Late Night Obsessing

Okay, is this something we should all be worrying about? It was a bit of a jolt for me, but nothing compared to the hundred thousand volt slam to the american National Endowment for the Arts, when their recent polling revealed that only 34% of Americans attended a cultural event in the past year, the lowest number since they started asking in 1981. THIRTY-FOUR PERCENT???
That's heartbreaking. More than that, it's a frightening indication that the arts have become less important in that land to the south of here (no, not Calgary), and the moment that the culture of a society becomes less essential...well, le'ts start talking about empty shells and scrambled brains.

Obviously, my real concern is what the numbers are like here in Canada. Surely tuh gawd they're much better than the U.S., but what nobody seems to know is if the decline in american arts-going is a sign of things to come. Is it the recession and belt-tightening? Are people staying at home and living on these hideous machines instead? Is it all just a blip? Are we all going to hell in a handbasket?

Even scarier food for thought was that article in the Nov. 23rd issue of Maclean's (gimme a break, I'm weeks behind my catch-up reading on the bike at the Y), the one where the Toronto DJ and part-time sociologist--I'm NOT making this up about his combined professions--finds that he rarely plays any song in a club for longer than a minute. At his ripe old age of 24, he finds that his own generation is "unable to listen to a piece of music for longer than ninety seconds." He's even got a name for this syndrome: Musical Attention Defecit Syndrome, or MADD. Yeah I know, the acronym's already been spoken for,but if this guy really has a point, if he's right that sustained concentration is going the way of the dodo or good television, if we really are doomed to attention spans shorter than a newt's, then I'm feeling kinda twitchy. I need to believe that the so-called "younger crowd" of music listeners won't be aching to flip the switch less than ninety seconds into a Mozart opera or a Brahms concerto...heck, they won't even be able to focus long enough for Maria von Trapp to teach them "Doe, a deer". Music will be dead.

I've got to stop reading Maclean's before bed.