Some blogroll updates first:
- Do the Math has a new URL and feed. It’s no longer a band blog, but purely the work of Bad Plus pianist Ethan Iverson.
- Brigid Slipka’s blog is now at brigidslipka.com. The feed should be unchanged.
- The Future of Music Coalition blog’s feed has changed.
- The Idea Feed’s, uh, feed has also changed. I was really glad to discover this one was still active but upset to realize that I’d missed several months’ worth of posts!
- Community Arts Network, the publishers of both APINews and CANBlog, is no more, so I’ve removed them both from the list. The CAN website, which has a number of fantastic educational resources for arts policy nuts, is archived here.
You might have noticed a few aesthetic changes here at Createquity, as well: the rotating backgrounds form a more coherent set, and I’ve consolidated the large number of categories to four “channels” (Policy & Advocacy, Philanthropy, Economy, and Research) and begun using a tag-based system instead. Thanks once again to the talented Evan Stein for his help with this.
Art and Avarice
Voice teacher and opera singer Milena Thomas has a degree in finance and an ardent affection for the free market. It’s a dangerous combination that has caused her to take some headscratching positions, like when she argued that outlawing unpaid internships would disproportionately hurt the poor or that letting big record companies bribe radio stations for airplay would somehow create more opportunity for indie musicians. I went back and forth for a while about linking to her for this reason, but Thomas is a gifted writer whose ideas are often worth considering even when her politics are (in my opinion) misguided. The post that got me off the fence was her most recent one, a beautiful reflection on the balance between art and family. Thomas was nine months pregnant when she wrote it, so understandably she’s been a bit MIA since then, but when she comes back, I’ll be reading.
Buzzing Reed
No relation (that I know of) with his namesake above, Columbus Symphony clarinetist David H. Thomas writes this very active blog about clarinet, classical music, and audience engagement. A reader who plays clarinet will definitely get more out of Buzzing Reed than one who does not, but Thomas is a voracious reader who keeps up with some very different sources than I do, so I appreciate his bite-sized reactions to classical music articles like this one. A good way to keep up with what orchestral musicians are thinking these days.
NYFA Blog
The New York Foundation for the Arts has a long history of providing grant and technical support to artists in New York State and beyond (NYFA Classifieds, for example, is one of the key local sources for job listings in arts administration). Now NYFA has a blog written by executive director Michael Royce, and it looks pretty promising. Of greatest interest to me was an early peek into the NEA’s strategic plan framework for 2012-16, though unfortunately the link to the plan itself no longer seems to be active. Still, there’s lots of other good stuff to keep one occupied here.
OK Trends
I have to hand it to my coworker Tim Cynova: he emailed me a link to a New York Times article that discussed this blog some months ago and my life has not been the same since. Christian Rudder and Chris Coyne perform technically ambitious and highly entertaining data analysis on the 3.5 million active members of OKCupid, a well-known online dating service. The OK Trends blog bucks some pervasive blog-authoring conventional wisdom: posts are infrequent, averaging about one a month, and very, very lengthy. But hey, they’re about romance and sex, so somehow people find the time to read them (one post has, um, attracted more than 1300 comments to, um, date). Math + Cultural Anthropology + Hilarity = Awesome.