The state of the pandemic being what it is just now, management didn't want to cancel the event entirely as they did last year, but concert venues in Austria didn't seem likely to reopen in less than three weeks. So the festival is being transferred from one big Catholic feast to another: it will take place in the days...
The brothers frequently refer to Irish dancing as a “sport”. “It’s not that we don’t consider Irish dancing an art form because obviously it is one,” says Michael. “We consider it a sport because it is extremely athletic but also because of the hours of training that you put in for a World Championship. You’re training every single day,...
While Britain hasn’t seen the cash influx — about $2 billion — that streaming and traditional media companies have spent snapping up the American podcasting companies in recent years, listening numbers here have surged. Nearly a fifth of the British adult population, more than 10 million people, now regularly listen to podcasts; entertainment and tech companies, investors and advertisers...
The Metropolitan Opera House has been dark for a year, and its musicians have gone unpaid for almost as long. The players in one of the finest orchestras in the world suddenly found themselves relying on unemployment benefits, scrambling for virtual teaching gigs, selling the tools of their trade and looking for cheaper housing. About 40 percent left the...
The Washington Post talked to the owners of six indies about how they weathered the year. What follows is an oral history of these shops’ highs and lows as the pandemic knocked life and business upside down. - Washington Post
When Generation X was published, Douglas Coupland observed: “information overload meant 50 TV stations instead of ten.” In the current era where internet connections give access to a previously unimaginable wealth of content, this seems rather quaint. Nonetheless, Generation X’s intuitions help us understand the destabilising effects that the online world has on our sense of self today. -...
As students, Fulford and Gould would argue about music. Fulford was acquiring a taste for jazz and other forms of popular music, which Gould dismissed. Having to argue with someone as informed and quirkily opinionated as Gould forced Fulford into becoming an ad hoc critic, thus beginning a second career on top of journalism. - The Nation
We are aware, of course, that we might be wrong, because we know that on certain issues we have changed our minds, and therefore must have been wrong at least once. Nonetheless, at any given moment, we believe that we are right. The contrary would be ridiculous. - 3 Quarks Daily
Despite the pandemic, book sales were up over all last year, but mostly for places like Amazon; bookstore sales fell by more than twenty-eight per cent. Even at stores where sales held steady or increased, profits declined as customers migrated online, raising shipping and delivery costs. More than one bookstore closed every week in 2020, and many of the...
He started drawing for the magazine 65 years ago. “Hitting the century mark in age, it’s a nice number” for the brain to consider, Jaffee said with a warm laugh Thursday from his New York home — even if some body parts don’t “seem to appreciate it.” - Washington Post
The performing arts, heritage sector and spectator sports – areas of the economy that depend on ticket sales– have lost more than 60 per cent of their GDP value. The only subsector to suffer more is air transportation, down 87 per cent on its GDP. - The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Jagoda sang and wrote songs that connected her to her grandmother in Yugoslavia. "They were songs of home and family, of love and Hanukkah, many of them in the diasporic language — Ladino, a form of Castilian Spanish mixed with Hebrew, Arabic and Turkish — spoken by the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Spain by King Ferdinand and...
Can there be hope for regular humans when the Grammy Awards can't get the sound right on Zoom? "The multiple acceptance speeches during the Premiere Ceremony that suffered from echoing, distortion or absent volume felt like a big miss for a show of its stature." - Variety
TikTok has dramatically changed how songs, pop in particular, get made. "In some cases, performers are trying out ideas on the platform to see if they catch on. In other cases, major labels are signing new artists with suddenly viral hits and adding superstars to remixes in hopes of boosting their profile." - The New York Times
