“More than 16 million people tuned in to the Country Music Association’s 2011 awards show on ABC in November–the fourth most watched program of the week. Its success was predictable. Although rock albums outsell country albums by a wide margin, country outranks rock on Billboard‘s weekly “Hot 100″ chart of single record sales and the number of radio stations with all-country formats is roughly twice that of the stations that play rock. Yet the CMA awards no less predictably received scant attention from the mainstream media. Country is rarely written about in major newspapers and magazines and almost never seen or heard on network TV or in Hollywood films. Nor is its place in middlebrow culture other than marginal…”
Archives for January 1, 2012
TT: Irresolute
I’m not making any clever resolutions this year–I’m too distracted by my mother’s illness, and 2011 was so complicated a mixture of success and sorrow that I scarcely know what to think about the year that’s just arrived. I’ll try my best to be a good husband, a good son, a good friend, and a good writer, and that will have to do.
May all of you know comfort and joy in 2012.
TT: Snapshot (special New Year’s Day edition)
Glenn Gould plays the opening aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations in 1981:
TT: Almanac (special New Year’s Day edition)
“Either life entails courage, or it ceases to be life.”
E.M. Forster, “The Poetry of C.P. Cavafy”