“It is one of only five states without any sales or use tax, meaning that a Manhattan collector who might owe, say, $887,500 in sales tax on the purchase of a $10 million painting at Sotheby’s in New York, would owe nothing by shipping the art to Delaware directly after purchasing it.”
Ronald Broun, 75, Classical Music Critic For Washington Post
“Mr. Broun applied informally to write criticism for The Post in 1998, although he had never published in a newspaper before. His gift for lively and informed prose was recognized immediately, and he was soon covering several concerts a week. [He] had the ability to convey serious musical information with a good-humored twist.”
How Our Technology Is Changing Us
“The existence of the medium has created an unremitting low-intensity neural disquiet that we somehow feel only the medium can allay. We are on the run from the anxious vibration of our living.”
Lucerne Festival 2016 To Feature 11 Female Conductors
“Emmanuelle Haïm will conduct the Vienna Philharmonic, which, more than any other top orchestra, has been criticized for its slow pace of adding women to its ranks. Marin Alsop will make her debut in Lucerne conducting the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, and Barbara Hannigan will conduct the Mahler Chamber Orchestra. Susanna Mälkki will conduct a new work by Olga Neuwirth, the festival’s composer in residence.”
What If You Made A Great Movie And Nobody Came? Why ‘Steve Jobs’ Bombed
“Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin’s exhilarating biopic-but-not-a-biopic of the late Apple co-founder sank like a stone in its first week of wide release after promising numbers in major markets and mostly rapturous reviews (ours included). What happened? The Internet, being the Internet, has some theories.”
Oldest College Dance Program In US May Stop Offering An Undergrad Major
“While the dance minor and graduate program will remain, the school has proposed dissolving the dance major under budget constraints. … Founded in 1938, Mills’ dance department is the oldest, continuously-run program in the country today. With that comes a list of distinguished alumni, including Molissa Fenley and Trisha Brown.”
The Link Between Ticket Prices And The Community Around You
“My fellow arts leaders, the next time you find yourselves asking, “Why don’t our audiences include younger people? Why is our neighborhood gentrifying? Why aren’t we staging more innovative shows and developing young talent?”—rethink your admission prices and your outreach strategy.”
Beirut’s Art Scene Remains Lively Despite The City’s Never-Ending Tumult
“The creative ferment is happening even as unrest in the region and domestic political instability have ground the economy and tourism to a near halt and threaten to embroil Lebanon in new conflicts. Beirut is also a city where luxury towers are redrawing the skyline while the arrival in recent years of an estimated 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria has strained the infrastructure of a country of 4 million. A crisis over garbage collection recently plagued the city, but seems to have subsided.”
What Libraries Can Still Do, Even As The World Becomes Digitalized
“The library has no future as yet another Internet node, but neither will it relax into retirement as an antiquarian warehouse. Until our digital souls depart our bodies for good and float away into the cloud, we retain part citizenship in the physical world … In the midst of an information explosion, librarians are still the most versatile information specialists we have. And the purest.”
Pianist’s Blasphemy Conviction Annulled By Turkish High Court
“The 8th Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court of Appeals ruled by a majority vote that [Fazil] Say’s Twitter posts, which had led to his sentence on grounds of ‘insulting religious beliefs held by a section of society,’ should be regarded as freedom of thought and expression and thus should not be punished.”
The Complex Reasons We Comply With Authority (Stanley Milgram is Back)
“The controversial psychologist, whose famous 1960s experiments concluded that most people will obey unethical orders, is the subject of a critically acclaimed new movie. … Not surprisingly, Milgram’s name is prominently mentioned in a recent study that takes a new look at an old question: What does it take to get us to comply with instructions, even when we know doing so could harm others?
The study’s conclusion: A gentle nudge will generally do it.”
Why Video-Game Culture Is Stuck Between Leftism And Libertarians
“There’s a hypocrisy of claiming to do both, creating meaningful work worthy of the protection of free speech, ignoring the fact that there are very few efforts working to push discourse on any subject in a direction that would be uncomfortable … That’s when you know you’re saying something that matters, when people start getting bothered by it. … You don’t see furniture-makers talk about how they need free speech to protect the integrity of their appliances.”
Jazz Vocalist Mark Murphy, 83
“Celebrated for his interpretations of songs by Cole Porter, Antônio Carlos Jobim and other great songwriters, … he ranged from bebop to ballads, torch songs to scat singing, from vocalizing Kerouac’s poetry to experimenting with rhythms inspired by the whistle that summoned his neighbors in upstate New York to the local wool mill.”
Billions Of Views – Online Video Is HUGE (But Not Entirely)
“I am not saying YouTube isn’t a huge, game-changing deal. It is. I am not saying YouTube sensations aren’t real sensations. They are. But we can’t even have a conversation about what is really happening with people’s attention, or relative value, if we aren’t talking in the same terms.”
Hobby Lobby’s “Christian Values” Owners Investigated For Theft Of Ancient Iraqi Artifacts
“The tablets were described on their FedEx shipping label as samples of “hand-crafted clay tiles.” This description may have been technically accurate, but the monetary value assigned to them—around $300, we’re told—vastly underestimates their true worth, and, just as important, obscures their identification as the cultural heritage of Iraq.”
Is There Still Any Value In Big International Music Competitions?
There is something to be said for weathering the rigour of these competitions without ever actually placing, as victories can take on a pyrrhic quality. “Life is squeezed out of the winner, as he has to keep touring and play his winning pieces.”
Reuniting The Humanities Into One (Great Big) Discipline
“Rather than conceiving them under a rubric of disciplines, we are developing the ‘big idea’ that the enterprise entire is the study of the different ways that human beings have chosen or been able to live their lives as human beings.”
Oregon’s Salem Chamber Orchestra Cancels All Concerts, Considers Bankruptcy
“Salem Chamber Orchestra has canceled the three remaining concerts of its 2015-2016 season. The board came to this decision during the past week and is seeking legal counsel to discuss a potential bankruptcy. Teresa Cox, interim executive director, could not confirm whether the 31-year-old nonprofit is dissolving.”
Delusions Of Candor: How Gore Vidal Fooled Us (And Himself)
“In the course of more than half a century, his quips, aphorisms, insults, and punch lines amounted to a self-portrait, airbrushed so as to highlight his favorite warts: Olympian detachment, patrician hauteur. It was an act, a put-on – perhaps the most effective double bluff in the history of literary P.R.”
Confessions Of A White Writer Who Used A Latino Pen Name
“I’ve been struggling with ‘coming out’ for a long time. I didn’t know how. I considered quietly disappearing, which is easier to do online than it is in real life. But disappearing isn’t owning up to what I’ve done, and this issue is bigger than I am. A friend suggested that I do the opposite of disappear – make a public statement. Here’s my best attempt.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.26.15
Monday Recommendation: JALC In Cuba
The JALCO’s 2010 visit to Cuba coincided with the beginnings of warmer official relations between cold war enemies. Their two-CD set recorded … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-10-26
Annals of obsolescence
A week after bringing home my new MacBook Air, I’m more or less used to it. To be sure, I have yet to explore any of its more recherché capabilities, but now that I’ve written … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-10-26
Who’s our competition?
Or, rather, who’s classical music’s competition? Especially when we go out in the world, who are we competing with? Which is something anyone in the field might do, whether you’re an entrepreneurial chamber ensemble … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-10-23
Just because: the Byrds sing Bob Dylan
The Byrds perform Bob Dylan’s “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” on a 1968 episode of Playboy After Dark. Roger McGuinn is the lead singer, accompanied by Clarence White on lead guitar, John York on bass, and … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-10-26
[ssba_hide]
Want To See Some Broadway Shows? You Can Stream ‘Em Now
“We’re trying to make the digital capture of a Broadway show more like an original cast recording — something that’s done for every show as a matter of course.”
Twyla Tharp Deals With The Dance Masses In Her Post-Performance Q&As
“There is of course one place where language is not so helpful and that is if you are actually interested in what a dance is.”
How Does Google Answer Ambiguous Questions? Ask RankBrain
“RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.”
Woman Thrown Out Of Theatre For Singing Along ‘Loudly And Badly’ During Musical
“Audience members claimed the woman threatened people who complained, with some saying the police had been called.”