“Snowden’s body might be confined to Moscow, but the former NSA computer specialist has hacked a work-around: a robot. If he wants to make his physical presence felt in the United States, he can connect to a wheeled contraption called a BeamPro, a flat-screen monitor that stands atop a pair of legs, five-foot-two in all, with a camera that acts as a swiveling Cyclops eye.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Benign Neglect – Why Are America’s Great Symphonists Ignored?
“A British colleague observed that American works, highly celebrated in their own time among musicians, contrast in their current obscurity with comparable works by UK composers that are increasingly celebrated in the UK. This got me wondering: have US musicians and presenters unjustly ignored their own symphonists, or have audiences voted against them?”
Local School Board Votes To Charge Students $100 Each To Participate In School Plays
With strapped school budgets, the school board is looking to close its budget by making families “pay to play”.
This Week in Audience: The Latest Fronts On Understanding Who’s Paying Attention
Is social media communication, marketing, art, or all three?… The perils of market research when it drives your art… The latest front on artists’ war on cell phone use… How NPR discovered a ton of information about its listeners… How the internet is changing our perceptions of the world.
Ticketmaster’s Ticket Voucher Settlement Has Been A Big Fiasco
“The entire process was flawed and confusing from the start. Ticketmaster emailed people their voucher codes. When people went to the Ticketmaster website to get the codes, they had disappeared without explanation. Another annoying detail: Part of the settlement included vouchers for $2.25, which could only be redeemed as a discount on additional tickets.”
NY Post Lets Its Theatre Critic Go
“The steady decrease in professional journalists covering theatre and reviewing Broadway and Off-Broadway productions has been made evident once again, as the New York Post’s first-string theatre critic, Elisabeth Vincentelli, has apparently been let go.”
Brexit’s Impact On The Arts – It Comes Down To Money
“The chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne (who warned against Brexit), might not have been popular among the culturati but he did genuinely value the arts and, especially in the latest spending round, went out of his way to protect funding for our national institutions. All those old conversations we used to have about arts funding (“instrumental” versus “intrinsic”) will disappear—quaint reminders of indulgent times past.”
What Boston Loses As The Globe “Refocuses” Its Arts Coverage
“The truth is, “compelling” stories can be found just about everywhere online; arts groups regularly post feature material on their websites. What are we losing? Something that is becoming increasingly rare in the world of professional journalism — invitations, via criticism, to think seriously and honestly about artistic accomplishment and failure. Let’s not pretend it is a fair trade.”
Last Week’s Don’t-Miss AJ Stories: Brexit Edition
Clearly Brexit is a cultural decision, and it will have a big impact… A new jazz scene emerges and re-energizes the art form… There’s a practical reason there are so few women ballet choreographers… Christo’s simple idea wows the world… Has public radio figured out a compelling future?
The Stark Awfulness Of Conflict Journalism
“There’s an awful word that Western media folk sometimes use to describe my kind of journalism that’s meant to be flattering but always makes me cringe precisely because it expresses so well this gap between audience and subject, and the conflict therein. The word is “humanizing.” By my own standards, if my article has succeeded, if I’ve done what I set out to do, I have to some degree “humanized” a situation—a conflict, a crisis—for the reader. But of course the subject doesn’t feel any more human for the experience; the subject, in most cases, doesn’t even realize he’s been made more human in the eyes of the subscribers to the New Yorker and the New York Times Magazine.”