Journalism as Relevant Art When AP photographer Anja Niedringhaus snapped a photo of an Italian soldier standing in front of his bombed-out military barracks last week in Iraq, she created an image which would wind up on the front pages of more than 50 newspapers around the world. That unanimity of editorial taste proves once and for all that news photography can rise to the level of art, says Alan Artner, and Niedringhaus' photo is a perfect example of the undervalued genre of war photography. "Some war photographs record destruction; others present human reaction. Niedringhaus' combines the two. Or does it?" Chicago Tribune 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 6:44 am
Why Visionaries and Budget Sheets Don't Mix In 2002, architect Jean Nouvel was hired by Pittsburgh's Carnegie Science Center to design a $90 million addition to its building. But "Carnegie Museums terminated Nouvel's contract in May for failing to produce a scheme that could be built for that amount," and withheld a chunk of the money it had promised the architect. A legal battle ensued, but now it appears that a settlement is near. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 6:28 am
Taiwan Guggenheim Hits Funding Snag The Taiwanese government putting together financing for a $400 million Guggenheim outpost on the island, has told the Guggenheim it can't yet raise the money it had promised, and has asked for a six month extension of the deal. Thomas Krens said "he could not understand why the budgeting should be a snag. He wanted Taichung mayor Jason Hu to give him a timetable for the establishment of the Guggenheim museum in Taichung. No timetable is available, however. Hu is not certain if and when the Legislative Yuan would approve the special funding." China Post (Taiwan) 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 5:59 pm
WTC Memorial Finalists Chosen Eight finalists are announced for a memorial at the World Trade Center. "It's a very moving moment. The memorial is at the heart of the site. It defines everything around it." The New York Times 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 4:11 pm
- Muschamp: Simplicity Is What's Required For WTC Memorial "For better or worse, we are living in baroque if not byzantine times. Some of our most impressive contemporary architecture reflects this. All eight designs chosen as finalists for a memorial of the World Trade Center disaster bear strong traces of it, to a greater or lesser degree. Each of them suffers as a result.
The New York Times 11/20/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 4:08 pm
- Youth Figures In WTC Memorial "As far as visuals go, the coolest design is, without much doubt, the project by Gisela Baurmann, Sawad Brooks, and Jonas Coersmeier, all three of whom live in New York. The center of their design is something called the Memorial Cloud, a field of tubes that is flat and see-through on the top, at street level, and has an undulating ceiling, one whose shapes recall church architecture, when seen from underneath. The tubes are lit dramatically from below: one beam for each victim." Slate 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 4:06 pm
- WTC Memorial Judges A list of the 13 judges for the World Trade Center memorial. The New York Times 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 4:02 pm
File-Swapping Bad! (Unless There's Money To Be Made...) "The recording industry, it seems, doesn't hate absolutely everything about illicit music downloading. Despite their legal blitzkrieg to stop online song-swapping, many music labels are benefiting from — and paying for — intelligence on the latest trends in Internet trading... One company, Beverly Hills-based BigChampagne, began mining such data from popular peer-to-peer networks in 2000 and has built a thriving business selling it to recording labels." Yahoo! News (AP) 11/17/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 6:41 am
No Solutions Yet In Houston Only a few months after a crippling strike in which the musicians of the Houston Symphony Orchestra called for the resignation of their orchestra president and much of the board, the HSO has announced that it ran a whopping $3.56 million deficit for the 2002-03 season. Slumping ticket sales and decreasing donations have a lot to do with the fiscal problem, but the HSO has also had to contend with the costs of severe flood damage to its concert hall in recent years. The orchestra acknowledges that the deficit is as large as it's ever been, but says that its long-range plan calls for surpluses by the 2005-06 season. Houston Chronicle 11/19/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:52 am
Giving The People What They Want "Record labels have long been accused of stealing musicians' copyrights as soon as the ink is dry on the contract. Now, one small independent label in Great Britain is doing the opposite: It's giving the rights to the artists -- and anyone else who wants to use the music, too. Loca Records wants to foster experimentation and freedom in music by building a stable of free music which can be shared, remixed and manipulated by anyone... The music is available for free in MP3 format, but the company sells its CDs and vinyl in retail stores throughout Europe." Wired 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:36 am
Scientists: Deep Frozen Trumpets Don't Sound Better There has been a theory among trumpet players that deep freezing their instruments improves the sound. But scientists report to the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Austin, Tex., that "scientific testing of cryogenically freezing 10 trumpets showed minimal differences when the instruments were thawed and played by six musicians." The New York Times 11/18/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 9:26 pm
Digging Up Petrarch "A team of 14 researchers exhumed the bones of the 14th century Italian poet Francesco Petrarch on Monday, in the attempt to uncover new aspects about his physical appearance and health." The researchers plan to spend several months examining the nearly-intact skeleton, and hope to eventually use computer technology to create an approximation of what the poet's face might have looked like. Creepy? Sure. But Petrarch is used to it: this is the fourth time his remains have been dug up by scientists. Discovery News 11/19/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 6:49 am
Another Journalist Felled By The P-Word When longtime Denver Post music writer G. Brown resigned his position last week after being accused of plagiarism in a review, he chalked the copied portions of the review up to sloppiness and the pressures of the daily deadline. But now, it appears that an even larger chunk of the review that cost Brown his job may have been pilfered from a New York Daily News story, and the whole incident has caused the Post to rewrite its internal ethics policy, to the dismay of some staffers. Westword (Denver) 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 6:34 am
Kesey's Prankster Legacy The '60s may be long gone, but don't tell that to the Ken Kesey-inspired Merry Pranksters, who continue to traverse Northern California in a psychedelic bus, spreading beat wisdom and leftist radicalism wheresoever they find it lacking. Sure, the Pranksters may be a bit more, um, self-promotional than they once were, but Kesey, who died two years ago, still exerts a clear and powerful influence over the writers and poets who hung on his every word in life. San Francisco Chronicle 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 6:15 am
Controversial Collector McMichael Dies "Some people just can't take yes for an answer. Robert McMichael was one of them. The photographer/salesman-turned-art collector founded one of Ontario's most popular cultural attractions, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg... But Mr. McMichael never could accept the consequences of his own generosity or the success of the gallery he created. Rather than celebrate the independence of the institution, he fought its evolution at every step." McMichael died Tuesday, aged 82. Toronto Star 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 6:06 am
- A Legacy of Passion and Folly "[Canada's] affection for the McMichael Canadian Collection, I suspect, will survive long after the founder's follies have been forgotten. The latter were, unfortunately, many and famous. For much of the last 25 years of his life, you could never be quite sure what he would do next." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 6:05 am
Last Of The Surrealists Dies Gordon Onslow Ford, the last of the 1930s Paris Surrealists, has died in California, where he had live the past 50 years. He was born in 1912, and joined the group that included Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy in 1938 and worked with them until 1944." BBC 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 5:54 pm
Broadway's Bumpy Fall "All across Broadway, producers, landlords and investors are suffering through one of the bumpiest fall seasons in recent memory, a snake-bit period that has seen one show close in previews ("Bobbi Boland"), another close in rehearsal ("Harmony") and a Stephen Sondheim show ("Bounce") close out of town." The New York Times 11/20/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 9:19 pm
Closed - Three High-Profile Projects Trip On The Way To Broadway "In the last week, three shows headed for Broadway - the long-gestating Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical "Bounce" in Washington, D.C., the Barry Manilow-Bruce Sussman musical "Harmony" in Philadelphia, and Nancy Hasty's play "Bobbi Boland," which had already begun previews at the Cort Theatre - closed before opening here to critics and audiences. New York-bound projects failing are not uncommon, but three high-profile shows in a row facing this fate is most unusual." Backstage 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 6:09 pm
Actors Union Fighting Non-Union Roadshows The Actors Equity union is launching a campaign to fight non-union Boradway roadshows. "We've reached a crisis stage. According to our latest statistics, 40% of all road tours are non-Equity. Producers are using new strategies to avoid or circumvent our contracts, thus robbing us of workweeks and desperately needed health contributions." Backstage 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 6:07 pm
Hazzard Wins, King Fumes at Nat'l Book Awards Shirley Hazzard took the top fiction prize at the National Book Awards last night, winning for The Great Fire, her first novel in nearly a quarter-century. Cuban memoirist Carlos Eire took the non-fiction prize, and C.K. Williams won the poetry award. In the strangest moment of the evening, bestselling horror writer Stephen King accepted a medal of honor, and then lashed out at the literary world during his acceptance speech, explicitly criticising those authors "who make a point of pride in saying they have never read anything by John Grisham, Tom Clancy, Mary Higgins Clark or any other popular writer." The New York Times 11/20/03
Posted: 11/20/2003 5:32 am
The Trouble With Self Publishing There are about 4.5 million books in print. And the number of new books each year has been growing at an alarming rate. Why? The proliferation of digital self-published books. There are some downsides to the new publishing - self-published books haven't been vetted through the usual process of editors and publishers. And print-on-demand publishers don't take returns from bookstores... Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 11/16/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 9:05 pm
NYTimes Book Review - Caught Between Two Worlds? The New York Times is looking for a new books section editor to replace Chip McGrath. "Mr. McGrath’s successor will arrive at a time when there is actually some larger debate about book reviewing going on. It’s all a bit strangely polarized: On one end of the spectrum are the likes of the militantly mild Believer editor Heidi Julavits, issuing rambling screeds against "snarky" book critics. On the other are bomb-throwers like the novelist Dale Peck, who routinely goes after big quarry in his long reviews in The New Republic, and whose supposed acts of critical derring-do got him an anthropological profile in The New York Times Magazine last month, as if an ambitious, bloodthirsty critic were some kind of special case that demanded to be analyzed. Some see these extremes, and the attention they’re getting, as reactions to the wishy-washy state of the Book Review." New York Observer 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 6:57 pm
Literature Idol - Coming To A Book Fair Near You The Pop Idol series has been a hit around the world. Now the idea is being transfered to literature. "Lit Idol has been organised by London Book Fair to uncover untapped talent in the world of fiction writing. The winner will secure a deal with a leading agent which would be almost certain to result in a contract." Entrants submit work, which will be voted on over the internet. Finalists will be judged after readings at the London Book Fair. BBC 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 5:50 pm
A River Of Illegal DVDs In the UK one of every three DVDs sold is said to be an illegal copy. "No one knows exactly how big the market is for bootleg discs, but already this year more than a million copied DVDs have been seized in the UK. Compared to videos, which are bulky and offer compromised quality, the new digital format is a bootlegger's delight. The discs are cheap, light and easy to transport, while copying is quick and quality does not degrade." BBC 11/19/03
Posted: 11/19/2003 5:48 pm
