N.E. Brigand

Here's why I thought it related to the thread. FYI, I've heard about that guy's forthcoming book for months and never mentioned it on DCP (and to be fair, his argument that the way to make America great again is to increase America's population calls for both more immigration and for the Americans already here to have larger families -- I don't really want to get into a discussion about immigration; that was just what spurred his remark). It was his comment yesterday about the population decline of many midwest and northeast cities that brought home for me the disconnect between where most corps have been located and where the population was trending up. Any post-Covid plans may as well take into consideration the whole of the reality that corps face. The simplest thing that occurs to me is that corps might be more successful in the south. It's not just about membership but about local corporate support. Take it from someone who works in a non-profit performing arts organization in a city with less than 50% of the people it had in the 1960s. Looking back at our older files, as recently as the 1980s, I see the names of lots of companies that moved from here. There is one well-known example of corps having adapted to that population shift by moving across the country: Crossmen. Are there other corps who should consider that? it occurs to me that another notably growing city is your own (meaning Columbus not the suburb where you live). There is one tiny corps based there now. I wonder if they're making the most of their situation.

This cultural commentator has been heavily pushing his forthcoming book One Billion Americans lately, and I've been thinking maybe I'd read it once it's out in September, but until seeing that tweet from him tonight, it didn't occur to me that the book might have relevance to drum corps, although I suppose it's obvious if I'd just thought about it: - - - - - - - - - - "'"We need more immigrants to repopulate our empty cities." Get ready for it.' Oh, I've got a book about this! Meaning, like, the dozens and dozens of cities (mostly midwestern but also some of the smaller northeastern ones) that have been depopulated for decades, not the (likely-fake) trend of New York City depoplating because of Covid. Springfield, Massachusetts, for example, is far from the hardest-hit city in America. But [...] it's lost 12% of its population since 1960 which creates a lot of secondary problems. If you’d like to know more about why this kind of widespread urban depopulation is a problem, trapping vast swathes of America in a cycle of decline while valuable capital wastes away [...]". - - - - - - - - - - Many of those cities that lost population since the 1960s are also those where a lot of drum corps were based. Has the activity ever seriously reckoned with that population shift? Or did it carry on as if that hadn't happened? (Not that I'm sure what the right response would have been.) Not just the junior corps. As recently as 20 years ago, Rochester had two DCA finalists and Syracuse had one; those three corps, from cities whose populations peaked in the 1950s, no longer exist. Were they running on fumes the whole time?

AP says 200,000. BBC says 220,000. In which case, we'd need multiple stadiums for Finals. Every corps has to perform four times! For four sets of judges! Average their scores to get the winner. Debates rage between fans about which of the four sequential Finals performances is the best one to attend.

I'm generally not a fan of mash-ups, but this is fun:

Dream big! I'm dreaming of crowds like this (taken earlier today in another country) outside stadium entrances trying to get in and see drum corps: (A drum corps coincidence: in the background I have Youtube randomly playing, and it happened to pull up "Autumn Leaves", albeit by Vince Guaraldi not Bluecoats.)

You are a nonprofit arts/education organization and you have the resources.

Somehow I never realized before how close Carlisle was to Harrisburg. I stayed overnight in Carlisle once, having caught a ride from Boiling Springs. You don't get much of a perspective on the larger picture when your map just shows you the elevation gain and the next shelter.

I see that both corps performed in Toronto on Sunday, August 11, 1974.

Throwing them to the lions!

It's a tpo.

Wait, what? I missed that point earlier. How much is the annual fee for participation, and how how much had Crossmen collected by March? I have a very hard time believing that Crossmen could justify just keeping that much. Most performing arts companies I know, whose primary "earned" income (as opposed to contributions) comes in the form of ticket sales, either for individual shows or for season-long subsriptions, took a three-pronged approach to customers who already had bought a ticket or a subscription for performances that were cancelled (or indefinitely postponed) due to the pandemic, in this order: (1) Would you like to donate your payment? (2) Would you like to roll your payment over to next season (or whenever the company is again able to perform)? and finally (3) Would you like your payment refunded? It woud be unconscionable for Crossmen not to offer the third option to members, in my opinion.

Sure that could be one example.

People act against their financial best interests all the time, so I think it would depend on his personal relationship with the supporters. It's not inconceivable that someone forced out of an organization might be able to convince friends at other companies that they shouldn't do business with that treated him badly. And yes, if this were happening, it might be possible for Crossmen to find alternate supporters, but perhaps not in the short term. (But this is all hypothetical, as far as I know.)

I often am confused by this one, but it appears that "were" is the correct choice. The subjunctive is used for "wished-for, tentatively assumed, or hypothetical states of affairs, rather than things that the speaker intends to represent as true and factual."

Based on what garfield writes, it sounds like this alone shouldn't be a make-or-break factor (unless perhaps Morrison was poisoning the well with other supporters).

Probably. That he was able to stay around for some months after the news story about hiring someone who shouldn't be working with drum corps (and paying to conceal that person's history) might or might not indicate that there was or is a larger problem with the organization's culture. Think of Cadets, which continued to have a "George Hopkins issue" for a time even after he was no longer with the organization. As someone who works in a non-profit performing arts organization that has laid off a lot of people this year, my first thought on hearing about staff departures at Crossmen was that it was probably due to financial concerns brought on by the pandemic.

Fred Morrison is the former executive director of Crossmen. In late 2018 or early 2019, I believe it was, there was a news report about how Morrison (1) had hired an instructor who had previously engaged in inappropriate behavior and (2) had paid a firm to de-optimize that instructor's name for internet search engines so that it was harder for people to learn about his past (I'm not sure how one does that, but I think it's by creating a bunch of bogus content with that person's name and linking to that content everywhere possible so that the real results get buried at the bottom of search engine results). Morrison stepped down during or just after the 2019 season, I think. However, he then joined the Crossmen board of directors (and reportedly was a notable donor, as he also is said to have been while he was their director). Then in June of this year, he posted an apparently derogatory message on his personal Facebook page about the Black Lives Matter movement. Crossmen's board and leadership felt that message didn't reflect the organization's values and put them in a tough spot (e.g., it's hard to recruit people of color as members, or keep the support of other organizations in your community, when one of your board members issues a public statement like that), so at their request, he left the board.

Ouroboros. (Just kidding. I saw that one live, although not at Finals.)

46 years ago today (or yesterday, depending on your time zone). I notice that DCI Finals were still a week away that year: Aug. 17. And junior corps were getting scores as early as May 25 and as late as Sep. 7. Did seasons just slowly get shorter over the years, or were there particular years in which a clear change was noticeable at the time?

Isn't it usually about this time that Bruckner8 pops in to note that his theory of Competitive Inertia has held up for another year?

If you haven't yet seen the recent British/American film The Death of Stalin, a very dark comedy, I highly recommend it. And it was banned by Putin!

Does he mention these guys?

The Random House publishing company in 1999 commissioned a group of literary notables to come up with a list of the 100 greatest works of fiction (in English) of the 20th century.* After perusing that survey, one critic made a point that's stuck with me: the best works of art are often imitated, of course, but they often don't infuence other great works of art. Instead, the great works represent the end of the line: pushing a particular concept as far as it can go, the culmination of everything that came before. - - - - - - - - - - *Here is the top ten from that list: 1. Ulysses (James Joyce 1922) 2. The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald 1925) 3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce 1916) 4. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov 1955) 5. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley 1932) 6. The Sound and the Fury (William Faulkner 1929) 7. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller 1961) 8. Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler 1940) 9. Sons and Lovers (D. H. Lawrence 1913) 10. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck 1939) There were lots of complaints about that list, for what it included and what it left out, and to what degree the list was intended just to sell Random House books, and a number of alternate lists were created by others.

Didn't 7th Regiment perform music from Alexander Nevsksy about five years ago? As I recall, although Eisenstein filmed both parts of Ivan the Terrible back in the 1940s, the second part didn't come out until years after his death, because Stalin's people felt it seemed too much like an allegory for their current political situation. Not the first time that he came under the government's thumb. The silent films of Soviet directors was hugely influential in the 1920s, with bold visions and new techniques, and they were pretty successful as propaganda, too, but the filmmakers wanted to continue to experiment and innovate, and the authorities wanted them to keep it simple for the masses.