco and Missoula. Even though the Sunday New York Times didn't arrive until Tuesday on the morning train.

With recordings, radio, TV, you didn't have to see the Beatles at Busch Stadium to be changed by the Beatles. They were on The Ed Sullivan Show, on the radio, on the record player--and they were in our heads and changed how we wore our hair and dressed and walked and talked and changed what we thought about.

In the technological revolution we're living in now, culture is immediate, a click away. And it is infinite. Douglas Coupland, the man who came up with the moniker Generation X, recently suggested that pop culture may be near extinction because there is no one thing that can gain traction in the vast expanse of culture--no defining group such as the Beatles, or film such as The Graduate. There's always more, with no mood or sensibility or gesture that lasts long enough to define. It devours itself.

And yet, there are artists whose power is most fully realized in direct contact with an audience, who still have the allure of minstrels or Provencal poets or a group of players arriving at Elsinore, or Jenny Lind in Havana, or Oscar Wilde in St. Louis.

Meredith Monk is that sort of artist. As David Robertson has said, she "is from a vocal tradition both classical and primal." Sure she puts out CDs and you can find her on YouTube, but her power, and that of her ensemble, is best realized in direct contact with the senses, in her presence through your eyes and ears and skin and mind. It is culture moving through you with all the haunting power of a night train.