#tbt April 03, 2014 at 09:20AM
Author Archives: shaun
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Interested in the new Amazon Fire TV. I’ll glue it to my Roku, Apple TV and Chromecast and finally have the set top box of my dreams.
— geekadelphia (@geekadelphia) April 2, 2014
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Lawmakers on the tax writing committees — like Ways and Means — can benefit, too, as they become a magnet for hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions, even though Mr. Camp’s early legislative drafts of the tax proposal included provisions that would have hurt some of his top donors.
Donors to Mr. Camp’s political action committee this election cycle — and some of the guests at the Park City event — include PACs run by MetLife, Koch Industries, Bank of America, the Altria Group, Pfizer, Home Depot, PricewaterhouseCoopers and AT&T, among dozens of others. It is money Mr. Camp can pass on to other Republican candidates, now that he has announced he is retiring from Congress after 12 terms in the House.
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Some people say that because it’s so hard to put a dollar figure on such benefits, this principle is of little practical use in Detroit. But the benefits must be substantial — how else to explain the extraordinary efforts of private donors to save the collection?
Fortunately, costs are easier to estimate, and those for displaying a painting derive largely from its market value. Consider “The Wedding Dance,” a 16th-century work by the Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Detroit museum visitors have enjoyed this painting since 1930. How much would it cost to preserve that privilege for future generations?
A tidy sum, as it turns out. According to Christie’s, this canvas alone could fetch up to $200 million. Once interest rates return to normal levels — say, 6 percent — the forgone interest on that amount would be approximately $12 million a year.
If we assume that the museum would be open 2,000 hours a year, and ignore the cost of gallery space and other indirect expenses, the cost of keeping the painting on display would be more than $6,000 an hour. Assuming that an average of five people would view it per hour, all year long, it would still cost more than $1,200 an hour to provide the experience for each visitor.
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“What’s irreplaceable — what you should ideally be paying for — are the chef’s judgment and palate; the difference between good and great may be a half teaspoon of lemon juice. The point of having a chef in situ is that a brilliant one isn’t going to allow a dish to be sent out unless that half teaspoon of lemon juice is there. Not everyone can do that; only a few can. And even fewer great chefs can afford to hire other great chefs to work for them, and when they do, most of those No. 2s will go off on their own before long. In 95 percent of the world’s restaurants, where dishes are standardized and even corporatized, this doesn’t matter. But it does matter at the very narrow top.”
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In the last generation or so, the classic script of Babe Ruth, Harmon Killebrew and Rivera has largely deteriorated into a mess of squiggles and personal branding.
It is not just baseball, of course. The legible signature, once an indelible mark of personal identity, is increasingly rare in modern life. From President Obama, who sometimes uses an autopen, to patrons at a restaurant, few take the time to carefully sign their names.
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While concert soloists are commonly expected to perform from memory, it is very rare for a chamber ensemble to do so. In the early decades of the 20th century, the Kolisch Quartet built a reputation on performances free of sheet music, a high-wire act few ensembles have copied. For a group to perform without printed music requires both thorough preparation and absolute trust among players. “Everyone needs to know in advance not just their own part, but everybody else’s as well,” Mr. Sirota said.
Yet today more string quartets are taking up the challenge, part of a generation for whom independence from the printed page is only part of a wider search for depth and freedom of musical expression. In 2010 the Parker Quartet gave a run of Haydn performances by heart. Last November the JACK Quartet performed a work by Georg Friedrich Haas in complete darkness.
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shaun james bockert 