Ideas Of Power Laws And The 80/20 Rules Weblogs have been touted as the loosing of democratic speech - anyone can publish, anyone can read. But as there are more weblogs, natural powerlaws are kicking in and predictably some blogs are rising above the rest. "For much of the last century, investigators have been finding power law distributions in human systems. The economist Vilfredo Pareto observed that wealth follows a 'predictable imbalance', with 20% of the population holding 80% of the wealth. The linguist George Zipf observed that word frequency falls in a power law pattern, with a small number of high frequency words (I, of, the), a moderate number of common words (book, cat cup), and a huge number of low frequency words (peripatetic, hypognathous)." Thus too, it appears with the success of weblogs... Shirky.com 02/10/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 6:24 pm Network Solutions... "How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior? As simply as it can be asked, this is one of the most fundamental and pervasive questions in all of science. A human brain, for example, is in one sense a trillion neurons connected in a big electrochemical lump. But to each of us who has one, a brain is clearly much more, exhibiting properties like consciousness, memory, and personality, whose nature cannot be explained simply in terms of aggregations of neurons. What makes the problem hard, and what makes complex systems complex, is that the parts making up the whole don't sum up in any simple fashion. Rather, they interact with each other, and in interacting, even quite simple components can generate bewildering behavior." Chronicle of Higher Education 02/14/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 5:57 pm Visual Arts 4000-Year-Old Body Giving Up Clues To Stonehenge A man buried near Stonehenge 4000 years ago is giving a number of clues about the monument. "The first scientific results, from a burial already regarded as astonishing, are bewildering archaeologists but give clues which could solve the continuing mystery, despite innumerable theories and experiments, of how Stonehenge's four-tonne bluestones were transported 240 miles from Preseli in the Welsh mountains." The Guardian (UK) 02/11/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 10:38 pm Picasso ANd Matisse Come To Queens... This week's opening of the Museum of Modern Arts' blockbuster Picasso/Matisse show has people wondering how MoMA's temporary home in Queens will show itself. The blocks around the museum have been cleaned up, and the museum is anticipating large crowds. “Seeing fine art changes the way you look at the world. I hope that seeing the show here changes the way hundreds of thousands of people look at Queens.” New York Magazine 02/10/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 10:27 pm Reports Of My Death Are... Why do critics so often rush to declare the "death" of painting? "The supposed death of painting springs in part from another misbegotten belief that each new art movement or technology renders earlier ones obsolete, that it is impossible to go backward once something has gone forward. Among the many holes in this theory is its simple defiance of history. The arts long have been cyclical, not just a forward unbroken continuum, and artists frequently look to the past for inspiration and reinvigoration." Denver Post 02/09/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 6:16 pm Tycoon Gives Hamilton Museum $50 Million Art Collection Toronto tycoon Joey Tanenbaum is donating $50 million worth of 19th Century European art to the Art Gallery of Hamilton. "Tanenbaum, a contrarian investor in art as in business, has amassed a flamboyant collection that probes some of the more eccentric corners of art production in that period. Since the 1980s, the pendulum has swung in art scholarship of the period, with interest turning from the well-known work of the Impressionists to the works of French academic and salon painters such as Jean Léon Gérôme and William Bouguereau, as well as Symbolists Odilon Redon and Gustave Doré, and the marketplace has followed suit." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/10/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 6:12 pm Music One Work Wonder Gilbert Kaplan is a former economist who conducts one symphony. Ane he does it very well. His second career "has to be one of the strangest acts of wish fulfillment in musical history, not quite on a par in historical importance with Gustav Mahler's becoming conductor of the Vienna State Opera in 1897, but possessing its own odd grandeur. Mr. Kaplan is doing what he regards as the definitive "Resurrection" Symphony with the orchestra that Mahler conducted when the work was first performed 108 years ago. But the Vienna Philharmonic is one of about 50 orchestras that Mr. Kaplan, who is not a professional musician, has conducted in the Mahler Second Symphony." The New York Times 02/11/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 11:10 pm Big Decline In UK Recordings Sales Sales of recordings are way down in the UK. "Figures out this week will show sales of CDs and other recorded music were down almost 4% last year, says the British Phonographic Industry (BPI). It is understood the figures will reveal the biggest downturn in a single year since the birth of the CD market in the early 1980s." BBC 02/10/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 8:05 pm Recording Industry Contracting Warn Industry Analysts Stock analysts are warning that the recording business is a fading one. "We believe the structural issue of piracy and weak pricing power will continue, and predict that the industry will continue to contract through 2006." The Guardian (UK) 02/11/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 7:34 pm Pop Criticism, Served Fresh Daily How do you stay fresh if you're a popular music critic? NYT critic Ben Ratliff says it's the most difficult thing: "The real challenge of the job - and particularly in writing for a daily - is to keep in motion, always putting more distance between you and what you thought was cool when you were in your early 20s. (You can always admire the old favourites again, but carefully: you must meet them on new ground, as a more developed person.) You have to keep going against assumptions, especially your own. Hipness is a disease, it really is. It freezes thought." Rockcritics.com 02/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 6:20 pm Arts Issues Economy Cuts Into Manhattan Arts In New York, a down economy and cuts in arts funding are starting to make a visible impact on the city's arts institutions. "Museums, theaters, concert halls, opera companies, public gardens and zoos throughout the five boroughs are cutting performances, exhibitions, days of operation and staff members. This is only the beginning, arts executives say. 'It's like a patient whose health is slipping. The strong will reduce what they do and the weak will have to take more drastic measures'." The New York Times 02/11/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 11:05 pm Channel Crossing - Sport Of 19th Century Artists British and French artists of the 19th Century competed with one another, collaborated and spurred one another on - indeed, there was much to-ing and fro-ing. "The artistic and literary relationship between France and Britain - which also included a French fascination and infatuation with Walter Scott, and with Shakespearian themes - was much more a matter of give and take than, say, the British artistic love affair with New York between the mid-1950s and the late 1980s, in which British art played a largely subservient role." The Guardian (UK) 02/10/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 10:42 pm People Havel: From Playwright To President And Back Vaclav Havel's presidency of the Czech Republic has ended. "Awkward and shy, Havel is a curiously natural director. Forty-odd years ago, he started out as a stagehand and a playwright. He was an acolyte of Beckett and Ionesco—the theatre of the absurd. The sense of the absurd extends to his own life. There is surely no modern biography that is more improbable yet dramatically coherent. Havel's is the rare life, Milan Kundera has written, that resembles a work of art and gives 'the impression of a perfect compositional unity'." The New Yorker 02/10/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 10:15 pm Theatre Coveting A Charles Manson Poster? A Denver production of a play about murderer Charles Manson is having a poster problem. No sooner do posters for the play go up in local businesses when they're taken down. "The average poster life is about 48 hours, we're finding. They're either coming down because somebody's offended or because they're hanging them on their wall." Rocky Mountain News 02/11/03 Posted: 02/11/2003 9:21 am End Of The National's Musicals So Nicholas Hytner decrees London's National Theatre won't be producing the big flashy musicals anymore. "This seems, at first blush, somewhat dog-in-the-mangerish of him. As a guest director, he was responsible a few years ago for a production of 'Carousel' that ranks as one of the National's most successful and enlightening musical revivals. It's as if, having had his fun, he's all set to stop other directors - not to mention other audiences - having theirs. He has a point or two, though." These big musical revivals - do they really work artistically? National Post (Canada) 02/11/03 Posted: 02/11/2003 9:01 am More Title Squeamishness Producers of a production of "The Vagina Monologues" in Moncton, New Brunswick are finding a chilly reception there. "People get all giggly and squeamish when they hear the word. But worse, we've had companies very reluctant to support us, people who wouldn't return our phone calls. One person I spoke to wouldn't send out our e-mail poster to their 700 employees because he didn't think his boss would think it is a good idea." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 02/11/03 Posted: 02/11/2003 8:16 am Publishing Another Large Publisher Moves To Unload Unprofitable Division McClelland & Stewart, which used to bill itself as "the Canadian Publisher," is selling off a small but prestigious press it bought three years ago. "If no buyer can be found, the rights to its backlist of some 60 titles — as well as future projects already in the works — will revert to McClelland & Stewart and MW&R's core employees will lose their jobs. Non-fiction (MW&R's specialty) has been an increasingly hard sell, and the company "blames the loss of book review space in newspapers and magazines, new book-unfriendly programming by the CBC, and fewer and more tough-minded booksellers for the failure of many good non-fiction books to find their intended audience." Toronto Star 02/11/03 Posted: 02/11/2003 9:28 am Poetic Justice - American Poets Speak Out Against War American poets are becoming an unexpectedly vocal opponent of a war with Iraq. "On Wednesday, in the kind of coordinated grass-roots action unseen since the Vietnam era, poets and writers will stage more than 50 readings in bookstores, libraries, churches and meeting houses across the country, inspired by poet and Copper Canyon Press publisher Sam Hamill, who in an e-mail late last month asked 50 friends and colleagues to dedicate the day to 'Poetry Against the War.' How did one e-mail launch a nationwide protest movement that will stage events through the month and beyond? Los Angeles Times 02/11/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 11:01 pm The New Women Literary Publishers A new generation of women running British literary publishing imprints is making a big success of them. "So what differentiates these women from the men who came before them? Perhaps the fact that they represent 'joined-up' publishing. The new hierarchies comprise editors who understand business, or business people who appreciate books. Unlike their predecessors, they can safely be introduced to an author without saying anything embarrassing." London Evening Standard 02/10/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 10:57 pm Media Online Pirate DVD Factories Offering Latest Blockbusters Movie studios are trying to shut down slick new internet sites operating out of Malaysia that are offering pirated DVD copies of all the latest Hollywood fare for $13.99 a disk. "Pirated DVDs have been available on the streets of New York and other U.S. cities as well as on the Internet for years, but Temple said Web sites attempting to mass-market bootlegs were a relatively rare and recent phenomenon." New York Post 02/11/03 Posted: 02/11/2003 9:13 am Do Automated Radio Stations Degrade Local News? Instant news response has always been one of radio's greatest strengths. However, with consolidation of ownership in the radio industry, many radio stations are automated, programmed from miles away. So when big news happens, it's often impossible for "local" radio stations to report on it. "This debate is particularly acute now, because the FCC is considering whether to let companies own even more stations." New York Daily News 02/11/03 Posted: 02/11/2003 9:08 am "Chicago" Leads Oscar Nominations "Chicago," the musical, leads Oscar nominations with 13. "Other best-picture nominees for the 75th annual Oscars were the 1860s vengeance epic `Gangs of New York'; the Virginia Woolf-related drama `The Hours'; the fantasy adventure `The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers'; and the Holocaust saga 'The Pianist'. Nominations were announced Tuesday morning Boston Herald (AP) 02/11/03 Posted: 02/11/2003 8:00 am Hitler Film Too Hot For Berlin Film Fest The film "Max," which portrays Adolph Hitler as a struggling artist in Munich after the First World War has been controversial in Europe. "Hundreds of films are being shown at this week's Berlin Film Festival, but Max was rejected, despite that fact that it has been hailed as a brave, thought-provoking picture with one of the sharpest scripts and some of the best acting you are likely to see this year." The Telegraph (UK) 02/11/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 10:52 pm Dance Martha Graham Reborn (After A Very Very Long Time) The Martha Graham Company is back. But it's been away long before the legal dispute that shut the doors. "In fact, this famous troupe, the oldest dance company in America, had been in trouble long before [heir Ron] Protas took over. Graham, who was born in 1894, choreographed for sixty-five years, but she was in top form for only the first half of that run. In the nineteen-fifties she slipped into despair and alcoholism. Eventually, she stopped going to the studio. The dancers ran the company. Later she dried out, and came back, but on the arm of Protas, whom many of the dancers and staff found impossible to work with. Some quit; others were fired. Year by year, the company consisted of increasingly young people facing, without the old-timers' guidance, increasingly serious problems: debt, dissension, cold reviews, defecting funders." The New Yorker 02/10/03 Posted: 02/10/2003 10:20 pm