At the suggestion of an admirer of Sequenza21, I filled out and submitted an application last night to A National Summit on Arts Journalism, a project of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and the National Arts Journalism Program, which will feature five competitively-chosen projects at its annual conference on October 2. It would be great if S21 were one of them. I hope the judges don’t take away too many points for typos. The form was one of those where you paste your stuff in but you can’t see it all while you’re working or fix it later and

One fateful morning in the fall of 2004, I opened the door to pick up my New York Times and found instead a wooden basket containing a pale homo sapien wearing large black glasses who appeared, at first glance, to be a nerdish cousin of Edgar Winter but, as it turned out,  was a young  graduate student named David Salvage, fresh out of Sweet Apple, Ohio.   David was pursuing a Ph.D. at CCNY while earning a few bucks on the side as a loneliness counselor at the late, lamented Tower Records classical shop. This is about the time that I

  From:  Eve Beglarian hi my friends, some of you already know that I’ve developed an obsession with the Mississippi River and its place in American culture, politics, and geography. I’ve spent the last several months getting ready to journey down the river at a human-powered pace, investigating what the river means at this particular moment in our shared lives. I’ll be starting at the headwaters at Lake Itasca, Minnesota on August 1 and expect to arrive in New Orleans in late November or early December. I’ll make work in response to the journey, and then next season I imagine

And now, God help us, The Blues, Up and Down. One..two…

Sir Edward Downes, one of Britain’s most distinguished orchestra conductors, flew to Switzerland last week with his terminally-ill wife and joined her in drinking a lethal cocktail of barbiturates provided by an assisted-suicide clinic.  He was not ill. I wish I had that kind of courage.

Almost everyone on the web has seen this by now but if you haven’t, take a look.  It’s a classic example of don’t-get-mad-get-even. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo[/youtube]

Seriously nasty review of the Bang on a Can Marathon over on the Huffington Post (HuffPo, to its friends) by somebody I don’t know named Jan Herman. The review is faint enough but the killer is the tacked on comment at the end: “Look at these photos,” a friend writes, “and think of a bunch of dipshits making music with coffee grinders or Volan’s arty little piece appropriating South African tunes to make another of the limp-spined Left’s innocuous, feel-good, PC statements (and written about 30 years ago which makes its status as new music rather questionable). Beehive music is