Archives for January 2004

From the Associated Press:

Robert Harth, who became the head of Carnegie Hall days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and led America’s premier classical music venue into an adventurous new era, has died. He was 47.

The hall’s executive and artistic director was found dead Friday evening at his apartment near Carnegie Hall, said Ann Diebold, a spokeswoman at the hall. She said he suffered a heart attack.

Harth had planned to announce the hall’s new season on Tuesday, including the second year of programs at the Judy and Arthur Zankel Hall, the $72 million, 644-seat hall that sealed Harth’s reputation as a cutting-edge arts administrator.

Harth spearheaded an eclectic blend of programming at Zankel, from new classical compositions, jazz and rock to avant-garde theater that drew a wider audience than usually attends Carnegie performances.

Courtesy of Pejmanesque, this story from the Washington Post:

The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding A students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.

As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways — on the advice of school lawyers.

After a few parents complained that their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, lawyers for the Nashville school system warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission.

Some schools have since put a stop to academic pep rallies. Others think they may have to cancel spelling bees. And now schools across the state may follow Nashville’s lead….

Read the whole thing here. Unless, of course, you live in Nashville, in which case I guess I shouldn’t say that, for fear of diminishing the self-esteem of those who can’t read, and thus getting hauled into court.

Which reminds me (excuse the enharmonic modulation) that one of the things Sarah Weinman and I talked about at lunch the other day was the potentially fearful prospect of libel suits against outspoken members of the blogosphere. Believe me, it could happen, and then some, and I very much doubt that more than a handful of us bloggers have thought about it.

As you know, I believe in the amateur culture fostered by the blogosphere, and support it enthusiastically. But I did learn two things from my years of 9-to-5 work on a big-city newspaper that are highly relevant out here in the sphere:

(1) How to edit my own copy.

(2) How not to commit libel.

Back when I was on the editorial page of the New York Daily News, we were given regular updates on the evolving state of libel case law. What’s more, our copy was scrutinized by editors who knew a thing or two about libel (in some cases because they’d been sued). I’m not saying that made me libelproof, and I hope it didn’t make me unreasonably cautious, but it did make me aware of the perils of preemptive litigation in a way I suspect most bloggers are not.

Enough of these grim reflections. I want to go out and play in the cooooooold weather. But I did want to pass them on to any of you who don’t have anything better to do than sit at your computer on a Saturday afternoon.

This is just to remind you (yet again, and probably not for the last time) that Our Girl and I will be making our joint radio debut this Sunday night, opposite the Super Bowl.

For information on how to tune us in, go here.

In other news, I finished my Kandinsky-Schoenberg essay, then took a sixtysomething musician friend to the New York State Theater to see New York City Ballet dance an all-Balanchine program, Donizetti Variations, Apollo, and Serenade. He just discovered dance last month, and these were his very first Balanchine ballets. To say he was blown away would be a considerable understatement. In fact, he was reduced to near-blathering, which is no surprise. I’ve taken a lot of people to see their first Balanchine ballets, and they tend to blather all over the place afterward, the same way they do the first time they see Paul Taylor’s Esplanade or Mark Morris’ L’Allegro or Merce Cunningham’s Sounddance, three other great dances that have a way of overwhelming the novice viewer.

I particularly liked one thing my friend said about Serenade: “I kept wishing I could stop the action and point at all the beautiful things on stage, so that we could talk about them.” I know just how he feels. The first time you see a dance like Serenade, the events fly by so fast that you start to feel swamped by the dizzying onrush of beauty.

The good news is that NYCB dances Serenade a lot, as do most Balanchine companies. Like all the great Balanchine ballets, the more you see it, the more you see.

Courtesy of BuzzMachine, this posting from John Robb’s Weblog:

There are three ways to build a hot weblog.

To be a connection machine (people with huge blogrolls and/or RSS lists that point to other weblogs — they do add their two cents and sometimes their thinking).

To be a name dropper (people that imply they understand what is really going on — and you don’t — given their personal connections that they constantly let you know about).

To be an ideologue (people that support a single cause with unquestioned faith).

Here are the ways to build a second tier (but still popular) weblog:

To be a thinker (people that delve into topics with intelligence and/or wit).

To be a topic owner (people that own a topic and report on it with unquestioned knowledge and depth).

To be a voice of outrage/affirmation (people that critique others as often as they can).

To be a cool hunter (people that find the newest of the new, strange and interesting).

Which one are you? Are there more categories? Am I wrong?

I think Mr. Robb forgot this one:

To be really, really funny (especially in your use of That Word).

And judging by the way our Site Meter has been bouncing around for the past few days, I’d also be inclined to add this:

To be publicly accused of hyperendowment by a really, really funny blogger.

Memo to all of you who visited “About Last Night” for the first time this past week in search of whatever it was you were searching for: I’m sorry you didn’t find it. But you’re welcome to stick around anyway.

From the Daily Telegraph:

The head of a once-secret Russian committee that maintains the embalmed body of Vladimir Lenin denounced calls to bury him yesterday and vowed to preserve the revolutionary for generations.

Members of the Mausoleum Group still tend to his body 80 years after their predecessors embalmed it.

Valery Bykov, head of the 15-man group, criticised politicians for using this month’s anniversary of Lenin’s death to reopen a bitter debate over his future. “These people are mostly fools,” he said of a broad spectrum of politicians who want Russia to bury Lenin, close his tomb and let his legacy lie. “They have left no mark on history and never will, they are of no interest to us,” Prof Bykov said.

Opinion polls suggest growing support for removing Lenin from Red Square. There was constant debate over the issue during Boris Yeltsin’s presidency. His successor, President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB spy, has discouraged such talk, although he has restored the Soviet national anthem and encouraged Russians to be proud of their history under communism.

Prof Bykov is the fourth man to lead the Mausoleum Group since scientists were summoned to the Kremlin to freeze the decomposing body of Lenin, who died after a fourth stroke on Jan 21, 1924. They also removed and studied his brain in the search for the source of genius.

Prof Bykov’s team checks Lenin’s body every week for damage caused by the lighting in his mausoleum or changes in temperature or humidity.

They treat it with a chemical solution developed in secrecy and periodically change his clothes. “Lenin is in a fine state and we will make sure he remains so for our descendants,” Prof Bykov said. “We can guarantee preservation of his body indefinitely, certainly for a century and more.”

The Mausoleum Group also mummified and helps to maintain the bodies of Mao Tse-tung and Ho Chi Minh. It is based at Moscow’s Biomedical Technology Centre. Some say the basement holds Lenin lookalikes ready to take his place in Red Square if his corpse crumbles. Prof Bykov denies this.

Golden Rule Jones posted (scroll down a bit)
some really funny excerpts from Joe Orton’s play Loot, which reminded me that it’s been a long, long, long time since any of Orton’s plays were revived in New York. I sure would like to write about one (ideally What the Butler Saw, though Loot or Entertaining Mr. Sloane would do just fine). And while I’m no kind of Anglophile, I can think of any number of other modern English plays it would be a pleasure to see and review, among them No

From Cup of Chicha:

Author photos for literary fiction — that most introverted of artforms — try to squeeze intellectual noblesse out of a writer’s physiognomy and convince us that “depth” has a surface appearance; thus, in my opinion, author photos are funny. And how funny they are is in direct proportion to how seriously they want to be taken. The more they try to signify “thought,” the more their authors look like what they’d hate to write: clich

We’re gradually trying to make “Sites to See” a useful one-stop navigation tool for anyone interested in arts coverage in major American newspapers. Take a look at the right-hand column and you’ll find direct links to arts and book sections and pages in the New York Times, the New York Observer, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, and the Baltimore Sun.

Conspicuously missing from this roster, alas, are the Los Angeles Times, which segregates all of its arts and book coverage behind a pay-only firewall, and Terry’s own Wall Street Journal, which is very restrictive in the cultural coverage it makes available for free on the Web. We hope these papers change their mind, and if they do, we’ll let you know.

We’re interested in linking to the Web sites of other newspapers which offer serious arts coverage that might be of interest to readers elsewhere. Keep us posted.

In addition, we’ve also reorganized “Sites to See” into four separate categories for greater ease of use. From the top down, they are:

(1) Blogs and personal Web sites primarily about the arts (though they may touch on non-art-related subjects from time to time)

(2) Art-related non-blogs and informational sites

(3) Art-related newspaper sections and magazine sites

(4) Interesting blogs and Web sites not primarily about the arts (though they may touch on art-related subjects from time to time)

We hope you find all these changes helpful. If not, say so.