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Meet A Man Who’s Been Handling Priceless Art (And Not Just Paintings) For 40 Years

“Ken Simons has had his hands on Picasso paintings, moved Tracey Emin’s bed and manoeuvred an Antony Gormley sculpture though a third-floor window. For him, a famous painting or sculpture isn’t just a precious creation to be admired – it’s a practical puzzle. Will it fit through the door? How can it be carried? Which trolley is best to wheel it through the gallery? And, in the case of some outlandish modern sculptures – how does it fit together?”

In Which Our Intrepid Musician Tests Out Promises He Can Learn Perfect Pitch

I order the set on Amazon, used, for over 100 euros. It comes with a pile of CDs and a “Handbook,” basically a thick CD booklet. One morning, I make myself comfortable next to my electronic keyboard and pop Masterclass 1 into the player. The masterclass begins by talking up the value of perfect pitch. Without it, “something is lacking,” the voice tells me. He says that listening to music without perfect pitch is like watching a movie on a black-and-white TV.

What’s The Hot New Source For TV Material? Podcasts

“A podcast offers up intellectual property in a particularly appealing format – compared with a book or even a script, it’s a stronger proof of concept of how a show or movie would actually play out. ‘It’s one step closer to seeing it onscreen,’ [Matt] Tarses said. ‘You already know what it sounds like.'” (Tarses is the creator of Alex, Inc., an ABC series about a podcaster, based on Alex Blumberg’s podcast about launching his podcasting company, Gimlet Media. How meta can you get?)

Why Is Programming At “America’s Best Orchestra” So Backward-Looking?

Much of what the orchestra does is, in fact, innovative. The orchestra is well on its way to having one of the youngest audiences in the U.S., if not the world. The orchestra’s adventurous opera productions consistently surpass those of full-time opera companies in terms of production and sheer music-making. Student subscriptions, generously subsidized by philanthropy, are more affordable than those for many other orchestras. And the orchestra maintains residencies at some of the world’s most revered halls, including the Musikverein in Vienna and Lincoln Center in New York. Yet the orchestra’s commitment to innovation stops, frustratingly and inexplicably, with its choice of repertoire.

Stockhausen’s Impossibly Massive Opera Cycle ‘LICHT’ Gets A Half-Size Version (Which Makes It Just-Barely-Possibly Massive)

The seven-day, 26-hour avant-garde behemoth requires not only vocal and instrumental soloists, choir, orchestra, ballet dancers, and electronics, but four helicopters as well. (Yes, the notorious “Helicopter Quartet” is from LICHT.) The Dutch, being practical folk, have now devised a smaller-scale adaptation: aus LICHT, which runs a mere 15 hours of music over three days. Reporter Simon Cummings finds out how they did it (and convinced the famously controlling Stockhausen Foundation to cooperate).

Islamabad’s Disappearing Bookshops Signal A Big Cultural Shift

When Islamabad was built as the capital of a newly independent Pakistan, it was the “old bookshops” that gave the neighbourhoods a spirit and character beyond the insipid soullessness that pervades purpose-built cities. Now their accelerating disappearance tells a story of the seismic political and commercial shifts that have taken place here over the past two decades.

The Antiquarian Book Dealer Who Became ‘France’s Bernie Madoff’

Gérard Lhéritier, the son and grandson of plumbers, built himself into the biggest, and flashiest, seller of old manuscripts and books in France, a businessman whose (heavily publicized) prize piece of inventory was the Marquis de Sade’s original manuscript of 120 Days of Sodom. (Naturally, Esquire uses that fact as the hook for this article.) Now Lhéritier, his assets seized, stands accused orchestrating France’s largest-ever Ponzi scheme, using a Wall Street-style device to bilk thousands of shareholders of more than $1 billion.

The Egyptian Artist Who Was Really An Israeli Spying For Mossad

“In the early 1950s, a Mossad agent named Shlomo Cohen-Abravanel was sent to Egypt, under the cover-story that he was a French abstract painter named Charduval. Abravanel’s fake artist persona was so successful that he scored a small solo exhibition at Cairo’s Museum of Modern Art, while the actual Abravanel went on to design the Mossad’s official emblem.”