Calendar Feedback: Season tickets support of the L.A. Phil

Re: “Renew Time Tickets? Uh-oh” [May possibly 4]: This posting portrays the Los Angeles Phil as insensitive in going forward with ticket sales for the 2020-21 period though experiencing the biggest problem in its history (the COVID-19 pandemic).

The community should really be even additional supportive now, not a lot less. Time ticket holders have entry to absolutely free ticket exchanges should really they truly feel sick or for whatever other reason. I anxiety that this posting will guide to less folks renewing when the L.A. Phil wants us the most.

Even further, the very last paragraph of the posting quotes L.A. Phil supporter Robert Rootenberg as declaring, “I’m specifically hunting forward to ‘Einstein on the Seaside,’ the Peter Sellars opera.”

“Einstein on the Beach” is a Philip Glass opera and is not part of the L.A. Phil’s ’20-’21 period.

I search forward to two operas that will be part of the ’20-’21 period: “Nixon in China” and “Girls of the Golden West” (for which Sellars wrote the libretto).

Renew period tickets for the L.A. Phil? Yes. Guidance the arts when they are on everyday living guidance. And guidance the musicians of the L.A. Phil, who supply us with the biggest balm for the soul of all the arts, new music.

Jonathan Breton
Mission Viejo

Sharing independence taken for granted

In Television Critic Robert Lloyd’s critique of Netflix’s new series “Hollywood” [“1940s ‘Hollywood’ Was Not Like This,” May possibly 1] he writes “[W]e are not fairly in our environment.”

This is legitimate. We’ve experienced a long time of Hollywood films exactly where gals and black, LGBTQIA and folks of shade are disappeared or disparaged, essentially depicting a white male filmmaker’s fantasy environment.

Lloyd is complaining of the exact in this series, only this series promises a environment exactly where the stories of the marginalized are central.

I, for one, will watch mainly because the marginalized should really be afforded the exact latitude and freedoms white males ended up supplied for a long time.

Cybele Garcia Kohel
Pasadena

Rhapsodizing about Gardner

Many thanks for R.J. Smith’s profile of Invoice Gardner [“‘Rhapsody’ in R&B,” April 28]. No other radio clearly show in the spot performs the outdated new music that Gardner performs on KPFK. The new music is wonderful, the host is pretty mellow. I’m confident KPFK can use the publicity that your posting provides.

Until eventually Gardner can get again into the studio new music fans will love his reruns, as properly as the other high-quality programming developed by KPFK.

Donna Leslie-Dennis
Extended Seaside

Get astrology with grain of salt

I was shocked by Zan Romanoff’s critique of astrology guides [“Astrology’s Attractiveness a Signal of the Times,” April 26]. I assume it’s irresponsible to uncritically current the notion that astrology is a way to know oneself.

What could this powerful sophisticated force be that was in some way missed by hundreds of years of scientific endeavor?

Astrology dates again to when we thought the stars and planets ended up lights in a heavenly sphere and the Earth was the center of the universe. Today we know that stars, like our solar, are massive dense emitters of gentle of numerous unique sizes at varying wonderful distances. Constellations are just patterns we make from our Earth spot from their generally random spacing.

Just one can describe how astrology “seems to work” by human psychology that sees patterns and remembers matches significantly better than mismatches. So in figuring out a person’s astrological sign before obtaining to know the particular person, numerous “see” individuals astrological sign features. But identity checks done first cannot be matched to astrological signals any better than random.

All scientific checks of astrology have failed miserably. Please don’t check out to characterize or pigeonhole any individual primarily based on their astrological sign.

Tom Gingell
San Diego

Two assorted requires on quarantine

There ended up two wonderful but pretty unique articles or blog posts in the Monday, April 27, Calendar. [“Quarantine Diary”] was a clever, funny satire by author Lionel Shriver of a hugely fabricated tale of the beautifully beneficial rewards of the lockdown, interlaced with hilarious vignettes of the precise working experience. It was outstanding.

The other, by art critic Christopher Knight [“Napoleon a Pioneer in Plague Spin”], chronicles how well-known French painter Antoine-Jean Gros falsely depicted Napoleon’s steps, propagandizing Bonaparte as a “miracle worker” in a plague that may well properly have been started out by his wholesale slaughter of a great number of prisoners and the execution of numerous of his very own troops who ended up sick from the plague during his siege of Egypt and Syria.

It is an participating, properly-prepared, educational posting on how even high-quality art can switch truth “into truly feel-great fiction,” which Knight identifies as “disinformation.”

On the other hand, I wasn’t a supporter of the comparisons to President Trump in the very last two paragraphs.

Joseph F. Paggi Jr.
Pasadena