An Inappropriate Venue

I don’t usually do this. I usually prefer to leave the editorials to the editorial bloggers. But sometimes, once in a great while, I read a news article that pisses me off so much… that I just have to blog about it. It’s something that doesn’t even have anything to do with me personally, but it strikes the very core of my pissed-off-ness.

Read this article first...

Okay, so some of you are too apathetic to click the link and read the article, or maybe you found this post several weeks or months after the fact and it’s now a dead link, so let me summarize it for you.

Basically, after the intermission at a piano concert in LA, the Polish pianist changed the program to a series of Polish pieces in a not-so-subtle show of nationalism. Then the performer got up and spoke to the audience about how he was not going to finish the concert because he didn’t support U.S. presence on Polish soil, and declared a boycott of American concerts until the U.S. withdraws. Then, after pausing to catch his balance from carrying that massive ego around (it makes one very top-heavy), he actually went on to thank the Americans in his audience for spreading democracy. Wow.

First of all, I just want to say that iReport can suck it. Having a slogan like “Unedited. Unfiltered. News.” Just screams “pretentious,” and it reminds me of something sagely cynical (and cynically sage) that Dr. Gooch once told me, something that has stuck with me through the years: “The problem with the internet is that it’s self-publishing.” Ain’t that the truth. I mean, for example, look at the kind of dreck you see on this blog! Good God! So all I want so say is, if you fancy yourself a “journalist,” get a freaking spell-checker or something. At the very least, use capital letters to start your sentences! You’re NOT… NEWS! For crying out loud, FOX News is more “news” than you are!!

Okay, on to the righteous indignation.

This incident bothers me because I am a classically trained musician. My opinion on this matter is a “professional opinion.” So here goes…

1) Why do people in the arts automatically assume that the masses care about their views in the first place? Just because you’re on stage or on TV or whatever doesn’t mean that you’re that important. Get over yourself.

2) Oh, so a concert pianist demands that we withdraw all our troops? Yeah, we’ll get right on that. Because you have so much pull. Tell me, what’s it like to be the center of the universe? Better question: did you do your undergrad at Truman? Because I think you’d fit in just fine.

3) It’s an inappropriate venue for politicking. It’s that simple. Leave your politics at the door, please. It’s a concert. Be a professional. Don’t act like one of my more self-righteous Aural Skills Freshmen students from Bowling Green. Your idealism is misplaced. Sorely misplaced. There is a time and a place for such things, and it is not the concert hall.

4) It’s also called biting the hand that feeds you. These people paid money to hear you play the piano, and you’re not going to follow the program?! NO! Money is exchanged for services rendered, asshole! If you want to make a political statement with your art, write a piece about it so they know up front. Don’t hijack your own concert and punish unsuspecting, innocent audiences. You owe them a concert and/or their money back. Period.

5) Connect the dots. How do you get from Brahms to “Shame on America” by using a straight line? What does one have to do with the other? Before I was offended and ultimately irate about this article, I had to first be simply baffled by it. Non sequitur.

6) The part that baffles me most is that the audience, by and large, cheered for this. Are you serious? And the part where the performer thanks the Americans for spreading democracy—that just begs heckling. Why did only a small portion of the audience storm off in a fit of good taste?

That’s like the head chef of a packed, upscale restaurant coming out from the kitchen, walking around to every table, one at a time, putting his dick in the soup because his patrons are Americans. And some people don’t believe what just happened before their eyes—because how could that have possibly just happened?—and they taste the soup again, and say, “This soup tastes like… a dick!”

That’s exactly what this is like. Spare me.