Our cultural institutions are moribund without the support of an audience.
The commercialization of everything to get down to the lowest possible, least sophisticated, masses
paints a picture of deserted museums, concert and opera houses, and schools like Juilliard without qualified students nor qualified teaching staff. Even a Mozart and a Schubert need a society that welcomes such genius.
Whatever our own disagreements with the building designs, the restaurants, the communicating passages, we still welcome the facilities that provide for the enjoyment and knowledge that live perfprmances offer. We had no Lincoln Center when I studied at Juilliard on Claremont Avenue and 122nd street, the original site for Juilliard, nor did we have anything but '78's and chapel shaped radios with only AM reception. The skyscraper or at least massive structures that now dominate our musical cultural scene we, but what we had were yet to arrive, but we did have the top composers, singers and conductors fleeing from devastated Europe after WWII and teaching at Juilliard. Born and living in Jersey City, NJ I had the distinct advantage of proximity to the Met Opera and the New York City Opera to attend, at minimum cost, two to three times weekly, at standing room, from age 15, performances of a wide rep by major singers whose like simply does not exist today. At age 10 I heard on WNYC a broadcast of the recording of Toscanini's conducting the New York Philharmonic in the Rhine Journey and Funeral Music. This recording was made long, long before his recording with the NBC Symphony. That hearing encouraged me to borrow from our major library in Jersey City, on Jersey Avenue, the piano vocal scores of all the Wagner operas from Der fliegender Hollander to Parsifal and the full orchestra scores of the RING and TRISTAN. I started studying composition, composing, and as an autodidact at that time, singing. Taking at different comfortable octaves, I studied, "sang" all the major male roles, marginalizing the David, Mime, Alberich, Young Sailor, and their peer brothers whose roles did not interest me. MY professional career started at age 17. My study of voice with Friedrich Schorr, Alexander Kipnis, Margarete Matzernauer, Frieda Hempel, Martial Singher, Mack Harrell, John Brownlee and Karin Branzell, all leading singers at the Met Opera before they retired, prepared me for my rep decisions. Schorr, Kipnis and Singher I saw in performances at the Met long before I got to study with them. I am the director of the Richard Wagner Music Drama Institute, a Wagnerian heldentenor and an opera composer of "Shakespeare" and "The Political Shakespeare." Live performance has a special quality that no matter how sophisticated the recording home entertainment "Theaters" they will never replace the Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center or similar performance sites.

I think big oil is one problem but it's still the banks that were at the root of the crisis by treating people's mortgages like a Vegas casino. Real estate has always been a problem for this country.

Ironically, David Koch has his name on the State Theater now - essentially a guardian of the Wall Street status quo. It's entirely appropriate that these people protest at Lincoln Center.

All the Wall Street executives can be forced to stand on their heads and spit nickels, nothing will happen to improve the economy until everyone stops pussy-footing around the real culprit Big Oil, and its ties to Big Banking that go all the way back to John D. Rockefeller.
Big Oil is the giant leech that sucks the blood of the world economy, preventing productive businesses from having profits to reinvest, forcing them to the banks to borrow for growth. The monkeys on Wall Street are just opportunists on the fringe of the problem.
We can do our part by nationalizing the oil industry, it is the only solution.

Perfect solidarity with those who make history!