Donald's Blog
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This old house was only a few blocks from the state Capitol in Madison,
Wisconsin. All the neighborhood cats lived in the basement during the
winter. The house has long since been torn down, but in 1972 there were
AR2ax speakers in the front room, and a lot of good music was heard there. |
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In the 21st century I am just as opinionated as ever,
and I now have an outlet. I shall pontificate here about anything
that catches my fancy; I hope I will not make too great a fool
of myself. You may comment yea or nay about anything on the
site; I may quote you here, or I may not. Send brickbats etc.
to: dmclarke78@icloud.com.
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May 22, 2012The lowdown on FacebookFront-page headline in today's Wall Street Journal: "Investors Pummel Facebook". Inside, in the paper's "Noteable & Quotable" feature, Rich Karlgaard at Forbes.com cuts to the chase (apart from a silly and irrelevant swipe at Barack Obama). Read it here ... Oops. too bad. You'll have to subscribe, or run out and buy the paper.
May 22, 2012Opera News
A friend has hipped me to an article in the New York Times. The Metropolitan Opera's fund-raising arm is responsible for Opera News, a high-profile mag on the classical music shelf, which has now decided to stop reviewing Met productions, because the Met's director, Peter Gelb, has such a thin skin. The whole thing is hiliarious; read about it here.
Peter Gelb was an executive on the classical side at Columbia Records, while the classical biz turned to "crossover" music, so that the New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland symphony orchestras don't even have recording contracts nowadays. Instead of embracing new technology and finding imaginative new marketing methods they just washed their hands of it, and then Gelb went to the Met in 2006.
For all I know he has been an able administrator, but he is still does not miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. How can he not know that no publicity is bad publicity? Okay, there's a conflict of interest here, but that should just make it more fun. How can anybody in his position be so thin-skinned?
And on the other hand, the line from the magazine “The public is becoming more dispirited each season by the pretentious and woefully misguided, misdirected productions foisted on them” is just bad, pretentious writing. How does the magazine's features editor, Brian Kellow, know that? Is the Met losing money? Are not people buying tickets to watch the Met's productions in the cinema? Opera News probably dislikes Gelb, so they all end up looking like children squabbling on the playground at recess.
Once again I can recommend the hilarious book called Appetite for Self-Destruction, by Steve Knopper, about how record company execs could have done a deal with Napster back around 2000, and then walked all over Napster, who were naive to say the least, and retained control over their own industry. Instead they turned up their noses, and after the collapse iTunes and Amazon picked up the pieces. Gelb wouldn't have been directly involved in that, the classical divisions having long since lost any clout they may have had 60 years ago, but the suits are pretty much interchangeable.
STOP PRESS
The next day, May 23, Peter Gelb had backed down and admitted "I made a mistake." Read it here.