Let us start off with one of TMQ Watch’s patented musical interludes. This one even has a small amount of relevance to this week’s TMQ:
You’ve got to love YouTube comments:
stephen scazzafavo 2 weeks ago
thumbs up for REAL COUNTRY none of this new age shiit
Yeah. About that, Steve.
Anyway, with that diversion out of the way, let’s get into this week’s TMQ, after the jump…
Is it IKEA furniture or a death metal band?
I’m not doing well so far.
(Edited to add: 7 out of 20. Either I need to spend more time at IKEA, or more time listening to death metal.)
You know what New York City needs? Strict scissors control laws. I bet those were deadly assault scissors, too. At the very least, background checks for scissors purchasers would have prevented this…
And the New York City Opera has officially announced that they are shutting down. (Previously.)
(At this point, I would ordinarily nudge you, the metaphorical reader, in the metaphorical ribs and note my restraint in not making a “fat lady sings” joke. But the only reason for my restraint here is that FARK already did it.)
Barring a miracle, it appears the New York City Opera will file for bankruptcy next week and begin winding down operations.
The NYCO has been trying to raise $7 million before the end of September. So far, according to the NYT, they’ve managed to raise $1.5 million. They even have a Kickstarter: the goal is $1 million, but they’ve raised $194,549 (at this writing) with three days to go.
How did they get to this point? And how can New York City not be able to support two major opera companies?
The company cut back from “115 performances of 17 different operas” a decade ago to “16 performances of 4 operas” last year. The smaller number of performances has, in turn, resulted in a smaller number of patrons, and a smaller number of potential donors.
Apparently, the NYCO was in Lincoln Center up until 2011; then they moved out, and are now “an itinerant troupe at theaters across the city”. This may also have something to do with their problems. (I was confused about why NYCO was in Lincoln Center if the NYST was their home; if I understand Wikipedia correctly, NYST is actually part of Lincoln Center.)
And because they raided the endowment, the annual income from that source is now less than $200,000 a year – “less than City Opera makes from its Thrift Shop on East 23rd Street in Manhattan”. (If you try going to the Thrift Shop website, you’re confronted with an uncloseable fundraising appeal that completely obscures the rest of the content. Oh, wait; I hit the back button a couple of times and managed to close the fundraising appeal. Would you like to buy a piano? That’s a trick question: nobody wants to buy a piano.)
(O.M.G. Okay, I have to purchase this. If only as a gift.)
The back and forth in the NYT comments section is interesting, to the extent that any web comments section is interesting. Some folks complain about the unwillingness of the wealthy to step up and bail out the opera, others complain that of course the opera is failing because they present crap like “Anna Nicole” (while others point out that “Anna Nicole” is a critically acclaimed modern opera), and there’s a lot of blame for the management and board of NYCO.
There’s not really much more I can say about this, though I do find it interesting. I would be sad to see an opera company close down, in much the same way I’d be sad if a local restaurant that I liked closed their doors. On the other hand, it seems like the closure is the result of ten years of poor decision making, and there’s nobody to blame but NYCO itself.
This week’s TMQ, after the jump…
We were trying to come up with a clever introduction to the return of Tuesday Morning Quarterback (and, thus, the TMQ Watch) but we couldn’t. On the other hand, we were also suffering from a bad case of 70s nostalgia (brought about by many things, but exacerbated by the death of Bert Lance). So we thought we’d throw some vintage music your way before cracking open this week’s TMQ after the jump. Oddly enough, it turns out to be fitting for reasons we’ll see later on…
Tannhauser asks for her intercession with God, and dies of opera.
–Ken @ Popehat
Runner-up, also from Ken:
Sorry about the radio silence for the past few days. I’ve been spending a lot of time with family, and kicking around the Cleveland area.
Our flight got in around 7 PM last night, and it was 10 PM by the time I got home. I’m trying to get caught up, and hope to have more substantial reports and some photos up over the weekend.
In the meantime, have some music.
(Man, wasn’t Learning to Crawl a great album? “Back On the Chain Gang”, “My City Was Gone”, “Middle of the Road”…)
Alan Myers passed away on Monday, though I did not find out about it until today.
Myers…
I’m trying to find some appropriate links. I’m not sure this one shows Myers or the rest of the band well, but it is from the right era as well as being one of my favorite Devo songs. Plus, does anyone remember “Fridays”?
And now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like:
Also, a shoutout to my homeboys at Popehat:
Hey! @nytimes! Richard Matheson died two days ago. Where’s the obituary? “All the news that’s fit to print” indeed.
— Popehat (@Popehat) June 26, 2013
(I looked around a while back: there are several people who have registered Kickstopper-like domain names, but the associated sites seem to be dormant. Which is a shame, as I think a Kickstopper blog dedicated to highlighting possible scams and stupid projects is something the Internet needs. If I thought I could make money off of it, I’d do it: after all, my hero April Winchell parlayed Regretsy into a book deal. But right now I’m putting my energy into job hunting, not starting new blogs.)
James Gandolfini roundup: NYT. LAT. A/V Club.
This makes me kind of sad: one of Gandolfini’s pending projects was “Bone Wars” with Steve Carell, about the 19th Century paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. The Cope/Marsh story is fascinating, and I would have enjoyed seeing what Gandolfini and Carell did with it.
Also among the dead: thriller writer Vince Flynn. I’ve never read any of his novels, but I was aware of them: the Mitch Rapp books are ubiquitous in my local grocery stores, right up there with James Patterson and Lee Child. (I don’t say that with any snark intended; when your books are in every grocery store, you’re pretty much doing okay for yourself.)