Things I learned from the Cleveland Orchestra strike
As you might have heard, if you’re the highbrow type who pays attention to the Arts column (or if you just live in Cleveland — that’s not to say you couldn’t be both) the Cleveland orchestra was on strike for about ten hours this week. The two most striking (haha) things I’m getting from this episode are:
- The median pay for members of the orchestra is over $140,000.
- They get several times more paid vacation a year (10 weeks) than I do.
I’m not saying they shouldn’t get pissy over a pay cut. In fact, I’d love to redistribute some less deserving salaries (politicians, hedge fund managers, ambulance chasers, etc.) to the coffers of my own special interest groups (classical musicians, research scientists, underwear models, etc., especially people who are all three). However, that particular sharing of the wealth will have to wait until I am made dictator of the USA, probably around mid-August. No, I’m delighted they are defending their salaries, but that’s a pretty sweet deal!
Does anyone know what the range of salaries is? I bet that median figure is biased toward the low end of the range.
One of the first CD player reviews
Audiophile wank has spewed from the mouths of reviewers for many years (I’d love to see just how far back this goes — did the press ever talk about the luscious high-end on the first wax cylinders?). For my first exhibit I present this review of the first Sony CD player, from 1983. IN DIGITAL!
Featuring all of your favorite vague adjectives:
… the sound was so opulently gorgeous it almost defied belief! It was a total incarnation of the perfectionist’s wildest dreams: rich, velvety, airy, awesome, liquid, yet incredibly detailed. There were none of the analog disc’s problems. No marginal mistracking, no subtle VTA-error distortions, no disc-resonance smearing, no feedback-induced low-end boom or mud, no ticks or pops or pressing grumbles even at the highest listening levels. And there was no analog-tape flutter or modulation noise or transient-rounding or print-through or hiss.
I’d love a history of these reviews for each new audio technology as it came out.
Helping in Haiti
If you haven’t already done so, I’m giving you a nudge toward providing cash to help people survive the fallout of one of the most devestating natural earthquakes in recorded history. To help you decide where to most effectively donate your money I recommend looking at the ratings on Charity Navigator, as well as the list on NPR. I chose Partners in Health, who have been providing healthcare services to the poor in Haiti for over 25 years, via their sister organization Zanmi Lasante. I found they were independently recommended several times.
Something else I discovered is that you should under no circumstances send things which aren’t money. This can actually hinder the relief efforts, since it is extra boxes of stuff that aid workers have to sort through and deal with:
“Of course, the donors were only trying to help, but misplaced intentions actually worsened the suffering. Buried under care packages and out of date antibiotics labeled in Thai and Chinese were the world’s most advanced malaria medications. Meanwhile along the coast, people who had just lost homes and families writhed in malarial fever for lack of treatment.”
So just stick with the credit card…
“We don’t listen to enough Shostakovich…”
“We don’t listen to enough Shostakovich…”, G. said to me, recently, within the hour.
This was prompted by Harry Dean Stanton, who stars as the aurally challenged lead cowboy in this David Lynch shortie (“The Cowboy and the Frenchman”) we watched the other night, while putting the last few brightly colored marmosets and monkeys and minnows into a jigsaw puzzle:
Which at the time reminded me of his appearance as the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park in Fire Walk With Me:
(Which G did not remember, hence the Youtubing tonight. I don’t see how she forgot it really, it’s one of my favorites in the movie… “I’ve already been places”). Which brought us to one of the major atmospheric forces in Lynch’s movies, the soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti. Like this piece from Blue Velvet:
Badalamenti’s soundtracks are always luscious and dissonant, in a wandering, stringy sort of way. That’s exactly why I both love the music, and think it’s perfectly appropriate as a landscape for Lynch’s movies to live in. It is also very similar to some of Shosty’s brooding melancholia, especially that last piece, which was explicitly styled after his 15th symphony:
Which is of course how we wound down to the comment up there, at the top of this meandering blog post.