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“This work, a mural that stretches 12 feet high and 22 feet long, is free to whoever can extract it from the East Village loft where it was created.”

“Music-evoked sadness can be appreciated not only as an aesthetic, abstract reward, but (it) also plays a role in well-being, by providing consolation as well as regulating negative moods and emotions.”

Muti: “To take another position as music director of an opera house means that your life is finished. You have to deal with problems with singers, the chorus, the theater in another part of the world.”

“Once again we may have to respond by organizing a vocal and vociferous campaign to minimally keep the Endowments alive and their funding at the current level. The chances of our succeeding in that effort are, if history is any example, fairly decent. Of course, the effort will take time and energy we could better put to other endeavors, but we may have no choice.”

Called the Warner Music Prize and funded by industrialist Len Blavatnik, who purchased Warner Music Group in 2011, the award “is expected to be given out annually to an instrumentalist or singer between 18- and 35-years-old who shows strong career potential.”

“Sometimes one can recapture that fleeting sensation with names – place-names. If I am hiking up a familiar path near my house in Turin and I think, ‘I am climbing a hill in Italy,’ there is a brief whiff of foreign glamour. And, when I arrived in Uzbekistan and was disappointed to find that city people took buses and trams as they do everywhere else, I could revive a touch of fantasy by silently repeating, ‘Streetcars in Samarkand’.”

Producer Doug Berman: “He and his brother changed public broadcasting forever. Before Car Talk, NPR was formal, polite, cautious … even stiff. By being entirely themselves, without pretense, Tom and Ray single-handedly changed that, and showed that real people are far more interesting than canned radio announcers. And every interesting show that has come after them owes them a debt of gratitude.”

Arts, policy, and the election
AJBlog: For What it’s Worth Published 2014-11-03

Hirshhorn: Ageism At It Worst
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2014-11-02

What’s the Answer to Abstract Dance?
AJBlog: Fresh Pencil Published 2014-11-03

“Dido” and “Bluebeard” at LA Opera
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2014-11-03

“Let us look, then, at these case studies of how stale bread becomes fresh and familiar sweets take mutant forms, and ask why people line up at an ungodly hour to eat sweets that taste odd and look new. Is the pretzel croissant the forerunner of the Cronut or merely its parallel creature? Is the Cronut a craze that, like the designer cupcake, is doomed to walk the avenues briefly and then die in shame and embarrassment, or is it a true contribution – as the croissant and the doughnut and the pretzel all were in their day – and likely to become part of the common cupboard?”