The Good Old Now

The Arlo Guthrie concert was really fun. I ran into half a dozen people from the synagogue and old friends by the handful. Many people of my generation and political stripe were there, revisiting the sixties.
I was quite far away from the stage because the "organizers" didn't have signs specifying where the stage was. The day before we had watched a much smaller concert in a different location with a dance floor. This was not a dancing concert, and the audience was many times the size of the first one, so it was in a completely different place, near the balloon.
For those of you unfamiliar with it, the Great Park of Irvine is a pie in the sky project in development. It is supposed to rival Central Park, Fairmount Park, and all other urban green areas in its scope. The planners have told us they plan several museums, including an aeronautical museum to honor the former purpose of the area as a marine base and landing strip, a college campus, a library, a botanical garden, housing, and miles and miles of beautifully landscaped trails for walking and biking.
The Great Park was an alternative to an international airport. Now an international airport half a mile from where I live would have been a disaster, in my mind. The traffic is already almost impossible to handle sometimes, and naturally, such an airport, while it might be useful to others who do not live nearby, would lower property values still further than the real estate crash has done, cause more traffic and pollution, and generally be a pain. If people moved away and the neighborhood went down precipitously, many millions in taxes and revenue from the prosperous area would be lost or would go elsewhere, perhaps to other states. So I was against the airport and all for the Great Park, but at the same time, I had my doubts that such a grand plan would ever be realized.
It is several years since all of this finally was decided, and none of the things we have been promised has been built. All we have is a small restaurant inside an old airplane hangar, a stage, and a big orange balloon that goes up several hundred feet in the air and comes back down again, tethered as it is to a line attached to the ground. Millions have been spent, and there's not much chance of major sources of funding emerging when the legislature can't even get it together to pass a minimum budget. They are too busy squabbling about party politics and abstract policies, and this may mean that schools close down and people like me and my husband don't get paid.
But all of this doesn't stop me from going to events like the one I went to last night and enjoying them. Irvine is the kind of place where nothing ever happens, and that is exactly the way people have always wanted it. It was planned very carefully to be the ultimate in high-priced status suburbs, full of highly educated people of various ethnicities, various conveniences, fine schools, etc. A very good place to bring up children, in short, but purged of every urban danger, edginess, etc. So it felt odd to be going to such a concert here, particularly since Arlo Guthrie represents, via his father and his own past anti-war music, the old protest culture of the left. But it was a crowd definitely skewed in that direction. Everyone knew the words of the old songs and sang along. I guess we have finally become the system we scorned.
Guthrie performed with his son and grandson, playing not only his old hits but those of people like Leadbelly and other classic musicians he had come to know personally and musically growing up with his dad. It became obvious that he was a fine musician, if not the genius his father was.
All the while, I watched the giant orange balloon rise gently a few feet away, then sink slowly to the ground again in the darkening sky like a new planet. Lovely. A lovely way to end the summer.