April 2011 Archives

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als reviews "The Motherf**ker with the Hat" et al (The New Yorker)
Alicia Anstead on improv and the brain (Scientific American)
Martin Bernheimer reviews Riccardo Muti's "Otello" at Carnegie (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer on "Séance on a Wet Afternoon" at City Opera (Financial Times)
Misha Berson on the future of the Intiman Theatre (The Seattle Times)
Timothy Cahill on love, justice, and the power of art (Art & Document)
Robert Christgau on tUnE-yArDs, No Age, Superchunk et al (Expert Witness)
Michael Feingold reviews "War Horse" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "Go Back to Where You Are" (The Village Voice)
Christopher Hawthorne on LA landscape architects' anonymity (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Nostalgia for the Light" (The Washington Post)
Julie Lasky on young designers at the Milan Furniture Fair (The New York Times)
Julie Lasky on the Milan Furniture Fair at 50 (The New York Times)
Glenn Lovell reviews "The Bleeding House" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell on directors' opposition to PPV premieres (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on opera in film (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on Trio Mediaeval's "Worcester Ladymass" (The Washington Post)
Renee Montagne on 54 poets' cross-country poetry relay race (NPR)
Tom Moon reviews Gretchen Parlato's "The Lost and Found" (NPR)
Ann Powers on the need for healthy tension on "American Idol" (Los Angeles Times)
Craig Seligman on David K. Shipler's "The Rights of the People" (Bloomberg News)

Sebastian Smee, the chief visual art critic for The Boston Globe, was on a furlough day enjoying the beaches of Miami last Friday when executive editor Marty Baron called to say the writer had been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. When Smee landed in the newsroom on Monday, he gave a speech that praised his editors for holding to "a belief that the arts matter, and that good writing about the arts is going to be an important part of newspapers as they evolve.'' When I called to congratulate him this week, Smee reiterated the passion he has for his work in New England, spoke of the importance of value judgments in reviews and explained why he believes arts coverage is necessary to the future of journalism. 
 

In your 2008 article The Mind of the Critic, you mention three categories people tend to associate with criticism: to judge, to educate and to entertain. What is the role of criticism?

It may not be the most interesting part of a critic's job, but it is the most important: that he or she expresses an opinion. That's what people are expecting from a critic. There's a tendency out of politeness or good manners or fear for critics to sit on the fence sometimes. I understand that, and sometimes I succumb to it myself. But I do think you need to form and express an opinion about the merits of something. Of course, that opens onto a whole world of much more interesting questions, and you can delve into ambiguities and mixed feelings and a certain amount of education.

You're not talking about stating that something is good or bad. You're talking about expressing an opinion. 

Yeah, but good or bad is part of that. That's a critic's job: to make a value judgment on what they see. It's not imposing that value judgment as the only possible judgment about the thing. I see it very much as starting a discussion, but the discussion is going to get off to a much less interesting start if the critic hasn't actually said whether he thinks the thing he's looking at is good or bad.

What do you think about Boston generating two Pultizers in the arts this year? We might expect such numbers from New York, but what does it say about Boston right now?  

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Alicia Anstead talks literature with Marjorie Garber (WGBH-FM, Boston)
Martin Bernheimer on Tilson Thomas and the Thomashefskys (Financial Times)
Martin Bernheimer on "Le comte Ory" at the Metropolitan Opera (Financial Times)
Larry Blumenfeld on the Grammy controversy (The Village Voice)
Larry Blumenfeld on jazz trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire (The Wall Street Journal)
Robert Campbell on installations by Ai Weiwei et al at Harvard (The Boston Globe)
Robert Christgau reviews TV on the Radio in concert (MSN Music)
Robert Christgau on Paul Simon, Britney, Rainbow Arabia et al (Expert Witness)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Robert Woodruff in Bergman mode (The Boston Globe)
Paul de Barros reviews Paul Simon in concert (The Seattle Times)
Michael Feingold reviews "Anything Goes" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "Catch Me If You Can" (The Village Voice)
Matthew Gurewitsch on Bryn Terfel's journey to the Met "Ring" (The New York Times)
John Horn on the fourth in the "Scream" series (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday on "The Conspirator" and Civil War history (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Conspirator" (The Washington Post)
Michael Kimmelman on Cinecittà and Italian culture (The New York Times)
Glenn Lovell reviews "The Conspirator" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Scream 4" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette reviews "Rappahannock County" (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette reviews the Kronos Quartet (The Washington Post)
Paul Parish on queer dance-making and dance audiences (Bay Area Reporter)

The glassworks of Dale Chihuly, on exhibition at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts through August, stir competing passions between elites and aficionados like almost no other work by a living artist. He's high art for the masses. He's low art for the mavens. His "joyfulness" and "commercial success" are problems for some people, Malcolm Rogers, director of the MFA, said recently in the Boston Herald. The work is "tasteless" and the show is "enervating," ragged Sebastian Smee in the Boston Globe. The battle rages on in the comments that follow Smee's story, but at least one commentator -- "letsplaytwo" -- fell squarely into the pro-Chihuly camp: "I saw the exhibit yesterday and absolutely loved it. Now I'm no art snob, but I do know I respond deeply to color and light. The use of both in this show was breathtaking."

Another approach to Chihuly's work might be embedded in the title of the MFA show: "Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass." The pop-culture reference is obvious, but as I descended into the bunker-like Gund Gallery in the basement of the MFA Art of Americas Wing, I felt the Alice label was only the beginning of a journey. Maybe Chihuly for all his twirls and twists and whimsy and wackiness is really an artist of the remix.

Here are all the associations I made while walking through the exhibition (backward first, and  then forward aided by wall narratives): the poster for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, a Mozart overture, I Dream of Jeannie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (with Gene Wilder), Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (with Johnny Depp), every touristy store in Venice, a chemical stew of nuclear waste, Disney World's It's a Small World and mutations in nature after a post-apocalyptic disaster. (Sorry, I have no image for that.) 

Yes, I feel the love in Chihuly's work, too. But I also felt as if I had stumbled upon a mad scientist's secret (and very moodily organized) laboratory that investigates the impact of over-loving Italy, primary colors and drugs.

Barbara Rose, who wrote about Chihuly in 2000, called the artist a "mischievous, cunning, inspired shaman--a magician, a contemporary Merlin, a Ken Kesey Merry Prankster who produces the psychedelic experience of a magical, glowing, and sparkling, brilliantly alive panorama without drugs. This enchanted glass world has as much to do with Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz as it does with the great Renaissance and Baroque festivals that sovereigns arranged to entertain their courts and subjects."

So I guess I'm not alone. But I'm also not put off, pissed off or particularly captivated by Chihuly. To me, his work is puzzling in the most engaging sense of the word. Best of all, seeing his creations made me curious to know more about his influences outside of RISD and Venice. Through the Looking Glass got me thinking about the history of glass art in this country -- and that got me climbing up the vaulting Americas Wing staircase. And wouldn't you know, three floors higher: works by two of the most famous glass pros -- Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge.

In the end, the experience reminded me of what I like best about art: It sends you on a quest. Like Alice down the rabbit hole.

   

Photos: Alicia Anstead

Journalists know the importance of correct grammar. Even tiny factually insignificant errors can erode the confidence of a reader. One rap about blogs is that because they don't have editors, they can have more errors. So just how important is clean copy in influencing readers? Online retailers have tried to find out. And now they have some quantifiable evidence.

An online retailer noticed that indeed products with high-quality reviews are selling well. So, they decided to take action. They used Amazon Mechanical Turk to improve the quality of its reviews. Using the Find-Fix-Verify pattern, they used Mechanical Turk to examine a few millions of product reviews... For the reviews with mistakes, they fixed the spelling and grammar errors! Thus they effectively improved the quality of the reviews on their website. And, correspondingly, they improved the demand for their products!

In this test, they didn't change the opinions themselves, merely the typos and grammar. Turns out that even if the user review was negative, fixing the mistakes improved sales.

A review that is well-written tends to inspire confidence about the product, even if the review is negative. Typically such reviews are perceived as objective and thorough. So, if we have a high-quality, but negative, review this may serve as a guarantee that the negative aspects of the product are not that bad after all. For example, a negative review such as "horrible battery life... in my tests battery lasts barely longer than 24 hours..." may be perceived as positive by other customers that consider a 24-hour batter life to be more than sufficient.

Music for Silenced Voices:
Shostakovich and His 15 String Quartets
By Wendy Lesser
Yale University Press (2011)
New Haven & London

How was it that I found this dark, difficult music welcoming and warm rather than frightening and off-putting? It was something to do with how personal it felt.... Shostakovich's own voice could be heard behind the quartet the way it could not be even in the best of the symphonies.... what he was revealing was not just his own personality but all the suffering, awareness and shame that had come to him through his peculiar placement in history.

Dmitri Shostakovich, a fearful genius to begin with, lived in continual anxiety for himself, his family -- and the music that likely was as necessary to him as breathing. The terrors began in 1936, when the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk District was derided by the Soviet authorities and his Fourth Symphony suppressed. His music was denounced again from 1948 to 1953, the so-called Zhdanov Period. Nor did his fears allay after Stalin's death or during the Cold War thaw. When his friend Mstislav Rostropovich emigrated to the U.S. in 1974, Shostakovich wept, "In whose hands are you leaving me to die?"

Debate continues over his 15 symphonies: which were concessions to Party leaders looking over the composer's sardonic shoulders, which passages don't ring "true"?

Such speculations are rare to nonexistent with the 15 string quartets that Shostakovich (1906-1975) began in 1938, shortly after his daughter Galina's birth, and continued until the year before his death. If the symphonies show a public face or mask, the string quartets are as close as we shall get to the private man. In Music for Silenced Voices, a ruminative biographical and critical study, Wendy Lesser, who is not herself a musician, combines current Shostakovich scholarship with investigative passion and a journalist's acumen. As she has done in her previous nonfiction books, Lesser, the founding editor of the literary quarterly Threepenny Review (and a contributor to ARTicles) uses first-person narrative for her explorations. The language is fresh, the manner inviting, though the writer's enthusiasm for putting such ambitious material in context occasionally results in information overload.

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

MJ Andersen on the Maine mural controversy (The Providence Journal)
Alicia Anstead interviews David Lindsay-Abaire (WGBH-FM, Boston)
Robert Christgau on Saigon, Yuck, Generation Bass et al (Expert Witness)
Michael Feingold reviews Transport Group's "Hello Again" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo" (The Village Voice)
Sasha Frere-Jones on Bill Callahan (The New Yorker)
Matthew Gurewitsch reviews "L'Arbore di Diana" by Martín y Soler (Opera News)
Christopher Hawthorne on Neil Denari's HL23 in Manhattan (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on the book "Julius Shulman Los Angeles" (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on the Foo Fighters as a cinematic special event (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "In a Better World" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein reviews "The Love of My Youth" (Los Angeles Times)
Julia M. Klein on Addison Mizner in Boca Raton (The Washington Post)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Win Win" (CinemaDope.com)
Glenn Lovell reviews "Hanna" (CinemaDope.com)
Manny Mendoza previews Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet (The Dallas Morning News)
Manny Mendoza reviews Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet (The Dallas Morning News)
Anne Midgette on the ENO's lessons for Washington (The Washington Post)
Anne Midgette on "The Stravinsky Project" (The Washington Post)
Tom Moon reviews Paul Simon's "So Beautiful or So What" (NPR)
Laurie Muchnick reviews Tina Fey's "Bossypants" (Bloomberg News)
Laura Sydell on the benefits of playing video games (NPR)
Lesley Valdes reviews Stravinsky's "Pulcinella" (WRTI-FM, Philadelphia)

Having worked behind the scenes on a number of non-arts national conferences, I know the challenge arts leaders face when suggesting that non-arts types consider arts as a viable and provocative session theme in nearly any industry. Think of the potential conversations between those who work in the arts and those who work in: science, politics, healthcare, education.

When I found out that the National Conference for Media Reform, held April 8-10 in Boston, not only had arts sessions, but an entire arts and culture track, I was jazzed. Sign me up.

What distinguishes arts discussions at a media conference (as opposed to arts conferences such as for the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, which I have helped organize for six years) is the drive to look at the arts from outside the arts industry bubble. Plus organizers of NCMR included performing arts -- a dance party -- at the end of the day. (Extra points for that.) 

I was drawn to the conference for other reasons, too: a determination to see the arts in relation to media, a line that gets blurrier and blurrier in our blogosphere era. While most of the conversations I heard were about net neutrality and its impact on the industry -- from grassroots efforts to major commercial artists -- or about how culture, especially online communities, have replaced watchdog media as an agent of change, the most compelling panel I heard was Artists and Advocacy: Engaging Creatives in Cultural Change.

This discussion, which will soon be available on the NCMR site, covered the Hollywood writers' strike, the rise of one classically trained musician to director of programs at the Future for Music Coalition, the training process for young artists to be activists and the importance of copyright rentention for DIY artists.

As a journalist, arts activism and media are still uncomfortable bedfellows for me -- even as I was impressed by the level of commitment on the part of this group of arts spokespeople for the role of activism in their art forms and their adamancy about the importance of artists engaging in policy conversations at all tiers -- locally and globally. Each of these members of this panel regularly interacts with media, acknowledging the continued power of both traditional and new media outlets in the arts.

If the inclusion of arts and culture at NCMR reinforced anything for me it was the importance of not silo-ing ourselves in the aesthetics of the arts. I, for one, would prefer to write about the infusion of dignity and inspiration of empathy in F. Murray Abraham's portrayal of Shylock in the Theater for a New Audience production of The Merchant of Venice than about the wonky policy issues of the FCC, the difference between the 501(c)(3) and the 501(c)(4) tax exemptions, and the social, political and financial implications of the idea that "code is god." But this conference reminded me how tied the aesthetics are to policy, corporate control and social media. Like the artists, journalists must stay attuned to the changes that take place behind closed doors and in the fine print.    

Finally, I was also interested in a session on The State of Boston Media, in which not one person on the panel mentioned the arts. "Culture" as a general term, yes. But nothing about the arts, which was disappointing because Boston has such a rich arts life right now. I also didn't see any local arts media in the audience. That doesn't mean they weren't there. It means I didn't see them -- at any of the sessions I attended. Which only supports my earlier call to arts journalists: The arts are not just about what happens onstage. Or better: The stages for the arts are far greater than the ones in performing arts centers. They are on the floor of the government halls, the tables of corporate power and the forums in which artists make their voices known.  

Those words rarely belong together, because opera is such a complicated form that some bit of it -- some aspect of staging, or singing, or plot -- is almost bound to be slightly annoying or at the very least worse than the rest of it.  But the production of Alban Berg's Wozzeck that is now at the Metropolitan Opera is about as close to perfect, I think, as anything can be.

For one thing, it is only an hour and forty minutes, performed without intermission.  (If only everything, on every stage, could be performed that way!)  For another, it is conducted by James Levine, rapturously welcomed back from his recent illness by a knowledgeably excited audience.  The cast -- Alan Held as Wozzeck, Waltraud Meier as Marie, and Gerhard Siegel, Walter Fink, and Stuart Skelton in the other major parts -- is uniformly excellent, with no let-downs in terms of either acting or singing.  But best of all is the opera itself, and Mark Lamos's production is designed to allow that "thing itself" to shine through with utter clarity.

There is not a single excess piece of set or costuming on the stage:  Robert Israel, who was responsible for both, confined himself to a stark, expressionist design that is filled with haunting shadows (courtesy of lighting designer James Ingalls).  This is the sad, oppressive, grotesquely unfair world of the army private Wozzeck, as Buchner conceived it and as Berg translated it into music.  That music is both forcefully expressive and disarmingly adventurous, and the purely musical interludes (which come, in this opera, between each stark scene of action) have been given tremendous power by the way they are performed:  a black safety curtain comes down during the last lines of singing, and then the interludes are played against that blank screen, so that our attention is fully focused on the music.  Yet this seeming interruption does not detract in any way from the forward motion of the story; on the contrary, Wozzeck's and Marie's painful fate seems to hurtle toward its ending with even more inevitability than usual.  This Wozzeck is horrifying without being sentimental, beautiful without being pretty, and it grips one's attention from start to finish.

There are only two performances left, and, shockingly, there are seats available, because people think they do not want to hear atonal music in an opera.  They are wrong.  Benefit from their ignorance, and go.

I want to return ever-so-briefly to some old news: "Spider-Man, Turn Off the Dark," and the reviews that precipitated the ousting of director Julie Taymor and her creative team.

I know it happened a month ago. But I think it's worth bringing up again to underline the timing of Taymor's dismissal and the role of the professional critics. I see it as a significiant moment. 

Critics everywhere, one assumes, were in a quandry about the appropriate course to take with this show, and what precedents it might set: To review or not to review? Do we break the unwritten rules between writer and subject, which, in this case, was the anticipated but long-delayed opening of a $65 million Broadway musical? Audiences members were opining online, and yet the professional could not, should not. And the official opening date kept getting postponed. Preview performances began November 28.

Among professional reviewers, Newsday's Linda Winer and Bloomberg's Jeremy Gerard were the first to see and write about the show, publishing their appraisals in late December. The show was then scheduled to open February 7, but when that got pushed back, too, 11 critics decided to plunge ahead and publish their views. Their articles were posted online February 7, and they included influential news sources such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

It was then -- and only then -- that the show's producers faced up to the fact that they would have to replace Taymor if they were ever to get substantive changes to "Spider-Man." A new creative team was brought in, including director Philip William McKinley and writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. The critics' words had moved the mountain.

Some in the news business would have you measure an arts critic's worth by the number of online hits she gets. An art critic's true contributions, to the arts, to our culture and to history, have been minimized because we live in a time where empty numbers have become the gauge of significance. It's a messed up way to determine quality, and certainly the "value" of arts criticism isn't so easily quantified; indeed, why does value even have to be proved? 

Yes, arts critics - especially arts critics - speak truth to power, too, and so it's worth highlighting that every time it happens. We've all touched a raw nerve with our writing. In the middle of an otherwised civilized lunch with the president of the board of directors of a major performing arts venue, I was threatened with a punch in the face. We're not here to please anyone. And, for that matter, we're not here to make anyone's job easier, artist or producer. The readers deserve the truth, yet sometimes it feels like only a handful of them are even paying attention. Still, it is the critics who have expertise, training, curiosity and diligence who make a lasting impact, who aren't afraid to point out what's beautiful and what's ugly in this world. 

So I was cheered to see change effected in New York City, even if the story itself is not a particularly happy one. And it made me feel like a goofy Sally Field: "You need us, you really need us."

This week's links to NAJP members' work:

Hilton Als on Judy Linn's photos of Patti Smith (The New Yorker)
Misha Berson on women calling the shots in Seattle theater (The Seattle Times)
Robert Christgau on Sonny Rollins, Those Darlins et al (Expert Witness)
Laura Collins-Hughes on a Peter Brook production's memory trouble (The Boston Globe)
Laura Collins-Hughes on Stephen Karam and "Sons of the Prophet" (The Boston Globe)
Steve Dollar on the Unsound Festival New York (The Wall Street Journal)
Michael Feingold reviews "How to Succeed in Business" (The Village Voice)
Michael Feingold reviews "The Book of Mormon" (The Village Voice)
Matthew Gurewitsch on "Wittenberg" playwright David Davalos (Capital New York)
Christopher Hawthorne on a Pritzker for Eduardo Souto de Moura (Los Angeles Times)
Christopher Hawthorne on Diller, Scofidio + Renfro at Brown (Los Angeles Times)
John Horn on predictions of this summer's film hits and misses (Los Angeles Times)
Ann Hornaday reviews "Source Code" (The Washington Post)
Ann Hornaday reviews "The Woodmans" (The Washington Post)
Julia M. Klein on "The Borgias" (Obit Magazine)
Julia M. Klein interviews Margaret Morganroth Gullette about "Agewise" (AARP.org)
Glenn Lovell on Terrence Malick's upcoming "The Tree of Life" (CinemaDope.com) 
Glenn Lovell reviews "Lincoln Lawyer" (CinemaDope.com)
Anne Midgette on Ricky Ian Gordon's Civil War song cycle (The Washington Post)
Laurie Muchnick reviews Andrew Ferguson's "Crazy U" (Bloomberg News)
Claude Peck on John Ashbery's new Rimbaud translation (Rain Taxi)
Marcia Siegel reviews Boston Ballet's "Elo Experience" et al (The Boston Phoenix)
Jerome Weeks on Dallas arts and Dallas audiences (Art & Seek)

The only other time I ever saw Donizetti's "Elixir of Love" was years ago at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, and the tenor--a wonderfully talented local boy--brought down the house with his second-act solo. This time, at the New York City Opera, the same thing happened: the entire action ground to halt while the audience roared its wild approval. And this time I realized that the effect, though highly dependent on the skills of the individual tenor, is actually built into the opera.

In the version that is now running at NYCO, directed by Jonathan Miller, all five principals are terrific in their parts, but David Lomelí, a young Mexican tenor, is especially outstanding as the awkward, dopey, but finally triumphant Nemorino.  He starts out fidgety and pathetic, a guy who will clearly never get the girl he loves, the beautiful Aldina (here played by the charming Stefania Dovhan as a Marilyn-Monroe-lookalike who owns the local diner). But by middle of the second act he has gained new confidence through drinking a love potion supplied to him by a passing quack (the brilliant Marco Nisticò) -- and in fact by this time Aldina has indeed fallen in love with him, largely as a result of his new-found self-confidence. Just after accurately perceiving her change of heart, Nemorino gets a moment alone onstage to express his delight that she finally loves him, and it is this solo that stops the show.

It's not just that the music itself is piercingly beautiful, nor that Lomelí sings it with incredible tenderness and grace.  It's also that this character, for whom we've secretly rooted but whom we've also slightly despised for his stupidity and his clumsiness and his unthinkingly dog-like devotion, now turns out to be a man with a terrific voice.  So we fall in love with him, too, and it helps make sense of Aldina's rapid conversion.

I can't get over how clever it was of Donizetti to save up this secret weapon for the second act.  Handel, having discovered how to write that beautifully, would have used his discovery over and over (and in fact he did exactly that, note for note, in opera after opera). Mozart, the king of the beautiful, would have been unable to hold off his firepower to the second half of the show; he would have insisted on letting us know from the beginning how great his compositional powers were.  But Donizetti was a stage person above all:  he knew just how to save up the best for exactly the right moment.  And the result is magic.

Ellen Willis was a pioneering rock critic and feminist intellectual as well as the founder of NYU's graduate program in cultural journalism. She died way too soon in November of 2006, not yet 65. We were close for most of the high '60s, from 1966 to 1969, and when I participated in a tribute program at the 2007 EMP Pop Conference I suggested that her music writing was ripe for collection. Out of the Vinyl Deeps, edited by her daughter, Nona Willis Aronowitz, does exactly what I'd hoped such a book would do: collects everything, which means mostly her 56 New Yorker columns, written from 1968 to 1975, but also liner notes and essays from after she'd quit that gig. I just finished reading the book yesterday and may well write more about it in the future--pub dates's in May, with discount pre-orders already available. Right now I'll say that for a completist omnibus it is remarkably consistent--three or four of the pieces seem dated or flat, but most bristle with Ellen's signature clarity and idea density. What I want to announce now is a conference at NYU on Saturday, April 30, devoted to Ellen's music criticism, a full day featuring a truly remarkable array of panelists and readers. It's so remarkable, in fact, that instead of offering a selection I'll name every one, in program order. Panelists: Stanley Aronowitz, Daphne Brooks, Michael Berube, Scott McLemee, Kathleen Hanna, Ann Powers, Joe Levy, Joan Morgan, Evie Nagy, Nona Willis Aronowitz, Ron Sheffield, Alex Ross, Irin Carmon. Readers: Robert Christgau (I'm on first, at 9:30, reading from her seminal Dylan essay), Karen Durbin, Donna Gaines, Richard Goldstein, Georgia Christgau. You can pre-register here.

I love this post by InsideHigherEd's Josh Kim.