It's Easy to Complain...

... about living in a cultural desert in Utah. Not that my expectations are especially high, mind you. I'm from Idaho after all. But it's difficult to live in Utah without complaining about the provincialism of local culture. It's almost a pastime here. But that's usually not quite fair. Case in point: last week Michelle and I caught Brad Mehldau and his trio in concert in Salt Lake City and this week we went to a poetry reading by Billy Collins at BYU.

We've been Mehldau fans for five or six years now, ever since my colleague Greg Stallings (a pretty good jazz pianist in his own right) lent me some of his albums. Suffice it to say that anyone who can create both an achingly beautiful interpretation of "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered" and an amazing version of Radiohead's "Exit Music (For a Film)" back to back on the same album has got to be okay. We saw him in Madrid in November of 2004 and were able to see him in Salt Lake City last week. His trio was top-notch: Larry Grenadier, his long-time bassist, accompanied him, along with Jeff Ballard on drums. He played some new tunes, "so new they don't have names yet" as he explained, along with a Thelonius Monk tune (can't remember which), "Countdown" from his first album, and covers of "Baby Plays Around" by Elvis Costello and "Holland" by Sufjan Stevens. Not only are his chops impeccable, Mehldau is always interesting for mining the alt-indie pop world for great songs.

The Billy Collins visit was quite unexpected: on Monday I received an e-mail noting that not only would he be doing a public reading of his poetry on Friday at noon but that he would also be available to meet with faculty and answer questions. Collins was the US Poet Laureate from 2001-2003 and may well be the most widely read American poet since Robert Frost (for a fun animation accompanying his reading of one of his poems, "The Dead," see below). Michelle and I have been big fans of his for quite a while and, given that Michelle is organizing some activities at the kids' school for National Poetry Month in April, we were both thrilled to participate. We both attended the Faculty Q&A (where Michelle could ask him about his views regarding the memorization of poetry, a topic she's been interested in lately) and then the reading itself, which had to have been the biggest such event I've ever seen--I would estimate that somewhere around 1000 people attended and I doubt that anyone was disappointed (see local press here). His poems are always punchy, humorous, and "hospitable" (he doesn't like the word "accessible," which he thinks suggests images of wheelchairs going up ramps). He read a number of poems that we know well, along with some newer ones that haven't yet been published. The line to get signed copies of his work was so long we finally gave up. It's a wonderful problem to have, especially in a "culture desert." Then again, maybe we were just thirsty.