“The debate over how organizations should handle donations from members of the Sackler family has intensified in recent weeks after the revelation that specific individuals like Richard, former chairman and president of Purdue Pharma, played a far more extensive role in promoting OxyContin than previously known.” – Inside Philanthropy
Tag: 02.19.19
A Survivor Of The Real USSR Looks At The Pseudo-USSR Of ‘DAU’
“Born of infinite resources and expectations and hubris, the project’s formal artistic failure as cinema was as dialectically preordained as was the failed realization of the Soviet Communist utopia. Yet the Soviet-style command economy mobilization of resources needed to forge the institute in Kharkiv and the art installations in Paris succeeded.” – Tablet
What If We’re Trying To Find The Theory Of Everything In The Wrong Places?
“The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.” It’s as though physics has been turned inside out. It now appears that the answers already surround us. It’s the question we don’t know. – The New Yorker
What are Our Writing Tools Doing To Writing? (And Reading?)
Writing is so influenced by the machines we write with. The process of creating something is shaped by the tools. Ergo, what we write is also shaped? And how about readers? With constant demands on their attention, with screens and email and notifications, the process of reading has changed. What’s a writer to do? – The New Yorker
Creative Placemaking
Recently I had the pleasure of reconnecting with a friend and colleague. The Community Engagement Network hosted a conversation with Lyz Crane addressing the topic of creative placemaking and community engagement. – Doug Borwick
Recent Listening: Dave Young And Friends
Dave Young, Lotus Blossom (Modica Music)
Young, the bassist praised by Oscar Peterson for his “harmonic simpatico and unerring sense of time” when he was a member of Peterson’s trio, leads seven gifted fellow Canadians. – Doug Ramsey
Beckett’s ‘Rockaby’ Set by William Osborne
In Rockaby we hear the whispered thoughts of an old woman during the last twenty-five minutes of her life accompanied by the dirge of four distant trombones. “Those arms at last…”
Abbie Conant, actress, singer, all four trombones
– Jan Herman
‘Leonard Bernstein’s Black America’
“[Lenny] marched in Selma with Harry Belafonte, he brought black conductors to Tanglewood in the ’50s and in the ’60s integrated the Philharmonic by hiring violinist Sanford Allen. To raise money for civil rights organizations, he also hosted jazz in the afternoon at his house, and when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he called for André Watts to play Beethoven at the memorial.” Here’s a one-hour audio documentary by WQXR host Terrance McKnight on Bernstein’s activism for racial equaliy. – WQXR (New York City)