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Rolling Stone has a list titled “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”. Not “…of the specific time and style of music my little world encompasses,” and “…where great means “even I sort of understand it, it’s got a good beat, nice to dance to”: greatest of all time. It is the kind of list [...]
Archive for the ‘Music’ Category
January 10th, 2012
What comes to mind when you hear the phrase, “The Joshua Tree”? I’m just back from a week at Joshua Tree National Park. I was enormously fortunate to attend a fabulous Jewish Wilderness Spirituality program of Torah Trek, the brainchild of Rabbi Mike Comins. Comins’ book, A Wild Faith, is the fundamental starting point for examining the [...]
December 31st, 2011
Category: 501(c)(3), charity, Good news, Higher education, Human rights, Law Notes, Management, Music, NonProfits, Organizing, Philanthropy, Religion and Politics, Think Tanks, Uncategorized
Good Counsel: Meeting the Legal Needs of Nonprofits by Lesley Rosenthal (John Wiley & Sons 2012) As I embarked on writing Good Counsel: Meeting the Legal Needs of Nonprofits, well-meaning and concerned folks cited at least three reasons why no one had written such a book before, and (implicitly) why I shouldn’t try: it’s too [...]
May 1st, 2011
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Music, Politics and Leadership, Popular Culture, Struggle Between Good and Evil, Unions and organizing
This semester I laid on a freshman seminar about Art and Despair, partly because I was already offering Arts and Cultural Policy, partly because Cal had set up a program to encourage freshman seminars about art and promised Oakleys for any art event on campus. And partly because at that point in the fall I [...]
April 18th, 2011
I’m glad that Mike thinks that civilization has returned to the Bay Area. It’s about time. Here in Los Angeles, we have had a superb classical station, an excellent jazz station, two terrific news and general-interest programming stations, and a sort of mix-and-match music-news etc. station for a while. I couldn’t really expect such diversity [...]
April 17th, 2011
Many years ago, the typical public radio station played classical music and some jazz all day, news like Morning Edition and All Things Considered at drive time, some public affairs or newsy features in the early evening, and more music at night. About the time I moved to Berkeley in 1991, public stations started doing [...]
March 31st, 2011
Danny Holt performed five numbers at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technology last night. Holt is a formidable performer who, in this incarnation, plays a piano while also surrounded by, and greatly engaged with, a bunch of stuff to hit with sticks and hammers. Having learned to play all this percussion and the [...]
November 29th, 2010
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Arts reviews, Music, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Framing, Sports, Technology and Society, Uncategorized
Alex Ross noted a couple months ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s new $16m Ring cycle was beginning . Is this a good use of resources in tough times? he asks. He makes a good try at arguing that Wagner, at least, is opera for everyone (Wagner’s views on the relationship of art to society were [...]
November 7th, 2010
They were careless people, Mick and Keef. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess….
