April 07, 2007
Art out of Context - What happens when one of the world's premier violinists takes his Stradivarius to a DC subway stop and busks in his jeans and tshirt?
(an earlier Weingarten piece, still one of my favorites).
Yer, Id been one of the 1000 plus who would have ignored it completly.
I would totally have walked on by, partly because (like wine) the difference between a virtuoso and someone merely good is completely lost on me. And I would have felt bad about not giving any money.
I'd like to think I would have stopped -- I usually do for stuff like this -- but who are we kidding, I would have already been 10 minutes late to work.
Also, I hope that a red-letter day for every street performer in the greater DC metropolitan area followed publication of this article...
I almost certainly wouldn't have stopped but unlike all the people the Post interviewed I would have readily admitted avoiding eye contact purposefully to avoid feeling guilty about not paying. Ignoring is also my policy on city buses.
More:
I think if I'd had a minute to hear it coming up the escalator, I'd have thought to myself, "wow, he's pretty good," and then stared as I walked by (but not stopped, unless I had time to kill). I wonder what my mother, who's legitimately a classical music connoisseur, would have done. I gotta say, though, I don't tend to think of L'enfant as a cultural hub -- not that I necessarily think you'd get a critical mass at Dupont or Foggy Bottom (closest stop to the Kennedy Ctr) either, but I wonder why they chose it.
I like staring on buses, too, unless it's going to provoke either crude comments or violence (or in one case, could be interpreted as encouragement for even more really bad rapping). People can be infinitely amusing.
Weingarten wins a Pulitzer for this article -- as did the folks at the post who exposed the Walter Reed debacle and the Blackwater scandal. His (Weingarten's) post-prize discussion was pretty good (note the poll). Too bad leroy didn't have a bully pulpit when he won his Pulitzer in physics.
I thought Scott Templeton won the Pulitzer?
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I feel like in this situation I'd walk by, thinking to myself "this has got to be someone's prank on the world, best not to get involved," unless I was walking with someone and we had time to kill.
posted by McD at 10:53PM CST on April 07