Posts Tagged ‘journalism’

OC Register Cuts Arts Blog

OC Register Cuts Arts Blog

over the weekend the Tim Mangan (OC Register music critic) posted an oblique and epigrammatic message that the Arts Blog (classical music, dance, theatre, and visual arts) would be no more.

“Well, I can’t say that it hasn’t been a blast, because it has. But it has been decided that this blog has lived its span and that we can better serve you at www.ocregister.com/arts.”

this is depressing.

limiting the OC Register’s arts bloggers to writing reviews and color pieces is definitely a step backward.

especially in journalism the blog functions best in which thoughts, ideas, and commentary are posted that may not quite fit into the ever shrinking daily newspaper (does anybody actually read the physical kind anymore?). it also creates conversations (the “Should I review Bocelli” post is a great example of this) that help define and connect the broader arts community as a whole.

but of course if you are reading this on my blog you already “get it”


Bookmarks for December 27th through December 31st [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks for December 27th through December 31st [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from December 27th through December 31st:[del.icio.us]

  • Doctorow, How to Destroy the Book | Electronic Frontier Foundation -
    “When I buy an audiobook on CD, it’s mine. The license agreement, such as it is, is “don’t violate copyright law,” and I can rip that CD to mp3, I can load it to my iPod or any number of devises—it’s mine; I can give it away, I can sell it; it’s mine. But when you buy an audiobook through Audible, which now controls 90 per cent of the [downloadable] audiobook market, you get a license agreement, not a property interest. The things that you can do with it are limited by DRM; the players you can play it on are limited by the license agreements with Audible. Audible doesn’t do this because the publishers ask them to. Audible and iTunes, because Audible is the sole supplier to iTunes, do this because it’s in their own interest….”
  • how to make a living playing music | Ol’ Danny Barnes -
    “i hear so much complaining about this subject, i just wanted to lay my practical experience on you. free. first, three pre-conditions: 1. if you are a very materialistic person, skip this article, i don’t think you are going to like what it says. 2. if you don’t have the music where you want it art-wise, you might want to go work on that, this article isn’t going to help you much either. you will be better off by practicing and studying and working on your music instead. you will need to get the art pretty close to where you want it, before you should worry about making much of a living out of it. 3. determine if you are actually called to be a musician. if you aren’t called, all the gyrations in the world, won’t make it work. if you are called, no matter what you do, it’s going to work. this determination will solve most of the problems you are going to encounter. “
  • Mixed Meters: Could Terry Riley’s In C Be Accepted As Classical Music -
    “I fantasize that someday In C will be programmed on regular orchestra concerts. Yes, getting this piece into the standard repertory is a long ways off. If it happened, In C would change from a “minimalist classic” into an actual piece of classical music. That would provide strong evidence that classical music has some life left in it.” A chamber orchestra would be just the right size. Before the intermission the program could be, maybe, a Rossini overture and a Mozart concerto. And the second half would be a 35-minute performance of In C employing all the performers from the first half. Great concert! Of course, during In C the conductor should sit in the ensemble and play an instrument, provided he or she is capable. Otherwise tell the conductor to sit in the audience.
  • Militant Locationist Rant « 90042 -
    “Recently in our humble corner of Los Angeles, a brewery opened. Which is great news to anyone, (especially myself) who enjoys what Benjamin Franklin said was, “proof that God loves us.” Microbrewing is something I have supported for a long, long, and expensive time. Having a new microbrewery nearby is a wonderful thing. The only problem is the name. And what is in a name? To quote Shakespeare, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Maybe so, but out of the millions of names to engrave on your mast, the brewers of this new brewery have chosen to name their venture after a location here in Northeast Los Angeles. It’s good to represent, right? The name of this new establishment is Eagle Rock Brewery. Great, Eagle Rock is a fine place; home to many of my favorite festivals, restaurants, stores, and newspapers. The only problem is the brewery is not located in Eagle Rock 90041, but in Glassell Park 90065.”
  • Lefsetz Letter » Blog Archive » Gleevec -
    “I’m still reading the responses to my “Leukemia” missive. I appreciate the good will. But I’m reading slowly not only because the missives are all personal, directed specifically to me, but because I’m learning so much. I heard from Steven Page, formerly of the Barenaked Ladies. Did I know that Kevin Hearn from BNL had leukemia? Steven copied him on the e-mail. Turns out Kevin had CML too. Before Gleevec. He had a bone marrow transplant, and it worked.But it’s not. [snip] Because some guy who wasn’t in it for the money, who was willing to sacrifice everything for his passion, put together the pieces to come up with a breakthrough drug that allows me to live.”
  • UbuWeb Sound – Marshall McLuhan -
    “Marshall McLuhan appeared on the Dick Cavett Show in December of 1970 along with Truman Capote and Chicago Bears running back, Gayle Sayers. Both Capote and Sayers participated in the discussion with McLuhan. This recording was made on reel-to-reel audio tape in 1970 and directly transferred to computer in 2005. Unfortunately, the exact date of the show was not noted, except that the show did take place before Christmas. All commercials and breaks were removed from McLuhan’s appearance.”
  • The annotated world « BuzzMachine -
    “Tweet: A view of our annotated world: Hyperlocal is what’s around me and how I search that There are eight million stories in the naked city and soon every one of them will be available on your phone through visual, aural, and geographic search and augmented reality in our newly annotated world. Every address, every building, every business has a story to tell. Visualize your world that way: Look at a restaurant and think about all the data that already swirls around it — its menu, its reviews and ratings and tags (descriptive words), its recipes, its ingredients, its suppliers (and how far away they are, if you care about that sort of thing), its reservation openings, who has been there (according to social applications), who do we know who has been there, its health-department reports, its credit-card data (in aggregate, of course), pictures of its interior, pictures of its food, its wine list, the history of the location, its decibel rating, its news… “


Bookmarks for July 16th through July 19th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from July 16th through July 19th:[del.icio.us]

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  • WNYC – New Sounds: Minimalist Music Theatre (July 2009) -”Minimalist Music Theatre Hear some music theatre pieces on this New Sounds show. Listen to Philip Glass‘s recent release “Waiting for the Barbarians,” adapted from the novel by the South African writer and Nobel Prize Winner John Coetzee. Also, there’s music by Paul Bailey – his post-minimalist music theatre piece “Retrace our Steps.” He describes it as a four act vocal/instrumental spectacle based on texts by Gertrude Stein, Guy Debord and Jenny Bitner. The “alt-classical garage band” Paul Bailey Ensemble performs the work”
  • Big Brother Is Listening – The Classical Beat (Anne Midgette) – washingtonpost.com - -Anne Midgette neatly sums up musoc.org “But statements like “Art Music is in many ways objectively superior to Pop ‘Music’” (note the quotes) make me grit my teeth and want to play Talking Heads albums really, really loudly. And this, from the FAQ, is just stupid: “The ‘music’ is melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, structurally, texturally, dynamically, thematically and conceptually barren compared to Art Music; it’s also spiritually and politically shabby by comparison. It’s short, trite and highly repetitive.” One is tempted to order a copy of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” for the site’s editors, just for starters, but one wouldn’t know where to send it. Indeed, there’s something vaguely creepy about musoc’s deliberate anonymity, which is evidently part of its philosophy, though there are limits to how much an audience will care about what a website says if one doesn’t know who’s writing it.”
  • Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – In the hours and hours of preening, ponderous, self-serving media tributes to Walter Cronkite, here is a clip you won’t see, in which Cronkite — when asked what is his biggest regret — says (h/t sysprog): What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn’t make them stick. We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation. It’s impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite’s death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.
  • Philip Glass to perform film, opera works at Hollywood Bowl – Los Angeles Times – With “Koyaanisqatsi” — the name means “life out of balance” in Hopi — Glass had more than two years to work on the score. “There was no one waiting for the film — there was no distributor! So we were left alone to make a film — which I realized later was a great luxury.” Today Glass is struck by how pertinent the film seems, at a time when its notions of the world’s interconnectedness and the runaway power of technology have gone mainstream. But the film’s identity has changed since its premiere in 1982.”When we first showed it,” he says, “people thought it was a head trip. People seriously thought you had to get high before you watched it. It wasn’t too long, only four or five years, for people to realize there was actually a movie.”
  • Guest Blog: The Actors Diet: How I’m Recovering – Carrots ‘N’ Cake -Guest Blog: The Actors Diet: How I’m Recovering “…I’ve been struggling with binge eating and anorexia for a while; if you read my bio on our blog page you’ll see a little more about my history with food. I know a lot of women look up to actresses, and there are plenty of them who are in great shape, healthfully (my co-blogger Christy being one of them). As somebody who has been celebrated for her figure (in my feature film debut I played a ballet dancer AND got naked), I am proof that sometimes it is a false ideal, even when you have all the resources available to you, like a personal trainer, meal deliveries, a shrink, hypnosis coach, a best friend who’s a nutritionist…I felt like I had legitimate reasons to obsess about my weight – after all, my career depended on it.”
  • Intolerable Beauty: Chris Jordan Photographs American Mass Consumption – Photographer Chris Jordan describes the photos in his series “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption” as his “first foray into being an engaged artist.”
  • US State Department employees ask Hillary clinton for Firefox – Video – “Have you been trying to get your corporate IT staff to let you use Firefox or another web browser instead of Internet Explorer? Then you apparently know how a fair number of folks at the US State Deparment feel. At a recent town hall meeting with staff, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received a question from one government employee who wanted to know if they could “please” use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. You can see the Q&A by skipping to the 26:32 point in the video above. ” [del.icio.us]
  • Los Angeles News – Russian or Armenian Mob Used “Model Employee” Con at PCH Arco --
    An organized-crime ring that police believe is Russian or Armenian targeted a high-volume Redondo Beach Arco gas station, assigned a low-level soldier to infiltrate it and waited eight months while he worked himself into a position where he could implant a tiny, high-tech “skimmer” to steal customers’ credit-card information.
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Bookmarks for June 26th through June 29th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from June 26th through June 29th:[del.icio.us]

  • Los Angeles New Music Ensemble – looks like there is a new music group in town.  welcome aboard!  “The Los Angeles New Music Ensemble (LANME) is an organization created to promote new music, collaboration within the arts, the commissioning of new works, and the creation of multimedia presentations within innovative live performances. To further these goals, LANME is dedicated to learning and playing the best and most exciting new chamber music around.”
  • New school board members ready for challenge – LA Daily News -former John Marshall High School colleague Steve Zimmer is interviewed as he prepares to become a school board member. “Zimmer admits that scarier than dealing with a billion-dollar deficit is the idea of not being on the campus of Marshall every day. It will be interesting to see if someone immersed on the ground level can translate that experience to doing a good job on the board,” Zimmer said.” As a teacher, Zimmer has also been a very active member of United Teachers Los Angeles, which has prompted some to believe his vote will always follow the powerful union’s stance. I don’t accept that voting on the side of the union is siding against students,” he said “
  • laboratory tests of vegan restaurants in la | vegan food and living in Los Angeles -
    very interesting blog post that tests a number of LA restaurants to see if their food was really vegan. (fyi: i’m not and my wife is a pescatarian) although there were some meals that were obviously misrepresented as vegan, it seems the biggest culprit might be the mislabeling and mistranslation of food from the taiwan to us markets.
  • A Chapter from The Listen: Music for 18 Musicians – these excerpts are being touted as a new type of music criticism and a new way to attract audiences. i hate to throw a bucket of cold water on these ambitious young writer/composers, but the excerpts are overwritten and seem musically naive, trying to impress a faculty advisor in grad school. hence exhibit A and B: “
  • And now melody. And now melodies. The melodies here being the playings-out of the harmonies. The harmonies being the on-ringing of all the melodic notes” “
  • The harmonies are one harmony that absorbs the up-till-now waves of the other harmonies, that absorbs the leftover pulses. This accumulated on-ringing describes a recognizable environment… —a single addition to the bottom of the harmony—acts as a diaphragm, allowing this environment to open and to breathe in”
  • this play by play description doesn’t work for me and its certainly not the way i would want people to read about my music. i think a better tack would be to try and distill what makes these pieces great.
  • You balance the budget – Los Angeles Times -Try your hand at closing California’s budget shortfall, estimated at $24 billion. It’s not easy, but it can be done. Cut spending, raise taxes and/or borrow to get the state out of the red. For each choice — drawn from proposals from across the political spectrum — we’ve tried to give some sense of the effects. As you craft your proposal, the Deficit Meter will show your progress.
  • The tragic end of Michael Jackson: The Jeruselum Post – very tragic michael jackson quote that is further proof that fame is not a replacement for love “I am going to say something I have never said before and this is the truth. I have no reason to lie to you and God knows I am telling the truth. I think all my success and fame, and I have wanted it, I have wanted it because I wanted to be loved. That’s all. That’s the real truth. I wanted people to love me, truly love me, because I never really felt loved. I said I know I have an ability. Maybe if I sharpened my craft, maybe people will love me more. I just wanted to be loved, because I think it is very important to be loved and to tell people that you love them and to look in their eyes and say it.”
  • I’m in a band… -via S21, i’m glad to see other composer/performers starting their own groups
  • Just Released: “New World Ardor”- NetNewMusic – willam houston’s new (and very enjoyable) post-apocalypse party music. reminds me of john oswald’s ‘plunderphonics’

Bookmarks for the week: June 22nd through June 26th [del.icio.us];

Bookmarks from June 22nd through June 26th:[del.icio.us]