Is "Fake" Violence Rotting Us From The Inside Out? "Violence no longer informs me. It no longer has the power to teach. It is a one-note song I've heard so many times it has lost its power to stun or impress or delve deep. It now merely tears at the fabric of the soul, punches holes in the anima, scrapes its knuckles on the pavement of hate, and you can shrug and roll your eyes and go watch The Hills Have Eyes or Saw II or even play some hi-res shockingly ultraviolent video game and enjoy the brutal escapism and wallow in the bloodshed while pretending it's not slowly, quietly blackening your world view like a smoker sucking down another carton of Marlboro Reds, but deep down, where the meanings are, I think maybe, just maybe, you might be seriously mistaken." San Francisco Chronicle 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 6:51 am
A Grand Unifying Theory Of Everything Seth Lloyd believes that "the universe is a gigantic quantum computer. When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer." Wired 03/14/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 5:30 pm
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Cleveland Museum To Add Condos? "The Cleveland Institute of Art may soon build the most highly visible address for the wealthy in Cleveland since the demise of Millionaires' Row in the early 20th century. The art institute's board is thinking seriously about replacing an aging, outmoded classroom building opposite the Cleveland Museum of Art with a luxury condominium tower. The building would overlook the museum and the Case Western Reserve University campus, making it one of the most desirable addresses in the region... The condominium tower project, which could also include a ground-floor art gallery or other cultural facility, could generate income to help pay for college operations." The Plain Dealer (Cleveland) 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 6:48 am
Spinning Controversy Into Broad Discussion A new 100-foot sculpture by Jonathan Borofsky is prompting controversy at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University, not for what it is, but for where it's going. "Where and even if it should be installed has been widely debated on campus, ever since the university announced its intention to plant it at the intersection of the Hornbostel Mall and the Cut, the campus's two rectangular green spaces, by building a concrete pad there." The controversy has led CMU to create a new public art committee which includes student input and will create and monitor the school's new public art policy. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 6:38 am
Today's Museums - All About The Numbers "With the rise and rise of the blockbuster exhibition, curatorial history seems to be marked less by new discovery, re-evaluation and changing interpretation, than by visitor numbers. History is being made, on these grounds at least, in Japan, where last autumn's Hokusai exhibition in Tokyo has broken all records for visitor attendance." The Guardian (UK) 03/15/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 8:29 pm
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Musical Chairs Not So Popular In Pittsburgh If you're an orchestra looking for a quick and easy way to incense your season ticketholders, the Pittsburgh Symphony has a surefire technique for you: make them switch seat locations. A new set of ticket packages are forcing the orchestra to relocate 772 of its 9,650 total subscribers, and some are objecting, loudly. "Complicating things further, the PSO asks its subscribers to give to its annual fund-raising campaigns shortly before asking for ticket renewals." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 6:44 am
Less Music, But At Least The Tickets Are Still Expensive South Florida's recent history with classical music is an unhappy one, bordering on the tragic - the (some would say unnecessary) shutdown of the Florida Philharmonic removed the anchor of the local scene, and several smaller groups that sprang up in the Phil's wake have fared no better. So with the situation so precarious, why are some South Florida music organizations still charging $50 a ticket for a standard performance? Palm Beach Post Online 03/14/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 5:50 am
When Downsizing Isn't A Dirty Word As the Cincinnati Symphony prepares to announce its 2006-07 season, music director Paavo Järvi is turning up the heat on one of the orchestra's most pressing issues - its concert hall. "With 3,516 seats, it's the largest concert hall in the U.S., and despite having an audience any orchestra in the country would be proud to own (the CSO has more long-term subscribers than any U.S. orchestra), the cavernous hall swallows them up... There has been considerable speculation about 'downsizing' Music Hall, which was never intended as a concert hall in the first place, the CSO having left its home in Emery Theatre in 1936 to give Music Hall an anchor tenant." Cincinnati Post 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 5:32 am
A History Of Conductor Injuries They're worth thinking about as America's star conductors go down for the count. Let's see, there was Lully who jammed a stick down on his foot and died a few weeks later from gangrene... The Guardian (UK) 03/15/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 5:53 pm
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Demigod Needed: Must Enjoy Chaos "Wanted: an educational visionary with the political skills of a senator and the diplomatic polish of a secretary of state. The successful candidate will be a scholar of national prominence, a charismatic speaker, a successful fundraiser. Bold leadership required; affable personality preferred. The post is university president -- a job where the spotlight is bright, stakes are enormous and, some say, expectations are impossible to meet." Chicago Tribune 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 6:14 am
Sydney's New "Ticket Hub" A collection of Sydney-based performing arts organizations have spent AUS$2 million building a new "ticketing hub" which will allow groups using the Sydney Opera House to consolidate their sales departments, sell more tickets online and fix long-standing problems. "Previously, the various organisations were using different ticketing platforms and the ticket inventory was split, leaving the process prone to the double-selling of seats." AustralianIT 03/14/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 5:37 am
Safire As Arts Champion Americans for the Arts has pundit William Safire deliver its annual Nancy Hanks Lecture on the arts. "The surprise here is not that Safire, the self-proclaimed right-winger, has a mainstream view; rather it's that large policy organizations, like Americans for the Arts, have gravitated so far away from the "left" position." Washington Post 03/15/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 10:12 pm
Baldwin Testifies For Arts Funding Alec Baldwin lobbied Congress for arts funding on National Arts Advocacy Day. "If you told me back in 1996, we would have a Republican president and Republicans in charge of both houses of Congress, and the NEA would be flourishing and would be safe, it wouldn't be possible," San Jose Mercury-News (AP) 03/14/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 9:52 pm
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Levine Says He'll Lose Weight, Get Exercise Conductor James Levine says he'll use the next several months in rehab from his rotator cuff injury to exercise and improve his diet. "I've got three months to recover from this," he said. "I've never had a period in which I've had to do rehab and put my mind to correcting this, in my diet and exercise." He said his busy schedule of rehearsing and leading performances meant he never had a base line with which to judge his physical state. The New York Times 03/15/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 8:52 pm
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Levine Says He'll Lose Weight, Get Exercise Conductor James Levine says he'll use the next several months in rehab from his rotator cuff injury to exercise and improve his diet. "I've got three months to recover from this," he said. "I've never had a period in which I've had to do rehab and put my mind to correcting this, in my diet and exercise." He said his busy schedule of rehearsing and leading performances meant he never had a base line with which to judge his physical state. The New York Times 03/15/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 8:52 pm
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The Barrier To Risky Theatre? "Today's playwrights are a motivated, opinionated, highly intelligent, politically aware group of angry young men and women. It's not that we don't want to write big, demanding plays. It's that we're so often frustrated in our ambitions. And why? One reason comes up time and again: money." The Guardian (UK) 03/15/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 5:44 pm
Corporate World Discovers Theatre The corporate world has discovered acting school. Several acting schools around the world are dispensing tips from the typically more lively world of drama. "You have a unique way of seeing the world. In the business world, we try to help bring that to the workplace and have it be more than a job. It becomes a creative platform." Backstage 03/14/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 4:58 pm
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Aussie Wins Commonwealth Prize Australian writer Kate Grenville has won this year's Commonwealth Writers' Prize. "Grenville's winning book is a historical novel looking at the competing claims of Aborigines and settlers in 19th Century Australia. The award comes five years after Grenville won the Orange Prize for Fiction for The Idea of Perfection." BBC 03/14/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 4:38 pm
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Sopranos Ratings Way Down To judge by the slobbering devotion displayed by most daily newspapers these days, you'd think that The Sopranos was more or less the only program left on television. (Okay, they also admit to the existence of Desperate Housewives.) And certainly, the New Jersey mob drama has built up quite the following over its five seasons. So it had to come as a shock to HBO (and all those adoring critics) when the premiere episode of the show's final season lost fully 1/4 of its audience from last season. New York Daily News 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 6:31 am
Is It A Marketing Problem, Or A Quality Issue? Hollywood is considering a major promotional campaign designed to get the public off the couch and into movie theaters on a far more regular basis. The campaign, which would be patterned after the highly successful "Got Milk?" and "Pork - The Other White Meat" campaigns, would be the film industry's new hope for reversing the slide in box office receipts. However, at an annual conference, theater owners objected to the strategy, saying that the problem of slumping attendance stems from Hollywood's insistence on making and marketing terrible movies. Los Angeles Times 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 6:25 am
Everyone Loves A Sore Loser The author of the short story that inspired the film, Brokeback Mountain, has lashed out at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for denying the film the Best Picture Oscar last week. In a diatribe published in a British newspaper, Annie Proulx referred to winning picture Crash as "Trash," and accused Oscar voters of cowardice. The Globe & Mail (AP) 03/15/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 6:18 am
SD Lawmakers Slash Public Broadcasting Budget Earlier this month, the South Dakota legislature stripped $500,000 from South Dakota Public Broadcasting's annual allocation as part of a last-minute round of cuts. Now, with the cut having been made public, lawmakers are passing the buck on whose fault it is. But what everyone seems to agree on is that there is little chance of the funding being restored this year. Sioux Falls Argus Leader (SD) 03/14/06
Posted: 03/15/2006 5:21 am
Looking For An International Digital Movie Standard Can the international film industry agree on technical standards for converting to digital? "There are about 35,000 screens in the U.S., while the international market has about 100,000 screens. ... The transition to digital cinema is not only a U.S.-driven initiative, but more importantly, the international markets will make up the lion's share of the world's screens in order to achieve ultimate scale and global adoption of digital cinema." Backstage 03/14/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 5:06 pm
The BBC's New Goals The UK government has outlined its plans for the BBC. "As well as the corporation's traditional aims to 'inform, educate and entertain', the government has set it six new purposes: Sustaining citizenship and civil society; promoting education; stimulating creativity; reflecting the identity of the UK's nations, regions and communities; bringing the world to the UK and the UK to the world; and building digital Britain." BBC 03/14/06
Posted: 03/14/2006 4:31 pm
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Wanted - Boys To Dance Two years ago, Liverpool dance schools got a big boost when Strictly Come Dancing landed on TV. But the new recruits were girls rather than boys. Now they're looking for some girls. "Out of 84 students, we have only got 18 male students and they are getting a bit worn out dancing and lifting all the girls. They are very macho boys but there just aren't enough of them to go round." IC Liverpool 03/13/06
Posted: 03/13/2006 8:54 pm
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