“Acting on the findings of a Disciplinary Committee relating to a safe and respectful workplace complaint, Equity’s national Council ratified the recommendation of the Committee and expelled Bob Baker from Equity membership on June 23, 2019,” a notice on Equity’s website reads. “A possible appeal period has now closed.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Author: Douglas McLennan
Rethinking Susan Sontag
Sontag’s fraught relationship with her body wasn’t simply about physicality; it was about her tormented relationship to need itself—her shame at having needs in the first place. – The New Republic
Tim Page: What We’re Losing Without Critics
“Music criticism will go on – in a few papers, in small journals and on the web (some of the record reviews on Amazon are startlingly erudite, but they are in the minority). Still, for better and worse, there are few gatekeepers, people to guide a curious reader toward writing that will be both authoritative and as open-minded as possible. And with the near-disappearance of copy editors at most daily newspapers, all sorts of factual and lingual mayhem slip through into what you read. Worst of all, almost nobody gets paid.” – 21CM
A Short History Of TV’s “Golden Ages”
Golden Age evangelists love to wax rhapsodic on the artistic triumphs of their preferred series, but those same critics are quick to pull the “mass appeal” card to defend those series’ failings, reminding naysayers that, unlike the snooty purveyors of fine art and literary fiction, showrunners, both valiantly and by necessity, take a populist approach. – Harper’s
YouTube Steps Up Removal Of Hate Videos
YouTube is doing something about the proliferation of hate on its video site. According to a blog post published on Tuesday (September 3), it took down five times more channels and videos promoting hate in the second quarter of the year than it did in the previous quarter. The equates to more than 100,000 individual videos, more than 17,000 channels and more than 500 million comments removed in the second quarter of the year. – ColorLines
Should Ghost Writers Speak Out Against Their Subjects?
“It’s like a lawyer: if you find that the person you’re representing is a murderer you can’t then go around bewailing the fact you defended them – that was your job.” – The Guardian
YouTube Says It Will Crack Down On Manipulation Of Music Charts
This form of advertising lets the advertiser, like the artist or the label, play a shortened version of a music video as an advertisement in front of other videos. Under some conditions — like if a YouTube user interacts with the video or watches it for a certain amount of time — it would count toward the video’s overall view count. – TechCrunch
Historian Presenting Lecture On Controversial Musician Gets Shut Down And Banned
“Recently I was asked to present a lecture on composer Julius Eastman and his work at the OBEY Convention, a music and sound festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia. But rather than a fruitful discussion of Eastman’s probing, piercing minimalist music and legacy as an overlooked composer only now getting his due, the situation turned into a referendum on complicated questions: who gets to hold forth on artists of different identities, and on whose terms?” – ARTnews
When Words Fail Us
How serious is the gap between experience and the words we have? Serious. The need to render experience for others is tied to a need for others to understand us, and when unfulfilled, leaves an emptiness that hollows out our sources of motivation. – Nautilus
What’s This About Classical Music Evolving?
“The music itself is not the problem, in fact it’s what we do best—it’s our core product. Yet so many organizations think that if we change the product, it will help the bottom line, but it won’t.” – New York Observer