Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Last updated at: 6:04 am pst
|
Memory In A Jar (It's Coming) A few months ago, "researchers at West Virginia University stumbled across a gene in the mouse brain that appears to erase long-term memories. When scientists switched off the gene, the mice developed super-charged memory, able to recall the solution to a maze they'd seen six weeks before, an eternity in mouse time. The discovery is only the most recent in a flurry of breakthroughs that promise a new class of drugs that might help us retain newly learned information and stave off diseases like Alzheimer's." Boston Globe 06/25/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 7:00 pm
Click here for more Ideas stories...
Two Become One The Smithsonian's American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery will both reopen this weekend following six years of renovation, and where once the two institutions shared a building but not a mission, they have been redesigned to function together. "A proliferation of offices and interior walls that once narrowed viewing space are gone, giving way to floor plans that sweep visitors from one museum to the other and back again... As they collaborate to tell America's story through ideas and ideals, one conveys it thematically, the other through portraiture, each celebrating the complex forces and figures that have shaped the country since pre-Colonial times." The New York Times 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:30 am
Unconventional Beauty In designing Paris's new Musée du Quai Branly, architect Jean Nouvel didn't exactly take the easiest road to public acclaim. "Defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric, it is not an easy building to love. Its jumble of mismatched structures, set in a lush, rambling garden on the Left Bank of the Seine in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, hardly conforms to notions of Parisian elegance... Yet for all of its flaws, Jean Nouvel's building creates a kaleidoscopic montage of urban impressions. And once you give yourself over to the experience, you may find it the greatest monument to French popular culture since the Pompidou." The New York Times 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:25 am
Southwest Museum's Makeover - A "Highjacking"? The Southwest Museum is going through a major overhaul, redefining itself. "Some of the museum's neighbors, however, say it's more like a hijacking than a redefinition. Denouncing 'cultural piracy,' the Friends of the Southwest Museum coalition contend that the people behind the move are dodging 'a moral responsibility to maintain and revitalize' the institution's original location. Los Angeles Times 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 6:46 pm
An Abiding Interest In Whistler's Mother "Whistler's Mother is one of the world's most famous paintings... Yet in the recent edition of a prominent art history textbook, 'Whistler's Mother' was omitted for the first time." Boston Globe 06/25/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 6:04 pm
Museums - Priced Out Of Collecting? "Museums and galleries are facing a crisis of acquisition. As the art market booms, it becomes increasingly obvious that we have pitifully meagre resources with which to buy works of art to add to, and keep up to date, our museum collections. How on earth can we increase our collections if works of art cost so much? How can we find new sources of funding?" The Observer (UK) 06/25/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 6:02 pm
That Elusive American Thing "The whole idea of some kind of more fundamental 'Americanness,' seeping into all our art the way the landscape of Bordeaux seeps into its wines, falls apart as soon as you start testing it. What if it turned out, for instance, that all of Jackson Pollock's pictures were actually painted by a Frenchman -- a certain Jacques Saint-Paul Oc -- who got a hard-drinking young American to flog them for him? Someone would be bound to insist that only a Frenchman could have managed all that insouciant paint-dripping, with its Gallic joie de vivre and a soupcon of panache." Washington Post 06/25/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 5:44 pm
Click here for more Visual Arts stories...
Back And Better Than Ever? James Levine is back after missing several months of conducting engagements with an injured shoulder, and reports say that he has lost a noticable amount of weight during his rehabilitation. Levine will open the Boston Symphony's summer season at Tanglewood on July 7. Boston Globe 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:41 am
MD Mutiny Brewing In Seattle Mere weeks after extending the contract of music director Gerard Schwarz, the Seattle Symphony has been thrown into chaos amid what appears to be an open revolt against Schwarz's leadership. Executive director Paul Meecham, whose tenure got off to a rocky start a few years back when he suggested that the SSO might need to look beyond Schwarz, has resigned, and the orchestra's musicians are preparing to publicly release an internal survey expressing widespread dissatisfaction with Schwarz's leadership. One well-respected musician who recently questioned Schwarz's extension in a letter to a local weekly has also been tagged for dismissal from the SSO in what the musicians say is an obvious act of retaliation. Seattle Post-Intelligencer 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 4:28 am
Another Louisville Manager Flies The Coop A tumultuous year continues apace at the Louisville Orchestra, where the chief operating officer is leaving to become executive director at the Portland Symphony in Maine. Louisville previously accepted the resignation of its own ED in the midst of a bitter battle with the orchestra's musicians over a proposed reduction in the number of full-time players in the orchestra, before managing to stabilize its perennially precarious finances without such reductions. Louisville Courier-Journal 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 4:20 am
Ross: Barenboim The Traditionalist Daniel Barenboim leaves the directorship of the Chicago Symphony. Alex Ross likes what the orchestra has accomplished under a conductor he had some questions about ten years ago. "Ultimately, Barenboim is a fiery traditionalist, who can revitalize the most familiar scores." The New Yorker 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 7:35 pm
Group Protests Loss Of Texas Classical Music Station Texas classical radio station KTPB has been sold to a Christian broadcaster. So classical music will go off the air, but not without a fight. "Just because we live out here in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean we have to be a cultural void. This radio station has reached people who have no other access to the arts. Meanwhile, three other Christian music stations lie just to the north on the FM dial." The New York Times 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 6:53 pm
Conducting Left-Overs The Saratoga Performing Arts Center unveiled a new logo with a picture of a left-handed conductor. Nothing unusual about that. Except... how many left-handed conductors are there? The Saratogian 06/25/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 6:14 pm
Click here for more Music stories...
Nationalist Rhetoric: Now With Counterpoint! That Iran's extremist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has nuclear ambitions for his country is no secret - indeed, it's front page news around the world nearly every day. But Ahmadinejad apparently feels the need to trumpet his plans in a more literal sense. He has commissioned a "nuclear symphony" from an Iranian composer, and the work's debut will be given next week in Tehran. adnKronos International 06/26/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:06 am
LA To Double Public Arts Funding Los Angeles County will more than double its budget for arts grants in fiscal 2007, from $2.2 million to $4.5 million. The county board also awarded 5% of a $400 million surplus in fiscal 2006 to cultural institutions. "On the state level, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed a $5.1-million budget for the California Arts Council — a $1.8-million boost that relies on projected income from arts lovers' voluntary purchases of special arts license plates." California ranks last in the nation in per capita arts spending. Los Angeles Times 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 4:54 am
The Arts Center All Dressed Up With No Place To Go The huge Public arts center in West Bromwich, England was supposed to be a wondrous thing to revitalize a town in need. "The Public was meant to open last year, create or safeguard 400 jobs, and attract almost 500,000 visitors. It should have cost £38m. It's already cost £52m, the largest slice of it from the Arts Council. But the real problem is not so much what the building costs. It's working out what the Public is for." The Observer (UK) 06/25/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 5:58 pm
Study: Girls-Only Schools Don't Help A new study concludes that "half a century of research 'has not shown any dramatic or consistent advantages for single-sex education' for boys or girls. 'The reason people think single-sex schools are better is because they do well in league tables. But they are generally independent, grammar or former grammar schools and they do well because of the ability and social background of the pupils'." The Observer (UK) 06/25/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 5:54 pm
Click here for more Arts Issues stories...
Simon Schama - Uncommon Storyteller "Does your typical academic write best-selling 900-page histories of the French Revolution that deliberately omit footnotes? Produce texts mixing scholarship with fiction, to the point where you cannot tell the two apart? Dash off art criticism for magazines like the New Yorker? Teach seditious graduate seminars on Writing History Beyond the Academy"? Washington Post 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 10:09 pm
Colombian Town Rebuffs Name Change Nobel writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez's home town has rejected a proposal to rename itself. "The town's mayor proposed renaming Aracataca after Macondo, the fictional setting for the writer's most famous work, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Mayor Pedro Sanchez hoped the change would bring more tourists to the town. More than 90% of votes cast were in favour of the change, but only half the necessary 7,400 people went to vote." BBC 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 6:21 pm
Click here for more People stories...
New Leadership Model At Stratford "Des McAnuff, who directed this year's Tony-winning musical "Jersey Boys," has been named artistic director at the Stratford Festival, the classical repertory theater in Ontario, Canada. As part of a new arrangement for Stratford, Mr. McAnuff will become one of three artistic directors, along with Marti Maraden, who has recently completed an eight-year term as the artistic director of English theater at the National Arts Center in Canada, and Don Shipley, currently the artistic director and chief executive officer at the Dublin Theater Festival. The team will be led by Antoni Cimolino, who was appointed as Stratford's general director in April." The New York Times 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:37 am
Toronto Theatre Awards Top Honors To "Rings" "The Lord of the Rings took top honours at the 27th annual Dora Mavor Moore Awards last night. Despite some contrary reviews following its March opening, the mega-musical rendering of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy trilogy was the clear favourite among Toronto's theatre cognoscenti, in particular for stagecraft." Toronto Star 06/27/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 10:14 pm
"Phantom" Sets Up Shop In Vegas Other Broadway musicals might be finding Las Vegas a tough town, but "Phantom" has opened in a lavish production. "It reportedly cost $75m to stage, including $40m to create a replica of the Paris Opera house inside the Venetian hotel." BBC 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 6:27 pm
Click here for more Theatre stories...
Getting Hosed At The Bookstore Anyone who's ever bought a book in North America has seen the dual pricing model displayed in the corner of the dust jacket: one price for American buyers, and a considerably higher one for Canadians. The reason for the discrepancy, of course, is that the Canadian dollar has traditionally been far weaker than the greenback. But the American dollar is plummeting these days, and with Canada's loonie now worth upwards of 90 U.S. cents, consumers north of the border are crying foul over having to pay a 30-40% premium on books. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:50 am
Milne Family Won't Regain Pooh Rights "The granddaughter of the creator of children's character Winnie the Pooh has failed in an attempt to regain the copyright on stories about the bear. Clare Milne was challenging a series of licensing arrangements in place since the books were created in the 1920s. In 1983 the present owner - the estate of literary agent Stephen Slesinger - signed a deal blocking AA Milne's family from ever regaining control... Milne died in 1956 but bequeathed the ownership of the copyright to a trust rather than to his family." BBC 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:16 am
Rowling To Kill Off Two Potter Heroes In case anyone was hoping that JK Rowling might reconsider her decision to make the next book in her wildly popular Harry Potter series the last, any such ideas can probably be put to rest with the revelation that two of the principal characters will die at the book's end. Rowling says that she has known how she would end the series since years before she even had a publisher for the first book. BBC 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:13 am
How The New York Review Of Books Came Into The World "When The New York Review of Books made its début–Volume 1, No. 1, dated February 1, 1963, appeared in the midst of a four-month-long printers’ strike at the Times–the idea for an intellectually vigorous books magazine was so perfectly cooked, and its founding editors, Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, so skilled and connected, that an extended family of friends and sympathizers rushed to fill the chairs at a vast table of contents." The New Yorker 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 7:30 pm
The New Jamaican Literature "The literature of Jamaica, which has a population of about 2.5 million and a relatively small publishing industry, has existed as much off the island as on it until now. Traditionally Jamaican literature has been grounded in folklore and rural byways, or has consisted of chronicles of colonialism and of the island's violent political conflicts." The New York Times 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 6:50 pm
Click here for more Publishing stories...
Classical Station Could Survive Ownership Change When Boston classical music station WCRB was sold recently, fans feared that the format would be gone within months. But a new deal could keep the station and its classical format alive, albeit on a different frequency and with a reduced signal. Boston Globe 06/27/06
Posted: 06/27/2006 5:44 am
Does "The Daily Show" Hurt Democracy? "Two university professors have published a study claiming that Comedy Central's 'The Daily Show With Jon Stewart' drives down support for political institutions and makes young people more cynical about government." Los Angeles Times 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 10:20 pm
Click here for more Media stories...
Ratmansky's Big-Theme Thinking "The great thing about Russian writers of the late nineteenth century was their willingness to address, directly, the hardest questions of human life. That tradition was inherited by Russian choreographers. Nijinsky in 'The Rite of Spring'; his sister, Bronislava Nijinska, in 'Les Noces'; Balanchine in most of what he did—at times, you almost turn away from what they’re saying. It’s too much. With Alexei Ratmansky, you don’t have to turn away, or not yet, but the instinct is the same. Unlike most ballet choreographers working in this country right now, he takes on the great themes—love, grief, marriage, death—and looks them straight in the face." The New Yorker 06/26/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 7:32 pm
Music As Captive To Dance "If one presumes that one of the goals of becoming a conductor is to deepen your interpretation of the repertory, conducting for ballet does not do that, because it's about suiting the dance and the demands of the choreographer." The New York Times 06/25/06
Posted: 06/26/2006 5:52 pm
Click here for more Dance stories...
