Tag: 05.13.19

Pennsylvania Is Helping Pay For The Philadelphia Orchestra’s China Tour. What Do State Taxpayers Get Out Of It?

Basically, as one executive put it, “there are two Philadelphia brands the Chinese respect — the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the Philadelphia Orchestra.” Classical music is often used as a conversational warm-up for business discussions in China, not unlike the way sports is used elsewhere, and, as another executive puts it, the orchestra’s tour “serve[s] as a big draw for potential Chinese investors and companies to explore investment opportunities in the Philadelphia area.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer

A Vietnamese-American Theatre Critic Finally Sees Her Stories Onstage — And Feels What She Had Barely Known Was Missing

“There is a line in The Scarlet Letter: ‘She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom.’ I hadn’t known the weight of transposing myself into other people’s bodies until I no longer had to do it.” Diep Tran writes about Vietgone and Poor Yella Rednecks, the first two parts of a planned five-play cycle by Qui Nguyen about his family’s journey from Vietnam and settlement in the U.S. – American Theatre

90-Year-Old Composer Disrupts Opera Opening With 50-Year-Old Grudge Against Company

Just as the lights were going down at the State Theatre in Melbourne for the start of Opera Australia’s Rigoletto, George Dreyfus stood up and started yelling through a megaphone about the fact that the company had never produced the opera it had commissioned from him in 1969 and he turned in the following year. He went on for more than ten minutes at which point the police arrived. – Limelight (Australia)

Yet Another Problem With Peter Zumthor’s Design For New LACMA Building: You Can’t Hang Paintings On Bare Concrete Walls

As if there weren’t enough issues with the damn thing already. As Christopher Knight writes, you could hang paintings on wires coming down from a high rail. (Bad idea in an earthquake zone.) Or you could drill holes in the wall, which is loud, expensive, and weakens the concrete. And LACMA want to rotate the collection constantly, so there would be a lot of rehanging. What were these people thinking? – Los Angeles Times

Turns Out Susan Sontag’s Actual First Book Was The One Her Husband Put His Name On And Made His Career With

A new biography by Benjamin Moser argues, citing previously unreleased correspondence as well as textual analysis, that Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, which launched his academic career, was actually written (or rewritten) by Sontag, who had married Rieff when she was 17 — and that she relinquished rights to the book as part of her divorce settlement in order to avoid a custody fight over her son. – The Guardian

BBC Wants To Pry Listeners From Their Bubbles (Possible?)

The broadcaster is developing a “public service algorithm” that’s “built to surprise you,” said the BBC’s director of radio and education James Purnell.His hope is that audiences will stumble onto something new, instead of content that simply reinforces their views. Algorithms “do not have to create echo chambers,” he added, “they can open them up”. – BBC