Music critic for The New Yorker, Alex Ross, reviews the hugely popular 17-day festival by Carnegie Hall, Berlin in Lights, nicely encapsulating Berlin's Zeitgeist midway through -- and a plea for New York to stop being so expensive already dammit or face losing its real artists. You know, the starving ones:

The reunification of Germany has engendered what some consider an ersatz corporate city. Yet Berlin is once again seething with contrary energies, especially in its low-rent eastern districts; New York artists who can’t afford to live within a five-mile radius of Times Square are migrating there. I may not have been the only New Yorker who looked on Berlin in Lights as something of a threat. It may be time—if it’s not too late—for New York to protect its heritage of cultural experiment before the economy of the mega-rich turns the city into a large-scale convention center for out-of-town clients.

Mr. Ross has just written a well-received book, The Rest Is Noise, about the history of music in the twentieth century. Sure, anyone can get a blurb from Bill Bryson, but how many can boast of a snappy one-liner from Bjork? Not many, that's who.