Recommended Reading, August 17, 2025

Robert Cox

18 Aug 2025 — 5 min read

A pleasure to see Brendan Gleeson on Thursday in “The Weir” at Olympia Theatre Dublin.

DUBLIN, IRELAND (August 17, 2025) — I will be on holiday starting tomorrow with stops in Budapest, Vienna, and Prague before crossing into Germany to attend the Bayreuth Festival to see two Wagner productions (Tristan & Isolde, Parsifal) at the opera house he built to showcase his compositions; the Bayreuth Festspielhaus opened on August 13, 1876. I am also attending a production of Donizetti’s Don Pasquale at the Hungarian Opera House and a concert of opera at Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. It’s not all opera — I have worked in stops for castles and baths and art museums plus goulash, paprika chicken, chimney cake, strudel and lots of coffee. If you are interested to tag along follow me on my personal X profile: @robertcox.

I will work in a few minutes on train rides along the way to respond to Dum Dum and Loverboy as I am now well satisfied that Fedex’ing me a hard copy of their defamation complaint is not valid service here in Ireland.

I am happy to report some GETTING RESULTS news — my exposure of waste, fraud and abuse involving the New Rochelle CLD led to the first-ever competitive bidding for Jazz Under the Stars. That plus competitive bidding for the LINC-ing Futures event in March slashed costs by over $67,000 compared to previous no-bid contracts. Here’s how.

Why New Rochelle has dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into jazz, the least popular genre of music in America, is perverse.

A little housekeeping…

Important Update: Discontinuation of Our Basic Tier Subscription

As of September 1, 2025, I will no longer offer Basic Tier subscriptions, priced at $5 per year. For Basic Tier subscribers, you will continue to have Basic access until the end of your current billing period. After that, it will not auto-renew, and you’ll need to upgrade to Premium Tier ($7/month, discounted to $70/annual). Many readers will recall, this was always part of the plan since early 2024, to transition from the old Substack business model (they did not charge for every account, free or paid) to our new Ghost business model (they do charge for every account, free or paid). Given this, I was no longer willing to carry thousands of free accounts so offered a nominal fee option — $5 a year — to allow unpaid Substack readers to move from free to paid subscriptions on Ghost over an extended period of time. The goal is that by August 31, 2026, there will be only one subscription level, Premium Tier, which will be renamed as simply “Subscriber” (or something like that). I appreciate your support and want to make this transition as smooth as possible—please reach out to me if you’d like assistance with upgrading.

I continue to follow the Jerrel Garris case. I have done more reporting on this than anyone. The latest was: Recent Court Filings Show $200,000 of New Rochelle Settlement Goes to Garris Son. It is a straight news story on Talk of the Sound (as opposed to my opinion and commentary on Words in Edgewise). Despite this a commenter on the TOTS Facebook page went off on me, “Oh wow, here we go again another headline with zero compassion… Does this site ever post anything that isn’t drenched in negativity? I would love to see the writer cover something that actually uplifts or better yet, something that triggers the Black community in New Rochelle to stand up, speak out, and be heard… I wish you as the writer would write more positive things about the city that my family loves and calls home… you’re writing is trash. Point blank.🤷🏽‍♀️”

Oh well, can’t please everyone 😉

But I am pleasing Facebook: