Month: July 2000

FOND REMEMBRANCES

Van Cliburn is 66 and making still another comeback, with a concert at Tanglewood. “Mr. Cliburn gives the impression of being utterly content now and not too inclined to excavate the past afresh. He lets on at one point, as if revealing a deep family secret, that he’s thinking about performing Bach again, the E minor Partita, maybe, and he floats a program for a scheduled Chopin recital in Boston that is so preposterously long that it sounds like a fantasy of a young pianist in the first flush of success – as if, no matter how stressful the stage may have been all those years, it is still the locus of his imagination.” – New York Times

GRACE UNDER PRESSURE: That he’s retained these qualities through some pretty tough times is a remarkable personal achievement almost as great as his win in Moscow more than 40 years ago. – Boston Herald

ODE TO COPLAND

“Deeper than George Gershwin, more disciplined than Charles Ives, more accessible than Elliott Carter, more prolific than Leonard Bernstein, more varied than Samuel Barber,” Aaron Copland was the giant of 20th Century American music. He would have been 100 this year, yet no one seems to be paying attention. Why is that? – Chicago Tribune

SOUTH AFRICAN ARTS IN DISARRAY

One South African artist applies to start a porn site so he can finance his art. Thus the extent of “the frustrations felt by many over the state of the arts in South Africa, where the only certainty is uncertainty. Will the country’s last remaining permanent orchestra, the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic, still be around in 2001? Will Pretoria’s State Theatre survive? Will lottery funding help to revive the performing arts? Will SA arts and culture help brand the country as a tourist destination and as the export product it once was during its theatrical high point in the ’70s and ’80s? – Sunday Times (South Africa)

JOIN THIS

Statistics say that Americans are joining groups in fewer numbers – from bowling leagues to the Boy Scouts, we’re not the “joiners” we once were. Is this a bad thing? Is our sense of community slipping? “A curious thing about this decline of community – or of ‘social capital,’ to use the favored public-policy term – is that America appears to be awash in ‘community.'” – Boston Globe

SPUD DUD

The possibilities for interactive TV are exciting – shop, learn, book airline tickets, communicate with friends – it’ll all be possible. But in the short term, interactive TV will fail. Why? “Simply put, we like to watch. Period. Over the years, viewers have developed a seductively passive relationship with the small screen. They’re couch potatoes for a reason; they sit, they click, they veg.” – Boston Globe 07/30/00

DOING THE DVD

With more than 2 million players sold and thousands of titles available, the DVD has become the most successful consumer product ever. But some in the movie industry are still resisting, fearing that safeguards against piracy aren’t good enough. – Boston Globe 07/30/00

DIGITAL SHORTS

They still have tiny audiences, but short digital movies are hot right now. “Not just showing them, but clamoring for them; building businesses around them; showcasing them in film festivals; nominating them for Academy Awards, and, perhaps most significantly, paying for them.” – Chicago Sun-Times 07/30/00

  • ON THE OTHER HAND: An internet movie “George Lucas in Love” that cost  $25,000 “premiered last October on MediaTrip.com, one of several new Web sites that offer short films to Internet users. An instant hit, it was streamed to 150,000 homes in its first three weeks, and more than 1 million to date.” Now for sale on Amazon, it consistently outsells Lucas’s latest “Star Wars” installment. – San Francisco Chronicle 07/30/00

STREET BALLET

An orphanage in Nairobi is trying to make street kids’ lives a little better. “As well as being given an education, they are offered the opportunity to learn ballet – not a dance form much practised in the region.” – BBC