lies like truth

Jake Shapiro, a former public radio producer and now the founder of PRX, an online marketplace for the distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming, presented a thoughtful discussion yesterday afternoon at the South by Southwest Festival on the relationship between public radio and the Internet — two spaces where he feels very much at home.

Shapiro started by talking about public radio’s current strengths, from its growing audience to reasonably durable business model. (Public Radio has had to figure out a diverse fundraising strategy from the get-go featuring federal and state funding, underwriting, individual donations, and foundation grants.)

Then he acknowledged the challenges facing the medium which included threats to federal funding and changes in access to content brought about in the main by the revolution in digital technology. Plus, there’s the simple fact that public radio, whose mission it is to reach all Americans, actually only reaches a fraction of the population: “We still only reach 10 percent of the country,” Shapiro said.

The core of the presentation was a discussion of five elements that radio does very well — and that newer digital models of audio content production could do well to imitate. These points included:

– have a mission
– tell a story
– curate
– broadcast
– ask for money

Shapiro also told an engaging story about a provocative idea that came out of the early years of Internet broadcasting, which could teach public radio and other companies a lesson or two about how to reward their users.

When Shapiro played the guitar in a band, they signed up in the mid 1990s with a service called mp3.com, which was one of the early Web-based music showcases. When Mp3.com decided to go public in the late 1990s (as every Web startup was doing during the Internet boom,) it offered all the bands on its site — its users — shares in its IPO. The band members cobbled together a couple of thousand dollars and walked away with about $30,000 after the deal was made. The cash enabled Shapiro’s band to travel to go on an international tour. “Why don’t more companies offer their users a shot at the IPO,” Shapiro asked. “It was a great time. We made it big in Korea.”

I’m in Austin for my first ever visit to the South by Southwest Festival. The weather is ghastly and it’s a clusterfuck. But I’m having a great time so far nevertheless.

Caught an interesting panel at 2pm given by husband and wife improv team Lisa and Jordan Hirsch. Their presentation, “Change Happens: Improv for an Unpredictable World” made me think about the many, mostly awful improvised theatre shows that I’ve seen in my time and how improv may have more value as an education and self-help tool than an artistic statement.

The Hirschs’ talk began with the truthism that life is all about improvisation. We improv in everyday life; there is no script for what we do and say each day. As such, learning the sorts of skills that improv actors bring to their work on stage can help people improvise better in real life, off stage.

I buy this idea. I also buy the notion that because life constantly defies expectations and is is in many ways akin to an improv show where the actors don’t know what will happen next, we need to proceed with our lives in a similar fashion. Improv tools can help us tackle the unexpected in a more optimal way.

While I had been hoping for the presentation to be more interactive than it was (pairs of volunteers from the audience were called upon only a few times to demo a few short exercises and this is the SXSW INTERACTIVE festival after all!) and the Hirschs had that annoying married couple habit of saying the same thing at the same time, I found the discussion to be thought-provicative.

I came away feeling like the presenters had made a very strong case for improv as an educational / self-help tool. This wasn’t the intention though. When I asked them in the Q&A session to discuss the notion of improv as an art form versus a coping skills mechanism, the response I got was merely a defense of improv as art. They didn’t address the other side of the equation at all.

“Great improv is a real art form,” Lisa said, encouraging me to check out a documentary that supposedly proves the point entitled “Trust us this is all made up.”

I remain to be convinced about improv as art. But I think it can help people maneuver better in their everyday lives.

I just saw two plays in two different towns over the course of two days which featured two actors dressed up in bear costumes. And in both plays, the bears performed dance routines. Seriously.

The bears in The Ballad of Betsy Paradise, a whimsical and not always coherent drama about the elasticity of time written by Dan Poston and directed by Joy Brooke Fairfield at Stanford on Thursday night, were of the creepy variety. Mustard yellow in color, slightly threadbare and bulbous bellied, the bears had smiling faces and inert saucer eyes. They were the sort of bears that nightmares are made of. In the context of the play, which followed the real and make-believe life of an 11-year-old girl, the bears represented a haunted, lost childhood, something less to be remembered fondly as much as feared.

Contrastingly, in Timboctou, Alejandro Ricano’s hard-hitting and complex drama about American-Mexican relations and, more broadly, mankind’s twin impulses to nurture and destroy itself and the planet at REDCAT in Los Angeles on Saturday night, director Martin Acosta staged scenes in which a pair of actors in polar bear costumes behaved as cutely as possible. The costumes were somewhat realistic and very fluffy. Because one costume held a tall actor and the other a very short one, the dynamic was that of a parent-child bear pair, which further increased the “awww” factor. They clambered around and played in a way that was in stark contrast to the aggressive, serious punchiness of the rest of the action going on on stage, with actors engaged in scenes of violence and ruin punctuated by explosive martial arts-like movements, military marching and a near-constant flow of expletives. At the end of the play, when the bears performed a surreal ballet to a somber piece of music by Handel, the effect was bizarre and slightly chilling. The bears in this play signified a different version of loss from that of the student production at Stanford — a place where animals frolic in a natural nirvana unblemished by global warming.

At this point in my blog post, I ought to be ready to pontificate about what the pairs of bears on stage could possibly mean. But the truth is, I’ve no idea. Their presence will simply have to remain a wonderful curiosity of a weekend of theatre-going.

We’re getting beyond treating classical music performances in more causal settings like bars, art galleries, bookstores and dance clubs as if they were bold and exciting new phenomena.

These types of performances are so run of the mill in San Francisco these days that the “gee golly gosh” factor is thankfully becoming a thing of the past.

This is a good thing, as it means that music that many think of as having a high barrier to entry is now attracting broader audiences from many different walks of life.

This fact was very much in evidence on Saturday night at Cafe Royale, where the latest performance by the San Francisco chapter of Opera on Tap, a loose national collective of opera singers who sing arias from the standard repertoire in bars, was unfolding before a packed house of appreciative, wine- and beer-swilling people.

The audience was pretty diverse. I had a plum spot on the new moon-shaped, red velvet couch in the center of the space. To my right sat a white, middle-aged couple with a small terrier named Eli between them. To my left were a couple of young Asian kids called Frances and Henry. Behind me a trio of guys with pints sat, looking like a bunch of mechanics on their lunch break with pints and paunches.

Operating in a similar vein to Classical Revolution (the amazing, San Francisco-founded organization that plays chamber music before busy crowds in bars and other low-key venues) Opera on Tap’s mission is to bring opera to more people. I think the San Francisco chapter is fulfilling this mission with aplomb.

Its true that some of the singers’ voices weren’t fantastic and the string quartet that provided the accompaniment was clearly sight-reading its way through challengingly condensed versions of the full orchestral scores to warhorses like Carmen, The Marriage of Figaro, Lakme and Ariodante.

But many of the arias were beautifully sung and on balance the imperfections hardly mattered.

Let’s just say that it was simply thrilling to hear the “Habanera” from Carmen sung at such close range and with such commitment. Not even the best seats at the opera house get you this close to the music.

As I watched Steven Epp and Christopher Bayes’ stage adaptation of Moliere’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself at Berkeley Repertory Theatre last night, tedious memories of sitting through countless San Francisco Mime Troupe shows came sharply into focus.

The connection isn’t surprising — Commedia dell’Arte traditions infuse all of the Mime Troupe’s productions as they do Moliere’s plays.

The thing is, while I’ve never been able to get into the Mime Troupe’s schtick — there’s something about the combination of slapstick humor and shallow political commentary that turns me off; it generally lacks subtlety and room for multiple viewpoints – I can usually get behind Steven Epp’s work.

His passion for eighteenth century French comedy usually goes way beyond the ribald types that populate the Commedia style. In his adaptations of The Miser and Figaro, he warps the characters, turns presumptions on their heads and provides political commentary that is as serious as it is funny. Epp’s brand of theatre is right there, in your face. But it also magically manages to keep its distance and elude definition.

But no matter how much Epp (who plays the play’s antihero, Sganarelle) and Bayes insist that “laughter is the best medicine” in their adaptation of A Doctor in Spite of Himself, the giggles ultimately fail to fully cure. The acting style is way too helium-filled and larger-than-life, the trashy allusions to contemporary pop culture (which include everything from Lady Gaga and Abba songs to quips about the present Republican party presidential race contestants) don’t provide much in the way of meaning, there are no changes to the high-octane mood and one gets easily tired of the constant tits-n-ass jokes. As such, there’s little in the production to offset what with more tempering could potentially be an hilarious and incisive commentary on the state of today’s broken healthcare system.

That being said, I love the theatricality of the piece. My favorite conceit is the seamless link between the larger-than-life Commedia-focused actors and their corresponding tiny puppet personae. In some scenes, actors walk behind a puppet theatre set up center stage, then their puppet selves continue the trajectory by traversing the puppet stage, before the real actors take over the action on the big stage once the puppets have reached the other side of their smaller world. This gambit has the effect of making the actors, no matter how large they seem, shrink before our eyes. Thus the human drama is reduced to a “storm in a teacup.” Our problems and passions are succinctly and potently cut down to size.

Epp and Bayes intend the production to be first and foremost a piece of entertainment, with satire coming in a distant second. They reveal as much in the program notes. But in order for laughter to truly act as medicine, we need also to be able to taste some of the bitterness of tears.

In 2007, a group of theatre professionals in the Bay Area, me among them, decided it was time to get some rigorous, honest discussion going about the local performing arts scene beyond the dwindling pages of the local media. We did this because as in many arts communities, arts people around here tend to avoid genuine in-depth, critical conversation about the work being made on our stages. We wanted to break down conventional barriers separating artists, technical staff, managerial personnel and critics in an effort to confront both the good and bad elements we perceived on the Bay Area arts scene and its relationship to performing arts work elsewhere.

So we started a periodic gathering of theatre professionals and others immersed in theatre (even if they make their living another way) to talk about all manner of theatre-related topics. Our Theatre Salons meet several times a year, these days at Z Space in the Mission. Our team of six organizers sets the topic, creates and sends out a manifesto-like program/invitation outlining the salon theme and logistical details and provides the snacks and ambience. Our guests, which vary in number from 25 – 60, bring wine and enthusiasm.

Last night’s gathering was a little different to the usual thing, and I have to say it was better. While up until now, we’ve generally tackled a range of big, abstract topics like “violence on stage,” “the role of the audience” and “criticism,” last night for the first time we discussed an actual play.

We indicated in the invitation that part of the requisite for attending the Theatre Salon was to go ahead of time to Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to see Mariano Pensotti’s El Pasado es un Animal Grotesco (production image pictured above). John Wilkins, a local theatre director and teacher, and one of the core organizers, picked the production on the basis of its positive reviews.

It also made a compelling choice, quite frankly, because it was a foreign production on tour from Argentina. This fact meant that attendees could be openly critical about it without risking offending anyone in the room.

Homing in on a specific production rather than talking about an amorphous theme made for a much more focused, opinionated and diverse discussion. Though most people, myself included, got a lot out of Pensotti’s literary and physically arresting drama depicting 10 years in the lives of a bunch of 20 and 30-somethings, there were several strong cases made against the production. I was swept away by the bold use of metaphor and the uncanny mixture of 19th century novelistic naturalism and 20th century magical realism. But others found the endlessly trundling round stage and half-told stories to be frustrating and boring.

But what was even more exciting about the quality of our discussion was how it went far beyond the stuff of the play itself and into conversation about bigger ideas such as the nature of audience engagement and the role of criticism. We got much further and deeper yesterday with regards to these topics than we did in previous salons where audience engagement and criticism were the focal themes of the evening.

What we’d like to gradually move towards in the future is a discussion about a show that’s produced locally. It’s one thing to have a critical and analytical discussion about a play which was created abroad and doesn’t involve anyone we know. But can we attain the same level of engagement regarding a Bay Area show? That’s going to be much trickier, I think. But it’s a worthy goal to work towards.

Beginnings and endings are very important in art, as in life. The start of something and its concluding moments are the moments in performances tend to make the greatest impact on us. What happens in between these two points somehow doesn’t matter quite so much.

So it was interesting to attend a couple of largely wonderful vocal music happenings over the weekend by The Stanford Fleet Street Singers (pictured raising merry hell on stage,) a venerable men’s student a cappella vocal ensemble, and Magnificat, an acclaimed Renaissance and Baroque music group, and observe how palpable the difference between getting these parts of a performance right or wrong can be.

Fleet Street’s 30th anniversary concert at Dinkelspiel Hall on campus on Saturday night was riddled with amazing beginnings. The group always makes a memorable entrance, bounding on stage like a bunch of students that have just found out that their mid-term exams have been canceled. (They should be so lucky.) The songs all started strongly and purposefully, with different groupings of singers (both from the present ensemble and alumni who had returned to Stanford especially for the event) assembling in the middle of the stage.

Less convincing, however, were the endings. Perhaps it was part of their schtick, but the way in which the first half of the program ended, with the performers simply walking unceremoniously off stage, left their fans in the audience feeling a bit non-plussed. No one knew whether to clap. A lot of the non-singing elements of the performance similarly fizzled out. Comedic skits started out boldly enough, but often lacked climaxes and punchlines. The lack of finality, if intended, didn’t work as a gambit. It seemed very much at odds with the exuberant, engaged singing and adorably geeky personalities of the performers.

Magnificat’s concert of Monteverdi madrigals suffered from the opposite problem on Sunday afternoon at St. Mark’s Church in San Francisco, but somehow it didn’t bother me as much. The tight ensemble was excellent at closure. The expert singers and instrumentalists handled the curlicue final cadences with alternate bravura and wistfulness depending on whether the mood of the song was uplifting or sad, and we were never in any doubt as to when the music was coming to a final close.

What seemed much more ramshackle (though not necessarily in a bad way) was the start of the performance and many of the pieces on the program. The musicians more or less wandered in at the top of the concert when they felt like it and noodled around on their instruments. Artistic Director Warren Stewart made an opening speech which only about 50 percent of the audience heard as many of us were still filing in or not yet arrived when he made it. Some of the songs, which came from Monteverdi’s eighth and final book of Madrigals, were performed without Stewart leading. The musicians simply started up. It was hard to tell who would be singing or playing in any one piece. Again, this was very likely a stylistic decision. It certainly made things casual. But I also found it slightly unsettling for some reason.

The difference between camp and Camp was very much in evidence last night at the San Francisco Ballet.

The crucial factor distinguishing the small version of the word from the one with the capital letter is a sense of humor.

First, camp with a small c:

Alexei Ratmansky’s entertaining choreographic take on Camille Saint-Saens classic Le Carnaval des Anuimaux score bristled with cheekiness. The waif-like Courtney Elizabeth, trussed up in a pink, taut tutu, danced the role of the elephant with weighty aplomb. Hens Elizabeth Miner, Dores Andre and Clara Blanco bustled and bossed their way around, ruffling the feathers of the entire menagerie as they passed. And in Ratmansky’s tongue-in-cheek homage to Mikhail Fokine’s famous choreography for “The Dying Swan,” dancer Sofiane Sylve used her impressive height and uncommonly thin, long arms to daring effect. Her limbs crumbled beneath her cartooninshly as she skittered around the stage, causing the audience to titter. But the death was so moving, that the laughter felt uncomfortable.

Now, for camp’s big brother:

Yuri Possokhov’s world premiere ballet Francesca da Rimini, which received its inaugural performance last night, pushed characterization and storytelling way too far and ended up being a total turnoff. Drawing on Dante’s legendary adulterous lovers Francesca and Paolo for inspiration and set to the swirling, lush music of Tchaikovsky, the piece heaved under the weight of its attempt to create emotion and drama. Dante’s poetry is beautiful, but I don’t think I have ever seen such palpably ugly dance in all my life. The core de ballet led with their elbows, Alexander V Nichols’ gates of hell set design, consisting of several massive murky-colored panels covered in bars, had the effect of flattening the stage and making it seem two-dimensional and dark, and poor Maria Kochetkova spent most of her time as Francesca being slung around by Joan Boada’s Paolo like a mistreated rag doll. Her hairdo even came undone as a result of the battering she received. The choreography was fussy and brutish and the whole thing so heavily perfumed that I could barely contain myself from rolling my eyes. I came close to laughter, but couldn’t quite get there.

Helgi Tomasson’s 2011 Trio, a suite in three (or four depending on how you look at it) movements set to Souvenir de Florence by Tchaikovsky which kicked off the evening at the ballet, was largely luminous. The sense of ensemble was particularly striking, as was the clarity of Tomasson’s minimalist choreography . The only thing that I didn’t quite understand was the use of slavic folkdance-inspired steps in the third movement of the piece.

Last night’s performance goes to show how Tchaikovsky’s music — which is inherently dramatic and danceable — can be used to great and poor effect. Tomasson got the balance elegantly right; Possokhov crashed and burned.

Last night’s remarkable performance by Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Davies Symphony Hall as part of the San Francisco Symphony‘s American Orchestras series for its centennial celebrations reminded me that I am still awaiting the release of the new podcast series that the SF Symphony is supposed to be releasing this season around each of the residencies by top-tier visiting orchestras from around the country.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic came through last October but the accompanying podcast of the roundtable discussion that went on around the orchestra’s visit still hasn’t been released. Same thing with the Boston Symphony, which popped into Davies in December. I gather that Los Angeles is forthcoming. Why does it take four months to get it out? For an orchestra that prides itself on being at the cutting edge of new media deployment, this seems slightly absurd.

But back to last night’s concert: The highlight for me was Alternative Energy by Mason Bates (pictured.) The work, which is divided into two sweeping movements, takes a kaleidoscopic journey on the theme of energy use through four different locations and times. The first half spans the American rural midwest in the late 19th century and present day Chicago. The second half pitches forward to Xinjiang Province in China a century from now and winds up in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the year 2222.

Bates rarely resorts to musical cliche, though there were snatches of pentatonic scales to be heard in the Chinese section. And the second half of the piece is packed with otherworldly thocks and beeps emanating via a swirling surround-sound speaker system from an on-stage laptop, commandeered in last night’s west coast premiere by the mop-headed thirty-something composer himself.

What’s most gripping about Bates’ vision of energy use across time (from a steam-powered junkyard, to a present-day particle collider, to a high-tech nuclear plant and finally to something more primordial) is how energetic and optimistic it is. The work is riddled with humor — provided in the first half in part by the pitching and sputtering of a loud and persistent rattle and by quirky computer sounds in the second. Plus, the music is utterly kinetic, packed with jubilant rhythms that call Leonard Bernstein most strongly to mind. As I listened, I could picture a ballet company, Chicago’s Joffrey Ballet maybe, dancing to Bates’ music. The work would make the soundtrack for a great programmatic dance work.

It’s rare to hear positive things about our future on this planet. Many people think our energy needs and the greed associated with those needs are the thing most likely to destroy us. Bates’ progressive view of energy use provides an alternative perspective, as refreshing as the thought of solar power in a coal-smoked room.

An informative and disturbing 2006 article about the bird smuggling in Serbia by Djordje Padejski, a colleague of mine on the Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford this year, included the following line:

“Singing birds – most often from the family of finches, thrushes and warblers, buntings, sparrows, warblers, tits, and larks – are sold or smuggled dead or alive; per individual bird the price starts at € 5 and might reach as high as € 150, depending on the market.”

What I want to know as someone who is interested in singing, is this: How can a dead (i.e. non-singing) songbird be of use to anyone?

P.S. Here is the article in its entirety:

Serbia: Open hunt on protected species
27/09/2006
“Bird” mafia in Serbia and Montenegro
It was an Italian police raid “Balkans Birds” way back in 2001, revealing smuggling operation of tens of thousands of dead birds mostly belonging to endangered or protected species, that showed the existence of well organised ‘bird mafia’ in Serbia and Montenegro.
In Serbia, where the birds had been killed, no one among the authorities was publicly “outraged”, and we have been waiting for four long years for the first charges to be raised in relation to this raid, until May 2005, when the Sombor Municipal Prosecutor started criminal proceedings against Ivan Borovac from Sombor and Mira Milićević from Kruševac.
According to a ruling of the Italian court in Vicenza, the two owners of hunting agencies ‘Lube YU’ and ‘Eric Mir’ were guilty of conspiracy to commit crime, crime of smuggling and illegal import of wild animals and protected bird species. The court found that these two companies alone had smuggled into Italy, from 1995 to 2001, over two million birds killed in Serbia.
The Italian police raid at the Gorica border crossing with Slovenia in November 2001 was the biggest ever single capture of a bird load consisting of 120,702 dead birds and at the same time the biggest recorded slaughter of wild bird species in recent European history.
Money and structure of criminal
Regardless of the strong echoes of this well-known affair, in the meantime the birds in Serbia had fallen into oblivion again, precisely because they had no influence over the pensions’ amount, foreign affairs direction and as well as corruption or conflict of interest. Some officials have also made an effort to play down the importance and scope of these criminal activities.
From the Institute for Nature Preservation in Serbia (a state institution in charge of monitoring the condition of protected natural resorts and undertaking steps for their active and passive preservation) we thus saw estimates claiming gross exaggerations had occurred in terms of the scope of criminal activities. At the same time, some politicians openly stated the birds were not endangered and even advocated a “slaughter” of certain bird species.
However, some facts remain undisputed, such as reports by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES). According to these reports, trade in wild and exotic animals annually yields profits of up to some $ 20 billion US, which puts it right behind the drugs and arms trade.
Serbia and Montenegro are among the top five countries in Europe in terms of this type of crime. In
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trafficking, many animal smugglers sell specimens whose kilo is “worth” more than the same weight of cocaine or heroine, claims a CITES statement, urging the national government to take stronger action against the poachers and smugglers.
According to the estimates of several local organisations which are directly or indirectly involved in bird care, close to one million of different bird specimens disappear in our country every year due to illegal bird smuggling, and over half of them are goldfinches, nightingales and other singing birds.
Singing birds – most often from the family of finches, thrushes and warblers, buntings, sparrows, warblers, tits, and larks – are sold or smuggled dead or alive; per individual bird the price starts at € 5 and might reach as high as € 150, depending on the market.
In terms of a frequency of abuse, the second most affected group are the water birds – ducks, geese, herons, grebes, cormorants, waterfowl and other; they are mostly sold dead on the black market, from ten up to € 100 per specimen.
The so-called bastards, birds produced by genetic engineering – crossbreeding wild singing birds with certain exotic birds, are sold for much less money and still alive, with their price ranging from € 100 to € 200 per specimen.
Birds of pray, most often from the family of falcons and eagles, hawks, harriers and kites, are naturally sold alive, with their price ranging from € 500 to incredible € 50,000. Presuming that just one million of the “cheapest” singing birds disappear from Serbia and Montenegro every year, sold at the lowest price of € 5 per specimen, we get to the amazing figure – this business yields the annual turnover of at least € 5 million.
As birds are bought for all kinds of purposes, ranging from consumption to breeding, it is actually not possible to give an estimate of their ultimate financial value, claims the top expert on this issue, Aleksandra Tadić, the Chairperson of the Society for Preservation of Wild Birds in Serbia and Montenegro.
Some birds are definitely intended for the restaurants in Italy, where the price of certain dishes may be as high as € 200, so that it is in any case very difficult to make an estimate as to the actual profit of the “bird mafia”.
– There are three main branches of the bird mafia, says Tadić. – Firstly, there are people who sell live or dead singing birds, and closely related to them are legal and illegal hunting tourism agencies (dead birds smuggling); and the people who sell birds of pray, alive.
The first two branches often have very close relations and tight cooperation, as the agencies engage small poachers and traffickers to transport their goods across the border, or to catch birds, which they normally use for making the hunting easier for their clients. Tadić believes that the Italian tourist hunters are not the only ones behind all this, but that it also involves a criminal network with a structure organised in a way similar to the narcotics mafia. The hunters are at the lowest level of this structure, and the bird processing also includes the local farmers.
Illegal, transportable, makeshift facilities have been erected around the villages in Vojvodina, which
– according to Tadić – is where the birds are being processed. The facilities designed for this type of activity are often moved. These are illegal facilities from which even species of birds protected by law
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leave plucked, headless, with giblets removed.
Tadić claims that approximately one thousand people are engaged in the illegal smuggling, and in addition to hunters and local farmers, it involves workers from the hunting grounds and various state institutions, customs, ministries…
All elements of organised crime are out there. There is a conspiracy to commit crime, since the organisations have the authentic features of the mafia, with huge profit figures, a set up command structure, with clearly defined hierarchy of who gives the orders and who executes them.
The birds mostly ‘travel’ through Montenegro, Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and since not long time ago somewhat less frequently towards Croatia, since the Croat customs service has introduced stricter controls. The border crossings they use are mostly those with no veterinary control.
Novica can do anything
The recordings of the phone conversations which the activists of the Society for Preservation of Wild Birds claim they had recently had with members of the Association of Bird Breeders in Serbia, pretending to be potential buyers, corroborate some of the Tadić’s allegations.
In one of the conversations, for which the Society activists claim took place with the author of the book “Standards for bird evaluation“, the current Chairman of the Executive Board of the Association of Breeders’ and judge for evaluation of the birds, Slobodan Kulić, you can hear:- And if something is not available at the moment, Novica can catch what you want, I just need to tell him… It is possible to get the forest birds at the breeders’, with some minor precaution, since as you know that is forbidden – but nobody will check you at home… I find goldfinch to be perhaps the most beautiful bird species… Well, I wouldn’t discuss the price over the phone… And at the Faculty of Agriculture in Novi Sad they also use my book – says among other things Kulić to the ‘potential buyer’.
A guide – insider
A long-time employee in the hunting tourism (a source who wanted to remain anonymous), who had recently left this profession, says in a statement he gave us that the business of bringing internationals for hunting trips to Vojvodina is very profitable.
He says that an average three-day (weekend) stay of a hunter coming from abroad (mostly from Italy, Germany, Holland) for the so-called “small game hunting“ in Vojvodina, can cost over € 2,000, not including some additional costs, such as travel, visa costs, etc.
The agency charges some € 2,000 per client and depending on the ‘arrangement’, the client must also pay for the guides, who charge at least € 50 a day – states our source.
The owner of the agency which employed him was in very close contact with the former US President, George Bush the senior; another frequent user of the services of this global agency for hunting tourism was also Silvio Berlusconi, the current Italian Prime Minister. So, the list of “high” and “medium” level clientele of this agency is rather long.
He explains that the agency provides the hunting ground in a very simple way. With an hunting
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association, which possesses the right to manage a hunting area, the agency signs an internal contract on ‘leasing’ the hunting ground, that is hunting permits for the period when certain species are ‘in season’ (for instance, quail and turtle dove from 1 August to 20 September).
The agency is also able to get the hunting area for use from the Ministry of Agriculture. At the same time, deals are made with regards to accommodation, international hunters stay at hotels in Vojvodina, and sometimes the agency hires the entire hotel, or resort, which in that case becomes the ‘closed to public’ type accommodation. Of course, only the accommodation facilities close to the hunting area are considered for this purpose.
– Cars meet the groups of clients at the Surčin Airport and both us and them try to attract as little attention as possible during their stay in our country and the best hotels for that purpose are those with restricted access to them – says an insider who did not want either to confirm, or deny stories on the agency’s connections with brothels and prostitution; on hearing this he just laughed and replied: “Well, we serve the people“.
– For entertainment of the international tourists hunters in Vojvodina, the best drinks are always provided, says the insider, and the best food – venison. The only trouble is that they want to take with them what they catch. This is where hunting and hunting tourism definitely cease, and the smuggling starts. Known and unknown tourism chains
And Tadić explains what one such hunting trip looks like: – It involves all sorts of things, prostitutes and drugs, and the hunters shoot all over the place, and as drunk and as high as they usually are they can’t hit anything, so they engage someone to bring the catch – she says adding that the “Balkans birds“ affair concluded seized larks couldn’t have been hit while flying, but that their wings were broken prior to that. – They were actually thrown into air or released to run like chickens, so the bad hunters would enjoy shooting easy targets. And the fact that some exotic bird species, which resemble goldfinches, were found in the load tells us that in some locations they had run out of domestic species, so they had to “engage” the exotic ones.
– Whoever wants can still open an agency here, though the Ministry of Agriculture was announcing they would introduce a serious monitoring of the hunting agencies. These agencies do not have to report who they bring in, or when, it’s enough that they have a registered business – says Tadić. – Hunting agencies are the beginning and the end of the “bird mafia” story, she states.
By checking over the phone, we learned that the “Donavista“ agency from Novi Sad ( www.donnavista.co.yu ) at the moment quite regularly offers hunting of quails, turtle doves and water birds.
It is interesting that this agency, regardless of the fact that it is obviously a potential criminal offence, has posted on its web site, as part of its offer, the exact number of birds that the buyers of a tourist arrangement get, as well as the service of exporting, plus certificate issued by a vet. Of course, this is all posted in English.
It literally says: “40 quails shooting and export“. When I asked the agency employees if my friend from abroad could also take the catch with him, I was first told that they do not recommend that, but subsequently also that “everything can be arranged after we book the trip and agree the details“. Only in person, not over the phone.
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The agency “The Royal Quail” (“Re di Quaglie” – www.rediquaglie.com ), from Doroslova near Sombor, operates quite alright these days, claim the sources from its surroundings, although its owner Count Pjero Arvedi d’Emilei, according to the police, has not visited the country since the end of September last year, when he was arrested under suspicion of intending to smuggle birds to Italy.
At the Tovarnik border crossing, the Croatian customs service seized a load of 8,300 quails and 1,479 turtle doves, weighing a full tone, in a refrigerated trailer truck, which allegedly transported wood. D’Emilei was released from detention and found himself on a plane to Italy within a couple of days.
According to information from Italy, the police there know of d’Emilei, however the Serbian police had not delivered any evidence against the Count to date, oor requested any investigation, so d’Emilei still walks free. This Count and his connections with smuggling of the dead birds were widely reported by the media, and it is also known that he had been present in Vojvodina since at least 1998.
Still, the most interesting fact is that in 2002 the Ministry of Agriculture has awarded the “Gornja šuma“ hunting ground to the Count’s company for management, at the time when the then Minister Dragan Veselinov was a frequent guest at “The Royal Quail” complex. The then Assembly Speaker of the AP Vojvodina, Nenad Čanak, has on several occasions received the Italian Count, who at the time was introduced as a big investor into the development of the agricultural and hunting tourism at the north-east of Bačka.
Much less known in the media, but not on the global bird hunting scene, is the “”Safari International”, registered in Sremska Kamenica, as part of the “International Safaris Corporation“, owned by Sergio Dimitrijevic.
To be more precise, this is Srđan Dimitrijević, who brokered the sale of the Serbian “Telekom“ to an Italian partner, for which he had, according to his own account to an Italian Parliamentary Commission set up due to the irregularity of the whole transaction, received a commission in the amount of 16 million Deutsch marks.
Photographs and offers on the site of this corporation explain what it does. Its activities range from hunting in Tanzania, through Mongolia, Armenia, to Ukraine and Siberia. Croatia and Serbia, and Vojvodina in particular, take up a larger portion of their hunting tourism offer.
As part of a very popular “Salaš 137“ close to Novi Sad, otherwise a meeting place of “ethno-culture“, hunting and fishing fans, a hunting agency is also very active (hunting.co.yu). According to Dejan Đapić, from the Eco Society in Stanišić, the largest number of hunting tourism agencies are located in Sombor and the surrounding area.
End of summer – time for ‘open season’ hunt on quails and turtle doves
Adam Bugar, the Chairman of the Hunters’ Association of the Srednji Banat, who has personally witnessed the organised illegal hunting in the Specialised Nature Reservation “Carska bara“ (where this is, of course, strictly forbidden), says that in the hunting season for quails and turtle doves, from 1 August to 30 September, in the reservation area one can find illegal decoys, and cartridge cases from birdshot bullets used for small game hunting, i.e. birds.
Since a hunter accompanied by a dog using a traditional method can catch three to ten quails in one
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morning, the organisers of the hunt are using the help of the tape recorded decoys with love call of male birds.
When they hear male bird voices, the quails consider that location safe and gather there during the night. In the morning the hunters arrive to carry out a slaughter, killing up to 300 birds which instead of bird dogs are picked up by retrievers.
The catch ends up in the hunting lodge’s freezers where it is kept until the agreed quantity is collected. One cannot help establishing that hunting, and therefore illegal hunting as well, currently takes place at practically all good-quality spots in Vojvodina, since reports on illegal hunting tools are filed continuously.
Reports are filed frequently for the area of the hunting associations “Zapadna Bačka”, “Kurjačica”, “Subotička peščara”, that is Ada, Senta, Sombor, hunting grounds in the surrounding area of Bač and Zrenjanin, and in 2003 particularly intensive in the Biserno Ostrvo near Bečej.
At the moment it is impossible to get accommodation in the “Sibila” hotel, located inside the Specialised Nature Reservation “Stari Begej – Carska bara” near Zrenjanin, as everything is booked until the end of September. The ornithologists’ associations have on several occasions informed the Ministry that there are hunting associations and hunting & tourism agencies which fully specialise in this type of poaching and that their representatives advocate legalisation of this type of kill.
Quail hunting is at the same time fatal for many specimens of the globally endangered corncrake (there is a permanent hunting ban on this species), lark, pipit and many other singing birds, since during the migration they use the same habitats as the quail.
– We are asking for the turtle doves and quails to be put under the regime of permanent closed hunting season, the same as it has been done in other European countries – says Dejan Đapić, from the StaniÅ¡ić’s Eco Society. – Quails and turtle doves are protected in most parts of Europe, and during the migration period we feed them – they use fields and meadows to rest and this is where they are killed on a large scale. Protection by law is necessary also because under the pretence of hunting quails and turtle doves, the species protected by Regulation on protection of natural rarities are also killed.
The Institute for Nature Preservation in Serbia, supports this initiative launched by the Serbia and Montenegro League for Ornithology Action, Society for Vojvodina Birds Protection and Study, and the Eco Society form Stanišić, since there is a continuous fall in population numbers of these species in our region, which is a clear indication of how seriously endangered they are.
According to the data obtained from ornithologists’ associations, during the two months of the hunting season last year, 38,000 quails were killed, which surpasses the size of quail population nesting in Vojvodina. Dragan Simić from the SCG League for Ornithology Action says that over last 15 years alone, the population drop in Serbia and Montenegro is 20 percent for the quail and 15 percent for the turtle dove.
In Serbia, there was a 63 percent increase in the hunting activity on quail over the last years, which is, following the drastic changes in habitat, the second largest danger for the survival of this species in our country.
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In most European countries (Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovenia) turtle dove and quail have been placed since long ago under a permanent regime of closed hunting season, while our legislation allows the shooting of both species from 1 August to 30 September.
Another particular problem is a violation of the legal regulations in hunting. The ornithologists estimate that over 90 percent of birds are killed using forbidden methods (using tape recorded decoy and the five-bullet guns without blocker in the chamber).
Why is Serbia so attractive?
In line with our legislation, hunting, owing and trading in protected wild bird species, as well as trading in unprotected birds, are all criminal offences punishable by prison sentence of up to five years. A user of a hunting ground cannot give the ground or part thereof to another user for management or lease.
By law, hunting for international tourists is organised by local hunting associations and these are mostly organised in Vojvodina. However, law enforcement is what is missing, and the profit is huge, in particular for the Italians, so that they are all too happy to smuggle birds out of Serbia.
Of course, the profit of the local “executors” is much smaller that that earned by the hunt organisers and the agency for hunting tourism. And birds are ordered by quite “ordinary” Italians as well.
Thus the “Balkans birds“ affair uncovered that among one hundred implicated Italians birds were ordered or previously killed by Ansaloni Vittorino from Modena, a tile-layer, Arfini Giuseppe from Valenza, a jeweler, Albiero Renato from Broglia, a professor, Ederle Giuseppe from Verona, Pietro Miglioli from Brescia, Lorenzo Parisi from Latin…
– Hardly anyone knows that hunting of about only 20 species of birds is allowed in Serbia, and these can be hunted under strictly prescribed conditions, says Tadić. – Though they are not on the natural rarities list, quails are also protected by different regulations – closed hunting season, use of allowed types of guns, ban on decoys, etc.
– The problem is not in the law, but in the fact that the hunting associations – hunt whatever they want. Although hunting of the birds of pray, singing birds, herons and some other species is forbidden, they still hunt them, explains Tadić, adding however there is also some hope for the enforcement of the law.
In October 2004 in Niš a sentence was delivered for trafficking and illegal hunting of the birds for the first time in Serbia, and since then 15 more suspended prison sentences were delivered. The real ‘precedent’ was the decision of the Fifth Municipal Court in Belgrade from January this year – a suspended sentence delivered for a single killed bird.
– However, all those held responsible so far are small fry, says Tadić. – Delays in the process for the “Balkans birds“ affair was not done to protect Ivan Borovac and Mira Milićević alone, or hundreds of minor criminals who had killed and caught birds for them, or carried out other business for them, but, rather, in order to avoid mentioning the names of individuals holding various state positions, with whose help the smuggling of our birds has been going unhindered for decades, all of which could be expected at a trial such as this – says Aleksandra Tadić and concludes: – Ministers come and go, but the ‘service’ [Security and Information Agency, former State Security Service, ed.] – does
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not.
EPILOGUE
Causes of biodiversity impoverishment in Serbia
In Serbia today there are around one hundred million birds, 382 species, which makes up 74 % of the bird fauna in Europe. The excessive exploitation in hunting is one of the basic reasons for the disappearance of certain endangered bird species. Recently from Serbia the following species have completely disappeared: black vulture (Aegypius monachus), bearded vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), white-headed duck (Oxyura leucocephala), little bustard (Tetrax tetrax), common crane (Grus grus), and great white pelican (Pelecanus onocrotalus). Criminal activities committed over wild bird species have resulted in a horrifying 20-80 percent range drop in most of our bird species, threatening complete extermination of some of them soon.

I had a curious and somewhat short-winded conversation just now over lunch with a professor of mine at Stanford who is a prominent patron of the arts and teaches a class on the management of non-profit organizations at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

We were discussing patronage of the arts — that is, patronage in the old-fashioned sense of the word. Y’know, the rich and powerful individuals in days of yore like the Medicis, the Duke of York and the heads of the Catholic Church who would back artists like Shakespeare and Michelangelo as a means of showing off their wealth and political acumen.

These days, the work of sponsoring the arts has fallen largely to charitable foundations, and it strikes me that there’s less of a direct link between patron and artist than there used to be, with foundation middlemen performing detailed processes in order to ascertain how to spend a collection of rich individuals’ money or the money of an specific family or individual.

The professor pointed out an obvious point: That the nonexistence of the old style of patronage in this country is due for the most part to the fact that givers can only get tax breaks by sponsoring non-profit organizations rather than individual artists.

I’m not advocating for the old system, where not paying proper homage to a patron could get an artist cut off, jailed or worse. But for some strange reason, I do feel a vague nostalgia for the old way. All those odes written in honor of haughty Queens; and all the frescoed saints with more than a passing resemblance to the people who carried the purse strings.

The contract between artist and patron was much more explicit in Renaissance times. These days, the relationship seems quite faceless and corporate. Which in many ways, I suppose, is a good thing. Thank goodness that poets don’t feel the need to write odes about the program officers at the Hewlett Foundation.

Finally: Does anyone out there know of any good books on the history of arts patronage? I’d love to read something excellent on the subject.

Meyer Sound Laboratories in Berkeley makes audio equipment, especially high-end speaker systems. The company has been doing this since 1979 and its clients include Cirque du Soleil and Celine Dion.

Recently, though, Meyer Sound has moved into an interesting terrain which merges sound manipulation with visual art.

Yesterday, I was visiting Helen Meyer, who runs the company with her husband John, (both pictured above) and Helen took me into an adjacent building which houses a new product entitled the “Libra Acoustic Image System.”

When I walked into the building, all I could see were beautiful, enormous canvases on the walls — displaying the photography of local artist Deborah O’Grady. In the first room, the walls were covered with desert landscape and the acoustics, which were clean enough to hear several conversations going on at once, belied the terra-cotta flagstones on the floor and high ceilings. In the second, which was adorned with images of galactic nebulas, also by O’Grady, the sound was more lively. A chamber music concert would have worked perfectly in the space.

There wasn’t a scrap of wire or a piece of sound-absorbing foam to be seen. That’s because the technology that precisely controls the way the space sounds is embedded in the works of art themselves. The technology is being patented by Meyer Sound.

A Berkeley restaurant has already commissioned the sound optimization art from Meyer Sound and O’Grady. Noisy restaurants strike me as being the perfect place for this invention. They’d also add brightness and audio optimization to otherwise noisy and drab manufacturing plants: An earlier prototype of the panels which currently exists in a manufacturing space on the Meyer Sound campus provides a good example of this application of the technology.

More info about Libra to be found here.

Sound control has never looked so pretty.