pt at large

Singer/Songwriter Hannah Bethel: On The Verge

Hannah Bethel
Holiday Express Hotel Lobby
920 Broadway, Nashville, Tennessee
January 12, 2019 

For a singer/songwriter, Nashville is the first stop toward recognition, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or the last stop before you press the dream like a rose between the pages of the Nashville phone book. A nameless busker, you sing everywhere…anywhere in search of the possible…airport terminals, street corners, taverns, bars, restaurants, hotel lobbies. 

 

You want to breathe the air of Music City USA, uncork the bottle that will release the genie and spin your straw into gold. If you’re not driven and don’t have the long view, stay home.

 

You’re singing to an audience of two or two-dozen, unfazed by an audience with faces in their phones or watching the plasma TV blaring in the corner. You’re singing from the deep uncharted place in your psyche, following your North Star, singing from a manger and hoping that the three wisemen, one of whom who’ll tell a cousin in the industry about the fabulous singer he just heard, will pass your name along.

 

Right now you’re the only person in Nashville who believes in you. 

 

Setting foot in Nashville is the secular version of the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage that you have to take, one foot in front of the other, on the road heading for stardom. Singing on that chair in the corner is the moment that counts. You’re singing from your guts, grateful for a smile, a tip jar filled with folding money, a smile of acknowledgement, any small tokens of appreciation until lightning strikes.

 

Willie Nelson couldn’t break through the Nashville ceiling in the early 60s. In a few hours, at the galactic “Willie: Tribute To An American Outlaw” show, 18,000 fans will fill every seat of the Bridgestone Arena. How’s that for inspiration?

 

That’s why Hannah Bethel is perched on a high backed chair in the corner of the Holiday Express Hotel at 5:30 PM. Guests are grazing appetizers in the lobby. To most of them, she’s acoustic wallpaper. In her mind, and to my ears, she’s singing for a full house. 

 

A request from the audience… Kris Kristofferson's “Help Me Make It Through The Night.”

 

The atmosphere in the room turns on a dime. The guitar chords are bare bones. But the voice… supremely supple, original pacing and phrasing, emotive cry breaks, tenderly evocative, focuses an imaginary spotlight to her corner of the lobby. By the time she hits the final chords, people have stopped chatting mid fork. I swear that some nights she must sing herself to sleep with the lyrics. She kills the song. VIDEO

 

Most guests are passing time in the lobby before heading to the Bridgestone Arena for the “Willie: Life and Songs Of An American Outlaw” tribute show. Kristofferson, one of the original  Highwaymen back in the day with Willie and Waylon and Merle, can’t sing that song with more genuine soulful depth than Hannah Bethel.

 

“I moved here from Michigan ten years ago,” Hannah says as I put folding money in the tip jar and ask for her web site address. She’s been paying her dues for years, dove headlong into climbing the ladder, trying to gain altitude at roadhouses around the country. 

 

Bethel's web site notes her recent successes but I was surprised by the two songs on it. In that little hotel lobby she was a woman with a voice and style that set her apart from the crowd. For me, "Train" and "Witchy Woman" are too much Nashville and too little Hannah. The purity of her supple voice gets lost in a Nashville-ized version of  her best feature...just sayin'.

 

This song of Kristofferson's? Bethel’s voice lilted, skimmed, and caressed the lyrics with a style all her own. Conversations stop in mid-sentence. Her range, depth and tonal purity, it’s all right here, in one tender, evocative, emotive, vulnerable song, with sub-strata of conviction, not desperation. Anyone who can sing with such conviction can survive. 

 

She’s got the goods.  Will she thrive?  If one of her pared down originals leads off the samples on her web page, she’s got a running start. 

 

 

Hannah Bethel, Holiday Express Hotel, Nashville, TN

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Sing with conviction, hold nothing back, no matter where, no matter when...you were born to be here right now

Photos, videos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Berkshire Athenaeum: Morphing from the 19th to the 21st Century

UPDATE: BOSTON GLOBE STORY SEPTEMBER 5, 2024

Harvard buys a GREEN BOOK  for $5,000

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/09/05/metro/50000-harvard-buys-green-book-jim-crow-era-travel-guide-that-lists-local-businesses-safe-black-motorists/

The Berkshire Athenaeum
Pittsfield’s Public Library
1 Wendell Avenue
Pittsfield, MA
March 14, 2019

The Berkshire Athenaeum on 1 Wendell Avenue…

A place for scholarly endeavors, a community center, a nexus for social interaction, a drop-in center, a quiet oasis of tranquility thankfully without a plasma TV in sight, rooms dedicated to local history…that’s a start to describe the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.

Not a drop of stuffiness here. The modern two story building wraps its arms around you as you walk inside, a spacious atrium, airy and well-lit, offers a silent handshake of greeting to the visitor. Surrounded by the usual stacks of books arranged with the Dewey Decimal, navigation is aided and abetted by signage, an efficient self-explanatory guide to the first time visitor.

Before you’ve even begun to take in the contents, your eyes are drawn to a powerful black and white photographic montage that plants you square in the historic and cultural ethos of Berkshire county.

Those large photos, printed on cloth and draped over the perimeter of the second level, give a visitors and locals a very specific sense of time, place, and people that are the fabric of Berkshire County. "Facing Berkshires Heritage" photographs by Nicholas Candida capture the spirit of the county.

I was born and raised in Pittsfield. Those photos hit a chord for me. I can smell the new mown hay, feel the chill air around Mt. Greylock, hear the lowing of cows and the voices of farmers in Savoy as I explored what was down the road as a 16 year-old with his first drivers license.

Facing Berkshires Heritage photographs by Nicholas Candida VIDEO

The staff keeps it real with displays as fresh as today's news. You’d have to have been living under a rock not to know that “The Green Book” was named the 2019 Oscar Best Film. A glass case just past the circulation desk contains an original copy of “The Green Book” with photos and details of how “Negro” visitors could find gas stations, hotels, and restaurants where they could be served and not shunned right here in Pittsfield.

Pockets of reading rooms and a food and drink room are tucked around the first floor perimeter. Two areas with banks of computers, being used by three generations of residents, are nestled toward the end of the first level. Spacious, well-lit areas to work or research or read whatever you need to read on the internet are arranged around the stairs to the second level. The Auditorium, located in the basement seats 175 people, and is often used to host meetings involving town matters.

An early definition of Athenaeum is “a place in the temple of Athena in Athens where writers and scholars met.”

Back in 1876, the city’s elite wanted to upgrade Pittsfield’s cultural standing by erecting a building with such erudite purpose. If they were to stroll through today’s athenaeum I’ll bet they’d be proud by the egalitarian way the pursuit of knowledge and social connectivity has evolved.

 

Berkshire Athenaeum Exhibit: The Green Book

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The Berkshire Athenaeum signage makes navigation easy for visitors

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Berkshire Athenaeum: A community destination

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Berkshire Athenaeum exterior on Wendell Avenue

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At noontime the library hosts a crowd composed mostly of senior citizens. After 2 PM, a younger generation will show up as students from Pittsfield High School, a five minute walk away, show up.

Original library, 1876 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshire_Athenaeum

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.

 

The Harvard Art Museums: Three Museums in One Luminous Cloud of Culture and Scholarship

Harvard Art Museums
32 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138 
March 5, 2019

A museum brazenly steals the show from it’s world class contents…

Wow…I stopped in my tracks. My feet were on the ground. I felt like I just walked into a transparent cumulous cloud.

That’s a likely universal reaction to a first timer’s foray into the Quincy Street entrance to the Harvard Art Museums. Every visitor I watched enter did the same thing – stood transfixed a few feet inside, eyes involuntarily trained upward, gazing to the glass vaulted ceiling five stories above.

A sunny day, blue sky looking like a freshly painted fresco visible through the pyramid of glass atop the five story structure, this moment is an affirmation of brilliant design. Rapture is not too strong a word to describe what I felt. When’s the last time you could say that upon entering a museum?

https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/mission

The Harvard Art Museums are what happens when an institution thinks big, has the dough to shoot for the stars, and hires rpbw architect Renzo Piano, whose bloodlines channel Leonardo de Vinci, to imagine the form and function of a museum of the 21st century. https://www.harvardartmuseums.org/about/history-and-the-three-museums

Beginning in 2008, the university closed the ancient Fogg Museum (1895) and the staid Busch-Reisinger Museum behind it and took a bold step that reinterpreted what a museum's purpose could be. For the next 6 years, a chunk of the block between Quincy Street and Prescott Street was a construction site; entire walls were removed, cranes resembling prehistoric birds hovered and built a glass nest three stories high high over the Fogg Museum. The 1991 building that had housed the Busch-Reisinger Museum, located right behind the Fogg, was demolished. The Quincy Street exterior facade remains untouched. The Prescott Street entrance looks as different as the two sides of a coin. The inside…well, it was reassembled with the inter-connectedness of a Rubik's cube.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/11/01/with-opening-expanded-harvard-art-museums-complex-patience-rewarded/DGhCKlNLxmBqwlvB3ZatMK/story.html

The Harvard Art Museums are the equivalent of a world-class teaching hospital. Its patients are historic artifacts and priceless art from a millennium or so. Its doctors are directors, curators, and faculty. Its interns are students and scholars from around the world who preserve and document and study the collection in their care.

Areas for study, preservation, scholarly work and teaching surround the atrium on the top three floors - all visible through glass doors with huge glass panes admitting from outside. On any given day, the space looks like an inside out beehive, students, scholars and conservators visible as they work in offices on the perimeter of the glorious atrium. The building has loads of 21st century green technology but none of it can match the generative smack of natural light that imbues the glass bubble with the sense that its floating in an architectural amniotic fluid filled with creative ions that charge the animate and inanimate forms inside.

The Harvard Art Museums (Fogg, Busch-Reisinger, Sackler) each have their own philosophies and guiding principles. Miraculously, they retain their identities, bonded together by the diffusion of natural light and visitor friendly flow design and signage.

One of my favorite museums, the Fogg fell off my radar when it closed in 2008. Eleven years later, I felt like Rip Van Winkle when I strolled inside after such a long hiatus. I came to the museum to see the Bauhaus Show that my architect friends and scholars wanted to see. The Bauhaus Show was mesmerizing but honest to goodness, in this first visit, the design and architecture of the Harvard Art Museums were the stars of the show.

Photos...

The original brick exterior structure of The Fogg Museum remains intact. The glass pyramid centered across the top of the structure is visible in the first photograph.

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Harvard Museums Quincy Street Entrance

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Natural Light controlled by shades, blinds

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The blinds and shades are in a constant state of flux according to the needs of the researchers, students, scholars in the offices that surround the atrium on the third and fourth floors.

Luminous multi-purpose interior

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Harvard Art Museums Prescott Street Entrance

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The old Busch-Reisinger Museum was demolished and replaced by the addition to the museum with an entrance on Prescott Street. Note the brick exterior to the Fogg Museum behind the newer cement and steel addition.

No detail left without natural light, even the Gift Shop...

Harvard Art Museums Gift Shop

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Terrific guide to help plan your visit...

Visit the tiny Jenny's Cafe, eat in a  cozy seating area or saunter out find a table in the original atrium under the pyramid of glass five stories above.

Photos by Paul A. Tamburello, Jr.