Ravel & The Deaf Man Michael Chorost would like to listen to Ravel's Boléro. But since 2001, when the last of his already feeble hearing left him lost in a soundless world, he hasn't been able to. Chorost has been a guinea pig at the forefront of the cochlear implant industry, which uses surgical implants and computer technology to allow deaf people to "hear" by stimulating certain parts of their nervous system. But while such technology can allow the deaf to decode human speech, music is a wholly different (and far more complex) matter. Still, Chorost is a determined music lover, and years of trial and error eventually lead him to a breakthrough. "It's like going from being able to tell the difference between red and blue to being able to distinguish between aquamarine and cobalt." Wired 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 5:27 am
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Museum Reopenings Spark A Bit Of American Self-Adulation "To celebrate the reopening of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery next July, a coalition of cultural organizations is organizing a salute to America's originality. The two museums, which share the historic Patent Office Building, will open July 1 after a six-year, multimillion-dollar renovation. A special 24-hour preview of the massive building, with 30,000 square feet of additional gallery space, will be held that day." Washington Post 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 6:56 am
Paris's Gehry Gets A New Life To read many of the stories written about Frank Gehry these days, you'd think that one of his buildings was all that was required for a destitute city to leap into the forefront of global metropolises. But in Paris (which gets along just fine on its own merits,) the one Gehry-designed structure has sat abandoned for a decade, "a sad monument to a failed American dream. It was planned as a new headquarters for the American Center of Paris, which was founded in 1931 and had long drawn crowds to its rambling Left Bank home as a place to discover American culture and to learn English. But the dream of a dazzling image went sour. The new center opened in June 1994 - and closed just 19 months later... Now, thanks to the French government, the building has begun a new life, this time as the headquarters of the Cinémathèque Française." The New York Times 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 5:55 am
When Museums Sell Their Art (It's Worrisome) A number of American arts institutions are selling off some of their art. "The scale of such selling - by institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art - is renewing debate. 'History will make a fool of these museums. It always happens. Often the things that are sold are based on inherited prejudices that will be overturned in the future'." The New York Times 10/26/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:16 pm
National Gallery's "Madonna" Was Expensive If It's Not Raphael Two years ago, London's National Gallery bought "The Madonna of the Pinks" for £22 million, including £11.5 million in public money. "James Beck, a professor at Columbia University, New York, a tireless critic of the attribution, has just completed a book in which he claims that the Northumberland Madonna cannot be by Raphael." The Telegraph (UK) 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 6:15 pm
Critics Bash Munch Museum For Board Game Critics are attacking Oslo's Munch Museum for selling a board game based on the theft of the museum's most famous painting - The Scream. "In principle I find it a bit in bad taste to make a game out of the theft of The Scream. My initial reaction is to disapprove of an initiative that helps trivialise a national and international drama while the painting is still missing." BBC 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 6:01 pm
- Previously: Scream: A Museum That's Kept Its Sense Of Humor The Munch Museum in Oslo, which lost its "The Scream" painting last year in a dramatic theft, is selling a board game in its gift shop based on the incident. "Players of The Mystery of the Scream, a game aimed at the family market, must hunt down the robber before he reaches a criminal paradise." The Guardian (UK) 10/24/05
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Florida Orch Flush With Cash The Tampa-based Florida Orchestra this week reported a $323,789 surplus on a budget of just over $9 million for the fiscal year that ended June 30. The orchestra's ticket sales amounted to 38% of its overall revenue, which is low in comparison to the rest of the industry, but contributed income was robust, to say the least. Also significant is that "the orchestra finished in the black in a year when the board and musicians agreed on a new labor contract that boosted musicians' pay by about 5 percent over the previous year." St. Petersburg Times (FL) 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 5:11 am
Sing A Duet After You're Dead? Nothing unusual about releasing an album by an artist after he or she is dead. But here's a new low - a "duet" by two stars, mixed after they've both died. "Both Marley and Notorious BIG were used to pushing the musical envelope while alive, but this effort would still have surprised them. I know I scratched my head wondering why anyone would risk the reputations of two of the industry's most influential artists for this ghoulish effort. The guilty parties, of course, are the late artists' estates..." The Guardian (UK) 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 6:21 pm
NW Chamber Orchestra Director Steps Down David Pocock is leaving as artistic director of Seattle Northwest Chamber Orchestra. "Pocock, who has worked with the orchestra since 2003, came from the Colburn School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles, where he served as the dean. Pocock has accepted the position of director of institutional sales with Sherman Clay Pianos." Seattle Times 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 5:28 pm
Swedish Ambassadors Traveling orchestras are ambassadors for their art. The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic played Carnegie Hall this week, and this is what we learned: "First, Stockholm, not widely known as a music center, has a legitimate orchestra to serve its needs, and people should know more about it. Second, Sweden, and Scandinavia in general, produces composers the world should hear more of and doesn't." The New York Times 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 5:26 pm
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See Edinburgh Wirelessly The city of Edinburgh is planning to put a wireless system in place so tourists could get "wireless tours" of the city on their mobile phones and hand-held computers. "The service, which could be in place as early as next summer, would help tourists pre-plan their visits and also provide regular messages updating them about events taking place in the capital." The Scotsman 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:29 pm
Canadian Artists: More Money Please Canadian artists are lobbying the federal government to increase arts funding to a rate of $5 per capita per year. The group has asked that any new arts money be directed to the Canada Council for the Arts, which supports 2,200 arts organizations and more than 2,000 individual artists. The council invests $156 million in the arts each year; but the coalition wants to double that amount. An increasing number of arts organizations and individual artists are requesting money from the council as Canada's artistic community gets more diverse." CBC 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 5:35 pm
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A Forever-Distant Author Gets Personal Joan Didion has always been known for her famously refined literary voice, her sentences so polished and buffed that they almost seem to come from another literary era. But when tragedy struck Didion's family, writing became a way to deal with her grief, and to work through her conflicting emotions. As she puts it, "This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself." Washington Post 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 6:50 am
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Siminovotch Award To Half Life Author Playwright John Mighton has won Canada's richest theatre prize for his entire body of work, which includes this year's breakout hit, Half Life. The Elinore & Lou Siminovitch Prize, which pays CAN$100,000 to the winner, recognizes "a body of work by an artist in mid-career," but there's no question that the popularity of Mighton's latest play was a factor in his win. "Last week, it was short-listed for the Governor-General's Literary Awards, for English drama. Audiences have also embraced Mighton's play, set in a nursing home and exploring memory loss as a natural and necessary part of human evolution." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 6:23 am
Broadway Tix Get Yet More Expensive Forget about family-friendly pricing. The price of the top Broadway theatre tickets, which shot past the $100 threshold four years ago when Producers mania was in full swing, have risen again, to a top price of $110 for popular shows like Spamalot and Wicked. The average ticket price on Broadway now sits somewhere north of $60. The New York Times 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 5:59 am
Broadway - Where Are The Latinos? Few Latinos attend Broadway shows. "Despite many mainstream companies' frantic attempts to cater to the booming Latino market, Broadway remains overwhelmingly non-Hispanic. Though the number of Broadway-going Hispanics during the 2004-5 season was the highest since the League of American Theaters and Producers began such surveys, they still made up just 5.7 percent of the total. They account for 12.5 percent of the United States population, according to the latest report of the United States Bureau of the Census." Now some producers are trying some unorthodox marketing to build that audience. The New York Times 10/26/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:20 pm
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A Series Of Fortunate Career Moves "As Daniel Handler and his editor, Susan Rich, laugh together and share anecdotes about how they launched A Series of Unfortunate Events, it's apparent that they're both still gobsmacked by their success. The Lemony Snicket books have sold 46 million copies, and the total is ballooning every day with the release this month of the 12th of a projected 13 in the series, The Penultimate Peril." Handler actually didn't start out with the intention of being a children's author, but after several failed attempts at getting publishers interested in his adult fiction, he pitched his "terrible" idea for the Lemony Snicket series, and in no time, he was one of the hottest commodities in young adult literature. Toronto Star 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 6:45 am
Still, It Beats The Usual Political Memoir (zzzzz...) Politicians do not generally make great novelists. (Heck, for most of them, getting through a speech without falling all over themselves constitutes a minor victory.) So one could be forgiven for sneering a bit at California Senator Barbara Boxer's debut novel, which pits a liberal senator (surprise!) against an arch-conservative nominee to the Supreme Court. But wait - Boxer wrote the novel over a year ago, long before the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and the subsequent death of Chief Justice William Rehnquist. The parallels to the current dust-up over Court nominee Harriet Miers are palpable, and make the book worth a look. Of course, Boxer is a blue-state pol first and foremost, so red-staters looking for a sympathetic (or realistic) portrayal will be sorely disappointed. Los Angeles Times 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 6:31 am
Some Authors Side With Google Against Publishers Publishers are suing Google over the company's plans to digitize libraries of books. Says Google: "The world would be a much worse place if the card catalog in a library only contained the books that the publisher had come by and put in" Some authors agree with the search giant, and believe that making their work freely searchable online will boost their stature and sales. Wired 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 7:26 pm
Vanity Fare Why do people buy books? To look good. A new survey reports that "driven partly by pressure from incessant literary prize shortlists, more than one in three consumers in London and the south-east admit having bought a book 'solely to look intelligent', the YouGov survey says." The Guardian (UK) 10/25/05
Posted: 10/25/2005 6:25 pm
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Shocking, Sure, But Will It Still Be Funny? When Aaron McGruder's blunt and unapologetic comic strip, The Boondocks, hit newspapers in the late 1990s, it sparked enough outrage to make even Garry Trudeau flinch. Now, the strip is migrating to TV (albeit late-night cable,) and McGruder has obviously refused to tone down his inflammatory style for wide distribution. The hope, of course, is that Boondocks will be an underground hit with the disenfranchised left. "But can underage conspiracy theories, racial paranoia and offensive stereotypes come across as funny on television? Can you really say the n-word so many times and still get laughs, shock or outrage?" Washington Post 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 6:58 am
iPod Porn? Not Bloody Likely Admit it, men. When Apple rolled out the video iPod last week, your first thought (possibly your second, after "who would possibly need such a thing?") was, "I wonder if that baby is porn-capable?" After all, every other new technology eventually seems to become fodder for the frighteningly large adult entertainment industry, so why not the little jukebox that could? Well, don't hold your breath. "With a couple of exceptions, porno producers are in no hurry to provide stag movies for the iPod, thanks to fears of a public outcry and a government crackdown." Wired 10/26/05
Posted: 10/26/2005 5:46 am
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