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Friday, January 2




Ideas

A Quantum Experience "Nary a week goes by that does not bring news of another feat of quantum trickery once only dreamed of in thought experiments: particles (or at least all their properties) being teleported across the room in a microscopic version of Star Trek beaming; electrical "cat" currents that circle a loop in opposite directions at the same time; more and more particles farther and farther apart bound together in Einstein's spooky embrace now known as "entanglement." At the University of California, Santa Barbara, researchers are planning an experiment in which a small mirror will be in two places at once." The New York Times 12/27/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 6:37 am

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The pain felt on both sides The Los Angeles Times, 12/25/05
WHAT'S GOIN' ON? Straight Up 12/27/05
Artist gives data a global dimension Christian Science Monitor 12/23/05
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Visual Arts

Why Rural Museums Are Dying Over the past few decades, while museum attendance at big city museums has soared, the numbers at smaller rural museums have fallen by about half. Why? "Numerous causes have been cited for this precipitous decline, including the weather and 9/11. But one factor stands out among the reasons behind this consistent, decades-long trend: the 1978 deregulation of the airline industry and a new era of cheap air travel." OpinionJournal.com 12/27/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 7:08 am

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Music

The First Great Pianist Of the 21st Century? Following the release of two CDs this year, critics are prophesying that Yevgeny Sudbin - who spent part of his childhood in the basement of a refugee hostel - will be one of the greatest pianists of the new century. The Telegraph (UK) 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:53 pm

Brits Fail Musical Literacy More than half of Britons polled do not realise that Elgar was English or that Beethoven was born in Germany, according to a survey for the digital arts and culture channel Artsworld. The Guardian (UK) 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:37 pm

The Met: Volpe's Legacy Joseph Volpe caps 16 years running the metropolitan Opera. "Through various crises—a singer dying onstage, a bloated supersta cancelling, attendance figures falling in the wake of September 11th, Cuban billionaire patron turning out to be neither a billionaire nor Cuban—Volpe kept the great old house trundling along. Was he visionary? No. Did rival American companies—particularly the Sa Francisco Opera, with its history-making productions of Messiaen’s “Saint Francis” and John Adams’s “Doctor Atomic”—challenge th Met’s preëminence? Yes. But the chaos that has surrounded many bi houses elsewhere has been absent from the Met, and in this busines the absence of chaos is a considerable achievement." The New Yorker 12/26/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:23 pm

Buying Music As A Political Act "Once upon a time, it wasn’t so. Thirty years ago, you just walked into your local music retailer, found the LP you wanted, then went home and cranked up the stereo. No thought was necessary. Thanks to the Internet, those carefree days are gone. To go to the trouble of actually walking into a record store and paying full price for an actual CD is now a transaction that carries with it all kinds of meaning. It signifies that a music lover is making a choice to support a particular group or musician." London Free Press 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 8:36 pm

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Arts Issues

Turkey: Charges Against Novelist Pamuk A Mistake? Turkey's foreign minister acknowledged yesterday that charges brought against Orhan Pamuk, the country's best-known novelist, have tarnished Turkey's image, and said laws that limit freedom of expression may be changed. The Guardian (UK) 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:45 pm

What New York Means To the Arts How big does New York loom on America's creative landscape? A new report takes some measures: "No other place in the U.S. even comes close to matching the city’s creative assets. In fact, 8.3 percent of all creative sector workers in the U.S. are based in New York. The city is home to over a third of all the country’s actors and roughly 27 percent of the nation’s fashion designers,12 percent of film editors,10 percent of set designers, 9 percent of graphic designers, 8 percent of architects and 7 percent of fine artists." Center for an Urban Future 12/05 (pdf)
Posted: 12/29/2005 8:44 pm

Technology As Liberal Arts Liberator "Many students and faculty believe that there is no place for technology in small liberal arts colleges, a belief they cherish and are loathe to let go of. But technology doesn’t have to be the great invader, the destructor of the special nature of a liberal arts college education. It can, in fact, make that education better and more sustainable." InsideHigherEd 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 8:39 pm

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People

Elliott Carter At 97 "Perhaps the key to his longevity and the feeling of constant rejuvenation in his music lies in his attitude to writing it. 'I go to bed every night, and just before I go to sleep I read one or two pages of Proust. This gives me a great deal of pleasure, so one of the things about music is that I want to write something that gives me pleasure. I would never write anything that didn't say something to me that I thought was important or interesting'." The Telegraph (UK) 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:51 pm

Guitarist Derek Bailey, 74 Yorkshire-born guitarist Derek Bailey, who "has died aged 75 of complications from motor neurone disease, was a guru without self-importance, a teacher without a rulebook, a guitar-hero without hot licks and a one-man counterculture without ever believing he knew all the answers - or maybe any at all. With his passing, the world has lost an inimitable musician and an implacable enemy of commercialised art." The Guardian (UK) 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 8:16 pm

Pamuk's Turkish Legal Troubles Continue Orhan Pamuk is Turkey's most famous writer. Turkish authorities now say he will "not face charges over saying in an interview with a German newspaper that Turkey's military was sometimes a threat to democracy. "He is already on trial under Article 301 of Turkey's penal code for remarks made to a Swiss newspaper earlier this year about the massacre of Armenians and Kurds. Article 301 makes it an offence to insult the 'Turkish identity' or state institutions, including the armed forces." CBC 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 6:58 am

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Theatre

A Great Year For Broadway Theatre The League of American Theaters and Producers reports that paid attendance on Broadway this year 'was the highest since 1985 - just shy of 12 million people, an increase of almost 6 percent from last year. And those theatergoers paid an average of $68.86 a ticket, about $2.75 more than last year. Gross sales reached $825 million for Broadway's 39 theaters, a jump of more than 10 percent from 2004. The total number of performances, another indicator of the industry's health, increased by about 4 percent, and attendance per performance was up, too, by about 1.5 percent." The New York Times 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 7:24 am

The Producers: A Flop That Shows Why Theatre Works "The Producers has a litany of things that are wrong with it as long as Elton John's wedding guest list. But the faults are instructive in the ways that they demonstrate why theatre has survived the onslaught of cinema and TV and why movies can be turned into great musicals, but seldom the other way round. The flaws flap around the film like munchkins in the Wizard of Oz." La Scena Musicale 12/28/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 7:13 am

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Beckett's Century Chicago Sun-Times 12/30/05
Windy City Creates Stage-Friendly License Process Backstage 12/22/05
Away in the Mangers, The Business Is Booming Washington Post 12/22/05
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Publishing

Statistics Wrong For Da Vinci Code Success A team of statisticians developed a model to predict books that would hit big. Trouble is, books like "The Da Vinci Code" didn't rate high in the model. "This year's runaway bestseller should have had only a 36% chance of reaching the charts, according to Alvai Winkler and his team. Their model fits work by some topselling authors but gives only middling marks to the Harry Potter titles and rules out almost everything by Charles Dickens except for his lesser-known Christmas story The Battle of Life." The Guardian (UK) 12/28/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:42 pm

The Lit Economy "Literature is conventionally taught as a person-to-person aesthetic experience: the writer (or the poem) addressing the reader. Teachers cut out English’s middlemen, the people who got the poem from the writer to us, apparently confirming his point that we have to deny the economics of cultural value in order to preserve the aesthetics. But, once we’re outside the classroom, how rigidly are these conventions adhered to? How many people today really imagine “art” as a privileged category, exempt from the machinations of the marketplace?" The New Yorker 12/26/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:28 pm

Has Book Reviewing Gotten Creepy? "For those of us who are serious about book-reviewing, here are a few of the questions that nobody—not even the New York Times—has yet been able to answer: In the world of serious literary criticism, where do newspapers belong? The credentials of their editors are often more journalistic than literary, an interesting conundrum assuming that literary merit is the stated goal. Regarding the visual and performing arts, newspapers are mostly event-oriented, with a dominant focus on what’s commercially viable (rock music, blockbuster museum shows). Yet book sections often feature books that will sell a relative handful of copies compared to those they overlook." Bookstandard 12/28/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:18 pm

The Culture Of Texting "About 7.3 billion text messages are sent within the United States every month, up from 2.9 billion a month a year ago. Compared with an ink-and-paper letter, messages may seem disposable. The relative inconvenience of typing out words using a numeric keypad -- the letter "c," for example, requires three presses of the "2" button -- and the brevity of the message may seem a hostile environment for heartfelt discussion. But the discipline of having to distill thoughts into short bulletins, then waiting to receive the response, allows users to pour more meaning into the writing, some text-message users say." Washington Post 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 6:32 am

Understanding Israel's Book Market "Israel leads the world in per-capita new titles per year - more than 4,000, or about 70 a week. 'I think that there is no need to publish more than 1,500 to 2,000 new books a year in Israel, tops. In France, 25,000 new books are published every year, but its population is 10 times the size of Israel's. In other words, they publish about half the quantity that we do, and France is a cultural superpower. Everyone there reads books on the streets and in the Metro'." Ha'aretz 12/23/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 6:29 am

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Media

Hollywood making Chinese Movies For China "Traditionally, Hollywood studios have tailored their films for showing in Los Angeles or Kansas City or Lubbock. Foreign markets were the icing on an American cake, a lucrative revenue stream for the cost of a few subtitles or some language dubbing. Then in recent years, as the cost of filming in Hollywood skyrocketed, foreign lands became the destination of choice for bargain-basement movie production — with their offer of cheap labor, financial incentives and unspoiled landscapes. But American moviegoers were still the endgame. Now, faced with shrinking, fragmenting audiences at home, the studios are rethinking how they operate in foreign markets." Los Angeles Times 12/30/05
Posted: 12/30/2005 7:07 am

Movie Slump - Blame To Go Around "The Great Box Office Slump has been covered by the entertainment press with a kind of giddy obsession ever since the summer proved blockbuster-deficient. The year isn't quite over, but Hollywood will likely end 2005 having sold about 1.4 billion tickets in the United States, which is a 6 percent decrease from last year. Revenue at the box office is expected to reach about $9 billion, trailing last year by 4 to 5 percent (the dip is slightly less than it would have been otherwise because of rising ticket prices)." Washington Post 12/30/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 11:07 pm

Movie-Going - An Exercise In Planning What's all this about movie attendance dropping? In New York at least, getting in to a movie is tough. "In the age of Fandango, premovie advertising and sellouts every weekend, it has become increasingly difficult to simply "catch" a movie. Going to see a film has become an exercise in elaborate planning and, particularly this holiday season - when many big films like "Munich," "The New World" and most famously "King Kong," are clocking in at two and a half to three hours - a major time commitment. It's basically impossible to see a movie spontaneously." The New York Times 12/30/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 10:56 pm

NY Touts Film Tax Credit For New Revenue New York's film office says new tax incentives are responsible for $600 million of new film shooting and 6000 jobs in the city this year. "The mayor's office also claimed that more than 250 movies and 100 new and continuing TV productions were shot in New York during the past year as a result of the program. It was one of several initiatives launched this year to help boost city entertainment projects and the resulting income from them." Backstage 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 8:22 pm

311 Movies Run For Oscar Three hundred and eleven movies are in contention for this year's Oscars. That's a 16 percent jump from last year. "Academy credits coordinator Howard Loberfeld cited an increase in the number of feature-length documentaries playing theatrically (35 vs. 15 in 2004) for the spike, as well as industrywide distributor reorganizations, which led to the release of an unusual number of long-delayed projects." Backstage 12/29/05
Posted: 12/29/2005 7:54 pm

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Dance

Dancing In A War Zone The Baghdad suburb of Mansour is known mostly these days for the near-constant sound of bombs, set off by insurgents targeting the new Iraqi army, and for the cries of those whose loved ones are caught in the crossfire. But Mansour is also home to Iraq's one and only Music and Ballet School, where a dedicated staff of teachers and professionals works to fill the lives of Iraqi children with a love of dance. In post-Saddam Iraq, anti-Western sentiment runs strong, and many at the school now keep their Western-derived professions secret from all but those closest to them. But asked how many Shiites and how many Sunnis make up the student body, the school's director has one firm answer: "We don't know. We have students." The Times (UK) 12/29/05
Posted: 12/28/2005 9:22 pm

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