Monthly Archives: May 2024
Work Sucks. But What Could Replace It?
It’s no wonder that anti-work thought has gained such traction in recent years. - The New Yorker
When The Writer Attempts To Do The Thing
Nicholson Baker is a professional writer who has become an amateur artist. It is hard to get good at one art form, harder still...
A Musicologist Explains Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter
At 78 minutes, Cowboy Carter is nearly as long as composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s epic Seventh Symphony (1941) and has structural similarities to symphonic music...
Kurt Cobain, 1994 And The Rise Of “Authenticity”
The embrace of Nirvana showed how the recording industry has changed tactics to embrace what was once underground culture. - 3 Quarks Daily
Marin Alsop In Search Of Her Next Act
At a time when orchestras are eager to connect with a broader swath of their communities, Alsop’s struggle to score a position at the...
Barenboim: What Beethoven’s 9th Means To Me (On The Piece’s 200th Anniversary)
"Music on its own does not stand for anything except itself. The greatness of music, and the Ninth Symphony, lies in the richness of...
Kennicott: When George Washington (The Statue) Is Repurposed For Political Protest
What is most striking is the symbolic incorporation of the statue into the wider messaging of the protest... The students have dressed up Washington...
So TikTok Might Be Banned In The US. But It’s Already Been In Decline
“It’s just not hitting like it used to.” I still find some joy on the app. The delight is just less abundant than it...
How Orchestra Conductors Have Changed
The reason conductors have changed is that the musicians they lead have changed. And the reason the musicians they lead have changed is that...
NextDoor: The Art Of Neighborhood Surveillance
Oh, no, there’s no butting out on Nextdoor, only butting in. Somebody posted the other day about the “slow moving vehicle following the school...
Some Members Of The Bauhaus Were Nazis – And One Designed The Auschwitz Crematoriums
"The Bauhaus, in its American imagining, became a place of heroism, even martyrdom. Nazism was, by definition, something done to the school, not by...
The Musicians Suspended From The NY Phil After That Article About Sexual Assault Have...
"Matthew Muckey, associate principal trumpet, and Liang Wang, principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic, have filed federal lawsuits against both the orchestra and the...
The Supposedly Centuries Old Society Seeking To Refocus Our Attention Spans
That’s “the Order of the Third Bird—supposedly a secret international fellowship, going back centuries, of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists. Participants in the...
Chicago’s Improv Theatre Scene Is Expanding
The Revival returns "with the opening of a new theater in the South Loop. And The Home Comedy Theater, conceived by a collective of iO and...
The Power Of Student Protest Art
Those dismissing the protests as incoherent "should stand back and consider the iconography. … The students may be making inconvenient or even irrational requests...
Why Seattle’s Bellevue Art Museum Is Emergency Fundraising Again
Interviews show that “dogged by debt, over-optimistic financial forecasting, leadership turnover and overreliance on a small group of funders, the museum patched holes by...
Don’t Blame Screens For The Steep Decline In Kid Reading Joy
OK, blame screens a little, but also the loss of peer hangout time during the pandemic; the right-wing campaign against school libraries and librarians...
Why Warner Bros Discovery Stock Took A Steep Hit
It’s not because David Zaslav is a grasping media tycoon who made a zillion dollars while trying to tell writers and actors to accept...
How Frank Stella Kept Abstract Expressionism Alive
"Today, in our era of figuration and socially conscious painting, Stella’s 60-year devotion to abstract art might sound academic or even antediluvian. By his...
UCLA Faculty Protest At The Hammer Museum Gala
The faculty "protested Saturday night outside the UCLA Hammer Museum’s celebrity-heavy gala, calling for amnesty to be granted to pro-Palestinian students arrested on campus...
In Britain, Bristol’s Floating Music Venue Turns 40
The Thekla "started life as a cargo ship transporting timber around the Baltic Sea,” but now it’s had four decades of hosting music -...
When Kim Godwin Was Hired To Head Up ABC News, She – And Disney...
But that history has ended. Godwin, in her goodbye note to her staff: “I understood and appreciated the profound significance of being the first...
What One Author Thinks About The Way A Movie Changed The Ending Of Her...
This may not shock you, but The Idea of You author Robinne Lee agrees that the movie of her book fundamentally alters the ending....
The Issues With Translation Technology
In short: A human is better, but live translation programs are already pretty great (if the world you want is machine learning, “universal” translations...
Meet The Boston Symphony’s Newish President, A Guy With A Plan For Transformation
Chad Smith: "The critical decisions we’re going to make will set us up for the next 50 years.” - Boston Globe (MSN)
