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Weekend, July 31-August 1




Ideas

The Real Manchurian Conspiracy? In the original version of The Manchurian Candidate, soldiers were turned into cold-blooded assassins by "a diabolical method of mind control based on memory's emotional power." The brainwashing technique seemed suspiciously familiar to a lot of actors, says Lee Siegel, because it was, in fact, nearly identical to the school known as Method acting, which was developed by "left-wing, socially adversarial" Russians. Hmmmm... The New York Times 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 8:40 am

The Sage Of Conventions Past One name kept popping up in the international coverage of last week's Democratic National Convention, and it wasn't John Kerry. The name was H.L. Mencken, the famous journalistic curmudgeon who covered political conventions for nearly a half-century, and whose words describing the process have never been equaled: "There is something about a national convention that makes it as fascinating as a revival or a hanging... It is vulgar, it is ugly, it is stupid, it is tedious, it is hard upon both the higher cerebral centers and the gluteus maximus, and yet it is somehow charming." Baltimore Sun 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 7:12 am

Visual Arts

A Museum Everyone Can Hate Together In the Middle East, a building is never just a building, just as a national boundary is never just a boundary and a religious shrine is never just a tourist attraction. Frank Gehry is finding this out the hard way, as his design for the new Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance draws withering fire from both Israelis - who have called the design "so hallucinatory, so irrelevant, so foreign, so megalomaniac" - and Palestinians, who accuse Gehry of designing a building that calls to mind the Israeli destruction of Yasir Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah. What everyone seems to be saying underneath the rhetoric, however, is that the museum is just too American. The New York Times 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 8:28 am

Music

Phil Orch Prez Admits Misleading Statements As the Philadelphia Orchestra's contract negotiations spiral into an embarassingly public spat between managers and musicians, the orchestra's embattled president, Joseph Kluger, has been forced to admit that some of the statements the management made on a website intended to turn public sentiment against the musicians were inaccurate. Kluger and board chairman Richard Smoot had claimed that rental costs on office space for the orchestra were unanticipated and impossible to predict; they had also claimed that the orchestra's second harpist performs only three concerts per year. In fact, the rental costs were always known, and the harpist in question plays "16 of 30 subscription weeks, 19 single concerts, and has played or will play nine of 28 summer concerts." Philadelphia Inquirer 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 9:29 am

Who Needs Cocktail Parties When You Can Stage An Opera? "In Britain, these days, opera in the garden is all the rage. If you own a country house with grounds, you turn everything upside down in July and August to stage a home-grown Götterdämmerung (or for the fainter-hearted, Barber of Seville). And patrons, ideally in evening dress, picnic grandly on your lawns during intermissions... The phenomenon feeds on fantasy... the proprietors imagine they've traveled back in time, as 18th-century princelings with private courts and orchestras at their disposal, while they reinvent the Arcadian dream. Not that they readily admit it." The New York Times 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 8:34 am

The Musicians' Conductor It's well-documented that the conductors best loved by musicians are not always the ones who get the best results from their orchestras. So when the Toronto Symphony hired former Tokyo Quartet violinist Peter Oundjian to be their next music director, William Littler needed convincing of the wisdom of the decision. But after following Oundjian around North America for a week and talking with members of various orchestras, the critic admits that there may be something to the idea of a musician leading musicians. "There is an unfailing politeness in the way he addresses the players and a consistently high energy level in his conducting." Toronto Star 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 8:09 am

Following The Nose From an operatic standpoint, Shostakovich's The Nose is a bit of an odd duck, "an absurdist portrayal of a man whose nose departs from his face, runs around town disguised as a bureaucrat, and makes hash of prerevolution Russia's strict class distinctions." Musically, the work is a brutal exercise in control, featuring among other things a ten-part chorale and a double canon. ("Imagine Noel Coward patter songs played at warp speed and thrown into a blender.") But after decades of relative obscurity, The Nose is starting to see some more performances, and the Kirov Opera has adopted it as something of a cause. Philadelphia Inquirer 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 7:55 am

But Pros Play An Awful Lot of Crappy Music, Too Chicago's Steans Institute for Young Artists may not be as famous a professional training ground as Tanglewood, but it has been nurturing young musicians in a semi-professional setting for 15 years. But while the program has come far from its humble origins as a chamber music seminar, Andrew Patner says that the organizers may need to reconsider some of their programming decisions, if they're truly aiming to educate their participants, rather than simply to bore their audience. Chicago Sun-Times 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 7:18 am

Arts Issues

Financial Scandal At UK's Royal Academy "Brendan Neiland, an esteemed Royal Academy academic and articulate public champion of painting as an art form, has resigned after financial irregularities were discovered in his work. The academy said Professor Neiland, 62, had left his post as keeper [head] of its art school following an internal investigation. The inquiry uncovered an unauthorised bank account, as well as unauthorised deposits and disbursements." The Guardian (UK) 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 9:25 am

Cash-Strapped UK Universities Selling Diplomas A new investigation has revealed that some British universities have made a practice of trading diplomas for cash with students who would not have achieved passing grades on their own. "The 'degrees-for-sale' scandal stretches from the most prestigious institutions to the former polytechnics and includes undergraduate and postgraduate degrees, foreign and home students." The Observer (UK) 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 9:19 am

Reading Is Fundamental. Or Is It? Ever since the NEA released a report bemoaning the decline of literature's place in American life, defenders of the canon have leaped to reestablish reading as an essential part of life. And who could argue with that? Well, Mark Edmundson isn't arguing, exactly, but he does have a few quibbles with the approach: "Reading, you hear, is necessary to maintain democracy. It can produce informed citizens. Right, but couldn't public radio do the same thing? We hear that reading conveys knowledge; it delivers the bounty of the past to the present. Again, good, but in terms of pure rote knowledge, couldn't film and verbal delivery work nearly as well?" The New York Times 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 8:46 am

People

The Luthier's Secret: Cold Water & Vibrational Energy A Berkeley acupuncturist is gaining a name for himself as a maker of some of the best modern violins available today. Peter Van Arsdale's secret is the wood he uses - found timbers salvaged from the icy waters of Lake Superior. "Cut from logs that sank maybe two centuries ago as they were being floated to frontier settlements, the wood -- rot-free because there's almost no oxygen in the cold waters where it was preserved -- has a richness and density rare in younger timber." He also sees a connection between his two professions: "Acupuncture works with vibrational energy, and violins are nothing but vibrational energy." San Francisco Chronicle 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 8:03 am

Still Shocking After All These Years "Peek into Isaac Bashevis Singer's fictional universe and it is easy to see why so many still take offense. Singer's characters, nearly all Jews, curse and covet and commit adultery. They impersonate demons or invoke them. They are superstitious, provincial, desirous. Nearly everything forbidden by Jewish law and custom is done by one character or another... Now, with the publication of three encyclopedic volumes of Singer's short stories by the Library of America, and with lectures and readings honoring the centennial of his birth this year, another opportunity is being offered to take the measure of those transgressions." The New York Times 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 7:52 am

The Deadline Poet Gets Political (And Popular) Calvin Trillin - the often-political poet who got his start in published verse with a little gem titled "If You Knew What Sununu" - does not harbor any illusions about matching up with the great poets of his or any other era. (In fact, he once penned a two-line poem on the subject: "They've named another poet laureate / It's not me yet.") But Trillin's latest collection of doggerel debuted at #7 on the bestseller list, and while the humor of his work may have something to do with it, there's no doubt that his liberal slant and anger at the Bush administration is feeding sales as well. The New York Times 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 7:46 am

Theatre

Saving A (Decrepit) Landmark "Eighteen years after [Denver's] Bonfils Theater was shuttered, it no longer matters who was the bad guy responsible for the decay of the once-great venue. The important question is whether anyone will take responsibility for the building's reclamation before it's too late... In the past two decades, many plans have been put forward to save the theater. Most were done in not by the modest purchase price but the daunting task of rehabilitating a theater that has grown decrepit from lack of use and maintenance." Denver Post 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 9:14 am

The Impossible Life Of A Working Actor Steven Barkhimer is one of Boston's busiest actors, a man beloved by critics and audiences alike. And yet, he hasn't been able to pay his own rent in more than a year, and barely manages to scrape by financially. He's not an anomaly, he's the poster boy for the life of the Boston actor. And that's a big problem for the city's theater scene. Boston Globe 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 9:02 am

Is Broadway Choking On Talentless Celebrity? Broadway's obsession with big-name pop culture stars and washed-up blips on the cultural radar is getting out of hand. "Just a quick gaze at today's theater listings can give a person the distinct sensation of watching a particularly poignant episode of 'I Love the 90's.'" Worse, previous experience and actual talent or ability seem to have next to nothing to do with these casting decisions. The New York Times 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 7:39 am

Publishing

The New Pulp Fiction "For good or for bad, street lit is eating up the African American book world at the moment. Walk into the Karibu bookstore in Prince George's Plaza and you'll see. It used to be there were just one or two small shelves of 'street life' books. Now there's a whole section... What is a street lit novel? The telltale signs usually include a shut-your-mouth title, straightforward sentences, vast amounts of drugs, sex and rap music and varying degrees of crime and punishment. An exemplary tale is a mixture of foul language, flying bullets, fast cars, a flood of drugs, fallen angels and high-priced frippery. It venerates grams over grammar, sin over syntax, excess over success." Washington Post 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 8:15 am

Media

Let Chicago Be Chicago! For years, Chicagoans have rolled their eyes while viewing films purported to be taking place in their home city, but clearly filmed elsewhere (usually in Toronto.) But the fact is that plenty of movies have been shot in Chicago - it's just that those movies are usually supposed to take place in New York. Or Cincinnati. Or East Berlin. Chicago Tribune 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 9:10 am

Stuck in Development The critics are nearly unanimous: Fox's Arrested Development is the best thing to happen to sitcoms since The Simpsons, and the show is so well-written, well-acted, and refreshing that it could revitalize the entire genre. Now, if only someone other than the critics would watch it. The New York Times 08/01/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 8:25 am

The British Blandcasting Corporation? Peter Aspden is exasperated by the BBC's culture of high-minded talk and middlebrow action. "It is admirably well-meaning, and there is a striking sense of solidarity about the place, the kind of feeling that found expression following the abrupt departure of its former director-general Greg Dyke in the aftermath of the Hutton inquiry. But there is also... something scarily bland in the air." Lately, though, the BBC had been fighting back against those who claim the company has been dumbing down its cultural coverage, and while some claim that the timing is awfully convenient, it's hard to deny that many of those assaulting the BBC have a bit of a class-fed elitist bent. Financial Times (UK) 07/31/04
Posted: 08/01/2004 7:26 am


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