new plays, new works, new music, new friends

It seems repetitive to tell readers what a great place we live in, how much there is to do here, that you should get out and do more. But as we put this issue of The Wire together, we are reeling with the humanitarian crisis unfolding in New Orleans, the untold lives lost and destroyed. Clicking between headlines and work, I see Nat Baldwin is headed out on a big tour around the eastern United States this fall to celebrate the release of his new CD, with a stop in New Orleans scheduled for October. Of course, there won’t be any stop in New Orleans, not for a long time to come. As a city with a shared musical spirit, I tried to imagine what that meant. How many nightclubs silent, how many record collections lost, how many treasured guitars swept away in the flood waters? I’m listening to Bruce Pingree’s Blues Show on WUNH as I write this. He’s playing scratchy old music, songs about the great floods of 1927 in the Mississippi Delta. Losing New Orleans’ cultural artifacts to the flood waters may not be equivalent to the loss of the library at Alexandria, but it will set us back. In the digital information age, it’s easy to think everything’s recorded somewhere. It’s not. It’s in the people, in the cafés, in the artists’ studios.

The Seacoast, though less storied, offers its own analog cultural treasure. Art-Speak, Portsmouth’s Cultural Commission, is in the process of collecting surveys from the couple of thousand uncounted  artists—dancers, actors, musicians, painters, etc.—living and working in the area. A new indie label has sprouted up in Portsmouth with aspirations to reach small communities like ours around the globe. Every week, a new play opens at a local theater, featuring the talents of dozens of people, including, quite often, local playwrights. More than 200 visual artists are currently exhibiting this month alone. What’s their work worth? We’re not talking about the price you’d pay to put it on your wall. We’re talking about the value to the community, our cultural heritage and our legacy.

Sure, these artists have Web sites. You can (and should) buy their CDs . But there’s no substitute for walking into a darkened theater  and watching an imaginary world come to life before your eyes, or for visiting club or concert hall, an art gallery or a book store, and meeting the artists. That experience can be reported and reflected in the pages of newspapers like The Wire, but its heart beats strongest in the moment of human contact.

There will be a whole lot of things to do around here this fall, which, as one of our contributors, Anne Webber, noted in an e-mail exchange, will be needed as a social anchor: “After what has happened in New Orleans this week and the death of Rehnquist, the country is in for a pretty wild ride this fall. Between our inability to respond as a country to a natural disaster, the economic tsunami that is about to hit the middle class in October with the impact of the new bankruptcy law and rising gas prices, plus the bloody cultural war that will be the subtext to the nominations of two new Supreme Court justices, I think this country’s collective nerves are going to get awfully frayed.”

We’re not telling you to go out and keep shopping, as our national leaders suggested in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. We’re saying, go out and meet your neighbors. There’s no better place to build a future than here.