A great read

I read this on the wires earlier this week and couldn't pull myself away from it. It was captivating from both sides of the story - from the violinist, as well as from the passers-by. And having grown up in the D.C. area and frequently used the Metro, I understood the motivation of writing/participating in a story such as this.

 

Grohl, thanks for posting this.

It's an absolutely first-rate story -- really wonderfully structured and paced, written smartly but reading almost like a conversation somehow. There's some neat synergy going on there -- writing about art and beauty and meaning in an artful, beautiful, and meaningful way.

I also choked up, Babs, with the smallish, baldish guy who stopped to watch and talked about what a great start to his day it was.

Damn, that was a great piece, and the more I think about it, the better it gets. "Art Without a Frame." I think that needs to be the title of a book.

Holy frig. What an inspirational story.

 

I loved the idea.

Just as some of the writers on this board feel inadequate when comparing themselves to Gary Smith, I feel the same way as an editor when I read stories like this one and wonder why I can't come up with similar ideas.

Oh well.

 

Great great great.

I've sent the link to a bunch of people.

 

I'm glad someone linked to this. I read it and considered it but wasn't sure anyone would appreciate it ... glad I was wrong.

 

Like a Sorkin riff, almost. You could see this fitting in quite nicely in an episode of the West Wing.

 

Very good stuff.
Having been on the Metro I can understand why people didn't linger, but I still don't understand why more people didn't even pause.
The part about why context matters reminds me of an experiment Paul McCartney, I think, did a few years back. He came out with an original album and included a Beattles song or two. But used fake names for the band and himself, fake pictures for the liner notes, put it on a different label than normal. Left no clue that it was actually Paul McCartney who did it.
He just wanted to see what people thought of the music and not the name.
Sales were poor to middling and the reviews were mixed. One said it was obvious that he had some talent, another said it was blatant ripoff of the McCartney sound, and others just ripped it.
I also like the doomsday scenario of the editors, how people might recognize him and cause a problem. Just a brilliant idea and the execution was even better.
I put a call into my sister-in-law and see if her commute passes near that station.

 

Great story. I'd like to think that I'd stop if I was passing by -- especially since I have a large appreciation for music -- but when in a crowd and in a rush, it's easy to tune the world out regardless of what you see or hear.

 

I noticed that most of the people who stopped, other than the kids, had played the violin. Surprised there weren't more violin players who stopped.

 

Seriously, thanks for posting that.

My mother was an opera singer, and my sister played the violin for much of her life (and also used to live in DC). I'll be making copies for both.

 

Amazing stuff. Folks, that's WRITING. A great idea, beautifully executed.

One of the questions I ask in the seemingly daily conversations I seem to have with someone about the death of newspapers: "When was the last time you threw a newspaper at somebody or sent a link and said, 'You HAVE to read/see this'?" For me, before this piece, it was the Jim Sheeler/Todd Heisler opus from the Rocky Mountain News. If newspapers could come up with something like this even once a quarter, we wouldn't be sitting around lamenting the impending demise of the medium.

SF's point about the multimedia was well-taken, too, but it all starts with the writing. I'm inspired by this story, for a lot of reasons.

 

I made my SO read it and he said "it was good, but too long." Aaaaaaaaaaaahhhh!

I'm going to pretend he didn't say that.