CLASSICIST:

Requiem for a Punster: Leonard Slatkin Pays Tribute to P.D.Q. Bach (and Peter Schickele) (Chris King, November 22, 2024. Common Reader)

Leonard Slatkin: Peter Schickele was a composer, first and foremost. He played the bassoon and the piano as well. He had written, among other things, the music for a show back in the early sixties called O Calcutta that was a little bit like Hair, and these other sort of hippie-inspired things where it was very short, momentary flash of full nudity onstage, very shocking back in the early sixties. He wrote the music for a film called Silent Running with Bruce Dern, which was about the impact of pollution on the environment and outer space. He was part of a group called The Open Window, that combined classical music with pop genres of the time.

The success of that concert at Town Hall really put him on the map. He would appear on The Today Show; he would be on late-night chat shows. This invention of the last and least of J.S. Bach’s children was giving a kind of comedic bent to the stuffy world of classical music. Even if you didn’t know anything about classical music, you could come to these concerts and you would be rolling on the floor, because all of the references he would make to different music. At the same time he would invent instruments, all these things that were crazy. But it was very funny, and it really caught on—the public really embraced it.

When I came to St. Louis in 1968, we had this idea to do a concert at the Zoo, and we commissioned Peter to write a piece which was called A Zoo Called Earth, and at the end of the piece there was a march where many animals came out. The piece has become almost a staple of children’s concerts these days. It was also one of the first classical music pieces to deal with the environment because it had to do with an alien who comes to visit and thinks, well, if you’ll take better care of your planet, maybe we will come back and visit again.

I commissioned a symphony from Peter which we premiered in Washington. Then I would conduct for P.D.Q. Bach concerts that Peter would do around the country and many of them here. Peter would usually arrive late for the concerts, and he might come in swinging on a rope from the balcony, Tarzan-style, and then crawl his way to the stage. With this most disheveled-looking manner you could possibly imagine, he would then proceed just to totally entertain the audience.

He also had a fantastic radio show called The Schickele Mix, which, in a way, was an inspiration for me when I started doing The Slatkin Shuffle. It is based on the idea that you don’t need to categorize music. You just need to find ways to juxtapose it in both ways that work and ways that don’t. And Peter was really good at that as well.

So, this marvelous person, terrific composer, we decided, since he passed, to do a concert to honor him.

THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

Even People Who Hate AI Art Appear to Actually Prefer AI Art in a Blind Test (frank Landmore, 11/23/24, Futurism)

To the untrained eye, it seems that AI-generated images are more than just passable; in some cases, they seem to match up to the old masters themselves.

That at least appears to be the findings of a recent blind test conducted by the blog Astral Star Codex, which found that the readers who took part incorrectly distinguished between AI images and human art 40 percent of the time.

But perhaps the most striking takeaway was that overall, the participants slightly preferred the AI creations to human ones, with six of the top ten most-liked images being AI-generated, and the top two slots going to the AI paintings.

This preference was even the case among participants who identified as having a profound distaste for AI illustrations — perhaps demonstrating the unnerving capabilities of the technology.

SO MUCH DONE, SO MUCH YET TO DO:

Is the US national debt a risk to investments? (Brian Levitt, 7/03/24, Invesco)

The US is a very wealthy country. For example, the total US household net worth is over $150 trillion, which is close to five times the size of the nation’s debt.5 From that lens, the debt level may not seem as troubling. It may be one reason to explain why the nation is generally viewed by markets as a good creditor.

With $34 trillion in liabilities and $200+ trillion in assets, the US federal government has far more assets than many realize.1 Rather than measuring debt as a percentage of GDP, which is primarily an income measure, measuring debt against total assets paints a far more solvent picture. If all the US government land, buildings, and natural resources were combined, the country would likely have more than $200 trillion in assets. While not all are liquid, they certainly paint the US as a much better creditor than many would believe.

Given that Treasuries are one of the safest and most liquid assets in the world, it’s unlikely investors will lose their appetite for US debt. The federal government owns 20% of US debt, making it the largest single holder.2 Since this debt is just money the government owes itself, however, it has no effect on overall government finances. More than 40% of US debt is owned by US savers, pensions, mutual funds, and financial institutions, who hold Treasuries for safety, yield, policy requirements, or regulatory reasons.2 While it’s true that more than 20% of US debt is held abroad, it’s not heavily concentrated in one country. The largest foreign investors include Japan and the UK, where yields are historically lower than they are in the US. 2

The debt, like the Border, is only an aesthetic matter, not an economic one. But the aesthetics make people believe government isn’t functioning well. Some showy but trivial “fixes” would be worthwhile in that context.