An 83 year old white knight

Two years ago under one of the side-stage tents at the Newport Folk Festival I heard the first rumors. The company which produced the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals was being sold, and longtime producer George Wein was retiring.

"The new people want to turn the Folk Fest into Bonnaroo," a friend whispered. Bonaroo is the fabulously successful, multi-genre music fest held every June in the swampy heat of the Tennessee hills.

Wein, and his fellow producer Bob Jones had never ossified the festivals into something dusty and rigidly traditional. In fact they always took heat for bringing the new things along. Bob Dylan wasn't the first electric band at the 1964 edition of the Folk Festival, but he gets all the credit.

Well, the Newport Folk Festival wasn't quite Bonnaroo last year, but it did somehow yoke Jimmy Buffet's parrotheads, and the smoky inertia of Black Crow fans with the dreamy meanderings of Jim James. This strange lineup, along with the regional ambitions of Festival Networks put them deep in a hole, from which they apparently haven't climbed.

Re-enter George Wein. He's back. And he's ready to make the Newport Folk and Jazz Fests rise again. And there's no small sense of relief among folk fans who wondered if the Newport Folk Fest would disappear on it's 50th anniversary.

I hope I have half the energy and ambition Wein does when I'm his age.

The quietest week of the year

My blogging has been scattered and superficial this week as I've spent many hours in a dark AVID edit suite chopping together the rough cut of a video for Kurn Hattin Home, a residential school for kids with problems at home (the homelife is usually the problem, and not the child). The edit is based on shooting over the course of a year, and many hours of footage. It takes a lot of concentration and creative energy.

That being said, I've always found this week of August to be the quietest of the year. Here in Middletown, Wesleyan's summer programs are over, students haven't arrived, and the energy is poured into preparing buildings for the arrival of students in a few weeks.

The New England Folk Festival season is temporarily in hiatus. Somehow, no one has ever claimed this second week of August as the logical or reasonable time for a festival (it's been claimed by the Newport Jazz Festival for several decades), and while it's usually hot, dank and humid, this weekend would have proven to be a delightful one in which to sit and listen to music.

Lots of folks are vacationing, and I sit at home wondering why my tomatoes haven't ripened (I've got a Brandywine vine that hasn't put out even a single tomato bloom - help).

And somehow, I've been up every night this week at 3, unable to sleep. It's taken me nearly all the way through one of my summer passions, the latest James Lee Burke novel, Swan Peak, popcorn crime literature featuring Cajun detective Dave Robichaux.

And the news media has nothing better to do then pursue pitiful John Edwards.