Stealing from the Met

Age of the audience 
Conventional wisdom: the classical music audience has always been the age it is now. Reality: It used to be younger -- dramatically younger, in fact. Here's some evidence -- primary sources (actual texts of old studies, links to NEA studies) -- plus two of my blog posts on this subject, and some anecdotal data.
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Dion on YouTube 
He's singing his first big hit in the balcony of a theater, with his group (aka two backup guys) the Belmonts. The song is gentle, and if you listen to the words, it's supposed to be sad. "Why must I be a teenager in love?" But Dion is cocky and confident, enjoying his easy triumph. So this -- in Milan Kundera's famous definition -- can't be kitsch. There's no subtext telling us that he knows he's being sad, because he's not being sad. But the song is honest. It's about something he might have felt before he was famous. And surely it catches the helpless longing all the girls listening to him felt, all the girls clapping dutifully, right on the beat (because we white people hadn't yet learned what a backbeat is).

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles 
Smart, searing TV series. For instance: Cameron looks like a teenage girl, but really she's a killer robot from the future, reprogrammed to help people, rather than kill them. But she's still a killer. And though she tries to understand human beings, she can't grasp empathy. Someone finds a turtle on its back, and turns it over, so it can walk again. Why do that? Cameron asks. Later she attacks -- with unrelenting violence -- a friend of the people she's helping, because she thinks he's a liar. "Stop," she's told. She looks down at the man -- battered, groaning -- and with no expression turns him over.
 

Lucinda Williams, Little Honey 
Her most joyful album, but also her roughest -- very frayed, vocally, with edgiest band she's ever had. I don't know if I trust the joy (and I'm sad to say that), but she sounds like she's bitterly earned it.

Mantra for the arts 
From a New York Times Sunday piece on Wong Karwai, describing how he made his early film Ashes of Time:

"Mr. Wong was in a corner watching on a monitor. Every so often, in his measured way, he...called out to his cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, 'Is that all you can do?'

"Mr. Doyle, now a longtime collaborator of Mr. Wong's, said in a recent telephone interview that he heard that question as a constant challenge. 'It should be the mantra for all people in the arts.'"