Out West Arts: Performance at the end of the world

Today is the one year anniversary of Out West Arts and I’m celebrating with a new look. Working on the blog over the last year has been has been fun and I’ve been surprised with my willingness to stick with it. I've posted more days than not this year with 206 posts and thousands of visitors. I’ve been looking back over what I said initially about why I was starting this blog and what I was going to do with it and while I haven't always met my goals, I'm rather pleased with the outcome overall. I mainly started this blog as an opportunity to write about things I enjoy seeing in the hopes to share these thoughts and experiences with others. I think Los Angeles is one of the world’s richest performing arts communities and wanted to do my part to advocate for this great city.

I also wanted to counter things I don’t like about other classical music and opera blogs out there. I did not and still do not intend this to be a space for arrogant crackpot ranting, gossip, or journalism be it ersatz or authentic. Not that those aren't worthwhile activities, just not ones I find particularly interesting here. This blog is also not about my personal or professional life though of course the boundaries can be permeable at times. I also find that visually, most music blogs range from corporate-boring at best to 90s-Dreamweaver-template at worst and I wanted to do something that didn’t look cheap or like I was just using a prefab template from blogger. Of course, there are still things I would like to change such as talking more about recordings and writing more commentary on other topics beside “reviews” of performances.

So what’s new?
First and foremost I've tried to set up better indexing of my previous posts. Above the calendar to the left is a more detailed index of recent reviews including drop down menus of links to my music and opera reviews from last season. I’ve also updated my links and am continuing to include selective links to blogs and other sites I think are worth reading. I know this is far from an exhaustive list, but that is the idea.

Thanks
I also want to thank all the other sites and bloggers who have been supportive of my modest endeavor through their links and mentions including Alex Ross, Steve Smith, Robert Gable, Nicholas Scholl at Trill, Gert at mad musings of me, Charles Downey and the folks at ionarts, Christian M. Chensvold at FineArtsLA, George M Wallace, Jason Heath, Blake Oliver, and the many great folks up in the Bay area such as the newly blog-outed Mr. C, Patty Mitchell, Lisa Hirsch, Joshua Kossman, and SFMike at Civic Center. As for me, I shall continue to remain partially in the shadows for professional reasons, but some of my eager correspondents may wish to know that my last name is in fact not Langham. Everything should be up and running except some IE tweaking is still going on, but if you're still using IE it's time to come into the 21st century anyway. I always love hearing from readers so feel free to drop me a line or comment if you see something you like or don't. Here's to another busy year.