There is nothing new about a news organization outing someone like Corey Pearlstein trying to intimidate its supporters and staff; we last week reported that Pearlstein as the Executive Director of The Majestic Theater expressed his displeasure to several of our advertisers about their supporting us. On a very basic level this is what news organizations do every day, they report on behavior, both the bad and the inspiring.
The events as we reported them were not only corroborated by our staff, but members of The Majestic Theater board of directors as well—they are trying to come to terms with these events, too. In other words, there is no controversy about the facts.
We would like to suggest there are bigger questions here for Corvallis. Art and culture always travel a bandwidth built of practitioners, patrons, collaborators, and yes, the occasional troll at the edges—it’s a grand and fragile architecture and this little metro of ours, to our way of thinking, could choose to iterate itself past the city limits more than it already does.
Compellingly, The Arts Center has hung everything from Brittney West to Julie Green these last few months, subterranean to that; artists are moving here as collaborations like Midnight Muse and the Temporary Art Guild bubble just below the surface; and the body of serious musicians emanating from our schools is becoming impressive—our town is tempting their visits back home ever more frequently.
Corvallis has long paid homage to art and science, but our residents are increasingly the progenitors of these. The idea that we are simply an engineering town is going the way of the wagon wheel. We are at the locus of new and higher standards, this little metro of ours, but it will take the courage to insist that the principals commit civilly so that all can move forward.
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