Battle For The Internet About To Enter Crucial Phase "Telecommunications firms salivate at the prospect of eliminating Net Neutrality requirements and setting up systems where websites that pay for the service will be more easily reached than sites that cannot afford the toll. And U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican who has for many years been a dominant figure in communications debates on Capitol Hill, is determined to change the rules so that Internet gatekeepers such as AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner, can create an 'information superhighway' for those who pay and a dirt road for those who fail to do so." The Nation 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 6:02 pm
When Collective Memory Goes Into Overdrive Amid the nonstop anniversary commemorations of Hurricane Katrina and the Sept. 11 attacks, are nuance and the perspective of time being jettisoned in favor of instant history? "There are still 60 minutes in an hour, still 365 days in a year, but time gallops today. The cement of history cures fast. Maybe too fast. ... The hopped-up environment generates its own vicious cycle of compressed-time demands: to cover an event, to analyze it, to memorialize it, to understand it, to produce the first feature film about it. It's a daisy chain of rushed judgments." Baltimore Sun 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 7:03 am
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The Numbers On Art Thefts "Experts have a tally of 170,000 pieces of missing art -- many stolen from private homes, others taken from museum walls or pilfered from storerooms. Only a small fraction are ever found: Interpol puts the figure at around 10 percent." Chicago Sun-Times 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 8:55 am
Canadian Artists Demand License Fees Canadian artists don't make anything on resale of their work. But some have begun demanding licensing fees from auction houses and dealers reprinting images of art to advertise sales. "For their part, auction houses and art dealers warn that such additional fees could tip some of them out of business or drive them away from exhibiting certain artists." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:15 am
German University Returns Parthenon Fragment A fragment of the Parthenon was returned to Greece this week. "The marble fragment of a foot, measuring only a few inches, was placed by Culture Minister George Voulgarakis back on the northern frieze of the 5th century BC Parthenon on Tuesday. Part of the frieze is now in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, but much is in London." Los Angeles Times 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:04 am
Failed Promise: WTC The design and building process for the World Trade Center has been a disaster, writes Paul Goldberger. "Forty years seem not to have got us beyond the folly of Nelson Rockefeller and the building of the original World Trade Center. And they haven’t freed us from the use of sanctimonious rhetoric to cover up what, ultimately, has turned out to be a lot more like a typical New York real-estate saga than anything else." The New Yorker 09/11/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 5:14 pm
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Shafer Out At Washington Chorus Robert Shafer, who has led the Washington Chorus since 1971, is stepping down as music director. "I had requested a sabbatical. And then I was called in at the end of July and told that the sabbatical had been granted, but that they had also decided to begin searching for a new music director." Washington Post 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:52 am
Director Walks Out Of Production Opera director Christoph Loy shows up to first rehearsal of London's Royal Opera House production of Mozart's "La Finta Giardiniera", then walks off the project, disappearing... The Guardian (UK) 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:24 am
At The Opera: Hip Hop And Dictators English National Opera is taking a big chance in presenting a hip hop opera who's subject is Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. "This is crunch time for the ENO. Can the company really attract a young Asian audience and persuade them that they might want to return for a Madam Butterfly or a Bohème? Or will they simply succeed in alienating their loyal opera fanbase in the attempt?" The Guardian (UK) 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:21 am
Hyping "The Next Mozart" (Isn't Nice) Jay Greenberg is a 15-year-old composer who's being touted for great things. The hype is building. "But although no one can prophesize what kind of composer Greenberg will turn out to be, he will not be the next Mozart. No one can be that, no one should be that. If we come away with nothing else from the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, which is being celebrated this year, it should be that times have changed and that it isn't nice to exploit kids." Los Angeles Times 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:01 am
Dallas Symphony's Big Search The Dallas Symphony is looking for a new music director to replace Andrew Litton. So who are the leading candidates? Hard to tell, but there are some clues... Dallas Morning News 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 5:45 pm
Two Southern American Cities Get Concert Halls "At first glance, the classical-music ambitions of Nashville and Atlanta look much the same: abandon a drab old hall and find fame and fortune with a sparkling new music temple. But on matters overt and subtle - from the balance of funding sources (public vs. private) to artistic vision - the two cities' approaches to building a concert hall have little in common." Atlanta Journal-Constitution 09/03/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 5:41 pm
An Opera Lover's Generosity Wasted An elderly Australian opera lover leaves the Victorian State Opera $2 million. But in the four years since she died, $800,000 has been spent on lawyers' fees in a dispute over the money. The Australian 09/06/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 4:42 pm
What Does Music Serve In The Human Scheme Of Things? "The fact that music is universal across cultures and has been part of human life for a very long time-archeologists have found musical instruments dating from 34,000 BC, and some believe that a 50,000-year-old hollowed-out bear bone from a Neanderthal campsite is an early flute-does suggest that it may indeed be an innate human tendency. And yet it's unclear what purpose it serves." Boston Globe 09/04/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 4:27 pm
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60s Satire Changed Us American satire of the 1950s and 60s spawned a social movement. "The two decades following World War II spawned satiric forms and techniques that have permanently altered the direction of modern American comic expression." Los Angeles Times 09/03/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 5:58 pm
New Organization To Give $50,000 Grants To Individual Artists "A new charity, United States Artists, will announce today an ambitious plan to provide support to working artists, starting with a grant program that will be one of the most generous in existence. Fifty artists working in a wide variety of disciplines and at various career stages will receive $50,000 each, no strings attached. The first recipients will be announced on Dec. 4." The New York Times 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 3:32 am
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New Republic Suspends Critic The New Republic has suspended a critic from writing for the magazine. "Lee Siegel, creator of the Lee Siegel on Culture blog for tnr.com, was suspended indefinitely from the magazine after a reader accused him of using a “sock puppet,” or Internet alias, to attack his critics in the comments section of his blog." The New York Times 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 5:31 pm
Why Christgau Is The Dean Of Rock Critics The Village Voice has disposed of a legend in firing Robert Christgau. "Christgau's project at the Voice was to create a venue for popular-music writing that assumed a certain readership—one equipped not just with broad cultural knowledge but with a fluency in music history, the pop canon, and all the little meta-narratives of individual artists and their discographies. The goal, in other words, was to talk about pop music in the way literary critics talked about books." Slate 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 4:22 pm
Palme d'Or Competitor Banned From Filmmaking "Chinese authorities have banned the film director Lou Ye from making films for five years because he failed to seek permission from them before his latest work, set against the backdrop of the Tiananmen uprising, was screened at the Cannes film festival. Mr Lou's film 'Summer Palace' is to be confiscated and income from it seized, the Xinhua news agency reported." The Guardian (UK) 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 6:38 am
Saxophonist Dewey Redman, 75 "Dewey Redman, an expansive and poetic tenor saxophonist and bandleader who had been at the aesthetic frontiers of jazz since the 1960’s, died on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 75 and lived in Brooklyn." The New York Times 09/04/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 3:50 am
Poet Gyorgy Faludy, 95 "The Hungarian poet Gyorgy Faludy, a major figure of the resistance against Nazism and Communism, died Friday at his home in Budapest, the national news agency, MTI, reported Saturday. He was 95. The poet, known to many in the West as George Faludy, was part of Hungary’s 1956 anti-Communist uprising and was to have been a major speaker at a conference to celebrate its 50th anniversary this month." The New York Times (Reuters) 09/04/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 3:42 am
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Out Of Development Hell, Onto The Stage "New stage musicals in search of a ... showcase-marketplace model have their own clearinghouse: the New York Musical Theatre Festival, a three-week bazaar of 34 new musicals that sprawls through midtown Manhattan next Sunday through Oct. 1. Though only in its third year, the festival has become so entrenched that top theater actors, designers and directors routinely waive fees for the chance to invest in the future of their field. Audiences have apparently been hungry for the chance to sample new work for a mere $20 per show: The festival boasted more than 95 percent capacity both previous years." Newsday 09/03/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 6:24 am
SmackDown: "Hamlet" Vs. "King Lear" "Why are 'Hamlet' and 'King Lear' so great? And which is the greatest?" Sid Smith asks. "Though it's ultimately a fatuous exercise -- like choosing between the Pieta and the statue of David -- my money's on 'Lear.' 'Hamlet' is eloquent Sudoku. 'Lear' is primal scream." Chicago Tribune 09/03/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 5:37 am
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Rare Book Stolen, Substituted A rare 16th Century book was stolen out of a castle in Austria, but the theft was not noticed for a few days because the thief substituted another book. "The 1532 volume, Astronomicum Caesareum, by Petrus Apianus, disappeared from Peuerbach Castle between August 23 and 26, when a guide discovered it had gone." The Guardian (UK) 09/05/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:34 am
How Libraries Could Reassert Themselves? "Google does not have to eliminate the market in printed books to make this impossible. It merely has to shrink it so much that the price of books goes right down again. If no one gets paid for writing books, fewer will be written, which may not be an unmixed catastrophe, but very much fewer really good ones will be written. The only way out of this, it seems to me, is for libraries to pay for the right to distribute electronic texts." The Guardian (UK) 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:33 am
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Apple And Amazon To Jump Into Movie Download Biz "Apple, which invigorated online music with its iTunes store, is expected to reveal plans next week to offer downloadable movies from Walt Disney Co. Amazon has agreements with at least three of the other major studios to offer movies at its online store, expected to be announced as early as Thursday." Los Angeles Times 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 7:11 am
MIA: Hollywood Heroes Hollywood used to live on larger-than-life heroes. No more. "Where have all the action heroes gone? They certainly haven't gone to be soldiers; no, they've gone to be sensitive, not so much in the touchy-feely way, but in that way that strikes at their essence. They no longer dominate." Washington Post 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 5:36 pm
Movie Workers: Where's Our Pay? Movie industry workers are asking for payment for content that is streamed. "Because streaming is best viewed as merely promotional in nature, network execs argue, actors, writers and directors are thus owed no extra payments for Internet-repurposed programming. It's a contention that closely follows an argument over which formula to use for residuals on Internet and iPod downloads of movies and TV shows." Backstage 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 5:27 pm
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Glen Tetley At 80 "While Mr. Tetley often worked abroad as a freelance choreographer after lack of money obliged him to disband his modern-dance troupe in New York in 1969, his influence has been felt as widely in American dance as among the Europeans and Australians who have encountered his pioneering ideas over the last 50 years." The New York Times 09/06/06
Posted: 09/06/2006 6:53 am
Cuban Dance And The Revolution "Incongruous as it may seem, ballet was part of the Cuban revolution from its inception. Legend has it that, while Castro was battling the imperialists, he sent Alicia Alonso a message from his hideout in the sierra asking her to form a national ballet company in the event of his victory. When he came to power in 1959, she had no hesitation. 'I was dancing in Chicago, but I dropped everything and came running'." New Statesman 09/05/06
Posted: 09/05/2006 4:51 pm
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