Just as an FYI.

I know that it disappoints some blog readers when I stoop to caress the little people. If you're one of them, perhaps you'd like to stop here.

Long ago, the Tribune permitted letters to the editor with “name withheld by request," and naturally, most such letters were nasty, unforgivable personal attacks.

During the unfortunate period into the Nineties when Eddie Laduke spectacularly verified the Peter Principle by serving as the Tribune’s editor – itself a phenomenon that surely ranks as the nadir of intellectual attainment in this city – he regularly defended the practice in terms similar to those used by our spiteful troglodytes of the Noughts (paraphrased):

“But no one’s willing to call his or her boss a son of a bitch in print without an anonymity clause.”

So it goes. Time passes, the world keeps changing, but as both Laduke then and Steve Price now aptly illustrate, small provincial minds proliferate forever, and hooded personal attacks still are nowhere close to the same thing as “whistle blowing” and other such exculpatory nonsense.

What’s most interesting is the identity of the person during my formative years who taught me right from wrong in this context, because it was my father who was invariably outraged when one of those “name withheld” letters appeared – even if he agreed with the particular sentiments expressed.

If he was feeling okay with the world, the anonymite was simply a “coward,” but if he’d been having a hard day, the full repertoire of colorful adjectives and adverbs gleaned from three years’ service in the Marine Corps in WWII would be unleashed on the offender. The message (expletives deleted) my dad gave me never varied: If you’re not man enough to stand behind it, then keep your mouth shut.

It is a lesson I’ve not forgotten, and so anyone reading this who actually knew my father personally, and who really thinks he’d be “rolling in his grave” at the way his son conducts his life and work – anyone whose pen name throughout somehow remains “anonymous” – is so utterly allergic to irony that he or she is beyond redemption. Lies are another matter, but I think you get my drift.

I’ll give you a tip, anonymous: Keep some of your powder dry, because next week, your blood pressure’s going up. Way, way up. Have a warm, sunny weekend. Time to break out the biking shorts, don’t you think?

Ain't no river wide enough

As referenced last Friday, the bluegill clan spent the evening across the river. While it was a special occasion for us in many aspects, it was, in fact, only one of hundreds spent on the other end of the bridge in search of culture in a state whose mere mention conjures assumptions of a grim lack thereof on a national scale.

Despite that stereotype, it was a fantastic evening spent in the company of old friends and the acquaintance of new ones. An artist friend sold thousands of dollars of his contemporary work; a boon to a young man who’s rehabbing a 1930 medical clinic in Portland for use as a studio and gallery. A recent University of Louisville music school graduate beguiled the crowd with his cello and voice, accompanied by a djembe, sax, and spoken word improvisations. I spent hours talking about art, music, and travel in a room filled with multimillionaires to the unemployed, representatives of several different countries to people from around the corner.

In other words, it was a typical Friday night less than five miles from here.

And yet, after crossing the bridge toward home, my family was relegated to a late night sit-down at Steak 'n Shake, the only place open save Denny’s with room enough for us at one table. It made me regret pointing the car in a northerly direction almost as much as I resented having to use the car at all.

What gives? As much as I value the revitalization efforts underway, I can’t help but wonder what made us so inhospitable to the creative spirit in the first place, what death led to the necessity of rebirth, especially given New Albany’s obvious appreciation of innovative endeavors in its earlier days.

The automobile and misguided development may have diminished investment in the physical infrastructure of downtown but what killed its intellect?