Riding Laziness To Good Health Want to live longer? A new book says the way to make it happen is kick back and be lazy. "The book begins with an explanation that we are all born with a limited amount of "life energy". If we use it all up quickly - by exercising and getting stressed out - we will die early. If we do very little and live life at a snail's pace, we can eke it out and live much longer. It's a theory that doesn't find much support in the scientific community... The Guardian (UK) 01/11/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 8:55 pm
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Designing A Headquarters For Architects Here's an intimidating project - designing the headquarters for an institution devoted to contemporary architecture. London's Architecture Foundation will be the city's first completely new cultural building in 27 years. From the beginning, the group "was determined that the competition should be as open as possible, not only to well-known names but also to those who had never built. An initial list of 208 entrants from as far afield as Mexico, Japan and Lithuania was reduced to the shortlist of eight, half of whom are based in London, half abroad, but none of whom had built a new building in London. All were paid to produce a design." The Telegraph (UK) 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 7:17 am
Manchester On Spikes Britain's tallest sculpture has been errected. It's in Manchester and rises 180 feet. It's a starburst of spikes "designed by Thomas Heatherwick and took 20 months to put together from 180 tapered steel spikes, connected 22 metres above the ground. To keep it anchored it has foundations weighing 750 tonnes, including a 400-square-metre reinforced concrete slab. The sculpture itself weighs 300 tonnes and leans at an angle of 30 degrees - 10 times more than the leaning tower of Pisa." The Guardian (UK) 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 6:46 am
Perreault: Time For A Virtual Barnes? John Perreault visits the Barnes Collection while it's still in the original. "Yes, the ideal would be to replicate exactly the Barnes art ensembles. But you and I know that only in Artopia are ideals achieved. In real life, time goes by and there are emergencies, fancied and otherwise. Someone might come up with a new way of teaching art that is much more effective than Barnes' juxtapositions. Or people may just become bored with the same old arrangements. So, not only as an educational creation in itself but also as a fallback, the Barnes should create a virtual tour of the museum to record exactly the way the founder of the foundation intended the art to be shown." Artopia (AJBlogs) 01/09/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 9:09 pm
Whitechapel To Double Down London's Whitechapel Gallery is expanding. moving next door to its current location. "The former library space, once the home of the largest collection of Yiddish books in Europe, will provide space for site-specific commissions, the display of rarely seen collections, and a new restaurant, bookshop and education room. It will also display work from the archives, which includes material relating to visits to east London by artists including Picasso and Rothko. The architects are Robbrecht and Daem." The Guardian (UK) 01/12/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 8:29 pm
Student Appeals Barnes Move Decision A Barnes Foundation art student is appealing a ruling last month that permits the Barnes to relocate to downtown Philadelphia. "I don't want the art to be relocated away from where it is suppose to be. I was disappointd in the court's decision and felt the evidence did not support the decision." Philadelphia Inquirer 01/11/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 6:26 pm
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Classical Music Cuts Crime In London Underground London's Underground has been piping in classical music into some of the most crime-ridden stations in the system. "Mozart and Pavarotti broadcast through loudspeakers has resulted in a drastic reduction in anti-social behaviour by gangs of youths. It is not that the music has a soothing effect - the gangs hate it and it has driven them away." London Evening Standard 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 8:49 am
SF Symphony Gets Major Funding For Multimedia Project The San Francisco Symphony gets a $10 million grant - the largest in its history for use in 'Keeping Score: MTT on Music,' the orchestra's multimedia effort, started last year, to build new audiences for classical music. The gift will be delivered once the Symphony raises $10 million during the next three years. "Keeping Score" was initiated with a two-part national television show last year, which featured Thomas and orchestra members talking about Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony and then performing the piece." San Francisco Chronicle 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 8:43 am
2004 - Great Year For Concert Business America's live-concert business did well in 2004. "The concert business not only survived 2004, it hit a new high of $12.8 billion in revenue, according to a report released yesterday by the trade publication Pollstar. That figure is a 12 percent jump over 2003, when the industry took in $12.5 billion" Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 8:37 am
Israeli Opera To Perform Beethoven In Buchenwald "The New Israeli Opera Tel Aviv will participate in the controversial staging of Beethoven's prison-based opera "Fidelio" at the site of Buchenwald concentration camp, German organisers of the production announced on Tuesday. The controversial production is the brainchild of Giancarlo del Monaco, guest artistic director of the new Erfurt Opera House." Expatica 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 7:27 am
Where Are America's Music Geniuses? "What musical geniuses has America produced? From the nineteenth century, the pickings are slim. If the idea of musical genius is defined by Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert , Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, Stravinsky and others in the list of immortals, it can't be appropriate to consider Louis Moreau Gottschalk, Stephen Foster, Scott Joplin in that category, however remarkable and special their gifts and contributions. In the 20th century, Copland, perhaps, Gershwin, but then when we talk about Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, to pick a few others from a longer list, the term genius seems inapplicable." San Francisco Classical Voice 01/11/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 9:18 pm
Haydn - Admired From Afar "Today, nearly all of Haydn’s music is available on CD—but he remains a composer who is more admired than played, at least in the concert hall. No celebrated conductor or instrumentalist champions him; no stylishly written English-language narrative biography has yet been published. The absence of such a biography from the extensive Haydn literature helps to explain one reason for his comparative obscurity, which is that his life, though interesting, was not notably eventful." Commentary 01/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 8:54 pm
SF Opera Narrows Director Search David Gockley, the visionary longtime general director of the Houston Grand Opera, has emerged recently as a leading candidate to take over the reins of the San Francisco Opera... San Francisco Chronicle 01/11/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 6:36 pm
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Proposed California Arts Budget Lowest Per-Capita In US The California Arts Council has a new director - Muriel Johnson, a veteran Republican politician and arts advocate from Sacramento. But she won't have much to work with. The $3.2-million arts budget governor Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed Monday means that California again will likely rank last in the nation in per-capita state spending on the arts. Los Angeles Times 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 8:35 am
TicketMaster Starts Arts Division American ticketing behemoth TickeMaster has established a new division for the arts. "Ticketmaster sold 100 million tickets valued at $4.9 billion in 2003. It serves more than 8,000 clients worldwide." Los Angeles Business 01/11/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 6:12 pm
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Charismatic Director Steps Down In Minneapolis Evan Maurer is stepping down as director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. "A burly former rugby player with a doctorate in Renaissance and modern art, Maurer has been for years the welcoming face of an institution that was once regarded as a venerable but stuffy cultural dowager. In his heyday, Maurer seemed to be everywhere, serving on civic art committees, showing up at other museum galas, giving impromptu tours of the institute's collection and even helping kids into the new strollers the museum provides for tots." The Star-Tribune (Mpls) 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 7:11 am
Sontag Would Have Hated The Reviews Of Her Death Carlin Romano is apalled by many of the things written about Susan Sontag after her death. Why all the false cliches? "If Sontag had lived for another decade, the esteem in which many international critics held her might have won her the Nobel Prize for literature. Why, then, should the cliché persist that she remained primarily a critic? Might it be that "appreciation writers" -- praising her for always thinking for herself -- couldn't do so themselves? That "appreciators" who celebrated her indefatigable reading couldn't be troubled to read her fiction and enter a judgment of their own? That American media, only attentive to intellectuals when they bark out something outré, insisted on reducing her to a highbrow sound-bite babe?" Chronicle of Higher Education 01/11/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 6:50 pm
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Chorus Line Back On Broadway Sixteen years after it closed a record-setting run at the Shubert Theater, Michael Bennett's landmark musical about the lives of Broadway dancers is to be restaged with the help of three of the original production's creators: the composer Marvin Hamlisch, the designer Robin Wagner and the choreographer Bob Avian. The New York Times 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 7:35 am
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Is Google's Library Deal Legal? There's one problem with Google's deal to put online millions of library books. "It is not at all clear that Google and these libraries have the legal right to do what is proposed. For work in the public domain, the right is clear enough. But for work not in the public domain, Google's right to scan — to copy — whole texts to index is uncertain at best, even if it ultimately makes only snippets available. When permission has been given by the copyright holder, again there's no problem. But when permission has not been secured, the law is essentially uncertain. If lawsuits were filed, and if Google and its partner libraries were found to have violated the law, their legal exposure could reach into the billions." Los Angeles Times 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 8:02 am
Reinventing Book-Of-The-Month The Book-of-the-Month Club is reinventing itself, updating to try to compete in internet age. "The popularity of Internet booksellers and the ubiquity of heavily discounted hardcover books at warehouse clubs and mass-market retailers have combined to make the Book-of-the-Month Club - and other general-interest book clubs - far less important in the selling of books in the United States." The New York Times 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 7:42 am
Mississippi Libraries Un-Ban Stewart Book A Mississippi public library board has reversed its decision to ban Jon Stewart's book "America" after waves of protest. "The board voted 5-2 Monday to lift the ban, and the book was returned to circulation in the system's eight libraries Tuesday. "We have come under intense scrutiny by the outside community. We don't decide for the community whether to read this book or not, but whether to make it available." Yahoo! (AP) 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 7:31 am
- Previously: Mississippi Libraries Ban Stewart Book Librarians in two Mississippi counties have banned Jon Stewart's best-selling "America (The Book)" because of a picture in it depicting the Supreme Court justices naked. "The book by Stewart and the writers of 'The Daily Show,' the Comedy Central fake-news program he hosts, was released in September. It has spent 15 weeks on The New York Times best seller list for hardcover nonfiction, and was named Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly, the industry trade magazine." Yahoo! (AP) 01/09/05
Author Sues Da Vinci Code Author For Plagiarism Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown is being sued, accused of plagiarism in his best-selling book. "Author Lewis Perdue has brought the copyright action at a court in New York, claiming Brown lifted plot material from two of his books - The Da Vinci Legacy and Daughter of God - and used it in The Da Vinci Code, which has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. But Brown is already suing Perdue for making the plagiarism accusations." The Scotsman 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 7:14 am
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Split Of The Titans Bob and Harvey Weinstein are leaving Disney. But the split is a complicated one, involving scores of projects and relationships that muct be untangled. "Disney executives and representatives of Miramax, which is owned by the Burbank-based company, are expected to discuss later this week or next which creative projects the Weinsteins, who have been in testy negotiations over their contracts, will be allowed to take with them as they exit Disney. 'This may be a divorce, but it's a divorce with children'." The New York Times 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 7:38 am
Needed: A New Internet Strategy For Movies The director of Blockbuster Video in the UK says it's time to get serious about a movie strategy for the internet. Films should be released simultaneously in all countires, he says. He also said that "film studios should follow the lead of the music industry and look at ways of releasing films on the internet where they can be downloaded legitimately. He called for downloads, DVDs and VHS to be made available at the same time films are released in the cinema." BBC 01/12/05
Posted: 01/12/2005 6:42 am
Is Bush Good For Indie Film? Reagan was good for independent filmmakers. "As we enter Bush's second term, the country's extreme rightward turn could ignite the type of movie renaissance not seen since eight years of nuclear proliferation, HIV discrimination, and materialist greed helped produce the American independent film movement of the late '80s and early '90s. If the careers of Todd Haynes, Spike Lee, and Steven Soderbergh were all launched during the Reagan-Bush regime, imagine what's possible over the next four years." Village Voice 01/11/05
Posted: 01/11/2005 8:18 pm
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