Wireless Broadband - Just Basic Civic Infrastructure Two remote rural counties in Oregon offer free wireless broadband internet service for everyone. "Broadband is just the next step in expanding the national infrastructure, comparable to the transcontinental railroad, the national highway system and rural electrification. Indeed, we need to envision broadband Internet access as just another utility, like electricity or water. Often the best way to provide that will be to blanket a region with Wi-Fi coverage to create wireless computer networks, rather than running D.S.L., cable or fiber-optic lines to every home." The New York Times 08/06/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 8:19 am
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UK - A Challenge To The Design Establishment? Richard Rogers and Norman Foster have dominated English architecture for the past decade. But "as London embarks on eight years of major regeneration to transform the city's East End and the Thames Gateway, an impassioned debate has begun about the practices and philosophies that should shape a new era. Amid the steadily increasing clamour of building and hype, the two lords' hold on British architecture is under challenge." The Guardian (UK) 08/06/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 10:08 am
Verdict: We Hate The Scottish Parliament Building "Less than a year after the Scottish Parliament building opened its doors, the public have delivered their verdict: knock it down.
The £431 million flagship at the foot of Edinburgh's Royal Mile, already mired in controversy after running 10 times over budget and opening three years late, has suffered the final indignity of joining a list of eyesores including Gateshead Car Park, Northampton Bus Station and Rugby Cement Works on a list of Britain's 12 'most vile' buildings as voted by up to 8,000 viewers for a forthcoming Channel 4 series, Demolition." The Observer (UK) 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 10:05 am
Dia - The Un-Guggenheim? New York's Dia Foundation gives a look at what will be its new home. "Dia could well be described as the art world's un-Guggenheim. Both institutions are developing a network of spaces; both embrace contemporary art. But while Mr. Krens has pursued outposts around the world designed by big-name architects like Enrique Norten and Frank Gehry, Mr. Govan is fashioning a network of spaces closer to home that are as unobtrusive as possible." The New York Times 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 8:24 am
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Farewell To The Lindsays "After 40 years, the Lindsays, the most successful British string quartet of their generation, have given their final concert..." The Guardian (UK) 08/06/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 10:12 am
Pay To Play - Now We Know Why A CD Cost $20 Why are recording company execs paying radio stations for airplay? "After congressional hearings revealed the extent of payments to DJs by record companies and distributors in the early 1960s, authority over what music gets on the air was taken out of disc jockeys' hands and vested in radio station executives. But both executives and DJs continued to receive gifts from record companies, and large payments to stations by supposedly independent promoters hired by the record companies still make up an important part of radio station revenues." Washington Post 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 8:59 am
What Is It With The German Cellists? Is there a German school of cello-playing? Yes, in a way. Some prominent young German cellists are attracting attention. But "the classical music world is less like soccer than like bicycle racing: allegiances and teams are formed without much regard for national boundaries. And like bicycle racing, the pack is a group of fiercely competitive individuals. These German cellists acknowledge one another's existence but are not exactly pals." The New York Times 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 8:43 am
Download Music - To Buy Or Rent? The online music business is changing. Now you have the option to buy, rent or subscribe. But there are drawbacks to each of them: "the rental outfits look more attractive if you think of them as services, like cable TV or satellite radio, rather than stores. Like satellite radio, you get music only while you're still a subscriber. You pay $3 more per month than satellite radio costs, but you get to pick the songs." The New York Times 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 8:30 am
What Is It About Perlman? What is it about Itzhak Perlman that inspires such devoted fans, asks Peter Dobrin. Surely not his music-making alone. "A blindfold test in the first movement would have revealed an often-dull player with moments of difficulty with intonation. I'm not saying that in total the Perlman experience was a bad one, or even that his shortcomings outweighed his assets. But would a fresh-faced recent Juilliard School graduate have gotten the same response from this audience with exactly the same performance? Hardly. It's a point worth considering if only because perpetuation of the art form will require cultivating love for the next one or two Itzhak Perlmans - or dozen." Philadelphia Inquirer 08/06/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 7:47 am
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All By Myself... (Is This Art?) "Sea Forts, which is billed as a study of isolation, will cost £93,000 in lottery cash and taxpayers’ money and is the brainchild of Stephen Turner, a Kent-based artist who describes his work as being 'concerned with aspects of time and the dialectics of transience and permanence'. He will spend six weeks living in one of a complex of observation towers built during the Second World War to provide early warning of German attacks on the Thames estuary, where he will communicate his thoughts about loneliness in an internet journal." The Times (UK) 08/05/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 7:43 am
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Gergiev: Rebuilding Russian Music Conductor Valery Gergiev is on a mission. "When I meet [Putin] I tell him, 'Do we have a chance to improve dramatically the situation of the provincial orchestras in Russia?' " He asks 'What is the situation?', and I tell him we lost, in the 1980s and 1990s especially, many great teachers, many great musicians, not only famous ones but also . . . thousands of teachers and tens of thousands of professional musicians." The Globe & Mail (Canada) (Reuters) 08/06/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 9:08 am
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Edinburgh Fringe Opens The Edinburgh Fringe Festival opens with a parade through the city watched by 170,000 people lining the streets. Some 16,000 performers are taking part in nearly 27,000 performances in 300 venues until the end of August. BBC 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 10:30 am
In Los Angeles - A Better Way To Encourage Diversity? (Hmnnn) This summer Los Angeles' powerful Center Theatre Group eliminated four programs intended to help develop minority plays. Director Michael Ritchie says the programs weren't effective. But Margo Jefferson wonders what the theatre plans that will be more useful. "Talent is not an equal opportunity employer. It certainly isn't. Most of the plays produced by traditional mainstream theaters are written by white men; many of these plays are terrible. Quality isn't the barrier. Access is. Experience is. Exposure is." The New York Times 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 8:50 am
Naked Broadway "In the last decade, though, nudity on and off Broadway has taken a decided turn for the male. An informal examination of Broadway and Off Broadway shows and a survey of longtime theater industry people showed that over the last 15 years, there have been about 25 plays with full frontal nudity. In a count of the nude bodies seen in those shows, 40 or so belonged to men, and only about 10 belonged to women." The New York Times 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 8:33 am
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The End Of Editors? Increasingly, editors are MIA at publishing houses. Many publishers don't even really employ traditional editors anymore. "If editing is in decline, that's bad for literature. History suggests that while some authors work alone, more or less unaided, the majority benefit from editors - and that a few are utterly dependent on them." The Observer (UK) 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 10:27 am
Why Only Books Will Do (Not Online) "The internet is a library, a reference library, brilliantly adapted to looking something up, creating inventories, updating catalogues, adding new entries in a dictionary or an encyclopaedia, and consulting directories. The web serves magically to store knowledge that would be costly in paper, in volume, to print: references, appendices, original background sources, documentation of a detailed kind, extra apparatus in general. But I don't think that writing and reading as acts of imagination can exist in cyberspace only; words don't become flesh for me unless I print out and read the materialised text; but even so, the uniform, ugly look of the copies does not draw me into the mood of the work and its meaning or imprint its contents on my memory as deeply as reading it in a book." The Observer (UK) 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 10:24 am
Cowley: A Vintage Year For Fiction Former Booker judge Jason Cowley writes that after a post-9/11 funk, writers have roared back with some of their best work. "I think, perhaps the richest year for contemporary British and Commonwealth fiction since the launch of the Booker Prize in 1969, with most of our best novelists - Ian McEwan (Saturday), Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go), Zadie Smith (On Beauty), JM Coetzee (Slow Man), Julian Barnes (Arthur & George), Salman Rushdie (Shalimar the Clown), Hilary Mantel (Beyond Black) - publishing exceptional new works." The Observer (UK) 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 10:15 am
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Why Do Movies With Minority Casts Have To Keep Proving Themselves? "No studio would stop making action films when they fail. Yet, films with minority casts - or movies about race - constantly have to prove themselves. It's the emotional investment by behind-the-scenes talent that will eventually make the difference." The Observer (UK) 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 10:20 am
The Difficulty of The Da Vinci Code (As A Movie) The Da Vinci Code seems like a natural movie blockbuster, an easy slam dunk. But "Da Vinci, set for release in May, is shaping up as one of the movie world's more complicated exercises - so much so that Sony has dropped a scrim of secrecy over the affair, refusing to discuss anything but the barest details. The script has been closely controlled. Outsiders have been banned from the set. And those associated with the film have had to sign confidentiality agreements." The New York Times 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 8:35 am
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The Bolshoi - Homeless And On The Road "Still unsettled after a series of directorship changes, still reinventing itself as a successful Western-style enterprise, still reeling from the hostile reception that greeted last year's radically modern presentation of "Romeo and Juliet," the Bolshoi remains the Bolshoi — arguably the most majestic ballet company in the world — and the troupe is determined to remain a force even on its home turf here in Moscow, where it will be performing on secondary and borrowed stages for the next three years." Los Angeles Times 08/07/05
Posted: 08/07/2005 9:14 am
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