Culture

Imagine a picture-postcard expanse of blue ocean hugging a lagoon bursting with greenery, a tropical paradise populated by women in dresses shot through with color, and men who walk with the noble bearing of kings. It's a scene out of time that might have been painted by Gauguin, whose passionate embrace of Tahiti and its people more than a century ago helped launch the revolution that led to the birth of modern art. But Gauguin was an outsider to the idyllic society he portrayed -- a culture that, as it turned out, already had begun to fray under the pressure of advancing modernity.

By the desensitizing standards of routine American gun violence, the shootings at Virginia Tech University were shocking only in their scale. Over more than 20 years, Americans have got grimly used to a ritual that plays out on the cable news every few months. The initial news is sketchy, reports of shots fired at a campus or in a schoolyard. Then, the first confused images of students running terrified from classrooms, black-clothed SWAT teams gingerly pressing into doorways; the press conference in which some dazed school principal or university president mutters the first incomplete details, with casualty estimates and emergency phone numbers for worried relatives to call.

Standing before the bar of justice to answer for his crimes, former state Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell was accorded a stature he never quite attained. He was hailed as a mighty poobah, one of the "most powerful," a lion of the legislature whose wish could not be safely ignored. Those who watched him in General Assembly councils remember a somewhat different figure. He was a bar owner who flaunted his rough edges. He was a big man with a dark, wavy forelock. He laughed a little too loudly.

Asked where he went to school, Malcolm X answered, "Books are my alma mater." I've always treasured that reply, for though I have a college degree (undergraduate only!), most of my real education took place after hours, in the stacks of public libraries and the aisles of used bookstores.That's why I started writing "Instant Culture" for The Sun: I believe that well-chosen books can immeasurably broaden the cultural horizons of anyone who takes the time and trouble to read them. So far, in these pieces, over two years I've recommended 100-odd books on subjects ranging from fine dining to country music.

BOSTON -- First of all, imagine a place women greet each other at the market with open arms, loving smiles and a cheerful exchange of ritual compliments:"You look wonderful! You've put on weight!"Does that sound like dialogue from fat fantasy land? Or a skit from fat-is-a-feminist-issue satire? Well, this Western fantasy was a South Pacific fact of life. In Fiji, before 1995, big was beautiful and bigger was more beautiful -- and people really did flatter each other with exclamations about weight gain.

"Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism," by Walter LaFeber. W. W. Norton. 160 pages. $22.95.If you came to believe while watching Michael Jordan play basketball that man could fly, you may, while reading this book, come to believe the retired Chicago Bull also accomplished with his oversized Nikes what the Roman legionnaires could only dream of: total world domination.LaFeber's book, the latest in a career's worth of thoughtful self-examinations of American influence, is a primer on what some see as the coming global conflict of culture.

There's a wealth of culture in metropolitan Baltimore, born of thriving ethnic communities and kept alive through food, stories and song.State tourism officials see a gold mine and are developing a brochure touting the state's diversity."

Sykesville Middle School is inviting the community to circle the globe today without leaving town.Visitors to the Culture Cruisin' Festival in Cooper Park can shake hands with a mummy, charm a snake and dance around a Maypole. Pupils are offering tastes of international foods, strains of native music, snippets of Shakespeare -- all to give lessons in diversity.It started with the seventh-grade social studies teacher looking for innovative ways to research history, culture and geography."I didn't want to hear, `I gotta do a boring report on Sweden' from the kids," said teacher JoAnn Heller.

LOCAL GOVERNMENTS in the Baltimore region long ago abandoned a plan to increase funding for the arts and culture. The 1990-1991 recession waylaid a pledge by the counties and city to designate a fraction of their budgets for the arts.Some area governments contribute roughly the same -- or less -- to the arts than they did at the start of the decade in spite of growing populations and revenue.Howard County, for example, gives $105,000 to regional museums, down from $150,000 in 1991. Baltimore contributes about $6 million toward those institutions.

FOR NEARLY two weeks, we've listened to psychologists, pop culture experts, police, politicians, educators -- even religious leaders -- as they tried to make sense of the shooting rampage at Columbine High School.They've blamed it on the Internet, violent video games, a permissive society, the modern dysfunctional family, the gun culture, violence in films and television, bigotry, alienation, and the failure by the Littleton, Colo., school to identify the two shooters, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, as potentially violent.

Viewers coming together in an adrenaline rush or an aesthetic high as they soak in pristine images from a beautiful big screen. That's been the promise of American moviegoing as a major piece of our culture - a promise that the Senator Theatre has fulfilled year after year. The good news from Wednesday's auction is that the Senator won't become a church hall or a college auditorium. But it will take ingenuity and commitment on the part of movie lovers and arts funders to see that the bad news doesn't come.

Yes, that was a pack of Samurai strolling down Howard Street near the Baltimore Convention Center. But that giant marshmallow? That was actually "Happi Paper," a giant dancing roll of toilet paper "with a simple heart and a kind soul." Such characters convene each year in Baltimore for Otakon, the largest anime and Asian culture convention in the country, which ended Sunday. More than 25,000 people - many dressed in full cartoon costume or sporting punky hairdos or wielding enormous cardboard swords - attended this year.

Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation By David Denby Simon & Schuster / 144 pages / $15.95 God save us from Gawker's world. The New York-based media gossip Web site, which launched in 2002 and has distinguished itself by, among other things, attacking writer Neal Pollack's young son, Elijah, is generally regarded as the prototype of a new style of cultural discourse: dismissive, superior, jaded, marked by what David Denby, in Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation, calls "false knowingness," a way of pretending to be more clued-in than it is. Denby quotes Gawker founder Nick Denton: "The ideal Gawker item is something triggered by a quote at a party, or an incident, or a story somewhere else and serves to expose hypocrisy, or turn conventional wisdom on its head, and it's 100 words long, 200 max."

Does anyone know what we're supposed to call this decade? Is it the 2000s? The twenty-ohs? We're coming up on the last year of it, and I still have no idea. Personally, I always liked the "oughts," as in, "Back in ought-six, I ate a brick of cheddar cheese in one sitting." But perhaps the best reason to call it the oughts is that one is left with the sense that this decade ought to have been about something, and yet it really doesn't feel that way. As flawed as the American habit of dividing our history into decades may be, it's always made at least some intuitive sense.

Kenneth N. Harris Sr. could have very easily taken a different path. He could have been like so many other children of 16-year-old single mothers in Baltimore's forgotten neighborhoods, and taken the route that eschews education and accomplishment for the lure of streets ruled by violence played out amid a cancerous drug epidemic. He could have spurned responsibility, assumed the mantle of a victim of limited opportunities, and fallen in with the crowd that wallows in nihilism. But he did not. And so he did not allow us the luxury of ignoring his murder, as we do so many other acts of violence that are more commonplace than we wish to acknowledge.

The Bangarra Dance Theatre, which has been described as "Australia's most sensual performing arts troupe," strives to fuse modern movements with elements of Australia's native culture. In Awakenings, which will be performed this fall in Washington, the company examines the symbolism of 40,000 years of Aboriginal life - and how those ancient rituals both collide with and inform modern culture. The troupe was formed in 1989; it gets its name from the word bangarra, which means "to make fire" in the Wiradjuri language of New South Wales.

Shine a Light has two maestros, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger, and once they begin to mesh, around the third or fourth song, they put on a display of showmanship that erases the line between art and entertainment. The great rock and roll bands of the 1960s and 1970s did so much to define popular culture and youth culture that pundits and critics tend to burden the few survivors with unfair questions. Have they reinvented themselves? Can they embody rebellion and effrontery as middle-aged or old men?

Many middle-aged American Jews have identical memories of Yiddish - the language their parents spoke when they didn't want the children to understand. That's what Gila Haor remembers from her childhood in upstate New York. But at 33, she's trying to change things in her Pikesville household by speaking Yiddish as often as possible to her three daughters, ages 3 to 8. "It would make my grandparents - they are gone - so proud to know that I am speaking Yiddish," she says. Enthusiasts like Haor are few and far between.

Little generosity in Bush's budget The column "Treatment, not talk" (Opinion Commentary, Feb. 3) expresses the logical view that President Bush's "personal struggles against alcohol addiction" would lead him to advocate "generous and caring policies." Unfortunately, as the column points out, that hasn't been Mr. Bush's record. To understand this point, you need only turn to page three of the same paper to learn of Mr. Bush's proposed 2009 budget, which squeezes funding for education, health, housing and anti-poverty programs while maintaining tax cuts for big business and the wealthy ("President's budget comes under fire," Feb. 3)

Standing before the bar of justice to answer for his crimes, former state Sen. Thomas L. Bromwell was accorded a stature he never quite attained. He was hailed as a mighty poobah, one of the "most powerful," a lion of the legislature whose wish could not be safely ignored. Those who watched him in General Assembly councils remember a somewhat different figure. He was a bar owner who flaunted his rough edges. He was a big man with a dark, wavy forelock. He laughed a little too loudly.