The Brain - One Man's Theory The brain's cortex contains "at least 30 billion neurons with 1 million billion connections between them; counting one a second, it would take 32 million years to count them all. There are also multiple brain regions, 200 types of neurons, even large-scale neuronal deaths. How does such an object function, let alone give rise to consciousness?" The New York Times 03/27/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 6:51 am
Catholic Churches Close Massachusetts Churches That Dominate Local Architecture The Catholic church is financially devastated in Massachusetts after the chuch's sex abuse scandals, and closing many churches. "The architectural landscape of Eastern Massachusetts, dominated in so many communities by church steeples and bell towers, is at risk of being diminished as the region's largest religious denomination, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, prepares to shutter a significant number of parishes, preservationists say." Boston Globe 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 9:00 am
Checkpoint Airport Art Wonder where those items confiscated from airline passengers at security checkpoints end up? An artist bought a few hundred pounds of the items and made art out of them. "In the massive Plexiglas case, wrapped in a heavy chain Maloney bought at Home Depot and hand-painted a rust color, are deer antlers, a tuning wrench for bongo drums still in its plastic case, his and her handcuffs, knitting needles, a decorative diaper pin, metal brushes, hair picks, a painted horseshoe, knives and forks, tweezers, meat thermometers and fishing hooks along with the lines and sinkers." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 03/27/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 6:37 am
Vancouver Museum's Limited Space The Vancouver Art Gallery wants to expand, but that is a complicated proposition. The museum's current site has little additional room, and there is no obvious alternative location. "The gallery, the fifth largest in the country, has a permanent collection of more than 8,000 works worth $100-million. But right now there isn't enough space to show the permanent collection, which includes extensive holdings of Emily Carr and of conceptual photography." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/27/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 6:31 am
Bands: The Internet For Fun And Profit More and more bands are discovering that the internet is their friend and that digital downloading can help promote sales of recordings and concert tickets. "Whereas once the record industry sold 90 percent of its records to 15 percent of the U.S. population, digital distribution has paved the way for more people to participate in music than ever before, whether making, distributing or consuming it." Chicago Tribune 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 9:59 am
A Revolution To Transform Music As We Know It "The music industry stands at an historic crossroads -- almost every aspect of the way people consume and listen to popular music is changing, dwarfing even the seismic shift in the 1880s when music lovers turned from sheet music and player pianos to wax cylinders and later, in 1915, newfangled 78 rpm phonograph discs. The one thing all of the experts agree upon is that these changes -- which are already under way -- will be dramatic, quick and inevitable." Chicago Sun-Times 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 9:38 am
Sorting Out The Look And Sound Of Opera "We are told all the time that the audience's expectations for opera have changed because our society is visually oriented, educated by films and television, even by opera on television. We now expect opera to be theatrically vital. One problem with this view is that our visual society has not been well educated by films and television -- media that even now often ignore the "visual" reality of the society they are supposed to reflect. People come in all sizes, shapes, colors, ages, and types of behavior; they engage in passionate love affairs and die nobly or ignobly, regardless of their outward appearance. In a way, opera is a more honest art form than the movies, because people look the way they do rather than the way film fans expect heroes and villains to appear." Boston Globe 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 8:54 am
- Sound And Fury Of A Size Does size really matter in opera singers, wonders Justin Davidson? "There is a rough, unofficial consensus that in some operas size matters more than in others. Companies will bend over backward not to cast a fat Carmen or a slow-moving Zerlina in Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro," but all of Wagner, some Strauss and much Verdi are open to singers of any dimensions. As we whittle down the options for large singers, we also deplete the pool of people who can sing these demanding roles. Voices like Deborah Voigt's are a precious resource." Newsday 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 8:03 am
Lessig: Give Artists The Choice About How Their Work Is Used Lawrence Lessig thinks that a copyright law that declares that millions of people are crimminals is wrong. "I think artists should be allowed to decide what the rules are under which their content is made available in a good copyright system. Sometimes that means their content is made available under compulsory license, which means they get paid but not a price that they set, sometimes they'll give it away. Sometimes their copyright expires, at least that's what was supposed to happen. And copyrights that expire [go into] the public domain." Chicago Tribune 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 9:51 am
Censorship Wars Suddenly, content in the media is getting the once over for "objectionable" material. "Hoping to avoid millions of dollars in fines and protect their licenses, the networks' gatekeepers are now rushing to cover naked body parts, cut foul language and monitor anything that smacks of poor taste
except when they're not. The only consistent thread running through the current crackdown which has ensnared culprits ranging from a chronic provocateur like ousted radio personality Bubba the Love Sponge to an accidental offender like NBC's "ER" is how wildly inconsistent it all seems." Los Angeles Times 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 7:23 am
Stage Fright - Iraq Theatre Up And Running Iraq's National Theate is up and runnign again, and a week-long festival of plays, dance and music is being produced. There's still not much of an audience yest, in a city once renowned for its cultural life. "The situation is still very complicated. It is difficult to start living culturally again." Aljazeera 03/27/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 6:19 am
Urban Pioneers With A Stake In The Theatre The historic 3,600-seat Chicago Theatre is being restored and revived - by a couple of theatre entrepreneurs with an impressive track record. "We are going to be the on-the-ground, in-the-theater general managers of the Chicago Theatre. And if you look at our entire careers -- our entire lives, really -- you will see people who have been interested in taking old downtown theaters, reviving them and contributing to the after-dark lives of this country's great and historic cities." Chicago Sun-Times 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 9:45 am
A Better Mousetrap - 30 Years And Still Going Strong Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap celebrates its 30th years in the sme London theatre. It has to be the defining production in British theatre history. The Scotsman 03/27/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 6:26 am
Media Obscenity: We Object! (Don't We?) Linda Winer wonders why the media obscenity crackdown currently underway in the US isn't being objected to by more people. "The vise is tightening again on freedoms that, at this late date, a grown-up country should not be forced to keep defending. The FCC, temporarily distracted from efforts to allow even further consolidation of Big Brother media companies, is zealously pursuing the revival of standards-and-practice departments - you know, the old in-house decency police - for radio and network TV." Newsday 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 9:33 am
Does Media Consolidation Equal Obscenity? "For years, media consolidation was one of those issues considered worthy of debate only by policy wonks and public interest groups. The general public rarely stopped to read sober-minded studies, such as the one done after the 2002 elections, which found that 60% of the top-rated local news broadcasts had failed to devote one second to campaign coverage. But after Janet Jackson's Super Bowl antics shone a spotlight on Viacom's MTV-CBS hegemony, people began to connect the Big Media dots. The Super Bowl had more of a galvanizing effect on the media and the FCC than it did on grass-roots America. Ordinary citizens were already upset. For the past three years, when I boot up my computer each morning, I see dozens of complaints about what was on TV the night before. We're just catching up." Los Angeles Times 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 7:29 am
Art Of The Film Credit Consider the film credit: "At their best, they use the requisite list of names and credits as a mere leaping-off point for clever experiments in graphic design, typography and kinetic wizardry." The New York Times 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 7:17 am
Info-Edu-Propa-tainment - If It's All The Same To You... The lines between news, comedy, propoganda and entertainment are so blurred these days, it's sometimes difficult to tell them apart, writes Frank Rich. "At such absurd moments, and they are countless these days in our 24/7 information miasma, real journalism and its evil twin merge into a mind-bending mutant that would defy a polygraph's ability to sort out the lies from the truth." The New York Times 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 6:59 am
Generation X, Generation Mellow? Generation X movie-makers are generally been known for their ironic take on the world. But as they grow older, there are signs that that defining sttitude may be mellowing... St. Louis Post-Dispatch 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 6:47 am
New Tactic: File-Sharers Are REALLY REALLY Bad Guys The recording and film inductries are pressuring the US Congress to make file-sharing peer-to-peer networks illegal, and lawmakers are complying, introducing bills that suggest file-sharing networks are the haunts of terrorists, pornographers and big bad evildoers. "In defending the Pirate Act, Senator Orrin Hatch said the operators of P2P networks are running a conspiracy in which they lure children and young people with free music, movies and pornography. With these "human shields," the P2P companies are trying to ransom the entertainment industries into accepting their networks as a distribution channel and source of revenue." Wired 03/27/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 6:41 am
Mark Morris - Of Dance And Music It's impossible to separate Mark Morris's choreography from music. "His extraordinary dance vocabulary is arguably matched only by his breadth of musical tastes. He began, in a way, in two different dance and musical worlds, simultaneously studying Spanish folk arts (after he saw a Jose Greco concert at age 8) and classical ballet. Thus began an eclecticism so vital to his eventual role as versatile post-modern experimentalist, though he, not surprisingly, rejects labels." Chicago Tribune 03/28/04
Posted: 03/28/2004 9:55 am
