Hockey: Built For Life In Canada Everyone knows that hockey is a national obsession in Canada, but even some Canadians are surprised by the way the game has suddenly exploded across the nation's cultural scene. Just as baseball has inspired generations of American authors, singers, playwrights, and photographers, so hockey is now finding its way onto Canadian stages, screens, and bookstore shelves. If baseball is as pastoral and cerebral as Americans would like to believe themselves to be, hockey is distinctly Canadian: simultaneously graceful and gritty, with a quiet undercurrent of ugliness that almost requires a poet's soul to understand. And just as hockey is facing a crisis that threatens to destroy the sport, many Canadians fear that their unique culture may be slipping away as well... The Globe & Mail (Canada) 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 11:53 am
The Dream and Nightmare Of The Asian Megacity "The United Nations says that by 2010, some 18 of the world's 30 largest cities will be in Asia (compared to only three from Europe and North America). In the region's new megacities, height is might, speed is wealth, density is power, and the skyscraper — that American symbol of modernity — grows on steroids and is colonizing the sky." Trying to define these supermetropolises as good or bad, dangerous or progressive, is useless, and misses the point in any case. Any organism as huge and complex as a city cannot be reduced to such platitudes, and the startlingly fast growth going on in Asian cities provides plenty for urbanists of all stripes to marvel and shudder at. The New York Times 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 11:44 am
Glamorizing The Whitney Biennial This year's Whitney Biennial is a hit with public and press alike, says Peter Goddard, "because some of it reflects a new kind of thinking about art. But that brings us back to glamorizing. Is there such a word? There should be, to point to how much otherwise indescribable stuff is going on at the Whitney Museum of American Art." In addition to the new embrace of art that's hard to "get," there is also a distinct sense of generational turnover about the Biennial, and the subtle air of competition between young and old, old and new, has given the whole event a feeling of renewed vigor. Toronto Star 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 10:11 am
The Apartment Building That Made Your City Boring "At first glance, it is an apartment building like countless others around the world. A medium-height slab made of concrete and glass, it occupies an anonymous site surrounded by parking lots and a shopping mall. Appearances can be deceiving. This is Unité d'habitation, arguably the most famous apartment building ever constructed. Designed by Le Corbusier, the celebrated and enormously influential apostle of modernism, this is the building that would save mankind and lead us into the future." What it actually did was lead urban planners around the U.S. "to an appalling and unprecedented urban sterility and homogeneity." Toronto Star 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 10:06 am
Emerson Quartet Wins Avery Fisher Prize This year, the administrators of the $50,000 Avery Fisher Prize for American musicians changed its rules of eligibility to include ensembles, and the first beneficiaries are the members of the Emerson String Quartet, who will be announced as the 2004 winners of the prize in a Monday ceremony. The group says it will "try to do something creative [with the money.] We won't just spend it." The New York Times 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 11:28 am
U.S. Music Sales Bounce Back "Music sales in the US rose by more than 9% in the first three months of 2004 compared with the same period last year - signalling an end to a four-year dip. The 9.1% upturn in sales of CDs, music DVDs and legal downloads is a ray of light for an industry that has battled online piracy and new technology." BBC 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 11:12 am
Scottish Opera On The Brink Scottish Opera is planning to lay off 80 staff members in a desperate effort to avoid fiscal collapse, according to a union representing Scottish actors. The crisis managemant plan the union claims to have seen would cut across the entire organization, with dozens of musicians, crew members, and administrators losing their jobs, and "the entire 34-strong chorus [would be made] redundant." Scottish Opera has already taken a £4 million advance on next year's £7.5 million grant from the Scottish Arts Council, and general consensus has been that the company is severely underfunded. The company isn't commenting on the layoff report. Scotland on Sunday 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 11:00 am
Whither The American Sound? Nationalism can be a dangerous thing, but a love of country and all that it stands for is the only thing that can lead to the development of a serious "national sound" among composers, says Robert Jones. Individuals like Copland and Bernstein aside, America has never really had its own tradition of classical music, and even works identified as distinctly "American" are often written by European composers like Dvorak. "America always seemed nervous about nationalism in music," and Jones says that will have to change if anyone expects the U.S. to develop a compositional tradition as easily recognized as those of countries like France, Finland, and the Czech Republic. Charleston Post & Courier 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 10:27 am
The Guitar That Changed Rock 'n Roll The Fender Stratocaster may be the most famous instrument of the 20th century, and it turns 50 this year. From Les Paul to Jimi Hendrix to Eric Clapton, the guitar built with an eye to architecture and a sound like nothing anyone had ever heard before has helped define three generations of rock 'n roll sound. Toronto Star 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 9:53 am
Re-re-reconsidering Shostakovich. Again. The debate over whether Dmitri Shostakovich was a talented but limited composer in the pocket of the Soviet leadership; or a secret dissident, hiding messages of anti-Stalinist revolt in his music, is unlikely to ever come to a satisfactory conclusion. But a new book by Solomon Volkov, whose earlier book Testimony reignited the Shostakovich debate a quarter-century ago, sheds some new light on the complicated relationship between Shostakovich and his chief antagonist (and chief sponsor,) Josef Stalin. Volkov divides the composer's career into two periods: the brash, exploratory years before Shostakovich penned his opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtnsk," and the cautious, paranoid period after Stalin denounced "Lady Macbeth" as an anti-Soviet muddle. The New York Times 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 9:11 am
Arts Make A Comeback In The Heartland The post-9/11 focus on national security and the weakened U.S. economy has famously cost arts groups millions of dollars in local, state, and federal funding over the last few years, but in some cities, the arts are starting to rise again. In Indianapolis, where funding cuts hit hard, the city's Arts Council will see its budget rise this year, despite flat levels of government funding. Contributions from foundations and the private sector are up, and there is reason to believe that local officials are beginning to buy into the notion that money pumped into the arts is returned to the local economy in measurable ways. Indianapolis Star 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 10:40 am
U.S. Denies Visas To Cuban Supergroup "A two-month US tour by the 15-piece Cuban jazz-pop band Cubanismo! has been canceled because its members were denied visas to enter the United States. The group had planned a 43-show, 34-city itinerary... Cubanismo!, made up of musicians from various Cuban bands, has played in the United States several times over the last decade, including last year." The Justice Department has offered no explanation for the refusal to grant visas. Boston Globe 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 10:21 am
Tracy Emin: I Can't Get No Respect "She is the artist the British public likes to laugh at most. Even Damien Hirst's infamous pickled sharks and cows are treated with more respect. And yet until now Tracey Emin, the creator of 'that bed', has accepted ridicule and contempt as all part of being a famous conceptual artist. No longer. Speaking for the first time about her row with a primary school over the sale of a quilt - a row that has seen her branded as selfish and money-grabbing - Emin reveals she has been deeply upset by the onslaught of criticism. Blame for the unpleasant affair, which at one point came down to a physical tug-of-war, lies with the school, the 40-year-old artist claims." The Observer (UK) 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 11:18 am
Making The Sausage Theater people love to talk about "process," whether it be the actor's process of developing a character or the director's process of fashioning a cast, crew, and set into a believable story. But the behind-the-scenes process that goes into creating a single theater season may be the most fascinating process of them all, and for the people who run Washington, D.C.'s Arena Stage, it's a study in compromise and a careful balance between challenging the audience and satisfying the ever-present demand for the familiar. Washington Post 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 12:36 pm
The Terrorist On Broadway "Broadway has always been an incubator of lunatic dreams, but these days, with the outrageous expense of putting on a production, and a theater marketplace ever more reliant on the credit cards of out-of-towners, a lot of the adventurousness has gone out of producing." So for Rocco Landesman to be seriously pitching a play featuring a suicide bomber as a sympathetic character to the Broadway poobahs is, well, something of a noticable display of hubris. In fact, most of Landesman's usual New York investors had closed the door before he even got the pitch out of his mouth. Washington Post 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 9:23 am
A Who's Who Of The Forgotten and Ignored Two Harvard scholars have launched a wide-ranging project designed to document the lives of African-Americans throughout the centuries of U.S. existence who, for one reason or another, have fallen through the historical cracks. "It is an ambitious effort to patch the spotty historical record about the men and women who, among other things, fled slavery, created art and shepherded civil rights campaigns in the shadow of giants like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." The New York Times 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 8:56 am
Split Signal Ever since classical music station WFLN switched to a rock format in the mid-1990s, fans of classical music and jazz in the city of Philadelphia have had to share a single radio station, Temple University-owned WRTI, which attempts to please everyone with 12 hours of classical and 12 hours of jazz each day. It's better than nothing, of course, but there's been plenty of grumbling about the lack of seperate jazz and classical stations in the nation's 4th-largest radio market. But now, WRTI is planning to begin splitting its signal into two different full-time streams - one jazz, one classical - offering listeners with high-definition receivers a choice of what they hear at any given time. Philadelphia Inquirer 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 12:16 pm
Canadian Eye For The Queer Guys (And Gals) "As American courts and politicians wrestle over the legality of same-sex marriages, Canadian producers are embracing them. With Canadian courts recently allowing and recognizing same-sex marriages, filmmakers are documenting gay and lesbian couples heading to the altar wearing chocolate thongs beneath their tuxedos and placing femme-butch toppers on their white-icing cakes... But besides the frills, what Canadian filmmakers have stumbled on and are chronicling is a modern-day underground railroad of same-sex couples coming to Toronto from the United States to exchange marriage vows." Toronto Star 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 9:59 am
The Clear Channel Crusade Claims Two More Filthy Smut Peddlers The increasing paranoia among broadcasters over the FCC's threatened crackdown on "inappropriate" on-air content has led radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications to declare a no-tolerance policy on risque talk and bad language for all of its stations. Last week, that policy saw shock jock Howard Stern yanked from six Clear Channel stations, and now, two Florida DJs have lost their jobs after accidentally leaving their mics hot during a commercial break, and allowing what they thought were off-air comments of a sexual nature to go out over the air of station WKLS. Washington Post 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 9:39 am
- More Trouble Ahead For Howard? Howard Stern's problems may not end with being yanked by Clear Channel, and the New York Post's research indicates that the self-styled King of All Media shouldn't expect much support from his remaining affiliates. "Of 17 Stern affiliates contacted by The Post - there are now 35 altogether - only four station managers expressed unabashed support. Another is on the fence, and 12 more avoided all comment - possibly a bad omen, considering that big fines may be headed their way, too." New York Post 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 9:38 am
Sony Pictures Buys Clarke's Story In a move which surprised absolutely no one with any knowledge of the modern infotainment business, Sony Pictures has purchased the film rights to the book on counterterrorism penned by Richard Clarke, who has become the largest thorn in the side of the Bush administration during the hearings on the 9/11 attacks. Sony says it envisions an "All The President's Men"-type approach to the film version of the former counterterrorism advisor's account of the rise of Al-Qaeda and the failure of the U.S. government to properly address the danger. Clarke's literary agent says that nearly every major Hollywood studio called to explore the concept of a film. The New York Times 04/10/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 8:43 am
The New Graham Devotees Martha Graham's dances are hardly what one would call timeless: in fact, many look distinctly old-fashioned in the modern era. So what is it about the mystique of Martha that has made her legacy such a draw for young dancers seeking to make their mark in the dance world? A new generation of Graham proteges gives varying answers to the question, but all speak of a certain "emotional trutfulness" that distinguishes a Graham dance. The New York Times 04/11/04
Posted: 04/11/2004 11:38 am
