This season, the orchestra has a new music director and a new chief executive. But some very big challenges – including raising vast amounts of money for hall renovations and financial stabilization. Also – where is the orchestra artistically? Very big questions hang in the air. Brian Wise explores the issues.
Author: Douglas McLennan
A Fascinating Tale Of How This Book Might Have Bought Its Way Onto The NYT BestSeller List
“Nowadays, you can make the bestseller list with about 5,000 sales. That’s not the heights of publishing’s heyday but it’s still harder to get than you’d think. Some publishers spend thousands of dollars on advertising and blogger outreach to get that number. Everyone’s looking for the next big thing and that costs a lot of cash. For the past 25 weeks, that big book in the YA world has been The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, a searing politically charged drama about a young black girl who sees a police officer kill her friend, and the fallout it causes in her community.”
Bern Museum Starts Removing The Cobwebs Off The Gurlitt Art Horde
“The Kunstmuseum Bern has so far received 220 works from the hoard of more than 1,500 pieces that Gurlitt inherited from his father, Hildebrand, an art dealer who worked for the Nazis. Cornelius died in May 2014, unexpectedly bequeathing his collection to the Bern museum. The Swiss institution has said it will only accept works it knows are free from suspicion of Nazi looting, while the rest will remain in Germany until provenance research is complete.”
Stress Of Being “Authentic” Weighs On YouTube Stars
“Some 20-somethings are making millions by playing video games or dispensing beauty tips online. But the pressure of having to endlessly produce original content that makes them look accessible, transparent and authentic has proved too much for some people.”
Acrostics As Subversive Protest
It’s a trick that’s been tried twice in recent days. First members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities spelled out “RESIST” with the first letter of each paragraph in their joint resignation letter. Then Daniel Kammen, formerly the science envoy at the State Department, resigned in a letter that contained the acrostic “IMPEACH.”
Hundreds Rally In Moscow To Protest Detention Of Leading Theatre Director
For four years Kirill Serebrennikov’s Gogol Center has played an important role in Moscow’s cultural life. It was funded by the state but it was Serebrennikov, the theater’s artistic director, who managed this unique venue that provided a platform for political thought and that many fans called “a new place of power.”
A Name By Any Other Spelling? USC Challenges Spelling The Bard
“To E, or not to E, that is the question,” USC said in a statement. “Over the centuries his surname has been spelled 20 different ways. USC chose an older spelling because of the ancient feel of the statue, even though it is not the most common form.”
New World Record For Dancing Robots (No, Seriously – And You Can See Video Here)
“On a large plaza in the city last week, company staff diligently set up more than one thousand of the 18-inch robots to attempt the dancing record. You’ll be pleased to know that the team achieved the feat, with a total of 1,069 Dobi robots strutting their stuff in sync with one another, and as a consequence delighting the Guinness World Record officials who had traveled to Guangzhou to verify the effort.”
What Cities Lose When Alt-Weeklies Die
The shortage of smart, professional digital newsgathering in smaller American cities is a real problem with no immediate solution on the horizon; sadly, the number of eyeballs likely to land before a local story online isn’t enough to generate the income that would justify making it. In the longer term we probably can’t crowdfund our way out of that.
How The New Yorker Trades On Its Unique Style
“The magazine’s paper subscription slips have long carried a tagline: ‘The best writing, anywhere.’ It follows that the source of the best writing, anywhere, must also be the finest available authority on grammar, usage, and punctuation. But regular readers know that The New Yorker’s signature is not standard usage, but its opposite.”