Why Do They Hate Us? Well, We Gave Them The Idea. Since 9/11, the mainstream media can't get enough of the question: 'Why do the terrorists hate us?' The answers tend to divide along political lines, but there is very little question that many in the Muslim world view the West as decadent, materialistic, imperialist, and dangerously secular. "But how did such ideas develop? One surprising source turns out to be a little-known group of 20th-century European intellectuals. They passed these ideas on to small groups of ardent followers, but their books and pamphlets gradually shaped a worldwide subculture of belief and devotion." The New York Times 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 8:23 am
Is Pulling Rank A Social Injustice? When a power-hungry boss, an overzealous coach, or a powerful politician uses his perceived authority to slap down an underling, most people would label the guy a jerk, a bully, or worse. But Robert Fuller is taking it one step further, accusing such types of "rankism," a serious social injustice which points up the need for society to begin tearing down traditional structures of rank, or at least to demand better treatment from those in authority. Fuller, a prominent physicist and past president of Oberlin College, is proposing some controversial societal changes to combat rankism, including the abolition of university tenure. The New York Times 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 7:54 am
All Those Museums In Search Of An Identity "Just as New York is shaking off its sorrows and crawling out of debt, making new claims on the world stage with a bid for the Olympics, our museums seem to be going through weird convulsions, falling apart, abandoning their collections, being hijacked by trustees or suffering delusions of grandeur. This is their most precarious moment in many years." From the "perennially insecure" Whitney to the dumbed-down Brooklyn Museum to the cash-strapped Guggenheim, it seems that none of the city's venerable art institutions are safe from the new malaise. The New York Times 07/11/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 10:02 am
Gehry's New Chicago Landmark "It's hard to say which part of Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion, opening Friday as the $50 million centerpiece of Chicago's new Millennium Park, is the most striking. Is it the bandshell itself, with its 50-foot steel-and-glass doors that roll in and out from the sides? Is it the almost baroque proscenium... that frames the stage with a 120-foot-tall fantasia of billowing shapes clad in brushed stainless steel? Or is it the metal trellis that crisscrosses like a vast spider-web above the heads of the potentially 11,000-member audience? Whatever the answer, it's clear that many people are happy with the combined result." Chicago Sun-Times 07/11/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 9:36 am
Please Hand Cancel "A small London gallery has been told by Royal Mail to destroy prints showing postage stamps of the Queen in a gas mask - and tell them of anyone who owns copies. The series, Black Smoke, Stamps of Mass Destruction, was created last year in protest at the Iraq war by James Cauty, a former member of the art-world pranksters and rock musicians known variously as KLF and the K Foundation." The UK's postal service is claiming that the works violate its copyright. The Guardian (UK) 07/09/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 8:54 am
Is Sotheby's Trading In Forgeries? This year, Sotheby's came within hours of auctioning off what it claimed was an authentic painting by the Russian artist Ivan Shishkin. The asking price was £700,000, a huge number, especially when it turned out that the painting was actually a forgery created on a £5,000 work by an obscure Dutchman. The backstage fallout from the near-auction has been swift and cutting. "Behind the scenes there are growing recriminations in the secretive world of Bond Street dealers. One accuses Sotheby's, which dominates the market, of lack of competence." Others are alleging that this is hardly the first time the auction house has been duped. The Guardian (UK) 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 8:45 am
Axelrod Strads Can't Travel To Canada "The efforts of Stratford Summer Music to bring the Axelrod Stradivarius String Quartet to Canada for a series of concerts have fallen through -- and have left the Stratford concert presenter and Washington, D.C.'s Smithsonian Institution pointing fingers at each other." The quartet plays on instruments worth $50 million, and the Smithsonian has clamped down on how often it allows them to travel in recent years. What actually caused the breakdown in this case is still murky, but the connection of the instruments to now-incarcerated philanthropist Herbert Axelrod is high on the list of speculative hang-ups. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 10:30 am
Juilliard's New Fundraising Strategy This week, the Juilliard School, possibly the world's most famous training ground for classical musicians, will put on a benefit concert featuring... um, Elton John? "The benefit is only one of the renowned music school's latest fund-raising strategies, part of an effort to find new donors to support a major capital and endowment campaign estimated at around $290 million. The funds will be used to expand the campus and increase the scholarship money available for students." Crain's New York Business 07/12/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 9:52 am
A Good Year In Philly, Mostly It was a good season for classical music in Philadelphia, but there are more than a few storm clouds on the horizon. The city's music critics go over the good ("Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia music director Ignat Solzhenitsyn went several extra miles with Shostakovich's darker-than-dark Symphony No. 14"), the bad ("the elimination of the city's arts and culture office by Mayor [John] Street"), and the profoundly worrisome ("Now that most listeners have tired of talking about the acoustics of the Kimmel... let's not forget that the city spent $265 million to build a great orchestra hall and didn't get one.") Philadelphia Inquirer 07/11/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 9:43 am
NY Phil Cancels Tour The New York Philharmonic, battling deficits and deep into contract negotiations with its musicians, has canceled a tour of Europe scheduled for September, saying that the Spanish presenters couldn't guarantee the necessary fees to keep the tour in the black. This is the third time in the last calendar year that the orchestra has canceled a tour, but Philharmonic officials insist that a fall 2004 tour to Japan and South Korea is not in danger. The New York Times 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 8:16 am
A Bloody Awful Comedy Mozart's Abduction from the Seraglio is supposed to be a comedy. Comedies, as a rule, do not include "scenes of copulation, fellatio, rape, torture and mutilation." Comedies do not end with the protagonists littering the stage as corpses. And yet, this is the much-criticized approach being taken to Seraglio by Berlin's Komische Oper. People are walking out of the production in droves, and newspapers are braying about misuse of public funds. So why even attempt such a bloody and controversial production? Well, every show thus far has sold out. "It could also be that shock treatment is just what's needed to jolt some outmoded art forms back to life." The New York Times 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 8:10 am
Dyke's Golden Parachute When BBC director general Greg Dyke was forced out following the Hutton Inquiry, BBC staffers protested and many commentators bemoaned the loss of Dyke at the helm of Britain's largest broadcaster. But as it turns out, Dyke was able to laugh all the way to the bank, with a £456,000 severance package. BBC 07/08/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 9:27 am
Gardeners Can't Like Beethoven? This August, just like every year, the BBC will devote a sizable chunk of its schedule to presenting the BBC Proms, the world's largest classical music festival. But its choice of host this year has some devotees in a snit: Alan Titchmarsh, host of a popular gardening program. But Titchmarsh is firing back at the highbrow crowd: "I was rather amused that people thought it was all right for a newsreader to present the Proms, not a mere gardener, as though gardeners, by definition, know nothing about music, which is very insulting to gardeners. I have loved classical music for 45 years... I come to the Proms from the perspective of a shared passion, not as a musicologist." The Telegraph (UK) 07/08/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 8:57 am
The Intellectual Musician Pianist and author Charles Rosen may well be classical music's most important intellectual of the last hundred years. But his devotion to the inner workings of musical style may have led to his reputation as an ultra-intellectual performer who sometimes doesn't see the forest for the trees. "The fact that he has chosen to write about the physical experience of making music... may indeed be a reaction not just to some critics' views of his performances but to the fact that his brilliant reputation as a writer and intellectual has distracted public attention from his considerable career as a concert virtuoso and recording artist." The Guardian (UK) 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 8:31 am
Can Cleveland Theater Bloom Anew? The Cleveland Play House has fallen on hard times both artistic and financial in recent years, but the arrival of new artistic director Michael Bloom seems to be generating real excitement for the future of theater in the city. Bloom talks less about reinvigorating the Play House as he does about reinvigorating the city, with theater as a focal point. "There has been what I would call a 'standard repertory vision' that just kind of assumes people are going to know why you are doing a play. You can't assume that." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 07/11/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 10:51 am
Should The West End Be More Like Broadway, Or Less? London's West End is in trouble, and the debate is on concerning the best direction to take London's theater district. Should the West End be imitating Broadway, where producers "take risks and maintain a buzz"? And should such buzz be more important than maintaining some gauzy image of theatrical integrity, especially if going Broadway puts rears in the seats? "What London needs is a stonking great hit." The Observer (UK) 07/11/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 10:40 am
Shakespeare In The Park Arrives At A Crossroads Poor reviews, philosophical disagreements, and controversies over preferred seating have plagued the New York Public Theater's famous Shakespeare In The Park series in recent years, and the troupe may be rethinking its strategy. Free performances may soon be a thing of the past, for one thing. Still, Public Theater is debt-free for the first time in years, and the company appears to have plenty of options. The New York Times 07/11/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 10:07 am
PBS Takes Aim At FCC Ever since Congress started murmuring about abolishing the supposedly left-leaning and elitist institutions of American public broadcasting over a decade ago, NPR and PBS seem to have been running either to the right or just to blandness. So the fact that an action-packed new cop drama is being produced by public television might qualify as a minor surprise. Even more surprising is that the producers of "Cop Shop" are taking some serious shots at the FCC's recent crackdown on "indecency." Washington Post 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 9:14 am
The Original iPod The Sony Walkman turns 25 this month, and if that doesn't sound like a big deal to you, you're probably too young to remember life without portable music. But Daniel Rubin isn't: "For a mix-tape obsessive, this was like sprouting wings. Countless new soundtracks beckoned. I made running tapes, sunning tapes, sauntering tapes, strutting tapes. It provided groove for the quotidian, put joy in waiting. I was no longer prisoner of Donna Summer or Molly Hatchet on the radio." Philadelphia Inquirer 07/10/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 9:07 am
Bickering Radicals Choose A Leader "For most of its 33 years, Pilobolus Dance Theater has styled itself as a radical democracy, with four artistic directors making decisions in concert. But like so many utopian societies, this experimental collective based here in the bucolic hills of Litchfield County has struggled to live up to its ideals. Friction between the directors — Robby Barnett, Alison Chase, Michael Tracy and Jonathan Wolken — has pushed the troupe to the verge of disbanding in recent years... Enter Itamar Kubovy, an energetic theater director with a knack for tempering backstage rivalries." The New York Times 07/11/04
Posted: 07/11/2004 10:15 am
