Month: April 2000

KILLER (N)AP

Napster, the music-share program is considered by the music industry the greatest threat its ever faced. “In recent weeks, piracy using his Napster software program has reached such an unprecedented scale that many industry analysts believe that it marks the beginning of the end of paying for recorded music. To virtually every American under the age of 25, Napster is rapidly becoming synonymous with a bottomless free supply of music from their favourite bands.” – The Age (Melbourne)

SO MUCH FOR THE ‘BRAVE LONER’ PLOY

David Irving lost his libel lawsuit in London claiming that the Holocaust never happened. The judge found against Irving, calling him, in effect, a propagandist for Adolf Hitler. But, “we ought to condemn – better, dismiss – him not because of his convictions, but because of the way in which he states his evidence.” – Newsweek

DIARY SCANDALE

Marc-Edouard Nabe has become a sensation in France with the publication of “his ‘Intimate Journal,’ a ponderous diary, which to date runs to 3,915 pages and relates the day-to-day minutiae of his life and of those around him. While previous volumes passed largely unnoticed, the fourth and latest, entitled Kamikaze, has turned the author into a cult figure in Paris, much to the horror of the friends and family whose secrets he has betrayed.” – The Times (UK)

SENSATIONALIZED

  • Conservative New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has a reputation for a conservative’s sensibility when it comes to art. Not so his wife, actress Donna Hanover, who is about to star in “The Vagina Monologues,” a play that uses “humor and drama to explore such subjects as sexual fantasies, orgasms, pelvic exams and rape.” – MSNBC

MONUMENTAL CONCERN

“Throughout the centuries, the grand, open-air museum that is Italy has been an easy target for thieves. The peninsula is littered not only with Roman ruins but also Etruscan, Phoenician and Greek artifacts – not to mention the vestiges of countless pre-Roman peoples and even prehistoric settlements. Today, the plundering of Italy’s archaeological treasures has become a highly lucrative business involving a sophisticated network of tombaroli, ravagers of archaeological sites; expert fences in Italy, Switzerland and England; and knowing buyers in the United States, Japan, Australia and elsewhere.” – Washington Post

MAD FOR MONET

London’s Royal Academy decided to stay open all night during its recent Monet show. It worked. The museum has become one of the top ten tourist attractions in Britain. “The exhibition, which cost £1.8 million to stage and four years to assemble, boosted the number of visitors to the gallery to 1.39 million last year, up from 912,714 in 1998. Nearly 8,600 people attended the show each day despite the queues and the high entrance charge of £9.” – The Independent (UK)

MY MADNESS BEATS YOUR MADNESS

A hundred years ago mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria built an insanely expensive castle whose opulence was so frivolous, his ministers murdered him and dumped him into a lake. “Eleven decades later, another “madness” as great as Ludwig’s has been built. Rising up from the shores of the Starnberger lake, beside Neuschwanstein castle, an entire theatre has been constructed for the sole purpose of staging ‘Ludwig II, The Musical.’ At a cost of £26 million, it is the most expensive musical in the world. – Sunday Times (UK)

THEATRE UTILITY

For most of us, watching live performers act and sing is an infrequent luxury. Theater, like many of the other performing arts, long ago broke with its proletarian roots and assumed the gilded mantle of “culture.” In an era of instant entertainment on the TV and the Internet, attending a play or a musical has become a special event, identified (unfairly, some might argue) with formality, cultural literacy, seriousness and, above all, disposable income. But theater, by its very nature, is about emotional outreach. – Orange County Register