Pearls Before Breakfast: Can a great musician cut fog of rush hour? (2007) | Hacker News Reader

Pearls Before Breakfast: Can a great musician cut fog of rush hour? (2007)

washingtonpost.com

38 pointswglb18 comments

I couldn’t figure out what the title meant until I saw it had been altered from the original:

> Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.

“Cut through the fog” is a known expression, while “cut fog” is not.

Headlines in newspapers used to be compressed in this manner, where they would omit words (especially "the"), so it didn't phase me, but interesting to think how this could be confusing, especially to those who didn't grow up reading physical newspapers, but even for those who are just used to the less constrained headlines in today's media.

Yes, I’m aware of newspaperese but you have to do it carefully to avoid butchering phrases like this.

sorry, pet peeve word mixup: it didn't "faze" you

Unphased is that feeling you have right before Lt Worf stuns you.

HN has a short title requirement and it is not always easy to preserve the full meaning.

I'm going to take that term, Cut Fog, and use it for my own purposes from now on. I'm cutting fog right now as a matter of fact.

Sounds like a euphemism for either farting or vaping

This made a sorta interesting story but not really a surprising one when it first ran.

- Yes, people are hurrying and not really paying attention.

-The acoustics are not… great.

- Many of the commuters are plain not interested in the type of music

- Even in a proper concert setting even many of us who do, sometimes appreciate fine classical music, can’t blindly distinguish reliably between the highly competent of which there are many and the truly gifted.

Then a follow up article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style/wp/2014/10/14/gene....

The story is exceedingly well written.

And a follow-follow-up: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/0...

Unfortunately for Weingarten, the only living two time Pulitzer winner for feature writing leaned into his ignorance about Indian food and managed to get himself invited to retire from the Post.

After 10 years of only writing his opinion/humor column, not features, his contract was not renewed in 2021 in the wake of the curry controversy. His feature writing was long done by then.

He wrote "A Dog's Life" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/11/08/why-are-s...), a feature in the Post's magazine, in November 2021. (A heartbreaking story, if you're a dog person.)

https://archive.is/2023.07.15-223555/https://www.washingtonp...

The late and great Richard Taruskin used this incident to frame a book review in the New Republic[1]. Many people have commented on the location of Bell's stunt, which was chosen to deliberately make a point. I think it's more interesting that Taruskin mentioned a contrasting incident discussed in one of the reviewed books.

>With that in mind, consider Kramer's cleverly titled final chapter, "Persephone's Fiddle," which is largely devoted to--guess what?--a violinist Kramer once heard busking unaccompanied Bach in the New York subway. Unlike Joshua Bell at L'Enfant Plaza, this fiddler drew a rapt crowd:

>It was early fall, the start of a new academic semester, and the performer on the platform--Times Square, my usual spot--looked like a music student trying to pick up some extra cash for books or scores. She was young, in her early twenties, blonde, attractive, and well dressed, which may help explain the unusual amount of attention she was getting from a crowd that in normal circumstances wouldn't give a busker a second glance.

>Or maybe it was the music. . . .

>Kramer goes on to speculate about what it was in Bach that so captivated fifteen or twenty listeners in that noisy atmosphere, and moved them at the end to "a moment of complete silence followed by a smattering of applause." My question, rather, is whether you noticed the difference between the scene Kramer describes and the one that the Washington Post reporter engineered for Joshua Bell. It couldn't be simpler, or more crucial.

>Bell was playing at the entrance to the station, where trains cannot be seen and everyone is hurrying to catch one. Kramer's little Persephone was playing down on the platform, where riders are apt to be at (enforced) leisure. Little Persephone knew that she needed an appropriate location to get across her message ("Isn't this beautiful?" or "Can I have some money?" or whatever you like). The Post reporter chose the least appropriate location possible. One of them was trying to make money, the other was trying to make a point. And Bach served them both equally well.

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/64350/books-the-musical-myst...

tldr on the haul: "the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies."

From the follow up article:

> 1. The insidious, intelligence-challenging “TL;DR” phenomenon: The Web values concision and simplicity over subtlety and context and, uh, complex truth.

Reminds me of a joke that can't be repeated here. "Who gave 25¢?" "They all did!"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com