Slashdot Mirror
Pianist Asks Washington Post To Remove Review Under "Right To Be Forgotten"
Goatbert writes with word that pianist Dejan Lazic, unhappy with the opinion of Post music critic Anne Midgette, "has asked the Washington Post to remove an old review from their site in perhaps the best example yet of why it is both a terrible ruling and concept."
It’s the first request The Post has received under the E.U. ruling. It’s also a truly fascinating, troubling demonstration of how the ruling could work. “To wish for such an article to be removed from the internet has absolutely nothing to do with censorship or with closing down our access to information,” Lazic explained in a follow-up e-mail to The Post. Instead, he argued, it has to do with control of one’s personal image — control of, as he puts it, “the truth.”
(Here is the 2010 review to which Lazic objects.)
when the pianist succeeds. This is clearly a case where the "right to be forgotten" conflicts public interest.
Sure. Remove the Google link to the bad review.
And every other link to the guy. Forever.
No more searches on him, for the entire rest of his performing career.
It's the only way to keep that review from sneaking back into future search results.
Overwhelmingly you are going to have people with mis deeds wanting to have those deleted from history. Just imagine the Enron principals decide to emigrate and have their histories expunged ?
I wonder if they are knowedgable of the Streisand effect and the Slashdot effect. If not, they will know now. LOL. The news of the request is more important news than any old review they were trying to escape.
The truth shall set you free!
I'm shocked, I tell you.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Grandiloquence is an occupational hazard for a solo musician. There you are, alone onstage, playing works that are acknowledged to be monumentally great with breathtaking ability. It can be hard to avoid assuming the trappings of greatness.
Exhibit A is Dejan Lazic, who made his Washington debut Saturday afternoon as part of the Washington Performing Arts Society's Hayes Piano Series at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater. Lazic, 33, is a pianist, composer and sometime clarinetist. A few years ago, he made a strong mark as a performing partner of cellist Pieter Wispelwey. More recently, his claim to fame was turning Brahms's violin concerto into something dubbed "Piano Concerto No. 3," which he recorded with the Atlanta Symphony earlier this year. The feat ranks somewhere on the "because it's there" spectrum of human achievement: attention-getting, large scale and a little empty.
His recital of Chopin and Schubert on Saturday was unfortunately on the same spectrum. The selection of those two composers is usually a way to demonstrate a pianist's sensitivity as well as his virtuosity. This performance, though, kept one eye fixed on monumentality. Some of the pieces, such as Chopin's Scherzo No. 2, sounded less like light solo piano works than an attempt to rival the volume of a concerto with full orchestra. This scherzo became cartoon-like in its lurches from minutely small to very, very large.
It's not that Lazic isn't sensitive - or profoundly gifted. The very first notes of Chopin's Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise Brillante at the start of the program signalled that he can do anything he wants at the keyboard, detailing chords with a jeweler's precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet. Again and again, throughout the afternoon, he showed what a range of colors he could get out of the instrument, switching from hard-edged percussiveness to creamy legato, crackling chords to a single thread of sound. The sheer technical ability was, at first, a delight.
Soon, though, all of the finesse started to seem like an end in itself. Every nuance of the music was underlined visibly with a host of concert-pianist playacting gestures: head flung back at the end of a phrase; left hand conducting the right hand; or a whole ballet of fingers hovering over keys and picking out their targets before an opening note was even struck at the start of Chopin's Ballade No. 3. There were fine moments, but they stubbornly refused to add up to anything more than a self-conscious display of Fine Moments. The final movement of Chopin's Second Piano Sonata was in a way the most successful part of the program: sheer virtuosity, and perfectly unhinged.
Schubert's B-flat Sonata, D. 960, was a chance to shift into another gear and show a more reflective side, but it was a chance Lazic didn't quite take. The notes, again, were exquisitely placed, and there were things to like, but the human side fell short. All of the precision didn't help bring across the lyricism of the first movement's theme, or the threat of the bass growl that keeps warning off ease from the bottom of the keyboard. The second movement, instead of being a searching, tugging quest, was reduced to merely very pretty music.
The pianist was received with reasonably warm applause, but it didn't last long enough to draw an encore - which ought to get his attention. He's a pianist of prodigious gifts, and he's too good not to do better, to move beyond the music's challenges and into the realm of its soul.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
That is only true because this is still a novelty. When other people and companies jump onboard, google will be deluged with hundreds of thousands of requests from everything from microsoft to restaurants to politicians. At that point no one will be paying attention. This needs to get fixed, ASAP.
You do NOT have a RIGHT to control your public image. A public image is something that emerges from HOW you perform in public.
You do NOT have a RIGHT to not have your religion, beliefs, politics offended.
You CAN be just as misguided, idiotic, self absorbed as you want to be as long as I am not forced to change my behaviors to accommodate your stupid world views.
The way I see it, I DO have the RIGHT to see, believe, read, write, learn, say, do what I want want if it doesn't interfere with someone else's right to do the same. If you do not agree with that, then we have a problem.
Letter To Iran
Am I the only one who actually laughed out loud at the utter pretentiousness of this review?
detailing chords with a jeweler's precision, then laying little curls of notes atop a cushion of sound like diamonds nestled on velvet.
Amazing. It tells me absolutely nothing except that the writer is in love with her own prose. It's a shame Mr. Lazic couldn't see this review with the proper humor and irreverence it deserves. I think I'd wear it as a badge of honor if I was criticized with this sort of pomposity. Instead, he's gone and done something for which he should be rightfully shamed - much worse than an apparently decent but lackluster performance.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
... you do make some BOLD uppercase statements.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
is that the review has within it significant amount of praise, and the criticism is mostly constructive. The pianist should have taken this as a learning opportunity more than anything else. The critic closes the review with what is basically an encouragement for the pianist to not limit his considerable aptitude at the keys to mere showmanship, and to strive for true greatness. I don't know the current stage of professional development of this pianist, but there are two main possibilities: either he's not improved since the review, or he has. If the former, he has no one to blame but himself, and more recent reviews would probably be in line with this one--so why single it out? If the latter, then this review should not be seen as a black mark on his career, but a historical point of reference and a symbol of his continued improvement--so again, why try to hide it? The trappings of the ego often end up working against its owner.
"Politicians and diapers must be changed often, and for the same reason."
But Midgette's pretensious prose parrots Lazic's performance, presumably.
I've heard Lazic's recitals, and I must say, this review perfectly describes them. All of them. The man is talented, certainly, but fails to produce even the slightest musical effect on the listener. His play is a waste of great pianistic control - all that control and virtuosism bring about nothing of substantial value.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
The European Union disagrees.
The EU couldn't get negative rights straight if one hit it over its head.
Statists who love entitlements love to call them "rights" because "rights" have popular support.
The EU has created an entitlement to be forgotten, not a right, no matter what they call it. It's easy to tell the two apart - a right requires simply leaving a person alone - an entitlement requires a third party to provide a good or service, customarily under some threat of retribution for not doing so.
That's exactly what the EU has done - it forces somebody at the media outlet to remove a bit of data, without compensation - call it servitude or conscription, depending on your perspective, to provide a benefit to the person making the complaint.
Compare that with the right to free speech, the right to practice religion, the right to be free from searches - they all require the person to be left alone, and no third party is pressed into service.
Malarkey like TFA is what happens when people start thinking that entitlements are right - in an area where no entitlement has even been created, people who've heard about the EU's folly start thinking they have a right to another's labor. That kind of thinking is not alien to the US, though it's gone out of favor in the last century and a half, at least in the direct sense.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The winners have always been able to rewrite history to suit them. These (very) few years of the Internet keeping semi-accurate track have been an anomaly. It isn't a given that it will be allowed to continue.
Orwell was an optimist.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Dejan Lazic went from being obscure to being world famous for the wrong reason, now he will remain in the memories of people as a person not able to take criticism.
How many did know of him before this story?
Who will hire him for a concert now?
If I wanted an obnoxious person-centered musician with an ego the size of Mount Everest I would hire Prince.
If I wanted a piano player that is fun to watch I'd take Robert Wells instead.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.