Blog

The Blazing Talent (And Mental Illness) Of Pianist Oscar Levant

“To read about Levant is to be struck by how his seeming compulsion to blurt the details of his mental illnesses into the nearest microphone foreshadowed the modern-day “oversharers” who chronicle each twist and turn of their private lives. Even so, there was more to him than his madness, and the story of his career as a musician, sometime actor, and media figure avant la lettre will be of interest to anyone curious about what it meant to be famous in America at midcentury.” – Commentary

What Went Wrong At Ireland’s Two National Orchestras, And How To Fix It

An investigation last year found that the national broadcaster’s two orchestras, the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra and the RTÉ Concert Orchestra, were under-utilized, underfunded, and plagued by low morale and mistrust. RTÉ National Symphony general manager Anthony Long talks with a reporter about how things got to such a pass and what’s being done to improve things. – The Journal of Music

‘Empire’ Producers Write Jussie Smollett’s Character Out Of Script

“While these allegations are very disturbing, we are placing our trust in the legal system as the process plays out,” said a statement from the series’s producers at 20th Century Fox. “We are also aware of the effects of this process on the cast and crew members who work on our show and to avoid further disruption on set, we have decided to remove the role of ‘Jamal’ from the final two episodes of the season.” – The Washington Post

Dorrine Kondo: Film Industry Diversity Numbers Are Revealing, But Not Nearly The Whole Story

“In my book “Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity,” I approach the issue of diversity as a cultural anthropologist, playwright and performance studies scholar. In it, I argue that cultural representation is about something deeper than parity for the sake of parity – that everyone needs to be mirrored in the public sphere in order to exist and to count as a fully dimensional human being.” – The Conversation

What Does The Jussie Smollett Saga Reveal About 2019 America? Victimhood Chic

John McWhorter: “Smollett doesn’t need the money he would get from a court settlement, and he isn’t trying to deny someone higher office. So why in the world would he fake something like that attack — if he did indeed fake it? The reason might be that he has come of age in an era when nothing he could have done or said would have made him look more interesting than being attacked on the basis of his color and sexual orientation.” – The Atlantic

Actor Jussie Smolett Charged With Felony For Staging Hate-Crime Attack

The 36-year-old actor, a star of the Fox series Empire, received an outpouring of national attention and sympathy after he was reported to have been violently attacked in Chicago by two white men shouting anti-black and anti-hay epithets. After the police found and interviewed the ostensible attackers, who turned out to be two Nigerian-American brothers, and collected additional evidence, they arrested Smollett, alleging that he concocted the entire thing. – Vulture

Nine Months After #MeToo Resignation, Milwaukee’s Florentine Opera Names New CEO

Last May, company general director William Florescu resigned because of what the Board described as because of “violation of the Florentine Opera’s policies and prohibitions concerning sexual misconduct.” His successor, the company’s first female leader, is Maggey Oplinger, currently director of community partnerships at the Milwaukee Symphony. – Milwaukee Journal Sentinel