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

Re: “Renew Season Tickets? Uh-oh” [May four]: This report portrays the Los Angeles Phil as insensitive in relocating ahead with ticket gross sales for the 2020-21 season although facing the finest challenge in its historical past (the COVID-19 pandemic).

The public really should be even additional supportive now, not much less. Season ticket holders have entry to free ticket exchanges really should they really feel sick or for whatsoever other motive. I fear that this report will lead to much less people today renewing when the L.A. Phil wants us the most.

More, the previous paragraph of the report quotes L.A. Phil supporter Robert Rootenberg as indicating, “I’m particularly seeking ahead to ‘Einstein on the Beach front,’ the Peter Sellars opera.”

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

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

Renew season tickets for the L.A. Phil? Sure. Assistance the arts when they are on lifestyle assist. And assist the musicians of the L.A. Phil, who present us with the finest balm for the soul of all the arts, tunes.

Jonathan Breton
Mission Viejo

Sharing flexibility taken for granted

In Television set Critic Robert Lloyd’s critique of Netflix’s new sequence “Hollywood” [“1940s ‘Hollywood’ Was Not Like This,” May one] he writes “[W]e are not very in our world.”

This is correct. We have experienced a long time of Hollywood movies in which women of all ages and black, LGBTQIA and people today of shade are disappeared or disparaged, essentially depicting a white male filmmaker’s fantasy world.

Lloyd is complaining of the very same in this sequence, only this sequence claims a world in which the stories of the marginalized are central.

I, for a single, will check out for the reason that the marginalized really should be afforded the very same latitude and freedoms white males had been specified for a long time.

Cybele Garcia Kohel
Pasadena

Rhapsodizing about Gardner

Many thanks for R.J. Smith’s profile of Monthly bill Gardner [“‘Rhapsody’ in R&B,” April 28]. No other radio demonstrate in the place performs the previous tunes that Gardner performs on KPFK. The tunes is great, the host is pretty mellow. I’m guaranteed KPFK can use the publicity that your report provides.

Right up until Gardner can get again into the studio tunes lovers will take pleasure in his reruns, as effectively as the other good programming made by KPFK.

Donna Leslie-Dennis
Very long Beach front

Choose astrology with grain of salt

I was stunned by Zan Romanoff’s critique of astrology textbooks [“Astrology’s Attraction a Sign of the Times,” April 26]. I believe it is irresponsible to uncritically current the strategy that astrology is a way to know oneself.

What could this potent complex force be that was in some way skipped by centuries of scientific endeavor?

Astrology dates again to when we thought the stars and planets had been lights in a heavenly sphere and the Earth was the center of the universe. Nowadays we know that stars, like our sun, are significant dense emitters of mild of a lot of distinct measurements at varying great distances. Constellations are just designs we make from our Earth location from their largely random spacing.

A single can describe how astrology “seems to work” by human psychology that sees designs and remembers matches significantly better than mismatches. So in being aware of a person’s astrological indicator in advance of getting to know the human being, a lot of “see” all those astrological indicator characteristics. But character exams carried out initially are not able to be matched to astrological symptoms any better than random.

All scientific exams of astrology have failed miserably. Make sure you really don’t test to characterize or pigeonhole any one centered on their astrological indicator.

Tom Gingell
San Diego

Two varied will take on quarantine

There had been two great but pretty distinct content in the Monday, April 27, Calendar. [“Quarantine Diary”] was a intelligent, humorous satire by writer Lionel Shriver of a hugely fabricated tale of the splendidly valuable benefits of the lockdown, interlaced with hilarious vignettes of the actual knowledge. It was amazing.

The other, by art critic Christopher Knight [“Napoleon a Pioneer in Plague Spin”], chronicles how renowned French painter Antoine-Jean Gros falsely depicted Napoleon’s actions, propagandizing Bonaparte as a “miracle worker” in a plague that may effectively have been started off by his wholesale slaughter of many prisoners and the execution of a lot of of his have troops who had been ill from the plague through his siege of Egypt and Syria.

It is an partaking, effectively-published, educational report on how even good art can change truth “into really feel-great fiction,” which Knight identifies as “disinformation.”

Nevertheless, I was not a supporter of the comparisons to President Trump in the previous two paragraphs.

Joseph F. Paggi Jr.
Pasadena