Month: November 2014

Notes On The Exotic

“Sometimes one can recapture that fleeting sensation with names – place-names. If I am hiking up a familiar path near my house in Turin and I think, ‘I am climbing a hill in Italy,’ there is a brief whiff of foreign glamour. And, when I arrived in Uzbekistan and was disappointed to find that city people took buses and trams as they do everywhere else, I could revive a touch of fantasy by silently repeating, ‘Streetcars in Samarkand’.”

Tom Magliozzi, Clack Of “Car Talk”, Dead At 77

Producer Doug Berman: “He and his brother changed public broadcasting forever. Before Car Talk, NPR was formal, polite, cautious … even stiff. By being entirely themselves, without pretense, Tom and Ray single-handedly changed that, and showed that real people are far more interesting than canned radio announcers. And every interesting show that has come after them owes them a debt of gratitude.”

The Granddaddy Of Chinese Classical Composers

Tim Page profiles 91-year-old Chou Wen-Chung, who recalls his reaction, at age 14, on learning of Ravel’s death: “I thought composers were a gift from nature and that music was written by dead people, because every composer I had heard of, Chinese or Western, was dead. And I thought, ‘Could I become a composer? How wonderful!'”

“Macbeth” Yanked From Turkish State Theater After Gov’t Officials Actually See The Play

A group of officials from the Ministry of Culture and Tourism attended the production in Ankara last Tuesday and reportedly stalked out without applauding; the play was promptly replaced on the schedule. Last month the now-former director of Turkey’s State Theaters resigned, complaining of censorship by the Culture Ministry.