The Lit Olympics (Why'd We Forget 'em?) "The world has forgotten that literary 'happenings' were once an essential ingredient of all ancient athletic festivals; for those well-rounded Greek crowds, the 90-pound-weakling writers could be as compelling an attraction as the beefcake that paraded stark naked around the stadium. In fact, we should thank the first Olympics for several crucial breakthroughs in the Western literary tradition—including the pioneering act of self-promotion by a celebrity-hungry author." Village Voice 08/17/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 8:59 pm
John The Baptist's Cave Found? "A quarter of a million pottery shards from small jugs, an underground pool, a foot-washing stone and wall carvings unearthed in a large cave west of Jerusalem could be the first archaeological evidence for the existence of St. John the Baptist, according to a forthcoming book." Discovery 08/18/04
Posted: 08/18/2004 8:09 am
Artist Tows Bus With His Toe As a protest an artist has pulled a London bus 30 meters with his big toe. "Mark McGowan, 38, dragged the 7.5 tonne vehicle on Wednesday in Camberwell, south London. The stunt was in protest against bus lanes and mayor Ken Livingstone's 'ridiculous traffic strategy'." Last year McGowan pushed a nut seven miles down raods with his nose to protest student debt. BBC 08/18/04
Posted: 08/18/2004 7:59 am
Collectors, Please Share With The Masses Critic Blake Gopnik outlines his plan for Washington, D.C., private collectors to exhibit the city's hidden plenty, serious contemporary art, in what he's calling the Washington Collectors' Project. "As the first project of its kind, the WCP would also help to put the city on the art-world map, and would likely lead to copycatting elsewhere." The Washington Post 08/15/04
Posted: 08/18/2004 5:21 am
The Royal Academy's Longest Summer London's Royal Academy is having a dreadful year. Divisions in leadership, accusations of mismanagement, and plenty of general squabbling have muddied the RA's reputation. "Now the talk in London's art circles is that the Royal Academy has lost its way." The New York Times 08/18/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 9:26 pm
Peter's Bad Day At The Art Museum Cartoonist Peter Baage goes to a Seattle gallery and has a (figurative) shouting match with the contemporary art there. "95% of what they're hyping is pure crap, yet if you say as much out loud you'll be looked upon as a clueless Philistine!" Reason 08/17/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 7:26 pm
Phone Tone With new ads on MTV promoting their cell-phone ring tones in advance of their new album's release, the band Green Day is a veritable case study of the blurring between music and marketing. Ring tones are huge business in the UK - a new major source of revenue for the music industry. And now US bands are following: rap stars 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg have recently signed ring tone deals. Consumers seem to want the tones, and U.S. record companies, looking to boost sales, are eager to oblige. The New York Times 08/18/04
Posted: 08/18/2004 2:58 am
The Trumpet King Hakan Hardenberger is consdered by many to be the world's foremost trumpet player. He's on a mission - to stimulate more composers to write for the instrument. "Hardenberger's eagerness to encourage composers to celebrate the trumpet was born of frustration at the paucity of things written for it, but then, he says, 'I started to see it as an advantage. Although I am not a composer, I had to be creative - to look for something new'." The Telegraph (UK) 08/17/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 10:01 pm
Spano's View Of The Present What does it take to direct a festival of contemporary music? A composer? How about conductor? Robert Spano, who is directing this summer's Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. "Mr. Spano has been an inspired choice. He assembled an eclectic program - eight concerts in five days - that touched on everything from the most abstruse essays in rhythmic and harmonic complication to works rooted in rock and jazz, and with classics like Elliott Carter's String Quartet No. 1 (1951) and Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Gesang der Jünglinge" (1956) nestled against freshly minted scores." The New York Times 08/18/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 9:35 pm
Ireland's No Atlantis The Irish National Museum dismisses claims in a new book that Ireland is the mythic city of Atlantis. An archaeologist has "linked Newgrange passage tomb and the Hill of Tara with ancient remnants of the mythical Atlantis- first described by Greek thinker Plato. But National Museum director Dr Patrick Wallace said today that there was no archaeological basis to associate Ireland with the utopian land." Irish Examiner 08/18/04
Posted: 08/18/2004 7:57 am
And On The Left We Have... Culture Who best to represent your city to visitors? How about taxi drivers? The city of Liverpool thinks so. It's looking for drivers who "will be expected to speak about Liverpool's theatres, galleries, concert halls and the city's artistic heritage: 'There's the Playhouse, where the young Beryl Bainbridge trod the boards and Blood Brothers was first done'." The Guardian (UK) 08/18/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 9:12 pm
Culture Disobedience (Will Anyone Be Swayed?) "Artists are mobilizing in historic numbers for the Republican National Convention, volunteering for duty in the Imagine Festival of Arts, Issues, and Ideas, the Unconvention, and other specially organized programs that offer opportunities to sing, act, dance, joke, and otherwise comment on the current state of the disunion. Progressive culture vultures may thrill at the gargantuan menu of politicized performances, screenings, exhibits, stand-up marathons, and concerts planned around the four-day coronation of George W. But if Michael Moore's $100 million-plus blockbuster can't breach the country's red-state/blue-state mental divide, what can we reasonably expect from an army of fringe acts sprinkled with mega-star cameos?" Village Voice 08/17/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 7:39 pm
Gérard Souzay, Baritone, 83 Gérard Souzay, who has died aged 83, sang mélodies for four decades after the second world war; for the first three of them, he was considered the leading exponent of the genre. His mellifluous and supple voice was allied to a bright intelligence in the treatment of texts that manifested itself in everything he tackled. He also had a successful career on the concert platform as a soloist in choral works, but his operatic appearances were restricted to three or four significant roles: he was no great actor. In his later years, he was a rather sad figure, living alone in the South of France, feeling forgotten and neglected." The Guardian (UK) 08/18/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 10:06 pm
James Marcus's Book Boom And Bust James Marcus was the 55th employee at Amazon.com. He came to review books. "He made $9 million on his share options, interviewed the biggest names in American literature and wielded such influence that he could change the fortunes of a little-known novelist or poet with a keystroke. But after the boom came the bust. It was no less dramatic. In months, the value of his shares plunged 95 per cent. Swingeing cuts saw colleagues sacked and escorted to the car park by security guards until, in a final ironic twist, the cutting-edge technology Marcus helped develop rendered him obsolete." The Telegraph (UK) 08/18/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 9:55 pm
Eleven Hours Long (And With Surtitles!) More than 1,000 people bought tickets for "Le Soulier de Satin," an 11-hour-long French play that has been promoted as a dramatic highlight of the Edinburgh International Festival. Actually making it through the performance, however, was another matter. The Scotsman 08/17/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 7:41 pm
The Classics Will Set You Free? On the campus of Brown University in a program called ArtsLit, a teacher named Kurt Wootton is using reading and performance of classic texts to teach literacy to local teenagers from struggling schools. "Like immigrants of earlier generations - the Italian stonecutter tuning his radio to opera, the Irish stevedore reciting Yeats in a tavern, the Jewish tailor viewing a Yiddish production of 'King Lear' - Mr. Wootton sees high culture not as the oppressor of the lowly but as an agent of their liberation." The New York Times 08/18/04
Posted: 08/18/2004 6:43 am
Khouri Admits Some Lies In Book Norma Khouri now admits that she fabricated parts of her best-selling nonfiction book, "Forbidden Love," which tells of her friendship with a Muslim woman murdered by her father for falling in love with a Christian. The author says, however, that she did not lie about the woman's existence or her killing. Yahoo! (Reuters) 08/18/04
Posted: 08/18/2004 5:57 am
- Previously: Khouri Insists Her Book Not A Fraud Norma Khouri is still maintaining her book is not a hoax, even after her publisher pulled the book from stores. "It didn't take them [Random House] long to make up their minds. They gave her until Friday to respond to them and when she didn't respond to them, they pulled the pin on her. They were obviously very anxious to move." Sydney Morning Herald 08/17/04
The 9/11 Report As Literary Success That "The 9/11 Commission Report" has become a best seller may not be solely due to its subject matter. Concerned that the American people be able to grasp its content, the book's authors and editors paid attention to something neglected by many historians and countless writers of government reports: good, clear storytelling. Chicago Tribune 08/18/04
Posted: 08/18/2004 4:55 am
A Renaisance In Christian Fiction As the quality of Christian fiction rises, readers are following. "Moving beyond prose that reads like either a Bible study or a dime-store romance, Christian writers have started a literary renaissance by exploring serious religious themes in everything from futuristic thrillers to historical epics." The Seattle Times 08/16/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 7:43 pm
Radio Network Re-signs With Arbitron Ratings Radio ratings service Arbitron says it has "signed a new deal with Infinity Broadcasting, two months after Infinity shocked the industry by declining to renew its contract and saying it was looking for alternative ratings services." Yahoo! (Reuters) 08/17/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 8:53 pm
Understanding Tudor Anthony Tudor died in 1987, yet "he is still regarded with a certain trepidation. He may be one of Britain's finest choreographers, but his work rarely appears on the UK stage. Although four of his ballets are being performed at the Edinburgh festival this year - three by Ballet West USA, and Dark Elegies by the Rambert Dance Company - it owes more to coincidence than any official celebration of this unsung talent." The Guardian (UK) 08/18/04
Posted: 08/17/2004 10:12 pm
