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Weekend, August 21-22
The Cure For The Over-Published World A 100,000 new books published in a year? 120,000? 175,000? Yikes - who can keep up? And yet, gentle reader, who wants to keep up? How many books can you read in a year? How many books are actually worth reading in a year? Fear not, Chickens Little, your innate taste will save you! The Observer (UK) 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 11:20 am
Donor Sues New Brunswick Gallery For Fraud The Beaverbrook Art Gallery's (New Brunswick, Canada) biggest patron is "suing the institution for fraud, claiming it lied or misrepresented the ownership of $200-million worth of disputed paintings. The Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation and a grandson of Lord Beaverbrook filed suit this week. The suit seeks $15-million in returned donations and punitive damages from the gallery." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 08/21/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 10:52 am
Underground Railway Center Rises The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center opens in Cincinnati this week. Blair Kamin reports that the building is a mixed success. "The architecture of the Freedom Center rises and falls to the extent it exploits and expresses this tension. The museum is, in some respects, powerful and poetic, its undulating travertine walls symbolizing the indirect, often-torturous routes -- through mountains and forests, and over rivers -- that slaves took to freedom. The trouble is, this sort of poetry doesn't occur with enough consistency, especially inside, to make the museum the powerhouse combination of intellect and emotion, the visual and the visceral, it might have been." Chicago Tribune 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 10:41 am
Dino-Theft - Concern For Fossil-Poaching There is big demand for dinosaur fossils, and poachers have been taking advantage of their remote location to "chip the prints out of rock illegally and sell them to unscrupulous -- or unaware -- collectors. Worried that online sales are making it easier for poachers to sell their goods, lawmakers, geologists, and police are searching for ways to find these looters and stop them." Boston Globe 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 10:09 am
Where The Art Is... Today's Big Time Art World travels in a pack - jetting around the world to where the perceived action is. "At the center of this pack are wealthy patrons who enjoy traveling together, often in their own planes, to far-flung art destinations. Some take chances on untried artists; others embrace challenging work by well-established names. But all keep abreast of one another's choices. A purchase by one can inspire further interest from others, directly affecting the artist's market and stirring up greater critical discussion. Wherever they go, they are always shopping, even at ostensibly noncommercial venues like Site Santa Fe." The New York Times 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 9:37 am
Gunmen Steal "The Scream" While Terrified Visitors Watch Gunmen entered the Munch Museum in Oslo and ripped Munch's "The Scream" from the wall, stealing it. "Two masked thieves pulled the work and another painting, Madonna, off the wall as stunned visitors watched. One robber threatened staff with a gun before the pair escaped in a waiting car, a museum officer told the BBC." BBC 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 8:57 am
- On The Trail Of The Stolen Scream Leads are coming in about the two Munch paintings stolen in Oslo this weekend. "On Sunday afternoon police found a painting frame near Carl Berners plass in central Oslo. Police believed the find could be linked to the Munch heist. One of the employees at the Munch Museum café told Aftenposten's Internet edition that she saw two men walking with the two paintings held between them." Aftenposten (Norway) 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 8:54 am
- A Scream Twice Stolen "The Scream is one of the world's most recognisable paintings. Copies of the anguished expressionist work can be found in any major poster shop and it is even the name and symbol of a popular pub chain in the UK." It was stolen before - in 1994, and held for ransom, but was recovered before the money was paid. BBC 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 8:45 am
Dreaming Of A Classic Cathedral In 3-D Work began on Catalan architect Antonio Gaudí's Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona in 1883. "Though work resumed in 1952, it has gone very slowly. More than 50 years later, the church is still only 40 percent finished. (It now holds 4,000 people; when it reaches its final circumference, 295 by 196 feet, it will accommodate 14,000.)" It will take at least 30 years more to complete. But for those unwilling to wait to see what it will look like, a new 3-D projection has been completed. The New York Times 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 8:37 am
Welsh Opera Director Quits "In a move that has shocked the opera world, the music director of the Welsh National Opera has resigned with immediate effect. At 26, the Ossetian conductor Tugan Sokhiev was the youngest musical director of a major national company anywhere in the world, except for Mikko Franck, the 25-year-old at the helm of Finnish National Opera." The Guardian (UK) 08/21/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 11:01 am
Trane's Modern Classic (40 Years Later) John Coltrane's "A Love Supreme" is 40 years old. "Revered wherever jazz is spoken, recorded (at least in part) by no less than Wynton Marsalis and Carlos Santana with John McLaughlin, praised by critics, dissected by scholars, rehearsed by young tenor saxophonists who dream of greatness, the indelible recording long since has earned a sacred place in American culture. So much, in fact, that musicians often hesitate when asked to perform this music publicly, for fear of presuming to step into the shadow of a jazz deity who addressed life and afterlife, man and God, in an oft-shattering recording." Chicago Tribune 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 10:36 am
The Chicago Symphony's Difficult Contract The Chicago Symphony and its musicians have taken a little time off from their contract talks. "Contract negotiations between CSO musicians and management are rarely easy, and they typically go down to the wire, but these talks could be among the toughest in recent memory. Like many American orchestras, the CSO has been running deficits and watching the size of its audiences stagnate if not shrink. CSO management is pushing to save money; CSO musicians are pushing to avoid losing too much ground." Chicago Sun-Times 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 10:30 am
How Does New Music Relate To "Classical" Music? "One wonders how much discussions of new music have to do with the classical music world today: a collection of fundamentally conservative institutions in which predominantly old music is presented and received in reverential, churchly silence and new music, for better or worse, is too often something to sit through. Many critics deplore this situation and are deeply invested in encouraging contemporary performances from classical institutions. In essence, we're demanding of classical music that it be a living art. But focusing as we do on the larger institutions, we're not necessarily keeping abreast of the latest trends in composition ourselves." The New York Times 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 7:09 am
Spreading Understanding What's next in classical music? Kyle MacMillan suspects the "next big thing is going to come in how classical music - in some cases, all music - is perceived and understood. Already causing a huge transformation is our unprecedented ability to log on to Amazon.com and buy recordings of music from virtually anywhere in the world and any period of the past 1,000 years. This widespread availability of recordings and the accompanying reach of the Internet are helping spread classical music well beyond its usual Western confines." Denver Post 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 7:04 am
The Case Of The Missing Manuscript Author Louis De Bernières, author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, has lost 50 pages of his next book by leaving them on a laptop computer and going to the Edinburgh festival. The Guardian (UK) 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 11:10 am
Of Theatre, Film, And Reality Many people find film easier to relate to than theatre. Theatre, for many, is too unrealistic, too tied up in its unnatural conventions. But what about a film that takes theatre at its core? The Observer (UK) 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 11:06 am
Rewriting The Book On Kids Plays At the recent Playwrights Showcase of the Western Region at the Arvada Center in Denver, Steven Fendrich took issue with the kinds of plays considered for young people. "At the showcase, which included four new works for young audiences, Fendrich championed age 6 as the baseline for material to be considered publishable. He admonished several authors for using sophisticated language and references to historic figures children 'could not possibly be expected to understand'." Denver Post 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 7:48 am
The Persistent Journal (As A Form) Small literary journals are a precarious enterprise. "Circulating only in the low thousands (most of them), subsisting more on donations and patronage than subscription income, kept viable largely through low-paid or even unremunerated labor by devoted staffers, these quarterly or biannual compendia of fiction, poetry, essays, and art are showcases of idealism begotten upon unlikelihood. Yet for all this, in spite of the myriad ills that under-funded ventures are heir to, in spite of the fact that our info-environment is now so paced to the fleeting quick fix, the double-barreled snort of gloss, these journals do survive. Better, they persist." Boston Globe 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 10:24 am
What The Well-Tuned Colonel Should Read The US military has lists of books it recommends to troops. In 2000 Army Chief of Staff Shinseki detailed his list. These are the books that the chief of staff thinks his colonels and generals should be reading. Now an update by the current Chief, and the changes are interesting. "The Army's reading list is actually a collection of four sublists, each designed for personnel at different stages in their career." Boston Globe 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 10:15 am
Fear In the Theatre Between politicians and Hollywood, there are a lot of people trying to scare us. "Is this the scariest summer ever? Cinematically, I mean. As the long movie season winds down, it's hard to say. This year there do seem to be more movies than usual that, whether or not they intend to provoke fear, take fear as their subject." The New York Times 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 9:10 am
Remaking Boston Ballet (A Progress Report) Mikko Nissinen has spent his first three years at Boston Ballet completely remaking it. "He didn't waste time making changes at the Ballet. Of its 47 current dancers, he's hired 32. He's made a fellow Finn, Jorma Elo, the company's resident choreographer. Elo is a highly sought-after talent at the moment, 'and when he goes around the world to work with other companies, he'll go as resident choreographer of Boston Ballet'." Boston Globe 08/22/04
Posted: 08/22/2004 9:45 am
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