Nashville’s Music Row was a wonder. A collection of seedy bars that seemed to have been there forever, it was a smorgasbord of live music, played by musicians who played for tips. You could wander down the street, poking into whatever sounded interesting. It was all informal and kind of ramshackle. The city is booming, and now a tourist mecca, it’s “upgrading”… – The New York Times
Author: Douglas McLennan
Takeaways From This Year’s Oscar Nominations
The nominations reflect a completely polarized votership many of whose various constituencies can’t stand one another! The resemblance to real life is uncanny. – New York Magazine
Why A Flashy New Concert Hall Might Be Just What London Needs Right Now
In a country grappling with austerity and Brexit, a plan for a 2,000-seat “center for music” seems to hark back to the more confident, stable time in the early 2000s when the Tate Modern opened. Indeed, there have been claims that it could do for the city’s classical music scene what the new Tate did for London’s standing as a center for modern and contemporary art. – CityLab
Chopin Was The Quintessential Composer For The Piano. But Was He A Great Composer?
Alan Walker’s Fryderyk Chopin: A Life and Times, which came out in the U.S. last October, is the first full-scale English-language primary-source biography of Chopin.1Best known for his definitive three-volume biography of Franz Liszt, Walker has done an equally thorough and thoughtful job of recounting the life of Poland’s foremost composer, of whose music he is an unstinting admirer. – Commentary
How To Create A “Viral” Play (What Is That?)
Iranian playwright Nassim Soleimanpour: “Marketing-wise at the time I didn’t have anyone helping me, so I put my email address in the show. I urged people to write to me. I asked a random audience member to keep the script after the show; it’s my way of spreading the word. It was a strategy and it worked.” – American Theatre
All-Or-Nothing? Following Dreams Is Fine, But It’s Not Everything
Advocates of dream-following, of commitment and career leaps of faith, often say: ‘You’ll regret it if you don’t.’ They might be right about that (actually, they almost certainly are). But here’s the rub: regret is not the sole preserve of the cautious compromiser. A failure to compromise can also beget future unhappiness. – Aeon
A Scaffold Is Intruding On A Historic James Turrell Ceiling “Window”
The obstruction seems to be protruding from the gargantuan high-rises going up across the street from PS1, at 22-44 Jackson Avenue. These two residential buildings, which replaced the former legendary graffiti haven 5Pointz, are also called 5Pointz and will house 1,115 units total (including 223 affordable housing units) when they’re finished. – Gothamist
Can Translations Be Anything More Than Compromises?
Doesn’t translating a work of literature inevitably involve moving things around and altering many of the relations between the words in the original? In which case, either the original’s alleged perfection has been overstated, or the translation is indeed, as pessimists have often supposed, a fine but somewhat flawed copy. – New York Review of Books
It’s Popular To Dump On “Rich” Cities. Why?
Well, there’s bad traffic. And unaffordable housing. Unaffordable everything. And income inequality. And forget about getting anything done. But why should this be? Rich cities should be places where things get better. The fact they don’t lies with policy. – James Russell
How Did The English Language Come To Be?
Is it fair to say it’s a mongrel language, drawing influence from all over. So it is important to remember that the formation of English was influenced by a huge range of ethnic and geographical forces. The emerging ‘England’ of this period was a melting pot. – BBC