music matters & more

i12bent: Japanese-American architect, Minoru Yamasaki (Dec. 1,...

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 22:52:45 -0500

Japanese-American architect, Minoru Yamasaki (Dec. 1, 1912 – 1986) was best known for his design of the twin towers of the World Trade Center buildings 1 and 2…

Yamasaki at a meeting of the National Council of Arts, Tarrytown, NY, US - 1965

Photographer: Stan Wayman, LIFE

Soon New York will welcome its first Jean Nouvel...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 01:32:40 -0500

Soon New York will welcome its first Jean Nouvel building…the architect’s first in America being the sleek Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

Unsurprisingly for New York, it will be an apartment tower, with an individualist, almost “bejewelled” facade contrasted against Gehry’s IAC Building

Jean Nouvel and the art of the façade : The New Yorker

DEBUSSY Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:29:10 -0500

DEBUSSY Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

meow. ‘You Must Be Stanley’ from A Streetcar Named...

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 23:40:51 -0400

meow.

‘You Must Be Stanley’ from A Streetcar Named Desire

or was it just another day(start at 1:40)

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:08:00 -0400

or was it just another day
(start at 1:40)

was it, really, just one of those days?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:56:00 -0400

was it, really, just one of those days?

Opening 10/21 in conjunction with Carnegie Hall’s China...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 01:03:00 -0400

Opening 10/21 in conjunction with Carnegie Hall’s China festival is an exhibition of ink painting by living artists, an artistic tradition whose lineage is traced from the late Tang dynasty (http://bit.ly/Af2dE)

Goedhuis Contemporary - Landscapes - October 21 - November 20, 2009

another gallery moves to the LES, another Norman Foster building...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:28:45 -0400

another gallery moves to the LES, another Norman Foster building will be erected in the city

Sliver of Space on Bowery Is a Challenge for Norman Foster - NYTimes

“The more I try to understand music the less I understand...

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:45:05 -0400

“The more I try to understand music the less I understand this [waves baton]”

- Riccardo Muti

"Even though Symphony No. 2 is believed to be Brahms’s first symphonic work, the composer..."

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:12:11 -0400

“Even though Symphony No. 2 is believed to be Brahms’s first symphonic work, the composer demonstrates a sure hand from the outset, with a glowing thematic statement from the horns. The flutes answer with a supple ascending line, requesting that the horns be more specific. But the horns simply re-state the same phrase a half step up, which only serves to irritate the flutes, who promptly hand the melody to the violins, as if to say, “Here, you deal with them.””

- Shouts & Murmurs: Program Notes : The New Yorker

Respighi The Pines of the Appian Way from Pines of Rome 01 GTMF,...

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 04:54:00 -0400

Respighi The Pines of the Appian Way from Pines of Rome

01 GTMF, Oue

Is this image so unfamiliar today? “That crazy feeling in...

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:19:00 -0400

Is this image so unfamiliar today?

“That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a nearby funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured….after seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.”

- from Jack Kerouac’s intro to Robert Frank’s The Americans

Robert Frank Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum, Road Portrait of America - NYTimes

A dragon lives forever but not so little boysPainted wings and...

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:37:54 -0400

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.
One grey night it happened, jackie paper came no more
And puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.

His head was bent in sorrow, green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his life-long friend, puff could not be brave,
So puff that mighty dragon sadly slipped into his cave. oh!

Peter, Paul & Mary - Puff the Magic Dragon

After 10 Years, Why I Left

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 08:53:37 -0400

crumbler:

Looking back on my last year in journalism, I’ve struggled to identify that turning point, that moment when I decided to give up what had been my lifelong passion and pursue another career. Was it when I registered for the LSAT last summer? When I spent hundreds of dollars on application fees to law schools last fall, or when I sent in a seat deposit this spring?

When did a hypothetical exploration of leaving journalism become my real life?

The answer lies not in the past year but all the way back in 2006, though I didn’t know it at the time. That was when The Baltimore Sun decided to close its remaining foreign bureaus. I remember it distinctly. I was sitting at my desk in the features section when the paper’s foreign editor, Robert Ruby, came by and asked me to step aside for a word. We walked over to a corridor and Robert told me the decision had just been made. “I wanted to tell you first,” he said, “because I was counting on you.”

Years before, I had told Robert of my interest in foreign reporting and asked him how best to prepare to apply for a foreign bureau. He recommended books to read. I read them. The bureaus were something special about The Baltimore Sun, a midsize paper in a blue-collar town, but one that always prided itself on hitting above its weight.

The closing of the bureaus – there were five when I got to the Sun, in 2001: London, Moscow, Jerusalem, Beijing and Johannesburg – was not on its own a major blow to foreign reporting or Baltimore residents. The Sun still got international stories from the L.A. Times and Chicago Tribune (though the space in the paper devoted to foreign news seemed to shrink by the day). If I had been sent to, say, Beijing for three years, the world’s knowledge of China would have expanded very little.

But this isn’t about all those readers interested in foreign news, who can find it online. It’s about me, and, I would bet, many talented others who are discovering that they can no longer make a living doing what they love. There are exceptions, of course – people like 25-year-old New York Times sports reporter Michael Schmidt, who started as a clerk and worked his way up. But people like him get profiled in the New York Observer precisely because they are so rare. There are many others who once would have spent entire careers – happy, fulfilling, satisfying careers – at papers like the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald and the Boston Globe who now are leaving the business in their 20s and 30s. A whole generation, lost.

I would not be going to law school if newspapers were healthy, if I believed that journalism could support into the future a sizable group of people making a decent living doing it. Perhaps it was a happy accident that newspapers in the second half of the 20^th century could employ a large professional workforce, could give people the means to buy decent homes in nice neighborhoods, send their kids to college and take pride in their work. I no longer believe that is the case.

But I also feel grateful that I experienced some of this golden age. I graduated from college in 1999, at a time when newspaper recruiters by the dozens came to campus to fill their growing newsrooms. I landed at the Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., which quickly become ground zero of the 2000 presidential election. I jumped in with both feet. I remember standing next to Rick Bragg at 2:30 a.m. one morning as the Palm Beach Canvassing Board took a crucial vote on ballot-counting, and sharing a puddle-jumper to Tallahassee with Wolf Blitzer. Here I was, just a kid, playing with the big boys! Who could ask for a better career?

I moved on to Baltimore, and the Sun treated me better than I expected or deserved. I was sent to Colorado to cover wildfires, to California to cover gay marriage, to Boston for playoff and World Series games, to Mexico to write about immigration, and to New Orleans to witness Katrina. In those places, I wrote many of the stories I am most proud of, and I also filed voluminous expense reports. The paper never blinked.

Those days are over. Not just the limitless expense accounts, but the adventure of chasing a big story, of seeing places you haven’t seen before, of taking the time to live in a story and emerge with something special. Now, often frivolous stories are quickly spun out, based on a bare minimum of reporting, designed to drive hits. But they are ephemeral, forgotten before you’ve even clicked on to the next one.

When I started at the Baltimore Sun, in 2001, the newsroom staff numbered 420. Today it is about 140. In Good to Great, Jim Collins writes, “For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.” For a few wonderful years, so many people I loved and respected worked in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun. Almost all of them have left, some voluntarily and some not.

Between the change in the nature of the job and the departure of so many friends, the Sun stopped being a fun place to work. I am filled with doubts about my next step. But I am excited to feel like once again I am the one controlling my destiny. Whatever happens next is on me.

-Steve

Just a small town girl, livin in a lonely worldShe took the...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:49:44 -0400

Just a small town girl, livin in a lonely world
She took the midnight train goin anywhere
Just a city boy, born and raised in south detroit
He took the midnight train goin anywhere

A singer in a smokey room
A smell of wine and cheap perfume
For a smile they can share the night
It goes on and on and on and on

Strangers waiting, up and down the boulevard
Their shadows searching in the night
Streetlight people, living just to find emotion
Hiding, somewhere in the night

Working hard to get my fill,
Everybody wants a thrill
Payin anything to roll the dice,
Just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

Dont stop believin
Hold on to the feelin
Streetlight people

Journey - “Don’t Stop Believin’”

‘New York Photographs’ - Frozen in Time, a City in...

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:41:26 -0400

‘New York Photographs’ - Frozen in Time, a City in Flux, at Bonni Benrubi, Yossi Milo, Laurence Miller and More - NYTimes

"‘I just want to be clear before we decide to do this together: I’m gay. My music is gay. My show is..."

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:43:30 -0400

“‘I just want to be clear before we decide to do this together: I’m gay. My music is gay. My show is gay. And I love that it’s gay. And I love my gay fans and they’re all going to be coming to our show. And it’s going to remain gay.’ That’s another clause in the Gagaland constitution: Gay culture shall gush undiluted into the rapids of society. It shall not be co-opted, fancified, dolled up, or Uncle Tommed. ‘I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream,’ she says, ‘It’s not an underground tool for me. It’s my whole life. So I always sort of joke the real motivation is to just turn the world gay.’”

- Lady Gaga, on what she told Kanye West before agreeing to tour with him, in Out. (via) (via crumbler)

60s-inspired, kitschy, and gay, and I like it. The Bird And The...

Thu, 13 Aug 2009 09:58:40 -0400

60s-inspired, kitschy, and gay, and I like it.

The Bird And The Bee - My Love (via emimusic)

HANDEL “Se Pieta” from Giulio Cesare - Sandrine Piau, soprano

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 19:06:06 -0400

HANDEL “Se Pieta” from Giulio Cesare - Sandrine Piau, soprano

Time for a Richard Strauss afternoon - R. STRAUSS Ein...

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 13:49:05 -0400

Time for a Richard Strauss afternoon -

R. STRAUSS Ein Heldenleden (battle scene) - Berliner Philharmoniker, Ozawa