November 2009 Archives

Last week I was at a dinner party when a guest to my left suggested I update my thinking about the gender gap from a glass ceiling to a window. Something on par with the views afforded by the floor-to-ceiling sashes at Jazz at Lincoln Center, perhaps?

I promised I'd think it over and have been ever since, though I admit it has me troubled like a riddle I can't quite parse. Am I to take away from this visual analogy that rather than unsuspectingly hitting my head, in 2010 I can expect only to have to bloody my fist on the forward charge? With a well-applied heel of my hand to the frame of the window, can I nudge it upwards with a little patience and minus any permanent damage to myself or the transom? All these scenarios demonstrate some interesting parallels when it comes to interpreting the state of play out there as far as gender politics goes. Look and see what's around you, note all that has changed (Gail does the research, January cracks the jokes). Maybe question if the window is really even there at all (well, if you want to get all mystical about it, at least).

Same dinner party, but this time the guest seated on my right is explaining how lost he has felt  ever since a new music director came on board at his orchestra. The new maestro was great, he acknowledged, but he was just so...so different, you know. "As in Wife Swap different?" someone inquired. And we all paused and tilted out heads and imagined what that would look like, and how close it already was to how things run in many orchestras, what with the game of musical chairs played by new hires and guest visits and the like. Drama all around. The Reality TV part, though? Well, we all laughed nervously for a second about that, and then the guest on my right disappeared to make a few phone calls. Hmm.

Aside: Though no one smokes at dinner parties anymore, you should be able to smoke at concerts, "other than, you know, the Symphony Orchestra,"--performances which are apparently not "hardcore" enough to warrant lighting up.

When it comes to the new music/experimental side of my iTunes library, it doesn't often happen that a once-heard track echos in my ears as I walk the city streets. But trips outside the boundaries of my professional genre areas do sometimes adhere to my brain as if playing through phantom earbuds on endless repeat. Usually it's a line or a turn of phrase that isn't even particularly remarkable, but it will lodge--lodge, I tell you!--in my skull.

Of late it wasn't Jay-Z as the new Sinatra that was hard to shake, but Alicia belting it out in Times Square (guess I was a little homesick or something).

And then, though Taylor clearly didn't want to talk about it, I couldn't stop her from telling me--over and over again.

La, la, la, so yeah. And if you're worried things are getting a little light and flaky around here, go get caught up on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.

Do internet memes perplex you? Do you just not care enough to follow (or do you need your kids to explain) that thing with the cats, that squirrel, or Kanye at the mic?

Well, there's a site that will do it for you, and it will even parse the Auto-Tune trend trajectory (though admittedly the "how" does not illuminate the "why").

In (finally) setting up a blog aggregator for myself a couple weeks ago, I realized how far behind I've fallen since the days when my Friday Informer deadlines kept me on a regular hunt for great online content.

However, now that I am properly outfitted with a consumption method, I love finding out who is reading what and why. But it's also making me wonder: Is anyone regularly reading blogs anymore, or have they been traded in for your TweetDeck? Who ranks as the best of the bunch you are following, and how are they feeding you?

Yes, the "Painfully Honest and Epic Mobile Home Commercial" is more, um, well, more everything.

[via BoingBoing]

But the one designed by Rhett and Link of "I Love Local Commercials" for Ray's Midbell Music of Sioux City, Iowa, capitalizing on the "band rap", is awkwardly poignant as well.

Now, I hear the LA Phil has the community cultural advertising thing down, but some other towns might need a hand in the marketing department. I'm not sure if these guys are open to such a project, but just imagine the possibilities if they showed up in your neck o' the woods.

Okay, admittedly this is a Gap commercial, of all things, and extrapolating large life lessons from it might be a little lame and more than a bit misguided, but it got me thinking about the role of art--as in: is the ultimate goal of art always to shake up our private worlds and ways of experiencing things, to let us mentally knock over a mannequin in the middle of a department store, so to say? And what about our arts institutions? Do we need them to be the staunch, quiet pillars and white walls of unchanging non-intrusive presentation, or could they use a radical redecoration in the way they do business as well? (Not that I'm suggesting we necessarily get extreme about it.)

Speaking of stirring up the dust, the NEA's own Rocco throws a hypothetical punch behind agency support for artistic areas such as hip-hop and graffiti. Cool, right? Gawker explains why this may not be such a great idea.

Some years ago Carnegie Hall asked me to draft a composer profile/program note for Idiot Divine, a solo show of Rinde Eckert's they were putting up in Zankel Hall. I didn't know much about Eckert's work before preparing for our quick interview, but I remembered that phone call for a long while afterward both because of what he had to say and the fact that he could be so philosophical with a phone in one hand and a spatula in the other (he was simultaneously chatting about theatrical devices and cooking dinner for his wife).

As it turns out, that conversation merely hinted at what this artistic polymath and self-confessed philosopher has to offer his audiences. I've been having a grand time digging much more deeply into his work as I put together the materials for this month's NewMusicBox cover story on him, which we posted today. His interview is brimming with great quotes, but here's a crash course that includes as much performance footage as I could pack in:

As per usual, editing choices had to be made and I didn't get to include one of my favorite Rinde Eckert tracks in the final production. Thanks to blogging, I'll be able to correct that in this space. This is "Carlo Dreams" from Eckert's song cycle Four Songs Lost In A Wall, which appeared on his 1997 release Story In, Story Out.