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Wednesday, May 18




 

Ideas

How The Internet Is Changing Class Dynamics With students now able to instantaneously check on the internet what teachers teach in their classes, the dynamics of the classroom are changing. "The immediate availability of vast amounts of information, and the ability to make perfect infinite copies, to communicate, and to distribute instantaneously will, by necessity, alter the ways we learn and teach. Transparency holds out the promise of a deeper, richer and more democratic educational experience, but also an implied challenge to the traditional academic order." InsideHigherEd 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 6:11 pm

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Visual Arts

Where's The Accountability? A few decades back, a museum that sold off some of its more valuable artworks to raise cash would find itself thrust into a firestorm of criticism, and most museums actually found it necessary to be accountable to the public that streamed through their doors. No more. Today, museums and libraries seem to feel free to divest themselves of whatever treasures are necessary to fund their latest flights of fancy, and Michael Kimmelman is tired of it. "It's time for transparency. Increasingly, we demand it from government, the media and Wall Street, in response to dwindling public faith. The same should apply to libraries and museums, which also regularly test our trust." The New York Times 05/18/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 6:15 am

An American In Venice Ed Ruscha is representing the United States at this year's Venice Biennale. "One thing this Venice Biennale thing has done is to make me focus on being an American. You can't help it. They make the rules and they have these nationalistic entries from each country. That does focus you on your origins. So I am feeling the fact that I am an American in Venice. I feel good about that. I take it from a particularly American perspective." Los Angeles Times 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 7:37 pm

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Music

Philly Heads To Asia The Philadelphia Orchestra is about to embark on a massive three-week tour of the Far East, and there's little question that they're going all out to impress the concertgoers of South Korea, Japan, China, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Superstar soloists Yo-Yo Ma and Lang Lang will be the featured attractions, and an exhausting set of three complete Mahler symphonies will form the backbone of the tour repertoire, as well as the core of a live-to-tape recording the orchestra intends to release after the tour from concert tapes taken in Tokyo. The cost of the tour, large even by major orchestra standards, is $3 million. Philadelphia Inquirer 05/18/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 5:25 am

Young Conductor On The Move "With classical music on the defensive, a new breed of maestro has emerged - confident enough to reinvent the past, communicative enough to appeal to a wider audience. But they still have one hurdle to overcome before they pass the test of maturity, and it's a test 30-year-old Edward Gardner is acutely aware of." Financial Times 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 7:05 pm

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Arts Issues

Keeping Memory Alive Archives are an underappreciated art, a tangible example of institutional memory lovingly maintained, frequently by individuals who don't want their personal passion forgotten. But therein lies one of the greatest challenges of the professional archivist: what happens when an amateur in charge of some vast and important archive dies without stipulating what is to become of her/his life's work? It happens far too often, and frequently, the result is that the archive is scattered to the winds. The New York Times 05/18/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 6:19 am

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Copyright? When it comes to new media, (downloadable audio and such,) Hollywood and the American recording industry are likely to talk about "threats to commerce" and the all-important god of Copyright Law. Meanwhile, across the pond, the BBC is doing just the opposite. "America's entertainment industry is committing slow, spectacular suicide, while one of Europe's biggest broadcasters is rushing headlong to the future, embracing innovation rather than fighting it. Unlike Hollywood, the BBC is eager and willing to work with a burgeoning group of content providers whose interests are aligned with its own: its audience." Wired 05/18/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 5:44 am

Mountain Laurel, Take Two The $35 million Mountain Laurel Performing Arts Center in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains was a grand plan that quickly became an unmitigated disaster, going out of business less than a year after opening amid accusations of incompetence and misuse of public funds. But "the complex, which was built with the help of a $15 million state grant, is reopening with a fresh infusion of public money, including $500,000 from the state and $750,000 in projected annual revenue from a new hotel tax in Pike County." Gone, however, are most of Mountain Laurel's original grand plans, such as playing summer host to the Pittsburgh Symphony. This summer's lineup includes mostly "blues, pop, rock, country, jazz and Latin music, genres that typically attract healthy audiences, in hopes of meeting ambitious attendance goals and buying more time to stabilize the center's finances." Philadelphia Inquirer (AP) 05/18/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 5:14 am

New Jersey Arts Center To Be Shuttered Facing a possible zeroing out of the state funds that keep it afloat, the South Jersey Performing Arts Center located on Camden's waterfront has announced plans to shut down by June 30. The SJPAC was to be the crown jewel in Camden's civic rebirth, but the plan has fallen far short of expectations, with the city continuing to struggle, and the arts center never attracting the audiences organizers had hoped for. The center, on the Delaware River just across from Philadelphia, has been open for nine years. Camden Courier-Post (NJ) 05/18/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 5:06 am

A Vote On NEA Money This Week? The US Congress may vote this week on a budget for the National Endowment for the Arts. The proposed budget calls for no increase. "The bipartisan Congressional Arts Caucus, composed of House members who support the arts, is prepared to introduce an amendment from the floor calling for a minimum increase of $9 million for the NEA. The House Appropriations Committee reallocated about $6.5 million to the new American Masterpieces initiative from the Challenge America arts program, and the caucus's amendment would restore the Challenge America funding." Back Stage 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 5:59 pm

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People

Pittsburgh's New Museums Chief The new president of Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museums comes from a corporate background, but boasts of a lifetime spent appreciating and supporting art. His duties will include keeping the bottom line healthy while simultaneously increasing the museums' community profile and national prestige. "The museums, founded by Andrew Carnegie 110 years ago, are comprised of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Carnegie Science Center and The Andy Warhol Museum." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 05/18/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 6:24 am

The Musician With No Memory "In his former life, Clive Wearing was a music producer for the BBC and the choirmaster of the renowned London Sinfonietta ensemble -- but all that has been deleted out of his memory. Life before the illness has left few traces. Garden variety amnesia -- people forget about their past lives -- is not terribly uncommon. But forgetting on a continuous basis; that is very rare indeed. To Clive Wearing, the world is an ongoing riddle. He looks around and sees an unfamiliar room. Frequently, strangers stand in front of him and claim to be nurses. They claim that he has been living here for many years. All Wearing knows is: He has just woken up from a deep haze. For 20 years Clive Wearing has been continuously waking up." Der Speigel (Germany) 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 8:40 pm

Ex-Seattle Symphony Concertmaster Settles With SSO, Stand-mate The ex-concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony has settled with his ex-stand partner over comments he made on his blog. "I regret having posted statements that were interpreted as being about my former stand partner, now the acting concertmaster of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra. It is my understanding that some people have come to misapprehend my remarks which were intended to be humorous." Seattle Post-Intelligencer 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 7:59 pm

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Theatre

Will Billy's Dance Set Broadway Toes Tapping? "Forget Spamalot, The Light in the Piazza and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. The musical everybody on Broadway is talking about is Billy Elliot, which opened in London last week to ecstatic reviews." Plans are already underway to bring the show to New York, but there might be some problems with translation from what is clearly a very British show. "Like the movie, it's set in a working-class coastal town during the miners' strike of 1984. Much of its power, the critics said, comes from its fierce, left-wing, anti-Thatcher political viewpoint... New York theater people who've seen the show say it would lose that power if it were Americanized the way another working-class British movie, The Full Monty, was when it was adapted for Broadway, where the story was set in Buffalo." New York Post 05/18/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 6:11 am

Toronto's Rings Rakes In The Cash "Toronto's Lord of the Rings musical is becoming a hot ticket around the world with $1 million in tickets sold internationally on the first day they were offered. Because of the international appetite for the J.R.R. Tolkien epic, Toronto's Mirvish Productions decided to begin public ticket sales on the internet on Sunday – a day before tickets could be purchased by telephone... The internet sales added to approximately $3 million the company has already racked up in group ticket sales to large parties, like tour operators who buy blocks of tickets." CBC 05/17/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 5:41 am

Where's The Conservative Backlash? "After the forced closure of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play 'Behzti' in December, two things were widely predicted. One was that theatres would become more conservative in their programming of potentially contentious Asian work (particularly on religious and sexual themes). The other was that it would be more difficult for theatres to retain an already fragile (and tiny) non-white audience." In fact, neither has happened... The Guardian (UK) 05/18/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 7:41 pm

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Publishing

Why Academic Historians Need To learn How To Write Better A new David McCullough history of the American revolution is due out, and academic historians are stewing. "Instead of grumbling over the public's middlebrow book buying tastes, the best thing academic historians can do is to try to offer them something better. A number of our own practices lead us away from engaging the public as we should. I've seen students entering graduate school aspiring to write like Arthur Schlesinger, only to be shunted into producing pinched, monographic studies. I've seen conferences full of brilliant minds unable to find an interesting presentation to attend that isn't literally read off the page in a soporific drone. We write too much for each other—and, as we do, a public hungry for good history walks into Barnes & Noble and gets handed vapid mythmaking that uninformed critics ratify as "magisterial" or "definitive." Slate 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 7:51 pm

Massive New History Of 20th Century Lit A "Waste Of Wood Pulp" The new Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature weighs in at nearly 900 pages (and costs $160). This self-described “authoritative narrative” consists of forty-four long essays by academics renowned (Ronald Bush, e.g.) and obscure (most of the rest). How many trees do you suppose perished in order to bring this (according to the flap copy) “major event for anyone concerned with twentieth century literature” into being? It must be said that the index is only the beginning of what is wrong with this waste of wood pulp." New Criterion 05/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 7:12 pm

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Media

Luke, I Am Your President... Ever since critics began screening the latest (and last) installment in George Lucas's Star Wars epic, the whispers have been building that, perhaps, the turning of young Anakin Skywalker to the Dark Side and the concomitant rise of the Empire are not wholly devoid of reference to current political theatre. Specifically, Skywalker, (or Darth Vader, as he comes to be known in the film,) seems to utter a number of hubris-inspired challenges which sound suspiciously like lines previously used by President Bush. Lucas, for his part, insists that it's all a coincidence. CBC 05/17/05
Posted: 05/18/2005 5:35 am

Movie "Sanitizers" Rile Industry "The business of cleaning up movies has sparked a round of skirmishing in the culture wars and launched a patent brawl in the technology industry as well. Hollywood directors say that removing swear words and bare breasts compromises their artistic vision and violates their copyrighted material. Meanwhile, a Florida company claims that a technology used to skip over the dirty parts steals from its own patented method used to skip right to the dirty parts." Yahoo! (Reuters) 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 7:47 pm

XM Passes 4 Million Subscribers Satellite radio seems to be gaining a toehold in the US. XM says it has passed the 4 million subscriber mark and was on track to hit its goal of 5.5 million subscribers by the end of the year. "XM said it added 1 million subscribers since late December. XM's rival in the satellite radio business, the New York-based Sirius Satellite Radio Inc., reported last month that it had 1.4 million subscribers and expected to have 2.7 million by the end of the year." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 05/17/05
Posted: 05/17/2005 8:46 am

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