Author: Douglas McLennan

Say Goodbye To The Cleveland Plain Dealer As Owners Dismantle It

“The paper’s remaining staffers are now faced with a devastating decision: they can either leave and let the state’s largest paper, (and the country’s first News Guild), die, ceding victory at last to the Newhouses of Advance Publications who’ve been ruthlessly and methodically busting the PD’s union for years; or they can stay on, suffering the indignities of filing low-stakes stories on distant locales that haven’t been part of the paper’s regular coverage area for years.” – Cleveland Scene

Seattle Is Boarded Up. Seattle’s Artists Are Painting Murals On The Boards

Plywood started going up about two weeks ago after vandals began smashing windows of closed businesses. That led to more plywood from store owners who feared they might be next. Things were starting to look bleak all over town. Already artists are out and about, painting  murals to combat the growing blight as the novel coronavirus pandemic forces continued closures of local businesses and restaurants. – Seattle Times

Amsterdam Embraces A New Model For Its Post-COVID Life

“When suddenly we have to care about climate, health, and jobs and housing and care and communities, is there a framework around that can help us with all of that? Yes there is, and it is ready to go.” The central premise is simple: the goal of economic activity should be about meeting the core needs of all but within the means of the planet. The “doughnut” is a device to show what this means in practice. – The Guardian

Mega Art And The Mega Market That Drives It

“The huge growth of the art market at its top end is surely, as Michael Shnayerson suggests, a function of the spiralling number of billionaires and increasing disparities of wealth. He also points out that successful artists are a very select few: the huge majority make at best only a few thousand dollars a year from their art. The question remains: how good is all this extremely expensive stuff?” – Times Literary Supplement

Do Musicians Need A Federal Works Progress Program To Survive?

Musicians have lost the battle to monetize recordings. With the internet awash in cheap streaming and free videos, our income now comes from live performance alone. Even if livestreams end up being only a short stopgap, offering them up for free on a large scale sets a dangerous precedent. Forced to be pioneers in this nuanced, digital field, we need to set the standard now—past performance footage is different than creating totally new content, for example. How do we assign value in an array of contexts? – Middle Class Artist

Leading Thinkers Speculate On What A Post-Virus World Will Look Like

As it has always been, history will be written by the “victors” of the COVID-19 crisis. Every nation, and increasingly every individual, is experiencing the societal strain of this disease in new and powerful ways. Inevitably, those nations that persevere—both by virtue of their unique political and economic systems, as well as from a public health perspective—will claim success over those who experience a different, more devastating outcome. – Foreign Policy

Violinist Commissions Composers For Online Fragments

Jennifer Koh got to work on Alone Together, an online performance series for which she hyper-compressed her usual process of discovering composers by asking 21 of them with some level of financial security (be it from salary or grants) to donate a new work between 30 seconds and one minute long, as well as to nominate 21 freelance composers for new commissions funded by Arco. – Washington Post