Last year the New York City Opera installed a “sound enhancement” system. After a season to get used to it, how did it work? “The results, to these ears at least, were troubling. On some nights, the opera sounded more or less normal (more when seated in the First Ring, less when seated mid-orchestra). On other nights, one heard odd echoes, bizarre imbalances between stage and pit, voices losing what one thought was natural focus, strange thumps and gurgles. After a while a curious psychological affliction set in: the tendency to listen to the sound rather than the music. A little knowledge can be a distracting thing.” – Opera News
Month: September 2000
COMMON TONGUE
English is becoming the common language of education worldwide. “The development is unprecedented. Not even Latin, the European scholarly language for almost two millennia, or Greek in the ancient world before it, had the same reach. For the first time, one language, English – a bastard mixture of old French dialects and the tongues of several Germanic tribes living in what is now England – is becoming the lingua franca of business, popular culture, and higher education across the globe.” – Chronicle of Higher Education 09/05/00
ATTACKING ONE OF OUR OWN
- The New York Times Book Review ran a scathing review of Canadian writer Margaret Atwood’s new book over the weekend. Canadians are taking it personally. “[The Times Book Review is] fairly erratic and tends to be very much tied into the New York publishing scene. There’s sort of a decision that somebody’s going to be praised and important at one point and a decision that somebody’s going to be taken down a peg at another. Generally, they don’t exert pressure on their reviewers, but they may have said, ‘Great it’s time somebody did this.’ It’s hard to know exactly what the politics are.” – National Post (Canada)
HAMLET THROUGH THE AGES
What is it about Hamlet that makes him the pinnacle of a male actor’s career? “Each generation and each individual actor who takes him on expresses something different. Each Hamlet is unique but of his time; he is everything and so can be anything. All the humanity, suffering, playfulness, imagination, intelligence, philosophical acceptance of mortality, love of others, self-disgust, Renaissance humanism, medieval Christianity, cruelty, wit and neurosis that a director or actor wishes to find is there, but the cocktail of his personality will be differently mixed by each interpreter.” – The Independent (UK)
DID PICASSO HAVE MIGRAINES?
“A Dutch doctor will tell a world congress on headache which begins in London today that Pablo Picasso may have experienced bizarre visual migraine auras. Some people who suffer from migraine experience a disconcerting distortion of their vision. When they look at people or objects, they see them split into two parts, usually on the vertical plane. Others say they see just an illusion of a fractured face.” – The Guardian
SO WHAT? Picasso was dismissive of critics who saw his Cubist paintings as philosophical exercises and tried to understand them through “mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis and whatnot”. He was even more dismissive of the idea that he was an abstract artist. Picasso’s visual distortions are always poetic. – The Guardian
TRY TO REMEMBER
US Gulf Coast artist Jane Brokl will create memorial paintings for your loved ones – incorporating their ashes into the paintings. “Brokl’s paintings are vivid and colorful, with small lines of the ash and bone pieces incorporated. They are designed to last, with memorial plates attached, and cost under $500.” – The Sun-Herald (South Mississippi)
THE POLITICS OF RETURNING STOLEN ARTWORK
Earlier this year the Seattle Art Museum returned a Matisse painting that had been stolen by the Nazis. Then the museum sued New York’s Knoedler Gallery, which had originally sold the painting to some Seattle collectors back in 1954. SAM is trying to reclaim the painting’s market value, now estimated at $11 million, from the gallery. “But some legal complications recently led to a court order for the museum to pay $143,000 for part of the gallery’s legal fees.” – Seattle Times
DID PICASSO HAVE MIGRAINES?
“A Dutch doctor will tell a world congress on headache which begins in London today that Pablo Picasso may have experienced bizarre visual migraine auras. Some people who suffer from migraine experience a disconcerting distortion of their vision. When they look at people or objects, they see them split into two parts, usually on the vertical plane. Others say they see just an illusion of a fractured face.” – The Guardian
- SO WHAT? Picasso was dismissive of critics who saw his Cubist paintings as philosophical exercises and tried to understand them through “mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis and whatnot”. He was even more dismissive of the idea that he was an abstract artist. Picasso’s visual distortions are always poetic. – The Guardian
BETTER LIVING THROUGH DESIGN
Russian design has gone through a rough patch lately – the rockets don’t fly, the submarines don’t come up and the communications towers burn. Simple cause? No money for infrastructure. “Even so, it would be unwise to demean the Soviet achievement. Soviet architecture continues to inform the designs of some of the world’s most intelligent and adventurous architects.” – The Guardian
CONTROVERSY FOR LATIN GRAMMYS
The Latin Grammys hit national TV in the US later this month, and the event has been touted as a means of bringing Latin music to a wider audience. But the awards have stirred up controversy, with a number of musicians charging that regional styles are being ignored. – Orange County Register