Category: AJBlogs

Much as I try, I can’t muster great enthusiasm for the appointment of Klaus Biesenbach to the directorship of MOCA, Los Angeles … While ambivalent, I didn’t have any strong objections to his appointment (as I did with MOCA’s last two picks), until I read Robin Pogrebin’s report in the NY Times.

Giovanni Simone Mayr (1763-1845) is hardly the sexiest name in opera history, but he became exactly that between the hours of 4 and 8 p.m. on July 29 at Purchase College — make that 4:35 p.m. Mayr’s Medea in Corinto needed time to warm up.

In last month’s announcement of its recently purchased “Rothschild Pentateuch,” the Getty Museum hyped this monumental volume (1,180 folios, of which some 150 are decorated), as “the most spectacular medieval Hebrew manuscript to become available in more than a century.”
The lavishly, fancifully decorated pages easily live up to their billing as “spectacular.”

Remember the Young British Artists of the ’80s and ’90s – Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, and so on? Their 19th-century counterparts were the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, led by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. For the first time, a major museum show has matched the Pre-Raphaelites’ work with that of the Old Masters who inspired them.

Last week’s Washington Post stories about sexual harassment in the classical music world are an important first step. But where’s the institutional accountability?

The Captain is the best movie in years. Fight me.

Two dancers create a performance that’s also theatrical, that’s also improvised, that’s also a comedy, and that’s also something different every time.

There’s a cool connection between some jazz liner notes to a recent book of poetry.

I see plate-licking almost every day, which delights me because I do the cooking. (I will not consider the possibility that anything in front of this one would be equally licked.) For “plate,” you may substitute “platter,” “bowl,” even “charger.”

FOR most of my life — I was a kid during the Reagan Revolution — I’ve been puzzled by otherwise smart people falling for Libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s brand of freedom snake oil.