“It used to be that you toured to help sell the record. Now the record helps support the tour.” How has this come to be? In the case of Live Nation, it’s the result of systematic growth over a decade that has seen the Beverly Hills-based company establish a presence in more than 40 countries via acquisitions or partnerships.
Author: Douglas McLennan
London’s New Tall-Building Boom Is Wrecking Its Urban Heritage
“The Paddington cube offends every principle of a conservation area. It demolishes old buildings. It pays no respect to the district’s character, brutalising it with one overpowering structure. Westminster’s own published plan for the area stipulates that “tall buildings could not be accommodated without detriment to the townscape”. As for flexible uses, the collapse of the luxury property market means that the cube is entirely for commercial use.”
What If You Could Upgrade Your Brain? There Are Complicated Moral Issues At Play
Confronting this tendency toward the commodification of persons, and counteracting it with effective cultural strategies for ‘re-humanisation’, will pose one of the most important moral challenges of our time.
Lessons In The Power Of Diversity From A Portland Theatre
“There are, unsurprisingly, literally hundreds and hundreds of contemporary writers of color whose plays will move, engage, titillate, outrage, and delight audiences.”
A Central Role For Dance In A New Netflix Hit
Can dance change lives? In “The OA,” it does. “When people say, ‘I was crying when I was watching it,’ it’s like, exactly. That is exactly what dance has the power to do. Whether or not it’s true — which I think is a beautiful question in the series — I know that it can heal.”
Kill The Corporation For Public Broadcasting? Big Stations Will Do Fine. It’s The Small Rural Stations That Will Be Hit
“So for KPCC, our CPB grant comes to about 5 percent of our overall operating budget. For stations in Alaska, for stations in a number of rural states, it’s as high as 40 percent. So there’s a real disparity in the impact that would have between rural and urban stations, and I think from a public policy perspective, that’s a concern.”
New York Times Theatre Critic Has Left The Paper
Three major contributors to The New York Times culture section have left the paper. The most recent is Charles Isherwood, the No. 2 theater critic since 2004, when he jumped from the top critic’s slot at Variety.
Looking In On Joshua Bell At Mid-Career
“It’s not quite true that he’s not interested in the trappings of celebrity – his New York apartment certainly fits his profile as star musician. Indeed, the limelight may fuel him – but he defines it on his own terms. Take his relatively recent foray into conducting.”
Classical Music’s Woman Conductor Problem Isn’t A Women’s Issue (It’s About The Culture)
I ask Marin Alsop if the young women she works with are particularly beset by confidence issues. “Confidence is an issue for all young people today,” she says. “But I do find that the challenges for women seem to be projecting strength unapologetically. Society interprets women’s gestures very differently, so that if women are exuding an aura of extreme confidence that can be deemed off-putting, whereas it’s desirous for men.”
Literary Places So Famous They Become Real
Perhaps the ultimate tribute? Places invented in literature that become so famous that real places name themselves after them. It’s a tribute, of course. And there are a lot of them…