Cultures

It was a cultural weekend.  On Friday and Saturday, I saw what you might call Utah's cultural bookends.

On Friday, I went to the Heber Cowboy Poetry Festival.  I've never been to anything like it.  Well, that's not ture.  It's not that unlike other small town fairs, except for the theme.  There were booths of people selling arts, crafts, clothes, jewelry, and toilet paper dispensers made of bridles.  You know, the kind of stuff you can find at the Farmers' Market at Pioneer Park.

There was also a vendor selling Cowboy Bubble Bath.

Besides potty humor, there was some awesome looking costumes and art.  Nothing was cheap (sculptures went up to $3,500), but it was mostly amazing.  One photographer has captured some great pictures of wild horses, which she showcased in albums with pictures of weddings.  She'll just drive out on ranges with her camera, find the wild horses, and then get out and follow them around for a few hours, and her results were amazing.

At least I think they were fighting.

So, walking and marveling at the booths took plenty of time, but the real reason to go is for the concerts and readings.  There is in fact a lot of poetry at the cowboy poetry festival.  Poets take turns on stage with country singers and bands.  Scratch that, it's not country music, it's western music.  The best we heard was from Carin Mari and Pony Express.  She's a 17-year-old girl who plays with her older and younger brother. Here's a video of the song we heard that makes me think she's got a future.

 

And then the poems.  MCs at concerts would suddenly break into rhyme.  I'm not sure what the difference between cowboy poetry and regular poetry is, but we did hear a poem about old people losing their teeth when they rodeo.

There were also some big has-beens (I say that very kindly) at the event, including Suzy Bogguss, whom my sister loves, but I didn't get to see her.  We did sneak into the Michael Martin Murphey concert. He sang a bunch of songs I've never heard.  Lots of banjo and guitar, and no percussion.  The music was actually really awesome for that.

I'd go again. Even though you can see booths and free concerts at about any small-town fair, I've never seen this much of this culture anywhere else.

To round out the weekend I went to the Utah Symphony for the first time on Saturday.  I suited up, had a nice salmon dinner and sat in Abravenel Hall for Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, one of my favorites.  I would have paid $50 just to watch the conductor--the music was just dessert.  Seriously.  The folds in his tailed jacket were worth the price of admission.  He looked a lot like this:

 

And since I think I've never heard the 7th symphony without waving my arms to it (it's about as peppy as the above), it was hard to sit still.  My date had to tell me to tone it down.  Beethoven's seventh symphony has the distinction of being the only of Beethoven's symphonies to be featured in an episode of Seinfeld.  (I couldn't find a video to embed, but you can go here and see it at the :36 second mark.)  The second movement is awesome also, and it's the underscore in the king's speech section of The King's Speech.

I used the restroom before the symphony started, and, as I suspected, the toilet paper dispensers were not made of bridles.  It's a completely different kind of culture.